Pennermag.com

If you’ve noticed, I haven’t been blogging much lately. Why, you ask? Eh, probably not, but I’ll tell you anyway.

I’ve been working at my ‘fall back’ job. Yes, you know how people always tell us folks with very expensive, we don’t use them, but are still paying for them educations — oh, but if things get bad — you always have a fall back. Don’t worry things aren’t bad. The truth is the housing renovation is killing me (I mean how much hammering and sawing can any one person take) and I desparately wanted to do something fun and challenging — well, that didn’t work out.

Now, while I believe that the ‘fall back’ is inherently untrue — I’m trying out some legal temporary work.

Well, it turns out that for a pittance I too can engage in brain numbing (yes, my dog Foley could do it) work — that pays more than typing for Kelly Services.

I’m currently ‘reviewing documents’ with two other folks trying to get out of the law profession. It’s fairly interesting that everywhere I go, I meet droves and droves of people who went to law school blindly and are now ready to get out — no matter if they are facing unemployment, loans, and no way of paying their mortgage.

I’ve moved way off blogging — but the question remains, how do we make better decisions going forward. Should we encourage others to make better decisions? Every time an acquaintance mentions that their kid wants to go to law school — I give them my card, e-mail, and phone number — because I think if I can save them $100,000 and a lot of grief — it would be worth it. Yet no one has ever called. Is it because we see what we want to see — or because our poor choices are validated as acceptable, even desirable?

Hard to say, but I must go now and put on my rubber fingers. I have documents to flip through.

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. . . where everybody knows your name.

In a relatively short period of time, I’ve become a regular at a number of places in Los Angeles.

It’s weird. I’m pretty sure that my life has no particular pattern. Yoga and Jamba Juice one day, a walk on the beach at Santa Monica, the next. Many of my friends don’t want to live in cities because they find them impersonal, callous, cold. No small town mayor to greet you as you walk down main street. The shopkeepers knowing your name.

But, lo and behold, there must be some pattern to my wanderings, because my face is becoming recognizable to folks in L.A. Just in the last month, I bought a coffee at Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf for the first time in months — c’mon, I was trying to lay off the caffiene — and the clerk called me by name. That one was a little weird — in the back of my mind, though, I think she may share my first name. What’s even weirder is I went to a furniture store where I had purchased a buffet over a year ago, and the proprietor, Max, not only remembered my, but my house as well.

There are folks you expect to recognize you . . . the regular yoga instructor (even when you’re not so regular), your neighbors (even though they see you in your pajamas), and the folks at the dry cleaners (because they are handling your dirty clothes). Other folks remember you as well . . . some very unlikely — the guy at Jamba Juice who can get your Orange Dream Machine ready when you walk in the door, the bank guard who hands you a deposit envelope even before you get to the ATM, and the guy at Trader Joe’s who knows to put the case of water in your cart before you even ask . . . .

I’ve found this big, sprawled out, city without a center, to be one heck of a friendly place. Everyday is like the opening scene from Cheers.

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