Project 365: Day 76

Day 76, originally uploaded by shalimargonzales.

In a few weeks Shira is coming to visit, and I'm nervous.


At the moment my primary nervousness surrounds the fact that I've never sucessfully picked someone up at LAX, and I'm worried I'm going to somehow do it wrong and leave Shira stranded or confused or, worse than that, under the assumption that I'm really bad at living in L.A. It is my perception that knowing how to pick someone up at LAX is one of the cornerstones of knowing how to live in L.A.


Yes, both Shira and Amy have already visited and thus have been involved in my airport pick-up disasters. With Shira, I drove around in circles because there is no cell-phone lot. Amy and I got lost coming back from the airport to my house; it's literally 1-street the entire way.

• "You know to wait at the In-N-Out for the person you're picking up to call so you don't have to loop, right?" Don said.
• "You know what to tell the cops if they tell you to get out of the arrival pick-up lane to get them off your back, right?" Anthony said.
• "You're going to take La Cienega all the way to La Tijera, right?" said someone I really didn't mean to slap in face...

No! No I don't know about In-N-Out and police evasion and the fastest route to the airport. I've only ever arrived via car service or the March airport disasters (see above), and at this point it's too late for me to commit these tricks to memory meaning I'm sure to mess it up and then when someone back home asks my lady friend, "how is Shalimar doing in L.A.??" she'll say, "It's a disaster. She doesn't know how to do it."


The simple solution, of course, would be to use the GPS in my car for use in instances when I'm 100% sure I will get lost without the device and don't have time to be lost in that given moment.


I've set those very specific parameters because I don't want to grow reliant on the GPS like I hear people who just move to L.A. can get, and then two years from now I still won't be able to get from my house to the part of town where all the karaoke bars are. And if there's anything I'm not willing to risk it's my knowledge of how to get to the part of town where all the karaoke bars are.


There are those very specific moments where you know you will get lost and don't have time to figure out where you are by looking for the Hollywood Hills and/or trying to use gas station prices as neighborhood indicators. This has happened twice. Once en route to a party in the Hollywood Hills (which I was able to find by virtue of they go up, but couldn't navigate once I got in them) and once en route from my office to a business meeting at another office. If there's two things you can't mess with it's proper arrival time to both parties and business meetings.

Don told me that if I lived near him, I could use the mnemonic device he made up for going to and leaving the airport. The recommended route there given his starting location is La Cienega to La Tijera to Airport Way to Culver Blvd is LLAC - so - Ladies Love Avocado Cubes and going home is Follow Signs to the 405 to take ramp to 405 North to actually exit onto La Cienega - which is trickier, so he just set those words to King of New York from Newsies, which works surprising well if you ever come across a tough mnemonic situation.


I'm almost certain that getting lost driving to or from the airport from Culver City is a clear a sign as any that you don't know how to live in L.A. and you do it in a forum that's totally inviting people to snap a camera phone shot of your lameness and upload it directly to Facebook. Caption: L.A. Fail.


I better use the GPS. Especially now that Shira owns a cell phone that is part of the 21st Century.