xmas vacation in hollywood
i'm sitting in an internet cafe in downtown hollywood right now.
my family decided to visit my little brother (23yrsold) who's scrounging a meager living for himself here as a video game tester (as bottom-rung in the industry as you get, but he seems to be holding in there pretty good so far). we also came to show my grandmother the rose parade, something she's always wanted to see.
the flight out here was SHIT, i left on xmas day. airtran was late getting me to my connection, and just fucked things up worse from there. some manager in atlanta (my original connection) gave us (a group of about 8 people, few of whom had anything to do with each other) a check for $2,100, put us on a flight to raliegh NC, and told us to give the check to southwest air, who should already have our reservations. well, arriving in NC, southwest never heard of us and our stupid check before, and at 1am, noone was around to care. the little children of a newlywed couple (older, obviously had prior relationships) started to cry and rightly so, the wife became quite stressed and about ready to kill. i played politician and gave each new person to deal with us a reasonable amount of time to reconcile things before allowing the floodgates of frustration to empty onto them. we spent the night on the floor of the airport, and a kind young southwest employee brought us some blankets. i'm a night person and used to it anyway, so i stayed up and guarded the group as they slept, until about 4am, when i woke the wife (who had the weird check that bound us all together) to establish our place in line, where we thankfully begged and flamed our way onto a 6am flight to tennesee, and then finally to los angeles. irritatingly, we pulled the extra-search ticket on our flight out of nc, and i reluctantly ditched some xmas spirit into the airport trashcan. we all traded names, phones, and addresses, originally to facilitate filing a group complaint (we likely still will), but more likely, we'll all get together again once we're back for a dinner or something and tell how the rest of our vacations went.
once in LA, we did little other than family activities. brought my brother's little 6 year old to disneyland (she clung TIGHT to me during pirates of the carribbean, then dissed it as boring once we were out ^_^;;;) and san diego's animal park where they let the animals roam relatively free accross a sectioned-off mountain range. my bother and i missed getting to the rose parade because we underestimated how long the subway would take to get us there, and again to see the stationary floats on display the next day because we overslept. hey, it was new year's.
everything we did was crowded. i loath high-traffic touristy areas. it's weird, i love people but HATE crowds; people seem so stupid in groups. i much prefer to either be off-the-beaten-path or at least off-the-beaten-TIMES. i like a lot of the touristy things, but i like to hit them when they're relatively empty. when i had a few hours to myself, i walked down to mann's chinese theatre (my fav prints were the marx brothers') and stopped into the ripley's beleive it or not museum: always good for a few hours killed.
we've eaten well, finding odd places.. the best of which have been breakfast. good diners and even a more european diner with classy dishes i'll rarely buy for myself. i love finding undocumented history, most especially in archetecture, and many of them had oddities to keep my interest.
new year's eve was alright, we almost went to long beach to see the gap band (i'd have preferred sir-mixx-a-lot or krs-one, who unfortunately play there the day and day after i leave), but oped to find something with a more reasonable cover-charge. it was just like a night in milwaukee in that we tried place after place, turning them down for the wrong cover, the wrong music, or just too damn crowded. we ended up back at his apartment complex, and it was great: they held a very college-dorm style party, with several floors of people getting down and all kinds of different people to visit. he lives in a place where the rooms are about as big as in the blues brothers movie: you have to move the bed to open the door just about. the place is reserved for starving artists, so there was good painting, photography, djing and musicians to be enjoyed. they opened up a couple of unused apartments, and for a while i enjoyed several techno-fans getting their midi equipment all together and jamming. i can't stand techno (and as you can guess, i uneducatedly lump a lot into that category) by and large, but i enjoyed watching and learning more about the process. someone fit in a digeredoo pretty well into the mix, and that was nice: i don't find it's an instrument that can readily be put together with ANYthing. i also got the only taste of supposedly famous cali greens, this was just stress as they'd call it, but it was appreciated. it made me run at the mouth as i tend to. ^^ i've not chased it here; finding in a strange place is always more trouble than it's worth. still, after committing 99f my time to family shit, it would be nice to get a little fubared in my off-time: it's supposed to be a vacation, dammit.
finally, on sat eve, i broke away to visit an old group of friends that all live here in LA. honestly, they were all patrons of an irc chat chan that i had partaken of when in my mid-teens, something i've not revisited since late high school. they're all jpop and kung-fu fans like myself, (once upon a time i came out here before to go to a convention of the stuff) and it was nice to geek out in old neglected ways. it's interesting to see who's outgrown it and not. regardless, it was nice to relax on my own terms and not be in family-vacation-mode.
so now my family has returned and i have an extra couple of days before i do to mill around LA of my own accord. i had wanted to rent a car and drive all the way up to sanfran (i've heard what a scenic drive it is) but i've been advised it's too long to accomplish. i'm probably going to use the subway and taxis to try to find the interesting things i've not yet hit. ...and stop down into chinatown and grab and armload of asian culture that i can't get in the midwest.
the odd find of the vacation happened right off the bat, in a used-book-store: a book by bill mauldin called 'the brass ring'. i didn't know a whole heck of a lot about him ahead of time, other than he was a WWII cartoonist that charles schultz lists as one of his prime inspirations. it's an old musty-smelling thing that i never really intended to more than graze-over, but it sucked me right in. great stories of him growing up in the depression, and up to his adventures in the european theatre of war. patton himself called this scrawny stars-and-stripes cartoonist into his office to bitch him out, but he always somehow found enough friends in high places to save his ass, more often unbeknownst to bill. i can't get enough of the kind of wisdom this book emparts, but sadly, it's too newly read for me to have a well-digested rationale about it to extoll here.
if you've read this far, have a fucking cookie, and thanks ^_-
my family decided to visit my little brother (23yrsold) who's scrounging a meager living for himself here as a video game tester (as bottom-rung in the industry as you get, but he seems to be holding in there pretty good so far). we also came to show my grandmother the rose parade, something she's always wanted to see.
the flight out here was SHIT, i left on xmas day. airtran was late getting me to my connection, and just fucked things up worse from there. some manager in atlanta (my original connection) gave us (a group of about 8 people, few of whom had anything to do with each other) a check for $2,100, put us on a flight to raliegh NC, and told us to give the check to southwest air, who should already have our reservations. well, arriving in NC, southwest never heard of us and our stupid check before, and at 1am, noone was around to care. the little children of a newlywed couple (older, obviously had prior relationships) started to cry and rightly so, the wife became quite stressed and about ready to kill. i played politician and gave each new person to deal with us a reasonable amount of time to reconcile things before allowing the floodgates of frustration to empty onto them. we spent the night on the floor of the airport, and a kind young southwest employee brought us some blankets. i'm a night person and used to it anyway, so i stayed up and guarded the group as they slept, until about 4am, when i woke the wife (who had the weird check that bound us all together) to establish our place in line, where we thankfully begged and flamed our way onto a 6am flight to tennesee, and then finally to los angeles. irritatingly, we pulled the extra-search ticket on our flight out of nc, and i reluctantly ditched some xmas spirit into the airport trashcan. we all traded names, phones, and addresses, originally to facilitate filing a group complaint (we likely still will), but more likely, we'll all get together again once we're back for a dinner or something and tell how the rest of our vacations went.
once in LA, we did little other than family activities. brought my brother's little 6 year old to disneyland (she clung TIGHT to me during pirates of the carribbean, then dissed it as boring once we were out ^_^;;;) and san diego's animal park where they let the animals roam relatively free accross a sectioned-off mountain range. my bother and i missed getting to the rose parade because we underestimated how long the subway would take to get us there, and again to see the stationary floats on display the next day because we overslept. hey, it was new year's.
everything we did was crowded. i loath high-traffic touristy areas. it's weird, i love people but HATE crowds; people seem so stupid in groups. i much prefer to either be off-the-beaten-path or at least off-the-beaten-TIMES. i like a lot of the touristy things, but i like to hit them when they're relatively empty. when i had a few hours to myself, i walked down to mann's chinese theatre (my fav prints were the marx brothers') and stopped into the ripley's beleive it or not museum: always good for a few hours killed.
we've eaten well, finding odd places.. the best of which have been breakfast. good diners and even a more european diner with classy dishes i'll rarely buy for myself. i love finding undocumented history, most especially in archetecture, and many of them had oddities to keep my interest.
new year's eve was alright, we almost went to long beach to see the gap band (i'd have preferred sir-mixx-a-lot or krs-one, who unfortunately play there the day and day after i leave), but oped to find something with a more reasonable cover-charge. it was just like a night in milwaukee in that we tried place after place, turning them down for the wrong cover, the wrong music, or just too damn crowded. we ended up back at his apartment complex, and it was great: they held a very college-dorm style party, with several floors of people getting down and all kinds of different people to visit. he lives in a place where the rooms are about as big as in the blues brothers movie: you have to move the bed to open the door just about. the place is reserved for starving artists, so there was good painting, photography, djing and musicians to be enjoyed. they opened up a couple of unused apartments, and for a while i enjoyed several techno-fans getting their midi equipment all together and jamming. i can't stand techno (and as you can guess, i uneducatedly lump a lot into that category) by and large, but i enjoyed watching and learning more about the process. someone fit in a digeredoo pretty well into the mix, and that was nice: i don't find it's an instrument that can readily be put together with ANYthing. i also got the only taste of supposedly famous cali greens, this was just stress as they'd call it, but it was appreciated. it made me run at the mouth as i tend to. ^^ i've not chased it here; finding in a strange place is always more trouble than it's worth. still, after committing 99f my time to family shit, it would be nice to get a little fubared in my off-time: it's supposed to be a vacation, dammit.
finally, on sat eve, i broke away to visit an old group of friends that all live here in LA. honestly, they were all patrons of an irc chat chan that i had partaken of when in my mid-teens, something i've not revisited since late high school. they're all jpop and kung-fu fans like myself, (once upon a time i came out here before to go to a convention of the stuff) and it was nice to geek out in old neglected ways. it's interesting to see who's outgrown it and not. regardless, it was nice to relax on my own terms and not be in family-vacation-mode.
so now my family has returned and i have an extra couple of days before i do to mill around LA of my own accord. i had wanted to rent a car and drive all the way up to sanfran (i've heard what a scenic drive it is) but i've been advised it's too long to accomplish. i'm probably going to use the subway and taxis to try to find the interesting things i've not yet hit. ...and stop down into chinatown and grab and armload of asian culture that i can't get in the midwest.
the odd find of the vacation happened right off the bat, in a used-book-store: a book by bill mauldin called 'the brass ring'. i didn't know a whole heck of a lot about him ahead of time, other than he was a WWII cartoonist that charles schultz lists as one of his prime inspirations. it's an old musty-smelling thing that i never really intended to more than graze-over, but it sucked me right in. great stories of him growing up in the depression, and up to his adventures in the european theatre of war. patton himself called this scrawny stars-and-stripes cartoonist into his office to bitch him out, but he always somehow found enough friends in high places to save his ass, more often unbeknownst to bill. i can't get enough of the kind of wisdom this book emparts, but sadly, it's too newly read for me to have a well-digested rationale about it to extoll here.
if you've read this far, have a fucking cookie, and thanks ^_-
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