Pregnancy Boom

This is what I've labeled it because every other woman I meet/see is pregnant. Maybe it's the post-Obama hope spell? Or people with a lot of free time on their hands because they're unemployed? Today, pleased with myself after a particularly bendy yoga class, I headed to my local Coffee Bean for my post-yoga caffeine reward and ran into yet another pregnant woman.

"Did you go to RISD?" she asked. At this point, I should stop scratching my head when I'm asked this question because it happens like once a week. I think the giveaway is my orange RISD yoga bag.

"No," I answered. "Did you?" It turned out she had. And she was a creative director. I liked her, she was an Indian woman my age with particularly good taste in pregnancy attire. And I am biased in favor of people who are content to sit alone in coffee shops because this is how I spend half my life. So I got my coffee and we chatted about RISD and Los Angeles and pregnancy and art. And I thought about last night, when drunk on a half-pour of wine (Ranga Ranga which means cool breeze) I felt particularly sensitive to the mechanics of friendship-building in urban areas. Which is a funny and counter-productive vein of thinking because I'm not some innocent ingenue in a new and glamorous city, seeking to find my way (in other words, I am not starring in a Lisa Cholodenko movie) nor do I feel particularly alone in the world. I feel healthily connected to a handful of people I love. But I am obsessed with others' interior lives. I am more curious about posers who hang out at wine tastings in fedoras and sensitive males who weep alone in their studio apartments in Echo Park than people who are relatively emotionally healthy and authentically engaged with the world around them.

But sometimes you feel like accessing others' interior lives will somehow allow you to access your own unexplored possibilities. Who knows, a roll of the dice and it may have been me in an I love civil liberties t-shirt trying to find my way in a city that can seem intimidating (I should buy that guy a drink for use of his t-shirted persona on my blog. In a similar vein, three years ago, my boyfriend took a photograph of a man at a diner and used it as source material for a painting he ultimately made for a gallery exhibit on the absurdity of eating. After the exhibit ended, the painting went up in our dining room, but we kept seeing the original source-material man on the street, riding his bike, or waiting for tickets outside our local movie theater. We thought of approaching him and telling him that we had a portrait of him up on a wall in our house, but ultimately decided that it would sound kind of creepy and weird to tell him this. Either way, we felt oddly connected to him every time we saw him).

Anyway, it's funny how a RISD bag becomes a catalyst for a meaningful conversation and potential friendship in a world where these things can seem particularly elusive at times.

When you start to break anything down - friendship, love, success, harmony, luck, creation, as I do, quite a bit, in my head, you realize that thinking about these things is a fairly pointless exercise. Most of what we experience is elusive and hard to categorize or explain or understand. Ultimately the way in which we connect with one another, find one another, or don't in this world is absurd. And maybe simultaneously meaningful, if you allow it to be.

I tell myself that the best I can do is write down observations. There are a lot of pregnant women in my neighborhood. Men who wear fedoras and Atwater Village t-shirts look like posers (to me). If you take a picture of a man in your neighborhood, you might run into him and feel strange about this. It is good to go to a wine tasting with a friend because most likely you won't want to talk to anyone else there, and the only person you will genuinely want to talk to will be said friend. Sometimes you will feel disconnected in a room full of people. Other days you will walk into a coffee shop and connect immediately with a woman your age, who looks content to be there by herself.