Of all the things from that period in her life, making mortadella and mustard sandwiches almost every morning would be what stood out the most. For it’s always the little details that burn brightest in the mind as time wears on. To those with unrefined taste buds, it might have seemed a foul combination. To Ramona, it was the only bright spot in an otherwise hellacious daily grind. Looking back, she could scarcely tell anyone how she was able to do it. That is, commute from her “efficiency” apartment located at the corner of Sepulveda and Venice Boulevards to the depths of Long Beach for a job that paid little more than ten dollars an hour. Customarily, people tended to commute into the Westside of L.A. rather than away from it, but not Ramona. And maybe that was a blessing in disguise, seeing as how traffic was heavier on the side of the freeway going north in the morning than it was going south. 

But that didn’t mean she still didn’t have to wake up ass early in the morning to arrive by eight a.m. on the dot. In point of fact, her boss, Mitch, had the gall to tell her that he would actually prefer it if she could even get there “about ten minutes before opening.” After all, as the receptionist, she was the “first line of defense” for greeting incoming clients and answering phones/“urgent” emails. Ramona held back from telling Mitch that there wasn’t going to be anyone champing at the bit with an architectural emergency at that hour. Then again, who could say? The architecture firm where she worked tended to reel in the type of clients who genuinely believed they were “high-profile” celebrities (with the expected demanding nature to go with that self-perception). But if they actually were, they wouldn’t be using an architecture firm in Long Beach. 

Ramona had found the job on Craig’s List, at a time when that website was more flush with legitimate opportunities. Though not so many opportunities that she was actually able to find something closer to home. Granted, she could have perhaps spent a bit more time poring through ads to unearth a “better” (read: more geographically favorable) job. Except that, like most people, she didn’t actually have more time. She needed money now. So the architecture firm it was. Besides, being freshly graduated from college, she considered herself “lucky” to have been given any job at all. She would have probably commuted four hours, let alone almost two, just to secure some kind of income. Simply to be able to tell her parents it was all “fine” and that, sure, she was “supporting herself.”

But she wasn’t, was she? Ramona reckoned that she probably wouldn’t be living on mortadella and mustard sandwiches if that were the case (what’s more adding other “frills” to it, like lettuce and cheese, was only reserved for truly decadent occasions). The rest of her money went to rent and gas. Oh the fucking cost of gas. It was like Metric sang, “Buy this car to drive to work/Drive to work to pay for this car.” In fact, Live It Out was one of the albums Ramona would listen to repeatedly during those early mornings of preparing her mortadella and mustard sandwiches. That and The Maccabees’ Colour It In. And yet, despite taking this job in the early months of 2007, Ramona was still listening to her album collection of the earlier years in that decade, which included Metric and The Killers and Hot Chip, with Hot Fuss and Coming on Strong also in heavy rotation on her CD player that she was always certain to play at a respectable volume so early in the morning (even though she knew full well everyone in the building was up at that hour on a weekday, ready to go out and “live the dream”). Occasionally, she would swap out one of these four albums with Junior Boys’ So This Is Goodbye, in keeping with the electronic tip she was on for most of the early and mid-00s. 

Unfortunately, like everything one absorbs during a period in their life they know is insufferable (and later realize just how insufferable, in the wake of being at last removed from the situation), this music would become unbearable for her to listen to. Setting off a visceral reaction and triggering a flurry of memories involving long drives on the 405, the smell of mustard, the texture of mortadella and the overall perennial sense of “stuckness” that characterized that era of her existence. Ramona only managed to last at the receptionist job in Long Beach for a year before she decided to quit. As it happened, that would be right as the 2008 financial crisis hit. Lucky Ramona. Not that her job would have probably spared her anyway. The architecture firm, she later heard, lost a lot of clients after that economic fallout. Who was to say that Ramona wouldn’t be part of “trimming the fat” to cover those losses anyway?

In the end, she had to pack up her pitiful attempt at a life in L.A. Leaving the “efficiency” apartment behind so that she could “downsize” to the much more “manageable” space that was her former childhood bedroom. Ramona brought along with her the CD player that had soundtracked her 2007 to add to the still teen girl-oriented decor. Although she “technically” remained in California, she might as well have been in a foreign country—that’s how far Redding felt from L.A. An almost nine-hour drive that Ramona probably wouldn’t be making again anytime soon.

Definitely not based on her wage at the Tsasdi Resort, which she still had to drive thirty minutes up north to get to—in yet another antithetical, against-the-stream route like her commute into Long Beach had been. Most of the people she went to high school with had moved down “south” to Davis or Sacramento, procuring jobs in sectors of no interest to Ramona. Though “hospitality” wasn’t exactly her preferred sector either… Not that her preferences were ever going to be a factor in her life choices again. Well, except one: she would never eat another mortadella and mustard sandwich.