seasons, a long drive, and goodbyes, part I: seasons

i woke up late for work yesterday. i just forgot to turn my alarm on. it happens, but it has been happening to me too much. my eyes shot open, my clock showed 2 minutes after i was supposed to be at work, and my commute during morning rush was an hour. fuck. drove to work, unshowered, no breakfast, angry and dirty and embarrassed. ready to give up...something. pissed that i was so stressed about a relatively mediocre job in the entertainment industry.

uneventful day at work, and i left a bit earlier than usual. i'm taking a journalism class at ucla. my plan, in the medium term, is to go to journalism school somewhere on the east coast. I miss seasons: that magical moment just as the first snow is accumulating on city streets and everything goes silent, snowflakes shine as they float past streetlights, and you can actually hear each flake falling on top of another like white noise in heaven as a cab crawls carefully over the slick streets; the first spring day when you can go out in a t-shirt, and you are free, finally, you skin feels like it's glowing and everything is green and everyone is smiling; the five-o-clock-alypse, a thunderstorm that rolls in from nowhere on sticky summer afternoons and drops huge raindrops like kamazazi bumblebees as viscious lighning cracks, lights up the sky, now thick and dark but blue and beautiful ten minutes ago, terrible rumbling thunder, and, if you're lucky, you have a copy of 'flight of the valkyries' in your car or your walkman, and you turn it on, and you are on top of the world; the crisp smell of winter, and fires, the crunch of leaves covering the ground, whips of smoke from fireplaces, and football.

as a means to the end (the end, in this case, is seasons, whereas los angeles is, in part, the end of seasons), i am taking this journalism class.

but when i show up i realize (read: the security guard told me after looking at the enrollment papers I hadn't looked at well enough) that my class didn't start till next week. re-cue anger and embrassment. two similar fuck-ups in one day. if i lived anywhere else I'd have taken a long walk to clear my head, but this is los angeles, and if they see you walking aimlessly they think you're a terrorist. A long drive then, down sunset boulevard, which streches the length of the city from the pacific to downtown, passes both UCLA and my house, and will give me time to think.

next: a long drive