on entropy

Apparently, even if I am only gone for a matter of days, my roommates wreak organizational havoc, remarkably efficiently, in my absence. Dishes pile in the sink, garbage cans fill to overflowing, important incoming mail becomes buried under several-month old issues of The Onion, The New York Times and The New Yorker.

Certainly, even the second law of thermodynamics predicts such change – over time, the universe inevitably progresses towards chaos. And yet, sitting this close to the seemingly inexhaustible energy supply of the sun, our little planet is mathematically destined to head in the opposite direction, towards an increasingly ordered state (see Morowitz, 1968). Perhaps, then, it is my recent time in sunny LA that inspired me to clean our apartment this evening in my roommates’ absence. For a few brief moments, at least, there is a semblance of civilization, everything is in its right place.

|  

the joy of travel

It is 9:00 AM and I am on my way to return my rented car, a little, white, brand new Corolla that feels remarkably underpowered on LA’s fast-moving freeways. I’ve rented the car from Midway, the company from which I leased the SUV I drove during the months I was in LA for shooting; they’re a pleasure to deal with, and have cut me a great deal, but sadly don’t have an office at Long Beach Airport, the closest place where JetBlue flies. So I am returning the car to their corporate headquarters, on the corner of Sepulveda and Santa Monica Boulevard.

I’m supposed to head back to near the Beverly Center, to meet the girl I’ve been seeing for breakfast before I head off to the airport. The Midway folks kindly offer to drop me off, and though Jorge, the mechanic who takes me, speaks absolutely no English, we make it through the twenty minute drive talking non-stop, he in Spanish, I in Italian. By and large we understand each other, yet Jorge is particularly enamored with most of the women we pass, and offers a running commentary I’m afraid my rather G-rated textbook Italian leaves me ill-prepared to follow in great detail.

Breakfast itself is excellent. She and I eat outside at a small caf

|  

back and forth and back and

Ridiculously enough, I’m out in Los Angeles, yet again, for a short stint (arrived Tuesday afternoon, head back early tomorrow morning) to deal with a couple of post-production emergencies and to begin lining up contracts and financing for our next project. Then it’s back to New York for two days before heading off to Florida for the Florida Film Festival. And then back to New York, briefly, before a trip out to San Francisco, next weekend.

By now, I have absolutely no idea where I live nor what time I’m on. But, on the plus side, I’m racking up all kinds of frequent flier miles, which means, if I’m real lucky, I can fly even more!

I remember my father once telling me about a patient of his who worked as a traveling salesman. When he awoke in the morning, the man would roll over and look at the carpet – if it was blue, he was at home; if not, he’d stay in bed until he could remember where he was and what he was doing there. For the first time in my life, that story makes a lot of sense.

|   

at the orchestra

Last night, I headed off to hear the New York Philharmonic play. It was my first chance to do so this season, as, though I’d held tickets for a number of earlier concerts, I’d always been out of town and had to pass them off to friends. The girl I was meeting was (per usual) rather late, which gave me a chance to stand in front of the fountain in the middle of Lincoln Center, perhaps my favorite place in New York (at least at night during the winter). The opera, the orchestra and the ballet all had performances that evening, and so the three glass-faced buildings that surround the fountain were lit up and teaming with couples and families and students and whomever else, dressed up and wearing mittens and overcoats and jostling for entrance.

Standing there, I was hit by a wave of homesickness – not homesickness for somewhere else, but homesickness for that very place, at the thought that I would almost doubtless eventually end up living somewhere that wasn’t as beautiful and crystalline and quintessentially New York as the fountain in Lincoln Center at that very moment.

|