Myself, The City
When we were in Los Angeles in March I reacquainted myself with the mixture of emotions I feel in that place I used to call home. Los Angeles for me was never Los Angeles proper - it's the name that people recognize for the cities I'd float between in my life in southern California. When you make it more granular it was a series of cities, amongst them Pasadena, La Mirada, Fullerton, Whittier, Irvine, and Hollywood.
Between these cities there's the unison of that large "metropolitan" connection while each maintains its unique identity. It's not perfectly correct to say that Hollywood is Los Angeles (although it used to be), but the lines between are so blurry that they operate as a unit - like the invisible barriers between cities that let a person claim one city from the jurisdiction of another. I hated living in Buena Park, so I'd always say Fullerton in response to questions of municipal origin.
And it goes without saying that southern California has problems. The way I prefer to think about it is that they are problems of a true democracy, expressed well in a recent exclamation at my picture of houses in Manhattan Beach: they're all different; anyone can build what they like there! The mix of people, ideas, economic statuses, and values make a picture that would disconcert any person committed to deliberate structure, unless that structure was lack of structure.
So while we were driving around I thought of southern California and its problems. My acclimation for driving in traffic is gone so it only inspired these thoughts while we sat in idle traffic at odd hours of the day on the freeway. The conclusion I reached was obvious: you can't really fix southern California. But I thought that was the type of cheap negativity I prefer to stay away from so I thought bit more and made the connection that even though southern California is an unfixable problem, it wasn't without problem solving. Rather than tackling the whole, one could see pieces of beauty in the mix of the whole - changes in small moves, little green spaces, gathering places of thought. The experience is uneven: at one point is Norwalk, a place I never would visit on purpose and at another point is Hollywood, a place I consider personally to die for.
But that was March. After a rough week ending I was looking at the pieces of my life and thinking it was in an unfixable state. There's no particular thing "wrong" but there is a lack of balance that's been growing - something I pondered and wanted to put a finger upon. In moments like that I switch off the radio in the car to experience silence and make space. I'm so used to noise that when I'm confronted with a longer period of silence, it tends to make time since I can no longer be distracted or entertained as time passes by. In that moment, south on I-29 just crossing over 12th street, I thought of myself as a city like Los Angeles - a place that's been built over time with disparately connected centers: my job, my marriage, my body, my spiritual life, my past, and all of the other things that wend their way outwards from an origin labelled "David Seruyange."
While I'm thinking about all that's out of balance I'm thinking of freeway bottlenecks like the golden state freeway (I-5) in Norwalk or how I the hazy sky prevents you from seeing the San Gabriel mountains until you're right up next to them. Or how strange it feels when I'm observing the mix of orange county high rollers and the Latino day laborers that live such a different life in the same space. Neither could I tear out and start over than officials blast away a city and redesign it. Your life, your city - it just grows organically. I envy the way some people "design" their lives but my envy is based on limited perspectives; on the whole I'd assert that none of us is really in control. You can wear that nice suit or organize your sock drawer if it makes you feel better, but reality is like that deer I hit in winter - invisible until airbag discharge.
And from this I extend the problem solving of Los Angeles: the small spaces, the little nooks that get reworked; urban redevelopment that happens a street at a time with a transitory period; a garden that seems out of place until its surroundings change; the visible silhouette of a downtown that is the public image of a place, as stretched as it may be.
My spaces are a little scrapbook of beautiful things that I can look at when a day is dreary. It's when I stop multitasking to spend time with K uninterrupted. At work, it's the small hack - some code I wrote and can be proud of, even if it's a part of a tower of Babel that doesn't make me particularly happy. At home, it's the places I read my books while drinking coffee. My conclusion is that balance is not about time or priority management as much as it's about those rejuvenating places that I protect with my best fierceness.
10:50:13 PM 
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