not appropriate nose jobs

just as i was thinking of posting about this VERY TOPIC, along comes a Newsweek story about MALE NOSE JOBS.

if there's a global epicenter of this horrifying phenomenon, it may very well be the Westwood branch of L.A. Fitness. look, there's already something nastily imasculating about the vanity of the gym, but guys with totally obvious nose jobs pumping iron make me want to curl up under the bench press and hurl.*

i consider myself something of a minor nose job expert because a) i'm from los angeles, b) i went to a hoity toity private high school where nose jobs for christmas were de rigeur** and c) i grew up in westwood, where the persian population is a particularly enthusiastic supporter of the rhinoplasty business. ***

which is all to say, when i see a nose job on a guy in the Westwood L.A. Fitness, i know what i'm looking at.

just last week, i met two extremely nice persian guys at the gym who showed me how to use some machines that i'd never used before. one of them was an obvious inappropriate nose job victim. i really felt for him, ya know, because he looked prette good otherwise, pumping weights and all, but the nose job was just...oy vey. it was the kind referenced in the Newsweek piece -- an overly feminine, pointy, upturned job of a nose.


but ya know what, i gotta give respect the INSANE GUY who agreed to BE THE SUBJECT of the newsweek piece about male nose job reversals. perhaps because of his brave public broaching of the issue, the botched male nose job population of westwood will feel that they, too, can demand the nose that they want and deserve. and then perhaps i will be able to work out in peace, without having to ponder the sorry spectacle of not appropriate male nose jobs.

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* i'd like to point out for the record that girls with obvious nose jobs working out are pretty bad, as well...but guys are worse.

** i have to give my hoity toity high school credit for cleverly mocking its student population -- in my senior year, the annual spoof newspaper (it turns from The Harvard-Westlake Chronicle to The Harvard-Westlake Chronic) graded that year's nose jobs on an A to F scale. at least one person went home in tears the day it came out.

*** no, i'm not the only one who's picked up on this trend.

some DTLA tips

if you ever happen to be walking in downtown los angeles, never walk under scaffolding. always walk around it. otherwise, you might end up having some very unpleasant encounters with human waste. the covered walkways with plastic sheeting seem to be a favorite spot for human defecation in the street.

second, and actually this is less of a tip and more of a request to the map gods: topography should be included in maps of downtown LA. actually, not topography, but an indication of levels. not that i had a map this morning when i took a new bus route to work and got lost, but maybe i would have if i knew it included elevations.

see, downtown LA is a maze -- seriously, a MAZE -- of levels of bridges and overpasses and streets at different heights. it is the opposite of human scale, something you feel strongly when you walk around here. you might think that manhattan, with its gargantuan skyscrapers, isn't human scale either, but on the ground, it's quite comfortable to walk around there and you don't really notice that the buildings are stretching up hundreds of feet above your head. by contrast, in downtown LA, that's all you notice (verticality), which amounts to a sensation that your little human body has no business walking around in a universe of towering concrete and cars.

today, i got lost for AN HOUR in the maze, walking from 6th and Hope to Figueroa and 3rd -- a walk that should take no more than fifteen minutes (true, a good half hour of my delay was due to going the wrong direction when i first got off the bus -- see route on map -- but still).

the most ridiculous moment occurred in that squiggly part, where i found myself walking down a slope towards the freeway (see picture at top of post). thank god though, i passed an attendant at the driveway to some huge building's parking structure, and she knew where figueroa was (the only person out of the 10 i asked on my journey who even knew it was in the area). these were her directions:

"wait for traffic to die down, then run across this street. then see that doorway over there? walk in it, and around the corner to the elevator. then take the elevator to the plaza level and walk towards the mural on your right. walk out the doors and down the sloping stairs about a block and a half. then you'll be at figueroa."

i had to ask directions a couple more times when i got out the doors, but if that woman hadn't been there, i probably would not have made it to work. and you probably would not be reading this wonderful blog post right now.