10086 Sunset Boulevard

New Year’s Eve is the most symbolic marking of time to me. Each New Year is different, because you have to acknowledge the milestones that have gone before. Unless of course you just medicate yourself through the holidays, and in that case, never mind.

Funny thing about time. You can dig your heels in all you want, but it marches on anyway. When you are not busy plowing through it, it plows through you. I’m digging in my heels a little bit right now. At the moment of writing this, I can still say that I saw my Dad just last year, but only for a while longer. Another step to another level of the grieving process. A process that never ends, just changes.

I have plenty of New Year’s resolutions and I am excited about most of them. But I have also had a New Year’s revelation. I am greeting 2006 as a free woman. I was feeling rather blue about it all when I awoke yesterday morning. But, thanks to a couple of friends, my attitude has been adjusted. I received a late, but perfectly timed Christmas gift from Maeve. A gift certificate to It’s a Wrap. What a great surprise! It’s one of my favorite places to shop in Los Angeles. The note attached said “go and get yourself something girlie to pose in”. I find that I am excited again about planning my trip to Los Angeles, because this trip is going to be all about me.

Which brings me to Rona. Rona is a good friend of mine. A Brit. Rona has the rare ability to speak her mind without being a bitch. Probably because what is on her mind is pure in motivation. She came by yesterday bringing gifts and advice. She’s been newly introduced to 10086 Sunset Boulevard and she’s very concerned for me. She was concerned about the jealousy and cyberstalking and I had to put her fears to rest, telling her that those stories were from earlier this year and I had moved past that. This was an email I received after our conversation:

I don’t believe after everything you and Dan have been through that you’ll ever be ‘out of friends’ but the distance will help to make the healed wound stronger and more resilient. More distance will enable you to truly become independent of one another. I hope you realize the significance and enormity of this decision? I think it means you passed another milestone.

It’s good that you see it may have been heading to a step backwards. You have grown tremendously in the last few months and have faced misery, despair, pain, hurt, deceit and anger, head on, full-on, body slam, in your face, and, despite all of that has turned it all around to your benefit - physically, emotionally spiritually. You may have more of it all to face but you are probably at the crest, ready to ride the wave to the next chapter in your life. All for you, by you, all you - dont’ forget that. It’s okay for you to be # 1 for you. Part of your continued healing is your new daily mantra = repeat after me - ‘all for me, by me, for me’.

Ready to ride the wave? Yes I am.

I hope for all of you that your New Year is at least as good as that. I go into the new year extremely thankful for my friends, family and for everyone who has read Sunset and shared thoughts with me.

HAPPY NEW YEAR TO YOU ALL!

Next:  The Long Goodbye 

What Dan did to me earlier this year was the ultimate act of disrespect.

It’s like when you go away on vacation, and your dog gets pissed off at you for leaving him and when you come pack he’s dug up your plants, chewed up your feather pillow, pissed on your couch and crapped in your slippers. You get the message right? But this is much worse, ’cause let’s face it, Fido probably didn’t bring home a little friend that you had to move out afterwards.

So, it’s understandable that when anything happens now, that I perceive as disrespect, I am probably going to overreact. I have no business entering into a relationship just yet, let alone dipping a toe back into the old one. I’m treading on dangerous ground to begin with.

I was back in my comfort zone with Dan, only with a difference. I was giving him a lot more respect now than I had been doing in recent years. But as things have gone along and “good old Jo” has been available for emails and phone calls, Dan has slid back into the same old routine of treating me as he did before and I’m not feeling much in the way of respect coming my way. Consequently, I’ve fallen into my bad habits of reacting the way I did before and for the first time in my life, I am suspicious. I’m not happy about that, but there it is.

The trip is off for now, for that reason and the fact that we both have heavy work schedules. I am going to stay in Northern California to help my mother move house next month, get her settled and take care of some other business in the area. It will be at least March before I can get away and head home to Los Angeles. If I will be visiting Dan then, I can’t say.

We’ve discovered we like living separate lives and living alone. There’s something to be said about that. Your time is your own and you have a lot more freedom. And sleep! You actually get some. When you are young sharing a bed has a lot to do with sex and chances are you will sleep through your partners snoring or teeth grinding, and maybe even think it’s cute. But as you get older and your tolerance starts to wear thin, you gaze upon your loved one while he/she snores away and your thoughts tend to be more on the line of putting a pillow over their face to shut them up.

So what did I overreact to? The fact that Dan is feeling the same way I am about taking a longer break. I should be happy that we have this new understanding, this new communication, but I found something out. The scorned woman inside of me still burns bright. After what he did to me, I think he should be eternally grateful that I bother to have anything at all to do with him, he should treat me with nothing less than perfect respect, beg me to come visit him and lick my boots when I get there! That’s not going to happen and it also proves I don’t know what I want, because I couldn’t respect a man who licked my boots.

…and so, the conflicted journey of a woman scorned continues.

Next:  Getting by With a Little Help From my Friends

Too much work and no play has been making Jo a dull girl, hence the lack of recent postings. I decided to take a break and go see King Kong yesterday.

The events of this year have forever changed me and, it seems, the way I view movies. Part of that is just getting older, but I see things through the eyes of a recently scorned woman, my eyes now. The bitterness has gone, for the most part, but I find that I am not quite the romantic I used to be. I feel both relief and sadness at this discovery.

While I was going through the worst of the pain of being betrayed earlier this year, I had trouble sleeping and I found that any movie that had a creature, or creatures wrecking havoc on humanity seemed to calm me down and make me sleepy. Especially if the creatures were dinosaurs chomping away on men. They don’t eat women, just men. I could put on Jurassic Park, watch the dinosaurs do their thing, and feel quite at peace with the world and I could get to sleep. Using that logic, I should have been in a coma somewhere into the second hour of the three hour King Kong movie, but that was not the case.

If you’ve never had a manic episode in your life and wondered what it was like, here’s your opportunity. Get yourself a giant caffeinated beverage, a large bag of M&M’s, settle into your seat at the movie theater and watch King Kong. Pace yourself, because you want the caffeine/sugar rush to start hitting around an hour into the movie. Once you get to the part of the story where they set foot on the island, get ready. When the action hits, it’s pretty much going to keep rolling from that point on.

Kong himself is spectacular, frightening, and leaves no doubt in your mind that he truly is king of the jungle. Andy Serkis (of Gollum fame) provides the movements for Kong, and the CGI geniuses take it from there.

The dinosaurs are constantly eating or trying to eat, even when plummeting to their death. The bugs are plentiful and big, really big. There is not nook, nor cranny that doesn’t harbor something unpleasant that you’d really rather not see. Think of every creepy crawly you can and then supersize them. Centipedes, megapedes, arachnids, Terapusmordaxs (filthy, pungent bats with enormous fangs), Vile Meat Weasles. Oh, and the mosquito problem is bad, very bad.

The action takes an uproarious turn when a herd of dinosaurs stampede through a narrow canyon where the rescue crew is taking a break. As the humans flee, the dinosaurs stampede and eventually the humans are running between the dinosaurs legs, with very few actually getting trampled. Along the way they pick up some pesky little velociraptor type dinosaurs that dart between the mammoth beasts and try to single out the human meals. These nimble creatures end up getting squashed by the larger beasts more often than the clumsy humans do. When the lead dinosaur takes a tumble, all the others behind him fall too, spilling over each other one after another out of the canyon onto a cliff edge, where one or two go over and the rest pick up and start stampeding along the cliffs edge, causing landslides.

It’s at this point you’ll probably wish you’d skipped the giant beverage, because there is no intermission and you still have a ways to go.

If there’s anything of the twelve year old still left inside of you, you are going to enjoy this movie. Forget about what is possible, you have gone to see a movie about a giant ape, after all.

This movie is a smörgåsbord of special effects and I ate it all up, which is what I’d like to do to Adrien Brody. How is it I never noticed this man’s sex appeal before? He is scrumptious as the sensitive writer, counter to Kong’s male macho chest beating ape man routine.

I found myself thinking that Ann, the heroine, was caught between two heartbreaks in the making; the protective but doomed Kong on the one hand and the sensitive, willing to “risk his life for love” writer on the other.

“Beware the sensitive writer type” was the thought that came to my mind “he may have written you into his stories today, but he’ll write you right out of them tomorrow”.

I’m not bitter, just a bit jaded.

You may wonder why I didn’t move back home and then again, more appropriately, you may wonder if it was even a consideration at all. I wanted to be home, I wanted to be back with Dan, but it didn’t seem like a good idea, at least not for the time being. For either one of us. What would stop us from sliding back into old habits? What if I put the weight back on? What if I got angry and his past infidelity proved too much for me? Or, what if he met a woman who was everything he thought the interloper was going to be? Oddly enough, I would be okay with that. If he found a woman who was everything he wanted in life, I would accept her. He still believed I was that woman, but I was not sure about that yet.

No, we couldn’t go back to what had been, nor should we want to.

I went to visit Dan a month after helping him move his house guest out. We again took a nice leisurely drive down to the beach, stopping at The Vermont in Los Feliz. My favorite TV show House M.D. had used the restaurant and bar to film a couple of scenes in an episode. It’s a beautiful setting, but more so at night when the not so scenic street is cloaked in street lights. Then we drove down Sunset Boulevard and headed towards the ocean. We walked out on the Santa Monica pier and stared down into the severely polluted water. It always depresses me to see the color the ocean has become. I was thinking that probably nothing could live in that environment, when seven dolphins broke the surface. That sight lifted our spirits and the oohs and aaahs could be heard by all the other sight seers lined up along the rail staring down into the dingy waters. One of those wonderfully symbolic moments, when at the back of ones mind the wheel is spinning, trying to figure out how we go forward from this murky mess we had created.

After our walk on the beach, we headed inland and stopped at Dalt’s Bar and Grill, one of our favorite hang outs for years. It’s a low key place and nestled in amongst the studios, you never know who you will see there. They serve a good French dip at the bar and they have Newcastle on tap. In searching for a picture I have discovered, sadly, that Dalt’s has now closed it’s doors over a rent dispute.

We drove into Glendale to one of my favorite shops. The Cat in the Lotus. If you are ever in Glendale, skip the Glendale Galleria and walk down Maryland Street where you will find this boutique as well as some other unique gift shops and some interesting dining choices. I had never set foot in the shop, just enjoyed window shopping, but on that day Dan grabbed my hand and pulled me inside. I came away with a full length, hand dyed silk kimono. We went back home and curled up on the couch to have our movie/discussion evening and everything seemed right with the world. For a little while.

It was not until the interloper was out of his house that Dan realized, with full horror, exactly what he had done to me earlier this year. He went through the grieving process, much in the same way I did, but with the added guilt of having been the one who caused such great pain. I woke up one night to find him staring at me with great remorse. “Do you have any idea how sorry I am for what I did to you?”. Yes, I had a pretty good idea and he had suffered enough already. You can’t “make it up to someone” in a situation like this, but that’s not what I needed from him. His dastardly deed had given me back my life. The price of the pain was worth it for me, I wanted both of us to be able to let go of the hurt and get on with life. A life for me, that now included Dan, but in what capacity?

And now Dan had a new next door neighbor to contend with. She’d use any excuse to try to get back through his door. She needed to borrow a cup of sugar, had he seen her lost pair of socks? She had some files stored on his computer, could she come over and download them on to disc? Eventually, she resorted to offering sexual favors. “I could blow you while you work”. He still had not succeeded in getting her out of his life.

That brings me almost up to date with my story. I am looking forward to a trip down to Los Angeles sometime this month to spend a couple of weeks with Dan for the Holidays. We are trying to coordinate our schedules right now. Sometime in the new year I am moving back to Los Angeles. To be close to Dan and to be back in the city that has always fascinated me, no matter what corner of the world I have lived in.

Next: Home for the Holidays - Not