18 Months and Counting

April 10, 2017 JG 2 Comments

It’s April. Spring showers, wildflowers, coming out of dormancy, beginning again. It’s also the 18-month anniversary of my return to corporate America, and the date by which my younger sister told me I’d better be out of it again.

I have always been better at doing what I was told, than determining what I would do. I have dreams, but I view them as the things I can’t wait to do when they pop up right in front of my face, not things I go out and make happen. It’s an approach that explains why my decision to travel around the world petrified me: I had made a statement of intent, and now I must follow through. It was exactly the opposite of what I was used to.

During the first week of this trip, I was terrified. I tried to be patient, but any forgiveness I happily show another person isn’t a generosity I bestow on myself. In calls home to family, an ‘auntie’ said to me, “you know you can always come home.”

This struck me as possibly the most ridiculous thing anyone had ever said to me. Of course I would not go home. Face-saving aside, who takes three steps forward into a dream and then turns around? Not THIS chick. And saving face isn’t an aside. I was not going to give up – not on the trip, and definitely not on myself. I had come this far. It was only the beginning, but it was still pretty far.

This wasn’t the first time someone had said such a thing to me. In grad school, out of my element, in a new town decidedly more conservative than any I’d been used to, in a program that forced me so far out of my comfort zone I began to drink regularly for the first time in my life (at the age of 30), I sought counsel from a mentor back in Seattle. She said a very similar thing, “if you are this miserable, why don’t you quit?”

When my auntie told me I could just go home, the first thing I heard was, “if you’re miserable, why don’t you quit?” It was ridiculous, and a revelation, and true: I could quit. I could go home, and no one would be bothered by it. Except for me. As much as I was out of my element in trying to catch the Transmilenio in Bogota, as much a failure as I felt for not having conquered the world three days into seeing it, I just needed to know there was an out, in order to find the ability to continue.

And so, last July, when I showed up for a family vacation 10 months into my new job and six months into literally dreading every single day of it, into waking in the night riddled with the buckshot of anxiety that tore up my confidence, into driving to the office and sitting in the parking lot willing myself to open the door and go into the building, I was slightly more prepared for someone to ask exactly what one sister did.

“You know you can quit, right? It sounds miserable.”

This time, I knew. And because I knew, I had started working through what the plan should be. How to turn the three steps forward into ten, into 20, into, potentially, a path to the door.

The project that was making me miserable was more out of my comfort zone than foreign transportation. It was amorphous, relied on resources who were poorly managed and had no people skills, and required the involvement of literally every area of the operation. I couldn’t articulate it, let alone lead it. I had no guidance, no mentorship. I was bogged down.

But here is what I knew: I don’t like to give up. I hated what I was doing, but I didn’t want to let it get the better of me. I had, by July, outlined the most significant milestones, the release dates and deliverables, and put regular routines in place to track them. I had found a mentor who could help keep me out of the weeds. I had taken three steps forward, and was continuing to put one foot in front of the other.

No one wants to see a resume with a job that lasts under a year, so I wouldn’t leave before October. I had a significant deliverable by Sept 30^th, and I was requesting permission to work remotely for a month. I would wrap up the first and if I got the second, I would stick around a little longer. I had my out, so I could continue to work.

I delivered the first, they delivered the second. And during October, from my remote work escape to the Pacific Northwest, I had my mid-year review, during which I was told something that caught me by surprise: I was knocking it out of the park.

How could I be this miserable, and successful? Because the metrics by which these things are measured are vastly separate. Delivery despite the cost it takes on my self is workplace success, but not a personal success. Unlike delivering myself successfully around the world, which was almost pure joy, where each fear conquered was a gift to the person I had once been and was becoming again, each milestone conquered at work was another little weight on the scale tipping in a direction way from who I am. I will pull the scale back into balance, but only by hanging off the edge of it and pulling it back down.

So here we are: April. Month 19. A time for growth, for rebirth, for new buds and sweet smells in the sun coming out. A time, perhaps for coming out of the cocoon as a butterfly and flying away. Only time will tell.

Los Angeles, Uncategorized

The Sounds of Silence

November 7, 2016 JG 2 Comments

There is no picture to go with this post, and for that, I apologize. But you can make one for yourself. Go ahead. I will help.

Close your eyes. Go on – close them. Close your eyes, and take a breath – slow, long, and deep. I’ll tell you what the breath smells like: clean, a little sweet with the scent of fecundity. Fall sun, the whisper of winter, a slight afternote of salt floating in. Now let out that breath and take another. And while you take it in, listen, and I will tell you what you hear: nothing.

You hear nothing, and that nothing is everything. It is the space that is made for a pair of mergansers to fly across a field and alight on the pond near you. It is the space that is made for a sudden wind to blow – strong enough that you can see it coming across the still surface of the water and listen as it shakes down the alders and birch and begins the winter process of stripping them bare. On its way, it bats the apples from the trees by the beach to the ground with a heavy, abusive thud that leaves sugar spots on their skin and calls the deer to feed, their slow chew a silence of its own, until they sense your presence and stop, perking up their heads in a frozen stance and then prancing away – a hop almost like a rabbit – the pattern of it smashing grass beneath their feet with the quiet underbeat of a drum.

Let out your breath and take another. Keep your eye closed. Here come the geese, the heaviness of their wings sweeping by you like a brush across a snare drum – sleepy, slow, the shushing of mother nature putting the earth down for a nap. The beat of fall. If you whistle for the dog, he will come, too, soft and silent across the grass and then faster, his own background beat, louder as he comes to your feet and stops suddenly and it is silent, except for his heavy pant of breath, backed up by a faint lap of waves sipping from the rocky shore and swallowing shells back down to sea with the tinkling of a wind chime.

This is what silence looks like. This is the picture to send with this post – of stillness and breath, of a life that happens around you like a quiet background beat of a drum to steady the earth’s breathing, and your own.

Now, open your eyes. Take a deep breath and try to hold on to that picture while the sounds of the city replace it with the cacophony of urban-ness, an aural affront that wakes your brain to alertness. It is endless, unpatterned: the unpredictable whine of a siren down La Brea. The inevitable, irrational hum of a helicopter over Hollywood, or the highway, or on a trip to the beach – the Uber of the rich driving through your backyard – louder, louder, closer, too close, too loud, receding, gone. Replaced in irregular waves of sound and motion. The neighbors are having the same discussion about their relationship across the alley over the one constant: the whir of air conditioning units pushing too hard at work, broken at irregular intervals by plumbing from the floor beneath you, so loud it may be in your own kitchen or bath.

These are the sounds of the city, and they create a picture of their own. The backdrop is an uncontrollable foreground that we don’t breathe in. We don’t move to them so much as follow them along, dodging their beat, letting go of our own, occasionally in step, or stepping aside. Welcome back to LA. Welcome back to the wake up.

Los Angeles, Uncategorized

Hollywood Forever

February 29, 2016 JG 2 Comments

People keep asking me how I like LA. Or how I came to be here. Or if I think I’m staying.

I, myself, barely remember that I am here lately. This is the first weekend in 7 weeks that I’ve slept in my own zip code, and between those weekends, I’ve been working a good number of 11- and 12-hour days at the office. In weeks like that, does it matter where one lives?

And yet it does. Because where else but LA could you take four pieces of art that have been sitting in your apartment, patiently awaiting frames for a year, to finally get the love they deserve, and end up taking the dog for a walk in that ultimate commitment to never leaving LA: Hollywood Forever Cemetery?

Tucked between the Paramount lot and Santa Monica Blvd, with a clear view of the infamous Hollywood sign on most days, Hollywood Forever Cemetery has a little of something to love from every corner of this city. There are Russian Orthodox here, and Russian Jews, and German Jews, and just plain Jewish Jews. I would imagine there are some just plain Russians and Germans and Chinese and Japanese and Vietnamese and Italians and maybe some Brits and people of other sorts, but I didn’t happen upon their individual ‘neighborhoods.’ There’s a Jewish mausoleum and a Catholic mausoleum and a giant empty space of mausoleum waiting to be filled with anyone ready to commit to whatever Hollywood brings on.

On a sunny Saturday that threatened to heat up, numerous palm trees and other deciduous arboreal delights provided ample shade and some wandering space for the dog. Like the rest of LA, the cemetery is absurdly dog-friendly. Of course it is – it’s the eternal home of Toto.

The grass is pleasingly unkempt; the cemetery (unlike LA) is not overly-coiffed. Its natural irregularity is inviting, and I was tempted to wander through the crowded rows of tombstones on a plush offroad journey. But I was informed by a friendly but firm security guard that dogs must stay off the grass. The reason, he pointed out from his seat on an official golf cart, is because the graves and some of their stones ride right up against the curb in a significant portion of the park.

The stones are worthy of their own rolling credits. It’s not the people who lie within or beneath them – though there is a Golden Age of Hollywood Who’s Who list buried here – it’s the pure variety of the stones themselves. They are stones the size of ledger paper. There are stones flush to the ground. There are stones the size of coffins, and stones that are sarcophagi; stones engraved with the symbols of Masons and Oddfellows, Stars of David and Coptic crosses, and things I’ve never seen before. There are family plots that are monuments themselves; there are crypts and obelisks and something that looks like a cross between a real pyramid and a pyramid you’d find on the Vegas Strip, but of course, this is Hollywood, and what is Vegas but a variation on that theme?

There are homages here. To mothers, and sons, to brothers and daughters and great grandparents ‘united in eternity’ side by side, their portraits etched in granite above them.

There are artists and actors and singers and writers and producers and directors and normal Joe’s. There are granddaughters now walking with canes and aided by great granddaughters carrying picnics to visit family members on a sunny afternoon. There are mourners gathered, and empty chairs set up awaiting more. And there are tourists – foreign and domestic, and local, like myself, wandering through a local past and wondering about the future. It’s a village of passed souls breathing a little life to those of us still walking above them, looking up at the palm trees and blue sky, and wondering how we got to this incredible place.

Los Angeles

I Left My Heart in San Francisco

October 5, 2015 JG Leave a comment

When people ask where I am from, I tell them, “San Francisco.” It’s a spiritual truth as much as a literal one. When I left the Bay Area at age nine, I truly left my heart behind, and when I graduated from college just over a decade later, the first thing I did was flee westward to the San Francisco of my dreams.

In the intervening years, San Francisco had grown some, but it was still, fundamentally, itself. It was a place where all possibilities were possible – from miner 49ers to flower children and beyond. It was a city filled with active neighborhoods and the activists who loved them; of spicy eucalyptus pods dropped along the park; a place of historical hangouts and the leftover hippies who still hung out in them, as fervent in the 90s as they’d been three decades before. A place of ocean and fog, of salt that floats out each morning and in each evening on a sweet wet wind, burned off and on by a bright but not-too-hot sun. It was the Golden Gate, the Bay-to-Breakers, Alcatraz and Angel Island and Marin in the distance. It was, of course, a city of hills – hills navigated slowly by original Beetles and VW vans with bumper stickers of dancing bears and, ‘CoExist,’ and ‘dog is my copilot,’ and the Darwin fish. It’s where garage doors rolled up on a Saturday, revealing one sale after another; where you could start a fight on the Muni by insisting your burrito place is best; where grown men rode skateboards, not scooters; and everyone was a politician of some sort because we were all devoted to our systems of belief.

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Like dancing bears, only San Francisco-ized.

It is by no means surprising that this city of free love and the Diggers and Bill Graham and the Grateful Dead and acid-dropping and Black Panthers (I’m appropriating Oakland here) and City Lights and Spec’s and Fillmore posters and the thriving Fillmore district replaced by the yuppie Fillmore street and motorcycles not bicycles outside Toronado and the TransAmerica building and hip-hatted Willie and Jerry Brown and Harvey Milk and Margo St. James and free speech and SDS not LDS – it is by no means surprising that this is the place where tech went boom. It was as inevitable as the fire of 1906. Only a place of such possibility would yield a creative mushroom cloud of such impact as to bust the city it dropped on.

Last month, I was home in San Francisco for a wedding. It had been a while since my city and I had reunited for more than a night or two, and it filled me with conflict, and an overwhelming nostalgia. San Francisco was, and remains, my one true urban love affair. I love its grungy streets and random murals, the sound of electric busses passing and the streetcar on a track. I love the beach in the fog and a grungy coffee house in the spring. I love those Eucalyptus trees, and triplexes of railroad flats. But San Francisco, my San Francisco, is gone.

San Francisco still has a funky attitude – one funky people can’t afford.

It’s hard to be a dreamer in San Francisco anymore. Dreams there are incredibly expensive. In the mid-90’s, I shared a three bedroom flat in the mission with two other women and we paid $1350 combined. We were two blocks off Dolores Park and surrounded by stores of used stuff, semi-functional laundromats, a couple sketchy-marts, and the 500 Club.

In that same neighborhood now, a one-bedroom costs upwards of $3000 per month, and our combined rent couldn’t even get you a studio (I’m not exaggerating). The sketchy-marts are now smoothie bars and hi-end independent organic grocers and farm-to-table restaurants with lines out the door. The 500 Club is still there, but I doubt the same is true of its Addams Family pinball machine, or the regulars who camped out on the same bar stools, night after nigh,t with a bartender who resembled Pinhead. Friends who grew up in the city by the bay, who are married with solid double-incomes have been priced out, and in their places have come a new generation of dot-com and start-up youth who think it’s normal for a martini to cost $15 and will never know the inside of a true dive bar.

The “go west, young man,” dream is in our national psyche, for better or worse. We leverage it to create a new beginning when the going has gotten too tough or the odds are never in our favor. But where do we go to start over when the start-over west goes bust?

When I was looking for a place to settle, I was frequently asked, “why don’t you go back to San Francisco? You love it there!” I struggled with an appropriate answer because what my heart was shouting was, “because my San Francisco is dead.” Meanwhile the Los Angeles of my memory was calling.

Since all of my fun Los Angeles memories take place on vacations, I figured I should come down from my temporary encampment in Washington State and check it out. I intentionally went to dinner during rush hour traffic, to see how bad it was (not fun, not horrendous). And then, while having lunch with a friend I’ve known since the sixth grade, the lightbulb turned on.

“LA is great,” he said. “I love it here because you can decide to do anything you want, and people will help you make it happen. Want to start a line of vegan baby clothes? Great, how can I help? I know a dude who went to Harvard and decided he really wanted to be a dog walker. Done. You just put it out there and work on it, and people are on your side.”

Now, granted these are ridiculously Californian examples, but the lightbulb went on: a place where all possibilities are possible. Not everyone’s dream will come true. But in LA, your dreams aren’t over before you find a place to lay your head.

My heart is still in San Francisco. It always will be. It remains the city that launched a thousand dreams – my own alone. It will always have its funk, its fog, its coffee and its political vibe. I will always want to be there, when the lights go down in the city and the sun shines on the bay (or when Journey is playing a concert). But I’m creating a life in the new San Francisco, a city with a vibrant history of its own, where museums are popping up amidst the bright lights of movie premiers and the dark corners that yield a crisis-launching number of homeless. We lack funding, and water, but we have enough palm trees and dreams for everyone. Come join us – we’ll help you make your dreams come true.

Los Angeles

The Jig Is Up

October 1, 2015 JG 2 Comments

I’ve never been great with milestones. When I left New York after five difficult years of college, the friend with whom I was driving cross-country asked if I had anything I wanted to say or do to mark the occasion. I said, “yeah, get in the car and leave.”

Setting intention isn’t historically my strong suit, and sabbatical-ing around the world was no different. As I mentioned way back when, I landed in Bogota with a four day hostel reservation, an around the world plane ticket, a six-year-old copy of South America on a Shoestring, and two weeks to get to Bolivia. Advance planning: not my strong suit.

So how do I mark today, the momentous last day of freedom before I return to work? With gratitude, with friendship, and with adventure – the same way I spent my time out and about in the world.

I walked the dog this morning the same way I have most days I’ve lived in this neighborhood. I happened, today, to see the owner of a home that I have watched, dog walk by dog walk, be lovingly restored and re-landscaped in a neighborhood where homes are more frequently torn down and replaced with McMansions. I got to tell her how much I’ve loved watching her house come back to life – and see how happy she was to be thanked.

Dogwalk LA today

I went to the Broad Museum, just opened last week, and saw amazing art with a friend who took the same semester off from college in 1991; the last cultural thing we did together was use my dad’s tickets to see La Traviata at the San Francisco Opera, which we left after one intermission because we were both crying so hard we couldn’t take anymore. But even today, we both remembered that evening for its beauty, which I believe is how I will remember today. Something old, something new, something inspirational.

Me beside a chair in Robert Therrien’s Under the Table, at the Broad

These plates are taller than I am. My grandfather always said, "Don't stack the plates!"

These plates are taller than I am. See the person in the background? My grandfather always said, “Don’t stack the plates!”

And then I delighted in the mundane. I went grocery shopping. I cleaned my room. I changed my sheets and unpacked my suitcase from last week’s adventure. I hardly remember how to go to work, despite some contract jobs here in LA (like that time I worked on the Oscars, which I’ve yet to report). So I’m trying to remember what I need at a desk, what one wears to an office, and to bring my paperwork to prove I’m a legal, able to work, resident of the USA. Thank goodness my passport is close at hand.

This transition – this last day of ‘freedom’ – is one of many lasts I’ve had since I packed up and hit the road over two years ago. There was my last day in Dallas , my last day ‘out and about in the world, which took place in Turkey, my last drive in my beloved Bessie. But this transition also marks one of many more firsts on this adventure my life has become: my first visits to 16 countries, my first published piece, my first new car in 15 years, my first time (and second, and third) in the Eastern Sierra in 25 years, and tomorrow, my first day at a new company since 2005.

My last day out and about in the world, in the harem in Istanbul.

My last day out and about in the free world (today). Do I look THAT different?

The struggle with this transition is the looming question, “Is this the end?” Is the adventure over? And while, of course, I’ve had moments of panic at this very thought, the reality is no, of course not. The adventure began where, somewhere along the way, I learned to let go of fear and let in life. To take risks that were previously unimaginable because I would have rationalized my way out of them, before even starting. Quitting my job was a risk. Moving to LA was a risk. Taking this new job is a risk – it seems safer than the wander but the truth is, I will be measured against or among a number of incredibly competent people while undertaking new and unfamiliar tasks, and I may not measure up. But at least I will have tried.

What I have learned these last two years could fill a book – and hopefully, it will. In the meantime, I will be toiling away at something new – at a desk, or on a page, or here in LA – and storing up time and resources for the next great wander. And I will be doing it with a degree of gratitude and compassion that I’ve only discovered in myself because of the amazing trip I’ve taken.

(PS: This isn’t goodbye. There are at least three half-written blog posts on this computer crying to be published, not to mention that in looking for that picture of Turkey, I realized I never wrote about Turkey (or Morocco, or Patagonia, or…). So check back…)

Worth Packing In

the little truth of traveling

Los Angeles

18 Months and Counting

The Sounds of Silence

Hollywood Forever

I Left My Heart in San Francisco

The Jig Is Up