One of the first things I learned in Los Angeles is that if someone says they want to “develop a show” with you, that means absolutely nothing. It’s like giving someone a promise ring, except there’s no ring, and the promise is kind of shaky too. Now, when Los Angelinos hear that I turned my life upside down because of a development deal, they laugh. It’s a fun inside joke.
LA presented new, unexpected obstacles. In New York, the obstacles are visually splayed out in front of you. It’s an upfront city. In Los Angeles, the obstacles are hidden in disappointing phone calls, offhand remarks, and the constant competition of living in a city where everyone around you wants the same thing. Los Angeles is tricky because she’s pretty, and everyone knows pretty girls are very good at hiding the scary. I spent my first year buried in a cloud of aimless depression that would be too boring and unfunny to even write about. My relationship with Los Angeles began to improve only after Sam decided to join me.
“I think I’m going to move out there in December,” Sam told me over the phone one day.
“Well, don’t do it on my account. Do it because you want to,” I responded, not wanting to bear the weight of his life change.
“I am doing it on your account, and you’ll just have to be okay with that,” he told me. And I was.
Sam said goodbye to eight years of memories, friends, and experiences and moved to Los Angeles eleven months after I did. We spent the first two weeks of 2015 together in bed. Not the sexy kind of in bed, but the flu kind. As soon as we could each sit up, though, I dragged him to the closest bar to celebrate.
On the walk over, we held hands and peeked into apartment windows. We kissed on crosswalks and basked in the warm January air. At the bar, we raised our glasses, and I began a toast, “To being one step closer to moving to New York!”
Sam put his drink down. “What?”
“Well, since you’re here now, we can start making our three-to-five-year plan to end up in New York,” I told him. I’ve since learned that if a person moves across the country to be with you, the first point of business shouldn’t be discussing your next life-shattering move. Apparently, it upsets said person who just moved.
The thing I love about being single—and I loved being single—is that you’re in charge of your own life. I always worried that I’d have to give up my hobbies in order to make space for someone else’s. What if I fell in love with someone who wanted to live in the suburbs? Or someone who was allergic to dogs? Or someone who didn’t want kids, or worse, did? My mind always raced with all the reasons my nonexistent relationship was doomed. This was my biggest fear about settling down.1 I didn’t want to be held back from achieving my goals and dreams, like returning to New York City.
“I am not moving to New York,” Sam sternly told me.
“How do you know?” I asked. I’ve always let opportunities govern my zip code, so I didn’t understand his way of thinking. What if he got his dream job in New York? What if I did?
“Because I just moved here. I’m not moving again,” he told me.
I used to think that New York was the only city for me, but that’s ridiculous. A city is not made for an individual, it just gives you a place to sleep and eat while you figure out what’s for you on your own.
People view different parts of the country with their preconceived notions: New York is too dirty, Los Angeles is too fake, Chicago is too cold, Austin is too weird. But the truth is, any city you live in is what you make it. Sure, I hate the heat, the beach, healthy eating, and just about everything else that makes Los Angeles unique, but I like palm trees, twisty streets, creative people, and the fact that Sam lives here too.
When putting together my 30 before 30 list, I didn’t think about how one goal (fall in love, the real kind) could interfere with another (move back to New York). Being in love sucks balls because it means adding someone else into all the decisions in your life, making things like spontaneously moving more difficult. But it also means that you have someone to help you carry an air conditioner up a flight of stairs.
That night at the bar, I let go of moving back to New York. It wasn’t easy. But it opened up space in my heart for Los Angeles, and for the first time in my life, I don’t feel like moving anywhere else.
21
BUY REAL FURNITURE
For most of my twenties, all of my earthly possessions could neatly fit into two suitcases. My motto was “You shouldn’t own more stuff than you can pack in a couple of hours.” All my moves were handled by myself with my own bare hands. I preferred it this way; it made me feel tougher, like I was physically earning my new life.
I am very anti–owning things, mainly because I never had the money to buy anything, but also because I moved eleven times in six years. Eleven. Two of those moves were international. If an engagement ring is a sign of commitment to a person, furniture is a sign of commitment to a place—and I was never ready to commit.
Pieces of furniture are like little anchors to adulthood. They give the people who enter your home something to talk about, a way to figure out your style, values, tastes, if you have money, etc. Furniture comforts you when you want to rest and weighs you down when you’re restless.
When I moved to Los Angeles, my life was disastrously unstable—no job, no prospects, and nowhere to keep my underwear. It also became clear that I’d need furniture. Unlike New York, Los Angeles had space. Lots of it. Rooms were bigger, yards were wider, and the rent stayed the same—I could no longer get away with my two-suitcase life.
Tired of particleboard pieces designed to disintegrate at even the slightest mention of the word move, I turned to my old friend Craigslist. You can learn a lot about your new city from Craigslist; popular things to steal and resell, which neighborhoods have nice stuff (and therefore overpriced apartments), the trendiest adjectives. For example, an armoire can be “organic,” and if you add the term midcentury to your noun, that noun grows exponentially in price but not necessarily in sophistication.
My first piece of furniture would be a writing desk, obviously. A desk was an accurate reflection of who I was, or at least who I wanted to be. The nice thing about Craigslist in a city like Los Angeles is it’s filled with people who have good taste and are in desperate need of money. Flailing actors getting rid of clothing. Struggling set designers hawking curtains. Stressed stylists selling jewelry. People in LA are constantly giving up on their dreams and moving away, meaning the deals are plentiful. I quickly found a desk.
It was forest green and labeled as distressed—a descriptor I’d never heard used for a table before. I thought only unmarried Jews and trapped animals could be distressed. The desk was wide, with two thin drawers, listed at $300. I offered $150. It was more than I’d spent on anything in my apartment, but it was time to invest in my new city.
The seller responded saying that she couldn’t go lower than $300. Soon after, I received a second email from her saying she couldn’t go lower than $300. And then a third email with the same thing. I shrugged, figuring it was a bug in the system, and put it out of my mind. That night, Miss Table sent me a fourth email apologizing for accidentally spamming my inbox and offering to knock the desk down to $190 due to the inconvenience. Ah, the art of negotiation!
The desk was just as beautiful in real life as it was in the photos. I borrowed my friend’s car to pick it up and was treated to a glimpse into Miss Table’s home. I love looking into the homes of strangers. My favorite activity is walking around at night, when apartments are illuminated, and peeking into people’s lives. Oh, they decided to put the TV there? How curious, I think while strolling to the next apartment.
I gave her an envelope with $190 inside it, and moments later, I had a desk. A desk without an apartment, but still, I owned something. Something with years of notes imprinted into the wood. Something that anchored me to Los Angeles. Something that ended up fitting perfectly into the bedroom of an East Hollywood apartment I moved into a week later.
My whole room was designed ar
ound that desk. I wanted to hang it on my wall like a work of art, but instead etched “I AM ADULT, HEAR ME ROAR!” into the wood. As I collected more things to complement my forest green desk, my room filled up with my own stuff. Previously, I’d been sleeping on borrowed bed frames, keeping my clothes in borrowed drawers, and cooking with borrowed kitchenware. None of my apartments had felt like home, just spaces I shared with people. That desk was the beginning of my carving out a home in my new city.
It was the centerpiece of my room, and then … I moved. Again. But this time, for the first time, it was in with someone—Sam. We rented a U-Haul on a warm Saturday morning, combined my stuff with his stuff, and moved to a small but bright loft with high ceilings and a tiny kitchen1—a loft we still live in today. It has eighteen plants, fifteen of which are alive. Photos of our families are nailed into the walls and books are organized by color. We have big bulky couches which will be a pain to move. On warm days, the three little boys next door shriek with elation as they beat each other with empty water bottles.
When it gets too hot, Sam and I have to sleep on an air mattress on the ground floor. We can’t shower when the neighbors are showering, and a condo is loudly being built next door. It is our home and I absolutely love it.
The desk, however, does not fit into my new life. Now it sits in our garage, adorned with empty shoe boxes, reminding me of a time when things were stable for a moment.
Maybe one day when we have enough room for our own spaces, I’ll bring the desk back inside and put it in front of some large windows with a view of palm trees. I love palm trees, especially how they look like large swaying lollipops at night. I’ll sit at my green desk and swell with pride thinking about a young twentysomething Marina who moved to Los Angeles with the hope of becoming a writer. She was unemployed and had zero sense of where her life was going, but she had a desk. A desk that supported her elbows as she wrote all the ideas that led to her first job, which led to her second job, which eventually helped her afford an apartment with large windows and a view of palm trees.
Or I’ll just resell it on Craigslist for three hundred dollars. The important thing to remember here is you shouldn’t get attached to things. Especially when you live a life in motion.
22
SELL A PAINTING
I’m not really a painter, just a person who scrolls through Etsy and thinks, “Well shoot, I can do that.” To actually have the focus to sit still, pull something out of your head, draw it on a piece of paper, redraw it until it looks better, and then paint it is not easy. Selling something you’ve made is even harder.
That’s why the earth isn’t overflowing with modern artists. Although I’ve never fully understood the weird, weird world of modern art, I’ve always appreciated the work needed to get your paintings into a gallery. That’s all being a modern artist really is—defending your work. All museum labels should simply read: “It is a painting! Yes, it is! YES! Yuh-huh.”
I always thought that if I sold a painting—and not to my parents—it’d mean I was a true artist. A person who could live off of what her freakishly small but powerful hands create. It’s a fantasy that plagues anyone who has even a modicum of artistic skill.
The nice thing about going from fifteen-hour workdays in an office to freelancing full-time—or, as my parents like to call it, “unemployment”—is that I finally had a chance to put my grand theories to the test. Instead of sitting at my desk thinking about how I could be a painter if I had the time, my new wide-open schedule gave me the chance to actually do it. I bought brushes, pencils, watercolor paper, an assortment of paints, and sketch books. That’s the only thing I splurge on: art supplies. As I write, I’m wearing a fifteen-year-old shirt with large holes under each armpit and what look to be bite marks in the back. I don’t have a car or food in my fridge, but there are twenty different types of paint brushes in a jar on my desk. My whole life is lived on the budget of, well, a struggling artist, but not when it comes to tools. Short of a kiln, I have just about everything needed to make any kind of art. It’s important to be ready with the materials when inspiration strikes.
But my dreams of becoming a painter were quickly dashed. Turns out, when you make the leap from a corporate job to working for yourself, it’s difficult to paint when most of your free time goes toward being curled up in a ball, on the floor, rocking back and forth, repeatedly mumbling, “What have I done?” Even if you don’t have the debilitating anxiety of most creative people, it’s very difficult to get motivated when you have an entire day to fill. There are just too many distractions. In the time it took me to write that last paragraph, I moved from my desk to the couch, but then needed to use the bathroom. While in there, I began to part my hair down the middle—just to see what it looked like—but then noticed that the soap dish was overrun with scum. I went into the kitchen to get a scrubber brush from under the sink and found this beautiful vase I forgot I had. There are these huge leafy palms on the property across the street that would look breathtaking in that vase. The property is going to get demolished anyway, so it really wasn’t trespassing when I went over there to get them. Honestly, I saved the palms from getting destroyed. The thing I didn’t account for when saving them was how thorny the stems were. Those suckers slashed right through the skin of my knuckles. It’s hard to bandage knuckles. Did you know that? Anyway, my injuries made it too difficult to type, so now it’s the next day and I haven’t even gotten through the intro of this story.
All this is to say I was only able to paint three things in the eighteen months I was “freelancing”—a robot, some ham, and a Nutella jar. I painted them to fill my bare walls because I hate blank spaces. My aesthetic is kitschy cluttered, but with purpose and sentiment. I like to keep every square inch of my walls covered with photos, paintings, posters—anything that brings warmth to my soul. Sam is the exact opposite. He likes “the beauty of clean lines and white space.” If you split our apartment down the middle, one side looks like a Japanese lawyer decorated it, and the other, an Eastern European hoarder. It’s as if our apartment has multiple personality disorder.
Every day I was unemployed, I’d sit at my desk waiting for inspiration to strike. Nothing. I put a blank piece of watercolor paper in front of me and wait longer. Nothing. Willing ideas to come into my head didn’t work either. The secret about creation is that sometimes inspiration never strikes—you have to go in and yank it out of your big dumb body.
I forced myself to draw something. Anything. I drew what was sitting in front of me: a Nutella jar—very indicative of the kind of depressing work-from-home-unemployment life I led.
I drew the bright and hopeful imagery on the container. Flowers, hazelnuts, a butter knife, jar of milk, and toast. What a sweetly serene snack. The label makes it look as if their clientele uses a small butter knife to delicately smear melty chocolate onto a piece of toast—as opposed to a sad spoon, mindlessly shoved into one’s gaping maw at two in the morning. I drew the quiet hope of that label and then painted it while listening to Rihanna. This is what I ended up with:
When I finished, I posted it to my wall (like the kind that separates rooms, not the kind that creates a falsified digital projection of who you are) and took a photo. Then posted it to my falsified digital projection wall.
A few hours later, Brenda, a stand-up comic I met at a mall comedy show (it is exactly what it sounds like), asked me if she could buy the painting. There’s nothing like the feeling of someone offering to pay for something you genuinely enjoyed doing. It makes you think that you can open that greeting card company, onesie design business, or personalized magnet shop. Some people spend their whole life—and savings—chasing this feeling.
When I told my roommate-at-the-time, Ted, that I’d sold my painting, he laughed and said, “No offense, but someone paid you for that? I could’ve painted it in my sleep.” His comments bristled against my sensitive skin. Maybe he could’ve painted it in his sleep, but he didn’t. He didn’t take the time to sit at his d
esk and stare at a blank sheet of paper and then fill that sheet with pen and watercolor. He didn’t expose his painting to the bitter internet, or offer it to Brenda for $20. He didn’t bring it to her apartment or make small talk as she wrote the check. He didn’t come home and delicately hang the check next to his jar of paintbrushes, to remind himself that he can paint. So, you can go ahead and suck it, Ted.
Selling a painting was fun. I can see why so many people are attracted to the idea of leaving it all behind to become an artist. Writing is a continuous grind of balancing budgets, personalities, and expectations. To sit around all day and paint, now that feels like real art. I was completely seduced by the idea of living a solitary life as a painter. But if I ever were to leave the writing world and enter the painting world, I’d eventually find cracks and flaws in that one too. I’d get bored, lonely, broke, and turn to friends who were still pursuing careers in comedy writing—growing jealous as they moved forward and away from me.
At the end of the day, writing and painting aren’t that different anyway; they’re both about someone trying to expose themselves while eliciting an emotion from the audience, the viewer. I got my small taste of what it’d be like to be a painter, and while it was fun, I was already embarking on a new life, doggedly dedicating myself to comedy writing. It was time to stop distracting myself with tangential interests. I guess that’s what most people call “commitment,” a term beginning to seep into my life with a terrifying frequency. When it came down to choosing between making more paintings or focusing on writing, I chose to focus on writing because “I took an oath that I’ma stick it out till the end.”1
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