I’m back from an awesome spring break in London. It was great to go back and visit the city that I lived in less than a year ago…it seems as if time has stood still since then; everything was just as I had remembered it. I got back in L.A. on Saturday night, incredibly jet-lagged from an 11 hour flight but glad to be back in a warmer climate.

Everybody who stayed in L.A. had a blast, though. Most of us had the week off at our internships and nobody had classes: a formula for adventure. Lots of kids from Ithaca came out to visit, and several ICLAers traveled up and down the California coast, visiting places like San Francisco and San Diego.

Just because classes started again on Monday doesn’t mean things got boring, though. Lots of people kept busy organizing plans for St. Patrick’s Day (yesterday). People had parties at work, at the apartments, or at bars. There was a big parade downtown, and I even passed some random bagpipers marching down the road outside of Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank (check out the picture I posted on Twitter).

Some of my friends decided they were too cool to spend their time participating in these activities, and instead spent St. Patty’s on the set of "The Office". Amy and Laura are interns at Reveille, the production company behind the Emmy-winning show, and they got the chance to hang out at Michael Scott’s desk and chow down on corned beef and cabbage with Phyllis, Stanley, and David Wallace (check out their pictures on Facebook).

So things have been speeding along chaotically, as usual, out here in California. I’ll keep you posted on new developments as the week goes on, and I’ll also tell you a bit about my recent battle in an ancient temple (and no, I’m not talking about "Legends of the Hidden Temple". I wish).

Stay tuned.

I know I don’t really seem like a depressed person, but lately I have come to realize just how horrible my life is. Or maybe ‘horrible’ isn’t the right word. Allow me to explain.

Every day, I wake up in my quiet, clean, safe, spacious apartment and get ready for the day. I throw on jeans, sneakers, and a t-shirt. I have some good, strong coffee to get me started, and I leave to carpool to work with Mallory. The sun is shining almost every morning. We listen to Ryan Seacrest on the radio on our way to work and dance to the repetitive pop music. Sounds awful, right?

IT GETS WORSE.

I get to work. I’m greeted by smiling faces in the parking lot, the bus, the gatehouse, and my section of the office. I sit at my big workstation, turn on my computer with a giant display, and start learning everything I can about this incredible place. I keep drinking coffee and occasionally walk through the park on my way to the copy room. I laugh at the little Yorkie that hangs out at the workstations near the bathroom, often sporting a tiny sweater.

There are always plenty of projects going on to keep me occupied for the day. For lunch, I usually have a good salad or wrap upstairs, or sometimes I drive somewhere like Whole Foods or Panera. On a particularly unbearable day like today, our whole team goes out to a nice lunch. At the end of the day, I say goodbye to everyone, pass through the gauntlet of smiles again, and return to my apartment (listening to music again along the way).

Then I work out in our apartment’s nice, air-conditioned workout facilities, make dinner in my big kitchen, and sometimes relax with a drink by the hot tub when it is cooling down at night (disclaimer: I’m over 21). On weekends, I have an endless supply of things to see and places to go. My classes are only one day each week. And from time to time I talk to my friends back in Ithaca about how much it is snowing there…it doesn’t snow in California.

Yep, life is tough.

And if you think you can handle this kind of misery, all you have to do is check out the Ithaca College Los Angeles Program sometime. Then you will really feel my pain.

To make things worse, this next week is spring break. I’ll be spending it in London with my girlfriend, where I will be sure to revisit the Ithaca College London Centre for old time’s sake (which is another good place to spend a ‘tough’ semester). This means you won’t be hearing from me until after spring break. I hope you won’t miss me too much.

I’m starting to think I should invest in some good antidepressants to help me cope with all this sunshine and happiness. It’s pure TORTURE.

So I recently realized that I’ve spent all this time talking about all of the interesting places I’m going in L.A., but I haven’t really taken the time to talk about what consumes most of my time when I’m here: work.

Let me just preface this entire blogversation (yep, I just made that word up) by saying that I pretty much work at the greatest place ever. It’s called TBWA\Chiat\Day. It’s an Omnicom-owned media arts / advertising agency that’s part of the worldwide TBWA network.

I work in a giant warehouse that is filled with interesting things. My desk is right beneath a giant life-sized billboard, just like you’d see on a street. There’s a park in our office with trees and chairs and benches, and the trees are lit up with lights at night. There’s a red phone booth straight from the streets of London right next to the park. The espresso I drink comes from the “surf bar”, which is exactly what it sounds like: a bar made from surfboards. Sometimes meetings are held in the “board room”, which houses a giant conference table made of surfboards. There’s a huge aquarium, a car, and a basketball court in the building (I even tested out the basketball court for the first time last week). People bring their dogs to work regularly. Big dogs, small dogs, you name it. Some people move around the office via scooter, just because they can. The creatives all work in “cliff-dwellings”, which are basically giant yellow offices stacked three high, like boxes. There are very few doors, even on the offices, it’s all just open. Everyone has good fashion sense. And everyone is friendly.

And those are just my physical surroundings.

My job title is “Account Management Intern”, and I work on the Pepsi account. That means I’ve gotten to help with a bit of the process behind the new ads that are coming out for Pepsi and Pepsi Max, which has been a blast. I work with people who are creative, dedicated, and absolutely brilliant at what they do. People in this place have created some of the most iconic ads in existence.

Speaking of iconic, Chiat is also home to ad legend Lee Clow. If you’re at all interested in advertising, you’ve probably heard of this guy (if not, read up on him, pronto). I’m proud to say that one time a few weeks ago I walked down the stairs and realized he was just a few feet in front of me. He was looking at his cup of coffee with great intensity and didn’t see me. He hasn’t realized it yet, but we’re basically best friends now. His office sits right on the end of the creative row, on the lower level next to the park. From time to time I walk by and admire his plasma screen TV from a safe distance, to avoid looking creepy.

Every morning, I wake up at 6:30am and begin the commute by 7:45. By the time I get to work at 9:00, I feel like I’ve gone through an entire day already. I take the Pirate bus from the parking lot to the office (there’s this whole Pirate theme here at Chiat), and I smile at the bus driver and say “thanks” before entering the building. Then I walk through the giant tunnel, turn right, and head straight to my desk by the big green wall.

My days are filled with presentation prep-work, researching, organizing, learning, breakfast burritos, and (of course) obscene amounts of espresso. And sometimes the occasional company-hosted keggar or concert, which is another story all together. It is wonderful.

And that’s that. I’m actually at work right now, so I should go. Quit wasting your time reading my blog and go do something productive!

We live fairly close to two big AMC theaters out here in Burbank, and this past weekend my roommates and I discovered that both have IMAX screens.

For those of you unfamiliar with IMAX, let me attempt to explain its awesomeness to you. An IMAX theater has a huge screen. HUGE. A floor-to-ceiling kind of screen or, in some cases, one that is actually dome-shaped and covers part of the ceiling. IMAX film is also intensely high resolution. That’s why I suggest you see films starring good-looking people in IMAX rather than ones starring uglier people; you see every detail of their face (good or bad). These theaters also have a crazy sound system set up. It is like that old school THX surround sound business on steroids (all of my techie TV friends are laughing at my lack of appreciation for a good sound system right now).

When I was younger, we would regularly take trips to the local museum, which had an IMAX screen, to watch documentaries about things like the Titanic. Of course, at the museum most of the audience was either below the age of twelve or old enough to have been on the Titanic, so it wasn’t exactly a college student hangout. It had never dawned on me that feature films could be shown on IMAX. That’s why I pretty much wet myself when I learned that “The Dark Knight” was playing on IMAX in Burbank (okay, not really…but almost).

So last Saturday, since it was cloudy out, we decided to go see it (even though we have collectively seen it at least a dozen times). I got to watch a GIANT image of Christian Bale beat up bad guys while listening to his absurdly raspy Batman voice for two and a half hours. I swear the bass was so loud that I could feel my seat shaking every time he spoke (”I’m not wearing hockey pads…”).

We were so thrilled at the whole experience that we ended up returning the very next day to watch Coraline in 3-D. (Coraline wasn’t technically in IMAX, but the 3-D was definitely cool). Good movie, kind of creepy. You should see it.

The theater trips ended in time for the Academy Awards on Sunday night. There were plenty of unofficial ICLA gatherings in the Oakwoods to celebrate, but I stuck around my place for the most part to catch up on some work. On Monday, everyone at school and at work had something to say about the ceremony. People in LA are crazy about the Academy Awards! Since I drive right by the Kodak Theatre every day on my way in to work, it has been interesting the past few weeks watching the red carpet and all of the equipment get set up outside. It’s quite the production.

Well, it’s getting late here at the Pendleton Center and I need to take off so I can go grab some food. Happy Tuesday night, and we’ll talk soon!

Last week, a friend of ours told us that there was a knoc k on her door and she opened it to discover it was Jay Leno. Apparently he came through our apartment complex taping one of his “Jaywalking” segments and, sadly, did not come by our place.

But that’s all right, because I met him a few weeks ago when I got the chance to attend a taping of The Tonight Show. The experience was, needless to say, moderately phenomenal.

It all started when I learned from a friend that our awesome PR professor, Cathryn Boxberger, could get tickets to Leno tapings. Naturally, I asked her about them the first day of class, and before I  knew it I had a set of tickets to the Tonight Show for the very next week!

In an effort to save me from a lot of writing and to you from a lot of boredom, I’ll try to summarize the experience in five key moments:

1. Turns out the tickets I had were VIP tickets. Which means no waiting in line, just sitting around in a waiting area before being escorted to the front of the line that everyone else had to wait in for hours.
2. Leno’s guest that night was Rainn Wilson (Dwight from “The Office”). Anybody who knows me knows that I love “The Office”. I was thrilled.
3. The Tonight Show doesn’t really like having old people sit up front. Apparently they hand pick younger-looking people and pull them to the front of the studio in an attempt to convince viewers at home that Leno’s biggest fans are young, hip people (in other words, people totally unlike Leno himself). As a result, we were somehow chosen to be a part of the “young crowd” and were escorted to the front row of the studio. FRONT ROW. I was twenty feet away from Leno’s desk and Rainn Wilson.
4. As Jay came out to do his monologue, we discovered that we were literally inches away from where he stood. I shook his hand at the beginning.
5. Later that night we watched the show on TV (it isn’t done live, they tape it earlier in the day). And I saw the side of my face… MORE THAN ONCE. Guess I’m a celebrity now.

And that was it. One of the best things I’ve done since being here, all thanks to the wonderful connections at ICLA!