How I Spent The Hurriquake

Hi-la-ry!

Los Angeles may not be hurricane country, but it’s certainly earthquake country, which is why I’ve had three gallons of water, a flashlight with fresh batteries, and a few days’ worth of canned food (and cat food) stored in the cupboard above my fridge since shortly after I moved into my apartment. I was slightly surprised to realize, in the run-up to Hurricane Hilary, how many of my fellow Angelenos had none of this ready. Don’t they have…the fears? For a populace that complains this much about anxiety, very few of them seem to be taking any action on it! If 2020 taught us anything, it’s that this country is very racist, and we should all have toilet paper stockpiles at all times.

Even so, after work on Friday, I stocked up on snacks and made extra ice in case power in my fridge went out, just to be safe. I also charged my appliances, downloaded a bunch of podcasts, took the empty plastic bottles out of my car and filled them with Brita-filtered water and brought all the cushions from my balcony furniture inside. You could say I was…

The hurricane was named Hilary. That’s the context for this.

Better to be over-prepared and feel foolish when nothing happens than under-prepared and feel in danger when something does! As a child of split custody, I’ve often channeled any ambient nervousness into “packing up my stuff just in case.” During the early Trump years, I bought a water purification kit in case society collapsed, and put a picture of me as a child next to a Christmas tree and a wad of Canadian cash in a plastic bag just in case I had to convince our Handmaid’s Tale-style Christofascist overlords that I was a Christian before bribing my way into Toronto.

Anyway.

No one thought that the hurricane, or tropical storm, or whatever the weather event was categorized as, would be Katrina-like in its downpour. The issue is that LA, being a desert, has pretty much zero infrastructure for anything beyond twenty minutes of heavy rain. Even if Hilary wouldn’t be strong enough to break the levees…we don’t have any levees. So, precautions needed to be taken.

I awoke Sunday morning to a cloudy, rainy sky and my cat being unusually nice to me. Throughout the day the rain would…well, it would stay the same. I’m gonna cut to the chase here: absolutely nothing interesting happened in my neighborhood as a result of the storm. And I didn’t feel the earthquake, I think because I was in bed at the time, but it’s also possible my apartment simply didn’t shake, because nothing on any of my shelves fell over.

I heard a helicopter buzzing around — I live near the LA River and maybe someone was…in it? Or they were just keeping an eye on things?

I swore that this would never become a “what I’ve been up to” analysis-less type of newsletter, but I also planned on writing about the hurricane this week, so here we are. This is what I got up to:

• I watched the second half of Heat on Netflix (it’s pretty good! Natalie Portman is in it, which I didn’t know going in, and I feel like I should have, like people should talk about this as a movie starring mostly Pacino and de Niro, but also Val Kilmer, and then TBH the fourth most famous person here is Nat)

• I watched a few episodes of Younger on Hulu (very fun)

• I watched Master & Commander: The Far Side of the World on Vudu (really good!)

• I played but barely paid attention to Mission: Impossible 3 on Vudu (no opinion)

• I started watching Oliver Stone’s JFK on Max (corny? bad? Will it get better? It’s three hours long, I think I got…35 minutes into it?)

• I made a slideshow about Taylor Swift for my friend Ana; our other friend Becca and I are guiding her as she converts to Swiftieism

• I texted with my friend Raquel in New York about a student movie I directed that she was in a bunch of years ago

• I “worked” on my “screenplay”

• I listened to a podcast about the OJ Simpson trial. (Did you know he nearly sliced Nicole’s head off?) (Very bad person!)

By Monday it wasn’t even raining. And yet the strikes go on.

I guess the lesson here is that sometimes the things you think will be difficult are actually not, and the things you think will be easy might be difficult.

Stay dry!

Lizzie