This is Not a Real Place (Yet)

So, boys and girls. Welcome to Calabasas.

I'm house and dogsitting here in North LA (is it north? Is it even technically LA?) for my boyfriend's cousins while they vacation in Hawaii, but this is no ordinary house. No, no, people, this house, and its neighboring mansions are not houses at all, but temples of pleasure.

This house is downright palatial. Britney Spears is moving in across the street. I can see in the windows of her South Wing. (Again, guessing with the directions.) I take my mornings bathing beneath waterfalls and slipping down the waterslide into the tiled blue pool. I retreat to alcoves of pillows to relax in sweet air-conditioned bliss. My shower has a glass wall, and a stone bench, in case I tire of standing. If, heaven be shamed, I get bored...I just stop wherever I am, pick up the nearest remote and watch one of the many flat-screen televisions featuring hundreds of channels.

This is not my life.

The house I grew up in had four bedrooms, a kitchen, and a 1/2 acre of dirt to play in. We had one refrigerator, and until I was old enough to date, you had to get up to change the channel. You took your hand and had to twist a knob on the TV. The effort. We didn't even have stairs. None. We lived in a "ranch house." Made for easy escape if your domicile burns to the ground. This Calabasas house is unusual in the neighborhood because it doesn't have an elevator.

Again, not my life.

Not to say this can't be my life, or that I cannot aspire to owning enough money to warrant desiring and actually affording a home like this one. But being in this line of work, being an actor, really forces me to humble myself to accept I probably will never actually live in this house. I probably will be able to afford cheap rents in skeezy-ish neighborhoods before they're artsy cool, and I'll probably prey on innocent renters on Craigslist for an apartment here in LA when I move in October. I look forward to years more of sharing not just common rooms, but bedrooms with other starvin' artists, sharing not only Netflix rentals, but Ramen noodle bowls as well, highlighting in the newspaper not only job opportunities but obituaries too, to remind myself to check out their sidewalks later to score some dead people's free furniture.

Sigh. The life of an actor. My life.

It's okay though. I don't need to live here. I need to work hard. I want to work hard. I want to move across this honking big country because I want to work. If I could figure out something else to do that would allow me to buy a house at all, I would do that! But I can't. In my lowest times, I've sobbed into my checkbook, "Why can't I just be happy as a bank teller?!" Plenty of banks, plenty of jobs. I look great in blue and red. (Those are the colors of my bank, Commerce. They always seem so happy.) Alas, I'm no teller. Unless you count being a storyteller, haha! Oh God, the smell of maid-cleaned appliances is getting to me. I'm serious. There's a maid lurking behind me right now, 409 in hand.

So, Los Angeles. I don't know what I'm doing yet. I'm enjoying the sunshine today, and hoping in October, when I'm here for reals, acting jobs will abound and money will flow, Commerce Bank will love me, and I'll get the work I want to give me the money I deserve so I can live in a palace like this. With an elevator.