Tag Archives: los angeles

It’s Beer Garden Season!

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three-weavers-brewery

I know it’s still snowing in the northeast, and that sucks! But form my vantage point, it’s April, the sun is out, and those crisp/hoppy/malty/sour/but most of all fizzy cravings are in full effect. The brewery tasting room not only has the advantage of having the freshest drinkins possible but has a family and pet friendly license for its space. Bring your dog, set your kids loose on the giant Jenga (but watch them, duh), grab a pint, and spring the f* out of this joint.

For my Angelenos, it’s a great place and time to be at/in: Here’s a list I wrote about it a few months ago.  

To update this, I’d have to throw in the  Modern Times “Dankness Dojo” and the new Highland Park Brewery in Chinatown.

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LA vs. NYC: Epic Throwdown for Ages and Times

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*By your mother, who wants you to move home and meet a nice man/girl to settle down with.

Anyone will tell you, these two places are polar opposites. Actually: everyone, it seems, wants to tell you. You cannot move from one coast to the other without choruses on either side chiding you to make the call: which one? Which do you like more? What kind of a person are you, really? Well, I’ll tell you.

Polar opposites. Literally: One of the earth’s magnetic poles is located in an illegal casino for rats and cockroaches located at the base of the antenna of the Conde Nast building, the other one at the corner of Hollywood and Highland, masquerading as a man dressed in a bedbug-infested Cookie Monster suit.
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When new to the neighborhood

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Everyone at my new restaurant job is amazed I have only been in town one week. Not that I would relocate from New York to Los Angeles, because at least half of the nice folks I’ve met have done this. Everyone is amazed that I found a job “so fast.” Within a week! How lucky! They say.

We moved into the bare three-room apartment on Saturday night. On Thursday, I went to an open interview at a restaurant and was offered the “opportunity to train” as a serving bartender. The following day, I secured a counter position at a noodle shop opening next month. In between, I’d peppered the town with resumes, gotten dressed up and smiled through open calls. I made E pull over en route to pick up freecycle furniture because I spied “help wanted” signs from the car window. I had, in short, been hustling. It’s what I do best.
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Every Damn Year

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I move every year. Sometimes for price reasons, for neighborhood reasons, sometimes to flee infestations, to flee singlehood, to flee relationships. Sometimes it is roommates doing these things and my end of the lease is collateral damage. Changing position within the city feels like the natural extension of the shifting social currents that have been pushing me through to adulthood over the past decade.

I am famous for moving. One of the books I’m trying to get rid of is signed by the author with a cheerful note commenting that the two times said author met me, I’d been in the middle of moving. I’ve published essays about it. So it feels logical that, in my mother’s words, I’d be “pretty good at it by now.”

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Goodbye to all this.

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One of the things I know from moving all the time is that in the week before a move, you stay up all night. Having spent most of the daylight hours procrastinating by reading through your old bank statements and being mesmerized by the Blue Planet DVDs you put in for background noise, nighttime is the right time for packing. You also stay up all night with that roving anxiety that is your physical self reacting to imminent change. That too.

One of the obsessive insomniac motifs keeping me company this week is how I am about to experience a dramatic loss of street cred. Explanation:

Item 1: I am moving from New York to Los Angeles shortly.

Item 2: I have lived in New York for ten years.

Item 3: I have never been to Los Angeles.
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