One of the best things for us about hosting out-of-town guests is getting to go into tourist-mode in our own city. Los Angeles is huge (duh) and broken up in to a million distinct neighborhoods, and it can be easy, during our day-to-day, to stay within our manageable 6 mile radius of Silverlake-Downtown-Echo Park-Highland Park-Los Feliz, and ignore the glittering Westside or the sometimes underrated Valley, or the vast Southside, or even (shudder) Hollywood...
So whenever visitors are in town (note: please visit!) we take the opportunity to break out of our familiar routine and go forth into distant neighborhoods. There we try new restaurants and bars, take more impressive hikes, partake in whatever cultural activity is on offer, all in an effort to entertain and pamper our guests while giving them a taste of the diversity of this city. Also, often, we try and convince them to move here. (Note: move here!) And as a bonus, we pretty much always have an awesome time discovering new things to do.
Usually a large part of our plan consists of simply eating and drinking at interesting and delicious places, because really, what more do you ever need? But last week we were charged with hosting Jared's 15-year-old sister and her best friend for a few days, and for a moment we panicked. What do you even DO with children that age? They can't go out for cocktails, or even most concerts, they're too old for "little kid" activities like the zoo, and their culinary interests are firmly in the spaghetti-with-red-sauce/bean-burrito-no-salsa/cheese-pizza-no-toppings camp. To make matters worse, we don't have a TV, and our apartment is quite small, and we had no idea whether they would be into outdoorsy activities like hiking, or cultural activities like museums or concert halls (lol, as if)
(Diorama at the Natural History Museum, not a live elephant.)
Well I'm happy to report that aside from a few flight-related frustrations, the visit turned out to be a smashing success. And in case you are interested, here is exactly how you entertain two young girls in Los Angeles for five full days:
First you stock your kitchen full of Trader Joe's Frozen Pizzas, dry pasta, and multiple jars of spaghetti sauce. Trust me. Then you simply go to: Third Street Promenade for window shopping and watching street performers; Umami Burger for a coke and a burger with all the goodies scraped off (for them), and one with all its regular deliciousness intact for you; Venice Beach for ice cream, strolling, watching skateboarders, and getting henna tattoos; the Stairs of Silverlake to catch a glimpse of the Hollywood Sign; Amoeba Records for music browsing; a hike to Griffith Observatory on a beautiful day with an enthusiastic dog (making sure you run into Odd Future shooting a video (score!)) Mexcali for authentic tacos; a long stroll through Chinatown, Olvera Street, and Little Tokyo to look at tchotchkes; Pinkberry for pinkberry; the Americana for shopping and a PG-13 movie (Rock of Ages); Beverly Hills for a long drive past the fancy houses and a slow trek down Rodeo Drive; Santa Monica Beach for chillin' and getting a rosy sunburn next to the screams of the roller coaster; In-N-Out in Eagle Rock for scarfing animal-style; Hollywood for an obligatory walk-through including Grauman's Chinese Theater; LACMA for culture and pictures of Urban Light; Leela Thai for the girls' first Thai food; the Academy 5 in Pasadena for two-dollar matinee of 21 Jump Street; the dog park for dogs; a few more walks; annnnnd you're done!
1) Decide after months of mind-numbingly slow Internet that it may be worth it to upgrade to the slightly faster version.
2) Call your Internet Service Provider to learn that the slightly faster version is only $6 more a month! Make a bunch of salty snacks in anticipation of getting to stream season three of Breaking Bad without random jumps and pauses in the connection.
3) Three weeks later, when your bill comes and it is $38 higher than expected, get disproportionally angry and call your Terrible Internet Service Provider in a huff.
4) Two and a half hours and three transfers into your call, verify your account number for the fourth time and confirm your “favorite singer” to a tired-sounding woman in Indianapolis. When she pulls up your overcharged account she will exclaim, “Well this can’t be right!” Agree. She will make keyboard clicking sounds and tell you to expect a refund on your next billing cycle. Believe her if you like.
5) When the next bill comes, repeat step four, this time, with a fast-talking man in Philadelphia. Tersely explain your problem. Verify your account number. He will pull up your last two bills and exclaim, “This can’t be right!” in the same incredulous tone as the woman in Indianapolis. Agree. Attempt to extort an immediate solution from him with what you think of as your signature blend of “firm charm.” Fail. Demand to speak to “a higher up.” Fail. Warily believe him when he tells you to really expect a refund on your next billing cycle.
6) During the next three still-$38-higher-than-they-should-be cycles, up your calling regimen to twice a month, tag-teaming with your husband in a version of good cop/bad cop in which he plays the “Personable Southerner” and you play the “Aggrieved Harpy.” Verify your goddamn account number. Use your "mean" voice. Use your “unacceptable” voice. Threaten to cancel, knowing full well that they’re the only high-speed Internet provider in your pocket neighborhood. Know that they know this too. Use your pleading voice. Begin to see your failure to obtain this refund as a reflection of your general insignificance in the world.
7) Have a revelation. Search out your Terrible Internet Service Provider’s Twitter handle.
8) Tweet at them.
9) Receive an immediate reply.
10) Six minutes later, answer your phone to a serene, beautiful sounding woman named “Kate.” She’ll ask you how your day has been in a voice that will make you feel like the two of you have spent the last five months together in a tropical hideaway. Is that a waterfall in the background? Kate already has your account number. Kate just needs to confirm the name of your favorite singer. She will compliment you on your music taste. Then she will refund your five months of built-up overcharges with the customer service equivalent of a toss of her luscious brown hair. She will ask if there is anything more she can do to help and she will give you her personal line at the company headquarters. She will wish you a great rest of your day.
11) Ten minutes later, after you find the refund sitting placidly in your account, come up with a really snarky tweet about the power of public complaining,
12) But find that you just can’t bring yourself to do that to Kate.
P.S. I originally wrote this for The Billfold, a website which I adore, and which you should probably read everyday if you care at all about your life. Just sayin'.
Step Two: Avoid a mess by cutting head and arm holes into a trash bag and making a protective tunic.
Step Three: In a shallow ceramic bowl combine one part powder bleach with one part 20 volume creme developer. Mix these with your long tinting brush from Sally Beauty Supply. Are you wearing gloves? Great!
Step Four: Paint the bleach mixture onto the bottom five inches of your hair. There's no turning back now. Open a window and let it sit for 25 minutes, or until your hair starts to feel and look like straw. Rise the bleach out. Dry your hair carefully.
Step Five: Take a picture of your trendy new ombre 'do.
Step Six: Consider just stopping at this point. Isn't this the boost you were after? Doesn't this look cute enough? Spend some time feeling OK about this while you watch the Internet.
Step Seven: Start to meditate on your lost punk youth, specifically the bright colors you wore to match your spritely teenage personality. Think about how happy and how simple it was to sit with your best friend Lauren, watching The Real World London and eating frozen lasagna while she carefully tinted your hair violet or fuchsia. Recall how when you became an adult you made a big show about renouncing your former colorful look, declaring something vague about beauty on the inside. Think of the years you spent being studiously dull looking, buying your clothes from Old Navy and letting your hair become long and brown and forgettable because what did you have to prove? Remember how wrong it felt to look into a mirror a see such a bland reflection, but how silly you thought it would be to have pink hair at your age.
Step Eight: Get over yourself.
Step Nine: Put your trash bag back on. Start painting dye onto the bleached tips of your hair, layering the light pink Manic Panic at the top with the deeper Punky Color toward the bottom, creating an ombre effect similar to what you did for your ikea lampshade. Try not to think too much about how you are carefully matching your hair to a lamp...
Step Ten: Tape the bottom end of the trash bag to your shoulders to trap the mess you've made and avoid it getting onto your nice things (like the white sofa you got from Craigslist that was originally from Pottery Barn, aka Grownup Land.)
Step Eleven: While you are waiting for the dye to set, consider whether or not you think pink hair is actually about youth. Make the argument that it is more about brightness and beauty and living the one life you have in a way that feels honest and fun.
Step Twelve: Realize that no one is arguing with you.
Step Thirteen: Rinse your hair in the sink until the water runs clear.
Step Fourteen: Begin to dry your hair with a dark towel. Get overly excited. Take a laptop picture to send to your sister while everything is still wet. Start to feel like some sort of rock star. Get suddenly embarrassed about being so happy over something silly and superficial like pink hair. Wrestle with your feelings while you put your shoes on to go walk the dog. Realize on your walk that you have a spring in your step. Take the long way, feeling the sun on your shoulders and the soft breeze in your colorful ponytail. Come back home and look in the mirror.
I am writing a book. I have been writing this book for what seems like the entire history of time.
At some point, the wonderful people at Scribner decided they would take a chance and agreed to publish said book, so long as I finished writing it within a respectable framework of time.
And so, when school was done, Jared and I left behind our normal-person teaching jobs and our easy Iowa life and moved back to my homeland of California. Here we started a new life, one comprised of Jared leaving every morning for his normal-person teaching job, and me staying behind for the abnormal-person work of writing a book.
Now, I think that there is a certain type of person who is perfectly suited to the bizarro-world that is having an enormous chunk of completely unstructured time with a deadline planted waaaay down at the end of it, but that person?
She is not me.
BUT! All that really means is that I have had to develop strategies to get my lazy, distractible, procrastination-prone self to do the work that needs to be done. And so, since I think that the best people to take advice from are the people who are naturally bad at something themselves, I present to you my time-tested tips on working from home without turning into a toothless hermit muttering into the darkness and plucking on a one-stringed fiddle.
Tip One: Shower and brush your teeth! This may seem obvious, but let me tell you, when you roll out of bed morning after morning to an empty house where there is no one to see you or be offended by your slovenliness, it can sometimes be hard to remember why such things are even important. Don't fall into the trap! For Heaven's sake clean yourself.
Tip Two is related: Dress yourself in some halfway decent clothing, maybe even dab some makeup on your face. Again, it's tempting to feel like it doesn't matter what you look like when you are all alone, but I'll tell you, working from home is a mind game. Looking like someone who might be seen in public is a trick that will give you a psychological edge. Besides, the UPS man will see you. He sees all.
Do you see where I'm going with this? Working from home is just like having an actual job. It's just that you are the only one around to enforce the actualness of it. It's sort of like how you have to set aside tax money from your advance because there's no one to withhold it from your paycheck and you do that, right?
<cough> moving on...
Tip Three: Designate a fixed portion of your day to the work at hand and then stick to it. Start your work when it is supposed to start, and, perhaps even more importantly, END IT when it is supposed to end. This is actually the most crucial point of this whole lecture besides brushing your teeth. Before I figured this out my entire life was lived in a fog of guilt-induced anxiety. I couldn't take pleasure in anything I did because deep down a voice would be scolding, you could be writing right now! Nothing is worse for your creativity than that stupid voice.
So, figure out what time of day you are best at what you do and then stick to that time. It will probably not be eight hours. It must be manageable and realistic if it is to work. The important part is you are not allowed to watchpuppyvideos during that time. You are not allowed to read blogs during that time. But when the time is up, you are to wrap up what you are doing, and then you are to leave work.
"Leaving work" is such a crucial point that it deserves its own tip. Tip Four: Dedicate a section of your house to your work that is not related to the other things that go on in your house. Best case is you have an office with a door that closes, but I realize that may be a bit of a luxury. So. If you must work on the couch in the living room, try to do your TV and puppy video watching in a chair. If you must work in your bedroom, set up a little desk for yourself,don't work in your bed. Boundaries can be very tricky to manage when you work from home, but they must be maintained if you are to hold on to your sanity and not fall into believing that every minute of your day is about your job.
work-free zone
Tip Five. Keep your house tidy, and spend some time getting it set up to be as pleasing as it can be. You are going to be spending a LOT of time in this space. Do whatever you can do to make it a place of calm and not chaos. The chaos will get you down and the UPS man will judge you.
Then you can walk him. This is a very very good thing to do. Moving your stiff, chair-addled body, feeling the sun on your pale face, looking at things that are three-dimentional and not part of your computer screen, these are the things that will keep you from going off the deep end. You can also talk to your dog, if you feel like it's strange that hours pass every day without the sound of any human voice.
Which brings me to Tip Seven:During the parts of your day that are not your working hours, try to have some form of human interaction. This could mean walking to a coffee shop or going grocery shopping etc, but it could also mean simply opening up your gchat window and making jokes with your sister Olivia, who has a real job in a real office, or with your friend Matt, who is also a crazy home-based writer like yourself. Just don't let these chats bleed into your working hours like I sometimes do. Be vigilant!
Tip Eight.Don't allow your online Scrabble accomplishments to stand in for actual accomplishments.
Am I the only one who does this? Don't do this.
Tip Nine. The weekends are weekends and should be treated as such. Is it Saturday? Get out of your house! Go! What are you doing sitting here looking at a computer screen? You have all week to do that. Go be around the actual people! Go on a hike! See some music! Go to a nerdy party! Whatever. Just don't let me catch you here.
Tip Ten. When the walls are closing in on you and the words you are writing are all meaningless drivel, and your dog looks like he has lost all respect for you, and you feel like throwing it all away, do two things. First, lie on the floor of your living room for ten minutes with your eyes closed and play this song.
Then pick yourself up off the floor and read this.
Then get back to work, you old so and so.
You can do this!
(top photo by Shelby Duncan) P.S. Below are my four favorite books about the writing process. I cannot recommend them highly enough. I've also heard great things about Writing Down the Bones, but have yet to check it out.
If you're anything like me, the rapid approach of your thirtieth birthday will lead you down to the beauty supply store, where you will attempt to reclaim your lost punk youth by dying a hot pink streak in your boring old hair. This should stave off any pending crises for the time being, but it will also leave you with a nearly-full tub of hot pink hair dye left over.
And if you're anything like me, you hate the idea of wasting a nearly-full tub of hot pink hair dye!
Well, you know that boring white Ikea lampshade that you got cause it was like, four dollars and good enough to put next to your bed on your hand-me-down bedside table cause no one ever sees that part of your house anyway?
That's the one.
Wouldn't your life be so much brighter if it was a beautiful hot pink ombre instead?
Oh yes it would!
I thought so.
This project is so easy and quick. And since you are using things you already own, it costs nothing and you get to feel really pleased with yourself. (Of course if for some reason you don't have a nearly-full tub of hot pink hair dye lying around, you could always use plain old Rit Dye from the grocery store, and the process would be the same, and I wouldn't judge you one bit.)
Either way, let's begin.
1) First, grab a basin, some rags and a lot of newspaper:
You can wear gloves, or you can be hardcore. The choice is yours.
2) Fill the tub with about two inches of warm water, then dunk the shade, turning it all around to wet the fabric thoroughly.
3) Scoop out a dollop of dye (I used a hair tinting brush for this, but you could just as easily use a spoon) and stir it into the water. Mix well for a couple of minutes to dissolve any lumps.
4) Test to see if you've got the color you want by dipping a strip of cotton fabric into your dye bath. Add either more dye or more water to adjust your color.
5) Now the fun part! Place your lampshade carefully into your dye bath and watch the pink water start to wick up into the damp fabric. Oooooh magic!
6) Let the shade hang out for a second in the dye bath, then take it out and put it on your massive stack of newspaper to let the dye set for a few minutes.
Don't worry, it will even out in the next step.
7) While the dye is setting, dump out some of your hyper-concentrated bath and add some plain water until the tub is about five inches full. Now immerse your shade in that deeper, lighter bath. This is the secret to making everything all ombre-lovely.
8) Finally, take that baby out of its bathwater and let dry.
yay!
You're done! Now just slap it on its base and plug it in, you pink-haired whiz!
Here's a costume idea for those who read a certain kind of comic book, the kind that's rarely even referred to as a "comic book," but rather, "graphic novel." You know what I'm talking about. They feature cleanly drawn black and white characters with believable hairstyles and no superpowers beyond preternatural self-reflection.
Last year, when I was still within the nurturing bosom of writing school, I was working on my own graphic stuff:
So I thought it would be fun to dress up for halloween as myself in my graphic memoir:
(I wish my hair was this big)
It is a very easy costume. Here's how to get the look!
1) First, select black, white and gray clothing that looks like something you would actually wear. (You don't want to be mistaken for a mime.)
2) Next white out your face and hands and any exposed skin with drugstore clown makeup, then dust over that with baby power.
3) Then take a black eyeliner and draw anywhere a line would be in a drawing, including along your jaw and under your nose, and between each finger on your hands.
Here's a dubiously helpful example of where to put the lines. Pro tip, don't bother with your smile lines, you'll end up looking like a crone.
(The best part about this costume is you don't have to mess around with complex shading dots, which are really hard to get right, and often end up looking like small pox anyway.)
4) Next, make your props out of poster board. I drew a big head of hair like I've always wanted, cut it out, then hot glued it to a headband. Then I drew a beer and attached a little loop of paper behind so it could slip over an actual beer. Add any paper accessories you like, the more the better, in fact, as you are going for a 2D image here, and the paper really helps people get it. (I even made a paper wedding ring, mostly because I was a newlywed, and we are very annoying that way.)
5) Finally, and most importantly, make your captions. I cut down about a dozen sheets of poster board, drew a rectangle in each one and strung them together at waist level, along with a sharpie on a string. I wrote the first one, so that people would get the idea, but kept the rest blank. All through the evening, other revelers could come up and write a caption about what was happening, thus narrating the memoir. Things got pretty weird! But also fun!
