Yep, I am doing a second round and I am as surprised as you are. Really. I generally lose interest in things after a few days (a week at most) so I am not sure why or how I am keeping up with this one. I guess one of the consequences of getting old is that you get slower at everything: falling asleep, falling in love, losing interest, peeing. Especially the last one. Especially in the shower. Not me though. I don’t pee in the shower, it’s gross. As someone once said, “there are two kinds of people in the world: those who pees in the shower, and liars”. And I am definitely a liar. Always have been.
Anyway, I want to start by thanking you for your feedback and support after January’s message. At least 20 of you asked me if the link was a virus. Which says a lot of what you think I share with you. But what I actually loved the most was that after I clarified that it wasn’t a virus, most of you asked if you still had to open it. Like literally. “Oh that’s not a virus? Oh you sent it to me on purpose? Oh something you wrote? That’s very nice..oh do I still have to click on it?”.
Truly motivating. But I understand. We are friends for many reasons and one of them is certainly that we don’t give a shit about most things...especially if they are long and/or require effort to consume. Like Jazz. ( My views on Jazz are the same of Angela and Dwight in this clip by The Office: just play the right notes).
Regardless, to make sure this spammy “thing” doesn’t look like “a virus” anymore, I implemented a few improvements to the process. Because appearances are important, as I recently learned. (I am attaching the changes at the end of the post -- if you care).
One thing to clarify, though, is that this posting is by no means a social initiative or some sort of “blogging”. This is just because this year I wanted to write, learn new skills and maybe stay in touch with some friends a little bit more than I used to. You are free to share this, obviously, but I really don’t think a stranger or even an acquaintance would gain any sort of entertainment by reading this. Realistically speaking, most of you already do not find this entertaining at all. I bet I am actually talking alone since paragraph 2 of my first post in January. Which I don’t mind since it will spare me a lot of embarrassment for the next time we speak.
Cool, we are done with “A Month at a Time” updates, let’s keep going.
February went by pretty fast and not because it is a short month (which is a lame excuse used by people who don't want to work for a whole month) but because I moved out of Jersey and back to California. A move that made me go from the freezing and rainy weather of the east coast to the beach boys vibes of LA.
Why do Americans not massively move to California? Why don’t they all move to LA or SoCal? It's warm, it’s sunny, there are beaches for going surfing or laying in the sun, there are mountains to go skiing, desserts to go camping , parks to go hiking...there are people rollerblading, dancing, laughing all over the place…it’s like being on vacation 24/7. Why is everyone not here? (and by everyone I mean every American that can afford it).
Yes, LA is full of LA-people which are known to be shallow, superficial and bla bla bla. But that’s the thing, why is this an issue? Superficial people are actually better than deep people 90% of the time; superficial people are harmless, they laugh a lot, they make great parties and when you are tired of them you can just say something like “Man, I would really like to hear your thoughts about the Arab–Israeli conflict; let me grab a beer and we can talk about it” and they will disappear from your life no questions asked. I mean, isn’t that nice?
And for the 10% of the time you actually need a non-superficial person like a doctor or a true friend, you still have plenty to choose from. There are 10M+ people living in LA. 10% of that is 1M+ people. If that’s not enough for you, you are a sociopath. Which also means you are not looking to mingle anyway and the problem is solved at the root.
So what’s the issue here? What’s the catch? Many questions hit my brain as I landed at LAX and little that I know, I was going to soon find some answers. But let’s put this on hold since, as I arrived in LA, I didn’t have too much time to think about people or things. I had to focus on looking for an apartment since I had only 2 weeks booked on my airbnb.
LA housing is pretty tough. At least as far as I experienced it in Venice, Santa Monica, Culver, Playa and other parts of West LA (I obviously mean tough for a middle-class 28 years old white spoiled man). The main issue is that most places are rent controlled which means that rent is fairly cheap (since it can’t be raised more than a small percentage every year) but also that landlords have zero incentive to invest in maintenance and remodeling (since they can’t raise the rent after that).
Because of that, a lot of places are very old, poorly maintained, cheap looking and almost unpleasant. Which is kind of a surprise considering that Santa Monica, for example, is one of the richest neighborhoods in LA, and LA is the most important city of California, and California is the 5th biggest economy of the world (if California was independent, it would be the 5th economy of the world).
It’s kind of a “fascinating” urban planning problem since on one hand you have “affordable rent” but on the other hand you have a lot of shitty apartments. Which also means that the few buildings that are not in rent controlled areas (and have nice apartments) end up charging crazy rents (like 40%-50% higher than the mean) because everyone wants to get it. So in the end you actually have very expensive rents or very shitty households...which is probably not what the urban planners were planning for.
As often though, fascinating problems are fascinating only to scholars since to normal people (like me) they are just problems. Very annoying problems.
Just consider that I went looking at one place that was so bad I refused to enter. I arrived there, I looked outside and just said “nope, thank you”. And I would have left if it wasn’t for the fact that the guy felt insulted and angrily yelled at me “You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover”...which made me feel guilty (for being a judgmental spoiled middle-class man) and angry (for not being entitled of considering that apartment for what it was).
Anger and guilt are a powerful emotional chokehold. You can have a lot of people do a lot of thighs just through anger and guilt. For example, you can have me enter into an apartment I know I will never rent.
In my defense, the pictures online looked like the apartment had just been remodeled to host the Zvar family. Damn photoshop. People often complain about Tinder dates where the other person shows up and looks very different from their photos, try looking for an apartment in LA and then tell me. It’s like getting ready for a date with Sharon Stone (fuck, this is my “hot date reference”) and you end up having dinner with a Saint Bernard (the dog).
Anyway, luckily for me, I was able to extend my Airbnb stay through the month of March (which was pretty cheap because I knew the owners since this summer) and gain a little bit more time to look for a place. And that was exactly what I needed as it gave me the time to go pick up my awesome 18 years old car (that I long term parked this November in a remote lot north of LA -- see picture).
I call my car either “The Ammiraglia” (the flagship) or “The Soccer Car” and it’s a 2003 Mercedes ML 350 car that I paid 2000$ and looks very much like the car you would see in a 2000s tv series with a mom driving 7 kids to a soccer training field. Yes, The Ammiraglia has 7 seats. Absolutely not cool.
Julia once told me she was very happy I had that car since no other woman would ever sleep with me as long as I am driving it. Which was a nice way to say “I know you won’t cheat on me because if you drive that car you won’t be able to”. That’s how not sexy my car is. And I love her for this.
“The Ammiraglia” is by far the best investment I have made in this country (and I did good on GME last month and this month as well!) It cost me $2000 (+ $1000 of fixing) and it works like a charm. It does have some issues, like it doesn’t have a radio or music of any kind. Also, you need to be very gentle on the gas or the engine might flood. And the bumper on the back is kept together with a little bit of tape (but you can’t notice that because tape has the same color of the car...so it doesn’t count).
But who cares. She is loyal and faithful, she can carry more than you can buy (I literally put all my things in it and drove across the state when I moved to LA last summer - see picture) and the one time I forgot the keys inserted in it for a whole night, no one stole it. They did rob the inside of it and stole my tennis racket, but they didn’t touch the car. God bless her. (Again, that’s how not sexy my car is).
Anyway, the reason I wanted to get The Ammiraglia back (besides not wanting to spend a fortune on Uber) was that I had to run some errands in the industrial city of San Pedro, south of LA. And you really need a car to go down there because you don’t want to be stuck on the boardwalk waiting for an Uber. You really don’t.
The city of San Pedro has indeed been blessed with many things, but beauty and safety are absolutely not two of them. Being in San Pedro made me think of a bad GTA (the video game) mission where you had to go into a hostile neighborhood to kill a boss and everyone around you is shooting at you. And even after you finished the mission and conquered the hood, you still don’t feel comfortable going back to the place. Ever. Basically, even in a video game based on being a gangster and robbing people on the street, San Pedro feels a little bit too much. I would actually go ahead and say that Manchester in 1880 was probably a more delicate place than San Pedro in 2021. To get a sense.
Unfortunately though, San Pedro is also the home of a little shop called Pacific Wilderness, where me and Julia decided to enroll for a PADI open water scuba diving certificate. Obviously we didn’t know what San Pedro looked like when we enrolled since we did everything online (dhu). Just like we didn’t know that the people running Pacific Wilderness believed that Covid is a lifestyle choice and not a disease (No one wear a mask there. No one).
It was a mistake, I know. The course was so much cheaper than any competitor that it felt like a smart thing, but it clearly wasn't. Whatever. For now let’s just say that Pacific Wilderness is the reason this post came one two days late (and also the reason I might have Covid). I indeed spent this whole weekend doing the course and Sunday I didn’t have enough time to write. February truly is a shorter month; it’s so hard to get the usual amount of work done, right? Right
Anyway, despite the shop owners being constantly without a mask, the course was actually nice and the instructors always had a mask on. Scuba is pretty sick, even though I have only dived into a pool so far so I don’t really know what it feels in real water.
Actually, I take it back. Scuba is pretty boring. You put all this gear on, you go underwater and then you start doing the same things you would do on the surface but in silence and more slowly. I would actually take a leap and say that, so far, scuba is a lot like being very very old. You are slow, you are quiet, you are fairly alone, you are bored and you mostly wait for things to end (wow, this one was cold). But hopefully things will get better in the ocean.
The San Pedro experience, on the other hand, has actually already paid off. Not only because I had the chance to feel what GTA looked like in real life and experience some boring pool scuba diving, but also because I was able to rationalize something that had been bothering me for the whole month of February. Something that had been running in the back of my head since that guy told me “You can’t judge a book by its cover”.
Here is the story: two days ago, during my lunch break, I was with The Ammiraglia driving through San Pedro in search of a place that would sell something different from a burger (which isn’t easy because people down there believe that if it’s not a burger, it will turn you into a democrat or a climate change believer) when I heard Tchaikovsky playing in the air. Which is already something weird unless you consider that The Ammiraglia has no music so when the windows are open you can really hear everything outside.
It took me a second to decide that if someone was blasting Tchaikovsky in the air at 12pm on a Saturday in San Pedro, I really needed to know who they were...because as I mentioned San Pedro is not really a place where...well you got the point.
So I started driving around following the music, just like an idiot chasing butterflies.
I turn left, I turn right, I turn left again and BAM! There it was, the most unexpected thing you would ever expect to see in San Pedro. Right there, in a parking lot at the corner of a shitty street, behind some fences and with trucks parked right on the side, there were 12 ballerinas rehearsing the ballet at the rhythm of The Nutcracker. Unbelievable. They were moving so graciously they looked like they came from another planet. Which they clearly did considering the place they were rehearsing.
I tried to take a picture but it turned out to be quite a hard job. First because of the fences surrounding the lot, but more importantly because I was walking in the middle of the street without wearing a t-shirt...which made me look like a weirdo taking pictures of ballerinas from behind a fence without wearing a t-shirt (and I was one).
But that’s not the point. The point is that for a moment I thought: Look at that. Look at San Pedro’s art scene. I guess that guy was right, I guess you really can’t judge a book by its cover. And just as that thought was crossing my mind, the guy behind me started honking like there was no tomorrow and insulting me with words that would embarrass the devil (in his defense the light was green, but still).
In a matter of seconds I was brought back to reality, back to GTA San Pedro, back to what that place really was...a giant version of the Santa Monica’s apartments. I went back in my car, (gently) hit the gas and went back to Pacific Wilderness to finish my first day of training.
However, the ballerinas really struck me and I kept thinking about them. I was kind of “shocked”. So the day after (Sunday), during my lunch break, I decided to go back to that same spot and see if they were still there. I wanted to look at them better, maybe take a good picture, maybe a video, maybe even join them. Who knows. Considering the absurdity of that space-time point, the possibilities were infinite. But when I got there, I didn't find anything. They were gone. No ballerinas, no fences, no music, no grace. Just a parking lot. Raw. Empty. Rough.
What’s the morale of this story? Let me tell you: The next time someone tells you that "You can't judge a book by its cover", politely respond to fuck off.
Of course you can judge a book by its cover. Not only can you judge it, you actually should judge it. Just like that ruin of an apartment in Santa Monica or that cheap diving course in San Pedro. And even in the rare cases that something surprises you, like the ballerinas, you must remember that that’s all that is: a surprise. It won’t happen again and once it’s gone, all you are left with is an illiterate moron yelling at you godless words.
After all, if it looks like shit, it smells like shit and it tastes like shit, chances are that's not a high-end Belgian chocolate (for Scrubs fanatics, this is also known as the “Zebra diagnosis”).
That's what California and LA people have taught me so far. Don't enter that apartment, don't buy that course, don't click on that "virus-looking" website your friend is sharing with you. Be superficial. Most of the times, it's the right thing to do.
Anyway, that’s it for February: a lot of crap, a lot of nonsense, a lot of words, very little truth. As always, I hope you are happy, healthy, wealthy (if it matters) and that I’ll see you soon.
P.S. - Please don't take "my writings" literarily. I don't really believe in them. I just write them. As I said at the beginning, I don't pee in showers. I lie.
Appendix
In regards to the website changes. First of all, I absolutely over-engineered a “website” and built an application to host this whole show. It took me one month, a few posts on Stackoverflow and some digging into Django, Sendgrid and Heroku’s documentation. Completely unnecessary since I could have accomplished the same result in 1h using an out of the box service like Mailchimp. But whatever, at least now you can see a little icon as a preview and you can ignore it more easily. Also, I learnt something during the month of February, which was part of the 2021 goals. (I noticed that setting useless yearly goals is also one thing that comes with getting older.)
Nevertheless, setting a website wasn’t enough since it still didn’t fully remove the spammy experience of receiving a message on whatsapp. Therefore, I added a “Subscribe” button and an “All Months” button on the footer of each page. The goal here was to truly create a “user first” kind of experience. But not in the typical sense.
For example, the subscribe option is really there so you can more easily dodge this whole thing and pretend it never happened. If you subscribe, you will get these “messages” in your email which will mean you will more easily be able to skip them and go on with your life. Just send them to spam. I won’t judge you since I won’t know it. If you don’t subscribe, you will never receive them again. For that, I will judge you but who cares.
The “All Months” button instead, is a totally different game. The idea is to create a space you can always go back to when you are having a bad day and magically feel better about yourself. Something along the lines of “Fuck, this was really a shitty day... but at least I didn’t do this.” Which I think is a real use-case (and a real solution for it.)
In other words, I am thinking about simply posting here online and not spamming you with a message on whatsapp. Might be better. You can check the website, you can subscribe, you can let me know if I should expect a call from your lawyer because I offended you profoundly (which I will eventually do, if I didn’t already). I will continue to post every month until the end of the month regardless.
P.S. - I need to step up my game with pictures. I know. I suck at pictures. But at least I added captions (hover on desktop, tap on mobile). Cheers.