No Peace, Los Angeles

BurbankNow I can really appreciate the plight of Chinese people barred from the internet, as I too have gone a week without access to my own website and e-mail. Including three days with no internet access at all!

No need to call Amnesty International just yet; my hotel in Burbank just refused to connect to my web host, and the cheap motel in Anaheim didn’t even have a phone, much less an internet connection. My living conditions definitely fluctuate based on whether a giant, multinational entertainment company is fitting the bill or I am. I suppose it says something about me that I considered a motel room with no internet and only three cable stations “roughing it.”

Considering how much I went over budget with this little trip, I sure found my cheapskate instincts taking over — the hotel was charging seven bucks for a can of shaving cream, and I wasn’t having any of that. Better to go into work looking slovenly than pay that much for soap. Or food; the rain was coming down so hard the first night there that I couldn’t practically go out to eat, and I wasn’t going to eat at the hotel’s ridiculously overpriced restaurant, so I had a dinner of Pocky and a Whatchmacallit bar. But since I was at either Universal or Disneyland the entire time, I was forgoing the basics (balking at the costs as if I’d grown up during the Depression) but still paying theme park prices for dinner.

In any case, I’m back now, and I may be able to get a good story or two out of the week. For now, I’m in the first stages of a chest cold, so I’m tired and achey and I feel like Tom Waits after a tonsilectomy. (The fact that smoking inside my hotel room is such a novelty that I abuse it every time I stay in a hotel probably didn’t help). So I’m going to sleep. In my own bed.