Bottleneck

If there’s one consistent complaint among residents in LA, it’s the traffic.

I was driving to my internship one morning when the radio newscaster reported three separate rollovers on the freeway, and although accidents are common in the metro LA area, it would’ve taken nothing less than sheer determination on the part of the drivers to flip over in bumper to bumper traffic. In my head, I saw that man on his cell phone, that woman putting mascara on as they pulled onto the road. “I can do this. This is ok” they say as they gun it into a jersey barrier, sending a shower of glass and iced non-fat mocha latte with whip cream and a chocolate swirl onto the city streets below.

I had survived years of New England shenanigans and a cross-country road trip, but nothing compared to the demolition derby antics of LA. You’d think action movies choreograph their car chases—they probably just tape LA during rush hour. The remnants of the chaos litter the roads: a hub cap here, a mangled shopping cart there. “It’s not a mess,” the locals quip, “It’s the weekly commute.” Incidentally, there’s a myth where if you get into a car accident within the first year of moving to LA, you’re going to become an Angelino, a permanent resident of the city of Los Angeles. It makes asking the question of why people drive badly sound like you’re asking why tall people play basketball or why rapists frequent jails. They just do.

But I digress.

Sure enough, I saw the freeway and onramp in the distance, clogged with cars. Pulling onto the freeway was clearly going to be a bad life decision from any vantage point, yet the blinkers around me flared up as drivers continued to squeeze to the right, blocking my route and turning a 30 minute commute into an hour long smog fest. Sure, there were other ways these yokels me could go East and West, but when the highway was the “easiest” and well worn route to your destination, why bother changing plans?

I had been in LA for nearly five months now, and though the sunny weather was great for the first month, the consistent 70 degree weather blurred the weeks into a haze. You go to the internship; you read a script. You go to class; you talk about business. You go home; you eat your frozen dinner. You go to bed; you fall asleep reading another script. It’s not to say that I didn’t appreciate the opportunity to be out on the west coast, but the edges of my dream world had long since cracked, and I was beginning to have a horrible feeling that I wasn’t going to be happy in LA.

I worked two internships, one at an agency and another at a big-but-small film production company. At the former, I ran around to make photocopies, phone calls, summaries for scripts, and the like. I was surrounded by friendly, sleep-deprived college grads working as assistants for the agents. They all hoped to jump to another assistant job and climb the food chain. The latter yielded much of the same—except I’m working with an agent’s assistant that made the jump to the other assistant job, only he’s looking ahead to hopefully jump to another job to climb the corporate ladder.

I learned a lot about how to maintain a calendar for a boss and what the process was in turning a 120 page script into a 90 minute feature, but what I really learned was the type of life I had spent four years preparing for. There were no crazy stories to tell, no wild nights of adventure. Life is spent under the dull glow of a florescent bulb, moving at the speed of your blackberry. Your lunches, dinners, and drinks are strictly planned out for networking opportunities. You drink sparkling water and read bad scripts. Your friends are your industry-mates, and your industry-mates are your competitors. Some might like the lifestyle, but I found it lacking in several departments—and try as I might, I couldn’t see it as fulfilling work.

“But this is what development is,” one assistant told me. “It pays, and you get to be creative.”

“Creative? But you’re not writing, or making creative decisions” I replied.

He turned away from his online game of scrabble and sighed. “What do you think the corkboard in the office is for?” He pointed at the board in the next room. Mounted on the wall, the corkboard sat empty, save for a few stray tacks and a barrage of staples that held ideas long gone since I arrived. “Besides, you don’t really want to go through the hassle of writing. You hire writers to put your ideas in for you.”

I nodded, and he pondered his next scrabble move. It was true I was still green and unaccustomed to the business, but to me, it didn’t make sense. I had expected the late nights, the coffee runs, the insults, and yelling. What I hadn’t expected was how meaningless it all felt. Never had I felt so alone, so confused about my goals and if I’d be wasting my time working my way up the ranks. It was said over and over that sometimes you had to do the things you hate to get what you want, but what if I didn’t want that prize at the top of the ladder?

You can drag me out into the streets and beat me for saying this, but the one thing that I had wanted to do from day one was tell great stories, live a life worth living, and make enough money to afford the value menu. THAT’S what I thought was in LA, and that’s why I followed the thousands of other kiddos who followed the bright lights into the big city. We clog the streets with our misguided dreams and get lost in the shuffle. We get so desperate to be a part of the process we shove ourselves into any job we can get—because if we don’t, someone else will. “You come to LA, make the connections, and get a job,” my professors told me. “You can do it other ways, of course, but it’ll be harder.” Perhaps we make it hard on ourselves, because we compromise what we believe and want for what worked easiest in the past.

Fate, so it seems, has a funny way of making decisions for you. Stricken with money issues that would make a jump out to LA impossible, I’ve had to pack my backs and bid tinsel town farewell. So I left LA. I packed my little yellow car and headed out east on the freeway past the hundreds of drivers inching their way into the city. My life may take me back out to LA, but for the moment, it looks like I’ll be taking the side streets.