A Pessimistic View of L.A.

This morning I woke up, thinking how my life would be different if I were living in Manhattan instead of Hollywood.  Would I be more gainfully employed?  Would i be happier?  How would my life be different?  But then, I stopped.  Why am I wondering what if?  If I constantly have that thought swirling in the back of my brain, I never will be happy because I’d always be wondering about the prospect of something else instead of enjoying where I am now. 

 The grass is always greener.  We’ve all heard that one before.  Well, you know what, it really is!  We always want what we don’t have.  Because I haven’t had as much success as I had hoped out west, I keep thinking that venturing into the publishing world might be a better fit for me.  How ridiculous am I?  Backing up a farfetched dream with one just as farfetched.  I cannot help myself. 

Los Angeles is an interesting place.  Once you’re here, the magic and romanticism you always envisioned for the city is stripped away.  The landscape seems barren, sandwiched between mountains and sea; it really is just like any other city (except NYC, of course).  The true glamor only exists between Golden Globe night and Oscar evening (and even now life isn’t that glamorous) and everyone seems to be operating in a state of vacuous abandon, caught up in their own lives, but seemingly not really going anywhere.

It seems like everyone is putting something off or can’t get a leg up.  They have projects “in development” or ideas that want to pitch, but somehow, either because funding is impossible to find or the weather is too nice to sit inside and finish your work, nothing seems to ever get accomplished.  It’s a scary, terrifying lull.  I don’t want my life to turn out like that, caught in a limbo of trying to actualize my dreams and then waking up one morning at 38 years old with nothing accomplished.

I’m trying to break into a business that seems designed on keeping lesser-known names out of it.  Talk about a struggle.  But while I’m here, I’m going to make the best of it, or try to at least.  Does everyone feel like this when they move somewhere new?  Out of touch and lost?  Or is that part of the “magic” of Hollywood too?

I feel like there is one “magic city”, one place that if I go, all my dreams will come true.  But is there?  Is there really one special place to be where everything happens?  Or are you put in a place by fate and just have to make your dreams come true in the confines of that area?  Now it seems like New York is the land of opportunity, but that’s probably just because I’m in L.A.  Oh, the irony. 

One day I’ll figure it all out and when that happens, I’ll write a really good book about it.