It seems that I am addicted.

Those following my blog, and those who know me (what’s the difference, really? 🙂 know that I have just completed my Bachelors in English. YAY FOR ME!

A long time goal, that. It feels very good to be done. But…I miss taking classes. I love going to school and having a forum to ask questions and learn new things. I’m not through with that yet!

California is an absolute Nirvana of educational opportunities. With the difficulties of multi-culturalism and English as a second language for a large number of students in Cali, it is to their credit that they have made it so easy to learn stuff. I’m lucky. English is my first language, so it’s pretty easy for me to get access to all the goodies.

Not too long ago, I called my last remaining friend in Alaska. She happened to mention that her fiancée was really anxious to go to college, and he had never had the opportunity. A little later, she mentioned that she was thinking of moving to California. “Well,” I said, “Greg would be able to go to a jr. college for 11 bucks a credit if you moved here.”

She just about fell through the floor. “That’s impossible! Really?!”

California has made it very easy to get eddicated.

So. I am going to try to sign up for a journalism class at the JC around the corner. Maybe it will teach me to blog better.

We’ll see.

I have already mentioned the homogeneity of Silicon Valley–how it is very much an industry town. ONE industry: Computers.

When you are into computers, and you live anywhere else in the country, you tend to think of yourself as outside of the mainstream. If you have delusions of grandeur ( and many computer folks do, especially when they are young) you may consider yourself as part of an elite group of people “in the know,” able to toss around TLAs (three-letter-acronyms) like pronouns. After all, you are able to speak in hieroglyphic syllables to communicate with others like yourself, those who can engineer, control or manipulate abstract and physical machines that wrap themselves around the globe like a poly-tentacled jellyfish.

And so many other cannot do this.

In fact, so many others are in-“duh”-viduals who cannot even understand your syntax.

The idea of the ones who know and understand as an elite strata is easy to buy into.

That is, until you are in Silicon Valley. The maligned, misunderstood, socially inept computer geeks of the world have flocked to SIlicon Valley and found a community where they are simply one of many. TLAs are no longer mysterious knowledge symbols, they are common parlance. The erstwhile guru becomes a grunt in Silicon Valley.
There is a knowledge base there unlike anything else in the world; it is a veritable Fort Knox of Geek intelligence.

One of these troy ounces of Geekitude, my friend Tantek, has a blog now. It is his story about a Silicon Valley encounter that has set me off on this blog-rant.

Now let me just say, I understand the elation he describes at overhearing the deep-geek conversation in the restaraunt. Lord knows, when a person is passionately interested in a topic, it is very exciting to find others who also love it and can discuss it on the same expert level as yourself.

HOWEVER, I myself was getting a little tired of the ONE THING happening in Silicon Valley. Life is rich and full. It is important to have more than one interest. Computers are fascinating, and I enjoy them. But there is more to life than start-ups.

There is quite a lot of animosity going on between the North and South. Well, I have a feeling that the Northern part of California is more invested in the animosity than the Southern part is.

But as I said, I am still figuring it out.

An up and coming artist that I had never heard of before today has created a series of paintings depicting a fictional battle between San Francisco and Los Angeles.

It’s one of those profound-as-you-wanna-be series, I guess. There is a lot of immediate humor involved. It doesn’t take much previous knowledge to appreciate the idea of an army of pizza delivery guys and big gulp slurping soldiers. But there is more thought put into it than that, as the writer of that article shows.

I think the whole thing is pretty funny. I bet the artist had a lot of fun designing them.

Here’s another article that gives even more of the story.

I woke up VERY early this morning. I had washed my hair last night, and I wasn’t sure what to do with it all wet when I went to bed. So I wrapped it in a towel and went to sleep like that.

I think I may need to wash my hair more often down here..The air is muckier…I have been feeling like my hair is dirty, and I don’t usually feel that way. Or, I didn’t in sunnyvale. I washed before it felt that way.

Anyway, I woke up, and it had dried very pretty. I dindn’t have to do ANYTHING to it.

It is free and curly and pretty. How nice! Espcially on a day when I don’t feel so good, having to be up at

4:30

!!!!!

But it is nice to feel pretty, even though I am tired.

Before I woke up and discovered my hair, I lay in bed in a little bit of a stupor. I was listening to some guy talk about…something…Knowing yourself? He was saying something about making sure to live your life the way you know you need to…in the middle of a list of other things he said “…and make sure to have quality time with…” friends and family, right? NO.
“..our companion pets..”

That was not was i was expecting to hear. Is that shallow? In LA, they don’t tell you to reach out to your fellow humans, they tell you to spend time with your lapdog.

*smirk*

However, it made me feel guilty about not spending quality time with my companion pet.

Poor Skellig.

As I was about to leave, I was saying goodbye to him, like I always do. He was looking at me, lying in the middle of the living room. I felt bad, so I went up and petted him for a little bit.

He was lying next to a blue mouse. As soon as I petting him, he started chirping, purring and loving on the mouse.

Good kitty!

He really liked it that I petted him. Perhaps I should work it into my morning routine, to pet him for 5 minutes. That shouldn’t be too hard. He was very nice.

chirp
chirp

Ah yes. Early morning Wednesday. More about that later.

On Monday night, I went to a book club. I had signed up online, and I was very excited to be part of a book club here in LA.

Remember all those warning about the shallow people here?
Maybe shallow people don’t read books. Maybe moving here means that I will never be able to discuss what I read (because I am always reading) with anyone.

How sad!

But there was a book club, and I joined it.

Let’s see…Philip, Mike, Justin, Michael, Amy, Gneb, and…oh..what was that last girl’s name? I can’t remember. We were reading Othello.
It was fabulous. A lovely INDEPENDENT coffee shop, sitting around and discussing Iago’s motives. Then we got to know each other a little bit. Everyone was friendly and intelligent. Everyone had something to say and add.

At the end, I asked everyone what they did for a living. They were fascinating. Everyone back in the bay area would say, “IT” or “Networking” or “Programming” or “databases”. They are different, it’s true, but there is a homogeneity. Back when those fields were not sinking, it was kind of fun that everybody all worked in the same field. But at the same time, it meant that you ended up talking Tech all the time.

and NOT talking about Othello. For example.

So, at this table, we had ME. Video conferencing administrator. Kind of a glamorous career.

Not compared to these people. There was a guy who was a commercial artist, an illustrator. Then the guy who wrote descriptions of action in movies for people who can’t see the movies…Kind of like closed captioning (he said it was his firm that does that), but it’s said out loud. If you can’t see what’s happening on TV, you might not be able to pick it all up from just the dialogue. So this guy writes the stuff like “Sheila enters the dining room”, or “John furrows his brow”
I think that is also tremendously cool.

Then there was the former Jazz trombone player, whose lips were wearing out, so he was an insurance guy, making sure cars get fixed right. HE says he loves cars too, so it’s not a complete departure from his passions. He’s still composing.

Then the girl who is working on a reality TV pilot, but wants to keep her integrity, so think she would like to write children’s books.

Then the guy who is an Economics professor at a state university. He was actually asked a lot of questions. We all wanted to know things about what it was like to be a professor, or what economics was really about.

Then the girl who worked for the Chamber of Commerce at Hollywood. I guess she helps with the walk of the stars…Whatever that’s called. And other things. She got asked a lot of questions about the idea ( I had never heard about this before) that some part of Hollywood, or San Fernando valley or somewhere wants to secede from the city of Los Angeles. A whole discussion of local politics ensued.

I was, I must confess, enraptured. It was hard to leave. I was there almost 4 hours.

We all had to come up with suggestions for the next book to read and discuss. We filled up a whole page of ideas. NONE of them were science fiction or fantasy-those geek staples were left entirely out.

When I told my new co-workers where i live now, one of them said, “Oh, that’s a very trendy neighborhood.”

I said, “Really?”

I had no idea.

But. As I was watching the stupid afterwork television when I got home, I turned on that stupid show “Blind Date.”
It’s the one with all the pop-up insults, and commentary on how the date is going before you know how it ended?

THEY WERE DOING THEIR STUPID DATE IN MY NEIGHBORHOOD!!!

I am not sure what I think about this.

They went to the Irish restaraunt around the CORNER from me. THe Tam O’Shanter.
very weird.

TV is roaming about in my neighborhood. I don’t know.

Maybe I should start wearing makeup every day, In case I’m on TV.

Just kidding. I’m sure that would end up making me look worse.

Besides, since I do video conferencing, technically, I’m on TV every day.

But it was a weird feeling, seeing my neighborhood on national TV.

So I live in Los Angeles now. Imagine that.

I’ve already talked about the prejudice the Northern Californians have towards Southern Californians. As near as I can tell, Southern Californians really don’t care what people in the north think of them. However, I’m not moving from south to north, but north to south, so I get the prejudicial remarks.

My brother says, “You going to become all shallow and superficial when you move to LA”

Well, I personally think I could stand to become a little more shallow and not suffer much. I spend too much time in the deep end of the mind pool.

My mother says, “Everyone in LA does drugs all the time.”

“Mom, don’t worry. I’m too cheap to get addicted to drugs. I would never spend that kind of money frivolously.”

“Well, okay. But how will you find friends? Everyone else will be on drugs”

I guess I’ll have to cross that bridge when I come to it.

Another friend says to me, ” Oh no! You can’t move there. They have no culture.”

Yet another “All they care about is looks down there. People are not nice. And they are just not as intellectual as the people in the Bay Area.”

These are serious problems, I have to say. If I am stuck in a place where people only care about the surface, and social interaction would be the equivalent of living on Baywatch, I don’t know. That would probably suck.

But prolonged unemployment sucks too. I had a job offer in hand, so I went for it.

Now, I’ve been here less than a month. I have to say, I haven’t really made any friends to hang out with yet. But take into consideration that I have only left my house to go to work and buy groceries. I have not gotten involved in the social scene yet.

However!
I have been stunned and amazed by how nice people here are.

Everyone at work has been extremely friendly. I mean, really! My boss sent out a notice that a new person (me) had arrived, and to make me feel welcome. They really have. I chat with people in the break room and they all say, Oh you must be Murphy! I was meaning to meet you. Hi!

The boss and my co-workers almost always invite me to have lunch with them. This never happened in my jobs in the bay area. First of all, people were too busy to take lunch. I always worked through lunch anyway, but even if I didn’t, I didn’t get invited to be with my co-workers. People didn’t go out to lunch so much.

At my apartment complex, which really is huge, there is an elevator. It’s pretty similar to the way Chris the man’s complex is set up. All the floors and the parking garage share one elevator.

When I was moving in, and pulling in all these boxes and bags, almost everyone said something to me. They all were willing to help me hold the door open, and often they said, “Are you just moving in? Welcome!”

Even now, people are friendly and say hello in hallways and in the elevator.

This did not happen at Chris’s complex. If you were forced to be in the elevator with a neighbor, they looked sort of embarrassed to have to be near you.

This Sunday, I went to go check out my complex’s gym. I was trying to figure out the weight machines. It always takes a while to figure out what each one is FOR, you know? They all look like medieval torture device.

There were three muscley Italian guys also working out on the machines. The gym isn’t that big, so we were running into each other a little bit. I had stopped to try and figure out what the next machine I needed was, and one of these guys asked if I needed to use the machine he had just finished with. I said, “No, this is just my first time here. I’m trying to figure out what I need.”

“Well, if you have any questions, you can ask me. I could help you.”

Now, I thought that was very nice. I certainly did not look superficially fabulous in my crabby workout clothes and lumpy body. Not the expected gorgeous LA-type anyway. But this guy, Paul was his name, was quite friendly and helpful. He helped me out a little bit, and didn’t make me feel stupid.

I thought that was pretty decent.

So far, the stereotypes don’t seem to be true. I will have to report back after I’ve been here a while, but I am beginning to think it will be pretty nice here.