Paying the Rent

It’s three in the afternoon and I’m just starting my beautiful day. This morning (read: afternoon) I woke up to Travis’ alarm, signaling the thirteenth snooze command that meant we’d over slept the eleven o’clock mark by two hours. I really don’t have any problem with this right now. I’m enjoying life without a permanent job—at the moment at least.

The breakfast that might have happened at eight this morning—some pumpkin toast and apple cinnamon preserves, whilst thumbing through the appropriately contrasting Instinct and Pottery Barn—brought with it some comfort and a new perspective on life as it has become. As I wrote out the first rent check for our new West Hollywood apartment, I remember back to the time when I thought I would never say I was going to ever live here. For me, West Hollywood was always a cliché plastic place where I could get my rocks off on a Thursday night and then venture back to school. Now, that cliché is home.

I’m finding the presupposed and the new in this place. While it might be obvious to say that my boyfriend and I, sitting around lazily, reading through home furnishing magazines and queer rags, thinking about a run up Runyon Canyon later this afternoon with our dog, Dot, is something this town has seen before, I’ve been pleasantly surprised that we are making a unique space for ourselves.

NPR is on and apparently Chrystler is selling out to Fiat sometime this week. We had a wonderful group of friends to our place for a house-warming party that still has me glowing. Travis will be riding his bike to work later today and I’ll probably go for my run up Runyon. In all of this, this place is ours and will continue to become ours. Our neighborhood is not just stereotypically full of plastic queers and boys running around in underwear. Our neighbor, Jane, an elderly Russian woman greets us every morning as we get up to walk the dog and tells us, in broken English, how cute Dot is. We’re making a home for ourselves in a town that I always looked at as slightly unsophisticated and tragically superficial.

Honestly, I’m pleasantly surprised and a little disappointed in myself for making such assumptions. I’m learning about home as I make it in Los Angeles. I’m beginning to open up to the possibilities in store myself, my boyfriend, and our new life in WeHo. And that starts with going to drop off the rent.