Thursday, March 12, 2009

Los Angeles Blog #1

I stepped out of my car and onto a street in Los Angeles's South Central wearing my interview-best outfit. It was mid-day but the streets were still full of people. Cars were driving by slowly, little kids ditched school and wandered the neighborhood, a drunk homeless man walked without a destination. Behind an iron wrought gate a woman played with her daughter as a young man rode past the house on a bike that was much too small to be his own.

I felt dainty, and a bit ridiculous, in my fashionable skirt. A local man did appreciate it and was sure to let me know as he passed me by on the sidewalk. He said, "Hey bebe, garble garble drunk talk garble garble, yeaaaa-haa!" Still got it, I reflected.

South Central is different from the part of LA I grew up in. You can feel the difference in your attitude, thought, and even your body when moving from one place to the other. A dirty sidewalk makes you feel different than a clean one. And you can't forget about our country's poverty issues when you're constantly surrounded by it's symptoms. And you realize that some kids grow up with this feeling everyday, as opposed to you, who spent the 1992 riots in the comfort of her home watching the Sound of Music, blissfully unaware of the fact that the smoke in the air was coming from a violent mob only 10 miles away. Being in South Central is just different. So is being in Malibu, Westchester, Echo Park, or even... the valley.

This is one thing I love about Los Angeles-- it's incredible diversity. Social classes exist separately in their own little neighborhoods, but we're all right next to each other. We cross through, over, and in between each other's worlds to get to work or to a friend's house.

Sitting in bumper to bumper traffic yesterday, which I don't mind as long as I have good music, I noticed that to my left there was a Muslim woman wearing a head scarf who had prayer beads hanging from her rear-view mirror. To my right was a Latina woman who had a rosary hanging from her mirror. We all have our separate boxes that we live in: our cars, our cultures, our neighborhoods, our economic classes. While we often let these barriers separate us, sometimes we allow them to fade. And even when we do not let our barriers down on purpose, commonalities still exist that connect us, like those two sets of prayer beads on rear-view mirrors, that remind us again that our barriers are, in fact, permeable.

While I do miss Alaska, it's a pleasure to be back weaving through Los Angeles on the freeways. I hope to be writing about it much more in the future. I owe this post to AJ who asked me to write about my city for his newsletter, and who forced me to look at it through new eyes. THanks dood!

foggy mornings

Back in college I would occasionally get up early and sit on a bench that was carved out of a massive tree trunk and smoke cigarettes with m...