So here I am, finally, in
Los Angeles.
Los Feliz, to be specific, about a twenty second walk away from
Hollywood Boulevard. It's a nice part of town, everyone I talked to recommended it. East of
Hollywood, south of
Griffith Park, west of hipper-than-thou
Silverlake, the flats are a mix of hipsters, college students, and young professionals. There's a sizeable middle-class Armenian population too, but with the area getting as hip as it is, who now remembers the Armenians? The hills are a mix of normal wealth and celebrity wealth. I hear tell that
SuicideGirls is based out of somewhere around here, and I've overheard local waitstaff trading
Lindsay Lohan complaints on multiple occasions.
I like it here, and since I got over the fact that it wasn't New York, and wasn't even making the barest effort to be, the rest of the city's been growing on me too, despite the fact that it has so far lived up to every stereotype I've ever encountered. Some of them make more sense now that I'm here - you'd wear sunglasses and carry around water too if you lived in a desert. Some of them I've just come to accept - I saw the Olsen twins on the street the other day and realized I really didn't care. Some of them I embrace - seriously, people are just more attractive here. It's still a little disorienting, though. I saw the Hollywood sign the other day and was astounded by the audacity, not to mention the cliche, of the ripoff before I remembered that it was the original.
Starting a new household. Apartmenthold. Studiohold. I've been spending a lot of time at IKEA. IKEA has made me sympathize with the Sims in The Sims.
Now I've got to go find a job. As those of you who have been following my life will know, I came here to join the like fifty percent of anglophone Los Angeles that's trying to be a screenwriter. So in the interim I'm looking to work as an assistant to someone - producer, development exec, writer, agent - where I can learn something about writing, and make connections, alongside all the bitchwork. Now, the entertainment industry, by combination of nature, history, and the economics of the post-studio system world, is the most human of the major economic sectors. And while this includes good aspects like a somewhat laid-back, informal attitude, it also means things like nepotism. As in, getting a job is in large part a factor of who you know. Accordingly, I've been taking lunch meetings with friends of family friends I've never even heard of before. We'll see.
Speaking of money. A few days before I left for my cross-country drive, my parents sat me down and told me that when my grandfather died about a decade ago, he left me some money. Quite a respectable some. It's nice, and I'm perfectly willing to use it to bridge the gap between my projected lower-middle-class income and middle-middle class lifestyle, but I'm kind of afraid of it. I think that when you just graduated college and moved to Hollywood is not a particularly healthy time to come across more money than you know what to do with. At least I don't really care much for cocaine, that should help.
I've been writing some. I have a Firefly spec that I want to be done and polished around the time that Serenity comes out that I'll try to use to get an agent and maybe some interest come next television staffing season, plus some other stuff on the side, plus plenty of ideas, of course. I'm alternating between thinking that I'm fucking amazing and will have no problem, and that I'll be a total hack, except that "hack" implies that someone would actually pay me to sell out. These cycles correspond suspiciously well to how over- or under-caffeinated I am at the time.
Well. I guess that was childhood.