Los Feliz, Thursday, 7:42 a.m.

Our official shooting schedule for July 4

Los Feliz is such a white neighborhood. Everyone here seems well dressed and shiny with success, or the sheen of trying to look successful for everyone else. I can see the Observatory, which connects me to the old Hollywood of the larger-than-life stars much more than my neighborhood in south-east Hollywood does.

I live in a barrio of immigrants, strangers from El Salvador and the Ukraine. Doing what? Owning businesses, cooking food, raising children. They don't care about the hulking stages three blocks away or the manufactured billboards proclaiming the Next Big Thing. They cook something that smells like tacos at 8 a.m. and watch futbol. They wait outside the Home Depot. They park a taxi in the garage when their shift ends.

This makes it easier for me. In a business more "make it or die trying" than most, I would assume I would die trying, and end up living fatalistically. The pressure is on for us young folks trying to break into the industry to convince people that I'm It and you should pick me! pick me! Coming home every day to the yell of children and the scent of menudo reminds me that Hollywood, and the world, is bigger than the biggest hit show. There is more to life than making it here. And right now, at the end of my third week off work, I'm looking hard for that "more."

The upshot to not having a gig right now is not working in the heat. The other side of the coin is, of course, that there's no coin to have another side. People tell me they could never handle the 16-hour days of the film industry, and I tell them it's tough, but you get way more than two weeks' vacation per year. What I don't say is that it's not necessarily vacation, it's Looking For Work.