Art of the Odd

I started at the Santa Monica branch of the LA Law Library, in the Santa Monica County Building:

(If you’re sitting there saying to yourself, “But that’s not the County Building, that’s City Hall!”, you’d be right. Due to a lack of Creative Commons licensed photos of the County Building on Flickr (something I’ll try to remedy next time I’m down there), I settled for Omar Omar‘s very lovely portrait of City Hall. The County Building’s across the street, way over frame right.)

When the Library closed, I walked over to Joe’s Pizza, for a slice of white and a garlic knot. (Okay, three garlic knots, but I swear I only asked for one!) I had to smile along the way, when I passed a construction worker singing opera to himself. “Sometimes,” I thought, “I love the city.”

I was listening to one of Joe’s employees teasing a teenager who’d come in for some pepperoni when a Tweet arrived from NovySan:

“You’re going to the Cat & Fiddle without me?” I whined. “Fine, I’ll go to the King’s Head without you.” And I did.

I treated myself to a pint of Guinness at the bar (sandwiched between a British regular and an American hipster who seemed afraid to sit too close), followed by a 99 Flake at the gift shop:

(The ice cream, by the way, was lovely, but the chocolate is nasty, waxy stuff. Not to say I didn’t eat it, of course – it was stuck in my ice cream, after all.)

On the way back to my car, a blond skateboarder crash-landed on the astroturf between me and the curb and laid there grinning at me. “I assume you’re okay,” I said, and he laughed. “I’m fine.” “Not what we would have hoped,” his friends said, and he picked himself and his board up and prepared to tackle the next strip of green plastic.

And all of that adds up to one of my favorite days in LA.

Well, that, and finally owning a phone that’s capable of email. What am I babbling about? I set up the blog-by-email feature in WordPress. And it’s cool, but still a bit tedious, so I’ll shift to my laptop for the rest.

And now that I’m back on a full-sized keyboard (and have fixed the weird formatting in the above paragraph)… It’s been a roller-coaster day. Barack Obama will be the 44th President of the United States, and oh man, does that make me happy. But Prop 8′s passed, and so I’m angry and I’m disappointed and I have to remind myself that there are ways to fight that. (There’ve been three lawsuits filed already, and that makes me happy, because at first I thought, how do you challenge a constitutional amendment as unconstitutional? And now I have the answer. But it’s still up to the courts to decide whether they’ll accept the argument. And there’s another argument I’m wondering about, which is that if same-sex couples who married before the ban are still married, but no additional same-sex couples are allowed to marry, does that create a constitutional problem? And if those marriages are invalidated, does that violate the couples’ constitutional rights? I need to do some research on this…)

And even though I don’t write much about work (because I’m in an information-finding industry and I know any one of my co-workers is more than capable of tracking down my blog (especially since I haven’t made any effort to conceal my real name), and because I don’t want to be defined by what I do, and because if I feel like writing about work, it’s probably because I’m angry, and not everyone needs to hear me rant about it), it was a bad day today, and for all the reasons that make most of my bad days bad days. I was face-down on the kitchen table sobbing this afternoon, with my sweater pulled up over my head, and it wasn’t a pretty scene.

(I am looking for another job (something else I haven’t mentioned much, because I don’t want to panic anyone I work with), but it’s not a good time, and since I’m trying to transition back into the law, I have that additional “career switcher” hurdle to jump over, and sometimes it seems impossibly high.)

But NovySan’ll be home in a few minutes, and we’re going to The King’s Head for Guiness and ribs, and that makes it a good day, whatever happened this afternoon.