October 19, 2004 - 5:13 PM

It's Raining in (not) Baltimore

It's been raining a lot lately.

Huh. Rain in Los Angeles. What a novel concept.

It showered all day on Saturday, took a break on Sunday, then drizzled intermittently on Monday and today. The comfortingly familiar pitter-patter of raindrops on surfaces played in the background while I folded laundry and watched TV Saturday. The smell of quenched ashpalt and refreshed soil drifted through the air vents of my car while I went on runs on Monday. I can't remember ever being so happy to have the earthy odors of soil surprise my olfactory system.

I think that the rekindling of these sensory memories combined with the pictures of Boston and Fenway Park during the broadcasts of the American League Championship Series between Boston and New York stirred other storage compartments in my brain. How else to explain the jumble of dreams I experienced last night? In one part, I dreamt that I was living with Soph again in Boston, and Newt was with us, but then, I remembered, while still in the dream, that Newt was no longer a part of our family, and suddenly, when I called for her, she was gone. And then, I dreamt one of my recurring anxiety dreams, this one of having to retake my high school classes; only this time, I wasn't suffering alone- Mark and Y were in the classes with me. When I realized that, hey, I'd already graduated High School, I started skipping classes, but Mark and Y were good students and tried to convince me to stay in class with them. Then I had a dream that involved time travel and trying to avert disaster while not having anyone believe me.

Ahh, dreams.

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Two weekends ago, I went on a 2 hour tour around downtown L.A. (specifically, around Pershing Square) with a group of Amherst Alumni. A docent for the L.A. Historical Society showed us various buildings and discussed the architectural and historical significance of them. It wasn't mind blowing, but it was cool in that I felt like I was actively doing something to try to get to know a little more about the city in which I live. I've been fairly negligent in terms of developing bonds with the places where I've lived in the past, and I'm trying to rectify that now. Having to do a lot of driving around L.A. for my job lately has helped a bit in my exploration, and this tour bumped up my familiarity a few points. The highlight was checking out the Bradbury Building which was used as a location for the movie BladeRunner. Super sweet.

I went on this tour with my friend Flori (his middle name is Florian, his first name is Michael, and everyone calls him Flori...and girls, don't let the name fool you, the dude is hot. He's got a swimmer's body thanks to years of competitive swimming and water polo, and he was going for his PhD in Political Science before he scrapped it to try his hand at scriptwriting), and afterwards we got some Mexican food at this market-type place in the area. They offered brains and liver and strange meat called scruttle or something like that, but we just had carnitas tacos.

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Oh, I don't think I quite made it clear in my post-birthday post that I went to TWO Dodger's games that weekend. One the night of my birthday, October 1st, in which the Dodgers failed to clinch the Division Title; and the other on Sunday the 3rd, the day AFTER they clinched, and the day that the SF Giants were eliminated from the playoffs.

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