When Christina Mangurian’s abuelita was diagnosed with leukemia, Mangurian and her mother were very involved in the older woman’s care. Mangurian would sit by her abuelita’s side in the hospital, and when she was discharged, she would stay at Mangurian’s parents’ house.

Mangurian’s first language is English, and her abuelita’s first language was Spanish.

“Her English was maybe as good as my Spanish, so our relationship was really loving, but I could never ask her things like, ‘Tell me about what it was like when you were younger,’ or ‘What do you think happens after you die?’” Mangurian said.

She wished she could really have gotten to know her abuelita. But that would have required a fluency she did not have.

Mangurian is a professor of psychiatry, epidemiology and biostatistics, as well as the vice chair for diversity and health equity at UC San Francisco. The nuances in communication that she missed with her abuelita are absent as well in her conversations with her Spanish-speaking patients.

Growing up in a bicultural household — with an Ecuadorian mother and Armenian father — in Miami during the early ‘70s, she learned Spanish from speaking to her Ecuadorian abuelitos. At the time, Mangurian said, her family members and other immigrants were trying to make sure their children were very “American,” which, to them, meant “speaking English only.”

For some Latin Americans, like Mangurian, not being fluent in their family’s heritage language — the language spoken in the home that’s different from the dominant language in the country — hinders but doesn’t sever their connection to their culture. For others, though, language loss can be a shameful experience. That has led to a recent resurgence of Latino Americans who want to reclaim their language.

How language is lost

Mangurian’s experience with language is common in second- or third-generation Latino Americans.

Veronica Benavides, founder of the Language Preservation Project, said her parents didn’t communicate with her in Spanish because they were physically punished for speaking the language in school in South Texas when they were kids. Later, they were told that teaching their children Spanish would confuse them in the classroom.

Pew Research Center found that in 2021, 72% of Latinos ages 5 and older spoke English proficiently, an increase from 59% in 2000. This increase is driven by the growth in U.S.-born Latinos.

The research also showed that the percentage of Latinos who speak Spanish at home declined from 78% in 2000 to 68% in 2021. Among the U.S.-born population, it has decreased from 66% to 55%.

“Even though the share of Latinos who speak Spanish at home has declined, the number who do so has grown from 24.6 million in 2000 to 39.3 million in 2021,” the Pew Center wrote.

The human development and family science departments of Oklahoma State and Iowa State universities published a study in 2021 calling this type of loss among second- and third-generation immigrants “shared language erosion.” That’s the process of adolescents improving their English-language skills while simultaneously losing or failing to develop their heritage language; at the same time, their parents acquire English at a much slower rate.

The study found that communication is a “mechanism through which families are constituted and defined, as well as through which children are influenced and guided.” It also functions as a symbol of a person’s identity, promoting a sense of belonging and connectedness.

Losing language skills can weaken those links. When “adaptation into a new culture (a process known as acculturation) changes an individual’s proficiency in one or more languages, it can alter a sense of connection to one’s culture and people, including a connection to one’s family,” the study reported.

Not being able to communicate affects how a person creates and sustains relationships because speaking the same language is essential to sharing thoughts and feelings. The study found that shared language erosion results in deterioration of parent-child relationships due to linguistic and cultural misunderstandings, limitations on parents’ ability to communicate their life wisdom and to effectively monitor and discipline their children, and aggravation of preexisting deficiencies in parent-child attachment.

The Language Preservation Project conducted a study on Latinos in the Denver area who lost their heritage language, and Benavides said it found two major themes: People felt pride when they could speak their heritage language and shame when they couldn’t.

The study shaped her organization’s work with parents and educators on how to sustain one’s heritage language and pass it on to future generations.

Benavides said it’s important to them that program participants understand that language loss doesn’t happen because of an individual’s personal failure, but because of historic and prevailing systemic barriers.

Before getting into language-learning methods and materials, they teach participants about Native American boarding schools, English-only laws and assimilation in the classroom. We “help participants understand how restricting language is a colonialist tool to control and access power,” she said.

“We also help participants examine how viewing some languages as more ‘prestigious’ is an insidious cultural phenomenon rooted in racism.”

Lizdelia Piñón, an advisor to the Texas State Board of Education and a former bilingual educator, often instructs her students and their parents on the importance of speaking Spanish at home.

The Linguistic Society of America says the assumption that being bilingual in Spanish and English would be a disadvantage to immigrants and their children is not valid. In fact, the society says, research shows that being bilingual carries a number of potential advantages, such as “more flexible thinking.”

In 2016 Patricia Gándara, co-director of UCLA’s Civil Rights Project, published a study on the economic value of bilingualism in the U.S., which found that employers prefer bilingual applicants across all sectors of the economy.

But because maintaining a first language other than English isn’t typically supported in a child’s K-12 education, there are too few bilingual teachers in the U.S. That’s true in California school districts too, where the Learning Policy Institute recently reported a shortage. There are some optional dual-immersion schools in California to promote bilingualism, and the state’s high school graduation standards include a requirement to study a language other than English — but only for one year, and it can be evaded by taking art or career technical education classes.

“So [we are] trying to change these deficit mind-sets in all the systemic places — from legislation, to the district level, school, classroom [and] to even how the teacher talks to a student,” Piñón said.

“We need to get our kids to be bilingual, whatever it takes, because we’re just giving them future capital,” she added.

How language affects identity and mental health

Though the lack of Spanish fluency is common among second- and third-generation Latinos, it can often result in teasing by family and friends. The name-calling — labeling someone pocho, gringo or “too American to be Mexican,” for example — can often be passed off as cariño, or joking with endearment.

But it can manifest into shame, and sometimes that shame can stop a person from wanting to practice the language or pass it down to future generations.

All of these different feelings can lead Latinos who aren’t fluent in Spanish to doubt their connection to their Latino culture or identity.

But what does being “Latino enough” even mean? David Hayes-Bautista is the director of UCLA’s Center for the Study of Latino Health and Culture, and this is one of his main research topics.

“I can assure you that there are 62.1 million Latinos in 2020, which means there are 62.1 million different ways of experiencing being Latino,” he said.

Hayes-Bautista reminds Mexican Americans that Spanish wasn’t the primary language of Mexico until the country was colonized by Spain. Today, Mexico’s official languages are Spanish and Nahuatl — an Uto-Aztecan language.

Hayes-Bautista says your narrative, your family’s narrative and the part you have in that make you Latino.

If and when you decide to relearn Spanish, part of the work will be understanding why English became your first language and unpacking the feelings of shame and doubt that comes with lacking fluency, said Aurelio Montemayor, the family engagement coordinator for the Intercultural Development Research Assn.

“You’re perfect the way you are, and if you want to learn more Spanish, hay una manera,” Montemayor said. There is a way.

Community and language

Six years ago, Wendy Ramirez and Jackleen Rodriguez co-founded Spanish Sin Pena, a safe space where adults can learn Spanish at their own pace.

After a student signs up for the platform, Ramirez and her team assess the student’s Spanish literacy level and offer support and guidance on how to access the pre-recorded lessons independently. Students can also sign up for other virtual opportunities such as a book club, grammar lessons, small group conversation practice, cultura lessons and panels with guest speakers.

“One of our favorite quotes from one of our students is, ‘Come to learn this language and stay for the group therapy,’” Rodriguez said.

They aren’t mental health professionals, but they have created a community where students can be vulnerable about their relationship with the language. When students share their stories of shame, guilt and self-doubt, others in the group can relate.

“There’s so many other people that may or may not feel Latina enough and have mixed emotions about their identity and it can feel like a lot to unpack if you don’t ever really sit down and think about it,” Rodriguez said.

The nonjudgmental space is what gave somatic therapist Andrea Bayón, one of Spanish Sin Pena’s first students, the courage to try to become fluent in Spanish.

“I never would have thought that I could do that, [because] it felt like my window had closed,” she said.

Before, if Bayón spoke in Spanish around family and made a mistake, her relatives’ swift corrections made her “want to shrink.” She still makes mistakes but now doesn’t shy away from speaking in Spanish with her family — or her children, who attend a dual Spanish and English immersion middle school.

Aside from language acquisition, Bayón said the program helped her reconnect with her identity.

“I’ve gotten my soul back, my culture back, and that’s the honest truth,” she said. “Because words are just words, but the access that I’ve had to finding my roots [with their help] is what I will forever be grateful for.”

Ramirez and Rodriguez say the goal of their program isn’t necessarily that students walk away being 100% fluent in Spanish. They want their students to walk away more confident.

That confidence may never be 100%, but it’s enough to motivate them to meet their goal. “It’s more like, you do the work, you learn, you grow and then you continue to grow,” Ramirez said.

If you’re hoping to climb Mt. Whitney in 2023, Wednesday is the beginning of the drama. That’s when U.S. Forest Service officials open the monthlong lottery for permits at Recreation.gov.

The lottery will be open Feb. 1 through March 1, with applicants obliged to choose whether they plan to climb in a day or over multiple days. Results will be announced online March 15, when good or bad news will be posted to hikers’ personal profiles on the website. Last year, 29% of lottery entrants got good news. The year before, 28%.

At 14,505 feet (or 14,494, depending on which expert you ask), Mt. Whitney is the highest peak in the Sierra Nevada and the contiguous U.S. The most common path to the top includes 6,200 feet of vertical gain from the trailhead at Whitney Portal, 14 miles west of Lone Pine in Inyo County.

It can be dangerous, especially when snow remains on the trail. The Inyo County Sheriff’s Department reported at least four Whitney climbing deaths in 2021 and 2022, many of them “in spring or early summer due to falls on snow and ice.” Despite drought conditions throughout the West, the National Weather Service and California Department of Water Resources officials have reported an unusually heavy snowpack in the Sierra Nevada so far this winter.

“At higher elevations the snow might linger as late as July,” said Lisa Cox, public information officer for Inyo National Forest, in an email Tuesday. “People will need ice axes, crampons, and additional skills (and training) to travel on snow and ice-covered slopes. This shouldn’t necessarily deter people from going, but [be] prepared to turn around before reaching the destination of your choice, a.k.a the peak.”

The trailhead is 8,374 feet above sea level. From there, the most popular route is a 22-mile route up the mountain and back, including a stretch of 99 switchbacks near the top. In all, the trail typically entails 12-14 hours of climbing (and packing out your own waste in a WAG bag, named for Waste Aggregation and Gelling).

U.S. Forest Service officials call the route “non-technical, but strenuous” when it’s free of snow, which is usually from July to late September.

Aspiring hikers will need to give the size of their group (maximum 15) and the day(s) they hope to hike, with up to 10 alternate choices allowed.

Winners need to pay a $6 reservation fee per permit and a $15 recreation fee per person and fill in reservation details by 9 p.m. April 21. If there are dates left open, would-be climbers can seek reservations online (first come, first served; no phone applications) beginning at 7 a.m. April 22. Though walk-up permits have been possible in the past, there are none this year.

The vast majority of hikers go up during “quota season,” May 1-Nov. 1, when officials set a daily entry limit of 100 day-use climbers and 60 overnight climbers. The Forest Service forbids resale or transfer of permits, and there are no rain checks.

Inyo National Forest’s Cox noted that some climbers who win the lottery later cancel their permits or reduce the size of their group, “so permits may pop up again.” She suggested regular checks of Recreation.gov.

In 2022, officials took 26,767 applications Feb. 1 through March 15 and turned away 71% of applicants. The 29% of group leaders who won (that is, those who were awarded one of their requested dates) included 2,739 planning overnight climbs and 4,243 seeking day-use permits (which are only good for 24 hours, midnight to midnight).

 

Southern California isn’t the most obvious place to forage for mushrooms. Mushrooms thrive in damp and dark places, a description that doesn’t always match the climate of drought-dried Los Angeles.

But during L.A.’s rainy season — from mid-October to mid-April — local mushroom lovers still hit the trails.

“This is an exceptionally good mushroom year,” said Bat Vardeh, the field trip chair for the Los Angeles Mycological Society, walking through the trails behind Canyon View Park in Aliso Viejo. “This is not common, just walking around and seeing mushrooms left and right.”

Vardeh, 26, essentially eats, sleeps and breathes mushrooms. When she’s not leading Mycological Society forays (group trips to identify fungi), she runs another group called the Foraging & Mushroom Hunting Women of SoCal and forages on her own to reduce food waste. Even when it comes to work, she’s hunting for ’shrooms.

“Technically, I get paid to collect mushrooms for the fungal diversity survey,” she said. “I collect fungi that seem interesting and I send them in for DNA sequencing.”

For the last three years, both foraging and fungi have been on the rise. Creators like Alexis Nicole Nelson, who’s best known on TikTok as Black Forager, and William Padilla-Brown, who’s known on Instagram as Permaculture Papi, have drawn audiences with their tips and finds. The foraging hashtag on TikTok itself has more than 115 million views.

There are plenty of reasons why people enjoy foraging for mushrooms: Some forage for their own cooking and baking purposes, while others just enjoy the opportunity to get out of the house. One big draw for both beginners and experts is the challenge of exploring a field that still has so many unidentified species.

If you’re new to the foraging community, never fear. Here are some of Vardeh’s best tips and tricks for identifying and responsibly gathering fungi in the wild.

Go with the experts first

It’s advisable to start your foraging journey with some supervision. If nothing else, this will ensure you have someone verifying your mushroom identifications and bringing you to the safe trails. “There’s a lot of stuff that you might think you know, but until you have it confirmed, you won’t really know,” Vardeh said.

The Mycological Society organizes forays that are open to members (membership costs $25 annually) and some events that are open to the public, but parks like Griffith Park sometimes also offer forays that are open to anyone.

Vardeh, who leads field trips and forays for several different organizations, said she always tries to ensure that newcomers feel welcome to participate. “I tell them all that it’s a no-judgment zone,” she said. “They can take any mushroom ID guess they want.

“I love getting a ton of people just really excited about mushrooms,” she added. “And then getting them hands-on with the mushroom so they can go home and think about it.”

Beyond just keeping people safe (which we’ll expand upon in a moment), Vardeh guides groups to fruitful spots and nurtures their curiosity.

“Look to your left and right,” she said as we wandered deeper into the woods. “There’s mushrooms everywhere already. Once your eyes land on them, you won’t stop seeing them.”

Look for the right plants

One tip that Vardeh gives new foragers is to look for plants that have symbiotic relationships with fungi. “Oak trees are like ‘X marks the spot,’ because there are so many mushrooms that have special relationships with oak trees,” she said. If it rained recently, you’ll very likely find a mushroom under the tree.

“Let’s look up here because some of these oak trees are really big and really old,” she said as we approached a large tree. “They have some dead branches on them that are still kind of hanging on. A lot of times you can find oyster mushrooms coming off of these.”

As expected, her advice was spot-on.

“We’re gonna get them. Yeah, we’re not leaving without them,” she said as we looked at a cluster of oyster mushrooms about 20 feet above us. “We’re gonna get a big stick. One person pushes; the other one catches.”

Vardeh suggests that new foragers in SoCal keep an eye out for common mushrooms such as coprinoids (inky caps), Leratiomyces percevalii (a woodchip-loving ’shroom), Agrocybe (found in grassy and wood-chip-heavy areas) and Agaricus fungi.

Agaricus is “really common to find year-round anywhere there’s irrigation and grassy areas, and a lot of those are edible,” she said. “But they’re also known as the ‘lose your lunch bunch,’ because edible ones look exactly like the not-edible ones, but the worst that they’ll do is make you throw up.”

After a good rain, Vardeh also recommends looking for Pleurotus ostreatus (oyster mushrooms, which grow on some hardwood trees) and Trametes versicolor (turkey tails, which some people like to brew into a tea).

If you’re lucky, you might even come across Vardeh’s favorite mushrooms to find: Lactarius rufulus, better known as candy caps. “They smell and taste like maple syrup when they’re dried,” she explained. “Candy cap cookies are very popular.”

Take safety precautions

Vardeh uses the acronym BOLETE (yes, like the type of mushroom) to remind her foraging groups of what to keep in mind.

B: Be aware of your surroundings.

O: Only forage in areas where it is permitted.

L: Let someone know where you will be going.

E: Extra water and snacks.

T: Toxic lookalikes? Always make sure to double-check what kind of mushroom you found.

E: Eat only what YOU are 100,000% sure about. When in doubt, throw it out.

The last rule is especially important, since a few types of mushrooms are deadly when ingested.

“You can touch any mushroom,” Vardeh reassured. “In order for mushroom toxins to impact you, they have to be digested.”

There are some general indicators that can help new foragers avoid poisonous mushrooms. Fungi with red caps or stems; mushrooms with white gills, skirts or rings on their stems; and any ’shrooms with a bulbous sack or volva are all worth avoiding. Some edible mushrooms are nearly identical to toxic ones, which is a great reason to err on the side of caution.

While you’re on the trails, it’s also essential to note where you’re grabbing mushrooms from.

“We have this thing that we call the dog pee zone,” Vardeh said, pointing to the edge of the trail. Plucking mushrooms from there would be similar to eating yellow snow: gross.

But bugs, for the most part, are not a concern.

“Mushroom hunters are very aware of springtails being in their baskets,” Vardeh said as she brushed away some small insects. “They don’t actually cause any harm. Some people are like, ‘I don’t want to eat bugs,’ but we’re all just like, ‘It’s extra protein.’”

Though it might sound obvious, it helps to show up prepared.

Vardeh recommends wearing a long-sleeve shirt and long pants since some of these trails have poison oak and other itchy plants nearby. She also recommends bringing ample water, snacks and some reusable containers in which to stash your finds.

Reading up before you hit the trails also can be helpful. Vardeh’s favorite book for beginners is “All That the Rain Promises and More…” by David Arora. (For more advanced foragers, she recommends “Mushrooms of the Redwood Coast” by Christian Schwarz and Noah Siegel and “Mushrooms Demystified” by Arora.)

She also recommends joining iNaturalist, a social network for naturalists and scientists. “When somebody takes a photo of a mushroom and posts it on iNaturalist, it shows the location where it was found and has an algorithm that gives you a suggestion as to what it thinks it is,” she explained. “But then, it publishes it for experts — like really mushroomy experts — to take a look at these and then tell you what you have.”

Though you can observe mushrooms and fungi anywhere you please, each park and forest has different policies when it comes to taking anything home with you.

Cleveland National Forest, Los Padres National Forest and Angeles National Forest are three of Vardeh’s favorite places to forage. Most of the national forests advise visitors to limit “collection of edibles, such as mushrooms and berries, to what you can consume during your visit,” but it’s worth checking specific guidelines with rangers at each park.

“For the most part, as long as you’re being ethical and conscious of your harvest — basically not out there to pick the forest clean and sell them — national forests are OK with foraging,” Vardeh said.

And if you’re just curious to look around and take photos, most public parks are also fair game.

“This area’s really amazing because Southern California is not like this,” Vardeh said as we explored Canyon View Park. “It’s normally uncommon to find more than a couple of different species, but we’ve already found a ton of different species and we haven’t even scratched the surface.”

In Sunday Funday, L.A. people give us a play-by-play of their ideal Sunday around town. Find ideas and inspiration on where to go, what to eat and how to enjoy life on the weekends.

As the mom of a 2 ½-year-old, Rachel Bloom has had various aha moments about parenting. One example: “Becoming a parent means you now side with Ariel’s dad,” she muses on Instagram. And another: “Everyone says that toddlers are selfish, but my daughter has just very kindly given me her beautiful hand, foot, mouth disease from preschool.”

But one of the biggest realizations she’s had is that raising a kid is hard. “Most of us spend 30ish years of our lives honing skills in anything but this, and suddenly you have a kid and immediately need to become an expert in a thing for which you have had no previous training or experience,” she tells me. “There should be mandatory childcare classes in every high school and college. That, and how to do taxes.”

Yet for Bloom, the actress-writer-comedian who starred as Rebecca Bunch in the CW musical dramedy “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” (shout out to West Covina) and more recently as Hannah in the Hulu comedy series “Reboot,” there’s joy in the adventure. She calls her daughter “the sweetest, funniest, smartest and most conscientious toddler in the world” (while acknowledging that everyone says that about their child) and loves sharing stories about their days together.

“Lately, she has taken to getting on her toy phone, calling Barney the purple dinosaur, and then when he ‘picks up,’ saying to him, ‘OK, call you later’ — as if she weren’t the one who called him in the first place. She’s gaslighting Barney!” Bloom says.

She and her husband, writer and film producer Dan Gregor, work a lot during the week so Bloom says the weekend is their time to “be a family.” Here’s what they’d do on an ideal Sunday — both in their Silver Lake/Echo Park neighborhood and all around L.A.

10 a.m.: Take a morning stroll

We’ll get up and do a family walk with our dog, Wiley. I love our neighborhood because it is both incredibly suburban and quiet but also minutes away from Sunset Boulevard. I sound like a real estate ad.

11:30 a.m.: Order carbs and read the paper

With a toddler, going out to brunch is challenging. So we’ll either order pastries from Clark Street Bakery or bagels with lox and cream cheese from Maury’s. My daughter has taken to lox and smoked salmon and salmon sushi. It’s awesome. She’s like a baby bear. And then we’ll sit and read the paper.

1:30 p.m.: Optimize nap time

This is not the “fun day” part, but her nap time is our time to get errands done. We’re always going through her toys, like, “What can we give away? What can we prune out?” I’ll clean out my office and catch up on emails. Or I’ll get my nails done at Gloss NailSpa in Silver Lake.

3:30 p.m.: Explore L.A. through a toddler’s eyes

When my daughter wakes up, we’ll do a family activity. I love going to the children’s garden at the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. It’s just magical. My daughter loves the fountains and the fact that you can go barefoot in the river. That’s super fun. And we’ll run around and look for the koi. Sometimes, there are ducks and bunnies.

We also love going to Travel Town in Griffith Park. She can ride the train forever and ever and ever. And I love the fact that it’s a step back in time. L.A. feels like such an isolated place, and we’re just all in our cars. But it’s good to remember that Los Angeles was originally a place for great public transportation, including the trains.

Also, any park with a swing? That’s really all she needs.

5:30 p.m.: Try a kid-friendly dinner spot

A good place for family dinners is Messhall in Los Feliz. There’s an outdoor section, so if you have a toddler, it’s OK. Greekman’s in Silver Lake is another place we like to go. My daughter is obsessed with pomegranate seeds, and so we’ll always get something with pomegranate seeds. And then we’ll get some of the pita bread there. Their pita is great. And then usually a meat platter. You know what else is really good for kids, surprisingly? Girl & the Goat. Apparently, [chef] Stephanie Izard has her kid try every dish there.

7:30 p.m.: Have an evening ritual

We’ll do a big family dog walk at night. This is very ritualized — it’s like we’ll do the big family dog walk, she watches “Daniel Tiger,” takes a bath and goes to bed.

7:45 p.m.: Welcome the babysitter

We’re going out! If we get a sitter, that means we have a show. My husband performs at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, which is now back, and I perform at Dynasty Typewriter.

Or we’ll hang out with friends. We went to a birthday party at Clifton’s Republic in downtown, and now that’s something we want to do more of. It feels like you’re at Disneyland. It’s like an amusement park but for adults. I don’t know why everyone isn’t talking about it all the time! There was a burlesque singer. It was like she was in the swing-dance-1930s era. Every room has a different theme, and it feels like a bar version of the Madonna Inn. And I just love kitsch. It’s amazing that it exists.

11 p.m.: Head home

We might make a late-night grilled cheese and watch “Shark Tank.” We’ll be in bed by 12. Saturdays are when we push it.

I wanted to meet a man who loved opera as much as I did. A man who loved drama! Spectacle! Romance! And, most important, opera music — that magnificent sound booming across centuries into the mirrored halls of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in downtown Los Angeles.

Preludio

My dating history featured a catalog of opera seria, each ending more tragic than the last. In my 30s and four years out of a decade-long abusive relationship, I was finally ready to love again.

As a singer, I understood well that finding an available, age-appropriate, heterosexual man at “The Clemency of Titus” was as rare as finding a one-bedroom on the Westside for less than $1,800. And more than halfway through the opera season, I had yet to meet someone.

Still, to be the heroine of my own story, I had to follow my heart.

Atto Primo

After the performance, I boarded a shuttle to the after-party hosted by L.A. Opera’s young professionals club, wishing I had someone to share the evening with.

A woman sat beside me, turned and chimed, “I’m Rosa.” Her radiant smile, like a soprano’s voice, was bigger than her petite frame. We hit it off talking about yoga (we both love it), vegans (she’s a former; I’m a lifer), rude audience members (they never go away) and earthquake preparedness (because the Big One is coming one day).

Twenty minutes deeper into downtown at Preux & Proper, Rosa inquired if I was single. “I want you to meet my bestie, Denny. He’s like my big brother. Never been married, raised someone else’s daughter, best man I know.”

She handed me her phone. I flicked through photos of a long, lean Cuban man with cheekbones so chiseled they could cut a woman’s heart.

“Plus, he does yoga,” Rosa said beaming. “And he’s vegan!”

This is a lie, I thought. A setup. I scrolled through a mental list of prank TV shows while scanning Spring Street for hidden cameras. No way this guy is real.

Before I could refuse to sign the talent release I assumed I’d be handed, Rosa said, “I just texted him to meet us.”

Suddenly there was a glimmer of hope. I excused myself to the restroom, asking my reflection: Has my fortune finally changed? When I returned, Rosa looked up from her phone. “Damn. He’s in Calabasas.”

Given traffic from the Valley to downtown on a Saturday night, he may as well have been in Casablanca.

“Can I give him your number?”

Like so many ill-fated Angeleno relationships, our meeting was geographically undesirable.

Atto Secondo

Denny was supposed to call the next day but didn’t. Alas, he was too good to be true. Then the phone rang. “Please forgive me! I had a patent issue with my golf invention. How are you?” he said.

“Feeling like Cenerentola,” I said. “My toilet is clogged. My management company is worthless, and I’m scooping dirty water into a bucket so I can plunge it myself.”

“You don’t waste any time getting to the dirty talk, do you?” he said.

Our scatological salvos more than made up for the delay. As Rosa promised, Denny was playful and loving, smart and charming, interested and interesting. We talked for hours before setting up our first date.

During dinner at Vegetable in Studio City, I learned that Denny was an athlete and entrepreneur who liked plays and tolerated musicals. But he warned me: He’d never seen an opera.

“Rosa keeps bugging me to go, but it’s just screechy.” He shrugged.

Disappointed but not deterred, I also learned that Denny was a drummer and dancer. Perhaps he could learn to love opera, with its percussion and ballet.

We closed the restaurant. Between tables stacked with chairs, Denny gleefully leaped out of his seat and landed in a yoga pose. I joined him in Warrior II.

He extended a sculpted arm toward me. Our palms touched, and just like when Rodolfo clasps Mimi’s cold, consumptive hands in “La Bohème,” the orchestra in my head crescendoed into a love theme.

I invited Denny back to my apartment. At 3 a.m., I sent him home with plans to see each other later that day. Two weeks later, he’d practically moved in, and we made it official two months after that when I added him to the lease.

Atto Terzo

That same month, Rosa and I planned to attend a performance together, but two hours before curtain, she had an emergency.

“Can you invite someone?” she asked over speakerphone.

“I’ll go,” Denny said, surprising everyone — most of all himself.

It broke Rosa’s heart that Denny would see his first opera without her, but she gave us her blessing. “La Traviata” made a great introduction to the art. Sure, Violetta’s vocal gymnastics didn’t thrill him, but by the end of Act I, Denny admitted he was enjoying himself.

Then, at the top of Act II, some late-comers disrupted the lovers’ duet so badly that we wrote to L.A. Opera to express our disappointment. That’s how Denny wound up seeing his second opera — with comp tickets to “A Light in the Piazza.”

Now when “Don Giovanni” gets shuffled through the car speakers, Denny kisses me and kindly asks me to skip forward. I thought I wanted a man who loved opera, but what I really wanted was someone who loved me. And my big-hearted jock loves me with operatic ferocity.

Our romance doesn’t have a score, but it does have a tiny libretto — a text Rosa sent Denny from the after-party: “I think I just met your soulmate.”

A comic opera ends with a wedding, and our opera buffa is no exception.

Rosa will officiate.

The author is a writer, performer and producer living a low-impact life along the L.A. River. Find her on Instagram: @gia_mora

L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $300 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.

I’m familiar with magic mushrooms from back in the day. I took them a couple times in college — including on a particularly memorable Halloween — and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. So I was curious about a Santa Monica-based startup called the Reality Center that’s been trying to expand the mind and aid in healing the body via digital psychedelics — a proprietary combination of pulsing lights, sounds and vibrations — instead of consuming drugs.

Psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, is enjoying a peak pop-culture popularity not seen since the 1970s. Although illegal at the federal level, its consciousness-altering properties have shown promise in helping to treat PTSD, depression, anxiety and addiction. And recently I’ve heard Angelenos at cocktail parties swapping stories about their adventures in microdosing mushrooms (taking extremely small amounts) as casually as they might have discussed cannabis a decade ago.

The use of psilocybin mushrooms was legalized in Oregon in 2020 and decriminalized in Colorado as of January, but recent efforts to give similar access to Californians have so far been unsuccessful (though a handful of cities — including San Francisco, Oakland and Santa Cruz — have passed resolutions effectively decriminalizing magic mushrooms).

For Angelenos, that means experimenting with psychedelic drugs requires breaking the law or taking a trip — as in an actual physical one — to one of the above shroom-friendly locales.

That made the idea of taking a legal psychedelic trip right here in Southern California (even under the guise of “sensory wellness”) appealing, though the price tag — $249 for a 60-minute session — gave me pause. Could a drug-free drug trip be worth that much? Especially when compared to the cost of magic mushrooms in the decriminalized marketplace? (Shelby Hartman, co-founder and editor-in-chief of L.A.-based psychedelics-focused magazine DoubleBlind, said an eighth of an ounce of whole, dried psilocybin mushrooms — enough for a serious trip — is currently “somewhere around $40 to $50.” That means flying round-trip to Denver and munching magic mushrooms the old-fashioned way would be about the same price as an hour-long digital trip.)

But if the Reality Center’s magic technology really could alter someone’s consciousness the way magic mushrooms or other psychedelic compounds could, especially over several sessions (the company says the benefits increase over multiple sessions), maybe the results — therapeutic or recreational — would be worth every consciousness-expanding penny. There was only one way to find out.

I booked an hour-long session (and used a promo code for new customers, saving me $50 off my first session) via the Reality Center’s website, and then filled out two follow-up documents including a medical waiver (attesting that I didn’t have any implanted medical devices, photosensitivity or epilepsy). The other was a kind of New-Agey questionnaire that asked about my goals for the session, my astrological sign and my least-favorite color.

A few days later, I was on a bustling stretch of Santa Monica’s Second Street, where the portal to expanded consciousness appeared to be sandwiched between a hostel and a hot yoga studio. I found four other adventurous spirits were already queued up outside.

We were all ushered inside a dimly lit cluster of rooms by Tarun Raj and Jonathan Chia. (The former an artist and inventor and the latter a U.S. Army combat veteran, they co-founded the company with Benji Tucker and Don Estes.) The largest of the rooms inside the Reality Center felt like a trendy Hollywood fitness space set up inside a high-tech recording studio with a handful of massage tables in the middle, a trippy wall-sized video screen on one side and a rave-worthy stack of audio and visual equipment topped with a computer screen on the other.

“What we’re doing is sort of like neuroscience DJing,” Raj said after someone pointed out the equipment’s resemblance to a DJ setup. He explained that the role of the person behind the controls (known as the “reality manager”) is to use the various sensory inputs to, in his words, “jump-start” the mind and body and move it toward a near-meditative state. It’s an approach based on Estes’ theory of sensory resonance, which posits that the body’s autonomic nervous system can essentially be “reset” by synchronizing all of the major sensory mechanisms together — visual, aural and vibrational.

The foursome of aspiring psychonauts I’d arrived with would be launching from this room, which Chia said can accompany groups of up to eight people at a time.

Smaller rooms around the periphery were set up for different scenarios. One space was for vocal analysis (which includes creating a kind of visual voice print designed to help you amplify and manifest your intent), one for post-session integration, one for a two-person experience (“Like when couples get a massage together,” Chia said) and one for the Wavetable experience. It was this last room that was to be my departure lounge.

Chia, who was my session’s reality manager, first asked me to remove my shoes and glasses and lie down on what looked — and felt like — a massage table with a foot-thick soft-sided waterbed layered over top. He explained that the mineral-heavy liquid inside the squishy layer was designed to mimic that of the human body. As I prepared to take my journey, Chia shared a little bit of his own.

As a military veteran, he had originally tried to treat his post-traumatic stress by self-medicating with drugs and alcohol. His path to sensory wellness began after Raj, a longtime friend, introduced him to the healing power of reiki. Fast-forward to January 2022 when, having joined forces with Tucker and Estes, the Reality Center became a reality.

My session started with Chia leading me through some simple breathing exercises. Then he asked me to imagine myself in one of my favorite places (I pictured a mossy, wooded glen near my family home in Vermont) surrounded by the people who were important in my life (I imagined my family — a generation in each direction — with everyone wearing white like in the Season 1 finale of “Modern Family”). “You are rooted like a sequoia,” he said calmly into my headset, “strong and reaching up toward the sky.”

From here on out, things got next level pretty quickly. With my eyes firmly closed, I could full-on “see” the pulsing lights positioned just inches from my face — mostly cascading, melting and swirling whorls of color. Chanting, tinkling bells and crashing waves swelled into my headphones at the same time as rumbling and vibrating increased on all sides of me. From time to time, I could hear calming spoken-word snippets (“We find one ember. And very gently we fan that ember. Blow on it, it gets brighter. And from that ember we rebuild the fire …”).

Maybe halfway through, I became unmoored — detached as if I’d suddenly been cut free from a parasailing tether I didn’t know I’d been connected to my whole life. I had the sensation of hurtling through space. When waves crashed in my ears in concert with the rumbling beneath me and the rippling patterns lit up my optic nerves, it seemed as if I was nothing but sand passing through a reality sieve, all my constituent molecules dissolving at the waterline of a vast ocean.

I was one with the swirling fractal rainbow aura at the center of the universe and, for a brief moment, it felt as if I was staring backward through time to observe my own swirling double-helix strands of DNA taking shape out of the cosmic soup of nothingness. I felt hot tears well into the corners of scrunched-shut eyes. They were tears of gratitude, tears of suddenly feeling at peace, as if just for a nanosecond I’d been lucky enough to get a glimpse behind the curtain, to peek at the run-of-show road map of the universe and see where my dust-speck self fit into it.

Eventually, the sound, the pulsing lights and the vibrations began to ebb. As I once again became aware of my surroundings, I heard Chia’s voice urging me to take a few deep, centering breaths.

As I sat up, things seemed that kind of clean-windshield different you feel after a particularly good therapy session. I had the sense that many hours had passed, though Chia assured me only 56 minutes had elapsed since I had removed my shoes and glasses. As I left the Reality Center and walked across the street to my car, the sun felt brighter.

Was it my imagination or did the abstract design painted over the bank of elevators really look like the fractals I’d just seen from behind closed eyes? And was that the throaty rumble of passing cars synchronizing with the nearly imperceptible vibrations in my solar plexus?

Some of those feelings could be a kind of immediate-post-experience placebo effect, but a full week later I still saw things — large and small — that remind me of that mid-session moment when I looked the universe right in the all-seeing eye and saw it wink at me. I see it in the hummingbirds flitting past my window, hear it in the gurgle of my emptying dishwasher and feel it in the vibration of the cellphone in my pocket.

So, yeah, the ride was well worth the ticket price for me. And here are several reasons why it might be worth it for you too.

1. It’s totally legal

This is probably the biggest upside of taking a technodelic trip. Even if you go to a place where psilocybin has been decriminalized under state (or city) law, its status as a Schedule 1 drug at the federal level will make it a nonstarter for many people. (And tripping while keeping one eye open for the man isn’t exactly relaxing.) That’s not an issue with digital psychedelics. Unless you happen to live somewhere where music, pulsing lights and vibrating massage tables are against the law — in which case you’ve got more problems than psychedelics can solve.

2. $249 is the ceiling — not the floor

The price I paid was for one of the more expensive experiences: a 60-minute session on the waterbed-like Wavetable. Also on offer are half-hour sessions with the same set-up (for $149) and a couple of options that swap out the squishy layer of mineral-heavy liquid for a vibrating massage table (one hour for $99, a half-hour for $59). That’s not including any potential first-timer discounts like the promo code that shaved $50 off my maiden voyage.

The cost of a session could drop all the way to zero if you’re a qualifying military veteran. According to Chia, since it opened last year, the center has provided free treatments to 250 veterans and their families and discounted services for another 50. (Interested veterans should reach out to the Reality Center through its website for additional information.)

3. It’s super-convenient

The length of a drug-induced trip depends on a lot of factors. If you ingest magic mushrooms, you’re essentially booking a four- to six-hour flight with some lingering effects that can be felt long after that. When you go the digital route, an hour-long session is just that, making it possible for over-scheduled Angelenos to wedge this approach to sensory wellness into their lives as easily as booking a massage or taking a yoga class. (The day I visited the center, one of the foursome I arrived with at 11 a.m. said: “I’ve got to be somewhere at quarter of 12, will that be OK?” It absolutely was.)

4. It can be a real trip

I was surprised that the digital trip felt so much like the analog ones I remembered from my college days. Most familiar were the trippy visuals (though here through closed eyes instead of open ones) — the mid-trip epiphany, the realization that we’re insignificant specks of dust and integral parts of the great cosmic game plan at the same time.

5. Consider it pre-flight for a deeper dive

Doubleblind editor in chief Hartman said digital psychedelics — not just the treatments offered at the Reality Center but also virtual reality and augmented reality experiences in the space — can also be valuable for otherwise unprepared first-time psychonauts.

“I think for sure what they can do is give people a sense of what the sensorial experience of being on a psychedelic might be like,” Hartman said. “Specifically when it comes to visuals. If you haven’t done a psychedelic in which you’ve had a strong visual experience, it’s very hard to understand what that’s like — it can be profound and it can be overwhelming.” She explained that the kind of drug-free drug trips served up by the Reality Center can give people an eye-opening sense of what they’re in for if and when they embark on an old-school psychedelic trip.

6. The bottom line

Because the pop-culture ascendancy of the magic mushroom is all but assured (another bill to decriminalize psyilocybin in California was introduced late last year), the Reality Center’s biggest value may be that it’s not just giving us a glimpse inside ourselves but at the future too.

At a time when the president is an avowed Peloton enthusiast, corporate bigwigs flaunt their treadmill desks and even your Aunt Linda tracks her steps on a FitBit, it’s easy to imagine fitness as forever intrinsic to American identity.

But as historian Natalia Mehlman Petrzela argues in her new book, “Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession,” our collective attitude toward exercise has shifted dramatically over the last century. Once viewed as the dubious pastime of vain eccentrics, “working out” is now venerated as an essential part of a healthy lifestyle. At the same time, it’s become, for many, an unaffordable luxury.

A professor at the New School in New York City, Petrzela is perhaps uniquely qualified to write about this subject: She is also a certified fitness instructor who once taught a class at Equinox called intenSati — “high-energy cardio with vocal affirmations,” as she explained in a recent video chat.

Like America as a whole, Petrzela was once wary of fitness. As a bookish adolescent in the ‘90s, she was “mortally intimidated by anything physical or athletic.” That all changed when she enrolled in a group fitness class. “I was like, I don’t know what this is, but it’s where I want to be,” she recalled. “It felt so good.”

Petrzela taught middle school and eventually landed in academia, but also pursued a second career as a fitness instructor — a fact she was often reluctant to share with her scholarly colleagues.

At the gym, though, Petrzela never really took off her historian’s hat: “I kept asking the question: How did this fitness culture come to be?”

“Fit Nation” covers more than a century of cultural history, from strong man Eugene Sandow showing off his rippling torso at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 to the closing of gyms across the country during COVID-19.

It identifies a massive shift in the later 20th century, when the public — increasingly more affluent and sedentary — began to discover the value of yoga, jogging and dance aerobics.

While Petrzela revisits many well-known names — Jack LaLanne, Jazzercise, Jane Fonda — she also introduces less familiar personalities, such as Vic Tanny, whose gyms were outfitted with tropical fish tanks. There’s plenty of kitsch, including digressions on workout tapes by Debbie Reynolds and adult film star Traci Lords, but also powerful stories about Rosa Parks’ zeal for yoga and gay gyms that became community havens during the AIDS crisis.

Petrzela spoke to The Times about fitness inequality, potential political solutions and why working out doesn’t make you a neoliberal. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Fitness is a subject that touches on so many crucial issues — race, gender, class, sexuality. Why hasn’t it been taken more seriously by historians?

I think there are a few things going on. They have to do with scholarly disdain for bodily pursuits, particularly the ones that women do. We have a lot of enthusiasm for serious books about working-class consumer culture, but they’re often about men. We love to talk about major league sports, Bruce Springsteen and rock music. But like, going to dance cardio? That gets dismissed.

The scholarly world has also really bought into this notion that neoliberalism has taken over all aspects of American life. There are quite a few critics who are too quick to just dismiss the gym as part of that. You see smart critiques, but they tend to be like, “This is just productivity culture, off-hours.” They overlook much more complicated, interesting and even empowering things that go on in these fitness contexts, and not just for women.

The first section of your book deals with American attitudes about what we now call fitness, which in the 19th and early 20th century was seen as suspect. Tell me about that.

This was a time when to go and exercise deliberately was considered weird. American society had not bought into the idea that mind and body are connected, and that working on your body is part of being a fully actualized human.

If you were someone who was spending too much time working on your body, you were probably neglecting more important things. That was a really gendered set of assumptions, though: men should be consumed with cerebral pursuits. A guy who’s spending time working on his body in the company of other men? There’s definitely something suspicious about him.

For women, it’s slightly different because it was considered normal for you to care what you look like. Even in the early 20th century, you have these “reducing salons,” almost like proto-boutique fitness. But also, sweating is considered strange for women, because what woman or girl wants to be muscular? Ew. The science of the time said that exercising too vigorously would compromise your fertility. There’s a long-standing myth that your uterus will fall out if you lift heavy weights or run too fast.

As you argue in the book, fitness is widely viewed as a worthwhile pursuit yet for many it’s also an unattainable luxury, in part due to political failures. How do we fix this?

The federal government started what, effectively, is a marketing campaign [in the ‘50s and ‘60s]. It’s really important in changing sensibilities, but it doesn’t actually change infrastructure or access in a way that would make fitness the human right it should be.

My optimistic stance is that most people agree exercise is good for you. That is something that transcends political affiliation. But we need policies that invest in public recreation and fitness environments. That might seem obvious. But there’s a host of other public things which contribute to fitness inequality that we don’t necessarily think of as related — safe streets, better streetlights, labor policies that allow people to have more control over their time so that they can actually make time to exercise.

What role does California, especially Southern California, play in the story of American fitness?

It is a place that has always been hospitable to different kinds of experimentation, especially around health and spirituality. It’s a place where, especially because of Hollywood, image is important. Those things really come together in the fitness world.

This is probably the East Coaster in me romanticizing California a little bit, but I do think that geographically, it’s a place that has really sustained a connection to the idea of the self-made American dream. One of the reasons fitness culture becomes an American export globally is because it’s such a perfect arena to actualize these fantasies about self-fashioning that we have.

Another interesting piece is also technology. TV and VCRs are really important for spreading fitness culture. It’s no accident that Jack LaLanne makes his way from weird, seedy Muscle Beach to TV. I cannot overestimate how important [the VCR] was in spreading fitness culture. That is very much centered in Southern California, with Jane Fonda and Richard Simmons and others jumping on that.

If you could go back in time and work out with anyone, anywhere, what would you choose?

Can you tell I’ve thought about this? [laughs] I would love to be at the opening ceremonies of the 1984 Olympics in LA doing Jazzercise. I think it’s the only fitness brand that has ever been part of the opening ceremonies. I also would have loved to go to Richard Simmons’ class. And that makes me so sad because I just missed it.

There are a lot of very colorful figures in this book. Were there any you were particularly captivated by?

I would have loved to sit down with [pioneering weightlifter] Abbye “Pudgy” Stockton, who was this woman among the dudes at Muscle Beach [in the ‘30s and ‘40s]. Bikinis barely exist at the time so she has a bikini made for her to show off her muscles. She develops a strength training gym for women, and writes this column called “Barbelle” — B-E-L-L-E — assuring women that “beneath every lovely curve lies a muscle.” To me, she just embodies so vividly that push-pull that’s still with us, where she’s really breaking ground in terms of women’s fitness, but constantly having to be like, “Don’t worry, it’ll make you pretty.”

What’s the strangest exercise fad you came across in your research?

The weirdest thing was Stauffer’s Magic Couch. It was this huge piece of furniture that people bought to have in their house and it would shake you, like one of those [machines] at a reducing salon. It was supposed to “get you a new figure by Christmas,” as one holiday ad said. It was really remarkable to me that, at a time when exercise was still sort of weird, people would spend that much money and take up so much space in their house with this thing that was also a total scam.

How do you approach your work in light of the growing movement for fat acceptance and body positivity?

The fat-hating diet discourse is so loud in this world, and has for so long been the dominant discourse in fitness environments, that it’s really important for our fitness professionals and consumers to be very deliberate about resisting that. If I hear an instructor be like, “Bikini season is around the corner!” I’m probably not going back.

But we shouldn’t throw out the baby in the bathwater. We shouldn’t immediately say that weight loss is something no one should strive for or be allergic to talking about weight loss as a potentially health-promoting good. Nor should we throw out fitness culture because weight loss is part of it.

How do you see fitness evolving post-pandemic?

I really hope that all of the health drama and trauma that we’ve been through in the last three years brings new urgency to the importance of preventative health, fitness being a part of that. I hope the fitness inequality that’s been intensified [by the pandemic] will be redressed with policies that prioritize pools, parks and safe streets.

In the past two to three years, people have almost gone on an elimination diet with fitness, where you take everything away and add things back in to kind of figure out what’s meaningful to you. My theory is we are going to see a renaissance of what I call destination fitness, where people are very deliberate about going out into the world.

I slipped the card into Rick’s suitcase. My imagination vacillated between giddy and tortured for the next six hours, knowing he would land in the chill of a New York winter, retrieve his sweater and see the envelope sealed with a lipstick kiss. My fear that it was too many words said too soon was dashed when I received his call. His voice was shaky.

“Are you OK?” I asked, pressing my lips into the phone with hushed urgency.

“I got your card … ,” he said with a sniffle. “It was the most beautiful card I have ever received.”

I swooned, elated. I truly knew he felt, for that one minute, loved.

He dumped me one month later. His life was “too complicated.”

Writing cards felt vital to my communication of love (a throwback to my New England roots), almost like an itch I had to scratch. Regardless of the short-term inevitability of each relationship, I kept on.

Jeremy was an L.A. transplant from Chicago. He was jaded from the demise of his 25-year marriage. He didn’t do Valentine’s Day, so we had a candlelight dinner seaside on Feb. 13. The light chitchat turned quickly into an argument over our differing values. My subtext was, despite my past hurts, I was still a hopeless romantic. I wasn’t holding on to the past. He was. What he didn’t know was that I had sent him a romantic card anyway.

On the morning of Feb. 14, amid the fluttering of red tinsel hearts and sale-priced candy, I was in Ralphs in dirty sweats and a hoodie shopping for cat litter and a Swiffer mop when I received his call.

“Tell me where you are,” he said, wheezing slightly.

“I am at Ralphs buying cat litter,” I said.

He hung up. I continued shopping. I had a tub of odorless kitty litter in one hand and a mop in the other when he came running wild-eyed and red-faced into the supermarket. He beelined for me and threw his arms around my neck, sobbing.

“Your card. It was so beautiful,” he said, tears streaming down his face. “I ran the whole way here to tell you thank you. Thank you.”

We broke up when he lost his job and moved in with his parents in the Midwest.

I thought maybe I should stop writing cards.

During the pandemic, I sat on the beach in Santa Monica and wrote letters to myself and God and often sat in silence without an agenda to “try love again.” Amid my well-intended revision of amore, I got a wild hair that perhaps my story was I missed someone from my past. Finally, the solution! “Mr. Right” was always there. I just hadn’t seen him. The stoner from high school? The comedian from college?

I started on Classmates.com. Nothing. I didn’t recognize anyone. I grew despondent and then angry at myself for my despondency. I thought about the trail of cards and relationships over the last seven years. Was my writing just a desperate ploy to manufacture the assurance of love? An attempt to not be left behind?

Then came Barry. My ninth-grade boyfriend. Through a series of unconnected conversations with unrelated people on Zoom, my 14-year-old boarding-school love arose from my subconscious. Our awkward dalliance outside the school dance, he in his prep school blazer and me with my middle-class clothes and high hair. I could not recall his name now 38 years later, but it felt urgent. I searched the boarding school yearbooks online, zooming in on grainy images of PDFs until I saw a face I could recognize. A LinkedIn search revealed he lived in Los Angeles. I left him a voice message.

He called me back a day later. We made small talk, and I complimented him on his wife and family.

“Divorced,” he grumbled. “It’s a mess.”

The tone in which he said “It’s a mess” had been acerbic. It overshadowed my desire for him to be “the one,” but I agreed to meet at the beach the following day.

As we walked amid the surf, he shared his dating life since his divorce and, detailed more than I cared to hear about, certain arrangements. He paused and looked out to the water, contemplating his next words.

“I still have your letters,” he said. “In my parents’ attic.”

Something inside me stirred. The punctuation at the end of the learning curve was coming.

“Why?” was all I could say.

“They were some of the most beautiful letters I have ever read,” he said. “So romantic. I could never throw them away.”

I suddenly felt the gravity of the trail of my words all the way back to ninth grade. Imprints of lost love in bundles under eaves in Connecticut.

Barry and I never talked again.

I wrote a series of cards recently for a boyfriend who was embarking on a two-week trek. I was acutely aware of my vulnerability in wanting him to have a piece of me on his journey. I curated seven cards with passages from Kahlil Gibran and John O’Donohue’s blessings.

“Open one each day,” I said, handing him the bundle.

He broke up with me a few days after his trip.

“The cards,” I said. “Did you read them?”

“No,” he said. “But I will.”

In that moment, I wished he wouldn’t.

I’m not giving up on love in this city of Los Angeles, but I am putting a pause on writing men letters for a while. My words are too precious — and for now, just for me.

The author is a book coach and publishing consultant in Los Angeles. Her book “No Longer Denying Sexual Abuse: Making the Choices That Can Change Your Life” will be released Feb. 26. Her website is kimohara.com.

L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $300 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.

In Sunday Funday, L.A. people give us a play-by-play of their ideal Sunday around town. Find ideas and inspiration on where to go, what to eat and how to enjoy life on the weekends.

When Joel Kim Booster meditates on the current chapter of his life, he gets the sense he’s in a personal era of new beginnings.

The writer-comedian-actor’s hunch is understandable considering the myriad of professional and personal milestones that occurred for him in 2022. Booster debuted his feature film “Fire Island” on Hulu, which he wrote and starred in. The adaptation reimagines “Pride and Prejudice” as a modern queer rom-com for the ages.

“I sort of burned it all down in 2022, in a good way, in the best possible way. It was the biggest year of my life, both personally and professionally,” says Booster, who describes the time as a constant stream of dopamine hits.

His comedy special “Psychosexual” also dropped on Netflix, he co-starred in the Apple TV+ series “Loot” opposite Maya Rudolph and Michaela Jaé Rodriguez, and on the romance end, he and his boyfriend — a union that marks Booster’s first relationship — met each other’s families over the holidays.

While getting to see his creative labor come to fruition has been exciting, Booster acknowledges that being booked and busy can certainly take its toll on the body. These days, two self-care practices, in particular, help shed the stress: high movie nights at home with his boyfriend and going to the gym.

“The gym is a really big source of comfort for me. It feels like maybe one of the only areas of my life that I can control completely,” Booster says, elaborating on the uncertainty of working in the entertainment industry, from which projects move forward to the types of roles you get to take on. “And then on the other side of the equation, I really enjoy getting high. Sinking into the couch underneath a gravity blanket with a joint in hand, while watching a movie with my boyfriend, is my happiest place. That’s the most beautiful part of living in Los Angeles.”

Now, with Booster back in work mode, his sights are set on laying the groundwork for another bountiful year. “This year really feels like sophomore year for me. Even though I’ve been working in this industry for the better part of a decade, ‘Fire Island’ felt like my introduction to the big leagues,” reflects Booster. “I’ve got my bearings and I have to figure out what the next project is. That’s the scariest part about this year for me, looking ahead and deciding what I want that next big thing to be.”

Here, Booster takes us on a journey of how he’d spend an ideal Sunday in Los Angeles. This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for length and clarity.

10 a.m.: Enjoy the rain indoors

If I had my way, my ideal Sunday would begin with a rainy morning and clear up by the afternoon. It’s such an invitation to stay in bed and not do or go anywhere. I love the weather in L.A., but there’s something about the sunshine and good weather that automatically guilts you into not staying inside.

10:15 a.m.: Dive into the “Real Housewives” multiverse from bed

Unfortunately I’m at this age and point in my life where my body refuses to let me sleep past 10 a.m., no matter how late I’ve been up the night before.

So I’m usually in bed by myself essentially, with my sleeping boyfriend next to me, for a couple of hours until he wakes up. Sunday mornings are when I usually catch up on “Housewives” and all the shows he doesn’t want to watch. I treasure those hours of alone time so deeply. Our media diets are so intertwined now that, like, infidelity for us has nothing to do with sex and has everything to do with television. If I were to watch one of our shows without him I would be in deep sh—.

12 p.m.: Find the breakfast burrito of the day

I am a Postmates warrior, an Uber Eats warrior. I love to open up that app and figure out a new spot to see what kind of breakfast burrito we can find from the farthest reaches of L.A., along with the strongest cold brew I can find. We just had a great breakfast burrito from Sweet Butter Kitchen. I really loved their steak breakfast burrito, it was excellent.

1:30 p.m.: Off to the beach

I’m a former New Yorker, and as a New Yorker you’re always searching for reasons to get out of your house because it’s so small and there are so many interesting things to do around the city. Whereas in L.A. I find for me it’s about curating your circle of friends so specifically that you can exist outside of public spaces.

Not that there aren’t a million things to do in L.A. on a Sunday, but for me, I just want to be around my people. Usually that manifests in some sort of house party, whether it’s a pool party or just a gathering, a game day — we’re big game people. We love a game night.

The best version of a Sunday Funday I can imagine would be having energy to head over to the Westside for a beach day. Ginger Rogers Beach, the gay beach here in L.A., is the best gay bar in L.A. to me. You’re sort of towel to towel, body to body, on a good day when it’s packed. It’s like seeing everybody that you’re normally so used to seeing in nightlife, in the daytime, out in nature by the f— ocean. It’s really wonderful and it’s social and great.

Everyone brings their Bluetooth speaker and there’s a cacophony of different styles of music that you’re sort of battling with the entire day. On one side, it’s your standard pop, it’s Ariana Grande, Lady Gaga. There’s house music playing on the other side of you, there’s EDM playing somewhere else, you get it all on the beach there. People really get aggravated by it, but for me, I think that mish-mash of sounds is part of what I love about that beach-going experience.

Ideally, I’ll be at the beach until the sun has practically set. It is the perfect mix for me of the private and the public. I’ll spend a couple of hours with my book on my own on my towel, some sort of science fiction or a George Saunders short story. I’ll get up and socialize, I’ll go back to the book. We’re drinking, we’re having fun, we’re dancing. It’s sort of a mix of all the parts of L.A. that I love in one place. I just wish it were a little bit more accessible for me.

6 p.m.: Group dinner

It’s time to grab dinner at this point. It’s fun to gather together a hodgepodge crew of people that are meandering away from the beach into one big annoying table at some restaurant nearby that we’ve decided on. I love the experience of cramming as many of my friends into a meal as possible at a restaurant. I know it’s annoying and I know people hate it, but it is one of my favorite things to do.

I really love Genghis Cohen. It reminds me of the kind of Chinese food that I grew up eating in the Midwest. It’s very much not authentic but it is, to me, so comforting, and the atmosphere is great for a big group of people. There’s nothing I crave more after a day spent on the beach thinking about not snacking than Chinese food.

I’ve been good. People saw my body in a Speedo for the last six hours and now I’m ready to destroy it all in one meal at Genghis Cohen. When it comes to dessert, my rule of thumb is always look, no matter if you think you feel like it or not. About half the time, I’ll see something on the dessert menu and suddenly realize I want it.

8:45 p.m.: Dance it out at Hot Dog Sundays

I’m a notorious peer pressure fiend in terms of continuing the party. I want it to go on as long as possible. There’s a party that happens in Silver Lake every Sunday. It’s called Hot Dog at El Cid. It is my favorite Sunday activity, bar none. I love it so much. They serve hot dogs if you’re still hungry. They have amazing disco house music going on indoors, and then outdoors it’s just a sea of all of your favorite people chatting. And one of my favorite vintage shops does a pop-up at this party and I spend way too much. How long I stay depends on how my Monday looks, but let’s say it’s a holiday weekend. I would close the place down quite honestly. They close at 11 — I’m closing it down, I’m there until they kick us out.

11:30 p.m.: The afterparty

Sometimes against my better judgment — and it is always a bad idea, but at the same time it’s the best idea — is the afterparty. It’s my favorite part of L.A. nightlife culture. Our bars don’t stay open very late comparatively, especially coming from New York. And so you really have to dig into this network of people who own homes that are willing to open them up for an afterparty. For me, now that I’m a somewhat new homeowner, hosting the afters is my favorite thing about having a house.

My afterparties, especially if they’re happening on a Sunday, are like the oddest assortment of people that I’m very close to and then people that I’ve never met in my entire life who I’m connecting with for the first time on my porch, sharing a cigarette. Which I shouldn’t be doing and I only do when offered by a stranger, basically. It’s like the best way to connect. I have an amazing view on my back porch and there’s nothing I enjoy more than meeting a new person over a cigarette at an afterparty on my back porch.

3:30 a.m.: The wind-down

It’s a nice slow trickle until I finally hit my limit and kick everyone out. There’s a full decompression mode that has to happen and usually that involves watching one to two episodes of “Shark Tank” with my boyfriend. It is our biggest guilty-pleasure show. We cannot get enough of “Shark Tank.” It’s kind of embarrassing but we love it. Next, I do a full skincare routine and then bed.

I asked a man to marry me once. Until I met him, I had never known the way that love could provide the magnetic pull of a bearing. Like a pulse through the air, I felt the idea of him everywhere.

For three years, we had been living in the eastern Sierra Nevada. I was as enchanted by our mountain home as I was by him — but it was a demanding affair.

Each summer, there were little losses. A camper left without realizing his fire’s embers remained warm, and what was started for s’mores spread, igniting nearby brush. An acre burned. A mountain biker leaned too far right into a tight turn; their pedal struck rock and sparked. One hundred acres burned. My favorite trail was buried in a landslide. I set out to climb a glacier, only to find that it had melted and was gone.

To love that landscape was to maintain a desperate intimacy with its disappearance. I couldn’t bear it. I wanted us to run away.

From atop the high ridge we walked one evening, I stretched out my finger and traced along the horizon the part of the valley most likely to be destroyed when the inevitable wildfire came. “Don’t you think there are better places to live through this?” I asked him, touching my nose to his nose. It would be hard for him to leave our tiny town. He was an immigrant; his status was tied to his work. “We could get married,” I offered, kicking up snow. Little crystals sprayed around his knees. At home later, we finished two bottles of Grüner Veltliner, maps unfolded around us, pointing out new places we could go.

By the next morning, he had changed his mind. He asked me to leave without him — to leave him.

I fled for the coast. Better to see the sea rise on a land I hadn’t learned to love yet, I figured.

All breakups are hard, but they’re worse if you’re stupid. My mistake was that instead of indulging in a series of sloppy rebounds to recalibrate my aching heart, I threw myself headlong into a new career writing about global warming. I joined a research collective; I became a journalist.

By now, I have heard so many well-articulated visions of what the landscape might soon look like, I can nearly see their flickering edges hover just above the world that remains, like a holograph on the brink of being realized. I run through the pines, knowing that some forest scientists expect California’s mountains will soon be deforested from the joint forces of fire, drought and invasive pests. I hear the threatened sparrows’ chorus in the yard and wonder how long their song will last, knowing that, if all the currently endangered mammals were to go extinct, it would take 23 million years for evolution to replenish them.

An increasing body of research affirms the worry that human-caused global warming may rob us of a future — or one that is pleasant and survivable for most species, anyway. Depending on who you ask, we have somewhere between six and 10 years left until the planet’s atmosphere will cross an atmospheric tipping point beyond which there is no return. Some argue it’s a line we’ve already crossed.

It does not spark joy.

The climate crisis takes so much from us: cool summer nights and the ability to chit-chat with Trader Joe’s cashiers about the weather without wanting to suddenly weep, yes — but there’s also the bigger, harder-to-name thing. What do we do if our love cannot withstand these ever-worsening storms that disrupt our dreams and uproot our lives?

Today, three-quarters of Americans experience some degree of anxiety about climate change. For people under 25, it’s markedly worse. I wonder how many of them will get to revel in youth’s capaciousness like I did. For a few good years in my 20s, I knew climate change was coming, but I had not yet come to believe it would change everything about my life. The hopes I held then now feel like a 20th century relic: angular light pouring through the narrow alleyways of European cities; market baskets heavy with exotic, imported fruits, their juices staining my chin; endless travel, but unencumbered by guilt over airline emissions or fear about how to build emergency plans into a holiday.

I no longer expect a future full of ease, whimsy or fruit plucked from the branch. A threshold has been crossed. I’m not sure when — was it when my last love ended, or at some moment in the intervening years when I have failed to find another? When in some parts of the state as many as one in three Californians are projected to become climate migrants, joining 1.7 million people in the Americas already displaced by disasters each year, it feels silly to sow roots.

Nevertheless, I am dating again. I am stubbornly looking for something worth wishing for.

A crush is a craving, an aspiration, a will to live. It is an empty calendar, mine for the filling. At least, that used to feel true. The more I see the swiftness of the climate crisis, the less sure I am of what’s reasonable to ask of the future.

Plus there’s a chance that my proximity to this sense of impending disaster has made me undatable.

Recently I fell into bed with a stranger. In the moments after, tangled up in each other, we pecked away at the awkward small talk of people who still didn’t know each other’s names. When he asked me what I was thinking about, I monologued for 10 uninterrupted minutes about the agronomic insecurities that will mean, one day soon, we will have no ripe tomatoes lining shelves midwinter, and how I therefore always bulk-buy heirlooms I can’t afford. I left soon after, and never saw him again.

Like everyone else, I’m just searching for somewhere stable to leap, and then land. In this, I am no different than my most conventional, climate-naïve friends. Love has always stood in contrast to life’s existential threats.

Connection is a tiny revolt against everything we are up against. This is true even of trysts and other temporary flirtations. “A love affair,” Kathryn Davis wrote in her memoir, “Aurelia, Aurélia,” “confers motion, ferrying you through time.” Within the high of a good one, I can feel the gasping propulsion toward something sweet in each of my cells.

In my work, I have spoken to many people in the midst of an emergency’s fulcrum, fighting to survive unprecedented heat waves, ice storms or floods. Not one of them has made it through on the might of a single relationship. Neighbors install sprinkler systems to point to each other’s roofs in case of fire; community networks deliver life-saving medical equipment days before emergency managers could have. I recognize a bone-deep yearning in these orchestrations. My understanding of what a bond can accomplish is stretched. Such relationships might make here good and elsewhere possible.

On one of the final egg-yolk afternoons of last fall, I asked my new crush if they thought climate change was impacting their dating. I asked it as coyly as I imagine another person might casually mention the name of the child they one day hoped to have — which is to say, with no subtlety whatsoever. They paused, rustling maple leaves that had crisped brown from drought rather than turning yellow. “No, not more than it’s changed every other one of my relationships.”

My solar plexus warmed in the familiar way then — as though here, too, might be an opening for me to see my way through to a life populated with more desire than dread. There are other people, lots of them, still trying to find portals that will carry us to futures in which we survive. Like them, I am still looking. I still want to take that leap.