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Location: Home.
Listening: "Round And Round" ~ New Order.

I'll continue my rant on my mother, et. al. later. For the moment, I'll comment on something I read in Jenn's friend Mary Anne's journal just now. Mary Anne is apparently visiting her friend Lisette in West Hollywood for a bit and she wrote about a "Hollywood experience" of seeing the actress who plays Seven Of Nine eating Japanese this evening. Although she wanted to approach her, she didn't, kept her cool, and left the actress quietly eating. She's caught onto what I call "LA Blase": a ritual that's a point of pride among locals. Angelenos seem to excel in completely ignoring the presence of celebrities to the point of where it's considered a massive faux pas to evince even a little bit of awe in the presence of, say, Jerry Seinfeld (who a friend of mine saw eating breakfast at her favorite coffee shoppe in Brentwood one morning). This attitude is often taken so far that I've joked that a true Angeleno would go so far as to pretend not to see Nicole Kidman if she walked up and slammed them in the face with a cream pie. My own experiences with this have ranged from a polite but detached exchange with Robert Urich--who asked me for the time when my father and I first disembarked at LAX--to almost literally slamming into Al Pacino walking down the boardwalk in Santa Monica, mumbling his lines for a scene he was filming for Heat. I shrugged to the side and kept walking as my companion had a small fit. My most recent encounters took place at Jerry's Famous in Westwood, where Austin and I ran into Seth Green, Reese Witherspoon and Ryan Phillipe while having coffee at 2 AM on a Tuesday. Seth was fleeing a pack of UCLA coeds; Austin and I urged him to hide behind the nearest lamp post before the throng could reach him and then went back to our discussion of bankruptcy law.

Everyone has their own reasons for adopting "LA Blase"--the majority because the locals will mock them if they make too much of a fuss. I've just always been acutely conscious of the fact that, were I the one with my face splashed all over billboards, I would likely be pleased to catch an espresso at the Coffee Bean or a burrito at Chano's without being mobbed--so I give them the respect I would like to be given in that situation. It's one of the more unusual and amusing facets of living in Los Angeles--the knowledge that the person who cut you off in traffic could just as easily be Jack Nicholson as a housewife from the Palisades--and I've found that, in its own peculiar way, it makes one a more tolerant and considerate person, someone who's incapable of being dazzled by charisma or manufactured images and who can sit next to David Duchovny on the patio at The Omelette Parlor without drooling all over the floor.

Well, maybe not Duchovny...