1-22-2026

Yesterday, I had a thought while writing in my journal. I looked at the side and observed that the ribbon-thing was almost a third down the pages. I started writing in this journal at the start of January, and I am nearly 70 pages in!

I thought to myself, "if I published this shit, I'd be more prolific than Stephen King."

Well, what if I did?

My first idea was to write super honestly as a pseudonym, and then I immediately made a new email for it and everything and started writing, but then I decided not to do that and just have a normal-ish blog like a normal-ish person.

But the basic idea of writing in a blog in a way more similar to a diary is still standing. That's still something that interests me, and that's kind of what I'm doing right now.

I started writing a blog post earlier, and then deleted it midway. I was basically summarizing my recent troubles with figuring out my life path. Too much summary. It was boring and whiny.

Here's an actually digestible summary: I, who has lived in Southern CA my whole life, was going to transfer to a CSU next fall, but then my mom accepted a job in Portland, OR, and at first I was going to do my original plan, but then I had an existential crisis and now I'm probably going to Portland with them instead. In the process I also decided against the career path I've been on since I started college 4 years ago, becoming a teacher. And this has been weird because I've had that as my plan since high school.

Some new career paths I've considered since then have been accounting, nursing, other healthcare, and whatever secret 4th thing I come up with. Because, in reality, I simply have no idea for the first time in my life. I have to face the reality that life is unplannable and I need to just try things out until I find something that will accommodate my passion for writing and possibly filmmaking (but possibly just screenwriting).

There, my whole crisis in just two paragraphs. Can you imagine that as a whole blog post? Boring.

I mean, that could be a blog post, but not the one I was writing. The one I was writing was those two paragraphs but stretched. Nothing actually interesting was going on.

To change subjects, for the past few days I've been with my mom in one of the rich parts of LA. She's here for work and I tagged along to help with my stir-craziness in my small town. I haven't been able to take any in-person classes at the community college this year so I've been much less social than usual. Bad. Not good.

This trip has taught me that I actually don't like Los Angeles very much. Most people don't, I've heard. I'm not one of those people that's going to act like LA is objectively terrible (and act like the East coast or some weird town in the mid-west is objectively better somehow), I just don't think it's for me.

For one thing, the hustle culture of SoCal in general has never been my thing. It's always been hard for me. I'm a very slow person. I recently heard that people with ADHD are estimated to be about 2 years behind developmentally in terms of executive functioning skills, and I immediately related to that. A mental age of 19 makes sense to me (despite me already not wanting to meaningfully interact with anyone under 20 outside of family). I feel like I'm only just now figuring out how to function enough to get schoolwork done and keep my room clean.

So an environment that constantly expects you to have everything figured out and to always be pursuing a rich person career? Not for me.

I remember in high school how absolutely hell-bent all of the programs were on preparing you for a career. A large portion of the art electives at my high school were "Career Technical Experience Pathways."

When I took a video production class in middle school, it was very fun and self expression focused. Once I entered a similar class in high school, which was a CTE pathway, it was all about commercials and the boring parts of the industry. Hardly any actual artistic expression or fun going on. It didn't help that commercials were the teacher's only experience, it seemed. I remember him saying that all works, including narrative ones, needed an explicit purpose, other than to entertain. Not a theme, which stories certainly should have, but an explicit purpose, like "educate the audience on bullying" or something stupid like that. His experience seemed to be purely editing, which is fine for an editor, not as a smart ass teacher telling students objectively wrong info about narrative storytelling.

Another example of the weird career obsession in high school was when I joined stage-crew for fun and everyone there was part of the audio tech CTE pathway and expected everyone else to also be in it. Everything was super serious. All of the kids there wanted to be professionals in the field.

It was all just strange to me. High school seems like prime time to make stupid videos or do amateur, non-professional theater tech. It didn't seem like the time to be so crazy about doing super professional work for everything, or to always be planning for your career. At one point that video production class randomly had us make resumes. It was my freshman year; this was the first class in the 3 year pathway.

To get back to LA, I also just haven't enjoyed the LA-ness of it all. Especially in this rich people area I'm in.

My first night here, my mom and I went to the hotel restaurant and I got "The Burger." It was one of those dumb burgers with weird cheese, a weird jam for some reason, and absolutely no flavor. Not even the patty itself. I think they just didn't season it? A weird, dumb, rich people burger.

Weird rich people stuff is all over here. I decided to go to one street to try shopping and found that basically everything was wildly over priced. The best one was when I went to a home goods store that was also a cafe and found a singular glass cup for $70.

The 70 dollar cup

This would be funny if it was just that one store, but every store in this part of LA is like this, so that means that enough people are buying overpriced things in these weird stores for these businesses to stay afloat. Mind-boggling.

I also have a love-hate relationship with driving. One one hand, ever since getting my license I've loved being able to drive with the AC on and my own music and just take a chill 20 min drive to school. On the other hand, LA driving is not chill. And even in my hometown, having to drive everywhere for everything is a bit annoying. Portland is reported to have good public transit.

To compare to Portland, I'm sure there's dumb food and stuff in Portland. But even then I feel like the type of dumb might mesh with me better? Hipster dumb and yuppie dumb are different beasts, and I feel like I'll enjoy hipster dumb stuff better. It's the difference between an annoying person wearing flannel who writes bad (white) slam poetry and collects records and an annoying person who gets super dressed up to go to Stater Bros and collects nothing to keep their house as minimalist as possible. Both are annoying, but one of them is my annoying.

I could be completely wrong about all of this, of course. I've never even been to Portland.

Anyways, I have written a lot. My plan for today is to go to a metaphysical shop in WeHo called "House of Intuition." It's like 45 minutes away from where I'm at, but my mom happens to be working nearby so I'm gonna pick her up after I go to that store, and then we're getting dinner or something probably.