Hollywood!

In late September/early October,

I went to LA for my third cousin's wedding.

I couldn't believe that LA was as bad

as a lot of people said it was,

but it was--even with Jon.

Other than layovers, the last time I was there I was a junior in high school.

The band performed at Disneyland,

and we went to the San Diego Zoo.

We had the worst turbulence coming back home,

and I felt so sleep-deprived from that trip

that I was pretty suicidal when I got home.

It was a weird time.

The time before that

I was about twelve or thirteen, 

and I went with my brother and dad.

(My mom and sister went to China on a gymnastics trip.)

We flew in to LA and drove up to SF,

then flew to Oahu and Maui.

It was a really awesome trip,

yet odd because I was at that age where

I hated my body,

and I was really introverted and thought I was being very philosophical.

I had a uniform of

traditional low-top black/white Converses,

indigo jeans, men's tank undershirt (or the light blue girl's one),

and a blue and navy cardigan from Esprit,

and the alternative was jean shorts and polo shirts.

When I wanted to feel girly,

I had a striped polo dress.

I wore everything with my Cons.

 I had to tell myself to stop living in my head

and start experiencing life.

I wrote a lot of terrible poetry then,

if only to get my thoughts out of my head.

When I first landed in LA,

I was in awe of the palm trees.

Actual, real-life palm trees, like on TV and the movies,

existed in LA.

My dad rented a car, 

and we drove north on the PCH highway 

until he got too sleepy to drive further.

I remember eating a lot of salami and pizza (AWESOME!)

and getting car sick from the twists and turns (not awesome at all) on that trip.

When we drove through Malibu, I thought that it was

the scariest place on earth.

There were so many HUGE houses--like mini castles--on top of sprawling hills.

The people crossing to the beaches were so tan and built and blond.

It looked like Baywatch.

Totally unreal.

The first night we stayed at a hotel that was so booked up that

we had to sleep in one of the really fancy suites.

It was so fancy that you had to use your elevator key to get to that floor

AND it had a free buffet breakfast in the special suites' floor lobby area.

I hated eating in public and didn't want to be judged by all those snooty families

that had planned to stay in those suites (not landed there because there were

no vacancies otherwise), so I didn't really take advantage of it like I should have.

The bed was so big that it fit me, my brother, and dad with

no overlapping issues.

We went to Monterrey Bay and SF.

It was awesome fun.

And Hawaii was even better.

I remember being so enthralled with the rolling hills and valleys and mountains of CA,

thinking about how when I'm old enough,

I was going to live in each state for at least two years of my life

to really see the USA. And then I thought some states suck,

so I didn't have to live in all of them--just the cool ones.

Now that I'm old enough to know better,

the only states worth living in are NJ or NY,

and I can spend weeks at a time in any other city in the world.

Oh, young Christina.

In any case, here's the Hollywood sign as taken from the top floor 

of one of the buildings at the LACMA.

I think it connotes a lot of different things for everyone.