With every new season comes a new sense of hope. With every day, week, month and year comes a new beginning- a blank slate. A blank slate represents endless possibilities and it’s up to us to decide which path to take. We either make the best out of it or we mourn or losses and fall into mediocrity.  While the obvious option is to keep things positive and make the best out of our new “beginning”, sometimes it is inevitable to veer off the yellow brick road and start heading towards darkness and eventually fall into oblivion. Once we find ourselves in a dark place it’s hard to escape.  And although it’s ultimately up to us to make it out and resurge from our own ashes like a Phoenix, as much as we hate to admit it, sometimes we need a little help. 

The United States of America is known as the land of the free- a land of opportunity.  That is why many of us leave our native countries: for a better life, for something better, for opportunity and freedom. With many of us Latinos coming from Mexico and South America, living in this country has been a blessing.  We are able to do things that would be seemingly impossible to achieve back in our home country.  We are able to go to school, we have the chance to advance in our jobs, we are able to lead a decent lifestyle, and with the bad economy and all we are still able to get by day by day without succumbing to delirium. The system however is still far from perfect, proof of that can be seen in the ballots for the upcoming elections, just a couple of days away- Prop 8 in this case. 

I’ll be damned if watching hours and hours of “America’s Next Top Model” re-runs have been in vain. While Tyra Banks, her freak show judge panel and her team of wanna-be models make for some interesting cheap reality television, they have also helped many (including yours truly) realize that life can be like a runway. That’s right… it may sound ridiculous but if you take some time to think about it, it kinda makes sense. La vida real es más parecida a una pasarela de modas de lo que parece. In both of them (real life and runways) a good attitude is the most important weapon in order to succeed… es un mundo sumamente competitivo donde todos quieren ganar, it’s a world where 60 seconds in the limelight take several months to put together. But most important of all- in both of them, if you fall, la única forma de salir adelante es levantándote porque sino todos los demás te pisotean.

After what seemed like a long hiatus from L.A. nightlife thanks to a dislocated shoulder and a couple of torn ligaments, I was finally able to resume my weekend nightclub escapades just recently. Although I have a favorite must-go-to club on Fridays, I was ready for a new beginning, therefore me and my posse chose to switch things up a little bit and decided to check out “The Vanguard”, a club that has been in L.A. for quite some time now (you can check out a brief review on www.alborde.com/clubs) - talk about shameless self-promotion, ha!… Anywho, so with the excitement of partying for the first time after a couple of weeks and the hype surrounding this nightclub, my friends and I were ready for a hell of a night.