ham fisted theatrics

The thing to do in Hollywood seems to be to drive your mom around in your Scion. Be a cute girl in your twenties and drive your mom around in your Scion and you will not have any problems.

Dan is going to buy a video game and Dominic is going with him and I elect to come too because I haven’t done much in the way of leaving the house on this particular day. We drive to a shopping center that contains both a GameStop and a Best Buy so that if they don’t have the game Dan wants at one place we can try the other place without having to get our parking validated again.

We pull into the shopping center’s built-in parking garage and the parking attendant, a short older woman, is super-friendly to us. She packs a crazy amount of genuine friendly into a very brief transaction. While we park I have a five-minute thought-party in my head about how nice it is when people are nice to you. Walking inside, we discuss our various strategies for remembering where it was you parked. They’re all variations on “write it down.”

GameStop is first. Initially they don’t have the game Dan wants, but he talks to the (also extremely friendly) guys behind the counter for several minutes and eventually they realize, wait, they do have this one copy. This is exciting. Dan continues talking shop with the dudes and I paw through remaindered PS2 games, looking for old forgotten movie tie-ins or games based on obscure sports. At one point one of the clerks is describing why he quit Fallout 3. He describes his saved game like this: “I’m in a house full of robots that shoot lasers. I ran out of bullets, I ran out of money. I have a broken leg and the dog is dead.” Sometimes the barely-out-of-his-teens clerk at GameStop will just say an entire science-fiction country song. You have to listen for it.

After Dan gets his game we go around the corner to eat lunch at a barbecue place. It’s very good. While writing this I realized I still have some left over in the fridge. You guys, I’m very excited.

We see a guy with a beard and a lady-friend enter the restaurant while we’re eating outside and somebody comments that he looks like Devin Faraci, a critic who runs a website named CHUD and gave “Mystery Team” a really great write-up. After lunch, I am standing in line for coffee and looking at Twitter on my phone and lo and behold, Devin mentions that he’s at that barbeque place. I go outside and tell Dan “that was him.” We debate whether or not we should go back and say hi, and then it is eventually decided that we should. As we’re walking back to the restaurant, we see that Devin is coming the other way, with his female friend. They are holding hands. In whispers we try and decide whether we should interrupt them. We eventually opt to just walk by and e-mail him later. You could really get an entire thesis out of this, about technology and its bringing-togetherness and its distancing, about the fact that it brought us so close and we ultimately bailed, choosing the safer electronic option. But your thesis would be wrong. Really we just didn’t want to be, like, cockblocks.

Someone in the comments yesterday (Hi, Sasha) asked if we always eat out or if that's like a "we just moved here" thing. The answer is, Donald cooks and is a very talented cook. Meggie cooks and is a very talented cook. I would very much like to be the kind of person who cooks, I have had every intention in the world of becoming the kind of person who cooks for the last four years or so, and even the kitchen in which to do so for the past two, and I realize that this means absolute dick next to being the kind of person who actually does cook. But just know that someday I will cook frequently and with verve, like my dad does and my step-mom does and like many of my friend do, and you will think I'm really cool and it will appeal to something primal in all of us that needs to feed and be fed, so if you could just go ahead and feel that way about me now because someday I'm going to do it, like, feel that way on credit, that would be great. If you don't want to, I understand. Anyway. It's not like we can't, we just haven't really settled into the sort of schedule here yet that permits a lot of family meals at reasonable times.

Drew McWeeny over at Motion/Captured linked this First 100 Days Of LA series in his morning round-up this morning. Thanks, Drew! And thank you for reading if you clicked over from there. I hope you will find something you like here, be it small and petty observation about a person I saw on the sidewalk, or a sudden meta-epiphany about leftovers.