I’m waiting for my score to be released. I’ll find out in two weeks what I got, and what I got will determine where I apply. I’m set on staying in LA, so the list is already narrow. People on the sub-Reddits I lurk talk about applying to 20 schools. Apply broadly, the admissions experts say. I am not approaching it that way, and it feels like handing myself over to fate. “Here, take me and my narrow criteria and my condensed study period and the indecision of my 20’s. Take me, and show me where I’m going.”
I like being in a limbo. There’s always been magic in the days after last classes before flights home or between jobs. It’s time that isn’t watching me, and I feel like I can spread out. There’s a section of Santa Monica Blvd between Beverly Hills and West Hollywood which is long, gently curving, and bordered on one side by the most ridiculously trim hedges. The other side is a walking path and streets framed by trees which hide houses from view of the road. This is one of my favorite liminal spaces.
If you asked a group of 100 people in their 20s who went to arts school for a business idea, a significant portion would probably suggest a mixed used coffee-shop/bar/performance space with late hours. And there are 100s of those groups here, so why aren’t there places like this in LA? I am writing this at one of the only late night coffee shops I’ve found, Awesome Coffee, and it is awesome! It does not host events like my dream space would though. I’m sure there are intricacies which prevent this from being a good, actionable idea, but also, with such an obvious market, why can’t we figure it out?
On my way in I was thinking about the absence of third spaces as I looked at the sea of apartments around me in Koreatown. Another pitch: AirBnb, but just for places to go to when you want to be out of the house and on your laptop or reading or on your phone. Obviously this wouldn’t work in any apartment complex with neighbors who remotely give a shit, but there must be some place for it. One of my best friends moved here impulsively and got a studio in Ktown, and shortly after, met somebody and moved in with him. For a week or so, the idea was that he was going to keep the studio as a sort of community third space, and for a week, we got to experience it! My partner and I held callbacks for our short film there, we cooked there, we spent a night there sleeping on an air mattress sticking out of the closet. It was amazing. But it didn’t make sense for our friend to keep this place and so the third space apartment is but a dream.
I deleted “it was amazing” above and sat searching for some other expression to replace it which would go deeper and be less, I don’t know, cheugy? But in searching, I began to sink into self-aware quicksand which, if not moved away from promptly, would suck me under and probably stop me from posting this, and that would be unacceptable. This is an active limbo, okay? We try not to navel gaze in this passing phase. We don’t judge when we accidentally rhyme either. Just let it be, and move on, and post the damn first blog.
Spencer Kruse 