Mid-Trip Musings: 25 in LA

I’ve been a bad blogger lately.  Currently, I’m down in LA for my birthday seeing family and friends, so last week I was all “I’m going out of town next week!  I have all these things to do, no time to blog!” Despite this, I still ended up packing and cleaning the apartment the same day I left so that was a lie.  I definitely have some San Fran adventures to post, but for now I am in my ancestral home in good old Glendale, California.

It has still not been a full year since I made the Big Move, and moved to a new city for the first time in my life.  I came back to visit last June, but it didn’t feel very strange since I hadn’t really been gone that long.  But coming back now, it feels weird to be here.

I didn’t realize how much San Francisco felt like home.  But being back in LA feels like home too.  I can still get around and everything is familiar, but it feels . . . off.  I can’t really place my finger on it.  This is a new feeling.  I am not used to this.

It is really nice seeing my family and friends, some of whom I hadn’t seen since I left.  And it’s interesting how quickly it feels like I never left at all.  Last night I was at my bandmate John’s place, hanging out with him and his roomate Christine.  Within half and hour, we were back to playing cards and drinking beer like I’d never left.

Saturday was my birthday!  I am a quarter of a century now.  I feel like I am supposed to start feeling older and more adult-ish.  What I really feel is that the world around me is getting older but I stay the same age.

My twin sister Mel and I love to have childish birthday parties the older we get.  We’ve done Disneyland and mini-golfing multiple times.  Saturday was no exception and we had a Mexican park birthday at Griffith Park in LA.  For those of you not from the southland, this concept may sound strange and a little racist.  But it’s a real thing, I assure you.  If you are Hispanic and living in LA for most of your birthdays you go to the park, eat a ton of food, and hit a piñata.  Mel picked out the best tacky burro piñata she could find for us to beat the shit out of.

We also had an egg toss, which was a foreign concept to most of our friends.  It’s simple.  You find a partner and stand facing them, a few paces apart.  One person tosses a raw egg to the other.  If you catch it, you move back a step and repeat until the egg breaks and pray to God that it doesn’t break on you.  We used to do it at our huge Jewish family picnics growing up.  All of our friends were adamant about not wanting to do the egg toss, so it was a small group.  But once they saw how much silly fun it was, we had a second one!  Adding to the craziness was that for some reason the eggs were hard to break and would just roll on the grass.  It upped the tension when one would finally break when it was tossed hard enough.

Griffith Park is a huge park with many different sites in it.  We had the party was in the Old Zoo, my favorite part of the park.  For some reason, when the current LA zoo opened in the 1960’s, the old one was not torn down.  There are these large, cave-like enclosures where we set up our spread and smaller cages on a hiking trail farther along.  The big caves look like they were for bears or other large animals and are pretty cool to hang out in.  The smaller cages are pretty scary actually.  I would not want to be an animal kept in them.  The one problem with having a party in the Old Zoo is that it’s kind of hard to find.  I got lost, and I’d been before, so while people were showing up there was a lot of frantic lost phone calls and running down the hill to fetch guests from the parking lot.  If you ever have a party there, I recommend signs.  Lots of signs.

All in all though, it was a great way to spend a birthday.  Once the sun went down, a few close friends accompanied us to  the “Puppy Palace”, the apartment where Mel and her boyfriend Scot were dog-sitting.  We finished off the birthday with wine, Middle-Eastern food, and Trivial Pursuit.  Not the craziest party to be sure, but that’s the way I like it.  Maybe I am getting older after all!

Good Luck and Happy Travels,

Mo