So what's the point?

Well...last post, I had made a firm decision that I couldn't live in Pacific Beach.

Guess where I'm living?

We were sitting at the hotel del Coronado one evening having dinner. For whatever reason, our waiter asked why we were in town, and we all had to admit that the girl who previously made a juvenile fit about not getting the "chef's vegetables" with her meal was actually 25 years old and moving to the city for a job. After dinner as we were walking out, my dad struck up a conversation with the man and suggested I get the scoop from a local and ask about the best places to live. At that point, I was pretty married to the idea of living in La Jolla. The region was absolutely gorgeous (even if the apartments turned out to be crap), and our experience at the Pacific Beach "In And Out Burger" only solidified my desire not to live there. But the waiter insisted that the best place to live when you are young and fresh is PB. This bothered me.

To assuage the nagging, I decided that on our way up to La Jolla the next day, we'd take a route that led us through MB and PB - just to check things out. And as expected, it did seem a little seedy. I mean, I was looking through 'brown' colored glasses of course, but even without self-deception, this place was no La Jolla. Then I saw a sign for the Casa Del Mar - the Nazi apartments, and I screeched for dad to halt. I figured while we were here we might as well check the place out.

It was right on Tourmaline beach, as I had feared. Jeff, the manager, took us down the street leading to the famed surf spot and talked about how this was one of the best areas to live - far enough removed from the PB scene, close to La Jolla, and of course protected by his crazy rule system. Suddenly, this all began to seem not so bad. The apartment wasn't too luxurious, but there was one available at a good price with a bit of an ocean view and it was better than any we'd seen in La Jolla. We walked down to Turmo beach and looked down the miles and miles of coastline that would be in my backyard. I saw myself doing all the things I came to Cali for: riding my bike miles up the beachside path, or exploring the college-town like setting of Pacific and Mission Beach. Even sitting on the sand every night reading, writing, and watching surfers catch waves as the sunset spread over the water.

There were luxury apartments in the UTC that were steps from the freeway, boasted cooking classes from world class chefs, movie theaters, two resort-style pools, an entire gym complete with yoga and pilates classes, Berber carpeting and granite countertops. They were the same price as a dinky little place on the beach. In Pacific Beach, to boot. But the UTC was no different than the place I live now, except it was warmer and had palm trees. I didn't want to spend my time in SoCal at the local mall or poolside. I came out here to do something different.

So Pacific Beach it was.

I guess there's probably a lesson in all of that, but as is the running theme in my life, I probably won't learn anything from it. Does anyone ever? Clearly we cannot plan for our futures. My dad fed me a great line from John Lennon - "Life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans." In fact, it seems that the more you try to select your path, the more likely you are to inadvertently discount the one you were meant to take. Maybe it's a bit much to say that it's all up to fate, but you've got to wonder at the chain of events that led me to this place. The certain restaurant, the certain waiter, the afterthought of asking his opinion, the slight giving in on my part, the street we turned down, the internet site that gave me the name of the apartment building, my compulsion to stop and check it out... Maybe there really is no right answer, but if this is a good one, I'm pretty impressed at how hard fate had to work to counteract my attempts to take the wheel.

There's a lot of things that I once was sure would never be part of my life story: people I was sure I'd never warm up to, places I was sure I'd never be bold enough to visit, activities I never imagined I could get into, things that are now they are such a huge part of my raison d'etre. Throw it all to the wind I guess, and look gratefully upon life's little disappointments. It's proof that someone or something that knows better than you is working to put you back on the right track.

Oh, but there's a catch. I'm one of those people that can't make a decision unless she's consulted at least three sources (throwback to the MLA days in college), and consulting my sources led me to the sad truth that Pacific Beach (along with Mission Beach and Ocean Beach) are known as places where surfers, stoners, and spring breakers congregate in droves. I'm beginning to understand Casa Del Mar's Nazi regulations. They're trying to create a safe haven for people who live in PB and really wish they didn't. And so I'm back to square one dudes.

La Jolla seems to be the place to go, particularly if its bordering neighborhoods of OB, MB and PB are sweeping up all the wild college students in a big affordable housing net. UTC and Golden Triangle are also not leaving my list just yet, but I've heard you deal with a lot of traffic and noise all day/night long. Sadly, that dumpy little place in the backyard of the country club (La Jolla Riviera) is turning out to be my most promising option. At least, they're the only place that doesn't have bad reviews (they don't have any good ones either). I'll make a few more calls tomorrow, but after that I'm leaving it up to decide when I actually get to the city. I can't make any judgements based on conflicting reviews (except for the one place where seven separate reviewers all mentioned persistent dog poop in the hallways).

This may just be another case of my impossibly high standards. Why can't I live near the beach but far from the beach-goers?

Why?

Perhaps it's because I wanted to write a tome of my life without being narcissistic. Or maybe it's because I am a writer, and part of that involves turning my own experiences and insights into story elements. A piece of my personality is infused into all of my characters. Yet in another strange way, while art can imitate life as they say, I sensed that life could also imitate art. By exploring a fictional world crafted around my own, I gained access to an unusual gedanken laboratory. I could fall in love and be heartbroken without the messy emotional involvement. Few who received my relationship counseling could guess that the lessons I learned were from exploring fictional relationships between my alter ego and my characters. (Writing, claims E.L. Doctorow, is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.) Moreover in order to make the story more interesting, I had to make my life more interesting. In situations where my own ego fell short, my alter ego demanded more action. I put myself into the offbeat experiences I wanted to write about: hence working third shift so I could say I'd been in Kohls' Department Store at 3 in the morning.

Suddenly, however, my own ego has become as bold as its former facades. I remember clearly the day that I visited my sister at her incredible college campus and burst into tears on the campus center patio because I knew I had lost this opportunity out of fear and continued to lack the courage to pursue it. I will also remember another day, when sitting beside the flashing neon sign of a Kopps Frozen Custard, I took a call from a friend asking me to take a traveling job with her. As I watched the blocks of color travel up the signpost and slurped down my melting cone, I made a decision to just go. That day, I gave up the job I was offered after graduation, the apartment that I felt happy to call home and the closeness of my family to take that first step towards becoming that bold dreamer I'd written about.

I didn't end far with that first job - only Illinois, and I still came home on weekends. But the decision somehow transformed me. When it came time to decide where the job would take me next, my roommate postulated California. She was planning to get married (barring some ugly family drama exploding) and I thought - hey, here's my ticket. I always wanted to live in California (the location of "my" boarding school and my second protagonist's home). If my friend was going, I'd at least have a comfort zone to travel in. But it was uncertain. My friend wasn't even sure she was going to get married, much less move to Cali. The next thing I knew, she was making plans to go to Atlanta first. Sadly, I wondered if I would have to tolerate the big ATL too in order to follow my safety net.

Fortunately, I was hit with another epiphany. I can't trace the exact moment, but it might of been on some snowy morning while scraping ice off my car and grumbling yet again about being trapped in the brutal midwest. I suddenly realized that my fate did not depend on whether or not my friend went to California. If I wanted to go, why the Hell wouldn't I just go? All these years, I've been waiting around for people to make the decisions that affected my life, I've been waiting for friends to introduce themselves to me, for guys to ask me out, for someone to travel with, eat with, try new things with. I wasn't going to get anywhere if I just kept waiting. If I wanted something, I had to go and get it.

I have a lot of dreams. I want to publish a novel and see it featured in bookstores, maybe even made into a film. I've wanted to get involved in the movie business, to study or teach history, to travel the world, to go on a jungle excursion, to live on the Pacific coast where the sun shines all year round, and to be one of those ridiculous fit and tan California people who do yoga before work and know eighty different ways to make a fruit salad. And all of my life, I held onto the comfort that one day, "I will." I believed that my talent and my capacity to learn and create would get me there. After all, I considered myself to be in a fortunate position. I never fell in line with the popular crowd. My younger sister is meeting all her milestones in the correct order while I'm still waiting for my first real love. In high school, I chose drama over sports, homework over friends, and myriad strange creative endeavors over dating. Whether or not that was a good decision is a question no longer worth asking. The consequence of it is, I tend to not be as easily swayed by the pull of the world. I'm happily content in my own little world, playing games on the swing set at the park, swimming in a wading pool on a summer afternoon, watching the clouds drift for hours, and curling up with a good book at night. That's not to say I live as a recluse. I have a great group of friends, with whom I've experienced more than enough drunken nights to say I have a pretty good idea of what it's like. But I'm not driven to continue that chapter in my life. I've done it and I'm ready for something new. Something bigger.

People have a hard time believing me when I tell them what I do with my time. It's one crazy endeavor after another, always learning something or trying to master a seemingly useless talent. I wouldn't call myself a genius, but I excelled in school without putting in too much effort. Most of my notebooks were a mix of lecture outlines, floor plan drawings and story notes. Test-taking came easy, as did reading, writing, and using my own logic to solve problems before I was taught how. My erratic childhood transformed into the odd rituals of obsessive compulsive disorder before I managed to talk myself out of the faulty belief system and contain the symptoms. I've got a wonderfully supportive audience in my friends, who are eager to catalogue my accomplishments. I can remain humble while they boast about the books I've written, show others videos of the songs I've written on YouTube, and demand that I perform a dance step or write something in Arabic. They all seem to think I'm pretty extraordinary.

But the sad thing is, I'm not. I'm merely un-ordinary. I'm different, yes. I'm capable, yes. But I'm also lazy and uncertain. For years, I've been plagued by self-doubt imposed on me by the opinions of others. I felt that everyone could see right through me when I tried to pretend I was part of their world. Perhaps I was well-qualified and adequately articulate during a job interview, but felt I lacked the charisma of an adult. Perhaps I was a great catch, but I believed that any guy (or even friend) that I approached would laugh and wonder why I was even bothering. These things, along with good old fashioned love of the status quo, kept me from really accomplishing anything. Instead, I tried on a whole lot of hats but never wore one out of the store.

When I realized this, I felt very guilty for considering myself to be worthy of genius. I was, in fact, the stupidest kind of person: one who had left her genius fall just short of action. I was capable of doing anything but I was doing nothing.

Deciding to go to California was one thing, and so was booking the jungle excursion. Now, I was going to have to make a big change in my life to avoid letting myself down any further. I was going to have to stop saying "I will do these things" and say, "I AM doing these things." Right now, today, this moment. No more "I will write those letters to publishers." Instead, "I am writing a letter to publisher as we speak." No more, "I will get in shape." Instead, "I am running on a treadmill this very moment." No more, "I will meet someone special someday." Instead, "I am introducing myself to that guy in the corner." My dreams have become my next Thursday.

This blog is the story of my real ego learning to live by these rules. I am no longer so ashamed of my weakness that I must rewrite my life in terms of someone stronger. I am no longer going to be guided by what I fear, but by what I desire. I am going to start opening every door until I find the one that leads to the rest of my life.

I am.