This week marks my sixth LAnniversary (it's October 16, actually, but that will be a holiday and I'll be offline), so I started digging around for some of the things I wrote when I moved here. I found a piece that I reconstructed the morning after I lost the original because of a computer crash, and two pieces from my LAnniversary week in 2009, contemplating Hollywood after attending a conference, and a piece that is sort of about the weather, but more about the climate of L.A. in the larger sense. Here's a little unpublished something, found inside one of my many notebooks, from my first LAnniversary, on October 16, 2009.
I'm wearing California today - tones of turquoise reflecting cloudless sky and vast potential. My feet in flip-flops, part of the CA uniform, next best thing to barefoot (although, oddly, somewhat less comfortable). I also ate California today - vegan salad with pomegranate seeds, avocadoes, fennel mint and a "living dressing."
Self-definition is a process - turning the inner earth of you over and over, filling the soiled parts of your life and trying to place yourself in a context that (first) you and (then) everyone else can understand. But even after you think you've mastered your own self-definition, along comes every moment of every day thereafter.
As you move through people's orbits, beginning some relationships and ending others, life tempts you to keep your self-definition secret, obscuring some segments of truth and embellishing others. And then the challenge emerges: as you verbalize the version of yourself you present to others, you take in those words, process them like oxygen fuels your blood, and they become a part of you, infiltrating the you you thought you were, but changing its shape, maybe slightly, or maybe drastically, transforming you into a you that even you wouldn't recognize.
And many thanks to all of you who have helped me - the me I thought I was then, the me I believe myself to be now, and the me that you perceive me to be - feel at home here...
Thanks for sharing, Esther!
Posted by: Ryan torok | October 15, 2014 at 01:22 PM