Sometimes, you just have crappy days. Despite your best efforts to get enough sleep, dress nice, look pretty, eat well, channel productivity, be kind to others and make your day pleasant, things still don’t go your way. That’s kind of how I felt about today. Unexpected rain storms, thinking about bills, getting bad news, dealing with bad moods and just an overall irritated feeling sucked the joy right out of my day. Not even thinking about going home and zonking on my bed made me feel better.
And then, right when things felt super craptastic, there was a glimmer of hope. Literally. A rainbow.
Lauren called me to the window in our office kitchen to see the most brilliant, bright, thick and vibrant rainbow I have ever seen in my entire life. Almost instantly, my spirits were lifted and my jaw dropped in awe.
It was a full rainbow too, the kind that stretched clear across the sky beyond where the eye can see. The most amazing part, however, was the base, which appeared so close you could reach out and touch it, but was miles and miles away. This was not your average watercolor-esque rainbow, oh no, it looked like a cartoon – it was that bright. I half-expected Rainbow Brite or the Care Bears to come sliding down at any moment.
It’s times like these I wish I had a camera that actually zoomed, not my amateur-status iPhone. Really, these pictures do it no justice.
I ran down the stairs and into the drizzling rain (and nearly broke my neck in my yellow heels) to get a better shot of it, and immediately, it started fading away. By the time I took these photos below, the clouds had already smeared away the top of the rainbow. When I got back inside, the extraordinary colors we are oohing and ahhing over were already starting to bleed back into the dull gray sky.
The rainbow only lasted a couple of minutes, but that’s all we needed. I think we were all meant to see it. There is an important, poetic lesson in here somewhere, but I think for me, it just means to quit griping about all the garbage you think sucks in your life, because life is damn beautiful, just as it is, and even in the worst of situations, there is always something fantastically amazing just waiting for you around the corner.
How are you feeling today? Pretty good? Happy it’s Friday? Amped for the holiday season? Me too. I have a challenge for you – watch these videos – any of them, all of them – and tell me how you feel afterward.
So, what do you think? Still jonesing for that $500 handbag? Still thinking about which 5 star restaurant you’re going to dinner at this weekend? Dreaming about your next vacation or complaining about your job, when 10% of Americans are unemployed? I’ll tell you how I feel: I am humbled. I am in awe. I am shocked. I am ashamed. And I’m inspired. And I think I just discovered the purpose for me living in this city I loathe so much.
Thanks to Mark Horvath (@hardlynormal) for his incredible work with the homeless community in LA and around the country, I found these videos on his site, InvisiblePeople.tv. His story is quite an inspiring one, if you have a minute, read this. Or just watch this:
What you are seeing below is NOT a volcano, but rather, the smoke from the wildfires that have taken over Los Angeles for the past week. It breaks my heart to think of the thousands who have lost their homes and belongings, in addition to the two firemen who lost their lives attempting to control the blaze.
Brandon Riza captured some sped up footage of the smoke, and it makes me sick thinking that I am breathing that in every waking moment. Wildfires = suck.
This past weekend we went to the Hollywood Bowl to see The Decemberists perform with Philharmonic Orchestra. Andrew Bird opened. We brought food & drinks into the show, where we had incredible seats, like 15 rows back, box seats, omg.. amazing. Best show ever.
Tomorrow night we’re going to a free show at the Hammer Museum to see the Little Ones… very excite! Have any of you seen Flight of the Conchords? Very funny show on HBO! Also been doing my best to use my Mac at home and my PC at work – it’s going well but my router sucks ass with mac so I need to get a new one. Also I can’t figure out how to get all my music and pictures off of my external HDD onto my mac – because I’m pretty sure it’s formatted for a PC. Maybe a firewire cable but UGH that’s a pain in the booty and I’d have to transfer ALL my pics back ONTO the PC to do it.
