It is hot in Los Angeles this week. Everyone always thinks it’s hot — ideas of palm tree paradises flocked with bikini clad women and men in sunglasses, relishing the look of themselves in their convertibles have somehow managed to infiltrate the rest of the country like a fairy tale at bed time. As a native Angeleno I’ve never particularly identified with the love of palm trees or convertibles. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t fancy the ocean, but that is just a simple water affinity. I’d be just as happy near any lake or coastline in existence. Hell, just get me in a pool and I’m all smiles. The Pacific Ocean just happens to be the water body of my home. That being said, I haven’t been to the beach in years. Perhaps it is because I’m self conscious, perhaps the reported toxic water conditions play into it, but I have the feeling that I am more a product of so called normality than anything, even in this city of supposed dreams. I work. I clean. I buy groceries. I go to the gym, but not as often as I should. I sit in traffic. I sit on the couch watching prime time television, glad to be home from a long day of drudgery – often times worrying about the days to come. It’s frankly odd to live in a city with so many preconceptions, even odder to have grown up in one. It so often seems that the populous at large forgets that people are at their core just people, so many of us just trying to make our way from day to day in this life without glamour or dramatic turns. Sometimes I’ll pass the palm trees on the side of a freeway or road and think to myself that I don’t really care for them. They aren’t a symbol of any sort of lifestyle to me, they are simply a tree, and not a particularly nice one. I suppose they are symbolic of Los Angeles. They are not native of this region and have to be planted purposefully with much cost and circumstance, but I think Los Angeles is so much more than what could be bound to that analogy. Feature Image Credit: Meet Me In...

On any given day I pass you shouldering your duffle bags as you make your way into an intermediate modern, hip hop or barre technique class, ready to stretch, gyrate and twirl for an hour in a mirrored room smelling of sweat and resin, and I lower my gaze as I hurry by. Or sometimes I stick out my jaw and stare straight ahead. It varies, but the truth of my end of the encounter does not. Please know that – rational or not – for myself and perhaps for others who are braving the treadmill even though we are a bit out of shape or doughy or haven’t seen our tricep muscle, well, ever – your unstudied, bonelessly lithe pixie-visage greeting our sweat soaked form as we hobble out to the parking lot after a spin class like a bow-legged chimpanzee is relentlessly intimidating. Your graceful stride and slender form – obvious even under what seems a dozen or so layers of perfectly mismatched clothing under the summer sun – is something that many of us couldn’t dream of pulling off, even if we subsisted on only tofu, carrots and a daily relationship with the stair master. Although I don’t know you, your happiness or your health personally, and as someone who studied dance in my formative years but would never consider myself to be a true dancer, I am jealous. I move out of your path and shuffle past in my bleach-stained sweats and corporate softball t-shirt and all the hard work and perspirative progress that I have just experienced dissolves and is momentarily rendered pointless. You are simply too cool. Some social truisms never seem to change. In conclusion, I ask that perhaps the next time you pass by someone like me – someone who still feels the need to curl her hair when she dresses up, has a pair of booties that will never make sense no matter how many times tried on, someone who is terrified equally by the likes of mixing prints and late night bacon-wrapped street dogs, know that although my life is in many ways happy this is my ridiculous, inescapable truth. Know this, and perhaps if the moment arises smile as you walk by. Feature Image Credit: My Less Serious Life Image Credit: London...