Being there

The "difficult to find in an airport shuttle" hotel* had moved its entrance to the side because someone of authority had decided that they could make better use of the lounge (read: serve more people $15 cocktails) if they got the reception desk and the staircase out of the middle of the room. This must have been a fairly recent decision because they were still furnishing it when I arrived. I mean literally. Not "it was not yet entirely furnished", but rather, many employees scurrying around building small tables from kits, and scowling over the handfuls of leftover screws; workmen hanging mirrors over flaws in the sheet rock and the like.

When I first walked into the lounge, it looked as though they were planning on staging a production of The Chairs** in there. So many chairs. Large chairs. Everywhere. The major precepts of the new business model seem to be expensive drinks + armchairs. Somehow though, when I returned after dinner, they'd arranged things normally. There were still many large armchairs, of course, but it no longer looked like a room in which a maniacal chair enthusiast had been given free rein. It was Jazz Thursday and there was a three-person combo playing when we came back around 9:30, as my server, Celeste, who'd provided me with complimentary tea and chatted with me for a longish while during the table-building madness, had urged me to do, so as not to miss it. And then, when I did, not three hours later, she didn't remember me at all, which was bizarre to an almost "Twilight Zone" degree.

The reception area is now stuffed onto a little landing and the hotel "office" is now a desk directly adjacent to but lower than the reception desk. I won't lie. It's kind of silly looking. Fortunately, despite being there on a cut-rate coupon, I was not obliged to spend the night in reception, so it made no difference. Apparently, they had run out of the type of room I was meant to have, so I was upgraded to a king-size room, which was rather thrilling for me. The room was larger than my own living room, though it also had a couch and a table in it. There was a very large flat-screen TV that I was unable to turn on, but I didn't care because there were also several books on the bureau, one of which was Noel Coward's collected diaries. Noel Coward! He just keeps cropping up. Really, had I only had that one night in that huge bed with no baby overhead, reading things like, "Dropped in to see Winston. Found Mrs. Churchill alone. We played croquet." That would have been quite sufficient to count as a vacation.

And yet I got more. Lucky duck. I think I gained several pounds, which is tiresome now, but seemed irrelevant at the time. Marja and I ate many delicious things (including among many things, dinner at Street [outside seating, with blankets provided] and Industriel [more armchairs!]), We also had flaxseeds, which I found uninspiring and which adhered to the inside surfaces of my mouth in a remarkably determined way, but which Marja assures me are the key to health. That is a sentence with far too many whiches, but let's just ignore them. I am a staff of one. There are no copy editors around here.

There was also:

• miniature golf (!)
• a search for a dress that exists only in my imagination
  
• a search for shoes that exist only in Marja's imagination
  
• a discourse on when and why Anthropologie's clothes became so absurd, but no less costly
  
• dinner with a friend I seldom see, but love just as much as I always have
  
• an extensive Stanley Kubrick exhibition at which I came to realize I have seen very few Stanley Kubrick films.

Then it was time to go.



*Are you dying of curiosity about this? Sorry. I stayed at the Beverly Crescent. It's pretty. Though, of course, it looks rather different now that it does in the website pictures, clearly taken back in a bygone era when they had a front door and a sign. To say nothing of smaller chairs in the lobby lounge.

**I've actually never seen The Chairs; there may not be a lot of chairs in it, but let's pretend there are because, at the time I said to myself, "Good lord. It looks like they're staging The Chairs in here." And I hate to ruin perfectly good jokes I tell to myself.

Important announcement from the '80s

Having recently watched both, I am here to tell you that Beverly Hills Cop holds up much better than Rain Man. I assume this is because Eddie Murphy's character is affable and amusing from the beginning, whereas Tom Cruise's character is all, "Where is my money? I deserve money! I have had a terrible life and it would be fixed by the money I so much deserve! I am so furious that I will yell at all other characters!" for about thee quarters of the movie. Also, Eddie Murphy's hair and, indeed, clothes, still look relatively normal, whereas Tom Cruise's are very "of the moment" for 1988, which, from the perspective of 2013, is not a positive thing.

Also, also: bananas in the tailpipe and later evocations of said bananas trump any number of toothpicks that Dustin Hoffman can instantly calculate.

That is all.

Getting there

Last week at this time, I was in Los Angeles. It feels like last year. This week has been a little crazy and I realize I have not really been meeting my awesome Internet Responsibilities. Fortunately for you, the internet is filled to brimming with things to read, so I imagine that even when I falter, you're able to soldier on without me.

I went to L.A. to visit a couple of friends. The first night I was in town I stayed at a hotel because I had already paid for it long ago via some coupon and because I like hotels. I thought that it would be impolite to make my friend pick me up from the airport in order to take me to a hotel, only to pick me up at the hotel in order to take me to her house the very next day. And so, I decided to take a shared shuttle van into Beverley Hills. By the way, if you are hoping to make a polished, if not actually glamorous, arrival at your fancy boutique hotel (at which you could not reasonably afford to stay without the aforementioned coupon), pulling up to the valet station in a shared airport van and clamoring out of the backseat over your fellow passengers is probably not the best way. I assume most of the Beverly Hills crowd doesn't find it dismaying to spend fifty bucks on a taxi, but I think it does them good to mingle with flat-shoed commoners like me from time to time.

While economically and environmentally sound, shared vans are also not the world's most efficient way to get anywhere. There's a lot of waiting around and then there's quite a bit of circling the airport in case there might be more cheap frugal travelers to pick up. Of course, there are, so that's a whole other thing what with the suitcases and awkward boarding and all. After about an hour in the airport (during which I witnessed a really heart-rending drama of a man pulling up to the arrivals passenger-loading zone--where you're basically arrested if you linger for more than three minutes--and then promptly locking his keys and phone in his car, which suggests that being picked up by your friend can potentially be even less efficient than a shuttle), I was on my way.

Quite luckily, I was the second person (of seven) to be dropped off. This would have been more of a triumph had the driver been able to actually find the hotel. Instead we drove up and down the street and around the block several times while five other passengers pretended they didn't want to murder me and fling me out the side door. Since the last time I was there (a two-night coupon, friends, meted out, ever so cleverly, one night at a time over two years), they had moved the entrance from the front to the side of the building, meaning that the actual entrance no longer corresponds with the address. And there is no sign. (Maybe it's too cool of a hotel to have a sign? I know that "too cool to have a sign" is a category of bar, but is it a category of hotel? It seems flawed from a marketing perspective and from a your-customer-base-is-comprised-of-tired-people-who-don't-know-where-anything-is-because-they-are-not-from-your-town perspective. But I work at a school, so what do I know. We totally have a sign.) By the time we found it, there was rather a steely silence radiating from my fellow passengers. I was relieved to bid them farewell and I'm sure they could not have been more delighted to see me on my way.

Next up: Being there

However, since you've been so patient, I will give you a Friday bonus:
This morning on Haight Street, a large 50s-style convertible passed by, all the occupants of which, with the exception of the driver, were enormous teddy bears. Three in the back, and one riding shotgun.

As with most things encountered on Haight Street, I can offer no explanation.

Biological advancement

There is a commercial currently in heavy rotation that has a jaunty accompanying song, the first line of which is "I swallow the wind through my nose."

Discussion Questions:
1. Can one, indeed, swallow anything through one's nose?
2. Even if so, is it a felicitous song lyric?

PSA

You know how everyone's like, "you should never, ever stick a Q-tip in your ear." And you're all, "But why would it be so perfectly, specifically designed for ear-sticking if you're not supposed to stick it in your ear? That's just crazy. What on earth else would you do with it?" So you stick it in your ear and do a little maintenance and feel, briefly, very satisfied.

That's right before you start wondering if your ear will ache this much for the rest of your life or if--worse--you may be unable to hear any sound under stadium-rock volume ever again.

Don't stick a Q-tip in your ear.

Fin.