According to Martin’s lengthy description, Actun Tunichil Muknal, or the Cave of the Crystal Sepulcher, is the most spectacular Mayan site in all of Belize. We thought that he might have been hyping it up excessively for our benefit. Brandon and I had done some preliminary research back home on what activities to do in Belize, and Actun Tunichil Muknal (ATM) was more of an afterthought. We were more concerned about hitting up every Mayan archaeological site we could in our limited time. As far as ATM, we had no idea what to expect, nor were we prepared for what we would see.

We woke to the sounds of dogs howling and roosters crowing in the middle of a torrential downpour. It was still dark at 5AM - two hours before we needed to wake up - but I couldn’t fall back asleep. I remained in bed and stared at the ceiling. At least the mosquitoes hadn’t gotten to me through the sheets. When the sun rose over the forest of trees to the east, the rain stopped and skies cleared. As we got ready to leave the hotel, Randy noticed the chair in the living room was wet. We looked up to see that there was a leak in the roof. That put a slight damper on our overall appreciation of Martha’s Guesthouse, but it was only a minor annoyance at the time. We could only hope that it wouldn’t rain anymore, even though an online weather service predicted rain for the entire week.

We stopped in Mayawalk and sat around waiting for our ride to show up. The British girl running the office, Angela, introduced us to Evril, our tour guide for the day. Evril slumped into a chair next to Angela’s desk and barely managed to nod towards us in acknowledgement. His lack of energy was in stark contrast to Martin’s enthusiasm. I overheard Evril and Angela talking about Evril’s ex-girlfriend.

“I finally met her the other day,” Angela said. “She’s cute.”

“She’s crazy,” Evril replied.

“All women are,” Angela offered.

A few minutes later, another Mayawalk employee came in the office and handed us our bag lunches. Evril asked us if we were ready to go. We all stood up, flinging our backpacks over our shoulders. Evril sized us up.

“We’ll see if we actually make it,” Evril said to Angela.

Angela told us with a heavy dose of sarcasm that Evril was their most optimistic guide. I asked Evril how long the drive was to Caracol, hoping it wouldn’t be as long as our ride the night before. He said it was only two hours. Oh well. We piled into an old blue Ford van, and after a loop around town through the narrow one-way streets we were off to Caracol.

“If the world had any ends, British Honduras would surely be one of them.” – Aldous Huxley

Belize, formerly British Honduras, lies on the eastern coast of Central America, immediately south of Mexico. I had first heard of Belize when I was working at UCLA and had just turned in my two-week notice. I had a month to kill before I started my new job, so I asked my intrepid coworker, who had just spent the past summer traveling the world alone, where I should go on vacation. Belize, he said. I was thinking more along the lines of Brazil or Peru or Japan, but he recommended Belize enthusiastically. With its diverse geography, including subtropical forest with extensive Mayan ruins and enormous caves, and over 200 island cayes within the second-largest barrier reef in the world, Belize serves as a prime destination for adventure travel. However, it is still relatively obscure as a vacation hotspot, particularly among young people. White sand beaches, warm ocean waters, and beautiful scenery are all part of the package, but it’s not the main appeal. Belize exceeds its third world roots in safety and friendliness while maintaining its laid-back, multicultural identity. It’s a rare place of vast beauty that has up to this point managed to avoid the whitewashed decadence of tourism.

Maybe some day, I thought to myself, I might go visit. Three years later, as my time with the job I had moved onto from UCLA came to an end, my old coworker's descriptions of Belize had somehow stuck in my head. I had to find out what was so great about Belize for myself. On December 1, 2007, I went on one of the best vacations I have ever had.

“Wow, 2008, damn I’m old.”

Which isn’t necessarily true or false, but it illustrates the mindset of those of us approaching our thirties. We start to question who we are and what we’ve accomplished. For the majority of us – not much. We probably landed a decent paying job, starting saving for retirement, moved closer to marriage. Maybe we’ve found a career track we can stick with, or a city to live in that suits our tastes. For those lucky ones (or unlucky, depending on how you look at it), they might have gotten engaged or even married. But for the rest of us still muddling around in what is supposed to be the prime of our lives, a sort of paralysis sets in. The older we get, the more we define ourselves by the things we haven’t accomplished. And that is precisely what is expressed when we say, “Damn I’m old.”

Normally at the end of each year, I like to do some retrospective introspection. More often that not, I end up depressed. This year, I didn’t spend too much time thinking back on my life. Some of it sucked, some of it was great. I did get to travel all over the world, mostly thanks to my sister and her three wedding ceremonies – one at home, one in Pittsburgh, and one in Taiwan. I went to Hawaii with good friends and ran a half marathon. However, I spent most of last year at work, and between falling asleep at my desk, taking two-hour lunch breaks, and damaging my liver with weekly binge drinking, it felt like a giant waste of time. Originally, I had planned on quitting work and traveling abroad for a couple months before starting film school. Before I could commit career suicide, my former boss presented me the opportunity to continue working remotely while attending school. This would provide me the means to eat and live, something I had grown accustomed to. The most practical choice was to take the offer. After I accepted, I started to look back on my past three years of work differently. I had grown as close as family with some of my coworkers, honed my basketball game in lunchtime pickup games twice a week, and improved my people skills, slightly. I was also able to start this blog, which in turn helped me get into film school, and hopefully that will enable me to devote the rest of my life to exploring LA and the world. But in the meantime, since I couldn’t quit work before school started, I would only have one week of vacation to travel.

So in the beginning of December, I traveled to Belize with a group of high school friends. I will post the recap of our adventures in the following posts. It was one of the best vacations in my young life. Unfortunately, I feel just as mentally unprepared and even more financially unstable for film school than ever before.

Due to the fact that I will be working and attending school full-time, I don’t know if I will have the time to find contributors for 30 Day LA in the coming years. In all honesty, the success of the project resided more in the experiences of the individual contributors than what happened to be recorded in these pages. I am happy that they were able to take part in 30 Day LA, as much as I am grateful for the readers that happened to wander by. I grew up a lot during my initial month on this project, but it opened my eyes to how much more time and experience I had ahead of me.

One of the core reasons why I sometimes find myself disappointed with the direction of my life is my lack of focus. Consistency has never been my strong suit. However, as with every New Year, a foolish resolution is in order. For 2008, I resolve to become more consistent and focused. So for my first attempt at consistency, I will keep alive my tradition over the past two years of saying peace out to the year.

Peace out 2007. Will youthful wisdom find us all in 2008.

Day 4
It was a Thursday night filled with Kim Chi, meat, friends and fun. Manna in Koreatown may be one of the few korean restaurants that I know that gives you tons of meat and Kim Chi minus those worthless overly long spoons and metal bowls that you can never pick up if there's hot food in it because the heat will burn your hand. Plus, I got to have dinner with some Hollywood bigwigs. If you ever want to meet the guy from the Axe commercial, I'll have my people call your people.

Day 5
You can't avoid the club scene and booty shorts for too long in LA. So, I got suckered into throwing on a gold dress and platform shoes to party it up with the pretty girls at Sugar. So, before I left for the club, I asked my friend what I should do to make myself more approachable and respected by other Los Angelinos. Her response was to tell people that I was Julia Roberts' nanny. Four years of college, three years of law school, 6 months for passing the Bar and all I had to do to get respect in LA was wipe poop from Julia Roberts' baby's butt. What a City. But it did work, cause after that conversation, I had the confidence I needed to mingle with the clubbing LA crowd...and then I met a dude in porn. Nice.

Day 6
Day 6 was met with trepidation and hesitation after booty shorts and porn stars the night before. But it turned out to be not just fun, but way more fun than I could handle. A few friends invited me out to Citizen Smith where the drinks are stiff and the music is old school rock. The highlight was when I ventured to the bathroom and discovered that the sink had offerings of not just candies of different colors splashed with diry-hand water, but cigarettes! Cigarettes sold by the single!! wow, cause sometimes, after washing your hands, you feel like a smoke. I know I did. A good time was had by all.

For my second day LA, I decided that I would become a true Los Angelino and adopt a foul attitude with stunner shades and hot lip gloss. To kick off my new day with my new LA attitude, I pulled out my lipgloss and hair pins and decided that I would do any non-self-respecting Hollywood chick would do while driving--put on her make-up. And, to my surprise, it does shave off about ten minutes from your "getting ready" time. It also increases the chance of death from not paying attention to the road, but just like any LA resident, I was going to value vanity over my own life.

Day 3

My one new thing a day in LA is getting increasingly easier. 30 Day LA for me is not about going to a new trendy restaurant or bar a day, but being able to survive in a city where people actually think that they can escape the police by initiating a car chase. It's like they think they can get away. You can never get away! Since this city is all about speed, the one new thing that I tried to do today was try to actually relax. I live in Hollywood, where normal people and prostitutes commingle together like yellow and brown M&M's in a bag. The good part about Hollywood is that the views of the city are amazing. So, I went up to the rooftop pool and had a smoke amongst the smog. I overlooked downtown LA, the Hollywood Hills, and I realized that only in this crazy kamikaze place can I have a view of both The Hills where druglords dwell in their 50 million dollar homes and also catch a glimpse of the blinking Hollywood lights and Downtown LA. Of course, I also got a good view of the moon which burned red in the middle of the night like the depths of hell. But when the red moon sunk low enough into smog where I couldn't see it anymore, I felt lucky to be there. Single, young, and getting to start my career where so many other people have come to "make it." And then I felt sad, because I wouldn't be able to enjoy it since the smog was gonna kill me, well that or I really am in the depths of hell--the moon burns red! That can't be good.

Day 1 was filled with cookies, kiwis, and cream, oh my! I went to the ever popular and trendy Pinkberry on Melrose. Since I've been here before, I decided that instead of getting something that was tasty and sweet, I would make the most offensive blend of fruit and sugar I could possibly think of. And if it did magically still taste good, then all my myths would be confirmed-- that Pinkberry did indeed have magic sprinkles in that white whipped cream. Magic it is, for only that can explain how kiwis, Captain Crunch, and Oreo could possibly ever taste good together. All three in one bite was a combo of sugar upon sugar, upon more piles of sugar and of course those really annoying black seeds that get caught in your teeth. Heaven. Highly recommended.

Oh, but it doesn't stop there. What does Pinkberry have anything to do with the movie "Big?" you may ask? Well, nothing. But do you remember that kid that turned into Tom Hanks in the movie? Well, neither do I. But nevertheless, he was there too, enjoying his fruity dessert and shelling out bad one-liners in the hopes that he could cash in on his fame as once being the kid that turned into Tom Hanks in the movie Big. Captain Crunch and being hit on by a D-lister; all in all, not a bad day in LA. If this is a sign of the 30 days ahead, I'll have to strap myself in cause I have a feeling in LA, I won't have to look far for adventure. Adventure will surely come to me.

…that is, until BSGirl#2 unleashed Godzilla and wreaked havoc and destroyed everything in site. One might wonder, “How could such a catastrophe occur?” It’s simple: BSGirl#2 had a boyfriend.

But I was still lost. I still had the same unfulfilling job, the same mindset of insecurity. A month, no matter how memorable, can’t cure several years’ worth of missed opportunities. I’m a very restless person, and I knew that taking whatever handouts came my way wasn’t going to satisfy me. I would have to stop settling and catch something more on my own. So I did what one of the people I met on my 30 days told me to do – I took a risk. A few rejections later, I figured it didn’t pay off. No matter, I just had to keep trying. I thought about moving out of LA to either Seattle, Chicago, or New York. I went to visit Chicago and came this close to falling in love with the city, but something held me back. It was this strange feeling that I never thought I would have - I had come to think of LA as home. When I got back from Chicago, I tried to list the pro’s and con’s of each city, but it came down to the irrational idea that I wasn’t ready to leave. This after telling a friend that she should move to Chicago for law school instead of staying in LA just because it’s always been home. Then, a few weeks later, a letter came in the mail. I was in denial for the next two days, not ready to believe that the risk I had taken a few months ago had actually paid off. So the decision had been made for me – I would be staying in LA, at least for the next 3 years. After several failed rounds of applications, I had finally gotten accepted into film school.

I’m pretty sure that 30 Day LA was one of the biggest reasons why I got accepted. At the end of my undistinguishing phone interview with one of the professors on the admissions committee, he asked me about 30 Day LA, which I had written about it in my personal statement. He seemed genuinely interested when I talked about my most outlandish experience (which wasn’t all that outlandish). So while I started this whole experiment to pull myself out of a long mental funk, it ended up helping me distinguish myself from a big pool of talented and equally deserving candidates.

The main thing that had changed between the time I started 30 Day LA and getting accepted into film school was my perspective. I now saw LA as a place to explore as opposed to this giant city in which I was trapped. Once I broke free from that mindset, I understood that if I felt bored or unfulfilled, it was on me, not anyone or anything else.

Now that I know my life is going to change drastically, I’m able to look at everything through a different lens. My boring job was actually like a 3 year vacation that I got to enjoy with a group of crazed alcoholic coworkers. It afforded me the luxury of free time that I could spend on photography or writing. I had carved out a decent life for myself, and I hadn’t even realized it.

As far as the blog – it will continue on. J.Bean is finishing up her 30 Day San Diego adventure. We have a new contributor who just moved to LA taking over the reigns in September. The 30 Date experiment will continue as well, a little slower than originally anticipated, but updates are soon to come. To commemorate my one year anniversary of 30 Day LA, I tried to ride my bike to work everyday. While I didn’t completely accomplish my goal, I did manage to cut my gasoline bill in half this month. All in all, a busy and productive year for both myself and this little website.

Despite everything, I’m still pretty worried – worried about paying for school, meeting new friends, proving myself in the classroom. And that’s not even mentioning the lifetime of struggles and hard work that will follow without any guarantee of success. I recently went home and visited a family friend who’s good with numbers. He calculated that it’s going to cost me at least a half million dollars in lost wages, debt, and investments in order to get my new career going. I scratched my head, plunged into a whirlwind of anxiety. A half million dollars. Not too bad, he said, interrupting my thoughts. It’s a chance to pursue my dream. A few years ago I would have deemed this kind of thinking foolish and reckless. But now, I figure it’s all a matter of perspective.

Recently I celebrated a birthday. Birthdays usually get me in a foul mood because I start reflecting on my past. I had picked a restaurant that I had never been to, a habit that still remains from a year ago. Looking at my friends across the dinner table, I thought about how much things change but also remain the same. My friends still call me angry and bitter. And perhaps I will carry some of that anger and bitterness with me for the rest of my life, but at least now I know that I’ll be able to find reasons not to be. I smiled, something that used to happen so rarely that it would shock people, as we all raised our glasses in unison. A toast to another year gone, and also to new beginnings.

August 3, 2007

Dear San Diego,

So the weekend is finally here! I love my job but the thought of enjoying every corner of you is just so much more enticing. With the workweek coming to an end, and the weekend coming, my energy level dipped to a low but with a continuous sense of regeneration for what the weekend may hold.
I started my Friday shopping with Hollywood at Fashion Valley Mall, trying to satiate the need for earrings and a new top. Seeing as I’m going out far more than I have ever, I needed to look decent as well. After a quick hour, I got what I set out for while Hollywood wasn't so lucky. Banana Republic disappointed him…again.
It’s funny what new clothes will do to you…new anything, in any case. Anyway, we made it home after hitting up Target and Coffee Bean and Tea (yay for Jasmine Dragon Tea Lattes) after the mall with enough time to spare to get myself ready for a night of relaxation a.k.a booze. I’m kidding! I’m more interested in just relaxing tonight, just chillin’ and enjoying the slower pace of life that many love about you.

-Shihan

August 2, 2007

Dear San Diego,

Okay, I admit it. I had huge ambitions of discovering a whole new you but anyone who said that relationships are easy hasn’t been in a realistic one. The second day of my promise to get to know you and already, I’m tired. I’m not going to lie. I didn’t foresee life getting in the way. The fact that there is 168 hours in a week, 40 of which are at work, 10 of them being on the road traveling to work, who knows how many I actually spend on sleeping, daydreaming, socializing, eating, showering, getting ready…etc. Point being,:

The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.

That phrase always cracks me up because I imagine an old., crotchety man saying that at the most inappropriate time. HA! Well, other than the fact I love that word…crotchety.

With that said, I have to say that despite existing in a zombie-like state, surprisingly, I had a great time tonight…there was something I’ve always wanted to do but it seems to slip my mind every time. Seeing as my experience going toe-to-toe with spontaneity the day before didn't result in the whirlwind experience I wanted, the second day of my adventure made me determined to make this day an interesting one. And indeed it was.
The first Thursday of the month, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego hosts a night of artistic expression in their downtown gallery called TNT. Thursday Night Thing for the month of August featured the art work of L.A. based artist Robert Therrien, as well as various activities that filled the night. http://www.mcasd.org/events/TNT/index.asp

Dear Readers,

My challenge started on August 1 to find out what "The Finest City" in America has to offer little, ol' me. I hope you enjoy reading my slice-of-life accounts of adventures.

Sincerely,

J.Bean
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August 1

Dear San Diego,

You are a beautiful city, Whenever I mention you, people have this instant brightness about them which prompts them to go on and on about how great the weather is or how you are a great place to know. There is nothing about the things that are said about you isn’t true, you know that, right?

So, do you want the good news or the bad news first? I don’t know how to put this but here goes. Something’s been on my mind and I just couldn’t bring myself to tell you that…well, the honeymoon is over. I’m sorry but whatever that was once there isn’t working for me. You’re full of the same old faces, same old things and truth be told, if you were an island, I’d probably be kicking trees down in an attempt to build a raft to sail away. I don’t think I’m afraid of commitment and I’ve come to know you over the course of, what, about 15 years…and yet, I feel like I’m in a rut, maybe I’m not personally growing, who knows.

It’s not you , it’s me.
I love you but I’m not in love with you.
I think I’ve lost that loving feeling…

Here’s the thing:

I don’t think I can just leave you without giving us another chance.

Well, things can’t ever go back to the way they used to be. Things change, and we have to move on. But that doesn’t mean we have to just give up. If the relationship is going to change for the better, it’s up to us, not the other party or by chance. But how do you do it? You get up off your lazy ass, make a plan to fix it, and follow it step-by-step. It’s not easy, obviously, and in the end it still might not work out. But knowing that you are actively doing something about it makes all the difference.

J.Bean has fallen out of love with her hometown of San Diego, California. She feels suffocated. She can’t go anywhere without seeing the same people over and over again. For one of the largest cities in the United States, San Diego feels like such a small town to her. So instead of letting her relationship with SD wither and die, she has decided she is going to try to fall in love with it all over again. Over the month of August, she will take on the 30 Day experiment, which will include activities like speed-dating, midnight kayaking, and performing in a slam poetry competition. If anything, these experiences will help her gain perspective towards her relationship with San Diego. Then she can decide where to go from there.

We have no way of telling what’s best for us. The choices we make and even the things we want might ultimately cause our undoing. It’s difficult to filter out all the noise, whether it’s from other people or our own uncertainties. But we do have a fighting chance to succeed, in love and life, if we choose to take it. In J.Bean’s case, she’s going to take a chance. She’s going to discover, on her own, if San Diego is still the right place for her. If it’s not, at least she’ll have fought for it. But if she finds over the next month that San Diego might hold more adventures for her than she ever thought possible, she might just fall in love all over again. And all we really need is love.

A unicorn. A mythological creature. Although it resembles elements of reality, it never exists in reality. Rather, it only exists in the mind and imagination, which potentially tricks our eyes into believing that we actually saw one.

Ah...that's why Rent-A-Car was so enamoured by her current relationship problems. She's found her unicorn, but knows that having a unicorn is completely and utterly impossible. Unicorns aren't real. They are a product of our imagination -- a fantasy that disappears in the face of reality. Such is the plague of the unicorn.

I hate to admit it, but Kryptonite was my unicorn.