What is normal, anyway?

So I’m starting to get settled in and re-acclimated. When you’ve been gone a couple months, sometimes it’s the cultural differences that you have to get used to more than anything else. I was in the laundry room down in the basement of my building, all alone, with that feeling that time had stopped – until a dog wandered in. Half a second later the dog’s owner followed suit, but for that split second I couldn’t help but think “so they just let dogs wander the halls in this place?” If anything it’s just proof that people in this town won’t go anywhere or anything without their dogs.

Then I realized I was out of bottled water and so I walked down to the convenience store on the corner, which happens to be Hollywood Boulevard, so I guess it shouldn’t have been all that surprising that they were filming some kind of scene from a movie in the back corner of the convenience store. Must’ve been a pretty big production since there were film crew trucks parked on the street, police patrolling the sidewalk, and yet for some strange reason the convenience store wasn’t actually closed for business. So if you see a movie anytime soon and the guy buying a bottle of water in the background looks like me, it probably is me. If I’d known, I’ve had combed my hair or something.

Normalcy has a different definition around here.