Mary Poppins and Other Suspicious Foreign Drifters

The majority of this week has been spent on my CV, hopelessly shuffling and rejigging its items, like some pathetic greengrocer trying to hide rotten apples behind mouldy tomatoes. Huh. Having moved approximately one bajillion times in the last eight years (typing that, I begin counting on my fingers the actual number of moves, which for some reason greatly amuses Dr Strangename; it's ten times, and therefore we cannot move anywhere ever again because I just can't bear to start on toes) my work history is as long as each job is short. Since the ten moves have spanned four countries, anyone examining my full CV can come to no logical conclusion other than that I am a) on the run from the law, b) irretrievably feckless, or c) Mary Poppins.

Midway through trying to fit all of this onto one side of A4 (utilizing the same size font they use to write your name on a grain of rice down at the pier) I have a wonderful revelation: this isn't a research paper or a court transcript or my letter to Santa. It doesn't have to include everything. So I start the CV again, editing my messy life history into a Lifetime movie -- easy to grasp, nice-looking and with a compelling but not too alarming plot. I have cut most jobs that didn't involve Microsoft Office -- because, really, if you weren't logged onto a PC, what productive POWER VERBS could you possibly be using? -- and especially highlighted positions where I spent much of the day staring into the middle distance, because these usually have the safest-sounding titles (Information Assistant, Billing Clerk). The story ends with me skipping along the shores of California, waving my work permit and trilling I'm Jolly Glad to be Seeking a New and Challenging Position in the American Workforce. Fade to credits, commercial break.

Yippee.

The only thing that's really getting me down now (I mean, apart from: the job for which I spent two days drafting the perfect covering letter, only to notice that its posted date was several weeks ago, and then they didn't even deign to answer my email asking if the position was still available. Or the morning I spent trying to input my inconveniently foreign qualifications and work history into a recruitment agency's website, which was not designed to countenance anything existing outside the borders of America and thus awarded me a GPA of 0.0 and a list of jobs in LOCATION NOT FOUND. Or the number of job ads which specify I must have a car, except I can't afford a car until I get a job. Or that I have degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge and am applying to 'clerical/administrative' positions where the main duties are making coffee, making sure we never run low on paperclips, and being shouted at by everyone else,)... the only thing that's really getting me down now is that American CVs all seem to have a little tagline or motto or what-have-you underneath your name. Like,

Ped Xing

Twenty-five years' dynamic experience in sales, with PROVEN RECORD of TRIPLING TURNOVER by 800%, implementing DYNAMIC SERVICE-IMPLEMENTATION, and REDUCING COMPETITION TO ASHES AND SOWING THOSE ASHES WITH SALT. 

or simply

Ped Xing  

LOOK ON MY WORKS, YE MIGHTY, AND DESPAIR

Naturally, as a British Citizen, I might occasionally hint that I am a rather wonderful and accomplished person (did you see the bit above, where I mentioned Oxford and Cambridge? Weren't you impressed? I'll be very self-deprecating about it from now on, as per Michael Milton: 'Once he knew that you knew he had gone to Yale, he tended to play that down.') but I don't like having to spell it out, especially in sentence fragments all dressed up in italics. But I try.

Foreign Socialist seeks Westside position in order to buy a car. Moderately proficient in photocopying and answering the phone (no complex switchboards; will not wear a headset). Types with two or more fingers. Enjoys tea-breaks and passive aggression. Work permit expires 2012.

Cinderella-complex waif seeks Evil Stepmother boss. Will do crappy job for low pay and silently resent you for it. Don’t you know she’s a special little princess?

Mary Poppins type with ten addresses in four countries over the last decade requires employment in Los Angeles. Intrigued? Send letter via chimney. No childcare, please.
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Return of the Blue Busrider

The Blue Busrider had English visitors.

That's not a euphemism -- there were two visitors, and they rented a car.

[pause for reverent silence]

Yes, a car. I've been cruising around LA in a car, betraying the very ideals that founded this blog. We went to Venice and Malibu and Westwood -- on the same day. We drove out to Pasadena. We got lost on the freeway, confusing east with west and the 101 with the 110 and the 10. It was splendid.

It was also like being on holiday in another city. Our local area -- of which I know every pavement crack, fig tree and psychic readings sign -- suddenly shrank to nothing more than a convenient junction. Left or right? We're already gone. Instead of viewing the LA metropolis as a tangled, fraying circuit-board of bus lines, it was long straight roads and freeways and parking lots. 

I didn't hoard dollar bills for busfare, although I was expected to remember that we were parked in level p4, area B, space 313. Certain things faded from vision, somehow filtered by our windscreen -- homeless people, crazy people, anyone waiting on a street corner in the rain. The bus itself was no longer a glorious steamship, bearing down and rescuing us from the desert island bus stops; it was more like a dangerously decrepit old supertanker, edging up the road in a tide of traffic, foundering over to the sidewalk every block to disgorge sloppy passengers. We drove past, thought no more about it.

On Saturday, our visitors returned to England, and our Honda to Alamo. They are all greatly missed.

- We really have to get a car,

remarks Dr Strangename, a sage observation we have only made a couple of thousand times in the last six months. I nod. But not too emphatically -- we're on dangerous ground. 

Contrary to the tagline on this blog, I am now in possession of a work permit. Oh, yes. It says DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY on it, and it's very useful when I'm being IDed buying liquor. Since the cashier at Vons often has doubts about the validity of my namby pink EU driving license, and I don't want to carry around my passport, I feel that this function of the work permit is very nearly worth the $400 application fee. Dr Strangename has more traditional views, i.e. that it is a truth universally acknowledged, that a legal alien in possession of a work permit must be in want of a job.

Frequency of blog posts will increase in direct proportion to the amount of time I should be spending on my CV, which needs to be translated into American. Power verbs! Superlatives! Give me a job so I can buy a car!

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Trying to Get Inside James Franco's Mind

You're Invited!™ (No, Not You)

You're Invited!™

say the 2011 Academy Award billboards; we're not, but we go anyway. At least, we go to the Kodak Theater, twenty-four hours before the event, for a little light gawping.

We could do with the exercise. On Friday, I didn't leave the house at all; first there was a hangover -- grade 'nuclear winter' -- and then there was a migraine. I lay on the sofa for several hours, unable to find the remote or otherwise escape 'Maid in Manhattan'. The cat clambered over me, dribbling. Eventually I went back to bed; Dr Strangename came home, at the end of his working day, to find me in exactly the same position as when he'd left that morning. He can be very sarcastic.

Today I'm up by ten-thirty and we manage to leave the house before two. There's just no stopping us. We get the 12 to Westwood and, in undeserved good bus karma, transfer quickly to the 302.

It's always a relief when the bus behaves itself, as, approximately once a fortnight, Dr Strangename puts his foot down, shakes his fist, and says we'll never go on the Metro again. But this Saturday it's swift and uncrowded, and Dr Strangename laughs at the potholes on Sunset that threaten to disengage your cranium from your spine and roll your head down the bus like a bowling-ball.

We pass though Beverly Hills, with its ice-cream stripes of strawberry, vanilla and mint -- bougainvillea, white-washed walls, lemon-trees and lush hedges, almost pretty enough to distract you from its purpose (keep your dirty little bus-rider eyes off my lawn).

In West Hollywood we pass everyone's favourite artificially-enhanced-sex superstore:

JOIN THE HUSTLER FAMILY!

says a poster in its window, next to the shamrock-themed erotic outfits. I imagine the Hustler family: mom showing plenty of underboob in a sawn-off t-shirt, bending cheerfully over the (unlit, but no one notices) BBQ; dad doing some suggestive business with a foot-long; daughter eighteen yet still obliged to wear an undersized Catholic schoolgirl uniform.

Prohibition Is Over

appears in white on a sober black billboard across the road. No, thank you; after Thursday night, prohibition is back, and this time it's personal.

(I was drinking these lovely, faux-Japanese martinis, made from elderflower and lychee and gin, and they were as light and meadow-fresh as a fabric softener commercial. Friday morning, they may as well have been Clorox.)

Just as bus sickness and residual hangover are about to cause disaster, we reach Hollywood. Apart from Downtown -- where a woman directed a canary-coloured rain of junkie vomit at me -- Hollywood is the least glamorous district of LA we've seen so far. It's a particularly unappealing combination of genuine grot, tourist tat and anodyne chainstores. But everyone who visits us wants to go there, and, god, here we are again, of our own volition. You feel guilty for patronising it, as if encouraging some morally-dubious commerce that lowers us all, like a nice young man who keeps finding himself in Thai brothels.

But this weekend Hollywood is brisk and professional, full of tents and trailers and people with clipboards. Hollywood Boulevard is closed to traffic for several blocks, and we skirt alongside a screened area that is the Oscars red carpet. We can't see it, but we know it's there.

After being diverted through some battleship-grey service corridors -- it's no more than we deserve -- we find ourselves in the Kodak Theater. An Italian correspondent in a backless evening dress and a lot of panstick is making a broadcast. I take a photo of a sign saying NO ACCESS, and am reprimanded. There's more red carpet, a cinematic sweep of stairs, and some shrouded Oscar statuettes. Although the carpet is covered in polythene, we aren't allowed to step on it. I take several more photos. Even Dr Strangename is awed.

Eventually, we get to the top of the Hollywood and Highland mall, where you can look down fifty feet onto the transparent tent and red carpet walkway below. I see the public audience bleachers; I applied for a seat, but it's something like a 0.035 chance and I didn't win. Can't catch a break. This aerial shot is the closest we'll get.

We briefly consider throwing ourselves off the mall terrace onto the plastic roof, where we'd bob, waving at celebrities, for a short while, before being shot down like a couple of rogue parade balloons. But the celebrities aren't here until tomorrow, and we can't be bothered to take the bus again.    

They told me to come to Hollywood,
that it was the third biggest industry in the world.
Number one was safety razors.
Number two was sticking plasters.
Hollywood was number three. So I came.
-- Cowboy Actor

This is written on the mall's floor, along with lots of other dubious stories relating to The Road To Hollywood. Outside, we're filmed by someone getting establishing shots for The Lead-Up To The Oscars -- do look for us on Belgium TV -- and I linger outside a production van for Channel WowWowWow Japan, hoping to be discovered as a new Gaijin Tarento.

In the end, we walk south back to Sunset and wait for the Metro home. Our companions here are a guy with a guitar and gas mask, and another man who looks exactly like the reprobate who shot Sam in 'Ghost'. But on the way back through West Hollywood, I see a sign saying

Pierced People Pray Too

and resolve to be less superficial.

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Exposition Boulevard

I forgot to wash any clothes this weekend; really, my housewifing standards are getting very lax. Sometimes Dr Strangename is reduced to quark-wrangling in yesterday's socks. On Presidents' Day I leave the house dressed, for lack of any other choices, in United Nations blue: blue blazer from California, blue t-shirt from Germany, blue jeans from England and blue plaid scarf from Japan. In my handbag I have a blue beret in case it starts raining again, but the storms are over; our building's swimming pool is a bright aquamarine, rippling to koi-gold in the sun.

On the streets of Los Angeles, in the Westside, the walking wounded are out again. A tall, thin man in an old-school business suit -- pinstriped with matching waistcoat, and I'm sure there's a watch in those pockets -- comes along very slowly, more slowly than anyone with business. His face says nothing. Another middle-aged man pootles past on a mobility scooter, exercising a cheerful dog that is raw and pink with a skin condition. 

Sepulveda Boulevard, as I walk northbound, gets dirtier and dustier.

Bungalows offering Psychic Readings and Garage Sales turn into construction warehouses and lumberyards, with a handful of South American laborours lingering outside. They're there every day, wearing trucker caps and thick jackets, leaning against the fence, not talking; I assume this is a bad day, as it's already mid-morning and work would have presented itself by now. Cornerstone Mantels has eight Stars-and-Stripes fluttering from its roof, and a FOR LEASE sign. Nearby, The Best Little Doorhouse in Town is doing brisk business.

At my destination, I wait in an empty, high-up, doctor's office. Its inland-facing picture windows show a city panorama -- more tall mirrored buildings, SunAmerica and MGM and the Die Hard tower, and glittering lines of traffic, and usually the snowy mountains beyond. Today, even though the sky is a clean arctic blue, the horizon fades into a white blur and the mountains are invisible.

(Last week, at my volunteer job in West Hollywood, I was enjoying a similar view from a picnic table in the playground while I waited for my student. A small boy came up, stood in the herb garden and -- kicking wildly at some lavender -- remarked

- I need someone to keep me SAFE I ate too much SUGAR and now I think of SCARY THINGS.

Then he ran off shouting

- BLEEEEEEUUUUUUU.)

After ten minutes with a laptop-tapping doctor, I'm walking back down Sepulveda. I have to pass under the freeway to get home; two freeways, actually, the north-south 405 and east-west 10 that meet here in a compass-pointed rose, forming one of those looping cloverleaf patterns so beloved of LA aerial views.

But, underneath the intersection, nothing is clear, and all you know is a terrible moaning cathedral of concrete joists, shade and strange detritus: a pair of trousers snagged on a tree, a water-bottle of piss, fluttering reams of toilet paper. Abandoned vehicles are parked at the curb, with cars full of stacked trash, and a duct-taped RV covered in hand-written signs.

YOU ARE UNDER SURVEILLANCE

says one, and I hurry past before the fat man sleeping at the wheel wakes up.

The only cheerful point around here is Exposition Boulevard, regarding which I've prepared a laboured witticism: I would take Exposition, but it's long, pretty dull, and I'm not sure if it leads anywhere particular.

(Except I do know, at least, that it passes the astonishingly shabby local Postal Depot -- but why let this ruin a bon mot?)

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Sixteen Degrees (°C) of Separation

In the absence of beach weather, I'm surfing the 'Next Blog' button.

Video-game-playing guys, girls who wear vintage without looking like an unmade bed, Christian mothers, cowboys, and anyone double my age -- I'm reading, because you're not at all like me. Our only common ground is small, varied, and sometimes tenuous. Perhaps you:

- hold firm opinions about Valentine's Day.
- live in LA.
- live in Wisconsin (I hear it's the American answer to Somerset).
- are involved in academia, or grad-school, or are frequently described as 'pallid'.
- make a finely-tuned argument for atheism (I'm a weaselly agnostic, myself).
- make short, sincere lists of things for which you're Thanking The Lord today.*
- make long lists of everything that's gone wrong today.
- write haiku about TV shows, or poems entitled 'Go Fuck Yourself'.*
- know that Michaelmas, Hilary and Trinity are not a set of Victorian triplets.
- draw portraits of celebrities that bring to mind the description 'teeth like baseballs... eyes like jellied fire'. (Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas).*
- have occasional difficulty explaining yourselves to cashiers.
- walk a high wire through difficult times without ever grasping self pity or happyclappiness.*

(*Well, I don't do these, but I admire them. And, especially, I acknowledge that 'being obliged to take the bus in LA' doesn't count as 'difficult times', even when old men do shout at you to GO BACK TO CHINA.**)

(** I'm not from China, so this is just confusing.)

Criteria used to exclude blogs:

- overusing the words Blessing, Mommy, Trendy, Hipster, Hubby, Steampunk or Faggot (unless the latter is referring to a bundle of twigs or an unappetising British meatball).
- having an icon saying 'The Cutest Little Blog On The Block'.
- removing the 'Next Blog' button, forcing me to backtrack and waste precious time.
- any pouting to the webcam.
- too many photos of food (makes me hungry) or shoes (makes me covetous) or family (makes me feel like I've got horribly drunk and then woken up, inexplicably, on the sofa in your living room, possibly having puked on your Sears rug, and am now staring at your graduation/wedding/school photos in the hope that something will give me a clue as to my location*). 

(*Please don't worry; I've only ever done this in my own living room.)

On the last note: if your blog is not intended for the eyes of strangers -- perhaps you forgot to set it as private -- and you feel odd that I've linked to you, please tell me to remove it, or adjust your settings. I didn't search for any of these blogs, and was referred to them by nothing more than the wisdom of the Next Blog button.

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Facts for Visitors

GOD IS STILL SPEAKING

says a sign on Westwood Boulevard. It sounds testy, or ominous, or plaintive, depending on your mood.

Today on the Westside it's Golden State sunny but cold in the shade, and by the BluWave Carwash a man is wearing a sack over his ragged clothes for warmth. He's cut holes for his head and arms, and secured it round the midriff with twine, making it look like a Medieval tunic.

This is at Santa Monica and Westwood. Last month, in the LA Times, I read that there was a particularly nasty accident two blocks down from here; a northbound car crossed early, an eastbound car crossed late, and their collision killed a pedestrian waiting at the lights. Both drivers survived. The Escalades shall inherit the earth.
   
When the Blue Bus gets to Westwood proper, I switch to the Metro. While I'm waiting -- leaning against the wall of a Burger King that accepts food stamps -- I watch students, doctors and nurses at the busy six-way crosswalk. The UCLA medical buildings on the other side are monoliths; plaster-cast white, darkly mirrored or sonar-screen blue. My friend Rodeo Girl, TX, told me the other day that she overheard a hospital administrator on her campus shuttlebus say she loves the sound of ambulances sirens: it sounds like business. Rodeo Girl wants to get the hell out of TX .

After a while, a tourist asks me the way to the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and whether this is the right bus stop because the schedule says there should have been a bus by now but there hasn't  been so he's just wondering if there will be. I reassure him that it'll arrive eventually. Which it does.

When I get on, the guy in front of me has trouble swiping his bus pass.

- It don't work,

says the driver.

- It should work.

- But it don't,

he restates, and then lets him on anyway. I feed my dollar fifty to the fare machine. The only other people onboard today are two middle-aged ladies chatting in Spanish. One pleasant thing about taking the bus is, I suppose, the knowledge that, should we recreate the film 'Speed' right here and now, I will be a shoe-in for the Sandra Bullock character. That's just demographic fact. The 302 rattles up onto Sunset Boulevard, and its ads feature the same poem that always haunts me on this route, ending.

Some men will make a grave out of anything.
Anything.
Times when a body could dig through the night.*

Then I get off the bus near the Hustler store, and am nearly run over by a hippy on a Segway.



*Srikanth Reddy, 'Sonnet', from Facts for Visitors (LA/Berkeley: University of CA Press, 2004)

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You Wake Up At LAX

Tyler Durden gave insomnia a bad name. It's really not that terrible if you don't have a job in the morning, or any father-issue-related latent aggressive tendencies which eventually lead you to develop an alter-ego who destroys your IKEA furniture.

(And Tyler 'your condominium is holding you back' Durden would get short shrift in this household, where any savings we might theoretically possess are eternally locked up in rental deposits. Sizeable rental deposits, because we didn't have Social Security numbers when we moved in, and had to put up extra cash to reassure everyone that we were real people. I bet even Tyler Durden had a Social Security number.)

Dr Strangename has retired to bed with all the moral righteousness of the recent convert -- he was notably nocturnal throughout his PhD, which was convenient, given that he was in England and I was in Japan. Now he's a functional adult who starts work at 9am,  but he still has guilty little lapses at the weekend; staying up until 4am reading football blogs and dispatching lines of code to supercomputers, then concealing it the next morning like another sorry addict.

Insomnia in California beats insomnia in Germany, hands down, because we have cable TV. I feel perfectly entitled to watch as much TV as I like, since I own many leather-bound books and several college degrees. With my magical remote,  I can study Organizing With Ease, Painless Hair Removal, or Summer Sexy Abs. I could be Discovering the Bible or Exploring Society or watching Southland whilst reading the LA Times Homicide Report online and having a panic attack.

Actually, I may just put on Entourage and feel mildly depressed that that LA, the sleazy/glamourous one, is still a different country, even if I do volunteer at a school that's convenient for the Viper Room. Speaking of which, Johnny Depp was in Westwood for a premiere last night, and owes many people an apology for causing utter gridlock throughout the area. Certain non-resident legal aliens were forty-five minutes late for their Valentine's dinners, which would have caused husbands to become apoplectic had they not consumed large bottles of Asahi whilst waiting. When I finally arrived, the waiter was rather short with us, but that's ok; we're European and still forget that tipping isn't optional.

(In Germany, one of my visiting friends mistook a 0 for a 6 on our restaurant bill and inadvertently left a huge tip, which led to the young waitress giving us a stern lecture on Teutonic gratuity etiquette and essentially making my friend feel as if he'd handed her an obscene proposal on a napkin).

Is traffic any more glamorous because Johnny Depp is causing it? No. Especially not when you're on the bus.

Insomnia in California doesn't beat insomnia in Japan, though. If you want to stay up all night in Japan you'll at least have a vending machine within slipper-walking distance, and the opportunity to make ridiculous amounts of money, without compromising too many morals, doing night-shift English classes. Teaching eight lessons, from eleven pm to seven am, you pass through interesting strata of Japanese society:

Before midnight your clients are overworked or drunk or both.
From midnight till two your clients are insane.
From two till four your clients are rice farmers.
From four till six your clients are retirees who like to get in at least ten self-improving activities before breakfast.
From six till seven your clients are school children who really wish you would drop dead.

At seven you walk home though all the daytime commuters, your tiredness simply a mirror-image of theirs.

Oh god. Another trailer for Battle: LA is on the television. I don't need to see dramatizations of local landmarks being reduced to rubble, thank you very much. I have a husband here tinkering with the fabric of the universe, and did I mention my security deposit?

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Pestilent Beasts

Recently, the cats have been interrupting their standard position (reclining manatee) to scratch vigorously. Fleas. Aside from this being disgusting, it’s really disgusting because both cats are indoors-only. This means either Dr Strangename or I brought in the pestilence. How horrible -- I blame Dr Strangename, of course, due to his recent predilection for hanging around Parisian flophouses and the Haight-Ashbury.

I go to Petco in search of pharmaceuticals: drops, sprays, tablets, flame-throwers.  There is the usual Germany/USA retail culture shock. Here comes the national stereotyping.

In Germany, whenever you wish to purchase anything, there will invariably be two options*: the expensive one that costs a year's salary but can be bequeathed to your grandchildren, or the cheap one that is already broken. Both options will be hideous, and served to you with unconcealed disdain by a shop clerk who is operating secure in the knowledge that little, short of murder-suicide, can get you fired in the Socialist Republic. You must to hurry up and making your choose, schnell, because the shop is closing in half an hour and won’t reopen until Monday; the clerk is already deciding whether to spend his undeserved Sunday off Nordic walking, strolling around the city centre in a fur coat looking in the windows of closed department stores, or drinking Killepitsch in the local Schloss Schänke. Oh, and I suppose you want a bag for that, too? Prut. 

(*The only exceptions to the two-options rule are a) preserved meats and b) beers, because in Germany you cannot possibly have enough varietals of preserved meats and beers.)

In America, of course, it’s well documented that too much is never enough. I like this philosophy, despite its potential for ruining the character and waistline. But I cannot choose between forty brands/forms of flea zapper. Trying to pick a mid-price black mascara from thirty different types of mid-price black mascara makes me tearful, and I know something about mascara.

And, dear god, there’s all the other stuff, too. This Petco is bigger than our local supermarket in Germany. There’s kitten shampoo and dander-reducing serum, and I don’t know what a dander is. Maybe we do have too much. In the toy section they’re selling a thing in a bag called a Thing In A Bag©. I chance upon the Booda Dome Clean Step Litterbox©, reduced to $32.99: ‘Scoop Up The Savings!’ (not to mention the cat shit). Then there’s the Littermaid Elite©, an automatically self-cleaning tray, advertised at $60 as The World’s Greatest Litterbox©. But what about The Universe's Greatest Litterbox? Is it here? Is it in development? Can I get a discount coupon?

Eventually I come over all European, buy a $2 flea comb, and walk back down Westwood Boulevard. Because some of Dr Strangename’s European travel expenses have been reimbursed -- don’t get me started on the pyramid scheme that is academic travel, necessitating us to shell out for international flights and hotels then eat beans for months while we dream of the big payback -- I atone for the fifty hours a week I spend reading in Barnes and Noble, and actually stop in to buy two books. One is even full price. On the way out I’m discomforted to see that the ‘For Mom’ selection of the week is apparently ‘Surviving a Shark Attack (On Land)’, a self-help book about betrayal (including some pleasing intimations that adulterers, having broken the covenant of marriage, can be trusted with no further public duties and should presumably just be pushed out to sea on an ice-float). Recommended ‘For Dad’ is ‘It’s Not Really About The Hair’, the memoir of an gay Australian beautician turned American reality show star.

Maybe when my work permit arrives I’ll apply for a job at Barnes and Noble.

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On the Boardwalk

- You gotta dawg you can bring him in. We gotta dawg with five heads and you can PET him,

calls the Freakshow compere on Venice Beach boardwalk. I think I might like to see this, but my husband clarifies that it's a dog with five legs, not five heads. He also reminds me that seeing The Smallest Horse In The World at an Italian streetfair in New York was a disappointment. (Save your $5: it was a young Shetland pony viewed from a raised platform.)

Nearly everyone's gotta dawg on the boardwalk today, and crossed leashes and nose-to-nose greetings are slowing our progress to the pier. Dr Strangename has no patience with hot crowds and tries to drag me off to the sidestreets, but it's better to stay near the beach in Venice. The sidestreets are full of seediness they can't get away with on the tourist-and-loon-packed boardwalk, which is saying something, since pot, botox and piggy-faced vegan militants are openly tolerated. Amongst the foot-traffic and stalls there's the odd idling police car.

- They lookin for you, man,

says an old, skinny white guy to his doppelganger on a bicycle. Both are selling feather charms, sage and good vibes. Nearby, a man in a polo shirt pretends to study a vendor's tarantula paperweight while his bulldog craps profusely all over the sidewalk.

- Clean up after your dog,

says an enraged hippy, emboldened by the support of the crowd. There are Japanese tourists, kids on pink pushbikes, shirtless surfers, girls in hotpants, rastas on rollerblades, professional stoners and junior thugs all complaining as they step around the steaming patch. The bulldog looks embarrassed.

Dr Strangename and I conduct a pointless debate about some missing parcels as best we can, pausing every few steps to make way for a skateboarder or to split around a dawdling couple. It's the end of January, and two Christmas gifts sent to us from England still haven't arrived.

- It's not our fault,

says Dr Strangename, inexplicably belligerent.

- I'm just saying that it's awkward.

- I don't see why it's awkward.

We debate whether people taking the time to send gifts you never receive is awkward. I mention Wrapit.com, the wedding list company that went bankrupt, leaving guests without their money and newlyweds without their gifts, and which presumably engendered some tricky thank you notes. Dr Strangename enquires, with apparent sincerity, whether we had a list with Wrapit.com. We didn't. Did you not notice we received wedding gifts?

- I wasn't sure whether you were using that as a comparison because it also happened for us. Or if it was just a general comparison,

says my husband, as a man with a THE KUSH DOCTOR IS IN sign tries to sell me some medical marijuana.

- There's a dude there with turtles,

says a girl beside me to her friend.

- Oh, ima get a turtle. Cute ones?

- Yeah, cute, but I don't know.

- No?

- Don't they have like diseases you can get?

- Salmonella?

- Well, I'm not gonna lick it.

We all skirt around a solitary woman doing a deranged, jerky dance to no music, everyone avoiding her eyes lest the Medusa gaze of insanity lock us in stone, or a difficult confrontation.

- ...fucking fuckers don't know me, fucking know me, fuck,

says the woman to no one, her fingers flickering to the sky, as the LAPD helicopter passes overhead.

Dr Strangename and go to Island Burger for bottomless Cokes and nachos, because we're classy like that. On the way back to the beach, fizzing on caffeine and aspartame, I rant for several minutes about the poor design of the restaurant's bathrooms.

- Well, don't let it get you down,

says my husband, sarcastically. This from a man whose passionate views on throw cushions* have ruined whole evenings (*that they have no place in civilized society, or on our sofa).

Twenty minutes to sunset. We walk down to the end of Venice Pier to watch the surfers. The water is a choppy black, and it's looking like the twenty-seven-day run of sunshine in LA is ending. But there are still scores of surfers, bobbing like seals in their wetsuits, waiting with apparently infinite patience for the right kind of wave.

- How does a seagull get that fat?

asks Dr Strangename, his attention elsewhere. He's a scientist, so, of course, this is not a rhetorical question, and we discuss the finer points of avian diet on our way back to the bus stop.

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Miss Manners at the Mall

- Acne Thrives On Your Indecision

- Reinvent the 5 pocket pant!

- GIVE freely with a mall gift card

After two years of incomprehension in Germany, American signs bully me; apart from this, the Westside Pavilion shopping mall is as anodyne as a hotel bathroom, and an ideal antidote to LAX.  As it's only a mile away through a toytown suburb, and Los Angeles has been blue-skied for twenty-five consecutive days, I walk. This surprises several side-road-turning drivers, including one with the vanity plate AH0Y M8E and another whose car is decorated with red handprints. Maybe when the Big Bumper finally gets me, this'll be it: palm trees, roses and astroturf-perfect lawns. Except for a mock-Tudor two-storey with a Zen garden, nothing rises higher than a bungalow. By the freeway underpass I surprise a transient taking a leak in a miniature hedge. We're the only pedestrians.

It's only a shame that by the time I get to the mall I look like an extra on Miami Vice -- rolled up jacket sleeves, slicked back hair, suspiciously sweaty. The typical American mall always makes me feel shabby and apologetic, especially when it's nearly empty on a Friday afternoon and everyone wants to be your friend. Two women in Victoria's Secret enquire about my feelings on lingerie. Someone at a concession stall tries to sell me $9 soap. I buy nothing, as per instructions to lay low -- belly-on-the-floor low -- until Dr Strangename's paycheck clears on Tuesday, and scutter guiltily through the neon gelato and colour-coded Gap shirts to Barnes and Noble, where I read a book about ballerinas. Then I walk home. The transient is now sitting on the low wall outside Winchell's Donuts, eating a cruller. He calls me Hey Babydoll, and I don't reply.

- You got no manners,

he observes, correctly, as the Big Blue Bus comes through the underpass. I get onboard, reflecting that accomplishments today have been limited to a ten-minute phone conversation with our dental plan provider. When we arrive at my stop, a woman calls me sister and asks for bus fare, so I give her $2; around here that's enough to get you there and back.

.

. 

No Ped Xing

No Ped Xing

No Ped Xing

say the signs along the Howard Hughes parkway, as Dr Strangename and I head to LAX this morning. We take a Culver CityBus, even though the Culver CityBus is green and therefore beyond the remit of this blog. Inching south, its passengers a Venn diagram of the aged, deranged and down-at-heel, the 6 passes through a dilapidated series of Americana. It's like being on an abandoned Disney ride, lacking only mechanical hookers waving from the windows of the pastel motels.

Over here, disheveled beauty parlors offer Fine Hair Imports and Symple Grooming. Restaurant names come in three grades: classic (Johnnie's French Dip and Pastrami; Tito's Tacos; Dinah's Diner), unappetizing (Grinders, Sizzlers, Shakers) and inexplicable (the Edelweis Chalet). After dinner you can choose between being robbed and beaten at the Tattle Tale Cocktail Lounge, or beaten and robbed at the Scarlet Lady Saloon. 

While I wonder why an EZ Lube and a Jiffy Lube would set up shop within a block of each other, and which sounds ruder, Dr Strangename vacillates over the talk he must give in San Francisco and makes ill-advisedly loud comments about the welfare of his wife being alone in the city for three days. The man in front of us wakes, coughs onto the window, and folds up again. The bus runs a giddying set of circlets at the Culver City Bus Terminal, where the driver kicks down the access ramp and helps on a patron in a wheelchair, remarking

- Ain't nothing change but the date, Kenny.  

Kenny laughs and laughs and laughs, and waves at the hard-luck Debbie Reynolds boarding behind him. Outside, a man dressed as the Statue of Liberty and holding a sandwich board advertising tax services walks by. You can tell we're near the airport when jumbo jets begin slaloming a hundred feet overhead.

- El Lay Eggs,

sings the driver, making Kenny laugh again, and drops us off in a dirty parking lot. The duller the city, the nicer the airport; hence, Düsseldorf airport is cold steel, white lines and has a Skytrain, and the LAX transit hub smells like piss and hobos. Blank-windowed Radisson, Sheraton and Marriots stand by it like well-dressed strangers ignoring a streetcrime. We take a shuttle to the terminal. LAX itself feels more edgy than a civilized Western airport should; perpetually lit by the slow amber tones of 1970s cop drama, its stained concrete and palm trees lend it the air of a South American dictatorship run to ruin.

Dr Strangename checks in. I go back to catch the bus home. This is the fifth time I've been to the airport since Christmas, without having once left LA; there was the Texan arrival and departure of my good friend Rodeo Girl, and then Dr Strangename had to go to France. The moment I realized that my husband's career had taken him to the Other Side -- the side where all the successful people are, networking and drinking freely from the minibar -- was when he said, with a straight face, that although it sounded like fun, it was work, and he wouldn't see much of Paris beyond hotel and conference rooms.

(His being right about this makes no real difference.)  

I catch exactly the same bus for the return trip. Same seat; same sleeping man; same driver, who asks

- Didn't I just see you?

and I nod.

- Ain't nothing change but the date,

he says. Quite.

Origins of the Blue Busrider

- GO BACK TO CHINA

said an old man on the bus today, his eyes glittering.

The only time I've been to China was changing planes: Osaka, Beijing, Beijing, London.

- Osaka? Okay, GO BACK TO JAPAN.

Although I lived in Japan, I'm not Japanese. Please don't feel you have to sit any closer, but I'm actually Caucasian, which is why I look so confused right now.

- We're on the bus in LA. Everyone's confused. Where do you come from?

Are you demanding zat I show you my papers? I did just move here from Germany. But I'm British.

- What are you, some kind of international hobo?

When I met my husband, a decade ago, he won my heart by declaring his ambition to be a bearded drifter. Mind you, at the time he was clean-shaven, I was very drunk, and we were in the university bar.

- So the pair of you wander the world with your life in a bindle?

We've pared it down to ten boxes, two large suitcases, and wearing all our clothes to the airport. Oh, and a couple of crates marked LIVE ANIMAL.

- How the hell did you get into the USA?

We had visas. My husband, Dr Strangename, is an academic.

- But you don't have a work permit?

Not yet. My current visa authorizes me to be here for ornamental purposes only.

- Are you a rich housewife of Beverly Hills?

Yes. I just enjoy taking the bus with lunatics.

- Really?

No. We don't have enough money for a car, and we don't live in Beverly Hills. We live close enough to the 405 Freeway that the back wall of our bedroom vibrates.

- So what do you do all day?

Ride the Blue Bus, ponder what to microwave for dinner, and pretend that I'm only pretending to be a housewife.

- And who is Ped Xing? Sure sounds Chinese to me.

Ped Xing is invisible to the populace of Los Angeles, judging by the number of times she's nearly been mown down by Escalades turning right on a red light. In her mission to traverse the City of Angels safely and at a reasonable cost, she becomes... the Blue Busrider.    

- I wish I'd never started this conversation now.

I'm sorry. Please go back to clipping your toenails and shouting about the albatross.