Oakland

Didn't take a single picture while I was in San Francisco, doh. But here's one of picturesque Lake Merritt in Oakland, and Merritt Restaurant, where Ryan's family has been going for generations (Ryan's Gung-gung used to take his mom and her siblings to eat there when she was a little girl). Oakland is a lovely city and I will bus fight anyone who says otherwise.

Bergamot Station

I realize I already made a post basically saying I was done with LA, but here's one more for you: on Wednesday, Kelsey and I went to Bergamot Station!

Bergamot Station is an arts center and gallery complex in Santa Monica. It used to be a light rail station (where bergamot flourished, hence the name), then a warehouse complex, and then it was abandoned and the city developed it into what it is now. It has a really cool, industrial vibe. Each gallery is completely independent, so there are all kinds of art--photography, sculpture, painting, landscapes, abstract art, portraits.

(Side note: I generally hate coffee house food but the roast beef sandwich I had at the cafe was REALLY GOOD. Cheap, too!)

It's also dog-friendly... a lot of the galleries even had their own dog.

Sophie here was the sweetest! (I love black pugs!)

She desperately wanted something in Kelsey's purse. We eventually realized it was her gum, haha.

After Bergamot Station we ended up heading to Abbot Kinney, which is a shopping area in Santa Monica. A lot of the stores are in old houses that have been renovated, which is pretty cool, but this store took it to the next level by keeping all the rooms intact. There were aprons and cooking supplies for sale in the kitchen, and this awesome display of sea-related goodies (including lots of mermaids) in the bathroom!

We ended up hanging out pretty late that night, but eventually I had to say my first goodbye :( Kelsey and her family have been such a huge support since I moved to LA. I always have the best adventures with her because she knows where to go--even all the way back when I visited Ryan in LA, I wasn't sure I could live here until I met up with Kelsey and she took me shopping on Melrose. Her mom has had us over for many delicious dinners (and sent us home with leftover frozen dinners she had made for the cast and crew of Bri's film Gut-to-Go, which saved my life several times, especially during interviews).

Also, two tangentially related things (okay, one is actually completely unrelated). Speaking of Gut-to-Go: Ryan and I ended up being quite involved in production, and now it's finished and about to premiere. Bri did a fantastic job and is now reaping the rewards of her hard work: she's worked with some big names, was interviewed and featured on ABC News, has been accepted into several film festivals, and was nominated for the Best Actress award at the AOF Film Festival for her performance! Here's the link to her news page again--maybe it'll be playing at a film festival near you!

On a much less exciting note, I've been copy editing for Hyphen magazine for a little over a year now, but the next issue (on newsstands August 15--look for ukulele player Jake Shimabukuro on the cover) will be my last, and they've decided to feature me on the contributors page! Check it out if you get the chance; my "most memorable Hyphen moment" is pretty lolworthy.

Workshops they would offer at Tokyo Orientation if I was in any way representative of this year's JET noobs

• Life as a halfie yonsei JET: Getting used to making really long explanations involving visual aids and family trees
• Financial Matters for REALLY STUPID people
• Sorta-mid-level-intermediate-but-actually-you-skipped-everything-in-the-textbook-that-had-to-do-with-numbers-or-kanji Japanese
• Advanced Cockblocking
• Inaka Life: HELL YEAH!

New layout! (sort of)

If you're reading this on my blog's main page, you might notice a few differences. Hella Angeleno is now Hella 日本　(that's "Nihon" or "Japan" for the majority of you reading my blog), and the layout has changed! I'm not 100% sure about all this floral nonsense, but all the solid colors I tried made my blog look like the website for the historical society, so for now it stays. I suppose that is a risk of using this particular photo in the header... it's not exactly, you know, edgy. But too bad, I'm keeping it!

Speaking of the photo--it was taken sometime in the 1950s in Niigata, Japan. The lady on the right is my great-grandmother, Shige Sakuma. You can't tell from the cropped version, but in the original photo it's clear that she's the American visitor, with a nice bag and shoes. I have no idea who the other people in the photo are.

I don't know if any of you have read the book Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer (or seen the movie with Elijah Wood, which is probably more likely), but I suddenly find myself in the same position as the "hero" of that book. He's full of romantic visions of his family history; he steps off a plane in the country of his ancestors, with only a black-and-white photograph to guide him--and is immediately greeted by a flatulent dog and a guide whose English he can barely understand. No one is interested in his family; they just want to know if everyone in America is rich and has a giant penis, and require multiple explanations when he asks for a vegetarian dish in a restaurant (he ends up with potatoes). As crazy as it sounds, this is what I want--to bring my connection with Japan into the present, no matter how mundane or absurd the results. I'm not interested in lying to people about my "samurai ancestors"; I want to see rice fields.

(And rice fields I shall see. Hooray inaka!)

Los Angeles: A post-mortem

I've lived in Los Angeles for 6 full months now. 6 months and 24 days, by the time I leave for Japan on the 24th. I'm working on transitioning in order to make this blog into my Japan Blog(tm), but Hella Angeleno's original purpose was to document my LA experience, my first big move to a new city. So what did I get out of the whole thing?

I think a lot about the part of Elizabeth Gilbert's "Eat, Pray, Love" where she says that each person and each city has one word that describes their way of life. (In Rome, where she is first introduced to this theory, the word is SEX, in New York, it's ACHIEVE.) If your word doesn't match the word in your city, you're in for a lot of frustration and disappointment. I don't know what my word is, or LA's word, but I do know that this city and I don't match up on a fundamental level.

People come here to make it big. In San Francisco, most of the people I knew were from the Bay Area, with a few from Southern California and fewer still from other parts of the US. (These last ones were mostly gay people, who seemed in general to be willing to travel farther for the kind of freedom San Francisco affords.) Here, everyone is from the Midwest, from Toronto, from New York, from Honduras. Everyone--EVERYONE--is in the entertainment industry, whether as a writer, a production assistant, a producer, an office drone, a coffee-fetching intern. When the guy next to you at a coffee shop is working on his laptop and you glance over at his screen, nine times out of ten, he'll be working on a screenplay. At my old Gap store, my coworkers were mostly students; here, they're actors.

There are a lot of things I hate about LA. I hate how far apart everything is and how you have to drive to get anywhere. I hate the billboards for crap movies that no one in their right mind would want to watch. I hate the idiots lining up for American Idol (though I love American Idol). I hate how no one can stay in their fucking lane when they drive.

But to be honest, the reason I was so unhappy in the beginning wasn't because of those things, or even because of the disconnect between my way of life and the LA mindset. There was a lot of dumb luck involved, too. It rained for about a week straight when I got here. Then I got sick for a week; then it rained for another week. I couldn't find real work no matter how many resumes I sent out, and my retail coworkers were unfriendly and hostile.

There are some things I like about LA, things that wouldn't necessarily make me want to live here all on their own, but that are pleasant enough, since I'm here anyway. I like the jacaranda trees and magnolia trees and bougainvillea and honeysuckle and yes, on a good day I even appreciate the palm trees. I like the cute 50's style homes in my neighborhood. I like Melrose and Santa Monica and Silverlake and Hollywood.

And then there are things that make me think I've been wrong about this city. The main branch library, with its cozy workstations and wealth of books. The Kogi truck (seriously). Most importantly, Little Tokyo and the Japanese American community. It's so different from the community I'm used to in San Francisco. There, I sat in a stuffy back room transcribing interviews with people who had been in the internment camps; here, I handed out parking validations at a Jero concert and poured drinks for VIPs who had donated $10,000 or more to the organization I was volunteering for. I still can't quite believe how sleek and well-funded everything is (for example, the Japanese American National Museum). But despite these differences, volunteering in Little Tokyo was the one thing that made me feel at home in LA, and the one time when I met people I could really relate to. When I think about it, it even makes me look forward to coming back.

I won't lie--I'm still a little sad that I'm going to be coming back here, and not to San Francisco, when I finish JET. But I think I'll be better prepared this time. I know where to go when I'm homesick, and where to avoid (I'm looking at you, The Grove). I'll have a built-in network in JETAASC, and a more detailed plan than "get a job that is not at Gap." I'll have savings instead of debt, and Japanese language skills (useful for volunteering, getting random admin jobs, and talking to old ladies, who totally make my day).

You and me, we might not get along, but we're not through yet, LA. I'll see you around, and you better be ready for me.

Presented without commentary

A year ago, probably bored out of my skull at work, I wrote myself an email using futureme.org. It arrived in my inbox this morning.

...I'm writing this from my desk in the Diversity Office, and I'm entering an uncertain phase in my life. Ryan moved to LA a week ago, and since then I've been filling the time: learning Japanese again, transcribing interviews for the historical society, copy editing for Hyphen, watching Sex and the City, reading Anais Nin, writing in my journal, attempting to hammer out a short story. And of course driving myself crazy trying to decide whether to go on JET or not, whether to move to LA in January, etc, etc, as if I can even make these decisions right now. I think I just want to be imagining something other than this cubicle, but I am happy now, even if I constantly want to be moving on to the next thing. I hope by 2010 you've learned to breathe and take things as they come. It is not a skill I have at this point in time.

I hope you and Ryan are still doing okay with this long-distance thing (assuming it is still long-distance). That's what really kills me—I can wait to know about JET, and my career and all that, but knowing that I'm taking a risk on what I have with him by possibly leaving for Japan for a year makes me question whether it's worth it. This is something I've always wanted to do, but right now, I just wanna live with him and come home to him every day.

I hope all these concerns seem silly to you as you read this, that you've long since worked out everything you need to worry about. That's why I'm really looking forward to being you—even in the worst case scenario, by July 2010, everything will be certain. In fact, if I think about it, the only situation where things will still be uncertain when you get this email is the one I want the most. If you're going on JET right now and still with Ryan, you're probably scared to death about what will happen. I hope Japan is worth prolonging that anxiety and uncertainty for another year. I think it is.

It is, Past Me, it is. 

I climbed out of the Gap

And may I never have to work retail again.

(Actually, I still have 3 days left, which is why I went for the picture of John Krasinski instead of one of them typical Gap ads with the healthy-looking people in matchy sweaters. I was given 8 hours after I gave my two weeks notice, my budget is all thrown off, I'll have to go out of my way to pick up that pathetic paycheck on my last day in the United States, and I'm a little grumpy right now and could use the cheering up.)