Three words:  Van effing Halen.  No, wait… five words:  Van effing Halen, opening night.

The high stress levels over the past months, the panic attacks at 4am, the sleepless nights, the frenetic schedule and the unbearable workload… Tonight made it all worthwhile.  I was there, in the audience, as David Lee Roth and the Van Halen brothers kicked off their first tour together in 20 years.  And man, do they still have it.  They can still effing rock. 

One more day of the Convention, and then I come home.  Then my actual life resumes without the craziness and pressure of this Convention.  I feel like this one week has been the most important of my career, like I was handed the keys in my recent promotion and over these few days, my bosses are seeing whether or not I can drive the car.  So I’m rather looking forward to getting home and watching the 20 hours of stuff waiting for me on my TiVo.  I guess it also means that all the stuff I’ve been putting off until “later,” I finally have to get around to doing.

It’s been a weekend.  After going to services Friday night for Yom Kippur, I was up packing and then couldn’t sleep for the big trip.  I finally dozed off at 1:30am Friday night… then the alarm went off two hours later at 3:30am Saturday morning (I judge days by when I sleep) to head to LAX to fly to New York.  So not only was I running on no sleep, but I flew while fasting for Yom Kippur.  Suffice it to say that by the time I got the JFK and rented the car for the drive up to Connecticut, I had a splitting headache.  I went East initially for my mom’s best friend’s son’s wedding up there, and it was a really nice ceremony and reception in a beautiful area of Connecticut.  Sadly — and I wish I knew why — I got a huge case of homesickness while I was there.  It’s been three years since I’ve seen the town that I grew up in, and even then, I was only there for literally an afternoon.  Being back in Connecticut, and especially being within an hour of my hometown and not being able to go, made me a little upset.

Either way, last night, I drove back into New York.  It was great to see the city again, and strangely enough, this time around… well, being here makes me think that maybe, if the circumstances called for it, I might be able to live here again.  I know I’ve said for a long time that it’s too frenetic and too busy and too loud, but I actually think I might be able to work it if I needed to.  I’ve been doing the culinary tour, eating at all the restaurants and places I used to love to go but haven’t been to in years.

My hotel is 41 floors above TImes Square, but the coolest part of it was realizing that they do Good Morning America live from downstairs on 44th Street & 7th Avenue, across the street from my hotel.  And in other cool stuff, I was walking back from Rockefeller Plaza last night and saw a bunch of movie trailers parked along 49th Street with people gathered outside them — then Kristin Davis walked by and into her trailer!  Continued down the street… and a minute later, Cynthia Nixon walked right by me, dressed in a bathrobe.  Yup, they were filming the Sex & the City movie.  Today, I went back to pick something up in Rockefeller Plaza, and I actually saw them filming!  Sarah Jessica Parker is short.

Tomorrow, I wake up at 5am to fly out to Charlotte, where I’ll spend the rest of the week at my company’s big annual convention, running my ass off and not getting any sleep.  At least at the end of this week, a huge stress will be lifted — basically, my bosses handed me the keys with my recent promotion, and now I have to prove that I can drive the car.  No wonder I’ve been out of my mind for the past three weeks.

So with my company’s big-ass annual Convention happening next week, suffice it to say that my stress level has been through the roof and my workload is probably about as high.  When people ask whether they’ll see me at the Convention, my response has pretty much been “Look for the overtired, overcaffeinated blur… that’ll be me.” Thankfully, The Girlfriend™ has been stellar during this meltdown leading up to next week, being extremely patient and understanding and helpful and even going as far as to buy me a Futurama action figure.

I also have been watching a bunch of pilots — TiVo has some available for free download, so I’ve already seen Chuck, The Bionic Woman, Journeyman and The Big Bang Theory.  Honestly, I felt like I’d already seen The Bionic Woman because of all the promos I’ve seen in the movies, so it’ll be interesting to see an episode where I don’t already know what’s going to happen.  I did enjoy Journeyman and I’m looking forward to it, and I’ll give Chuck a little more of a shot because it seems decently funny, but I was sorely disappointed in The Big Bang Theory — I don’t expect that one to last.  At this very moment, I’m about 20 minutes into that new HBO show, Tell Me You Love Me, and I’m seriously thinking about turning it off and cancelling my Season Pass… it’s really just not holding my attention at all.  And is it me, or is NBC completely geeking out with the shows they’re offering this season? 

So, I’m starting to think about buying a condo.

It was only natural, I suppose.  I’ve lived in Los Angeles for almost 6 years now [shudder] and my position at my company seems pretty secure, what with having survived a buyout (and being 1 of maybe 20 out of 80 who did) and actually gotten promoted twice in the process.  I rather like what I’m doing, and I can see myself doing it for a fair amount of time, if they’ll let me.  So I figured it was probably time to stop flushing money away by paying rent every month and maybe starting to invest in something that’s actually mine, plus it’ll (hopefully) appreciate over the years.  Not only that, but everyone keeps saying that the housing bubble has finally popped, so within a few months, I should be able to get a decent place at a halfway decent-for-Los Angeles price.

The question is where.  I’d like to get a place in an area that has “stuff"… you know, a supermarket within a decent distance, some restaurants, maybe some bars, maybe even a movie theatre or some other cool area.  I’d also like to be in an area where I wouldn’t be afraid that my condo or my car would get broken into or that I wouldn’t get mugged and/or beaten on the street at night, as well as some place that’s not way the eff out and makes my commute an hour each way.  However, I’d also like to be in an up-and-coming area so the condo has a chance to seriously appreciate over a few years, rather than an area like Santa Monica or Brentwood, where there’s really not too far upwards that it could go.

So, my Los Angeles-based readers… any suggestions on where to start?

So I know I said that the media was unfairly ripping into Britney, but this just takes the cake… someone needs to up their dosage a little, despite how effing hilarious it is to watch.  The scary thing is that both me and my writing partner sat watching it for a full minute before we definitively decided that it’s actually a guy who’s in the video.  And I hate to say it, but it appears to be real and not dramatized, because I get the feeling that if it was faked, we’d be handing that dude an Oscar.

Note to whoever the she-man is in the video:  You say that Britney’s “not well right now"… Hello, pot, meet kettle!

I didn’t watch the VMAs this year, but I caught Britney’s performance online after I read a couple of the reviews.  And boy, were they right — she was walking through the performance, giving a half-assed show, looking half-asleep or dazed and just completely going through the motions without contributing any energy to what she was doing.  It was pathetic, and for a supposed “comeback,” it was something that could tank public opinion of her further.  My thought is maybe that she was just nervous after not having been on stage for such a long time and with all the pressure on the performance, she took something to help her calm down and it just completely mellowed her out.

But one thing that didn’t sit right with me was all these people talking about how flabby she looked.  Yes, she’s not as in shape as she used to be — she’s got a little bit of a pooch-belly and her rock-hard abs aren’t there anymore.  But fat?  No, especially after she pushed out not one, but two kids.  And she still looked pretty hot, she just didn’t look as anorexic or scarily toned anymore.  So while everyone’s screaming about how fat she’s getting, I think it’s a good thing that she’s starting to look, well, normal.  It’s a better role model for kids these days to look “normal” rather than anorexic, because then girls won’t feel the need to starve themselves, like the one I saw walking on Venice Beach over the weekend who was so thin, I could make a circle with my thumb and pointer-finger and encircle her leg.  So I’d love it if the media could lay off her looks.

Aside from that, though… Man, she needs to either clean up her act or get off the stage because the performance she gave on Sunday was horrible. 

...

On a different note, yes, I realize that today is September 11, and I realize that since it’s the 6th anniversary, it’s the first time since 9/11/01 that today falls on a Tuesday.  Honestly, I don’t have much to say about the issue.  I’ve grieved for those who died that day (and subsequently due to health issues from it), I’ve vehemently and vocally opposed this senseless war we’ve engaged in since then in the name of 9/11 that has cost us the lives of too many American soldiers, I’ve blamed our government for not holding itself accountable for the mistakes it has made both pre- and post-9/11.  The hole still sits in Lower Manhattan… a wound, a constant reminder that we were hurt that day, despite Bush’s promises that we will rebuild.  And that’s about all I’ll say on the topic, since I don’t want to be accused of trying to politicize an event that should’ve been a galvanizing focal point to unite, not divide, despite what has actually happened since then.  But later this month, I will be back in New York for only the third time since that day, and I will once again go to the site and mourn at the gravesite of my countrymen and my country’s forward momentum.

I’m so sick of that stupid Red Jumpsuit Apparatus song “Face Down,” it’s not even funny.  I hear it all.  The.  Time.  I don’t care that it’s got a “good message” telling people not to beat their wives/girlfriends/assorted attachments, but you can get sick of “Imagine” if it was played as much as this stupid song.

Overall, though, I’ve just been getting more and more sick of American culture.  There’s such a division between the haves and the have-nots, and it seems more and more that those who have are undeserving or have no reason to have.  Yesterday at the gym, The Girls Next Door was on the TV while I was working out, and I had to keep reminding myself not to watch (my eyes seem to be automatically drawn to wherever there’s a TV on) because seeing the show was just making me more and more angry — this blonde chick (who I didn’t even think was attractive at all and not worthy of Playboy) was shopping for a condo in the San Diego area, and I’m so glad I didn’t see her in person because I would’ve punched her.  She was just expecting everything to be served to her on a silver platter and so crass and so entitled and so dumb.  And yet, I’m sure there are many people out there watching the show, either wishing they could be her, have her stuff or grow up to be her, while I thought she wasn’t a role model at all (or any other kind of model, for that matter).

And then we have Exhibit B:  more crap from Avril Lavigne.  As if I needed more reasons to hate her?  The No-Talent Ass Clown proves how full of herself she is.  Someone needs to take that little (and she is way little) biatch down a peg or two.

I thankfully was not one of the people who lost power over this, the Long Weekend of Effing Hot Temperatures.  I did, however, spend a good portion of it holed up in my bedroom, since that’s where I have air conditioning.  Very unsurprisingly, even on the Westside where temperatures were a good 15-20 degrees lower than the 110ish temps in the Valley, I could hear the hum of air conditioners all around the neighborhood all weekend.  Earlier, I had thought of commandeering The Girlfriend™’s backyard for a small gathering/barbeque, but now I’m thankful I didn’t because I and our guests would’ve been the ones cooking, not the meat.

The weekend did kick off with a bit of an interesting twist, since I was invited down to E! to be interviewed as an “industry insider” on E! Radio’s Yo! on E on Friday.  Look, people care what I think!  In the words of Ron Burgundy, I don’t know if you know this, but I’m kind of a big deal around here....  [insert snickering here] In between the three articles I wrote this weekend, I also got a chance to see a preview of 3:10 to Yuma, as well as The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters.  Truthfully, none of us liked 3:10 to Yuma — it was implausible in parts and there were holes in the plot, plus it dragged in some parts.  But I will say that Christian Bale and Russell Crowe did great acting jobs.  On the other hand, I thought The King of Kong was great — funny (even though it wasn’t specifically intended to be) and an enjoyable documentary (though it initially comes off as a mockumentary) that isn’t about doom-and-gloom topics like global warming and stuff like that.  Go see it if you have the chance.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to climb into my fridge to cool off.