LOL

I was probably one of the last people in modern society to figure out what "LOL" stands for.  I'm a perpetually late adopter, and had a flip phone until mid-2018.  But, now that I grasp the concept, I can say wholeheartedly that Sandra Tsing Loh's Depth Takes a Holiday, which is a series of essays about her life in "lesser" Los Angeles, is one of the funniest books I have read in recent years.  LOL funny.  Her self-deprecating, italic-using, LA stereotype affirming, 90s essence emanating tales were not just hilarious, they were filled with sharp social observations.  So many passages had me in splits (do people still say that?!).  Here are some of my favorites:

I spent the entire late eighties shouldering about Los Angeles  in a Hyundai Excel without air-conditioning, not caring who knew.  I was a dodger of student lans, devoid of dental insurance, a buyer of Payless shoes...Oh my god!  How had this happened?  

In college, for instance, I insisted on dating these lean, athletic Sierra Club types with Ph. Ds in organic chemistry, their can-do optimism leavened with little gristly strokes of passive aggression.  Weekends became All About Rock Climbing.  Metal carabiners were always being thrust at one; I was constantly being belayed, like a stricken head of beef cattle, against my will.  One day I slipped and fell down one thousand feet of scree on my tailbone.  

"Bagging peaks" was the obsession of one bachelor.  We'' call him Stan, because today I think he's actually head of some kind of multimillion-dollar particle accelerator.  I imagine he has some frightened little family by now ("Dad says, "Let's all climb Half Dome without ropes!""), and his blood pressure is up to a thousand or his pulse is down to forty or whatever.  

Roger is suddenly drawing sixty thousand dollars a year - perhaps four times what he's ever seen in his fort-odd years.  Job description?  "Imagineer."  Now, many of us have brilliant, idiosyncratic, cantankerous friends who we think do not quite fit into this world - and certainly not into this thing called Entertainment Industry.   They chain-smoke their way into angry girlfriends' homes in Reseda, reading Tolstoy while everyone else goes off to their day jobs.  

When the flop sweat of this desperate town becomes just too nauseating, you drive up to Big Sur in a taut silence.