See, this is why I know I’ll be ridiculously successful in the entertainment industry. For the going away party we had last week, Julie had her typical dorky idea—let’s custom order cookies, put a picture of us on them, and hand them out to our guests. If it was up to her, it probably would have been a picture of us kissing on a cliff overlooking the ocean while a sunset turns the sky a beautiful pink color. That’s how you make people uncomfortable. So I stepped in and decided we should go for funny over uncomfortable. Boom, picture of me biting her face off. Then she said she wanted to put some words on it. Within seconds, boom again, I came up with, “Moving away from you bites!”
I probably don’t have to tell you how big of a hit these things were at our party. Most people couldn’t even bring themselves to eat the cookie because they were so amazed by the creativity I put into it.
We have just a couple of these cookies leftover. I was thinking about giving them away to a few friends who couldn’t make it to our party, but instead I think I’ll put them up for sale on Ebay and watch a bidding war ensue.
This week’s agenda for me is simple: Pack up my entire life in as few boxes as possible, and clean the apartment to the best of my abilities so I can get my security deposit back. If I lived by myself, this might be easier as I could make all decisions without consulting anyone else. But I live with other people, and specifically my brother and I share a decent amount of the items in this apartment. He’s at work all day so it’s tough to know what shared things he wants and what shared things I should have. Clearly I’m going to take whatever I want and pack it up before he can object, but before I do that, I thought it would be fun to share these items with my readers in case anyone wants to make an argument for why I should or shouldn’t take some of these things.
First, of course, let’s discuss sports-related items:
My Dad got both of the following Boston sports-related memorabilia for all three of us brothers for Christmas gifts a while back:
A couple notes: Yes, the football is technically an Indianapolis Colts football. But what’s important is that it’s signed by Adam Vinatieri. I wish it was a Patriots football, of course. But Vinatieri is a four-time Super Bowl Champ and future Hall of Famer. While I don’t believe in curses, I do think the poster is pretty cool mainly because of the picture of Jason Varitek dry humping Keith Foulke when the Sox cliched in ’04. But if I’m allowed to choose between the two, I’m taking the football. It’s probably worth some money compared to the poster, and as an unemployed sack of shit, I might need that money sooner than expected. You might be wondering, “what about the third brother? Why doesn’t he get one of these treasures?” Because he has the third thing that my Dad sent us…a Tom Brady autographed, practice-worn helmet….inside a plexiglass case! Yes, this is clearly the best of the three gifts. No, there’s not a legitimate reason why he gets the helmet instead of me or the other brother.
It’s times like these that I’m jealous of guys who live in apartments or houses that are larger than one bedroom and can have a room dedicated to all things sports. I’m already battling with the girlfriend to allow some other Boston sports paraphernalia in the new apartment as well as my two favorite posters: a Jack Daniel’s one and a picture from the movie Blow. I think I can get away with something that fits on a shelf or in a bookcase, but not another poster. My plan is to steal the Brady helmet, but when that ultimately fails, I’ll graciously welcome the Vinatieri ball into my new home.
Next up is something my Mom got me and my brother for Christmas this past year. Sure, it’s not as sexy of a gift as sports items signed by Boston legends, but look how practical this thing is for everyday use:
An air flosser! Believe it or not, neither my brother nor I have been to a dentist in the nearly seven years we’ve been living in San Francisco. Relax, it’s not as gross as you think. Whenever we go back to Boston, my Mom gets us into her dental office for a cleaning. Besides the dental hygienist saying I have the world’s most beautiful teeth, she also frequently comments on my lack of flossing. I guess when the hygienist starts flossing for you and your mouth looks like you just finished the 11th round of a boxing match, it’s pretty obvious that flossing doesn’t happen on the regular. Mom tried to take the hard work out of flossing by getting this air flosser for us six months ago. Sure, the box hasn’t been opened yet, but now that I can’t even pretend to get a dentist in LA (dental insurance is not in my budget), maybe it’s time to start using it. I don’t think there will be any objection from my brother if I want to keep this item when we move.
I realize DVDs are almost completely obsolete at this point. Or maybe more correctly I should say owning DVDs is obsolete. With Netflix, HBO GO, Hulu+, illegal downloads, and other services I’m probably not familiar with, there’s really no point in buying a physical CD with a movie on it ever again. But should we be keeping the DVDs we already own?
Our current collection has roughly 90 movies or TV shows in it, and I’d guess I don’t even watch one movie from those every two months. So are these artifacts just going to take up space and collect dust? Do we keep some of our favorites? I guess we can easily separate out whose is whose, but what about the ones that seem to have snuck into our apartment and have no owner? Specifically these gems that I found in our DVD case…
How these two atrocious movies got into our collection, I have no idea. But I’m going to be the nice guy and not fight my brother on it if he wants to keep them. I’ll get over it.
Finally, no conversation around dividing our possessions would be complete without the most controversial item in our apartment:
Just the Egyptian fertility god Min hanging out with his erection on our mantel. No big deal.
Wikipedia tells me that Min is the god of male sexual potency and orgiastic rites. And believe it or not, this is another gift from Dad…this time a souvenir from his trip to Egypt. Is it weird that my Dad would want to make sure we were having plenty of orgies in our apartment by giving us this statue? Who cares? What’s important is that it worked!
Since my brother is moving into an apartment that is far more likely to have orgies going on anyway, I think I’ll take my buddy Min down to LA with me.
So the clock is ticking on the month of May as I have only eight more free days before June 1st to get my life from a state of chaos to a state of organized chaos. While it seems ridiculous to be wasting this precious time blogging, maybe recapping the progress I’ve made so far will lower my stress level.
Here’s where things stand with the relocation efforts as of Friday morning, May 11th:
Apartment Hunting
-It was official yesterday: We have an apartment in Culver City locked up with a lease starting on June 1st. It’s funny how location, a fancy-looking complex and an amazing sales guy can make you forget about your ideal budget for an apartment (but I swear I’ll use the pool and the gym all the time!)
-I almost panicked when one of the first people I mentioned the signed lease to said, “Culver City? Why would you want to live in that shitty area?” He’s someone who is supposedly very knowledgeable about LA, but then he said Culver City is in the “valley,” and I realized he’s actually just a fucking moron. So I think I’m still happy with our location.
-No, I won’t include a link to the building we’re going to live in because it never seems like a good idea to put your exact address on the web. You can email me and ask nicely if you really want to see.
-It took us two-and-a-half trips to LA to find the right apartment. I consider my roundtrip to LA and back this past Tuesday a half trip because I was there for less than four hours (but was in the car driving down and back for over 11 hours).
-In total, we made 17 appointments to see apartments over the course of those LA visits. I believe we only went into nine of them because the other eight ended up being “drive-bys.” Drive-bys happened when we felt like either the apartment was too far removed from civilization or when we feared for our lives because the neighborhood it was located in probably experienced a lot of actual drive-by shootings. Of the nine places we really looked at, three would only show us “model units” instead of the actual units we’d be living in. Sorry, but you can’t convince me to sign a lease based on the theory of “your apartment could potentially be similar to this, but we’re not sure until you put a deposit down.” If they had allowed us to live in a model unit Arrested Development style, that would be a different story. A few other places just weren’t a good fit for whatever reason. There was the in-law apartment where the owner who lived in the main house was about 92 years old. I’m not living in a place where there’s a 95% chance that my landlord would die only a few feet away from me within the first month. There was the lovely homeowner who when I asked her how maintenance gets done in the apartment said, “Oh, that’s easy. I’ll send you a YouTube video on how to fix things when they break.” And finally, there was the leasing agent who told us he wouldn’t live in the area we were looking if he was us…as he’s showing us an apartment he theoretically should be trying to sell us on. It’s a good thing the place we locked down worked out because it really doesn’t feel like we found too many other options.
-If there’s one thing I’m most excited about with a new apartment, it’s picking a junk drawer. I’m actually bringing a box down to LA that’s filled with take-out menu’s, rubber bands, Sharpie’s missing their caps, some old Christmas cards that should have been thrown away five months ago, a stapler, a mouse trap and a deck of cards. I cannot wait to fill up my new junk drawer.
Moving Logistics
I’ve secured a moving truck for us to drive down to LA on June 1st with all of our possessions. I don’t have a lot of experience with this so I wasn’t sure what size truck to get. I went with a 16-footer. Since Julie isn’t yet an expert on driving a manual transmission, which my car has, she’ll be the one driving the semi down to LA. My hope is that I’m not updating the blog on June 2nd with a picture like this:
Cleaning
-Unfortunately before I can pick my new junk drawer, there are things to do at the old apartment in San Francisco. It would be nice to leave this apartment the same way my roommates and I left our college apartment at the end of senior year…basically without cleaning the place at all and then simply telling the landlord to use our security deposit as our final month’s rent. I don’t know how we got away with that without a lawsuit, but I have a feeling my current landlord wouldn’t really be on board.
-Not only is our landlord expecting us to clean, but she told us it needs to be “move-in ready” in order for us to get our full security deposit back. To me that’s a very subjective measuring stick. What’s move-in ready to me may not be move-in ready to her. For instance, I have no problem moving into a place that has a giant circle of dried paint embedded into the carpet, and even better, the dried paint has a large piece of broken glass stuck inside it:
You may not be able to see this clearly, but it’s paint that’s been there for over six years with a large piece of glass trapped in it
-She may not think of that as “move-in ready,” but if I cover the entire carpet in white paint and then stick random pieces of glass in the paint, will she maybe think that’s the type of flooring she originally put into this apartment? Luckily if she does tell us she needs to replace the whole carpet and that it’s coming out of our deposit, my Uncle Steve owns a furniture and carpet business in Massachusetts, and I’m sure he will gladly ship a nice carpet out here free of charge to help the cause.
Sexual Offenders in Your Area
-As I was reading through my new lease yesterday, I noticed a section about sexual offenders. I didn’t really pay attention to what that section was telling me because I got distracted by this link they included: http://meganslaw.ca.gov/disclaimer.aspx
-The next thing I know it’s three hours later, and I’m still screwing around on that MegansLaw website. Go ahead and give it a try, but just make sure you have some time on your hands. I was searching for sexual offenders in my new LA neighborhood, my current SF neighborhood, and even the neighborhoods of some of my friends. Once you’ve done the same, you’ll naturally start drilling into the individual offenders to see what they look like, what their crimes are and what documented scars and tattoos they have. If you’re like me, your imagination will run wild when you read the crimes because the descriptions are vague. For example several of the offenses I saw were tagged as: “LEWD OR LASCIVIOUS ACTS WITH A CHILD UNDER 14 YEARS OF AGE.” I’d like to know what these acts were specifically and how much “under 14 years of age” were the children.
-For those of you worried about me and Julie, relax. The closest sexual offender to our new apartment probably isn’t doing much offending these days:
That’s everything for now. Time for me to re-read the manual for my new vacuum to see what setting will suck up a “dried paint and glass” combo.
I’ll try to tackle just a few of the basic questions you might have about my plan to relocate to LA. For this specific post, let’s just address the broad questions that everyone seems to have. Some of you have probably already heard a bunch of these answers, but keep reading anyway. It’s not like you have something better to do with your time.
1). Why LA?
Whenever I get this question, it’s accompanied by a disgusted look on the asker’s face. What that person is really asking is, “Why would you move to a city that’s best known for its traffic problems and the fake, superficial, self-centered bastards who live there?” Good question. And those who know me well could also add in, “Why are you moving to a city you’ve never even been to?” Again, great question. The answer is because I want to be a writer in the entertainment industry. Look, if my passion in life was to be a woodworker in Santa’s workshop, I’d be moving to the North Pole. And if my passion was taffy-making, I’d be on my way to York Beach, Maine. If those are your passions, you need to be in the places where you’ll have the best chance to get your foot in the door (as a side note, being a woodworker for Santa and being a taffy maker were my 2 passions up until the age of 16). With entertainment, LA is where I need to be.
2). What makes you think you can succeed in the entertainment industry?
Well, you’re reading this blog right now, aren’t you? Also, I think I’m a natural born storyteller. I remember being picked for the role of “narrator” when my fifth grade class performed Aladdin…though in hindsight that might have been because when I tried out for the role of Aladdin, I kept getting a boner every time Princess Jasmine talked to me. And I also remember a priest at Church telling me I should be a lector (I think that means someone who reads the Bible stories during Mass) because I had storytelling talent…thinking back to that now, there’s a 100% chance he was just saying that so I’d let him take a closer look at what Princess Jasmine did not want to look at.
(Side Note: Have you seen the shit that gets made into TV shows or movies these days? C’mon, this is gonna be a piece of cake.)
3). What specifically do you want to do in entertainment?
Writing scripts for porn seems to be my calling, but I’m wide open to any type of writing that’s considered entertainment. No, really it’s all about comedy writing for me. Right now that makes me think script writing for TV or movies, as well as sketch comedy…think SNL, the late night talk shows, Daily Show, etc. But if someone wanted to pay me to write quasi-funny blog posts, that would be cool too.
4). OK, script writing. Do you have any experience whatsoever doing that?
Depends on your definition of the word “experience.” If experience to you means writing a couple of TV scripts more than two years ago, and then doing nothing more since, then yes, I have a TON of experience. I also took an online class two years ago through the Gotham Writers’ Workshop that tried to teach me how to write a funny TV script. I even got a group of friends together to do a table reading of my script. I realized the script was no good when my drunk buddy drawing fake abs on himself with a marker got bigger laughs than any part of my story. So no, I don’t have a ton of experience writing and completing scripts, but man, if you could only see my Google Docs account with all of my brilliant ideas…
5). Why not continue writing in your free time in San Francisco so you can keep a full time job?
That would make sense, wouldn’t it? Rather than go to LA with no job and no experience, maybe I should have waited until I could complete a few more scripts in my free time. The problem is I’m just not wired that way. I can’t stare at a computer screen for 45-50 hours a week at my job and then come home and write until I go to bed. The reason I was able to complete two scripts in 2010 is because I was unemployed during that time. In the two years since then while having a full time job, I’ve written no scripts. I’ve launched three different blogs with varying degrees of failure, but I really haven’t put enough time into writing. I actually just counted the number of books on my bookshelf where screenwriting is the primary topic…I have 18 of them. It’s time to stop reading books, stop writing down the next great idea, and just write. Write until enough people tell me I’m horrible or until I’m on the verge of homelessness.
6). When did you know you were going to make this move?
I think it all began when I was about 12 years old and tried to watch the movie Fantasia. I thought, “You gotta be fucking kidding me…a whole movie with Mickey Mouse and no sound? This isn’t entertainment. I need to fix this industry.”
More recently I’m pretty sure I knew during those unemployed days of 2010 that I eventually had to give this a try. I would have done it right then, but I was out of money after screwing around for four months in Europe and Australia. But if you’re asking when did I specifically know that I would be making this move in June 2012, then I’d have to say it came on November 3rd, 2011. I know it was that date because it says so in my diary. And that was the day I had jury duty. I remember sitting in that courtroom praying that I’d get picked to be on the jury for a six-day trial so I wouldn’t have to go to work. That’s when it all came together. Why would I stay at a job that makes me want to be at jury duty instead of working? After that it was simply a matter of calculating how many more months I’d need to work to save up the right amount of money for my journey.
7). Is there anything you wouldn’t do to break into the industry?
Blowjobs. Handjobs, yes; blowjobs, no.
Well that’s all the time we have today. I hope you all learned something, and I’ll be back with more next week.
This is exactly how I plan to move my things on June 1st
When I relocated from Boston to San Francisco with my brother in October 2005, I didn’t blog much about the moving preparations. As a matter of fact, I wrote only one blog post about the move before the move actually happened. Somehow it reveals absolutely nothing about the route we were taking, the transportation to get to the new destination, packing up all my belongings, saying bye to friends and family, tying up random loose ends, or what my plan was once I arrived in SF.
This is probably because I was five months removed from college graduation with no possessions, no money and no plan. Back then it was basically one brief conversation between my brother and I where we decided we were moving, followed by putting all of my clothes into a large duffel bag the night before we left. If I had been a committed blogger back then, I would have written about the amazing going away pub crawl my friends in Boston threw for me…a night that must have been good since it ended with me puking in the urinal of the White Horse Tavern and trying to escape the wrath of the bouncers. I would have mentioned how one day before we were set to leave, my brother tried to fix something in the car we were driving out to California only to inadvertently short out the radio. And when we told my Dad we might have to delay the trip by a few days to get the radio fixed, he basically threw his car keys at us and insisted we drive his car out West. In retrospect, what should I make of the fact that my Dad wanted us gone so badly that he literally gave away his car to ensure we wouldn’t linger? I also would have written that my brother’s friends threw him a great going away party in Fitchburg, but the only problem is that it occurred the night before we were leaving…and he got HAMMERED. This led to a great moment where I had to wake him up at 9am the next day to tell him we had to get going, only to have him look at me like he was hearing of this “moving west” plan for the first time. To say he was hungover and unprepared would be insulting to hungover and unprepared people. He woke up, found a duffel bag and started shoveling clothes into it. That’s the full story of him packing to move his entire life 3,000 miles away. I would have finished my blog post back then with a note on how I had to smoke a five-pack of Phillies Blunt cigars to stay awake at times when I was driving (did I mention I had no money? Five cigars for $2.50 was me splurging at the time).
But even if I had been writing all that down while we were moving, I still wouldn’t have had much to say about the preparations. For example, I never thought twice about mail that would keep getting sent to my old addresses in Boston and Fitchburg back then because there wasn’t any. I didn’t really care to have the bank’s letters that said “stop trying to withdraw money, you have none,” forwarded to my new address in San Francisco. Actually, I didn’t even have a new address in SF. I was sleeping on my oldest brother’s couch until further notice. That’s another thing I didn’t have to do in 2005…look for a place to live prior to moving.
So here’s my goal over the next few weeks: to unleash a new series of blog posts that will educate you on the successes and failures of my move to LA. The title of each of these posts will begin with “adventures in relocating” so if you really don’t want to read these, you’ll know which ones to ignore right away. And for those of you saying, “LA? What the fuck is he doing moving to LA?” Well, I’ll have a post coming up soon with answers to all the questions you could ever ask.
For anyone who has relocated as an adult, you probably realize that things were a little more difficult than my experience seven years ago. You deal with tying up loose ends in one place while establishing yourself in another place. And my move to LA is coinciding with me being jobless, which means I’m not going to spend money on having professional movers pack up my shit and deliver it to my new apartment. And I’m not going to pay for the cleaners to come to my current apartment to help me get my security deposit back. There’s a lot more “do it yourselfness” going on here.
But I expected a lot of work, and that’s why my last day at my job was April 27th. I’m moving on June 1st so I wanted the entire month of May to take care of all these things; big things like finding an apartment in LA and renting the right Uhaul truck, and little things like using leftover gift cards to places that only exist in San Francisco before I leave.
But then I went and booked a trip back to Boston from May 21st through May 30th. Why did I plan a trip that takes me away from everything I have to do for the final 10 days leading up to the move? I can justify a piece of the trip because I’m going to a wedding in Boston over Memorial Day weekend, but the extended 10-day trip? That was probably dumb of me. Soon I’ll be panicking because there’s less than three weeks before I have to be 100% ready for this move. There are also a couple days where I know I won’t be productive: May 7th when me & the brothers have a final golf outing together, May 12th when we celebrate the going away of me and Julie in Golden Gate Park, and May 20th when we party one more time in a way that’s only possible in San Francisco….Bay2Breakers.
It’s May 3rd. I have 15 open days to find an apartment, pack up everything and move. Something tells me I can’t get away with shoving all my belongings in a duffel bag and sleeping on someone’s couch this time around.
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