Radio Silence

I don’t listen to the radio.

In fact, I would assume that a majority of Americans no longer listen to the radio, perhaps with the exception of NPR.

However, I say this living in a city that isn’t quite radio friendly. In New York, it’s not like you can carry around a radio with you while riding the subway. Or at least, I assume that the radio waves can’t make down there, considering cell phones can’t.

You can listen to the radio on a podcast, but even then it’s not quite the same. You can’t sift between stations when an ad comes on, and you can’t sing along – which might be the most important part.

When I come to LA, I always forget to bring either an iPod adapter (which I don’t even own, so it’s not that much of a surprise that I would forget it) or some CDs to listen to in the rental car.

This trip I DID bring a CD that I had just purchased at brunch the other day – a NYC band called “Baby Soda” who I simply loved. However, when our car broke down I completely forgot to retrieve the CD and must now call tomorrow to see if they found it. I’ll be quite sad to lose it, and I hadn’t added it to my multiple devices yet.

Either way, LA usually means a lot of listening to terrible radio stations. Honestly, trying to find a radio station you can relate to is like finding a significant other.

You surf through the channels over and over and once you land on one that sounds familiar or interesting, you realize that it’s either just about to end as quickly as it started or it’s in a language you don’t recognize. Then it starts to get boring during the commercials so you give up and start surfing for more. If there was one song on the station that you enjoyed before the commercial break, you try to remember said station to try again later. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

For the most part, I end up turning the radio off for a while and leave myself with my own thoughts, much like my dating life.

But I like it that way.

Caffeine Overdrive

This is from a few trips ago to LA, but very much like the airplane ride I just took. Damn kids.

For my 8:30am flight from New York to Los Angeles, I came prepared to sleep. I was completely unprepared for the trip, and spent most of the night dreaming of things I forgot to do, only to wake up every 30 minutes and write them down. I know that I still didn’t do everything I was supposed to, mainly because I couldn’t read my dream filled handwriting. I’m still not exactly sure what “Take alligator repellent” means.

While waiting to board the plane, I saw one hindrance to my sleep plan: a 5-year-old boy holding a Grande Mocha Frappucino with whip. As a longstanding customer of Starbucks, I know my frappucinos, so much so that anti-Starbucks militia would probably throw cheaper coffee on my over-caffeinated body like I was wearing fur and they were carrying fake blood. And any idiot who has ever been to a Starbucks could safely this boy were going to stay awake for the duration of the 6 hour flight. Undoubtedly, the kid sat directly behind me and his mother and father, for some reason separated, sat all around me, so the kid was free to run back and forth in the aisles screaming about god knows what.

Strangely enough, this didn’t start happening until well into the flight, when I was dead asleep dreaming I was on a bus being taken to a Hertz station that looked like a federal penitentiary. And I had to wait there for my boss. For 6 hours.

Luckily, the screaming children and the annoying high schooler on her way to soccer camp, who kept elbowing me because she had obviously never flown in a plane in her whole entire life, woke me up.

That dream was awful and my body was definitely uncomfortable, and I still had another three hours of flight time. Additionally, now that the caffeine had kicked in, so had the boy’s ability to kick the back of my chair.

See, when I was little, I wasn’t allowed caffeine. I needed a lot of it when I landed in LA.

watch out for jaguars on 19th street