© 2006

It was one of those should-have-stayed-in-bed days. I should have given my alarm clock a one-way flight out my window courtesy of my old high-school softball arm, and just stayed home watching soap operas and stuffing my face with ice cream.

And I might have, if there’d been a nice, warm, hard male body next to mine. But nope, just as my mother has been woefully predicting since puberty, I’m still single. Not for lack of putting myself out there, mind you. But trust me, no matter what you read, the men in Los Angeles are slim pickings.

Oh, there are lots of them available. But they’re attached to their mirrors, or to their cell phones, where they have their shrinks and personal trainers on speed dial.

I could move away, of course, but where else could I go and have people pay me to paint murals on the sides of buildings? Where else could I wear flip-flops all year long, and have my biggest decision be whether to paint a night sky or a city panorama?

Yeah, despite myself, I am perfectly suited to L.A. living, to the come-what-may, no-plan-ahead lifestyle.

Most mornings I get up, toast half of a sesame-seed bagel and drink a large iced tea with lemon, heavy on the sugar. I shower, pull on a T-shirt and shorts (the upside of three hundred sixty-five days of sun a year), grab my paints and go to work, where, like my father before me, I paint on-spec murals to my heart’s content, while wishing it could be to my checkbook’s content as well.

But at least I love my job, right?

At night I go out to dinner with friends and bemoan the fact that we’re living the best years of our lives single. We have dessert-even though in my case, my shorts are getting a little snug around the waist-and then I go home, feed the fish, get into bed and dream of the cute FedEx guy, who still hasn’t noticed I’m alive.