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| Inside the Staples Center |
I have a lot of time to think. Too much time, at times. After speaking with a friend on the phone one day, telling her about my last relationship, what I thought had gone wrong, gone right, etc., my friend commented, "Jesus Chris. I mean, I over-analyze things, but you grind them into dust!"
So, perhaps it's not a great thing that commuting a few hours every day by bus and subway leaves me plenty of time to think. I try to fight it off by reading, sleeping, doing a Sudoku, but eventually, I begin to think. The thinking, in and of itself, isn't so much an issue, at least outwardly. It's what I do while I'm thinking. I have a tendency to act out what I'm thinking, because usually, when I do think, I tend to think in terms of conversations not had or am going to have. In these instances (which really are not so much instances but more like all too often occurrences), I not only speak out loud, albeit softly, but, and this is the disturbing thing, at least as far as I'm concerned, I tend to gesticulate. Not wildly, mind you, at least not yet, but gesticulate I do.
More than once I have been caught-up in one of my fantastical re-enactments, waving my arms, my hands fluttering about, when suddenly the realisation that I was in public grips me. Instantly I stop what I am doing and as coy as I can, glance around me. Of course there is always someone staring at me. My only recourse is to pretend that I'm speaking with someone on a Bluetooth device. A Bluetooth device so small and cleverly hidden that only I know of its existence.
These days, on the commute into work, bouncing along Wilshire Blvd or on the commute from work, bouncing along Sepulveda Blvd., I sometimes reflect on the past and how I ended up here in Southern California, specifically Los Angeles, a place not too long ago I had written off. A place years ago I used to deride and ridicule.
Briefly, because I don't want to bore you overly with my kevetching, I reluctantly left Marin County in the summer of 2006 to begin my graduate studies at California State University, Northridge (CSUN). I say reluctantly because I was dating a woman with whom I was very much in love and after trying, with not much success to get accepted into San Francisco State University's linguistics graduate program, had to look elsewhere for such a program. I ended up with CSUN through a variety of circumstances, not the least of which was the consideration that the university was less than an hour's drive from where my girlfriend's parents lived. My girlfriend broke up with me, rather unceremoniously and not without a bit of anger, the night before my going-away party and two weeks before I was leaving for Los Angeles. The break-up was so unexpected, at least for me, and I was so completely wrapped-up in my thoughts about the move and what my life was going to be like in LA and in graduate school, that its impact never really hit me until some months later.
Last I heard, she's in Ireland. But that's another story. I tried dating in LA but all I found were neurotic and overly self-conscious women. In addition, LA being LA, none of the women I met were particularly close. It's also hard, if not impossible, to attempt meeting someone and try to set-up a relationship with them while taking 16 units of graduate studies, working part-time, doing all the normal, daily things people do and fighting off overwhelming pangs of guilt about not being able to go hiking, running and skiing with my Husky the way we did. Well, that was in Lake Tahoe, so it's not really fair to compare that area to LA, but never the less, there really was not hiking nor running to speak of.
South Korea became the UAE which became Saudi Arabia in a matter of months. While in Saudi Arabia I continued perusing the job boards and came across a short-term, part-time job teaching a summer ESL class for UCLA Extension. After a brief stop back home to see my family, friends and my dog, I was living in a hotel in Westwood, working at UCLA Extension and still looking for work.
Along the way I had thought I was going to continue on with my graduate studies and get my PhD. Two and a half years of graduate school getting my MA sucked out of me whatever desire for continuing my graduate studies I may have had, or thought I had. I had thought that I was going to teach linguistics at a university somewhere with large, ivy-covered brick buildings where I would stroll across campus in my chalky brown corduroy jacket complete with leather elbow patches, smoking my pipe as students, their cheeks and noses read from the cold would wave at me, saying things like "Hi Professor Salisbury!" as they looked at one another knowingly and nodded; I was the best teacher they had ever had or heard of.
That dream was replaced with me teaching English at a community college. That dream has been replaced with the reality of what I never really wanted to do; teach ESL. Part-time. For less than $20 an hour, commuting over an hour each way, five days a week.
Dreams and reality have an uncanny knack for never getting to know one another, and it has been my experience that no matter how hard you try to steer your life towards your dreams, life has a way of sending you down different roads altogether.
And that is how I ended up in LA, teaching English in Westwood, to students from all over the world.
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