LA is a weird fucking place. Nothing is ever what it seems. I can’t decide if my trip out here has been a good thing or a bad thing. At the very least, I don’t know that it has really given me the perspective I was looking for. Since I got here on Saturday, I’ve spent a large portion of my time hanging out with a friend of mine who lives out here. I’ve gotten to see LA as he sees it; as he can afford to see it. It’s warping my perceptions a bit. He and I live in very different worlds. I’m debating whether or not I can afford a $500 a month studio apartment and he’s looking at multi-million dollar beach houses. This is not a judgment. It’s just a statement of fact. He is far and away one of the nicest, most grounded, down-to-earth guys I have ever met. If you didn’t know he had money, you would never know he had money. It’s just weird for me. I’m trying to determine if I can realistically afford to come back here, and hanging out with him has made that decision harder to make. I know my life won’t be like this once I move. I just have to keep reminding myself of that. I will have to get a job. I will have to live on a budget. I won’t be hobnobbing with the Hollywood “In” crowd every night... I have some seriously important decisions to make in the next few weeks. In the short term, Option #1 would be the easiest and that would be to just do nothing; stay where I am now and accept my fate as a corporate slave. That’s really not a good option though, unless you all want to watch me slowly lose my mind. That might be fun for the rest of you, but it’s not something I particularly want to do. Option #2 is to quit my job and find something else to do in Atlanta. That would save me the stress (and expense) of packing up my horse and all my stuff and moving across the country to somewhere that I have no job and know virtually no one. It still leaves me unemployed and in Atlanta, so I’m thinking Option #2 is out. If I’m going to stay in the ATL I might as well be employed and unhappy rather than jobless and unhappy. This brings us to Option #3. The one where I say “Fuck it!” and throw caution to the wind and just do this. Option #3 scares the shit out of me. The thought of just letting go of everything that has become so familiar to me and exchanging it for some dimly envisioned dream of a life out here on the coast turns me to ice. I spent a couple of hours out on the Huntington Beach pier yesterday afternoon watching the surfers. While I did that, the ice melted. My brain stopped the centrifugal spinning it has been doing for weeks now. My soul just breathed in the sea and the sand and halted its meteoric plunge into the abyss that it has been on. I’m happy here. I like me here. I need to just get past these fears, no matter how legitimate they may be, and find my way back here. I know it will be hard. Everything will not be sunshine and puppies and red Mustang convertibles. Still, I think it’s the right thing for me to do. At this point, I need to worry about feeding my soul rather than padding my bank account. I would rather be happy than rich, which is good, because at this rate, I don’t think that is something I’m ever going to be ;)
“I don’t want to earn my living; I want to live.” – Oscar Wilde
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