Update on my life

So much has happened in my life since the last time I posted. Basically, I moved back to Boston from LA, graduated from Boston University, got a job, and got a car. It was a pretty eventful month and a half!


My new job will be at TripAdvisor, a travel review website owned by Expedia. I'm SO excited to start working there. My title is Product Associate, and I'll be developing new features both on the website and on social media applications like on Facebook. Because the office is in Newton, and I'm very against taking the T an hour and then walking a half hour, I got a car (which was a very long process). Hopefully the commute won't be too bad, but it took me 45 minutes to an hour to drive to my internship in Santa Monica, so I'm used to traffic.

So that's the scoop on my personal life, and the reason I haven't posted in a while. Hopefully I'll be posting more regularly, but I've never been very good at this whole blogging thing...

I met Kevin from "The Office"!!!

Last night I went to a sports bar in Hollywood called Big Wangs and met Kevin (Brian Baumgartner) from The Office. He was a really nice guy, and didn't seem to mind at all that my friend Kelly and I interrupted his night out for a photo.



Hollywood is amazing! I love how started seeing celebrities after I stopped looking for them. :-)

Busy busy in LA!

Here's a quick recap of what I've been up to!

President's Day Weekend:
Went to Universal Studios with a bunch of friends, and had a great time. They're doing an amazing promotion where you buy one day and get the entire year free, so now we get to go as often as we want. It's a pretty small park with only two major rides, which is unfortunate, but the studio tour makes it worth it. Wisteria Lane, the street from Desperate Housewives, was closed off, but I can't complain because it means that filming has begun!!
Went horseback riding at the Sunset Ranch, which I would recommend for any tourists in LA. It was sort of scary, as we were riding up on the Hollywood hills, and all the horses insisted on walking right along the edge. But even though I was afraid of dying half the time, it was a lot of fun, and the views were spectacular, so it was definitely worth it!
Checked out the Hollywood Walk Of Fame, which isn't really a big deal, because it was something like my fifth time there. Even though it was a week before the Oscars, they already had the bleachers set up. I took some pictures, and it was just nice to walk around in great weather.
Oscar Weekend
No, I did not go to the Kodak Theater. First of all, I would have had to enter a raffle back in September for a chance to get in the bleachers, which I wasn't aware of at all. Secondly, it was rainy and gross that day, so they had these huge tents set up, so we wouldn't have been able to see anything even if we tried.
The show itself was a bit boring, and the montages looked like they'd been rushed, because I saw a bunch of editing mistakes. But I was very happy that Daniel Day-Lewis won for best actor, and No Country For Old Men is an amazing movie, so I was happy it won for best picture and directors, and that Javier Bardem won best supporting actor. And I loved that Atonement won best original score, it's an amazing soundtrack. I was hoping that Cate Blanchett would win best supporting actress for her performance in I'm Not There and that Ellen Page would win best actress for Juno. And congratulations to Robert Elswit, who won best cinematographer for There Will Be Blood! It was great to hear him talk about his experience with the movie last month.

Stuck in Traffic with Dwight Schrute

As soon as I walked into my internship this morning, one of the editors said to me, "We need you to run an errand first thing." Ugh. I hate driving in LA, so I wasn't too happy with the situation, especially since the office I was going to was right near where I got lost on my way to my Spyglass interview.

So I was driving (well, rather sitting) on Wilshire Blvd., less than a mile away from my destination. It was bumper to bumper, but I needed to get into the right lane. Someone let me in, so I waved that thank-you-for-being-the-only-nice-person-to-let-me-into-the-lane wave. I've made it a habit to look at all the people around me when stopped at a red light (you never know, Orlando Bloom and I might someday have a friendly conversation at a traffic light), so I looked in the rearview mirror to see what kind individual was in the car from behind me.

It was Rainn Wilson, the actor who plays Dwight Schrute in The Office.


I was so amused that I immediately called my boyfriend Bryan who watched every episode of The Office with me. When he picked up, I said, "Guess who's in the car right behind me? DWIGHT SCHRUTE!" Bryan thought it was awesome, which it was, even though I have no way to prove it (I had my camera with me, but I was in traffic, and I'd rather, you know, live).

So for future reference, even though he was talking on his cell phone while driving (which is legal in CA), Rainn is quite a courteous driver. And I've finally had a celebrity sighting in LA.

A week of rain and a celebrity sighting (well, sort of...)

Beware: Long entry ahead.

First of all, I'm sorry I haven't been posting very often. The wireless card in my laptop died, and every time I tried connecting to the internet since getting to LA, my computer blue screens and crashes. So I finally invested in an ethernet cord. Yay!

Last weekend, my friends and I went to an open house for established and aspiring cinematographers. Being a bunch of aspiring directors, writers, and advertising creative directors, we didn’t really fit in, so at first we just goofed around and pretended to be important (“So I got your script the other day…”).

But then we met Robert Elswit, cinematographer of There Will Be Blood. He talked about his experience working with Daniel Day-Lewis, who has to be one of the best actors ever. All of his performances are amazing, and he’s known to be so devoted to his roles that he stays in character when he’s not even on set. He literally becomes his character during all of production, and that takes serious dedication. I remember hearing that when filming Gangs Of New York, he always spoke with that crazy New York accent, even in normal conversation.

So Robert Elswit said to us, “You’d think he’d be a crazy guy in, you know, real life. But a couple of weeks ago, we were all at some event, you know, with our spouses… and he was talking to me and my wife. And I realized I’d actually never spoken to him off-set or had a normal conversation with him until right then. And you know what, he’s actually normal when he’s not filming anything!”

So that was really awesome, but that was the last sunny day I’ve seen here. It’s been 45 degrees and raining practically nonstop for the past week-and-a-half. And I don’t mean normal rain; we’re talking downpour style, like ack-I-can’t-see-three-feet-in-front-of-me-while-driving style. And I know that I’m supposed to be grateful to be out of the Boston cold, but honestly, it hasn’t been much better here. It even snowed here yesterday morning. 75 and sunny? Psh, talk about false advertising for LA.

So the rain means that everyone, including celebrities, go into hibernation mode. It cleared up for the two hours the actors were on the Screen Actors Guild red carpet (which is actually really eerie if you ask me… was this really just a coincidence?) But it’s been interesting to see how LA people react to the rain. There was one day when the rain stopped for a tiny bit, so my friend Alex and I practically ran to the Grove to enjoy some time outside. Of course, it rained as soon as we got there, so we sat down under a canopy and ate some sushi. It was pretty hilarious to see the LA natives reacting to the rain like it was acidic or something.

Stay tuned! Should get better now that it's going to be sunny again!

Welcome to La La Land!

I can’t believe I was still in Boston just a week ago. So much has happened, and life’s been pretty hectic. I moved in to a spacious apartment in Park LaBrea on Sunday, and my suitemates are awesome. I share a huge room with one girl, and we have a walk in closet that you could practically live in.

It’s still so surreal that I’m here; I’ve wanted to do this program since high school. The weather is gorgeous, the palm trees are beautiful, and the smog isn’t TOO bad (but it definitely does exist). Some of the other people in the program have already seen celebrities (including Steve Carrel from The Office in the 7-11 across the street, B.J. Novak from The Office at the Grove, and Marcia Cross from Desperate Housewives), but I still haven’t seen any.

Driving in LA is crazy, especially since I’ve only ever driven in a suburb before. There are tons of rules I’d never heard of before. Because of the intense traffic, there are strange rules. For example, there are some left turns that you can’t make during rush hour. But I’m starting to get used to it; except when I went to an interview at Spyglass Entertainment, and accidentally ended up on the freeway. That was scary. But most of the time, driving around here reminds me of Entourage. Which, of course, is awesome.

My two internships are going to be awesome. The first one I got is Goodspot, which is a movie trailer production company. They specialize in lower-budget films. I’ll be helping to design trailers, select fonts for use in trailers, and with other office tasks. I’ll have an even better idea for what I’ll be doing when I start next week. The internship I got just today is at The Ant Farm. This is another movie trailer production company, but they make the trailers and posters for many of the mainstream movies. They’ve done Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Shrek, The Kindgom, and so many more. They work on 50-80 movies at a time. I’ll be working in the music department, helping to organize the music database and suggest songs for use in the trailers.

So big news relevant to the writer’s strike: the director’s guild has made a tentative deal with the AMPTP. So hopefully this will have a domino effect, and the writer’s strike will be over very soon. It’s definitely easier to find out the latest insider news over here. It was also strange seeing the picketers for myself this morning on my way to The Ant Farm.

So if I don’t disappear in (1) an earthquake, (2) a forest fire, (3) a riot, (4) a gang fight, or (5) the smog, (yeah, BU spent like 5 hours warning us about the dangers of LA) I’ll post again soon. Despite the awesomeness of being here, I do miss Boston.