High-Low 12/2/13: Birthday Bliss & A Boy Named Paul I Used To Know…

This week was a reminder in how precious life is, how much we should celebrate our life & health every day…and how quickly it can be taken away.

HIGH

My high would have to be my birthday on Saturday.

Midnight cake, champagne & wishes. The best birthdays always begin at midnight. And so it begins...

 

It was a day filled with friends, food and fun! It started with a morning hike at Runyon Canyon…

A morning hike at Runyon Canyon to make me feel all 36 years alive!

 

Then there was a brunch with good friends & bottomless mimosas (the perfect marriage if you ask me) at Chic Wine Bar in my hood…

First, second and third apparent rules of bdays? 1) You must brunch with good friends and, well, 2) there must be bottomless mimosas and, of course, 3) you MUST wear sequins. Yep. It's a thing.

A manicure & pedicure at Polish Couture…

Now, THIS is what I call a birthday mani

And dinner and dancing with friends at The Village Idiot followed by Fubar.

Nothin' better than dinner & dancing with friends on your birthday!

 

LOW

Low: Remembering Paul...

As I was getting ready to leave for my birthday evening out on the town, I heard about the death of Paul Walker. I knew Paul Walker. He was one of the first people I met in Los Angeles and he dated my first roommate out here for years. I hadn’t seen him or talked to him in over a decade but those memories of that first year in LA came flooding back to me. Two Texas girls in the big city of LA ready to take on the world. And there was Paul Walker…a moviestar being a frequent face in our apartment on Holt. Eating pizza with us on our red couch. So this was LA.

I remember Paul hanging things in our new apartment when we first moved in and my mom making a joke that “If that acting thing doesn’t work out, you could be a handyman.” I wanted to die. At this point, Paul had been in Varsity Blues and had The Fast and The Furious franchise going on. This “acting thing” was workin’ out just fine for him. My mom knew this and thought it was good to keep people down to earth.

But Paul didn’t need that reminder. He was a born-and-bred Cali boy with a beautiful little daughter named Meadow who used to play at our apartment. I remember starting a diet on a Sunday and him telling me to eat some chinese food because “No one starts a diet on a Sunday. Everyone knows you start on a Monday.” I remember that I would get super annoyed that he wouldn’t buy toilet paper when he was basically living with us.  I remember that he had a very cool car – and I had no idea what it was, of course – and people used to stop in front our yellow 4-plex to look at it. Cars were a passion of his. So it seems even more tragic that they led to his premature demise.

Whenever someone passes, I always say that you feel an absence whether you really knew them or not. I would never profess that Paul was a good friend or anything like that. But Paul was basically my 3rd roommate my first year in LA and I feel the loss of that memory. He was a presence in that new chapter I started in LA all those years ago and I am so sad that his story has ended much too early. My thoughts, prayers and love go out to Meadow, his family and my former roommate who loved him very much for a chapter in her life. I’m happy he was a small part of mine for the brief time he was.

xoxo,
BF

BF Asks: What was your High-Low this week?