Box Girl Read Free

call. I’m not sure if there’s a huge difference. Every Wednesday, without fail, he’d do this rendition of Radiohead’s “High and Dry” that could peel the paint off the walls.
    When I leave for the night, the valet will tell me my tires are dangerously bald.
    â€œThanks,” I’ll say. “I’ll get those checked.”
    â€œNo, not checked,” he’ll say. “You need new tires .”

An Emotional Detroit

    My dad still sends clippings the old-fashioned way. Not by forwarding a link, but by digging scissors out of his desk, cutting out an article, circling the important parts, stuffing it in a manila envelope, and driving to the post office. It’s one of his many endearing Andy Rooney-esque quirks.
    While cleaning out my desk, I came across a photocopied page from a 2006 issue of Forbes . It was a list of famous quotes about Los Angeles, and at the top of the page, in my dad’s all-caps scrawl, it said: FOR L.A. PIG, LOVE DAD . (He’s always called me “Pig” or “Porkchop” or some other member of the swine family.) At the time that he mailed this, I had been living in LA for almost two years. He put a star next to his favorites:
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  * “California is a fine place to live—if you happen to be an orange.”
    â€”FRED ALLEN
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  * “Hollywood: An emotional Detroit.”
    â€”LILLIAN GISH
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  * “Only remember—west of the Mississippi it’s a little more look, see, act. A little less rationalize, comment, talk.”
    â€”F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  * “Living in Hollywood is like living in a lit cigarette butt.”
    â€”PHYLLIS DILLER
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  * “Fall is my favorite season in Los Angeles, watching the birds change color and fall from the trees.”
    â€”DAVID LETTERMAN
    As I re-read these quotes I could hear my dad laughing—just howling, his high-pitched honk of a laugh—as he scratched each asterisk into the page.

Oh the Horror

    Los Angeles is not a place I ever thought I would reside. Growing up on the East Coast, in very comfortable corners of Georgia and Connecticut, LA—or La La Land, or Hollywood—was not a place you lived. If anything, it was a place you read about in the tabloids and made fun of. In the beginning, when people asked why I moved here, I said I lost a bet. In actuality the decision was much less impulsive than that: It was decided over a couple bottles of white wine while eating lunch.
    To my dad’s horror and utter bewilderment, he and my mom (a chemical engineering major with an MBA and the recipient of a master’s degree in biology, respectively) raised two English majors. My dad was successful in the pulp and paper business and retired very young. My mom is hardworking in her own right, with the framed certificate in our laundry room to prove it: “Connecticut Volunteer of The Year.” My parents were not ones to put a lot of pressure on their children—it wasn’t like we had to grow up to do this, or had to become a “that,” but there were still certainunspoken expectations. My brother at least took his BA in English down a lucrative tract: He worked on Wall Street, got an MBA, and ended up back in New York, where he works in finance. While my parents knew I loved to write, they assumed I would also move to New York and get a job in publishing. I had assumed the same thing. Thus I spent all summer after graduation living at home in Connecticut, attending informational interviews in Manhattan, not knowing that “informational” means, “We don’t have a job for you, but we’ll give you ten minutes of our time.” I spent these meetings fielding comments like, “University of Colorado, huh? Big party school I hear,” while shifting uneasily in ill-fitting pantsuits from