Homelessness is something you see in Los Angeles everyday and everywhere. It doesn’t matter the neighborhood, it is there. Of course you see a great deal more of it concentrated in certain areas like downtown LA and Venice Beach. It is a very sad thing to see but I always found myself wondering what were these people doing the moments before finding themselves homeless. I do realize that a great deal of these people suffer from mental illness, some are just down on their luck, and for others it is a lifestyle choice. I know, it is hard to imagine someone choosing to be homeless but it is often the case.
This man is simply looking for recyclable items, but often times they are looking for food. You will see some with more than one shopping cart filled to the brim with stuff, plastic bottles or just personal items.
I use to think that it was awful that these people are on the streets like this, with no where to go and nobody that cared enough to help them. I now realize that this may be a situation that is never eradicated. Capitalism does not breed the kind of care and community necessary for all in this country to have the basic needs; and it is unfortunately but I have come to accept it. I know many would think that acceptance of this is even more sad.
I often give cash or buy a meal, but it is not nearly enough, but I do realize that it does help that person at that moment in time. The most heartbreaking to me other than seeing mothers and children on the street is when I see an elderly lady. We seem to throw them away like the trash.
Now this guy on the scooter was parked near the Starbucks in Brentwood, near UCLA, and besides this scooter being filled with so much stuff that he could hardly ride it, he had an outside table right outside of Starbucks, filled with papers, books and a briefcase. It seems as though he pretending to be a professor or something. He was wearing a fedora, which he took off and put to his chest, buttoned the jacket over it in the front of him so it would not blow away. However, he did put the helmet on when he mounted the scooter.
With my 50th birthday only four days away, I received an email for a vacation package to Las Vegas, and since I had never been I decided to check it out. Most of Friday, I went back and forth from website to website trying to find the best deal to Las Vegas. LA City Tours has a bus tour that I thought would be fun, since I was going alone, but I was not too excited about the hotel that they were using. When I was reading through the reviews, there were none on the hotel itself, they were all about getting the best steak for the buck. Since I am not a steak lover, I was not impressed, so I decided to skip on that package. My search continued. Priceline, Jetblue Airlines, and US Airways all had pretty good packages for Las Vegas, with a choice of hotels. After researching the hotels, I decided on a package from Jetblue with the New York New York Hotel and Casino. It was definitely the best value.
New York New York Hotel and Casinoue.
Inside the hotel and casino is like a city, with street signs, coney island, coffee shops, even a rollercoaster. Since I love New York City, this was a great reminder for me. The room was nice and very comfortable.
Park Avenue Deluxe w/ King Bed
I am telling that this place is huge with about 15 different places to eat all under one roof.
Inside NY NY
Inside NY NY
view of the casino floor
Waking up here on my 50th birthday was fun. At first I thought that I was way out my league, because I am not a big party girl, but after walking the strip the next day, I felt nothing but amazement. Most of that amazement was in the architecture and everything being bigger than life on the strip, a.k.a. Las Vegas Blvd. Even in the middle of the week the strip was jammed with people from every part of the globe. I met two separate couples that flew to Vegas from Australia.
For me this trip was mostly for discovery. discovering what everyone loves about Vegas. Now I didn’t catch any of the shows or win any significant amount of money, but I did enjoy the atmosphere and some great food. When I go back, yes I am going back, I will go to see a couple of shows and visit a few more fabulous restaurants.
It would not be Vegas if you don’t see at least one Elvis Impersonator
I thought Los Angeles had some of the best restaurants, but I was blown away in Chicago. Yesterday I had lunch at this beautiful little restaurant called Friends Sushi located on Rush Street in downtown Chicago. This is a place where my girlfriend Al often goes for lunch, because it is only a short walk from her Michigan Ave. office. It was a small place on a side street, but it was cute and the food was fabulous.
I arrived in Chicago on Friday after midnight and sat up talking with my friend from Philly until a little past day break. Yes the sun was coming through the windows. After only a couple of hours sleep we set out to get breakfast. Allison knows how to find the gems in any city, especially the one that she is so passionately in love with. So we ended up at this quaint little restaurant called Big Jones in Andersonville. Th menu at this restaurant is what I would consider southern with a Cajun flair, but much healthier than expected. It is fancy but affordable and the owners and staff were warm a welcoming.
I have been to the Getty Musem about six times before but this was the first time I thought of taking the audio tour. The place is beautiful and quite overwhelming. Even without the audio player it takes awhile to really take in all that the Getty has to offer. Usually when I go, I make sure I see the photography exhibit, because it changes every few months. Since I was just there in December and saw the present photography exhibits, I decided to start in the North Building, which is immediately to the left after entering the arrival plaza.
This is where most of the permanent exhibits are, and the audio tour is only for those permanent exhibits. The audio really brought everything to life for me. I found it very informative and it made me really slow down and learn about the things that I was viewing. The fabulous thing about the Getty and all of its wonder is that is a free museum, and that audio tour only cost me five dollars. This is a place that I think all should see and will definitely enjoy. The architecture and layout of the museum, designed by Richard Meier, is beautiful. It sits high in the Santa Monica Mountains, which gives you a spectacular view of the surrounding landscape. There are tables and chair all around where you can sit with your family and/or friends to enjoy a picnic that you can either bring yourself or purchase from the vendors on the grounds. There is also a beautiful Japanese garden that sits below the travertine clad buildings, where there is also a large grassy area where many just layout their blankets and enjoy the sun. It is a place where you can spend all day.
I see a great deal of interesting people while riding public transportation here in Los Angeles. It is one of the things that I love about this city. There is such diversity among the old and the young. Here is a young woman that is probably making a fashion statement. Maybe that is not what she is doing at all, just maybe she is experimenting with hair color and makeup. She could be in cosmetology school and they are all using each other for creative expression. It probably doesn’t matter what the back story is, because this young woman seems to be very comfortable with her choices and that is what I admire more than anything. She didn’t appear to be concerned with what anyone thought of her hair and makeup, she was being who she wanted to be at this moment and time, and there is a lot to be said about anyone that can step out and be themselves.
Now she may look back years from now and ask herself what in hell was she thinking as we all do when we look back and see some of our old pictures. I know that it is something Oprah often expresses on her shows when she looks back at clips of shows from the 80s. She has had her share of crazy and big hairstyles.
Kudos to this young woman to just step out and be who she wants to be, and next month her hair maybe dyed jet black and that would be cool too.
Yesterday I finally got the opportunity to go to the Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades, California. It is not a very large museum and it is all about Greek Mythology and it’s correlating Roman counterparts. If you are one that loves Greek Mythology you may very well like the exhibits. Even though I am one that has always been interest in Greek and Roman Mythology, I was not extremely impressed. I do however encourage all to see for themselves since admission is free. The most beautiful parts to me were the gardens.
It will only take about an hour to see it all and that includes reading all of the plackets on the walls. No it is not a total waste, because anything that is deemed educational is worth some time, but it merely depends on what interests you. There are things that I believe could have been done much better, but it was worth seeing for myself. It in no way compares to the Getty Center on Sepulveda, which also has free admission. Both of these museums were envisioned by Jean Paul Getty.
The highlight of the day for me was the few people that I met along the way. I met one lady on the bus that started talking to me, and we talked all of the way to the museum. Then at the entrance to the museum, I met and chatted with another young lady who was a college student from Boston and was in Los Angeles working on an internship. I chatted with the bus driver on the way back from Malibu, and later met two interesting gentlemen in an Indian restaurant on Santa Monica Blvd. and Ocean Ave.
These conversations were very enlightening. They ranged from the weather in the last ten days to alternative lifestyles, to sexuality. Talking to people, which I so often do, is always the highlight of my days. I often feel rejuvenated when I have these experiences and want to get out and do more of it, just talking to anyone and everyone that I come across.
Much has been written about mothers and daughters but I think maturity plays a big part in our growth with this special and often times volatile relationships. I now understand more and more about my relationship with my mother and even my daughter as I get older.
I felt the need to say more for two reasons:
Yesterday I met two women while out eating with my daughter in Westwood and we started to chat about various things. At one point we were discussing that there were only two months of the year where there was no holiday to celebrate. Well one of these ladies mentioned May, immediately after the other had mentioned that in June there was Father’s Day. When I said Mother’s Day was in May, and even if she wasn’t a mother she had a mother so she should never forget that holiday. She then said that she didn’t have much to celebrate there.She began to briefly explain why she felt this way and how she can see the love between myself and my daughter. Yes it is true that my daughter and I have a great relationship and we love each other, but more importantly we respect and even like each other. I went on to say that my mother and I didn’t have the kind of relationship that I have with my daughter, my mother was a good parent, and I now realize that she has loved me all along, even when I didn’t think that she did.
The second reason is that I had a dream about someone that has never liked me since I was a teenager, and her cousin happens to be a close friend of mine. In the dream, the woman’s adult daughter was in tears because every time she is around her mother she is brought to tears, and my friend was telling me this. The daughter went on to tell me about all of the things she has accomplished in her 24 years, and that she was also marrying a young guy that was also quite accomplished, but her mother could and did always make her feel bad about herself. So I started to talk to her about some of the same things in this dream, that I had talked to the two ladies in Westwood about earlier that day.
It has always been said, that we start to understand our mothers more when we become mothers ourselves, but in my case I didn’t really understand my mother until I got married. At that point I stopped seeing her as just my mother and all that I expected from her and all I expected her to be. I started to see her as a woman. That is when the light went off. I started to see her as another woman like myself that had to navigate things with all of the emotion and hormones raging inside.I realized then, that a person can only give you as good as they got. They can only give what they know, because they too are human with all the shortcomings as anyone else.Hence, why dysfunction is passed down from generation to generation. We try to give our children something better than what we have had, and because we didn’t really have it ,we don’t know how to give it, so therefore, we improvise and do the best that we can. Often times when we are little girls, we dream of what we want our own families to look like, and that is usually composed of the things we believe we missed out on, so if we are smart we try to change the pattern. This is what my mother did and this is also what I did.
I was an only child and both of my parents came from divorced families, and they are still married after 50 years; something that they both agreed they didn’t want to happen in their family. My parents sent me to the best schools in my hometown and sent me to great college, provided me with a better house than they grew up in, as well as every material possession imaginable. They paid for me to be involved in everything from pageants to debutante balls. These were all the things that they didn’t have growing up. They were African American, growing up in the South during the 50’s and 60’s. Continue Reading…
The early part of the week the weather was absolutely beautiful. I decided to go to one of my favorite places in Los Angeles, The Grove.There is always something going on there. One night, Adam Sandler was there in drag making his new movie, and another night Seal and his wife Heidi Klum were there with their kids shopping and buying ice cream.
This is the first time I actually took my own photos of any celebrities. Whenever I see them they are usually out with their families and I never take their pictures even though I am rarely without my camera. This particular night there was a frenzy of photographers so I figured that I would join in for sure. There is his wife, Heidi Klum carrying the red purse and someone else pushing their daughter in the stroller.
As I move away from the crowd of photographers, I spot Tyrese with his daughter.
My discovering exactly what it is I was going to do with the second half of my life and how I was going to do it was no easy task. Before, all I knew is that I wanted to travel any and everywhere and document it all through writing and photography. I thought about becoming a travel writer/photographer. After doing some research, I realized that everyone and their mother were doing exactly the same thing. There are very few successful travel writers around. There are more travel blogs popping up these days for that reason. Even though the idea of talking about my travels, my likes and dislikes, as well as the impact a place has on me, was something that I would like to write about, I realized that it just was not enough for me to live on. I know that I don’t just want to travel to the usual tourist spots. I actually want to live among the locals to truly feel the heartbeat of a place. There is also a great deal of writing out there of the many 20 something year olds that are backpacking all over the world and blogging about it, trying to create an income with ads on their websites, so that they can have money to continue traveling. I didn’t want to do this either, because I hate seeing those ads on a blog.
At this point I knew that I didn’t want to go back to punching a time clock and I wanted to be free to do what I wanted it to do and live life the way that I wanted to live it. Now isn’t that what everyone wants. So I continued to look for ways to make this happen. I came across the idea of copywriting while I was researching freelance opportunities. I ordered some books on copywriting and looked into taking some classes. After exhausting this idea, I realize that this would still make me dependent on someone else and their needs, as well keep me in constant search of new business. As selfish as it sounds I didn’t want to depend on others for my success, the quality of my life. Realizing that there is just no way around hard work, which I am definitely not afraid of, but I just wanted the hard work to be something that I enjoyed and paid off for me. Then I asked myself the question that is always posed to someone when they are looking for what is really important to them, and that is ‘what would you do if money was no option?’ My answer would be take pictures and tell stories. But how can I eat and pay for a roof over my head doing that. Not that there were not enough photographers already doing that. I didn’t want to take portraits. I didn’t want to be a wedding photographer. So how was I going to make this happen?
It dawned on me that cutting down on my expenses would be the first thing that I needed to do, and was something that I had started doing a few years ago, but I needed to cut down even more. Believe me, downsizing is quite liberating and definitely therapeutic. First of all it frees you from the stress of maintaining so much stuff. Here is a link to a list that will get you started to de-clutter your life.
A couple of years ago I got rid of my car and moved to an area where it would be easy to catch the bus or train to get to where I wanted to go in the city. I worked for Metro, and therefore I rode public transportation free of charge, so why not take advantage of it. I never would have done this five years ago, but I did it and it worked out well. I now had money in my pocket, because I was no longer paying a note on my Nissan Pathfinder, auto insurance, and regular maintenance, which was a pretty good chunk of money. Now this was easy enough for me to do, because it was only me in my household. I didn’t have to take any children to extra-curricular activities or anything else. I just had to get to work. That was the only thing I had to do.
I moved into a very small apartment that was affordable in Los Angeles, and I caught the bus. I didn’t need a two-bedroom apartment just for me. I decided I would not pay extra for something that I didn’t use on a daily basis. If someone were to visit me they would have to camp-out on the sofa or a blow-up bed. Other than my parents, they could have my bed.
After doing all of this, I am realizing that there is still so much that I can still dispose of and believe me I am working on it. Like Time Warner Cable, I must have the Internet and the wireless hub, but do I need to have a constant stream of bad programming that is costing me every month. No I don’t. Even though there is some things on tv that are quite enlightening, it is often times information that I can get on-line. These days a great deal of the programming is on the Internet. So why should I pay for something that doesn’t make me feel good. So I am going to cut that off soon.
There are some hobbies, liking knitting and crocheting that I have been doing for over 20 years, and have had great pleasure in doing so. However, I don’t knit or crochet near as much as I use to but I have a great deal of books on the subject that I can get rid of for sure. My mother says that she want all of my knitting, crocheting and quilting books, and she can have them. I have some really good stuff on these subjects and quite a few of really expensive books, but these crafts don’t do for me what they once did, so there again, out they go. Magazines are something else that I don’t need in my house. I have a crap load of them too. I do love National Geographic and at one time had thirty years of them, given to me by a lady in my old neighborhood, I don’t need to gather them up anymore. Now you can get National Geographic digitally and I am going to do just that, because it is a great magazine and lends itself to what I love most, stories about people and places far different from what I encounter in my everyday world. It is a great model to emulate.
I am an avid reader and true lover of the written word, but I no longer need to collect books, thanks to the beautiful influx of digital readers. I bought the Sony Reader after a couple of years of scouting around. I fell in love with it the moment I started to use it. The thing that sold me on this particular eReader over the rest was that it was expandable through the use of memory cards and that you were not limited to where you were able to purchase ebooks. The Sony uses the ePub format that is becoming the standard for ebooks, and it will also read pdf-formatted material. However, it is not the last of its kind that I will purchase. I love the color screen, but up until this year, there were not any color readers out there with the same features. Since the debut of the iPad, they are popping up everywhere. iPad still being the best at this moment, but still not serving my needs of expandability. The reason for my wanting a color screen is because I would like to read my magazine and newspaper subscriptions as well as many photography books on a color screen and not black and white.
The early part of the week the weather was absolutely beautiful. I decided to go to one of my favorite places in Los Angeles, The Grove.There is always something going on there. One night, Adam Sandler was there in drag making his new movie, and another night Seal and his wife Heidi Klum were there with their kids shopping and buying ice cream.
