I’ve done so much that I feel like I’ve been here a long time, even though it’s only been a week, and I’m very satisfied by the eclectic combination of sightseeing and eating and wandering and people-visiting and museum-going I’ve done here.

I’m also feeling the pull to get out of the city again.

My museum visits on this trip have been reminders that I do still love these places, and that they make me think. Think critically and disappointedly and aspirationally and fondly and many more adverbs besides. But I’m not done with them, in either a personal or a professional sense.

My social energy just is not what it used to be. Even in the Before Times (aka pre-pandemic aka BCE… Before Covid Era), I’d been steadily leaning more and more into my introverted side. But now, after over two years of majorly curtailed social behavior, I felt like I needed (at least) an entire day of rest to recover.

41 was a birthday that fit the year. I started it with pastry and latte treats, proceed on through the Time Travel Mart and funky hipster Echo Park, LA, meandered through the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, chilled at the swank and luxurious Prospect Hollywood hotel, ate delicious mozzarella and dinner with Kim Gouveia.

I finally made it to the Museum of Jurassic Technology. I won’t say anything to spoil it, but I will say that it’s by turns charming and weird and lovely and eerie and macabre and funny and thought-provoking. It makes you question what museums are for and histories of display and how you “know” something is authentic and what even is the concept of authenticity, anyway.

An incomplete list of things that made me very happy today.

&

An incomplete list of things that made me anxious today

I love a ghost town. I love places that are still extant but clearly decayed from their glory days. I love the sense of mystery and layered stories these places exude. I love the aura that floats thick in the air of unknown people whose lives were lived there and unknown occasions the places have seen.

First, some bird watching.

Second, some oasis watching.

Third, some watching of… I don’t know what the hell Pioneertown is exactly.

I’ve bid my darling friends farewell and camped in Joshua Tree National Park and avoided all information about the Oscars until the flood of text messages that came in today when I came back out of the park.

Some highlights and thoughts from the past two days.

These ladies are ride or die. We’ve seen each other through so many hilarious moments and traumatic ones. We’ve been through major life milestones together, and also little moments whose only consequence is that we’ve shared them.