The LA Years: “I’ve got an extra hour, and I haven’t seen any butts today” Lasagna

My family knows that I’ve got a lot of rants about Los Angeles, and they’ve heard a lot of them and the stories I have. I came up with the idea to write a series of essays about the realities living in LA as a just-out-of-college person while I was still living there. And when both my sister and my Dad said they would read them, I figured I should get around to it. So I sat down and dumped out a lot of words, and now I’ve got a week’s worth of mini-essays. I figured the two year anniversary of my road trip to Minnesota from LA was as good a time as any to post them, one a day.

I’ve decided to share them here for two reasons:

1. Where else am I going to share them? My family is the only consistent audience of this blog, and they are the only people who would be interested in reading this. So it’s as good a place as any to “publish” them.
2. After two years of really focusing my energy back on this blog and working up some consistency, I want to start branching out a bit more creatively. And since I’ve already deemed this more of a “baking diary,” why not lean on that diary/non-traditional element?

There were a lot (a lot) of reasons that I decided I wanted to leave Los Angeles. It’s impossible to pin down just one thing, or even one moment where I made the decision. I wish I had some great story of a breaking point moment that led me to pick up the phone and make the decision to get the heck out – that would probably be an insane story. But alas! It was just a slow build-up of just about everything that sent me over the edge. And the timing was right when my 401K vested!

I spent a lot time thinking about what I wanted my life to look like, and because I tend to think in paragraph form, they started turning into these posts. I’ve thought about these for a while, and according to my Google Docs, started writing things down in April 2023, months before I left Los Angeles. So today, I’ll start by sharing my “essay” on… traffic!

Traffic: How many butts have you seen from your car?

I’m starting with traffic for two reasons:

1. The first ideas for these essays began while I was stuck in LA traffic!
2. Traffic is the most stereotypical complaint people have in their heads of LA. Why not start where people expect?

To start, there’s not much that needs to be said that hasn’t been said: the traffic in LA is comical. Every time you think it can’t be that bad, it’s two times worse. Getting anywhere in the city takes a minimum of 40 minutes, and you should probably budget 20 for parking. The only times without traffic are before 6am and after 8pm, and even then it’s not guaranteed.

I also had the unfortunate luck of living a few minutes away from the Hollywood Bowl. I literally walked there. But Hollywood Bowl traffic is some of the worst in the city. Every night there was a concert, you could get stuck in standstill traffic that didn’t move for 20+ minutes, as people were going in or getting out. I kept a calendar in my car that had the concert dates marked so I would know that I should either get home early or late, or take an alternate route. During the summer, there’s a concert nearly every night.

On top of the roads always being packed, the city is incredibly spread out. There’s a lot to see, and a lot to do in LA! It can be a fun place to visit! But none of the things worth seeing are next to each other. Or even remotely near each other. It’s possible to find a nice fun pocket of things to do and see in one neighborhood, but those pockets are never large, and never near anything else. 

And on top of that, the spread out nature of things made friendships feel impossible. I was lucky enough to make friends with my coworkers, but I couldn’t help but feel that we would have been even better friends had we lived within 40 minutes of each other. Somehow, despite us all working in person at the same office, we all lived an hour or more away from each other. 

One time, I was invited to a coworker’s birthday party, and I carpooled with another coworker. He drove 45-50 minutes to my apartment, and then I drove us both another 45-50 minutes to the party. I lived halfway between my two coworkers, each of them 50+ minutes away (if you drove between 6a-8p). That’s absurd. I hope the birthday guy knew that his coworker drove nearly two hours to go to his party. That’s equivalent to driving from Indianapolis to Chicago for a friend’s birthday party. 

And that birthday party was fun! I truly had a great time, and it was the first party I’d been invited to in years. But driving an hour just to hang out with friends is hard. So while we all hung out on occasion, it could never be a casual or frequent thing. The planning required just to hang out, and the knowledge that at least one person is going to have to drive an hour is just a given. Obviously some people make this work, but I found it a huge barrier to making friends!

Just wanting to go out and have fun, with friends or alone, just becomes a matter of logistics that often sucks the fun out or makes you question just how much the fun is worth it. And maybe it’s just me, but… I tend to drive an hour for only my closest friends. Not casual coworker friends.

All this isn’t surprising, I’m sure, and is still just harping on how long it takes to drive places in LA. Everyone knows that’s bad. What really needs to be talked about in any discussion of LA traffic is the horrors you have to see. I don’t think people are talking about this enough. Because if you do make the effort to drive an hour to your friend’s house, or 40 minutes to a cool street with a cafe and a bookstore, you don’t know what you’re going to have to see on the way. Who knows what mindset you’re going to be in when you get there.

I have a list on my phone, and some images seared into my brain, of things that I have seen from my car while sitting in traffic. And it is stuff that I don’t think is dramatic to say would make anyone despair. I think the things that I had to see every day were the biggest wear on my will to live in LA.

I had a running joke that I was keeping a tally of how many bare butts I saw from my car just driving around. I remember at least 3, but I think it was 4. Not a crazy number I guess, but… I must ask my audience: how many bare butts have you seen while driving around your city?? Zero??

So, in the spirit of that tally, here are a few more things I saw from my car:

• A man on a street corner, fully nude, looking like he was just waiting to cross the street
• On that same street corner, a few weeks later, a horse pooping on the sidewalk, and the horse cop getting off to start scooping the poop (not that crazy, unless you knew about the naked guy)
• A woman in a hospital gown, stumbling across the road
• A woman dressed totally normally, walking a dog, who then proceeded to enter a tent where she lived.
• A woman walking into and crouching in a group of bushes, to use the restroom.
• A lot of blocks filled with tents. (But perhaps the more distressing part was when they would disappear from one day to the next.)
• A billboard that was saying begging people to stop leaving CA to move to Texas, because of the Uvalde shooting. (No consideration for why people might want to be fleeing California.)
• Two seemingly normal women walking strollers at… 1:24am. (I hope my niece never sees Hollywood Blvd past 10pm. And certainly not before she’s two years old.)
• A colony of rats crawling around at a gas station populated with homeless people. (These rats looked big from across the street.)

These are just the things I’ve written down. These are just the things I saw from the safety of my own car! And you always had to just sit and watch because you were stuck.  There was something every day, and that was the worst part of the traffic.

Since moving to Minnesota, I have gotten so many more hours of my life back just from not sitting in traffic. And in celebration of that, here’s a dinner recipe that takes a little extra time and effort. I’ve got time and mental energy for that effort now. (I’ve also got the disposable income to buy short ribs, and getting the ingredients from the store doesn’t exhaust me. But more on that in the coming days.)

Also, my mom first made this short rib lasagna a few years ago and I have been obsessed with it even since. It deserves a place on the blog! This is one of the best meals I’ve ever made, and it’s worth every minute. It takes 4 hours (not all active time), but it’s so so worth it. Unlike any drive I ever went on in LA.

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