Big City Now Now... Beep Beep

"I haven't found anywhere in the world where I want to be all the time. The best of my life is the moving. I look forward to going."  -S. Connery

If you can't ascend to James Bond, who can you agree with?  That seems like reasonable logic to me.  I remember standing at the end of the bar at Ceres (where traders from the CBOT/CBOE go for their Bloody Bulls at 7AM) with The Legend on his sixty-third birthday.  It just so happened that some synapse in my brain fired and I noted that, since both The Legend's birthday and my own fell in the month of June, I was pretty close to exactly a third his age.  That's when our shared sense of humor came out:

"Wow, I can't believe that I'm a third dead" -I. H. Palindromes

I ended up being a lot closer on that one than I had wanted to be, or at least on half of it.  Deadpool still reminds me of that one, he also found it humorous at the time and even funnier in retrospect, that makes one of us.

In any event, the great Scotsman got me thinking about a recurring topic that my idle brain likes to kick around a fair amount.  I am ridiculously and inexplicably lucky.  This isn't a new concept for me.  I remember telling friends in undergrad that since my heart had stopped beating when I was born, for a rather prolonged period of time, God must have already thought he had done away with me.  Therefore, I reasoned, the standard diet of hubris and tough breaks that seemed to be doled out to those around me never managed to make their way to my plate.  I think he may have heard me.

With all sincerity however, one of the best things in the world that came out of being the son of The Legend & The Sky is Falling was that travel was a requirement.  While my "crushingly underfunded, 50% failure rate, overcrowded" primary school friends were making their way off to the Wisconsin Dells for summer vacation, my parents packed me and The Dancing Orange up for California, Hawaii, London, Tokyo, etc.  I have half a Lupe Fiasco song in there.  Not satisfied with the simple task of getting to a far-flung destination, my mother would canvas every museum, cultural center and landmark of historical significance she could locate.  Then she would make me write book reports on them.  You read that right, book reports in the summer.  My father found every golf course with historical significance, which I also appreciated.

There were a few absolutely irreplaceable outcomes for me in all of this.  First, I got to understand very early on that I was a minority (no no, not literally... come on now).  The world was filled with people very different than me who lived in places that looked nothing like where I lived and valued things that I had barely even observed.  Second, it propelled me to read a disturbing amount.  How do you get a twelve-year-old to pick up The Letters of Seneca? put him on Kauai for six weeks pre-cell phones and satellite cable.  These are the advantages that parents confer on their children for which they will never be thanked (until said child does so anonymously to the inter-web).  Touching, I know.  I want to make sure I can do the same for my kids someday, make them miserable in ways that they will grow-up to appreciate.  Man those are going to be some lucky kids.

I now find myself in Los Angeles.  I have lived in other hub-cities, most of which were patently more enjoyable, none of which had as nice of weather.  Given my terminal case of finance-dorkiness (no, seriously, I have an HP12-C... no... as in I can reach out and grab it with my left hand right now...) I always assumed that I would end up in New York or Chicago.  Perhaps I could have fathomed San Francisco or Boston if I ended up working for an odd asset manager.  That's what this blog was born out of (outside of a certain more primary catalyst).  I was looking for a way to vent about the ridiculousness of this non-city city.  This place without character, a flaw that everyone seems to get over because it's always the same outside.  "Don't worry, she's not all that enjoyable, not particularly bright, kind of difficult to deal with... but MAN is she consistently pretty!"

Yeah, guess what, they were almost right.  I can still say rather confidently that I won't be here forever.  I'm sticking around for a little bit more of life to develop first but I do know, at some point, I'll be confronted with at least the option to go elsewhere.  The enjoyable thing for me is that the last two years (well, more like 19 months, but who's counting) have taught me what will actually get me to stay in one place.  I've moved cities four times and apartments about eight since I left undergrad.  I have finally found the one thing that can keep me static, and that's somewhat exciting.  What is that thing you ask?  Well, I'll give you a hint, it's on the back page of my passport.  Crushing.  Irony.

Now, off to dinner in Santa Monica, a return to more overtly clever and funny (at least as funny as can be expected from a guy who employs HP12C-based humor) material soon (I promise).  Also, more photos (I just did mental jazz-hands to exclaim that last phrase).

Save Ferris,

-I Heart Palindromes