LA Lessons #1: The water tastes like a staph infection

It hit me last week: "I've been in LA for two months." And then the less positive, "I haven't seen any of my close friends in two months." My posts have somewhat waned because my tourist-y, "I'm in a new land" energy has waned. Our apartment is settled (we're in the midst of hanging pictures and I'll post pics of a relatively decorated apartment soon), I know how to drive a car again and I'm taking palm trees and sunshine for granted. I've spent the past few weeks trying to career shit together. I don't want this to be a career blog - I have a website, Facebook, Myspace (which is I sort of want to boil myself after checking), Twitter and mass emails for shameless promotion. At the moment, I actually don't have anything promote. So to mark my first 68-ish days, I'll focus my posts on "What I've Learned in LA" so far. In the spirit of the rules of my first post, I'll offer my lessons one post at a time. It's also 12:33 in the afternoon and still need to shower. Speaking of water.... Lesson #1: Water You have to request water at a restaurant. Waiters rarely walk around filling glasses after every sip as a display of their service ability. In fact, be happy if you get the food and drinks you actually do order in a reasonable amount of time or correct order. It's weird and I spent a lot of time pissed off at the service industry. How else am I supposed to dilute the effects of my three glasses of wine? Then I connected the dots when the weather guy on the local news freaked the f out because it might drizzle the following week. Oh right, I live in a desert now, that's why I haven't seen a cleavage zit in weeks. Also, LA tap water tastes like lead poisoning. It's awful. Everyone spends a lot of time filtering water (our household method: filling our Brita pitcher via a Pur filter attached to the faucet), buying bottled water, ordering jugs of water, creating cocktails in its honor, but no one seems to put energy into actually fixing the problem of why water here tastes like a tire iron. LA is so passive aggressive, no one wants to hurt water's feelings about how bad it sucks, but will put on a full display about avoiding it.