And before that...

Life is so, so ridiculously good. I mean come on.

evidence:

1) I'm like a 2 minute drive from Griffith Park. I always knew this, but now i KNOW it. Do you know what's in Griffith Park? Well, besides the nice winding uphill walk to the observatory, the one where you can stretch out your eyes over the cityscape and on a clear day make out the ocean, and on a misty day it's like green hillsides in japan, and every day the sky is bluer than blue once you climb above the smog threshhold, there is also this babbling brook type thing at the bottom, this walk through area that has the smell that is so deeply difficult to find in LA: the smell of moisture. I mean sure, it's not hard to find water here, we have the ocean after all... and the ocean is nothing to sneeze at... or more accurately, you can sneeze at the ocean all you want but it's not gonna give a fuck... but this is the smell of Wet Soil. Smells like Virginia in the summertime. But it's february. (well, now it's march, but it smelled like that in february too). And it's a few degrees cooler in there, and the oxygen is fresher, and you can hear the water dribbling.

Not to mention, one day on my way up the hill i ran into four full grown does, hanging out in the path. Super close up.

2) I took my first kung fu lesson last Tuesday. Take kung fu. Really.

3) I got the most ridiculously amazing job in the history of jobs. It fell from the sky. I woke up one day hoping for a call from the temp assency and instead got a call from a friend of a friend with something so perfectly, distinctly, directly straight up my alley it was almost unreal. I got like picked up by the seat of my pants, pinched between god's forefinger and thumb, and dropped in a big basket of pillows and towels and kittens, then handed a fresh warm brownie and a glass of lemonade. It's absurd. I:

- work from home
- for 25 hours a week
- for a commercial-free educational cable network for 9-14 year olds (hi, who wanted to teach 5th grade or junior high?)
- doing website editorial and NO HTML OR QA WHATSOEVER
- for money.

It gets better. When i was in the interview/selection process, do you know what i used for clips. DO YOU KNOW? I USED SHIT FROM MY DIARY. I USED JULIAN THE OCTOPUSOLOGIST TO GET A JOB. A GROWN UP JOB.

I WORK FROM HOME FOR 25 HOURS A WEEK.

I go for walks in the park.

I go to kung fu.

I cook. I do laundry on Mondays.

I went snowboarding, took a monday off, and just made up the hours over the rest of the week.

The people I work with are AMAZING. They think right. You're sitting there in editorial meetings with them (well, on the phone with them) and they're talking about what's best for the audience, and not just to sound as if they gave a shit. The people are fuggin DOWN.

I was fantasizing about media literacy lessons for 10 year olds when I wanted to be a teacher. Now I'm having a hand in teaching media literacy to a national audience.

Oh and DUDE. Remember my whole diatribe about the unisex teen magazine? Guess whose audience is girls AND boys.

4) I did have to get cable for the job. And I did get TiVo. And while in many ways it is threatening to violently vaccuum my brain out through a gaping hole in my soul, it is also allowing me to catch Larry Sanders reruns. If you're gonna watch TV, at least let it be Larry Sanders, you know?

5) Did you see the latest Driver Down? It's a solid read. Made me feel things. Highly recommended. Also reinforced the notion that cosmically, things are repairing all over. I hope they're repairing for you, too.