A Case for Both Coasts

I'll wave to you when I fly over <3

To my dear, dear, readers,

I want to thank you for your PATIENCE as I missed my weekly deadline. However, this week’s installment of UMOV is about slowing down, so I’m letting myself slide. I was on vacation which is why I am late, but I’m writing this from an otherwise empty row on my delta flight and the vibes are still high. 

I want to take a second to pay tribute to Matthew Perry. I have always loved Friends and I definitely tried/ do try to emulate a little bit of that Chandler sarcasm in my own humor. I was devastated to hear of his passing as I was following his second act of life after achieving  sobriety and releasing his memoir. It sucked to hear about that. He was really, really young. 

One of my favorite storylines from season 3 is Chandler and Janice’s breakup. Joey sees Janice kissing her ex-husband (The Mattress King) and obviously tells Chandler. When Janice comes over, Chandler confronts her about the cheating. She begins to hyperventilate, and she breathes into a brown paper bag. She chokes on the receipt for the condoms he bought, which he obviously can’t return since she choked on the receipt. Chandler tells her to give it another shot with her ex. As someone with divorced parents, he acknowledges his role in this and decides he doesn’t want to come between a marriage. So they break up. 

Chandler’s always saying he can’t be emotional, he uses humor as a defense mechanism, etc., etc. But that episode always gets me; he articulated those big feelings and lets Janice go. When you love someone, set them free. Not many people could / would do that, and that encounter always proved to me he was more than a funny guy. I think Matthew Perry was a lot like that, too. 

The episode closes with him clutching the Lionel Ritchie’s record, sitting on the BarcaLounger. That image alone has circulated on the Internet for years, with people photoshopping their favorite albums into his arms. It’s something that I find so special, that these special moments will live on. 

Leave a comment with your favorite moment from the show, if you feel so inclined. I loved it a lot, as I’m sure most of us did. Thank you, as always, for reading. I have a lot of exciting pieces coming up, so I hope you’ll stick around. 

Love, 

VP  

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I am not a chill person. 

My therapist and I have spent the past few years chipping away at my faux personality that I spent years curating. For the beginning of my adult life, I thought I was relaxed. I really thought I was a “let’s just go with the flow, “no worries if not,” “all good, you can pick the restaurant” type of person. But the longer I spent talking about everything that bothered me, the truth had never been clearer

I am not a chill person. I do not like being or late or when others are late. I cringe when people sit down at a group dinner of 20 people and ask the waitstaff if they can split the bill. But I really lose my shit when the weather changes from hot to cold back to hot again. I do not handle this well, I cannot adapt. That’s probably my least favorite thing about living in New York in the era of climate change. Fall weather is more fickle than the G train’s schedule. The second I see people wearing shorts in McCarren Park after my birthday on October 1, I actually need to do a breathing exercise to calm myself down.  

However, I narrowly avoided that freakout this weekend, as I was in Los Angeles during that random NYC heatwave. I didn’t even check the weather before flying, as we all know it’s a comfortable 75 and sunny during this time of year. You can seamlessly enjoy every day in a pair of jeans and a t shirt. It’s a luxury, predictability. It’s one of the perks about California. Gorgeous weather, daily sun for all your Vitamin K needs. I can see the appeal, especially knowing I’ve had many a manic episode staring down my weather app. 

I go to LA a couple times a year, mostly for my own enjoyment. It’s really fun to cosplay living there. I think a huge part of me wishes I could live there. Not did live there, but could live there. The reason for this distinction is because I think I would really struggle with it. My 25-year-old self has to reckon with reality; I’m not chill enough for life in LA. Maybe in another universe, that’s where I am living, schmoozing tv execs and hiking every day. But I’ve been working on my self-awareness, and I am aware enough to know that while maybe I physically could move across the country, I probably wouldn’t be super happy doing it. 

This has been tough to acknowledge in myself. When I was seventeen, I wanted to go to college in California. I made this declaration when I was a junior and told my parents I’d be peace-ing the F out of New York, never to be seen again. When push came to shove, I didn’t even leave the state for college. I’m all talk. 

Despite staying in New York, I was blessed to meet some of my best friends at school, a lot of whom are actually from the west coast. I’ve been talking a lot about how fortunate I am to have high-quality friendships, and I was lucky that I met a lot of those people in college. One of those friends, Bri, moved to Los Angeles last October. I was genuinely depressed for a while when she left; I was afraid of losing touch with someone I hold near and dear, and was afraid that she would forget about me in her new city with amazing weather and gorgeous people with cool jobs and vegan diets.  

I’ve been lucky, though. We both prioritized staying in touch, dedicating hours to FaceTime whenever we could. and we planed for me to stay with her for a few nights during this trip. I soaked up west coast life, including but not limited to visiting flea markets, enjoying freshly cut fruit covered in tajin and lime, watching the sunset at the beach just because we could, paying for overpriced smoothies at Erewhon, sleeping on couches to avoid a $100 Uber home, sitting in traffic, blowing dust out of my nose, and encountering all types of interesting people. 

This past weekend, at 10:30 on a Saturday morning, after I actually had woken up on someone’s couch in Silverlake, I felt like I had my entire day ahead of me. I haven’t slept till 10:30 in years. If I did that at home, I’d typically spend the whole day feeling guilty. But on Saturday, I was in no rush. I had no worries. The only thing on my mind was if I would have a chance to drive down Sunset listening to Death Cab for Cutie’s “Tiny Vessels” while I was actually in SIlverlake. If you know, you know. Maybe it’s just because I was on vacation, but I felt untethered. What a concept.

Normally, I struggle to take things slow. For instance, a few weeks ago, I had plans to go on a walk with a friend in Central Park. We agreed to meet there at 10:30. That morning, even though I strategically woke up with more than enough time to get ready, take the train over, and grab coffees before we set off, I felt like I had to be in a rush. I determined my entire day around this plan, and before it even started, I felt myself wishing we had agreed to meet earlier, for no reason other than I felt like we should have. This invisible pressure can be exhausting. There’s no real rhyme or reason why I feel this way, I just do. In New York, I can get to Central Park in a tight 40, walk 3 miles, stop for a bagel, go to the store, have a drink with a friend, be home by 3 p.m. and still feel guilty that I didn’t clean the bathroom yet. The city will do that to you. I am constantly moving around, jumping from borough to borough like I’m a woman on a mission, even though the mission is fun plans and buying groceries.  

You can’t do this type of hopping around in Los Angeles. You can’t get anywhere quickly. Everything is a process. Your one plan for lunch can take the entire day once you account for the travel time both ways. A couple people I spoke to that are in relationships said they stay the entire weekend with their significant other to avoid having to drive back. Everyone there moves at a glacial pace, it’s incredibly different from living in New York where a 40 minute train ride seems like a long distance relationship. When you order a coffee in LA, they make a whole show of getting it ready and presenting it in front of you. One time in Brooklyn, I asked for a straw for my cold brew and the barista threw my drink at me. 

On the surface, the speed at which my friends in LA operate can seem like a recipe for disaster for someone with my type of anxiety. But the truth is, visiting is good for my soul. I can feel myself exhale. Visiting LA forces me to calm down, to look at myself in the mirror and truly ask, “what am I so worried about? Why am I so stressed about NOTHING? What am I rushing for?” The answer is, not really anything. But it’s good to acknowledge the fact that those feelings exist and that I have them. It helps me reframe a lot of different pressures in my life and slow down a bit. When I return, I give myself a little more grace and patience than usual. 

So yes, I am not a chill person. I might never be a chill person. I might never understand people who still don’t know what they want to order when it’s finally their turn in line. I will never truly be chill, but visiting the west coast can be a true wellness shot to my life. I feel myself being able to breathe a little easier, despite all the smog. 

me + bri enjoying LA