Slippery When Wet

It’s raining again. I should have noticed before I left the apartment this morning wearing sandals and a long-sleeved cotton shirt, or perhaps before I got a nacho plate at La Salsa and then decided to talk on the phone with Dominic while walking up the stairs outside, slipping, and totally eating it into the staircase, all losing only one nacho. I’ve finally figured out what’s going on, put on shoes and a coat, ate my nachos, and have been taking my time walking down the steps.

The other day I snapped this photo with my camera phone:

Cardinal and gold flowers on a FMS cart/trailer. I heard somewhere that USC’s annual landscaping budget is around $1M, most of which goes into putting in these flowers in the weeks leading up to commencement so the campus looks good when people come visit. And the sight of these little carts driving around means that it’s approaching commencement again. I’m not graduating, but I’m halfway there. It’s weird to take a step back and see… I’m halfway through college already, and I feel like I haven’t done much. I mean, I haven’t gotten drunk, I haven’t pulled an all-nighter (come close, though), I haven’t used drugs, I haven’t dyed my hair purple, I haven’t done anything that’s really like “whoa, he’s a crazy college kid”. Maybe this is my college mid-life crisis, I’m not sure.

So when I get all angsty like this, I know from past experience that it’s a good idea to clean my room. Seeing the overflowing laundry basket in my closet, I figured it might be a good idea to tackle that task. I quickly gathered everything up that hadn’t made it into the basket (dishtowels, sheets, bath towels…. not what you might be thinking) and made my way down the (slippery when wet) steps to the second floor laundry room. For some reason, the south end of the second floor hallway always smells really bad; today, an amalgam of pumpkin seeds, trash, and rotting orange juice greeted me as I shuffled down the hospital-like corridor with my brightly colored pile of clothing. I stepped into the laundry room to see one other guy there unfolding his clothes from the dryer — really the first time I’ve ever run into anybody else in the laundry room. I sorted my laundry into two washers and, to my dismay, it didn’t all fit. I hate being that guy who monopolizes all the machines and makes it impossible to do your own, so I left the last third of my clothes in the hamper. To my dismay, I was out of laundry soap, so I made a run back upstairs to grab a fresh bottle (mmm Tide). When I returned, the guy sorting his clothes was gone, and sensing my opportunity, I quickly dumped my hamper’s contents into the third washer. Nobody was watching, so it didn’t matter, right? I kicked off all three machines and quickly left before anybody else showed up and identified me as that guy.

Coming back up the stairs, I wiped out again. Karma comes around quick.

Hope there’s nobody there when I go back down to put everything in the dryer.

Los Angeles Public Transportation

So it’s only been a week since I last posted, but in college terms, that tends to feel like a year or so. But I guess I’m not doing too bad, since blogging is supposed to be freeform and all…

Tonight Steven was kind enough to treat me to another concert at the Avalon in Hollywood. We saw Mae (Steven’s favorite), Relient K, and a band called Sherwood. The show was good overall, and we went to Lucky Devils afterwards for the world’s best hamburgers and cake shakes. Not too bad of a night.

Of course, the unique thing was that, instead of fighting traffic on the 101 to get there, we instead opted to take advantage of LA’s unique public transportation system, which until this moment I didn’t actually believe existed. You’d hear people talking about it in hushed tones — the metro — as if it were some magical entity that whisked you from place to place at its own whim. You never actually wanted to take it because it was slow and unreliable.

Wellllllll… we took it. It does, in fact, exist, and is more a part of the LA cityscape than I ever knew. I mean, sure, I had experience riding the red line from Union Station to Pershing Square to visit my dad when he worked downtown, but I never knew the train went farther than that. And I knew LA had buses, but I never knew how extensive the bus network was, how far it reached, or how often they came. Our trip was as simple as hopping on the Metro Rapid at the Adams/Vermont station, jumping off the bus and taking a quick walk over to the Red Line station, and then getting on the Red Line. Twelve minutes later we were at Hollywood and Vine, no traffic, no fuss, and it only cost $3 — and that included the trip back, too. That’s less than a gallon of gas.

We saw the show, went to dinner, and finished up around 10:45. I had to be at KCRW at 12 AM tonight, so I figured we had plenty of time. We got on the Red Line at the Hollywood/Highland station around 11, and arrived at the Wilshire/Vermont “crossroads of the world” at 11:15. Here’s where things started to get tough. The next bus showed up 10 minutes later, at 11:25, and it was a regular Metro bus, rather than a Rapid, which makes less stops. The bus is relatively empty, and it’s quiet, save for three neighborhood kids freestyle rapping in the back of the bus (the words f*ck, c*nt, d*ck, b*tch, et al. come up a lot…) Finally, at 11:35, we found ourselves back at Steven’s house. OK, we’re doing fine. We jump in Steven’s car and race to campus, only to get stopped by a red light and an overzealous DPS cruiser. Finally, at 11:50, I race into PSA, up the elevator, and jump in my car to get on the road to KCRW. I gave a call to master control as a heads up that I was running a little late, got the go-ahead, and showed up at 12:05… not too bad, considering the unplanned little jaunt on LA’s public transportation system.

Moral of the story, if there is one: LA has public transportation. It works. It runs on time. You don’t get mugged on it. And it’s cheap. What’s the problem with it?

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