East meets West Coast [Like You Know Whatever]

Hi friends!

Good golly gosh, how are you?? I am doing really well! As I begin to write this newsletter, I am currently “on vacation” in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, New York, but by the time I finish writing, I will be back in Los Angeles. Weeee! It has been a very busy trip but a very good one, too. I’m only in New York once or twice a year these days, so it feels imperative to SEE EVERYONE and DO ALL THE THINGS and of course EAT ALL THE PIZZA! As you may recall, both my family and my husband’s family live in the suburbs of New York City (New Jersey and Long Island, respectively), and we previously lived in Brooklyn for five years, so we have a lot of friends in the area, too. Trying to give everyone we love the time they deserve is really fucking hard, but lord knows I’m tryin’ my best over here!

This time around I made a conscious effort to try to give more people one-on-one time, but giving some people more time inevitably just meant less time for others. I don’t fucking know what the solution is, man. When my husband and I come out here, we usually do at least one giant hangout where we invite all of our friends to come by over a window of time, and that’s very efficient and fun, but it never feels like enough quality time with everyone, and sometimes it actually feels very indulgent, like, “pray, come, pay your respects at a rare appearance from the King and Queen of California!” And you can’t really get into the good stuff of friendship when you’re at a table with 10 other people, the meaty, intimate stuff that you talk about when you’re just one-on-one. So, basically, I try to make time for everyone, but I fail, too.

I’ve been out in the New York area for a little bit over a week. The initial event that drew my husband and I here was our friends’ many-times-delayed wedding (their original date was in the summer of 2020), which was a fabulous time. Instead of a rehearsal dinner, they bought everyone tickets to a Mets game, which included access to a patio space, open bar, and a food voucher. I don’t think I watched one minute of that game–did I mention the open bar? Haha, but seriously, I was too busy gabbing away with people I hadn’t seen in years! And the wedding itself was lovely. The bride is Taiwanese-American, so they surprised us during the reception with a performance from these incredible dragon dancers. They were so cool! Also, the groom was the touring drummer for French Horn Rebellion, and the DJ was someone who had played with the band as well, so the music was very fun and high-energy, even if occasionally very eclectic. But I would expect no less from this couple.

I know the couple because the groom and I were on the same floor in our college dorm freshman year and became friends. My first real friend group in college was this group of guys from my dorm that included him and my husband. I made female friends my sophomore year, but freshman year I was a bro. It’s funny to think of what my friend was like when I first met him–goofy, raunchy, hilarious, wearing women’s jeans, obsessed with Prince and D’Angelo, sharing cheese curds from the care packages he received from home (which was Wisconsin, natch). Now he’s a husband and a home owner and takes care of two rescue dogs, and is all grown up and shit. We still heard “Untitled (How Does It Feel)” at the reception, though.

SEAMLESS TRANSITION: Okay, now I’m back in Los Angeles.

I felt more than one twinge of longing while I was out in Brooklyn for the years when I lived there. Like, wow, it is so easy to see my parents, I just need to take a train! You can walk everywhere, and everything you need is just around the corner! There’s a million things to do and always a new restaurant to try. I was telling my husband about this when I got back and he said, yeah, but you also weren’t working while you were visiting. A very good point!! Most of my time living in New York, either my job was making me miserable or my salary was, or sometimes, both. I didn’t get remotely as close to working in comedy there as I have in L.A. Plus, I was visiting in the summer; if I were visiting in January, when the five degrees Fahrenheit wind whips through the buildings and chills you to the bone while you’re walking to the G train, I doubt I would feel the same way. As it was, I did see my fair share of rats in backyards, which was less than charming. And the schlepping, always schlepping. It’s just hard not to miss a place when you’re experiencing the best of it.

It is very strange to have two different concepts of “home” exist simultaneously for me: where I grew up and where I live. Having spent the last 10+ years living in the two largest cities in the U.S., most of my friends are also people who’ve moved away from their hometowns. I have to remind myself that that’s not the norm. At all. I’ve been reading various statistics about it, and most people still live in their home states, if not their hometowns, if not the very same houses they grew up in! Wow. What a country!

It’s not that I don’t love and value my family, it’s just that living far away from them is not a dealbreaker for me at this time in my life. Sometimes I think about my great-grandmother who came over from Poland to the U.S. when she was just a teenager. She never went back again, even though later in life her daughter traveled to Poland and offered to take her. She said she just wanted to remember it as it was in her memories. She died without seeing some of her family members ever again.

I think that’s fucking crazy. I want to go back to New York all the time, I just can’t afford the time off! And I wish the plane ride was about half as long, or that there was an alternative that didn’t mean a three-day journey over hill and dale. But I guess a five hour flight is pretty good, considering it’s covering about 3000 miles. 

Alright, let’s get into some things:

- Flying. Yes, I flew across the country over Fourth of July weekend and lived to tell the tale! I know we are all hearing a lot of bad things about flying lately, and please, don’t let me stop anyone from bashing the greed of the airline industry CEOs! But I just wanted to share my experience because it was not bad! Granted, my flights were nonstop, but they were not delayed in any way and went quite smoothly! Most people were not wearing masks, which wasn’t great, but nobody was weird about me wearing one.

Not that there haven’t been well-documented travel delays and staffing shortages across the board, but sometimes I think people complain just to complain. I saw someone on Twitter yelling at Southwest for having a “bad experience” and it’s like… hon, you booked with a junky airline, what experience did you think you were going to get? You paid $49 for your seat, of COURSE it’s going to be terrible. You have to pretend that you are the parent of a toddler in those situations and come fully stocked: with snacks, with entertainment, with noise-canceling headphones, and with fully charged devices, because Lord knows they won’t even have a charging port on board. And you have to expect that someone is going to be stinking up the plane eating Popeye’s next to you, and you will just have to deal with it. That’s the experience you paid for: the plane version of the Chinatown bus.

- Changing my favorite season. As someone who grew up in the northeastern U.S., fall has always been my favorite season. I loved the changing leaves, the cooler (but not frosty) temperatures, getting to wear sweaters and layers, switching from iced to hot coffee, Halloween, and my birthday. I even liked going back to school as a kid, because it meant going shopping for new clothes and getting to see my friends again. But since I’ve been living in southern California for the past six years, I think my favorite season now is summer, because what even is fall in Los Angeles? We don’t really have transitional seasons here. In other places, the temperatures gradually rise or fall. Out here, it’s either hot or cold, and our transitional months are when there start to be more hot days than cold days, or vice versa. If you’re like, “but that sounds like the same thing,” you’re not getting it. Picture a week of days, and some are in the 70s and 80s, and others are in the 40s. That’s “spring.” In other places, spring is a week full of days in the 50s and 60s. You know?

Anyway, I’m starting to appreciate summer a lot more, seeing how I live in summery environs for eight to nine months of every year. I like breezy sundresses, eating outside, frozen drinks, ice cream, grilling, swimming. I love wedding season, travel with no weather delays, thunderstorm (we usually only have the one per year 😂), summer holidays, summer fruits and veggies, and the ocean. That’s good stuff. Yeah, summer isn’t as fun and fancy-free when you have to work, but I’ve been working since I was 14 (side note: why was I so eager to get a job as a teenager? Sure, money is nice, but I had the whole rest of my life to work!). I’m used to it by now. 

- Kimchi Grill. This casual Korean-Mexican fusion joint was one of my husband and my favorite spots when we lived in Brooklyn. I had been dreaming about their kimchi burrito (with spicy grilled chicken, kimchi fried rice, and kimchi-infused refried beans, of course), and it was extremely satisfying when I finally scarfed it. I also love their Mexican Korean chicken soup, which is like a kimchi-infused spin on tortilla soup, with rice gnocchi instead of rice. Sooo good, especially if you’re feeling under the weather! I wasn’t, and it was humid and in the 80s, but I still ordered it because it’s so delicious. Plus, now they have frozen cocktails to go! What’s not to like?

- The Apple Watch. I finally bit the bullet and bought one a few weeks ago, and I have really been enjoying it! I got the 41mm one and can’t imagine having anything bigger on my wrist, to be honest. It has actually been incredibly motivating and helping me move more! I’ve been going on walks in L.A., trying to close those rings. In New York, getting my movement in for the day was super easy, as I was always walking around to get food or meet a friend or catch a train or, one time, walked a mile from the 7 train in Flushing to a karaoke bar. (That was a bit much, frankly.) In L.A., I have to be a little bit more thoughtful about how I get my movement in, but it’s all good. One great feature of the watch is that you’re able to add friends who also have watches and see their progress for the day. I have two friends who I know through my husband’s CrossFitting who are always working out, and getting updates on them has definitely been motivating for me to move my ass a bit more. The one thing I haven’t done yet is swim with the watch on. I know you’re supposed to be able to, but that shit was $400, I’m not about to dunk it in water. Sorry!

- Supergoop! Unseen Sunscreen. A friend of mine who lives in Santa Monica introduced me to this sunscreen. I was at her place and we were about to go walk to the beach when I realized that I hadn’t put on any sunscreen. “Oh well, I have makeup on anyway,” I said, and then she said that she had this clear sunscreen that you can put on over makeup. Enter Supergoop! Unseen Sunscreen. I actually wouldn’t recommend wearing it over your makeup on a daily basis as A) it acts as a primer and is best applied BEFORE makeup and B) I think applying it over makeup would push around your blush and/or contour a bit, but in a pinch, it’s a great option. The only thing is that it’s SPF 40, and I wish it were a little higher, at least 50. I’m out here in this California sun, honey, and it doesn’t mess around!

- Independence Day (the movie). Can you believe that I just watched this for the first time on July 4, 2022? It’s true! And I call myself a Bill Pullman stan. Pshhaw! He is wonderful in this movie, but Will Smith is truly the breakout star. So many quotable moments! And props to Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin, because the screenplay gets RIGHT into the action. We were only 15 minutes in and everything was happening! Now that’s what I call entertainment!

- The Worst Person in the World. I finally watched this Norwegian slice-of-life movie on the plane ride back to L.A. after hearing rave reviews of it. I kept trying to get my husband to watch it with me for a movie night but he didn’t want to have to read subtitles, even though we always watch TV with the captions on?? Anyway, I don’t mean to be rude, but it was kind of a bust for me. Honestly, I thought Frances Ha did the whole meandering dilettante thing better and with more joy. If you watched, what did you think of it?

Alright, darlings, that’s about it from me this week! I was vacationing, so therefore not consuming that much pop culture besides season 21 of America’s Next Top Model, which happened to be on Netflix in the Airbnb. I got into it after listening to Hollywood Crime Scene’s three-part series on ANTM (recommend).

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Until next time—enjoy the summertime.

Love,

Liz

XOXO