mahiwaga

I’ve long suspected that I may have seasonal affective disorder. Despite living in Southern California, and despite the fact that currently, it’s 75°F outside and sunny, the critical factor has always been the number of hours of sunlight. So my mood always ebbs when Standard Time comes by, reaching its nadir around the winter solstice, then picking up again when Daylight Saving Time starts up. Rainy days (like the last few) make things worse. Unseasonably warm and sunny days like today make things better, but don’t fix things completely.

I suppose I am also at a major crossroads in my life. An existential crisis of the usual epic proportions. I simply don’t know what to do with my life.

Certainly, the practical answer is to get an actual job, but, truth to tell, I haven’t been pursuing this very effectively.

I haven’t felt this lost since I finished undergrad after having been rejected from medical school, and not having any job prospects.

As I lay marinating lightly in my misery—although in truth it’s really more like a tepid malaise than a full-roiling depression—I was caught up in a sensation that I find difficult to describe, not having felt it for a very long time. I suspect there isn’t really a word for it, and the best I can do is describe it with approximations. Which means that I’m going to try and tell it as a story, although I’m not sure it actually lends it to that either. But here we go.

So when I was a kid, I was a typically latchkey kid. My mom worked the swing shift and my dad worked the usual 9-5 (or, more accurately, 10-6) so there was a definitive gap in adult supervision for me and my sibs. Neighbors would pick us up from school and drop us off, and we’d watch cartoons for three hours. I’m not entirely sure how long this setup lasted for, but in retrospect, it seems like it was for a while. We managed to not burn down the house or maim ourselves, although this was not for lack of trying.

So as I lay in bed the other day, for some reason, I flashed back to these memories, and what hit me was this feeling of things that I haven’t felt in a long while, which I can only poorly approximate as sense of possibility, and a sense of wonder. Anticipation, perhaps. We were always waiting for something. Waiting for our dad to come home from work. Waiting for our mom’s next day off. Waiting for the weekend. A lot of my childhood could probably be condensed into that, waiting for something, and not doing much productive while doing so.

Oh, somehow I got my homework done while watching TV, and I pretty much went through K-12 on cruise control. (My sense of intellectual invincibility would manage to remain intact until the second semester of freshman year in college when I barely managed to pass calculus.) I did play a lot of video games with my brother and my oldest friend. But that was it, really.

But what I also remember are completely random moments of wonderment, to which we often attach the adjective “child-like.”

For example, there were those days of Santa Ana winds. I remember those days where the winds would howl through the canyons and passes, strong enough to make it hard to walk outside. I remember thinking (perhaps mainly being influenced by “The Wizard of Oz”) that those winds were a prelude to being transported to some imaginary place. There were those days that fog would actually roll far enough inland to completely obscure the small valley that my parents’ house overlooks, so that it looked like we were stuck on an island floating on clouds, and when the fog would finally melt away, perhaps the landscape would’ve have changed dramatically. There was the access panel in my sister’s room that really just led into a tiny space underneath the roof, but which I imagined was a secret passage into some mad scientist’s hideout. There were days where the setting sun would shine onto the houses on the lower reaches of the mountain to the north of us, and some houses would reflect the rays of sunlight intensely, looking like some kind of beacon, perhaps to summon aliens, or presage the opening of an interdimensional portal. There was this patch of what in my mind looked like the stereotypical fairy-tale forest on the way between school and home. Maybe you could find elves there. Maybe there were portals to the elves’ homeworld. Sadly, this patch of trees and overgrown shrubbery was razed when I was in college, perhaps in anticipation of a housing development. Strangely, in over a decade, all they really ever built there was a stub of a street with a single street lamp, but no landscaping, and no houses. Perhaps there was a curse on the land or something?

Perhaps the right word would be “imagination”, with the qualifier of “overactive.” The gist of it is that there were plenty of mundane occurrences that deep in my heart I kept hoping were preludes to something fantastically magical, things which never did happen, and which I’m pretty sure will never happen, although, interestingly, what studying science has actually taught me is that there are probably very few things that are actually physically impossible. Still, whereas voicing such things as a child would be acceptable (although certainly people would look at you funny), saying such things as an adult could possibly be taken as evidence of clinical insanity, unless you couched them in terms of a science fiction or fantasy story, and even then, most people are less apt to consider you “normal.”

Writing this down, I’m starting to get the feel for what my problem might be. I’ve spent too much time hoping for the fantastical, but I’ve gotten extremely good at accepting the mundane. And yet, I’m not sure I could ever bring myself to aim for whatever is realistic, although I’ve become too afraid to dream big.

Still, there is something about those hours between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. It’s those hours right before sunset that I’ve grown to love. It’s probably because my parents’ house has this awesome view, and you can just watch the sunset behind Mt. Hollywood or Adams Hill from their backyard. The family room has a sliding glass door that lets all the rays of sunlight filter in and illuminate the room, and the dogs like to lie there and bask in the light. If I could freeze time, that would be the hour, I would choose, right before sunset.

As soon as I got my driver’s license, I discovered that getting behind the wheel was very therapeutic whenever I got depressed. For some reason, it seemed that I would tend to take these random drives around this time of year. Back then, I would go up into the San Gabriel Mountains, and out to the Antelope Valley. I never really had a destination in particular, but the winding, desolate roads would somehow soothe my soul. It was then when I also learned the particular advantage of driving a car with a diesel engine, which was that if you were inadvertently submerged, the engine wouldn’t die like with a gasoline engine, a fact that may have been fortunate because I had to ford a rushing mountain stream on one of those drives.

One of my more epic journeys was the four-day road trip from Chicago to L.A., which I ended up doing twice. But I’ve done the I-5 run from L.A. to the Bay and back quite a few times, and the I-5 run from S.D. to L.A. and back has become pretty routine. But I didn’t rediscover the aspect of discovery and exploration until this past summer, when my mind was running in whirling circles, and I felt like I never had any time to think.

In August, because of my parents’ predilection for Native American casinos, I found myself wandering around the vicinity of Mt. Palomar. In a fit of complete insanity, I drove out to the Anza-Borrego desert at midnight, ending up on the western shore of the Salton Sea, and then driving to L.A. from there. That may have been the last time I took a random drive to nowhere.

Today, though, I was feeling the need. There’s this sense of needing to get out of here. Not necessarily the physical “here”, but definitely the metaphysical “here” where I’ve managed to imprison myself. So I drove down the Silver Strand, wandered randomly around Imperial Beach, then out to Otay Mesa, up to Spring Valley, through the hills to El Cajon, then back again. I’m not really sure I managed to figure anything out, and it’s certainly not good for the environment, but there is something about the open road that has always called out to me.

One kind of recurring dream that I’ve been having is about places that seem familiar, but don’t actually exist in real life. One of the places I’ve repeatedly dreamt about is this city that reminds me of Pasadena, except that it has a full-on subway and light-rail system that rivals NYC’s system, and that it’s the actual metropolitan center, and not just some suburb. I’ve dreamt about it enough times that I’ve even managed to draw rough maps of it.

More recently, I’ve been dreaming of places that remind me of San Diego, except with major differences in topology, in particular, a fantastical propinquity to the Colorado River. In my dream version of this city, the PCH runs all the way down from L.A. instead of ending in southern Orange County, and the 805 bridge over Mission Valley is a massive structure resembling the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.

In some of these dreams, I dream of structures that I’ve never seen in real life, but which I later discover actually exist. For example, there is this old-looking dam which you can see from the new California 125/California 54 interchange that once figured in my dreams before I actually saw it in real life.

Which got me to wondering again about the nature of Time.

Some modern cosmologies posit that free-will doesn’t exist, that all of time already exists, and that conscious perception of the passage of time is really just an illusion. The future is already there, and like the Oracle in the Matrix suggests, you’ve already made your decisions, the only thing left is to try and figure out why you made them.

While there are fantastic ways to funnel information from the future to the presence, such as wormholes and tachyon beams, its possible that since the future already exists, information somehow leaks through our four-dimensional manifestations in space-time.

Which may be what déjà vu actually is, although this is certainly not the mainstream mechanism that most neuroscientists posit.

My most recent experience of déjà vu or perhaps precognition was the other day when I got in the car to drive to the hospital. For some reason I was singing this song from some band that I would be embarrassed to admit to knowing (it may have been Savage Garden or something similarly cringe-worthy) and when I turned on the radio in the car, there it was playing. (Now why was my car radio tuned to a station that would play something like Savage Garden? I’d rather not pursue that line of inquiry.)

Perhaps there was a car that had passed before I had gotten in my car that had its windows open tuned to the same station that my radio was, and I had just picked it up subconsciously (But who would be bumping Savage Garden, for God’s sake?) I’m sure there’s a logical explanation for it.

The thing that I realized, though, is that even if precognition really existed, I bet it would be pretty useless except in very specific cases. I bet most visions of the future are about mundane things whose significance is impossible to determine until the event actually occurs, and all you’ll really be able to say is, “Oh wow, I saw that already!” Getting a vision of the future would be a lot like hearing a few lines from a conversation in which you have no idea who the referents are. When the future actually happens, you might be able to piece things together, but I’m almost certain that that brief glimpse of the future would not enable you to prevent some kind of catastrophe. Maybe precognition might even be widespread, but only crazy people admit to having it because everyone else is afraid of sounding crazy.

Now, I haven’t actually lived in L.A. since 1999, but I go there as often as twice-a-month to visit my parents and my sibs. In the time I’ve been elsewhere, certainly a lot has happened. When I left for college, Echo Park and Silver Lake were still kind of sketchy areas (Echo Park is, after all, part of the demesne of the infamous Rampart Division that had its infamous special anti-gang unit) and I felt like a lot of Angelenos had no idea that Eagle Rock was in the state of California, much less part of L.A. But as R can attest, the hipster population in Echo Park and Silver Lake have certainly increased, and I continue to be astounded at how much Colorado Blvd. and Eagle Rock Blvd. have gentrified. I knew it was a beginning of a new era when a Starbucks finally opened on the corner of those aforementioned streets.

Having spent my early childhood in Echo Park and Silver Lake, and my later childhood and teen-age years in Eagle Rock, I never really thought much about the Westside until B got his driver’s license. In general, we hung out in that ill-defined region of L.A. County that isn’t San Fernando Valley, but isn’t really San Gabriel Valley either, but is in fact where the two valleys meet. (Until the 818/626 area code split made it less ambiguous, it was always unclear to me where Burbank, Glendale, and Pasadena belonged geographically) Since there wasn’t really that much to do in Eagle Rock, or all of Northeast L.A., for that matter, if we decided to hang out in actual L.A., L.A., then we’d go down to the Fairfax District, back when Melrose Ave. was busy with gentrification. It was rare that we’d go out further west than that. We would occasionally make it out to Venice or Santa Monica, but only to hit the beaches.

It wasn’t until I was in college and my cousin M moved out to the actual district of West L.A. that I began to understand what the Westside was. Since I was going to school at Cal at the time, I wasn’t particularly impressed by Westwood. It certainly didn’t have any of the quirky, bizarre, and quasi-Marxist character of Berkeley (although I have to say that Berkeley has begun to resemble Westwood more and more, from the little I’ve seen of it since graduating.) I, like most Angelenos, completely loathe the 405, and am not overly fond of the Santa Monica Freeway, and would be quite happy with never driving out there during rush hour, which typically ends around 2 a.m., and starts up again around 4 a.m.

From then on, I’ve generally come to think of the Westside as anything west of the La Cienega (and obviously not counting the Valley, which is another animal entirely.)

Naturally, since there is a Westside, you’d think that there would be an Eastside. In my opinion, you would be wrong, but like I said, a lot has changed in the intervening decade, and apparently, being on “the Eastside” has become a trendy thing. When I grew up, there were only three regions that had geographic adjectives attached to it: West L.A., South Central L.A., and Northeast L.A., and I was only aware of the last one because that’s where I lived. East L.A. is not actually in the city of L.A. If any neighborhoods had the right to claim the title of “the Eastside”, then I guess it would be Lincoln Heights, Boyle Heights, and El Serreno, but even then, geographically speaking, only Boyle Heights is actually directly east of Downtown L.A. The other two neighborhoods are still technically northeast of Downtown L.A., which is the geographic area I’ve always associated them with. I’ve heard people—some affectionately, some disparagingly—call these neighborhoods “The Barrio”, and Highland Park, Glassell Park, and even Eagle Rock could be included in this description.

Indeed it’s only recently that I’ve started hearing the term “the Eastside” actually used. When I grew up, only Westsiders used the term “the Eastside”, which they used to refer to anything that wasn’t the Westside. Clearly, it’s elitist. The Westside is where the celebrities and the rich live. Everywhere else was where the hoi polloi lived. Parallel to the economic discrepancies is the difference in ethnic makeup. It’s really only on the Westside (and in the Valley, which actually has its own West and East dichotomy) that white people are the majority. Everywhere else, brown faces dominate by far. (These animated demographic map of L.A. illustrates this quite dramatically.)

But people who don’t live on the Westside hardly ever use the term “the Eastside”, except ironically, or perhaps for people who aren’t familiar with L.A. We tend to use the neighborhood’s name. Echo Park. Silver Lake. Hollywood. K-Town. The Fairfax District. Mid-Wilshire. Westlake. Pico-Union. Los Feliz. Atwater Village. Elysian Park. These are the places I knew growing up. My parents used to take me to MacArthur Park, or to the La Brea Tar Pits, or the carousel in Griffith Park. My mom did her banking in Downtown L.A. If we didn’t go to the Safeway in Echo Park, then we’d get groceries in K-Town. Sometime we’d eat Filipino food on Temple Street. I had my first piece of pizza at a place on the corner of Alvarado and Sunset that no longer exists. Across the street from there was where we’d get the car washed. My high school (which was a Catholic school) is in Pico-Union, where a priest who was my Latin teacher got mugged crossing the street. (Who the hell mugs a priest?) I remember after the L.A. riots, we’d pass by the burnt-out ruins of buildings every day.

But there is no monolithic Eastside. To me, the Westside is just a peripheral part of the city, despite the fact that that’s where the wealth and a lot of the power is, where the world-famous public university is, where the freaking international airport is. It may even be all the non-Angeleno who has never visited L.A. thinks of as L.A., when they’re aren’t demonizing the corrupting influence of Hollywood on American culture.

But it’s not like L.A. would be the only city in the U.S. to have a Westside but not an Eastside. Chicago has a Northside, a Southside, and a Westside, but no Eastside, and people would have no idea what you were talking about and think you were crazy if you tried to refer to the narrow strip of land abutting Lake Michigan where the streets are actually prefixed with “East” as “the Eastside.” L.A. is actually similar in this respect. The center of L.A. is technically the intersection of 1st Street and Main Street. Since Main Street north of 1st goes off in a northeasterly direction and then actually ends running east-west, even most of what people generally think of as Northeast L.A. is still actually technically on the western side of the city. Certainly Eagle Rock, Highland Park, Mt. Washington, and Glassell Park are all considered west of Main for address numbering purposes.

Clearly, the Westside is a cultural phenomenon. There is no official line of demarcation. I’m not the only one who favors using La Cienega, although there are some who even push the Westside further west by using the 405 as a border. There is some rationale to using La Cienega. Between La Cienega and Hoover, the streets are lined up on a grid following the cardinal directions. West of La Cienega, everything gets tilted somewhat. (And east of Hoover, north of MLK, everything is tilted by 45°, which is the part of the city that was built according to King Charles III’s decree when California was still a Spanish colony.) La Cienega is precisely where Santa Monica Boulevard stops running east-west, and actually starts running kind-of northeast-southwest, and it’s sort of where Sunset, Pico, Olympic, and Venice do the same thing. La Cienega is approximately where the developments of the city of L.A. going west pretty much ran into the developments on the coast going east back in the day.

Another possible way to demarcate the Westside from everything else is by area code. If you’re 213 or 323 you’re in the central part of the city. If you’re 310/424, you’re on the Westside (unless you’re actually in the Harbor District, I guess. And if you’re 818 then you’re in the Valley.)

What inspired all this was a FriendFeed post from edythe about the L.A. Times attempt at defining neighborhood boundaries. Prior to this, the L.A. City Council tried to do this by forming neighborhood councils, but apparently not that many people consider this definitive. I’m glad the L.A. Times didn’t endorse a Westside-centric view of the city.