Camilla Rantsen
Stories (11/0)
Finding Parking... or Love?
The city of Los Angeles is like dating. The actual layout, city planning, how to navigate it, is like dating or like how dating works. The traffic is the equivalent of how you end up dating a person. Maybe you met in a bar or maybe a grocery store (Bristol Farms has worked for me in the past)? And then of course there are the dating apps. But all in all, it’s the same thing. It’s traffic. It’s how you get there. Just like when you’re going somewhere in Los Angeles. From Bel Air to Silverlake, you can take the 405 (seriously?) to the 101 and just exit. Of course, you will want to account for the timing of your journey. Just like in dating. You could also not care about timing and take the scenic route. Taking Sunset the whole way, like if you feel that you’re not on a schedule to get there, at all, and you at least want the journey to be scenic, maybe even pleasurable.
By Camilla Rantsen4 years ago in Humans
How to Dress for a Breakup
If clothes truly made the man, it would be so easy. To dress him up, outline, and fill in the blanks would actually say something about your taste. And getting what you asked for would be either your reward or your curse. When you decide to have another person in your life, clothed, naked, or thrown together by circumstance, the wardrobe sometimes becomes textured subtitles, to matter and memories, and to what was, what never was or what is, ever after. It’s the story of how we dress for the first date, all the high and low points in between, and what we enter in, when we exit. Our clothes sometimes become our treasure map to how you feel undressed. What covers us in the first place might be what leaves us naked in the end.
By Camilla Rantsen4 years ago in Humans
Real Real Estate
Frankly, I was afraid it was going to leave a mark. That’s pretty much what swayed me. I live in LA and any kind of scarring on the outside is not okay. Whatever is wrecked, hurricaned and shattered into somewhat artful prisms on the inside can be covered by anything by Alo, Victoria Beckham or good skin on the outside. But that skin may break, or much worse, fold. But as it happened, at this particular moment, my friend’s insanely strong nails were digging into my relatively thin Scandinavian skin. I’m already accident-prone and have a few non-LA sanctioned scars on both the outside and, allegedly, on the inside, so I just decided to say Yes. Yes, I will help manage your big shiny quality problem, but a problem, no less. Yes, I will help you think something through that I have so impulsively done myself. No. Not have a baby. Something one has a little more control over (initially)—buying a house. I’m not usually an impulsive buyer. Not in regards to jeans, shirts or even dresses, but we all know that you can’t look fat in your house, so impulsivity had reigned. But my friend was terrified. She was in that horrible predicament of being successful, attractive and smart. But most of all, she was single. How could she buy anything when she was single? This is something you’re supposed to do with someone else. This was a secret code that most people know how to adhere to. Having a baby by yourself is absolutely fine, but buying a house? It means not needing something and as an LA woman there’s a fine line and great divide between appropriate neediness and ugly vulnerability. I told her that this was a great start, speaking in code, because when you start looking at buildings, you have to absolutely begin with code. Is the house up to code? Are you in the postal code you want to be? But this was neither about standards nor zips. Clearly she was buying into some code that did little more than surpass the mid-century moderns and take us straight back to the 50s.
By Camilla Rantsen4 years ago in Humans
Guynocology
Hello Boys. I think I get you more than ever. These past couple of years must have been horrible for you. I mean this. I’m assuming I’m talking to men who are completely flabbergasted at how many of their peers have had to learn not to rape, assault and overlook women for work. No, I’m not being facetious. I know more decent men than I know indecent men. A very decent, funny and smart man raised me. I’m the sister of one of one of those decent, funny and smart men. I’m talking to those men, right now. I’m talking to the guy who, even by the recent discovery of what women have known forever, still don’t fear going on a date, because if he was wondering about his past own behavior on dates, maybe he shouldn’t be dating, at all. If you’re a man who says that you don’t want to date now, because you don’t know if you might do something wrong, don’t date.
By Camilla Rantsen5 years ago in Viva
Issues Are My Favorite Shoes...
Issues are my favorite shoes. Baggage. We all have it. We pretend we don’t have it. If we don’t pretend we don’t have it, then we nod in ironic self-knowledge of “I have baggage," but it’s in service of the general feeling that, now that I’ve said it, you think I have a handle on it. It’s understood that the minute you’ve acknowledged what it is, you must let it go, and either tell everyone what was previously wrong with you or turn it into an app.
By Camilla Rantsen5 years ago in Motivation
Surviving Home Remodels - This Time, It's Personal!
I have upset my house painter. I have. I didn’t mean to, I just needed to have something done very fast, because I only have a 26-hour turn around. Did I insist that he did it? No. That’s not me. Even if I pay you, I often feel very bad asking you to do what I pay you to, because, polite. Yes, this makes no sense. Most of the time people want to do what they’re hired to do. I have been in a couple of careers where I’ve done a lot of things for free, because I was so desperate to do it one day for money. No, I was not a prostitute. Have I been treated like an unpaid prostitute at work? Sure. But that’s a very different story. I worked in my career choices for free sometimes, because I wanted to be in a friend’s project, I wanted them to be in mine, or it was just plain fun.
By Camilla Rantsen5 years ago in Journal
F**K Wendy
You know what? I don’t get it. It’s a fucking nightgown. A gown. Like a full on long blue nightgown. I know, I know. She’s not the problem. It’s not her. It’s just that she caters to him and I’m so freaking over it. He’s all excited, because he never wants to grow up, bla, bla, and bla. Still. He’s grown enough and jumping through the window of a girl/woman/whatever in the middle of the night and yammering on about being able to fly or something like that. In most places, in most worlds, that’s just plain creepy and really ill advised and inappropriate in today’s climate.
By Camilla Rantsen5 years ago in Geeks
5 Ways to Train a Wolf
When training a wolf it is important that you reach the status of the alpha. You may not be comfortable with that. But you must get over your fear of being assertive immediately. This is not easy. Do you want to be loved or do you want to be eaten? I know. Tricky question. Please refer to the SELF ESTEEM post that I haven’t written yet.
By Camilla Rantsen5 years ago in Humans
5 Things NOT to Say on a First Date
Cuffing season, I mean, the Fourth of July and the season of Instagramable romance, is upon us, so I am here to help. Yes, dating has been covered ad nauseam by people who have written books, written mean tweets, written notes on napkins and the ones who have gone beyond the first date to the PHD of dating, meaning marriage, and maybe perhaps un-marriage. Everybody says the same thing to women: Don’t talk about marriage, kids and hyphenating names on first dates.
By Camilla Rantsen5 years ago in Humans
- Top Story - June 2019
The Ultimate Eating Disorder... Solved by VampiresTop Story - June 2019
I was recently asked what my favorite comic book was when I was growing up. My answer: I didn’t read comic books growing up. They seemed to feature mostly ducks and mice in outfits, which unnerved me and so I took my shaken soul to other forms of reading material like Laura Ingalls, Astrid Lindgren, Daphne Du Maurier, Oriana Fallacci, even Erica Jong. (TOOOOOOO YOUNG. NOT READY. STILL NOT READY)
By Camilla Rantsen5 years ago in Psyche