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“It is a scientific fact that if you stay in California, you lose one point off your IQ every year.”
– Truman Capote

And on that note, I’m off to Nashville this weekend for the wedding of one of my favorite couples on the planet, Kayla and Tyler. So excited. And just a LITTLE bit excited about seeing my husband for the first time in nearly two weeks. YES.

Happy weekend!

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.

I hear you, God! Loud & clear.

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:

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.

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 totally bites 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.