The Gist

Overheard at the Grove

2009-03-24T15:01:00.000-07:00

Lady 1: "My cats do yoga with me in the morning."

Lady 2: "I bet they are exceptional at the cat pose."

Lady 1: "They are. They also do an excellent downward dog."

In Which I Eliminate Excess Baggage

2009-03-21T16:01:00.000-07:00

Here's the thing. Years ago, I told you that I thought the TSA's ban of liquids and gels over three ounces amounted to a kind of racial profiling. Because everyone knows that Jewish girls with hair like mine need mousse—which comes in bottles hovering around eight ounces, and which cannot be compacted into a smaller-size vessel because of its aerosol nature. And that is why, ever since the TSA regulation took effect, I have always had to check a suitcase, even when flying somewhere for only an overnight trip.

My prefered mousse brand—John Frieda Frizz-Ease—used to make tiny 2-ounce bottles of mousse, and then stopped making them ages ago to my deep dismay. I have always said that if I ever see those little bottles of nectar again, I will buy out the stock.

So we flash forward to this morning's trip to Target, whereupon I discovered the travel-size mousse bottles are back, their recognizable silvery skins glinting under the fluorescents! This in itself would have been huge news. But there is so much bonus good news too:

1) Turns out the 2-ounce travel-size mousse bottles are $0.97, and the full-size, 7.2-ounce bottles are $5.39. So do the math! That's a savings of like half by volume (almost)! Of course it's also a lot of extra packaging, so I'll still buy the full-size bottles for home use. And:

2) John-Frieda Frizz-Ease has a new formulation! For curly hair! And it comes in the travel size! Could this get better?

So I bought eight. It should be enough to last a while, but I'll be completely bummed if they disappear from stock again. That said, as of last week, I am the proud owner of 50 shares of Target stock (as part of my new foray into investing, spurred by boyfriend DR—whose presence on the scene accounts in part for why I have neglected this blog for so long, but that's another story, which won't appear on the Internet), so I'm pretty sure that means I get to determine what products the store carries in the future. (Right?) That way, I will never run out of plane-OK mousse. Who's the sucka now, TSA?

In Which I Set Myself on Fire, Bleed Profusely (Unrelated), and Meet Huell Howser

2009-03-21T10:40:00.000-07:00

It's been three months since my last confession, and I'm ripping off the Band-Aid with some tales from my wacky March.

Highlights included that time two weeks ago when I set myself on fire. Panicked about my impending wisdom tooth surgery the next morning, I tried to light a few candles in order that their wafting aroma might help me relax. Instead, the decorative tie dangling from the neckline of my shirt ignited, and then the rest of the front of my shirt caught fire, which I didn't notice until I was pretty well aflame. I dropped the phone (I'd been talking to my parents), screaming that blood-curdling scream that comes from the back of your throat that you mostly only hear in the movies and rarely in real life. I batted away at the front of my shirt before I remembered the stop, drop, and roll thing, so I did that, and eventually put the fire out on the Anthropologie rug without any significant injury (apart from a slightly singed bra and left boob). My parents heard the whole thing and assumed I was being attacked. I swear I could have died, y'all! Life is so precious and so ephemeral.

The next day, I was alive after all so I went to get my wisdom tooth removed in kind of an emergency situation, which is what you get when you've been told for years that you're going to have this half-erupted tooth out but you are too terrified so you ignore doctors orders and let it be. Then, when you go in for emergency surgery, and you've been squeezed in between other appointments, you have to wait like two hours while your anxiety builds. Then the dentist tells you that he'll only be using local anesthesia, which makes you regress into a wet-eyed, wobbly lipped child because you'd been comforted by so many friends who told you that you'd be out cold and wouldn't remember a dang thing. Matters are not improved when the zillion shots of Novacaine are not producing numbing results because apparently an existing infection hinders the efficacy of the shots. Finally the tooth comes out—and you watch the whole thing, the plier-ing, the popping, the sewing—through lucid, open eyes.

But the real drama comes when the surgeon doesn't realize how much you're bleeding (gauze in wound notwithstanding) and so sends you on your way out to the cashier, but when you try to open your mouth (to say, maybe, do you take Visa? Or, where is the sink?) you pour blood out of your mouth with a crime-scene looking result all over the counter. And then, with your bloody hands and jeans, you are escorted into a private room where you will be less likely to gross people out, until the dentist brings you back into the room where he can do some coagulating procedure that seems to work, until your mom whisks your bloody, drooly self home using the magic technique for solving difficult situations that moms know about.

OK, I guess those were more lowlights than highlights. Bona fide highlights include: wrapping up award season coverage and thereby returning to something that resembles more normalcy in terms of work load; enjoying sister and nephew's visit to California; clearing out bags and carloads of unnecessary house-cluttering stuff like old clothes and miscellany, and consequently feeling really good about myself; AND:

MEETING HUELL HOWSER. I MET HUELL HOWSER AND HE GAVE ME A HUG. What happened was I went to a KCET event at Paramount Ranch on Thursday celebrating the launch of Ken Burns' new documentary, National Parks: America's Best Idea, and Huell was there to introduce Ken. Before the program, I mustered the courage to tell Huell that I'm sure he has a lot of number-one fans, but I'm dang sure I rank up there with the most devoted of them. And he said, well I have to give you a hug for that! And so [breathlessly], I got a hug from teen idol (not actually) Huell Howser. It was the fulfillment of a lifelong dream.

Or, you might say, it was very much a part of California's Gold.

2008 Giveth and 2008 Taketh Away

2008-12-18T12:27:00.000-08:00

TAKETH AWAY
Same-sex marriage rights in California
The blue-eyed boy (reinstalled in friendship capacity)
An assistant editor in L.A.
A significant chunk of my freelance budget
Many thousands of magazine jobs, and many more thousands of other jobs too
Five pounds
Some of the moisture in my hair (see below: blonder)
Hope for another consecutive Raiders football season

GIVETH
The same five pounds
One Huell Howser autographed print and one California's Gold tote bag
President-elect Barack Obama
The Palin rap on SNL
A new iPhone
A nicely blonder head of curls (see above: lost moisture)
An unforgettable trip to Mexico
Best Coachella weekend yet
A triumphant Grand Canyon hike
So, so much thrilling possibility

Los Angeles Loves Civil Rights

2008-11-16T15:49:00.001-08:00

For me the most affecting part of the Prop 8 protest downtown yesterday was when the marching group stopped on the freeway overpass, waving signs and hands in the direction of the traffic speeding along below. And to see all those car windows open, and those arms go out with the thumbs pointing emphatically up—that was the part that did it for me.

Here's What Looks Unspoiled to Me While Rome Burns

2008-11-11T17:15:00.000-08:00

Trader Joe's
Pumpkins
Intervention on A&E
This cotton dress I have on that looks dressed up despite the comfort it provides
Beautiful Booty followed by Cardio Kickboxing followed by Ab Lab at the gym
Whole-wheat pasta
Wednesday night girls' night at my house
Huell. Freakin. Howser. (How do I love thee?)
California's Gold on public television (see also: Huell Howser)
In-jokes
Hiking
Judaism
My best-ever nephew who talks now, I am told
The Onion
Laughing
Regina Spektor
Spearhead, particularly Chocolate Supa Highway, which sounds so quaintly outdated now
Rosemary and basil
"My lovey" and "butzie girl," which my mom calls me sometimes
Club soda
White wine
Stilton cheese with bits of apricot in it (see also: Trader Joe's)
Making lists (such sweet therapy)
Em dashes
Abbot-Kinney
AE, LGP, AK, MIG, MAW, ADGL—in short, friends
Staying home on Friday night
Yogurt sundaes (fat-free vanilla, light choco syrup, granola, blueberries, fat-free whip)
The valiant protesters of Prop 8 (thank you)
Cream eyeliner
Wholehearted people
Honest people
Candid people
New people (but mostly not)
My fair reader(s)
Dinner. Bye!

Election Night: November 4, 2008

2008-11-05T14:21:00.000-08:00

How to write about last night, the night America elected Barack Obama its next president? How to write about the feeling at all, and particularly how to do it on no sleep and adrenaline alone?

I woke up two hours before my alarm yesterday—Election Day-induced insomnia. The day did not feel normal on any front. Traffic was especially light on the way to work in the morning; was everyone in the voting booth? I made it to my polling place in the afternoon. There was no line, which was almost disappointing because I had wanted to feel the energy of thousands of other voters [ironic foreshadowing]. When I punched my ballot for President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, I welled up. And I well up again as I write this. I collected my "I Voted" sticker and pressed it to my chest with my hand over my heart like how you stand for the Pledge of Allegiance in elementary school.

At the gym afterward, I watched on multiple TVs as the clocks counted down the moments until the first polls closed. I was agape with the thrill of it all, mouth open. The woman on the elliptical next to me instigated a conversation with: "It's magic, isn't it? He was born for this."

At home (after AAA rescued my keys from my locked car), I showered and climbed into my themey red and blue outfit, put on my "I Voted Democrat" party hat, and watched as the results came in. They called Pennsylvania for Obama. It seemed like it was over before it started, but I don't have the stomach for fourth-quarter nail-biters anymore; I'd much prefer a blowout, and it was really happening. I ate Indian food and cried while Anderson Cooper tried to wrangle his infinite throng of commentators.

AE, LP, and DL (the photographer of that shot up there) came to the house with champagne. We piled into the car for the short drive to the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza where the official California Democratic Party party was happening. There was space for 7,000 and nearly three times that number of RSVPs. We arrived at 7:15, 45 minutes before the local polls closed, and stood patiently at the front of the line and waited. ABY came late from work and joined us. The girl behind us in line wore an old Betsy Ross-style flag she'd stitched into a Project Runway-style dress. Her date wore an "Obamarama" shirt. AK and DF were in line, but saw an intractable access problem shaping up and left. ABY would eventually bail too.

It was the first blustery night of the year and we were in coats (and we are never in coats). It felt like Times Square on New Year's Eve, only better because everyone was in a good mood, and New Year's Eve always seems kind of hellish.

I checked email on my phone. In sequence I got emails with these three subject lines from The Los Angeles Times:
"Breaking: Ohio Goes for Obama"
"Breaking: Virginia Goes to Obama"
"Breaking: AP Calls Election for Obama"

The cheers ran through the crowd, along down the line like the wave at a ballgame, or a pocket of water in a crimped hose. It felt like the energy went through my physical body in much the same way. People hung out of their hotel windows above us, waving flags and cheering. News choppers shone their beams in a clatter overhead.

We waited and waited in line, and eventually the fire department showed up en masse. No one else is getting in. We are at capacity. We are sorry, but we are at capacity. I need you all to move back 25 feet.

I tried every angle I could think of—which is really a lot of angles—and we did not get in. We waited, tried to be patient, sometimes failed at that, got frustrated, I wondered how exactly I would file a story about the event without seeing its innards, we tried to stay positive, we cheered sometimes. Then we got cold and went back to my house.

We opened the champagne and a few bottles of wine. I broke a glass, cleaned it up. I heated up some edamame and samosas. We watched Obama's victory speech on YouTube, and savored some CNN, plus the Stewart and Colbert special on Comedy Central. It looked grim that Proposition 8 would be defeated, and we were regretful about that, but we were elated and proud of Americans overall. We toasted to president Obama, and someone said: "We have the coolest president ever." I filed my story: "Democrats Swarm Hyatt for Massive Public Obama Party."

This is about as chronological and structurally dry as a story can get, but I had to put it down before I forget it. I don't ever want to forget it. The night America elected Barack Obama.

Now and Later

2008-10-23T16:17:00.000-07:00

I couldn't eat the perfectly heart-shaped tomato from the farmer's market. It was too pretty, and anyway it was a gift. So I lovingly arranged it among the cluster of pumpkins and fresh flowers currently serving as my dining table centerpiece. I knew it was going to rot, so eventually I moved it to the granite countertop in the kitchen where it would not destroy the tablecloth. Now it has officially rotted—but I haven't yet tossed it.

If there is a message here, it might be similar to the one contained in those email forwards, in which so and so was killed in a car accident, and when her daughter was going through her belongings afterward, the daughter discovered some of her mom's most beloved possessions—some kind of unburned candles or unused fancy soaps or something—that the mother never got to enjoy in her lifetime because she was too precious and was saving them for a special time, but never determined a time to be special or perfect enough as a consequence of always planning for the future and not living in the present, and so the daughter uses them in tribute or something.

The blue-eyed boy told me recently: "I have watched you sometimes waiting for a fabulous time to pass to that you can tenderly memorialize it, and then safely enjoy the memories." That was pretty astute; I do do that. I adore my memories, but I like to think that I am also wont to exclaim how wonderful a wonderful thing is while it is happening. Like college, for instance, and Coachella, and my Caribbean travels.

Really though, I don't like tomatoes except in other things.

Rainy-Day Schedule

2008-10-20T15:10:00.001-07:00

No, it's not exactly raining—this being Los Angeles and all—but today feels amiss.

In part that is because I am editing stories at a cafe on Sunset Boulevard, instead of in my office on Sunset Boulevard, because our Internet has had persistent problems for about a week, and I was teetering on the brink of sanity trying to work within our Web-based publishing tool there under those circumstances.

So I am editing stories in a big leather arm chair—fantasizing about that time within the next 10 minutes when I will buy a cup of chai tea—with my laptop in the place for which it was named. It is gray outside. It feels like Berkeley. This could be Cafe Strada or Milano, if there were more students and fewer models in the neighboring seats.

At Warner elementary school, when it rained, we could not go outside for recess, and instead played games inside at our desks as part of an alternate plan known as "Rainy-Day Schedule." The only game I can remember was called Heads-Up-Seven-Up, and had something to do with hiding our faces in our hands, heads down on desks, until something happened, but I can't remember what.

The Lord's Day

2008-10-19T20:17:00.001-07:00

I don't typically work out on Sunday; it's my day of rest.

But tonight I felt I should go to the gym, because I couldn't work out Thursday on account of work, and I couldn't work out yesterday on account of a V.I. birthday brunch, and I couldn't work out this morning on account of a pumpkin festival in Calabasas. So I tried to get into the gym this evening before it closed at 7, but I only succeeded in getting there at 6:40, which was only enough time to take a steam—which I decided was a delightfully deserved thing anyway, and a thing I never do during the week when the pace is not suitable for soothing oneself with steam, which would add 10 minutes one does not have onto one's routine.

But tonight there was time only for steam. And, beginning in the steam room, and then continuing into the locker room until long after closing time, I had what may truly be the most surreal conversation I have had ever at the gym, which is saying a lot. I want to retell it here, this conversation I had with the Thai trannie, but it was very unusual and would not stand up to translation in blog form, I'm sure of it. I just have never heard such strange words uttered. I just— I— Weird.

I will say that there is something to a slow-paced Sunday evening, and to devoting a time block to myself without any expectations of particular greatness or specific achievement. The driving without traffic, the parking in the prime ground-level spot without competition or the necessity to slither through the 12-inch gap left between mine and the next car (which not infrequently happens to be a Yukon parked in a compact space), the quiet, the steam, the not rushing back to work or to dinner or to the store or to quickly style my hair for this or that thing—it's nice.

No, this is not much of a story. But it had been forever since I'd blogged and apparently I needed to dip a toe back in before I say anything sensible.

Is anyone still out there? I'm sorry I left you. It's just that, these days, the best of my stories are not suitable for publication on the Internet.

Best Email I'll Get From a Publicist Today

2008-09-17T14:39:00.000-07:00

"I die for you."

(In response to the question of: "What charity did the event benefit?" No, seriously, what charity? I need to know for my story.)

Walking in L.A.

2008-09-08T14:11:00.000-07:00

We had some joke in college about my friends calling me Patch, because we figured it was only a matter of time before I ended up with another clutzy eye injury. (I like to think it was also because I'm a Raiders fan to the core, but it wasn't.) Really, you can't argue with hard facts.

But lately I'm starting to realize that my toes are my new most vulnerable area to injury. In the last year, I haven't had much undamaged-toe time.

Last summer, there was the matter of the Half Dome hike, during which I managed to bloody one toe after not cutting the adjacent toenail short enough. And I ended up with two unsightly black-and-blue patches under my big toenails that took nearly a year to grow out fully.

Then in Mexico, wearing skimpy flats, I accidentally made contact with the back of my travel partner's shoe, resulting in a baby toe that turned all the colors of the rainbow. Nonetheless, I vowed I would shove my foot into a fin for snorkeling even if it meant I had to cut the offending toe clear off. Nothing was going to keep me from being face down looking at turtles in the Caribbean, and nothing did (although a vicious sunburn necessitated a tank top over the bikini, but that's neither here nor there on the toe topic).

And most recently, there was the Grand Canyon hike, which, because of the intense, all-downhill grade for the entire first day, led eventually to a giant blister under one of the big toenails. A blister that would pop while I was minding my own business a week later, and when I was not prepared for, ahem, the flood. When I eventually took the polish off, it was clear that I would lose that toenail sooner or later, because instead of being transparent, it was opaque white. But it hung on, and I dutifully kept it polished and groomed.

Flash forward to last weekend, up in San Francisco, where I was enjoying a Korean-style massage until I gasped during the aggressive foot-massage part. Look, I knew I would lose that toenail eventually, so I wasn't as worried about that as I was about the post-traumatic stress syndrome I would have caused the poor masseuse if she ended up with my big red-painted toenail in her hand on Labor Day. Still it hung on.

But not for long. Wednesday, it finally gave up the ghost. At work. So I went straight to the nail salon on Sunset Boulevard during an essential impromptu lunch break, and got a prosthetic. It looked pretty good and convincing, but apparently the acrylic was too thin and it started to loosen at an inopportune time as I sat in five-inch open-toed sandals in a corner booth at Trader Vic's at the Beverly Wilshire late on Friday night. Not cute, people. Not cute.

Back to a different salon on Saturday for a better version of the acrylic replacement, before hitting the MTV Video Music Awards event circuit, where it is not appropriate to show up and represent your magazine with nasty feet. Two years the pedicurist said she worked on perfecting the toenail-replacement technique she was using on me. Two years! Only the best for my problematic phalanges.

Anyway, all of this is to say that toe is the new eye in my injury proneness. It's only a matter of time before the next incident, I fear. Thank heaven for modern pedicure science.

A Sunset Boulevard Play in One Act

2008-08-26T10:34:00.000-07:00

Ext. A City of West Hollywood parking lot off Sunset.

ME
(pulling up in a Mazda3 hatchback)

You know a Yukon isn't a compact car, right?

LEON
(parking Yukon in two $125/monthly compact spaces)
Yes, but they're the only spaces left. You're busting my chops pretty early in the morning.

ME
(opening trunk to place gym bag, exposing pink boxing gloves stored there)
That's true.

LEON
(seeing gloves)
Oh, I see you're serious. Wow, I like that. What's your name? I'm Leon. I used to box. Where do you box? We should box some time.

ME
If you keep parking that Yukon in a compact space, I bet we will.

THE END

Good Morning, Los Angeles

2008-08-21T10:01:00.000-07:00

6:20 a.m.: Alarm on Treo sounds. Check email while phone is in hand. Mistake.

6:50 a.m.: Out the door.

7:09 a.m.: Arrive at entrance to Runyon Canyon, after a miraculous 19-minute trip from Westwood to Hollywood. Spend next 15 minutes looking for parking. Note to self that tons of other Angelenos have already finished their morning hikes. Perplexing and impressive. Wait for one such hiker to vacate parking space and pounce on it.

7:25 a.m.: Hit the trail with MA. Dominate conversation, as usual, with wildly interesting tales of reentry into dating world. Take opposite route this time: longer trail up, steeper trail down. Admire peoples' cute puppies and American Apparel short shorts. Perfect 45-minute loop.

8:10 a.m.: Back to car.

8:30 a.m.: Hit gym in West Hollywood for condensed ab-targeted workout. Shower without feeling rushed. See Janice Dickinson, sans make-up, animatedly discussing the worth of Hermes Birkin bags ("Really? For $10,000, do you think any bag is even worth it?") with another female gym goer. Note to self that a whole different set of irrelevant celebrities works out at this time of day.

9:15 a.m.: Stop for coffee at Primo. Order iced, get hot. When iced arrives eventually, say, "You know, if that hot one's headed for the trash, I'll drink it too rather than let it go to waste." Leave with two-for-one coffees, feeling justified, since it's highway robbery in there anyway. Sit down to text underwhelming Dickinson tip to AD for her celebrity-sighting blog, assuming that it won't make cut. While sitting, try without success to eavesdrop on cutie boxing instructor's convo with miscellaneous woman at restaurant.

9:30 a.m.: In chair at work. Ready for Thursday. Ready for anything.

Workout Notes: Week of August 18

2008-08-20T16:20:00.000-07:00

Some girl did the entire jump-aroundy Fit-Body Workout class yesterday without taking off her sunglasses. Really?

In Ab Lab on Monday, the guy who hollered the expletive when he couldn't hold the plank anymore was positioned close enough to the instructor's mic to broadcast the utterance to the whole room, which I enjoyed, particularly as I continued to hold my plank (sucka).

I'm convinced Fabio is stalking me, since I see him at the gym every. single. time I work out, without a single exception that I can recall. (Or maybe he just never leaves the building.)

I'm very excited now that the Hard-Body Meltdown instructor calls me "girl." Great workout, girl! Thanks for the hard work, girl! It makes me feel like the popular kid in class, not unlike when my fiery Miami boxing partner calls me "mami."

Speaking of boxing: At the Coffee Bean this morning, I got another compliment on my pink boxing gloves, which dangled from my gym bag. Best investment ever. And the CPW (cost per wear) is almost nothing by now.

Hiking Runyon Canyon is absolutely my new favorite thing. (Monday, it was after work. Tomorrow, before work. Whee!) You don't necessarily want every hike to be such a quintessentially L.A. scene—with all those dogs and lean sports bra-clad torsos—but once in a while, it's completely fun and hilarious. And the views!

God, I love this town.

In Which I Break the Bank for a Worthy Reason

2008-08-17T20:45:00.000-07:00

On Saturday, I treated myself to a very indulgent trip to the hair salon. This trip to the salon marked a return to the place that I originally picked, shortly after I moved back to Los Angeles from New York, for the owner's expertise in balyage, the hand-painted highlights that make foil highlights seem like a caveman's hair-coloring technique. Since, I've been getting my color done at another salon, which I picked strictly for the convenience of its Doheny location and for the price-consciousness afforded by a relatively junior colorist (oh, and for the wi-fi). I did love my Brazilian Jewish stylist who was such a fun conversationalist, and whose opinions on the Sex and the City movie were totally illuminating, and who met his boyfriend in synagogue in San Francisco, which I always thought was darling (and who did Britney's extensions, by the way, but that's neither here nor there).

But here's the thing: The color wasn't great. Look, you can't throw good money after bad, even if it's not an unreasonable amount of good money. It was time for a change, and this time I felt like doing something for reasons other than convenience and economy. I just wanted to do it right.

So it was back to Venice, where I sipped red wine as the Saturday breeze wafted in through the open, garage-style doors of the salon, which shares its Abbot-Kinney space with an art gallery. Us Weekly issues dot rattan tabletops in the adjacent garden and paper lanterns sway in the tree branches overhead. It's an appropriately reverential place for my hair, about which I'm freakishly precious, but at least I can be honest with myself about that. It just is what it is.

For four hours, I took residence in this place, swapping stories about men and beach hair and sushi with the colorist. She said he'd left her four months ago, but she always knew he'd come back. I told her I was glad for her that he was back, and that she should make sure to be true to herself and to communicate better this time. She said it's crazy hot in here, isn't it? No, I said, I like the heat. I'm a summer person. Then she put me under the dryer and I baked and shvitzed and ate my words. Do you know that your hair takes insanely long to lift? No, I hadn't heard that before. Well, it does, but it's going to look amazing. You're going to totally love it. It's just what you need. Five more minutes.

After assistant Frenchie (and you know I avoid using names here, but that one's just too good) rinsed out the color and did two shampoos, a conditioning treatment, and two different glosses (roots and ends), it was back in the chair for the cut. (The blue-eyed boy used to trim my ends as I sat on the rim of the bathtub at home, but it's been years since I've had a professional cut. Much too terrified for that under normal circumstances.) When the shears came out this time, I was so proud of myself. No tears, no physical, visceral, fight-or-flight reaction. Just, you know, cut off the tired bits. It's time. Do some fun layers. Anyway, I'd already said my peace, and she totally got it. Go for layers, but leave. the. length. For god's sake.

Afterward, at the register, I plunked my credit card down for an amount that was roughly equivalent to my rent when I lived in Oakland, or my plane tickets for my Caribbean vacation, or three months of all-California-access membership at my fancy gym (and that's actually saying something). It's liberating, really, to just be like: I did this for myself today just because I wanted it. It's kind of obscene, OK, sure, but I worked for it, I didn't steal it. And I deserve it.

I wish there were some dramatic dénouement in which I got to leave the salon with the bounciest, shiniest, most perfect head of blond curls ever, but there's no such moment, because: Almost no one knows how to style curly hair, even if they can cut it and color it. She tried to scrunch some sort of pomade in there and diffuse it and call it a day, but nothing works like mousse, which no one wants to use for the reason that it has an '80s reputation and is sort of drying, but people: It's the only thing that works.

Anyway, I went for sushi with a full head of frizz on Saturday night. And it wasn't until today, when I showered and styled my hair with the standard two hands full of mousse that I saw the result of an entire Saturday afternoon and evening spent in an airy Venice salon chair. And it was good.

August, So Far: By the Numbers

2008-08-12T10:17:00.000-07:00

Distinct fond references to the soundtrack from 1988's Colors that have come up in conversation: 2

Times I've used some version of my catch phrase for summer '08 about "running a tight ship": 1,000

Quantity of red wine consumed: +/- a case

Beautiful Booty and Cardio Kickboxing workouts completed: +/- 8

Times I've heard that M.I.A. track with the shotgun sound in Beautiful Booty and Cardio Kickboxing classes, since it's the instructor's new favorite song: 8

Semi-disposable clothing and accessory items purchased from Forever 21 and H&M: infinite

Times I have eaten Thai for dinner: 3

Miles traveled on PCH between Santa Monica and Malibu over several trips: at least 150

Cubes of tofu consumed: semi-infinite

New hair products sampled: 5
(New products integrated into routine: 1)

Books started: 2 (The Female Brain, which is so far interesting but full of excuses, and I Was Told There'd Be Cake, which is so far posery and cloying)

New blogs I've picked up: 1 (Thanks for the stories, Diet Coke. And sorry about the way those Valentinos cut up your feet like that.)

Times sister has told me, in words or non-words, to get over myself: at least 10
Times she's been right: same

Trips to Trader Joe's on National, where it's impossible to park: 2

Times I have consulted the Magic 8 Ball on my desk at work, after not having consulted it for months: 7
Times in the last one minute: 3 (but the second time said "ask again," so the third time shouldn't count)

Personal decisions put off until tomorrow instead of today: Brain is full. Can we talk about this tomorrow?

My Clock Is Ticking Again

2008-08-10T17:58:00.000-07:00

My old clock, which was a gift, which I think is from the 1940s or so, which was made in New Jersey, in a shape that mimics a ceramic kitchen plate, it works again. My clock, which nominally ticks for eight days before it needs to be wound, but was down to four days and then two, and then two hours, it went back to the giver of the gift for a mechanical tune up. On the back of my clock is inscribed by the giver: "Time is the most valuable thing you can spend."

The ticking sound of my clock, which is so pronounced in a quiet house, it's back. The ticking that sounds like crawling to the kitchen for water when the stomach flu had hold of me; that sounds like planning trips to see the Mayan ruins in Mexico; that sounds like "How was work today?"; that sounds like reading the Sunday paper and making egg and cheese breakfast muffins with veggie sausage; that sounds like the background noise behind Planet Earth in the living room; that sounds almost entirely like peace and only faintly like conflict, it's back. A fraught sound. A sweet, sentimental sound.

Skirt, the Issue

2008-08-06T14:01:00.000-07:00

Today I am wearing a skirt that cannot be denied. I am wearing a skirt that flows in a swirly pattern, in shades of bright orange and fuchsia, from slightly above the waistline clear to street level. It's from H&M's Marimekko tribute collection, and it's basically the loudest skirt in America.

I'm wearing this skirt because A), it's pretty hot outside, maybe almost 90 today. And B), it's sort of a statement that says, "Everything is super! Would I be wearing this skirt if everything weren't super?" This approach is similar in concept to the email I received last week from a friend (in regard to a certain sub-optimal first date she'd had), which she punctuated with an exclamation mark and the note: "I'm not really feeling the exclamation point, but if I type it, maybe it will manifest in reality."

This skirt gets attention. Everyone at work remarked on it this morning, as they always do, which brings the garment's CPC (cost per compliment) down to pennies. As I was walking down Sunset just now to grab a bite for lunch, the hostess at Cravings stopped me to ogle my skirt. CPC ever dropping.

Half a block later, in the crosswalk across from Chin Chin, the collagen-filled passenger in an Escalade-genre vehicle (indefensible, BTW) rolled down the window to go on and on about ohmygod ohmygod your skirt, I love it. Where did you get it? H&M. Recently? No, about two months ago. Shoot!

This tickled me, because I often feel like filling one's face with collagen and shopping at notoriously affordable H&M have a dependably inverse relationship. But not this time. It's the power of this skirt. It's universal.

In Which my Head Explodes at Summer Camp

2008-08-04T11:27:00.000-07:00

I didn't read the Sunday paper yesterday. I was back at camp instead.

It was alumni day up in Malibu, the occasion for which I set foot in a place I haven't seen since 1994, and which felt somehow the same, and also totally different.

The dirt and the heat and dehydration were all the same: check. The wooden plaques we engraved with in-jokes when we thought we were so cool, and that our in-jokes were the best ones ever, and when engraving C.I.T. plaques was the most important thing one could do on the planet—those were all still there. The one over the amphitheater that says, "You are entering this magic place: Forget what you have learned," on the entry side, and "You are leaving this magic place: Remember what you have taken," on the exit side, that was still there, still penned in the letters that seem to be the universal hand belonging to Southern California Jewish girls of a certain era with hippie tendencies and unfettered creative aspirations and mind-blowing, eye-bulging optimism.

Among the differences: Today's campers are whiners who tell their parents things that they should know to keep to themselves, and their parents are litigious, and their parents are the types who send threatening emails. So—we're told by the camp director who once was a camper when we were campers, and who had a mullet back then, but it was totally cool—you cannot punish a kid anymore by making him hug a tree and say the Hamotzee backwards or whatever it was. You must punish a kid by making him sign a contract of some sort, which threatens explusion if the behavior continues. There are real consequences.

These kids get Otter Pops instead of candy on some days. This is not an insignificant change, because I connect Abba Zabbas with only one reference on earth, and that is eating them on a bottom bunk with feet up on the plank under the top bunk, where many words and names were scribbled alongside swirls in indelible markers. “G-8 is great.” “AD slept here, summer ’89.”

Also, these kids have Ipods in their cabins and tents. We had our best-ever counselor DK singing "Crazy for You" over a karaoke tape to help us fall asleep. And these girls? They have doors on their cabins. Doors! We used to have only two walls in those same wooden structures, and we also walked uphill both ways in the snow to get to the bathroom cabin...

...which still looks the same, but it has been painted. No longer do the words "MA is a bitch, but I love him," penned by JH circa 1988, remain in one of the stalls. And no longer does that whole structure reek of Aussie Sprunch Spray, which had been pulled from Caboodles and applied liberally to curly manes on Friday nights, when we were supposed to be clean, and were for a moment, before we got our feet instantly muddy on the walk to Mercaz.

And there's more. These 21st-century kids sing in Hebrew a lot. I mean, we sang in Hebrew a lot too, but these kids seem to be asked to take their Judiasm more seriously, to treat it almost as if it were a bona fide religion as much as the pure enjoyment of our shared culture and our community. And, one of the rare English songs in these kids' song books is "Hey There Delilah," which is wrong for so many reasons.

And then there's the fact that our camp now has many areas, including a new organic garden laid out in the shape of the state of Israel, dedicated to the memory of fellow camper MB, who was killed by a suicide bomber while studying at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 2002. In some senses, camp is a more serious place now.

But before all this, there were the 1980s, when girls wore high-cut bikinis and odd-shaped, new-fangled monokinis, and when we all used to shout in unison, sort of inexplicably, "Cowabunga, I'm stoked on those hot, primo tubes. Ow!" when our bus turned off Mulholland Highway onto the Pacific Coast Highway as we headed to Zuma beach. And we relived those memories as we sifted through curled black-and-white photos sprawled out on a tabletop in the dining hall, where kids sang many extra verses at the end of the Birkat Hamazon that I had never even heard before.

At the ropes course, under the fancy new rock climbing wall, we asked a 14-year-old camper if she knew how old we were. It was a trick question, so she didn't want to answer. We made it easy for her: "Do we look more like your counselors, or more like your parents?"

"Like my parents."

And the seasons, they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We're captive on the carousel of time
We can't return we can only look behind
From where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game

I Want

2008-07-31T14:07:00.001-07:00

I'm on a shopping bender. But I'm OK with it; I deserve stuff this summer. I'm sorry, but.

My head almost exploded at the Marc Jacobs in the Forum Shops last week in Vegas when I had to choose between the three color combinations in which the most perfect snakeskin clutch on earth has been made. I picked the one with the blues and greens and browns, although I liked the '80s-inspired neon one too, of course, and I would have bought the one that the store clerk described as "Afrocentric," but she seemed so self-loathingly disparaging when she said it. Actually, first she said I should buy all three, but I was like, "Look lady, it's 3 in the afternoon. I know this is Vegas, but how drunk do you think I am?"

Yesterday I bought new bedding—a sheet set and a duvet set—as well as a new gold necklace (I need a chain worthy of my California pendant, hello), and a tablecloth. A tablecloth? Random, maybe, but I'm in spend mode.

What else can I buy now? Gimme.

Update: It's a 70-percent-off bonanza at BCBG. I picked out a slouchy, comfy little lavender-ish dress (deal sealer: "machine wash cold") and was telling the clerk, "Yeah, I thought it would be great into autumn with some leggings..." And he said, "Did you know we have leggings at 70 percent off?" So I got those too.

Update part deux: Today I am wearing the little Marc Jacobs cotton romper that I bought on Saturday, which is an extra small, but 80 percent off is 80 percent off. I can be an extra small for 80 percent off. I also scooped up some royal purple MJ shorts with gold hardware, even though it's late in the season, but they were 65 percent off, and I got an extra discount because of my birthday month, even though it isn't event technically my birthday month anymore. Then there's the matter of a new army green swimsuit. And that's it for a while, I think.

Stuff About Being Jewish I Have Heard Lately That Has Tickled Me

2008-07-29T21:50:00.001-07:00

"I think being a New Yorker is probably like being Jewish: You're either born that way or you aren't, and while you can convert, nobody will make it easy for you and nobody thinks it's the same."
—From Capella's blog, on her impending move

"You've heard the saying: Gentiles leave and don't say goodbye. Jews say goodbye and don't leave."
—From a guest at a Shabbat dinner in Venice earlier this month, as we all edged ever closer to the door and never quite got there

"When you get back from Vegas, let's go for drinks. Or Jewish drinks: food."
—From another AD with very good hair, by way of Facebook email

Also, at the end of a craps table at Mandalay Bay last week, I was positioned next to some guys who kept saying, "Easy money, all day, every day! Easy money!" They said this before each shooter rolled the dice. And I'm like, hello, Jewish much? No, not. We don't say that stuff on account of we're superstitious, even if we're just rolling dice, and not even naming babies before they are born or wishing somebody a safe flight. (Maybe we could say "easy money" and then also say kein ahora each time too, but that would get cumbersome and also kind of embarrassing.)

The Grand Canyon Hike Report

2008-07-01T23:05:00.000-07:00

This is the story of our hike down and up the Grand Canyon, on Sunday and Monday, June 29 and 30, 2008. Or rather, this is only my story. No doubt the other seven adventurers in our group—in total we were seven women, one man, all hovering around 30, with varying fitness levels and heat and fear tolerances, from the Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay areas—all have their own. But at least this one thing is surely universal among us: It was an unforgettable, tremendous thing.

Led fearlessly and tirelessly by trip organizer LP, we set up at Mather campground on Saturday night and tried to get to sleep as early as possible for an early-morning wake up. Racked with adrenaline and nerves, I don't think I slept for more than two 45-minute intervals; I could hear my heart beating in my ears.

We intended to wake up at 4 a.m., but I was up at 3:30, and so was most of the rest of our crew, everyone filling their hydration bags and packing and repacking their packs by light of headlamps. Mostly on account of our need to take two shuttle buses to the trail head, we got a slightly later start than planned, but were generally still on track: At 5:45 a.m., we set off down the South Kaibab trail.

The reason for the necessity of an early start is the rapidly rising temperature in late June in the canyon. National Park Service posters, displayed prominently throughout the park, generally seem to try to discourage hiking altogether, particularly in the summer heat. These signs basically warn you that your death is imminent, no matter your age or fitness level, so don't do it. Or if you must, then for god's sake be prepared. But probably just don't do it. (One of these posters in particular, which described the overheating death of a 26-year-old girl, made quite an impression on me, and probably accounted in large part for my lack of sleep the first night.)

But around 6 a.m. the thermometer had likely not hit 80 yet, and we were in good shape. From the top you head straight down at a tremendously steep grade (hikers often take this trail down, but rarely ever take the same one up on account of its arduous angle). And the view is wide open (I believe this is called "exposure" in hiking circles) as the trail follows the ridge line. You really have to suspend your disbelief to imagine that humans can get all the way down there, and then can get all the way up. To start, my pack was about 25 pounds, and I believe many of our other group members' were fairly comparable.

We stopped for rest and snacks a couple of times, saw a pair of condors with massive wing spans, and generally took our time to enjoy the view. With the temperature still mild even around 9 a.m., and the trip strictly downhill, our crew seemed to be holding up just fine. But during one break for shade, BC began to reveal her discomfort. We encouraged her to try to take some salty snacks to replenish some electrolytes, but she had no appetite, and she vomited here. My guess was that the problem was nerves.

You see, hiking into the Grand Canyon is a head trip. Generally, when you embark on a big hike, you know that you are free to reevaluate your goal at any point and go back down. You do the Grand Canyon in the reverse of a typical trek: first down and then up. So every step you continue to take into that abyss is one you know you must match during the crawl out. This can be a serious psychological disadvantage, particularly as you gaze out on that expanse from the South Kaibab trail. After managing a few peanuts and absorbing some pep talk, BC summoned her strength and we headed down again; I believe her new goal was to get to the bottom and find a ranger to inquire about an alternate way out, maybe on a mule. Onward we went.

We passed dust in all colors—bright red and white in addition to some greenish landscape—and much evidence of mules on the trails in the form of their prolific excrement. On one set of switchbacks, we stepped off the trail to let a mule train pass.

On the 6.9-mile, sharply descending South Kaibab—although it is a terrifically groomed trail befitting a park visited by 5 million oglers annually—there are few markers to encourage hikers. There are no potable water sources, and neither is there any visible water. At some point we saw off in the distance a shelter containing composting toilets, and we hustled toward it. The tiny glimpse seemed to take months to become a reality. Once there, AK, MIG, and I sat down against the structure, elevating our legs on our packs (which we'd read was a smart plan to reduce swelling whenever possible during breaks). As we waited for the rest of our group, we acknowledged that we were leaning against a toilet shed, and maybe that wasn't the most sanitary nor the classiest thing for ladies to do. But who cared? It was shade. MIG asked me what time it was, and I noted it was 10 a.m. We were both shocked—it already seemed we'd been up for days.

We scarfed down some more electrolyte chews and snacks, and talked to a couple of other hikers who passed. When you're this far down into the canyon, there are few others: It's too far for a day hike (except for a pathological few), so it's only the small group of committed campers who populate the trail in that area. We saw perhaps 10 other hikers between there and the bottom.

Funny, it was at that point that I thought we were close to the bottom. In fact, there was still a vast stretch of switchbacks separating us from the Bright Angel campground where we'd sleep that night. We caught our first glimpse of the Colorado River, and it motivated us to add a little extra spring to our step. And then we zigzagged across a few more switchbacks. And then we saw the river again and again and again... like an oasis that was hardly getting nearer no matter how much we walked. Eventually we got close enough to see the current moving (at an impressive clip), and to see the Black Suspension Bridge that spanned it, and the small tunnel that led onto it. I'd expected to be terrified of this bridge (my fear of heights had reared its head mercilessly on Half Dome), but from above, it actually looked like a thrill, beyond which was the reward of a cold creek and an end to the day's hike.

As we descended this set of switchbacks, I was feeling my first real physical symptoms. The continual pressure of my big toenails against my hiking shoes was causing seriously painful tenderness, of which I was acutely aware with each step. Also, we were nearing the bottom, and I'd say the temps in the sun were getting close to the 115-degree range.

Finally, we reached the tunnel (a few feet of shade!) and crossed the bridge. And to my delight, I wasn't afraid at all.

We could see down to a small beach on the river, exposed to full sun, at which a few folks were taking dips into the cold water. At that point, LP was suffering pretty bad from the heat, and my toes couldn't take much more. Everyone was close to their physical limits. According to my trusty Polar heart rate monitor, I'd burned about 2,200 calories by then. (It would be about twice that on the ascent.)

We wet our shirts and towels in the river, and walked the last half mile to camp. I changed into my swimsuit right there in the open (privacy is an irrelevant luxury when things are that raw), and we all got into Bright Angel creek... overjoyed.

The creek, which runs through the meandering row of camp sites, is rocky and cold and spectacular, and it's the thing that saves some hikers' lives who may be close to expiring from heat exhaustion by the time they reach it. (Seriously: One of the park service's strongly worded signs at the bottom encouraged summer hikers to get in the creek stat upon reaching it.)

That evening was one of the more surreal and wonderful of my life. After cooling down in the creek, a few of us headed into the canteen at Phantom Ranch for some iced tea and—shockingly—light air conditioning. There, you can buy postcards and stamps, and deposit the cards in a leather sack, from which they will be retrieved and brought to the post office on the rim by way of mule train. I amused myself by attempting to write five of these postcards without any sort of motor skills (the hike and the heat, not to mention the complete lack of sleep, had rendered those skills ancient history by this point, about 3 p.m.). I didn't have addresses with me, so I guessed on the ones I didn't have memorized (and who memorizes in the age of technology?), and I'm not sure I wrote anything that made sense. I imagine that reading one of these cards now would be something like writing a note to myself while high on hallucinogens, and then looking at it later, wondering whose creepy handwriting that was and what the heck that person was even trying to say. (So, apologies to those of you dear friends and family members who may actually receive these strange missives. But know they were written with love! And unfathomable fatigue!)

MC, whose profession is travel planning, had made persistent daily calls to the Phantom Ranch to try to secure some meals for us (which generally must be booked a year in advance), and had succeeded. So the eight of us were able to eat, depending on our preferences, steak or vegetarian chili with salad and cold drinks. Our group had these meals in two shifts, the first at 5 p.m., and the second at 6:30. Since MIG and I were on the second shift, we first played cards at a picnic table in front of the small dining hall, and then attempted to play hangman on a small notebook I'd carried with me. The word she'd selected was cougar, but the stick figure woman representing me almost met her fate before I could guess that simple little word. I guessed "S." And then after a long pause, "Um... S" again. I was so spent, I'd forgotten most of the letters in the alphabet.

The doors to the dining hall opened, and DML, LP, and AE—the first shifters—emerged happy and refreshed after their steak meals. Just then—and this is not for dramatic effect, it's actually true—monsoon-force winds began to blow. It was an ultra-hot, powerful wind, as if produced by a hair dryer. It was like nothing else.

After our own meals of veggie chili, we attended a brief ranger talk at a small amphitheater at Phantom Ranch. I was so fatigued that I was completely without filters, and I found myself shouting out things—even slightly lewd things, and hello, there were kids there—like a heckler at a comedy club. But I think he enjoyed it, this unconventional ranger, who talked at a clip, with deep enthusiasm, using words that indicated he was probably from Santa Cruz. He ended his geology talk with a sing-along—but it wasn't Kumbaya or anything; it was Metallica. It's entirely possible that I hallucinated this out of fatigue, but I'm pretty sure the other girls who were also in attendance will back me up.

We cooled ourselves in the river one last time before sleep. MIG and I had a tent; we'd heard it was going to be about 60 degrees overnight at the bottom, but I believe it had to be closer to 90. The girls in our group with only bug bivies (net shelters) had the smarter idea by a mile. I slept in my swimsuit bottom and filthy tanktop from the day's hike, over (not in) my sleeping bag, and I sweated profusely all over its synthetic materials. Later I would realize that I had been so tired I'd actually forgotten to even open the valve on my camping pad, and thus it didn't inflate. But even this insomniac might have been able to sleep on shards of glass when that exhausted, so it was moot.

At 4:15 a.m., we were up again for day two, our hike out of the canyon via the Bright Angel trail, a much longer route in distance (about 9.5 miles), but one with a lesser grade, some shade along the way, several potable water stops, and the chance to walk alongside creek water for at least a mile or more. It was not too hot yet at that time of the morning, and we were in good spirits. Sweet BC had found her strength and courage, and had decided to set out first to give herself a psychological edge, I'm guessing. She was making great time.

The rest of us were keeping a steady pace, first along Silver Bridge, which unlike Black features only an open grate below hikers' feet, which shows clear through to the river. Again, I found this enjoyable and not fear inspiring to my own great surprise. However it was on this bridge that my camera blinked low battery, and then pooped out for good. Nothing makes me feel more impotent than being without a camera. But, assured that seven other hikers were documenting our experience, I gulped down that disappointment and trekked on.

About four miles into the trip up (which we knew was about half of the distance along the trail, but far less in difficulty), we came to Indian Gardens, a little oasis with shade, potable water, and a creek running through. There, we ate the sack lunches we'd picked up from the Phantom Ranch. (I ate my bagel and cream cheese as if I were a wild dog, hurling pieces into the air and hoping some landed in my mouth. Somehow, DML managed to slice his neatly, and I joked that he might like some capers and roasted tomatoes on his gourmet dish.) We poured what seemed like the thousandth batch of electrolyte powders into our water vessels, and we were already cursing the notion of neon-colored warm water. (But from everything we'd heard, this diligence was going to save our lives, for sure.) I took off my shoes (something that makes you nervous—because you know if you do it you will never want to put those suckers back on, but you must), and went down to the creek to soak my feet in the cold water. LP and MIG slid right into the shallow creek, clothes and all. Afterward, I put more Moleskin on my big toes, which were definitely feeling the impact, and I was already guessing I might lose at least one of those toenails eventually. (At blog press time, the status of the toenail was still indeterminate.)

We'd heard initially that hikers would be smart to wait out the heat of the day here at Indian Gardens until 4 p.m. before beginning the rest of the trek up. But we'd arrived there shortly after 9 a.m., and were satisfied we'd had enough of a break by around 10:30. Plus, I'd asked Ranger Metallica the night before what he'd thought about that theory, and he said don't worry about spending the whole day there—keep going if you feel ready; there's a rest house only a mile and a half above it. So off we went.

The next stretch of trail is dubbed "the furnace." This bit is hot as hell, as you might expect from its moniker, and dusty. It was a long mile and a half until the rest house, known as Three Mile Rest House, as it's three miles from the top of the rim. In my memory, this rest house had a bit of a party atmosphere. There were at least 10 people seeking respite there, filling up at the water spigot, elevating their legs, and scarfing snacks. We met a group of hikers from Flagstaff who were doing rim to river to rim in a single day—attempting in half the time what we were doing in two days (a thing that is so, so discouraged by the park service). The funny thing was these world-class hikers were using Wal-Mart broomsticks for walking sticks. I think because I was absolutely loopy from heat and fatigue, I found this fact unbelievably funny.

There is no toilet here, so I found a tree (pardon). Liquid turns neatly to clay in that soil, which keeps it all very contained and tidy. No fuss, no mess! I ran my tanktop under the spigot and put it on soaking wet. That kept me cool for about 10 seconds.

As AE and I were leaving the rest house in good spirits, a ranger there told us that our group looked like we were in great condition, compared to the state of many other hikers who reach that point. He said he was deputizing us—that we were to give safety tips (regarding electrolytes, water, shade, rest) to anyone we might pass who looked like they were in trouble. He said we looked like we knew what we were doing. Maybe Ranger Rick says that to all the ladies, but I was feeling really good. (Actually, the whole way up, my heart rate never got much higher than 160, which is a vast improvement over the 180s I'd seen on my monitor as I was hoofing up the Vernal Falls stretch at Half Dome last year.)

On the trip up to Mile and a Half Rest House (guess why it is so named), things were starting to feel more treacherous. It was the full heat of the day now (maybe shy of 100 degrees since we were closer to the top, which can be 20 degrees or so cooler than down at the bottom). And plus the impact of my toes against my shoes was getting more intense. That next rest house is cruel in that you need to take several stairs to reach it. Also, it is rather small, with room for only, say, two hikers to sit with legs elevated. Also, this rest house has a bathroom with composting toilets, but those are in another shelter, at least 30 paces away. Thirty backtracking paces feels like a lot at this point in the hike—trust me.

Some N.B.s: By this point my pack was probably around 20 pounds, because I'd drank much of the water and eaten much of the food, and I'd put my camping pad in a duffel bag shared by several group members, which a mule carried to the top. Certainly DML's and LP's packs must have been heavier as they did not make use of space in the mule duffel. The whole trip down, I'd drank about three electrolyte-packed liters of water. On the way up, it was more like six. I was recalling Chris Rock's sketch about "Put a little Tussin on it," because we had conditioned ourselves to think like that about electrolytes. The cure all. Knee hurts? Sprinkle a little electrolyte powder on there.

We knew we were close to the top now, but looking up, the rim still seemed like an unbelievable way up, not to mention it looked like a sheer cliff. But that's what switchbacks are for. And more, and more, and more, and more of them, mostly exposed to full sun. The switchbacks can be demoralizing, and AK was exhausted and frustrated; you can see the top now, but it seems like you'll just never get there.

As we got closer, we saw more people on the trail, day hikers who came down with only a small bottle of water and no pack, and who were looking very, very clean in white Lacoste things. We looked like hell—covered in red dust and sweat and Moleskin, swollen and shuffling—and we knew it. It was a funny contrast to see them, and I wonder what they thought of us.

Finally, almost unfathomably, we crept up on it: There was the sign marking the trail head. We'd done it! MIG and I stood at the top and waved our arms and hollered cheers as loudly as we could as our fellow hikers crested the cliff too. We had all done it, and we'd all done great. It was a feeling of unmitigated joy.

And deep physical pain. My toes were useless, and the consensus seemed to be that our calves all hurt like all get out. LP's knee, which had been ailing her long before the trip, must have throbbed under the red-mud stained bandage she'd wrapped around it. We all tried to be patient through a few group photos with arms raised in triumph before we got on the shuttle to head back to camp. We moved slowly, Thriller-video style, in a limp apparently known as the "Kaibab Shuffle" among Grand Canyon hikers.

On the bus, I told the woman next to me: "Oh dear, I'm sorry if I offend." We didn't smell good. We didn't look good. And we felt like a million bucks.

Sunday night—thanks in part to a combination of Lunesta, red wine, celebratory champagne, ear plugs, and a black-out sleep mask, not to mention a 10-hour trek out of the depths of the Grand Canyon—I slept like a corpse. (And was also thankful not to be one after the harrowing experience.)

The 500-mile drive home to Los Angeles from Arizona via Route 66 with MIG and AK was filled with triumphant giggles, dirty jokes, and quips about electrolytes, water consumption, and salty snacks, which had been both our saviors and our albatrosses on the hike.

And our drive was filled with talk about what impossible heights we'll try for next year, in both the literal and life-goal senses of the word.

Peaks and Valleys

2008-06-26T12:37:00.001-07:00

Sweet. A blog post about a dream I had last night. Snore, right?

But seriously. We were on a balcony of a very, very tall high-rise building. Actually, we thought were were on the balcony, but later realized we were actually hovering near it in a basket trailing from a helicopter. For a girl with a moderate fear of heights, this was a nervous-making thing. After what seemed like forever in that state, the helicopter finally took off, soaring away from the building, carrying only me now in its basket, and then lowered gracefully so that my basket was gliding over the clearest Caribbean-looking ocean imaginable, where the sea was the faintest shade of blue, but mostly only showed right through to the sand below. It was heavenly. I was getting ready to drop in for a swim.

...and then a private caller woke me up at 6 a.m. for the second time this week. I will get you if I find you.

I'm sure this dreaming of heights, of soaring, of potentially plummeting, has something to do with the Grand Canyon trek, kicking off in T minus two days now. Two!

Temperature range: forecast at 39 to 108 degrees. Approximate percent grade for much of the way up: 15. Friends crazy enough to attempt: Nine, including me.

Subject line of today's pre-hike thread: "Just to add to your anxiety..."

Notable graf contained therein: "Apparently there is also a slight chance of showers this weekend. Which sounds kind of wonderful in 105-degree heat, but I have no idea what that means in terms of lightening killing us on the trail. Never fear... it's not likely, statistically, to kill more than one of us. That's only a one in nine chance you'll be fried."

Whew! Cake.

Beware of Women Who Make Lists

2008-06-20T11:46:00.000-07:00

That was the punch line of some comic strip ADG and I read in college. And we found it perplexing and not funny. Because we know that women who make lists are the best kinds.

With the big Grand Canyon hike near on the horizon, by now I'd be knee deep in lists, and many of the items on those would be crossed off already. But I got distracted (not my style, but "life comes at you fast," as the commercials say). So it's T minus eight days until departure and I'm... listless.

You see, there is a lot to think about when packing for the Grand Canyon hike. The temperature at the top rim is supposed to be something like 30 degrees cooler than the temperature at the bottom. At the top, we'll be car camping and can bring luxuries like air mattresses and real pillows. For the bottom, it's whatever you can cram in your pack and carry first all the way down and then all the way up without dying. It's supposed to be like 9 million degrees, or really, above 100. So even if my booty is in shape for this (and even that is questionable), my lists lag woefully behind.

But there's time. I bought a new pack with a solid frame and a camping pad from REI, plus some mysterious dehydrated food packages that become lasagna when you reconstitute them. Just this week I've bought six Clif bars and replaced the battery in my trusty Polar heart rate monitor, which I am counting on to tell me among many other things that I burned 10,000 calories over the two-day trek. Coupled with the info on LP's pedometer, I should be able to sate my voracious appetite for information. I need data. I'm like a data vampire.

Next up, I think I'll buy a dependable visor or hat (the desperate need for sun protection is as much about vanity as anything else, but hey, at least I know myself) and maybe a new tank top with built-in sports bra that will have to be up to a serious task.

List making aside, one benefit of recent distractions is that I have not been devouring every blog ever written on hiking the Grand Canyon by way of the Bright Angel trail. (This so-called preparation did not help me before Half Dome last year.) In the only one I read several months ago, some lesbians faced serious complications from heat exhaustion and vomited uncontrollably. Or something like that; I kind of blocked it out.

Anyway, regular readers of this blog will appreciate the great symbol it will be if I manage to claw myself out of a giant hole in the earth. And you know what, y'all? It's on.

Ode to a Butt Whooping

2008-06-16T19:19:00.000-07:00

I must be on the come-up because no impaired woman could endure the rigors of Beautiful Booty class followed immediately by Cardio Kickboxing (nor do I think most sane women would even attempt it on a normal day). I totally enjoyed it too.

Put "she lived and died by her jump squats" on my epitaph if I collapse. And I mean that in the most loving way.

**

For jump squats: "Start in a deep squat position with your arms folded out in front of your body. From this position, explosively jump up as high as you can and reach for the ceiling with your hands as you jump. Repeat this until failure."

What Has Helped and What Hasn't

2008-06-16T10:10:00.000-07:00

HAS
Don't Mess With the Zohan (surprisingly)
Game 5
The company of friends
The Fowler Museum
Getting my house cleaned by other people who aren't me
Working out (Man, that is sick. Slash healthy.)

HASN'T
The sadistic Facebook broken-heart icon
Wine
Game 4
Thinking
Shopping
Eating
Rejiggering vacation plans
Paying $4.67 at the gas station this morning for regular unleaded
Trying to get perspective by conjuring Darfur

Lucky Girl

2008-06-12T11:05:00.000-07:00

"Whatever you need, girl, we're here for you."

"I dedicated my yoga practice to you. Did you feel the strength and the peace?"

"We all think it would be a good idea to see your girls if you can muster the strength. Would it help to talk? Or would it help to listen to others' trivial problems? Or would it help to tell fart jokes all evening? Just say the word."

"I will continue to pray that you find love and joy of a more permanent sort and peace in the meantime. Om."

"Since you're probably feeling fatigued anyway, why not perk up your bathroom a little with new paint? I will send out feelers to the girls and work on a painting-party spreadsheet. Nothing makes me feel good like a) making a fabulous list, and b) getting stuff on it accomplished."

"In the end, you discover that you are a wiser, richer, fuller person for the experience. In the meantime, we have friends, family, and vacation! Not to mention shopping, countless hours at the gym, and martinis with the girls. I love you endlessly."

"I have Xanax."

"Take the day off! We'll go to the beach, shop for 'kinis, drink beer at the beach bars, and lick our wounds."

"We are women and don't have the option to dither forever on whether we want a family or not. It's important that you are faithful to your future self and your dreams of having a family. Love your broken heart, because your heart is what makes you so special. It brings pain, but it also brings you so much joy."

"I'll treat you to a private Pilates lesson."

"I love you lots! Call me whenever you are ready. Or I will harass you."

"Should we meet at someone's house instead of a public space? You know, for maximum huggability? Just hugging and being hugged releases good drugs in the brain. It'll help."

"I know it hurts now, but when you find the right person, you will have joy for the rest of your life. I love you with all my heart. You are so strong. This is a new beginning, a new adventure."

Love

2008-06-10T16:54:00.000-07:00

Me: mom was kind of a star yesterday because she asked me a million times
if i would like something to eat
and i cried over the questions a million times
and shook my head no
no i will not eat
then she put the matzah ball soup in front of me
and i ate it
and i was nourished

ED: cute
that's like a poem
sort of like a cross between shel silverstein
and a psalm

Everything in Moderation

2008-06-02T18:45:00.000-07:00

I covered a party last night that featured an M.I.A. performance that began at 11:30 p.m. This was a) pretty good, since I'm totally obsessed with M.I.A. since the blue-eyed boy brought her CD on our Yucatan trip and we logged 1,100 kilometers in the Tsuru listening to it, and since I rocked out to her at Coachella with the girls. But also it was b) pretty lousy because I had an 8:30 a.m. meeting this morning. So today I dragged. And dragged. And...zzz..zzz..z. Wait, what? I'm up.

After work, I went to the gym intending to make my own workout, probably 60 to 65 minutes on the elliptical with three-pound hand weights for light but sustained upper-body work, while watching some trashy reality show along the lines of Tila Tequila: Shot at Love. And then, instead, I guilted myself into taking the super-hard Body Design class. The instructor is great but instead of saying stuff like, "You can modify this one if you need to," he says things like, "You must keep up or you must leave. What's the point if you do it wrong?"

I felt every excruciating moment of that hour, but as I was leaving, I was feeling really smug, really proud of myself for undertaking the challenge when I could have fully justifiably gone easier on myself. I was busily making sweeping proclamations in my head about how important it is to continually take oneself out of one's comfort zone to gain rewards....

...when, as I was putting my weights away after class, my gymfriend said to me, "So, Alice, you staying for Ab Lab?" No. Shoot.

Damn. And the girl thought she had an angle.

Topics That Apparently Interest Me

2008-05-28T12:29:00.000-07:00

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Memorial Day Weekend: By the Numbers

2008-05-26T21:57:00.000-07:00

1.5 loads of laundry done (goal: 2)

2 out of 5 total Planet Earth DVDs watched on a 46-inch HD TV (obsessed), along with at least

5 episodes of the Deadliest Catch marathon

1 kick-butt 90-minute massage session

1 Lakers loss

70 degrees, or maybe not even, for a high temperature (boo)

$150 spent on a new blue polka-dot dress at Intuition (marked down from $310)

2 fancy cocktails consumed at Seven Grand downtown

1 new in-joke, at least (involving the "Pita-Pizza Connection")

45 minutes spent at the new Americana at Brand complex, competing for elbow room with about...

20 billion other shoppers

3 workouts since Friday evening, including 2 solid Hard Body Meltdown classes for a total of...

1,250 calories burned, which hardly neutralizes approximately...

50,000 calories consumed at...

3 barbecues, including

1 that was totally saturated with meats and meat paraphernalia, where I ate mostly desserts, and

1 that was almost fully vegetarian and included

1 recipe that I want to steal (portabella burgers with feta, pearl onions, garlic, dash of cayenne), plus

3 rounds of insanely concentrated fresh veggie juices that included stuff like kale. Overall, there were at least

5 instances when I felt like I would rather get my stomach pumped than endure the over-full feeling for another moment, but that's just

1 of the hazards of another great

3-day weekend among pals.

I Don't Know About This Blog-Tagging Business the Kids Are Up To, But...

2008-05-22T10:56:00.000-07:00

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Locate the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences on your blog and in so doing...
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged me.

"So how are things progressing with Ms. Sullivan?" he asked.
Alioto, as Martel had hoped and expected he would, blew up.
"Those sons of bitches! I'll tell you this, I'll sue the Chronicle when I get through with this trial and within the year I'll own that fucking newspaper!"

...on the case of Mondavi v. Mondavi, as recounted in The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty, which I coincidentally started reading the week before a 94-year-old Robert Mondavi up and died. (Moral: Drink your wine, kids, and live to 94.)

So I guess I tag my sister, CJ (since he tagged me, no doubt in a fit of bourgeois ennui), Capella, Wynter, and...the Aimless Idler? Why not. Dare y'all.

December 7, 1987

2008-05-11T11:51:00.001-07:00

Dear Journal,

Life is hard in Mr. McLeod's class. Today is Monday so we have spelling homework (yuck!). I hate spelling homework. This week our words are: herbicides, diurnal, endoskeleton, classification, arachnids, plastron, colloquial, perceived, immoral, absorption, and statistician.

Here it is December, and I still can't get over October. It really was a terrible month with the earthquake, the stock market crash, and it rained on Halloween. This month should be better. After all, Hanukkah is in only nine days. I can't wait.

Alice

I Won the Lottery

2008-05-09T09:26:00.000-07:00

More specifically, PBS selected my Antiques Roadshow ticket application by way of lottery! So I am the proud owner of two tickets to the Roadshow tour stop in sunny Palm Springs in June. Sweet!

My life rules.

Habit Forming

2008-05-04T12:38:00.001-07:00

It's no secret that I love settling into a good routine, and here's my routine du jour, or, more specifically, my routine du Saturday. The blue-eyed boy and I each like to work out at 9:30 on Saturdays, at our respective gyms in Santa Monica, so we've figured out that carpooling is the best (eco-friendliest + most mutually motivating) way.

I take Hard Body Meltdown class, which totally rules and is generally butt kicking. (I'm currently trying to decide which is the hardest workout of the week: boxing on Wednesdays, or this one on Saturdays. And I think Saturday's class edges boxing by a nose, which is really saying a lot. Both tend to make my trusty Polar heart-rate monitor beep and flash frantically.) Nothing makes me feel better than starting out the weekend with a fine Hard Body Meltdown performance on a Saturday morning, which generally encourages me to drink less and get to bed earlier on Friday nights, which is probably a good thing. I feel very much in control of my life when I am sweating like a gavone doing repeaters with weights off a step supported by four risers and managing to survive. Perhaps, even, with decent form and a half-smile on my face.

The blue-eyed boy starts out with yoga, and then likes to work out for an additional 90 minutes at his gym, which brings us up to noon, and leaves me with an hour and a half to spend alone, fresh and pumped full of endorphins after my class. That's when I leave my gym, and walk out onto the Third Street Promenade for:

1) a walk through the farmer's market. I'm not a hippie-dippie-needs-organic-all-the-time type, but I do love the feeling of scooping up some blueberries that have been picked that very morning, which I will probably use later that day in our patented yogurt sundae (the best imaginable secret recipe, conceived by the blue-eyed boy in a moment of culinary genius, now a daily staple). I usually snag some fresh veggies too, and often some cut gerbera daisies, to deliver to my mom or a friend whose home or birthday party I am visiting later. Then I carry around my bright flowers wrapped in brown paper, peeking out of the top of my gym bag.

and some combination of the following:

2) a stop for coffee or iced coffee, which I always order as "medium in a large cup," even if it's at Starbucks, and they're supposed to require you to use that grande/venti jargon (but I can never remember which size corresponds to which). And this is not because I am cheap; I use the extra room for skim milk and I don't fill it up to the top, because I am prone to spillage rather more than is the average person.

3) a recon mission at Forever 21. I don't have to tell all the ladies out there about why this store rules from top to bottom, particularly in the summertime, when everything is colorful or shiny or woven or besequinned and is typically $9.80 or under. This particular Forever 21 is the brand-new Taj Mahal of Forever 21s, and has three floors, each with multiple areas grouped by...something, I'm not sure. Usually I get excited about all the dozens of things I'm going to buy, and then panic in the face of all the choices (all the available jams, you might say), and then I flee with nothing.

4) a phone call with AE. I tell her about my workout (she's one of the few, along with maybe only the blue-eyed boy, come to think of it, who seems to have limitless interest in hashing out the full-on details of any fitness experience) and we make some plans for the weekend, because we almost invariably see each other, and also invariably need to have our ancillary discussions that correspond to any group date. It's multidimensional, all-angles socializing, and anyway we seem to have inexhaustible things to say about most topics.

Then it's noon and I meet the blue-eyed boy back in front of my gym again. He is carrying his yoga mat, and I'm carrying my gerberas, and it's such a Los Angeles scene, that it might nauseate the average L.A.-disparaging person, although I never understand why there seem to be so many of those out there. Jealousy maybe? What's so wrong with us? It seems like we might just know how to live.

Coachella Weekend 2008: Seen and Heard

2008-04-28T19:23:00.000-07:00

A glut of dust
A naked man doing a cannonball
Hella. many. Uggs.
A tortilla being used as a coaster for a popsicle
Two grown men riding a six-foot-tall donkey-shaped piñata off a roof into a pool (N.B.: donkey piñatas apparently sink snout last in dramatic slow-mo)
A live donkey
Bangs in spades
Snow-covered mountaintops rising above 100-degree desert valleys
The entire Cathedral City police department being brought to bear on a harmless little pool party [halo]
A girl eating a popsicle while pumping gas in a bikini (come to think of it, that was me)
"Stars are just like Us! They pump gas!"
Many swimsuits cut rather shockingly high or low, many worn with fanny packs
"You're leaving? You're Ghandi?"
Acres of tents in which I was very glad not to be sleeping
Superlative lighting and art installations
Portishead and Prince
Mustaches transcending irony into another category I can't even name
Something about gladiator man-sandals paired with a Speedo?
A giant-size Gold's Gym T-shirt with rolled-up sleeves worn by a woman in a look that so poignantly and freakishly evoked my junior-high years it nearly made me turn into a pillar of salt to gaze upon
A lawn turned entirely to mud that will need to be resodded for sure
Copious beans and rice
Churros
Only one small puddle of barf, surprisingly
"It doesn't make sense to set up an ancillary towel camp poolside, when we have our base camp here on the grass." (Not my words in this case, but words I would have said because, hello, it's strategic.)
A man covered in paint and neck tattoos wielding a mallet
"This dive is called 'Call 911.'"
"This dive is called 'How We All End Up in Tomorrow's Paper.'"
My odometer flipping to 10,000 miles
Insane amounts of good clean fun

Thanks for the memories, Coachella 2008!

Spring Break '08

2008-04-09T21:30:00.000-07:00

Tonight was going to be my first workout since returning from vacation last night around midnight. Running a little late for boxing class, I swiftly kicked off my work shoes in the locker room to swap them for my gym shoes when I looked down and realized...those aren't my feet. Whose feet are those? The toes look different. Stumpier, shorter. The ankles are fatter. Why? Oh wait, both legs are swollen from toes nearly to knees.

I started to run through all the things that had happened on our big Yucatan trip that could have resulted in this. Walking in Merida in skimpy sandals, I'd kicked the back of the blue-eyed boy's foot and had gotten a bruise on my pinkie toe that had turned all the colors of the rainbow (of which I had taken a million photos, Flat Stanley-style, posed with iguanas and ruins and things). But the toe was feeling better now, so it couldn't be that, could it? Shockingly, I hadn't gotten any notable bug bites, or did I, without realizing it? Ah, or was it the sunburn? On Sunday, on a beach in Tulum, the blue-eyed boy and I both turned red as lobsters (a trite expression for a really scary and painful experience) in a regrettable turn of events, which, I feared at that moment, would change the course of our trip from awesome to barely withstandable. But it didn't. Like Destiny's Child, we're survivors. And our trip freakin ruled, for real.

Here's how it went down.

On Thursday we flew into Cancun, rented a hooptie-ish Nissan Tsuru (which makes me laugh, because Tsuru is just like a Yiddish word meaning, roughly, aggravation, or like, issues, as in "girl has major tsuris," or at least that's the way I use it, which may be kind of a bastardization), and drove by way of the very expensive toll road (the cuota) all the way to Merida, the capital of the Yucatan. The 300-peso or so road offers only one stop, in Vallodolid, and is almost curiously well marked with signs that mostly tell you you're driving too fast. It's a straight shot through nothing but jungle.

Arriving at last, we checked in to an adorable little B&B, sheltered from the noise of the rather frenetic city behind thoughtful landscaping marked by waterfalls and a secluded pool. From this HQ, we set out the next day for our first day trip, to the ruins of Uxmal. A spectacular site. I told the blue-eyed boy, "As soon as we leave this place, I am going to imagine it was all a dream." Because it's so surreal, to see that glorious pyramid rising out of the jungle. We shared the cost of a guida with a family from Seattle, who had two little boys who were very well behaved. I liked this family because the dad was inquisitive and asked a lot of smart questions, and reminded me of my dad. (Later, at Chichen Itza, we'd meet a pair of medievalists-turned-engineers who I would take to for the same reason.)

Back in Merida, after a siesta, we strolled through the town in search of the pretty filigrana style of earrings I had wanted (but apparently you can mainly only find affordable, quality versions of these in the U.S., imported from Mexico, and not in Mexico itself). We ate and ate and strolled and strolled (the toe incident happened somewhere in here), and tried to find some ballet folklorico performance at the university, but alas it was happening instead the following Friday. That allowed us the opportunity to sleep earlier and wake earlier for the next adventure, this one to the ruins at Chichen Itza. I urge you to go and see Chichen once before you die. It is spectacular.

And the thing is, it's a major tourist attraction. Tour buses filled with mainly Europeans and Asians flood into this place, but, at least from my perspective, it didn't have that touristy feel; the former city is so huge—many kilometers in diameter—that the tourists are all spread out. And the fact that it's a wide-open space surrounded by and intermingled with jungle kind of dampens any noise. Even the dozens (hundreds, probably) of vendors who hawk their pottery and embroidery and things to the hoards actually kind of add color and spirit to the place, rather than take away from it. The vast ball field, observatory, and of course the iconic pyramid were among my favorite spots, and the figure of Chac-Mool carved there in stone seemed so deeply cute to me. Loved him. Bought a magnet bearing his likeness. See? Vendors.

Another thing? It's hot as all get out in Chichen Itza. We stayed three hours, but could have explored for days if not for A) it was suffocatingly hot and B) we, like, have jobs in California.

N.B.: Inexplicably the ruin sites on the Yucatan peninsula seem to have the most luxurious public bathrooms anywhere. Lots of marble. Kind of like the Wynn. OK, not like the Wynn, but more luxe than you might expect from public bathrooms in a Mexican jungle.

Moving on. Heading back toward the east side of the peninsula in the tsuris, I mean Tsuru, we stopped for a dip in Dzitnup, a cenote, or sinkhole in a cave filled with glassy fresh water. I had read much about the cenotes, including that Dzitnup offered water so turquoise and clear that "it might have been plucked from a dream." I'm going with no on that. The cave seemed a bit dank, and the water far from turquoise, with little natural light actually coming from the hole in the top of the cave. (Later, at Aktun Chen, my faith in the Yucatan's famed cenotes would be restored.)

With almost no daylight left of Saturday, we pulled into Tulum. In the darkness, we couldn't see the ocean yet (I was practically vibrating with anticipation; the beach portion of the trip had been the part about which I'd been dreaming forever), but we could sure hear the waves crashing feet from us. We checked in to our eight-room hotel; the reception desk is unmanned, so you go ask the bartender, who at his own pace finds the housekeeper, who strolls down the beach to find someone who feels like giving you a room key.

You see, there is no rush in Tulum for anything, and there is no need to throw your towel and bag down on the perfect spot on the beach before someone elese takes it because A) the spots are all perfect and B) there is no one else there. Thank god there is still a place like that on this earth. (Come to think of it, Treasure Beach, Jamaica is like that too, mon, likkle more.) Sun and wind power the hotel (both are in large supply), which has no air conditioner, but does have a ceiling fan, in which the blue-eyed boy accidentally inserted his hand while raising his arm to put on his shirt and sliced through a couple of fingers. It is fortunate that the casualty was not more significant; there aren't really hospitals in Tulum, so the general rule of thumb is, "be careful, for real."

When the sun came up, the vast expanse of beach sprawled in front of us, the sea a color so blue it requires a new word for blue, or not a word, but a gesture, or not a gesture, but a sigh. Incredible, unspeakable. You run out of superlatives quickly at the sight of Tulum.

As far as I can tell, Tulum is the playground of A) fancy, classy, adventuresome travelers with taste and at least a vague interest in yoga and B) total freakin hippies. Mostly palapas and cabanas and a few very diminutive hotels dot the beach; so too do tents set up by Berkeley types (probably at the end of their volunteer stints building latrines in Chiapas junior year) on the now completely unmanned stretches of sand formerly occupied by tiny hotels that were wiped out by Wilma in 2005. It's a peaceful commingling of types on this beach. Just peaceful and perfect.

So perfect. We walked easily along the beach a couple of kilometers to the ruins in Tulum, the only Mayan city built on the sea. We stopped for lunch at a very Corona-commercial-looking restaurant/hotel called, aptly, Vita e Bella, and later hired a fisherman to take us out to the reef where we could snorkel. I actually think I saw a barracuda, and some other great big fish, but it was a windy day in Tulum and the sea was choppy; I was seasick even swimming. (This is kind of classic, because I'd actually remembered to take Dramamine; I'd bought out the complete stock of over-the-counter therapies at the CVS in Westwood before we left). I was trying to talk to the fisherman in Spanish, but everything was coming out in Italian. It's funny how much Italian I realized I still know when I was trying to speak Spanish.

Yada yada, SPFs of all varieties, reapply, reapply, swim, sweat...look, we got real sunburned. It was bad. It was regrettable. By the end of the day, we were the big gringo jerks who were red as beets. And we had opposite reactions to the affliction: The blue-eyed boy couldn't get cool enough, and I couldn't get warm enough. I had the chills. After dinner (which I barely remember in my feverish state, but the photos I took suggest it was a gorgeous place), the blue-eyed boy sprawled out horizontally on the bed because he was trying to maximize the windshear coming from the open window. All I could do was moan, and I think I said something about needing some rum, but I was asleep by 9.

Falling asleep early in Tulum is a useful thing, because it is natural to wake up with the sun. Despite there being no technology- or traffic-type noises, there is plenty of noise indeed: The waves crash loudly and the birds' songs are, ahem, robust. It's a delightful kind of cacophony. Determined not to let our full-on gringo sunburns slow us down, we left Tulum for Aktun Chen, a spectacular sprawling cave and cenote in the jungle just north. Underground was the right place for our pink selves, and our guide shared so many insights about the geology that makes the Yucatan such an unusual place: something about it being like Swiss cheese under there, which it certainly seems to be. We wore hard hats to travel about 600 yards through many chambers of the cave; first we thought the hats were goofy props to make tourists feel like they were doing something treacherous, but we soon realized that they're actually smart tools against hanging stalagmites of all lengths. In the last chamber was a cenote that looked as clear as if there were no water there at all, only air. Faith in the beauty of Yucatecan cenotes: fully restored.

A few kilometers north still, we stopped for a quick snorkel jaunt at Akumal, a lagoon that is very protected from the open water and therefore waveless. I saw three turtles swimming together, and was just tickled. I found a piece of brain coral on the beach and picked it up. The blue-eyed boy kept teasing that customs was going to imprison me for plucking nature out of the reef, but whatever. I so didn't.

In a surprisingly uncharacteristic move, we pulled into Playa del Carmen with no hotel booked; I was almost testing myself to see if I could leave the last night of the trip to do whatever the heck we pleased, in whatever place, without totally freaking out that there was no plan. And I passed my own test. We ended up finding a completely adorable hotel, all colorful tiles and pretty bright linens...but not before getting pulled over by a Mexican motorcycle cop in aviators who was a ringer for one of the CHiPs. You see, the blue-eyed boy had mistakenly maneuvered the Tsuru the wrong way down a one-way street for a short distance before realizing his error, and we got busted. Somehow, in this moment, I spoke fluent Spanish, or so the blue-eyed boy tells me (I was so nervous and desperate, I kind of forgot what I said). Anyway, no ticket. Just a warning for the sunburned gringo and gringa who busted out the politest kind of text-book-learned high-school Spanish under pressure.

Our night in Playa was rather dreamy; the main drag, Avenida 5, is as touristy as anywhere (i.e. you could, if you wanted, buy there a T-shirt emblazoned with "I Love to Fart. Playa del Carmen") but really has charm and elegance somehow too. That night, I refused to take my glasses off in bed because that would be acknowledging that sleep was coming, and that would be acknowledging that the last night of our trip was over.

Not to waste a moment, we hustled the next day to Cozumel by ferry for a snorkel session amid parrot fish and schools of others in hues like neon purple. Back at Playa, it was back in the Tsuru (on which we logged more than 1,100 kilometers, all told) for the ride to Cancun to catch our flight home.

And that's where I am now, in bed with my cat and my mysteriously swollen legs. Looking at our zillions of pictures, I can't say we looked like Beyonce and Jay Z snapped canoodling in St. Tropez by the paparazzi, which is kind of how I thought we'd look. (Seriously, how deluded am I?) But, look, it's real hot out there and you sweat and you get sunburned and shred your fingers in the ceiling fan and stub your toes a bit and get seasick and your hair gets crazy frizzy when you dunk your head in the ocean if you don't instantly reapply product.

And that's how you know you're alive.

Patrons of the Arts

2008-03-27T17:20:00.000-07:00

Yesterday my dad told me on the phone that, while at the Getty Center on Monday with my mom and aunt and uncle, he ran into Huell Howser! Filming an episode of California's Gold right there at that moment! And they had a lovely chat! And my dad said he would not wash his hand after shaking Huell's until he got a chance to shake mine, so I could benefit from the glorious transference of my hero's germs or dirt or DNA or whatever, like on that episode of The Brady Bunch with Davy Jones.

I said, "Dad! That's even better than when mom ran into Val Kilmer at the Bel Air Hotel." And he goes, "Oh wait, Val was there too. At the Getty!" Seriously? What are the chances.

So it was my mom, dad, aunt J, uncle A, Val Kilmer, and Huell Howser all enjoying a sunny Monday afternoon at the Getty. The things you miss when you have a job.

Potential Titles for my Future Memoirs

2008-03-20T15:57:00.000-07:00

Motivated by Coffee: The AD Story

Motivated by Fear, Fueled by Coffee: The AD Story (borrowed, with permission)

Motivated by the Calorie Counter on my Heart Rate Monitor: The AD Story

Distracted in Yoga: The AD Story

Accident Prone (Or, Why I Am Wearing This Patch Over my Eye): The AD Story

Commitment to Finding Better Airfare Than You Are Likely to Be Able to Find on Your Own: The AD Story

Apropos of Nothing: The AD Story*

Eh, You Get the Gist: The AD Story

*Current front-runner

Happy St. Patrick's Day

2008-03-17T21:20:00.001-07:00

But for me it's no booze fest, like it was in the college years, god bless them. Now, here's what makes me happy on a Monday night:

6:30 to 7:45. Muscle through Beautiful Booty class followed by half hour on elliptical while watching CNN's Spitzer-inspired special on cheaters.

7:45 to 8:15. Drive home, while talking on Treo to blue-eyed boy, a comfortingly routine exchange of information about the day's work and workouts. Bonus conversation topics: 401k, taxes, the Yucatan.

8:15. Arrive to find a delightfully clean home. Best new house cleaners ever.

8:30 to 9:30. Cook and eat dinner, Hamburger Helper made with veggie ground beef and skim milk substitutions. (Yeah, I copped to my white-trash treat; don't sleep on Hamburger Helper.) Savor vodka/pomegranate cocktail while watching PBS. Life does not get better than Huell Howser. LOVE.

9:30 to present. Continue enjoyment of cocktail and PBS (now an Ansel Adams special filled with Yosemite porn images). Further savor delighted feeling that comes from not being out drinking in the midst of some slutty St. Patrick's Day mob scene. (Nonetheless pleased with selection of green polka-dot PJ pants.)

Perhaps this is the face of 30. I can get with that.

**
"There's something in Ansel's work that is almost gothic. It's this tracery, it's this shimmering tracery...It's not really substantial. It's like a movie screen, mm, flickers like that... It's all this surface ornament, very vital and animistic and never still. Shimmering, shaking."

Reckless Driving Incident

2008-03-16T21:26:00.000-07:00

Today I was browsing the grocery aisles at Target when another woman shopper ran her cart right over the toes on my flip-fopped right foot. I was startled and it hurt like hell, and moreover I thought it was going to mess up my 20-minutes-old pedicure (OPI Cajun Shrimp).

The other woman was so upset that she might have hurt me that she frantically apologized over and over, and then in a flash of panic let slip out, "Can I kiss it?" But not in a creepy foot-fetish way (like that guy outside the Macy's offices in San Francisco who always used to accost us on our way up from the BART station talking about, "nice...pretty...toes..."). But in a total Jewish mom kind of way; I could just hear the words coming out of my own mom's mouth. After the foot pain subsided, I released my toes from my massaging hand, and told her, no, no, no, it's no problem, of course you didn't mean it, things happen.

Then she said, "Are you...are you Jewish?" Yes, I'm Jewish, "Are you the daughter of...?" Nope, wrong Jewish parents' daughter. But I knew the reason she'd been distracted enough to run over my foot was that she was fixed on me trying to discern whether I was this person she suspected I was. I had wondered why she'd been staring.

[Vastly oversimplified kicker:] In this town, people offer to kiss your foot after running it over with a shopping cart in Target. In the Target in Queens, they steal your full cart so they can use it themselves, and throw all of its contents, including your scarf and winter coat with a monthly MetroCard in the pocket, on the floor under the boys' underwear racks. OK, so maybe that only happened once, but it obviously scarred me.

Eliot Spitzer, Stop Trippin'

2008-03-12T17:23:00.000-07:00

Men and their spectacular capacity for hubris and misjudgment!

The other day I heard: "Men are stupid and women are crazy." I would agree that men can be profoundly stupid, particularly when it comes to women. And I'm sure women can be profoundly crazy, particularly when it comes to men. But people, let's reel it in. Stop with the hookers and the lies, or The New York Times will find your hired help and link right to her MySpace page.

Hillary, if you get there, show these boys how it's done and do the ladies proud.

Where the Sidewalk Ends

2008-03-09T23:27:00.000-07:00

Wow, so I finally did it. I exhausted the World Wide Web. I've done so much Internet searching over the last week that I actually finished looking at all the Web pages ever posted regarding lodging in Tulum.

I don't recommend finishing the Internet like a book; it makes your eyes hurt. (Plus I managed to absentmindedly polish off most of a box of Life cereal in the process, which is not ideal.) But I do feel insanely educated now, just the way I like it.

See also: Reservation Mode.

Sands/Hourglass

2008-03-09T19:20:00.000-07:00

I bought three bunches of daffodils yesterday at Trader Joe's and they've already all opened into terrific yellow blooms in vases around my house. Daffodils always make me smile on account of this memory: In Berkeley, there was a thing called the Daffodil Festival, which was some kind of Greek-system charity fund-raiser. All the sorority houses would sell bunches of five flowers for $1 on Sproul Plaza. For that price, it seemed the campus became transformed into a brightly hued kinetic sculpture, with blooms peeking from bobbing backpacks, tucked behind ears on happy heads, and sitting in sills all along Bancroft. For a limited time, the sunny accessory seemed to transcend genres; who wouldn't want one of those pretty little things? Such a fond springtime memory from an era during which a handful of life's greatest gifts converged: youth, optimism, curiosity, hope, friendship, and learning. Le sigh.

Today I have the first sunburn of the season after a hike in Malibu with the girls (during which we figured out the answers to all the world's mysteries, natch) across five little streams to a graceful waterfall. Warm weather is my happy place.

You can take the girl out of California, but... please don't.

In Which I Try to Ascertain my Comfort Level With Scorpions

2008-03-07T13:27:00.001-08:00

And not the '80s hair band either, but actual crawling scorpions. I am in Reservation Mode now, fully in my element, researching and booking the details of our upcoming Yucatan vacation. There seem to be so many amazing things, and so many amazing nothings, to do there, I'm wishing we had four weeks rather than four days. Alas.

So, nu. Tulum. It seems to be a spectacularly unplugged place with little electric power, mostly wind and solar energy. So there seems to be little risk of accidentally stumbling into some kind of gross Sandals-type environment packed with fat Americans and sweating Swiss cheese on buffet tables. But I'm trying to figure if a relatively civilized hotel environment is the right choice, when there seem to be many tremendous palapa/tent-type options on the beach and in the jungle. But the more I read online, the more references I see to scorpions. Those things can hurt you, right? I mean, I'm not trying to be prissy, but. Also I am known for swelling up like a Macy's parade balloon when I get even a little mosquito bite that would be totally innocuous for someone else. I'm just saying, a girl ought to know herself.

One eco-hotel reviewer on TripAdvisor, who by the way loved one of the spots I am considering, mentioned that the place was not for people with "nervous dispositions" on account of all the "creepy crawlies." And that's when I was kind of like, OK, next. Unless I want to spend my rare vacation in the infirmary like I managed to do every summer at camp, I should probably keep looking for someplace, say, with more Aveda toiletries than nervous-disposition-challenging insects. Or at least somewhere in the middle.

Roll Call

2008-03-06T17:37:00.000-08:00

Aha! I am writing from the gym to add to the list another celebrity who works out here: Taye Diggs. He was on the recumbent bike, we made eye contact, it was serious.

What is it that gets me excited to see celebrities working out, considering I see them all the time when I'm out covering events for work (and then am generally disinterested if not semi-disgusted)? Because they are supposed to be at events, on the red carpet and things; it's their natural habitat. But to see Mr. Big on the elliptical is still a novelty. And also it makes me feel muscley to work out alongside Fabio. It's just too silly to be true.

And also I'm obsessed with my gym in general, but that's neither here nor there.

Update: I saw Mark McGrath at the gym again tonight too. What has he done since spread-your-wings-and-fly-oh-me-oh-my time? Pity for his career.

Update part deux: Oops, he hosts Extra. My bad.

Vacation, All I Ever Wanted

2008-03-06T15:40:00.000-08:00

It's on like Donkey Kong.

Yucatan trip officially booked yesterday...check! 28 days and counting. (--->OK so I stole that image from the Web, sorry, but I will take lots of my own pics next month!) Coachella pool parties, get ready for us at the end of April! Grand Canyon hike happening in late June!

It's shaping up to be just the kind of spring/summer season I like. The vacation-packed, friend-filled, swimsuit-shopping-spree kind. Yes! Don't sleep on spring break, y'all. (The difference between now and college is that these days I actually deserve a vacation.)

Stay tuned. Last summer's going to be hard to beat, but I'm up for the challenge. Ladies, are ya with me?

Every Moment Frontin' and Maxin'

2008-02-27T14:25:00.000-08:00

Yeah, I know that headline is about as relevant to 2008 as my last headline, which made reference to the Olson twins' weight, which hasn't been news in five years. But the first hint of beautiful weather every year will forever remind me of Fresh Prince's "Summertime," and I'm totally OK with that. (Plus the line about hustling to the mall to get a shorts set cracks me up for its specificity, just like that Usher lyric in "Confessions Part II" about, "hand in hand at the Beverly Center, like, man, not givin' a damn who sees me..." You go, Usher, all up in the Beverly Center with an Ice Blended and a Cinnabon. Maybe lyrics about going to the mall are just inherently funny?)

Sweet Jesus, it is an insanely gorgeous summer day out there. I had been slipping on my New Year's resolution to take lunch breaks since award season took over my life, but I'm going to try to get back on that wagon. I walked to the bank and back, and I'm shvitzing like a gavone. It's 80+ out there.

This is good news because I have been craving thermons, and scrambling to put together the best possible spring vacation under some limitations of time and loot. We started out with grand dreams of Tulum, then briefly considered Hawaii, but now we might be priced out of our airfare budget on account of it's going to be Easter weekend and crazy expensive. So, somehow this trip is being rewritten into a Sequoia hiking jaunt, or a Palm Springs foray. And those both sound divine, but a girl is trying to go snorkeling. SNORKELING IN WARM WATER is what I see on the inside of my eyelids when I blink. It's all I want. So stay tuned.

That said, the local B12 is doing me good, and I'm counting my blessings that my health has been restored. Yesterday, I felt like myself physically for the first time since before I got sick. (I have been dividing everything in my assessment into categories of BIGS—before I got sick—and AIGS—after I got sick). Last week, after the delightful vomiting attack mercifully subsided, it gave way initially to a lousy feeling of utter fatigue, like I was dragging 50-pound weights around by my ankles. Maybe it was just effects of the dehydration, or the result of my inability to stomach enough calories to sustain a robust life, or maybe I was even still sick. But I was beginning to panic that it was going to be a semi-permanent state. Wrong! I am back up and running at full capacity (and that means that I am in the condition to go to boxing class tonight and get whooped).

And I shudder to think here might be one particular reason why: BIGS, my coffee, alcohol, and Ambien intake was healthy (and by healthy I only mean vigorous). AIGS, I essentially cut out most of the coffee, booze, and sleep aids all at once. I think I can feel my insides getting all scoured out as a result. Day by day, I am becoming one of those creepy L.A. non-substance-using hiker types. And I can be OK with that. (At least for a while).

In Which I Shrink to the Combined Weight of the Olson Twins

2008-02-19T15:25:00.001-08:00

Gather round, children, and I will share with you the story of the Great Stomach Flu of aught-eight.

[Spoiler alert: This piece contains graphic descriptions that may not be suitable for easily grossed-out readers.]

It started on Sunday, when I was frantically asking all the women at EW's going-away party for menstrual painkillers, because that's what I thought the problem was. Turns out, it was not ovary cramping, but stomach cramping that was ailing me, and it's a miracle I got home before the barfing set in. Keep in mind that I haven't barfed in earnest since 1998—curse that raw spinach salad from the commisary at 20th Century Fox, where I interned the summer of my 21st birthday!—so this is not something I am used to. It was shocking.

The cramping, which hit in rolling intervals, became so severe that my folks insisted on coming over late Sunday night (even despite my protestations on account of fear that their presence might heighten the drama rather than diminish it), and the poor things had to bear witness to the gnarliness and the moaning in agony. It's funny: because I've not been married or had a baby, I haven't had that level of doting devoted exclusively to me since, say, college graduation. I could hardly say anything when my mom was rubbing my face and neck with a cold washcloth, but if I had been able to speak then I would have told her thank you, thank you so much for being one person on the planet who will always do this for me, do anything for me, no matter how awful I look, and no matter what else.

By Monday morning, I had determined that there was a predictable pattern: After each time I threw up, I had a period of about 15 minutes during which I felt better, before I felt worse again. I would use this time to close the shutters that the cat had opened, or plug in my laptop, or stretch my legs by taking a few steps around the house (I was confined to bed the rest of the time, except when I had to run to the toilet to barf, when I found I could move surprisingly quickly). I even used one of my post-barfing respites to give an interview to an Us Weekly reporter working under deadline on a story about Oscar parties; I was impressed with my fortitude on that one, believe me. But it is not a good week to take off a day of work altogether, so alas that was not an option.

Other than those precious moments, though, it hurt to do anything. I had to brace myself each time I wanted to do a quarter turn in bed (from right to front, or from left to back), because I was afraid it would make me queasier or exacerbate the pain. I couldn't even watch TV for much of yesterday because it made me too dizzy, and at the worst points I couldn't even open my eyes because I was too light sensitive.

At some point, I remember the blue-eyed boy came over and put on People's Court, and there was something about a girl who was suing her landlord for sexual harassment, and I was curious whether or not she was cute, but I certainly couldn't turn my head or even open my eyes to look. The blue-eyed boy took a wet towel to my lips to try to allay the discomfort from the dehydration; I had had to stop taking even water because it made me ball up in pain and then vomit. It's possible our relationship has surpassed another milestone, now that he's seen me heave bile (that's all I had left) while sobbing and praying out loud for death to take me.

I was counting on my stomach bug to run a typical 24-hour course, but I was panicked that it would not; my sister recently had it for two days. I was counting the hours (more like minutes) in abject desperation. Off and on, I slept from 7 p.m. last night until 8 a.m. this morning, and when I was up, I was better. Sweet mercy!

Now, look, I don't want to get all M-K Olson on y'all, but I know people are curious if I lost any weight, and believe me—I was too. I stepped on the scale several times during the ordeal. By this morning, the digital scale was vacillating between 124.8 and 125.0 pounds, people. (Yes, in a bizarre twist, I just put my weight all up on the Internet.) I haven't weighed that since I was like 4-foot-9 with no boobs in grade school. And it's a shame that most of those few pounds I lost are the result of dehydration. When I gain them back, I'm going to be totally buggin because it will take me months to lose them for real—if I ever do—just through working out and eating right (which, admittedly, has lately been paying off quite reassuringly too). All told, it was about 44 hours that I had nothing to eat, half of that time with no water either.

If I had known I was going to get that banana bread for free—that was the last thing I ate on Sunday—I wouldn't have made all those lower-fat substitutions in the recipe and I certainly wouldn't have used Splenda...

Anyway, morals of the story: Purell and obsessive hand washing. Nobody wants what I had. Nausea and vomiting are the cruelest tricks of fate out there.

I'm It

2008-02-13T15:19:00.000-08:00

Capella tagged me! And apparently that means I have to respond by writing half a dozen unimportant things about myself in this public forum. But I hate to be left out of anything (junior-high backlash) so I will have to hop on this bandwagon.

1) I am desperately afraid of the wisdom-teeth-removal surgery that I have to schedule this spring. Terrified. So much so that I cried in the office of the surgeon during the consultation, as she was showing me the teeth in my head on the X-ray, and saying something about drilling to carve away the bone. Anyway, this fear comes from the trauma I experienced when I had oral surgery in junior high. I remember that before that surgery, the doc had said that I should ask my parents for a CD, which the staff would play in my headphones as I was being sedated. So I asked for Depeche Mode 101; I thought I was being super stealthy because that was a double CD set! Ha! Score TWO for me! But not. What I went through with the pain and the bleeding all over the pillow was not worth all the Depeche Mode tracks in the world, which was saying a lot for 13-year-old me.

2) I can't believe it's the 25th anniversary of Thriller. What happened? Dubin and I used to have that album, which was one of those fold-out numbers on which, if I recall, Michael Jackson had a leopard draped over him or something? A jaguar? At any rate, it was one of the few records I remember us having, along with the theme from Grease, and the story of Tikki tikki tembo-no sa rembo-chari bari ruchi-pip peri pembo. (Holla if you remember that too!)

3) My cat, Cali, has a pathological clothes-eating issue, and therefore his insurance policy does not cover gastritis. What's the point then, jeez?

4) I have this weird thing where, if I watch a movie with a lot of hand-held camera action, I feel very nauseated. It's an equilibrium issue or something. This happened for the first time when I saw Murderball at the Landmark Sunshine in New York. I eventually had to leave the theater and walk around the block. This happened again more recently when I saw Babel at Century City. I spent most of the last half hour of that movie in the bathroom over the sink, sweating, and trying not to barf. Nasty.

5) I never pulled all-nighters in college, mostly because I have always hated procrastination. But I came close to pulling one for work on Sunday night after the Grammys, when I came home at midnight from three parties after the awards and still had four stories to file. It was a very surreal kind of thing. I kept rubbing my eyes like a baby who needs a nap, but I totally did it. Anyway, that segues into the last useless tidbit:

6) I am not a late-night person. I realized this early on, when mom let me see a midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show in junior high (three junior-high references in a single post—snap!) and I totally fell asleep during it. I thought that was so incredibly lame of me, since I rarely got to do anything cool that started late like that. Even in college, I wasn't a late-night person either, and sometimes I would even offer to be the designated driver into San Francisco so that I could manipulate everyone into leaving when I was tired, because the BART had stopped running by then. (Sorry, girls! But I assure you this was not always why—sometimes it was because I was just an awesome friend with a Ford Escort, willing to be selfless for the team.) I just don't have the all-night gene. On Friday nights, I like to do the same walk-to-Trader-Joe's-to-buy-the-same-salad-ingredients routine, capped off by a glass of wine and the blue-eyed boy's signature Tabasco popcorn (next to no oil, please) and a few DVR'ed episodes of California's Gold on the couch. Call me lame, but I cover events for a living. A girl's got to sit on the couch with Huell at least once a week, mmmkay?

So there you have a bunch of useless info that no one with a job will read fully, but whatever. Anyway, apparently the rules of this tagging game mean that I am supposed to tag four other people to also write six things. I can't tag my sister, who already did it, or Capella, who also already did it. So that leaves LF, who only blogs in haiku form, so I'm not sure how that will work. But it sounds interesting. I'm also tagging Megan. And CJ, who blogs on MySpace, but he's hella funny and usually makes reference to some contemporary fashion designer who borrows inspiration from Vanessa's sweaters on The Cosby Show but won't cop to it. And the fourth person I'm tagging may determine him- or herself based on whomever has the time and interest.

No presh.

PS: It took discipline not to write about the gym here, but I have a complex that I write about the gym too much. But a) I am gym obsessed lately, in a good way, and b) it's one arena that it is not dangerous to write about because I don't care what anyone there really thinks of me, nor does anyone—with one exception—even know my last name enough to Internet search my blog. Oh, and look: I just wrote about the gym again, dang.

Who You Callin...?

2008-02-11T14:24:00.000-08:00

It was another beautiful winter day out there on Saturday, kiddies.

Have You Seen Me?

2008-02-11T12:43:00.000-08:00

Several months ago, I made a gross error in judgment. I saw a great pair of sandals on sale at Bloomingdale's— and I let them go. They were marked down from $410 to $142, and I thought I was being a disciplined, liberated woman by telling myself, "That's $142 more than you need to spend on shoes right now. Just walk away, and after you do, you will not think about those shoes again." Nope, wrong.

I called the department store the next day, but the sandals had been sold. I've searched up and down (the Internet, the mall, the outlets) since then, but have only found the equivalent pair in army green—I'd wanted the nude—and even then at twice the price.

Marc by Marc Jacobs. Style name: Goat. Any shoe purveyors out there recognize this fine pair? They're the ones that got away.

On My First Time Boxing Since 1999ish

2008-02-06T20:23:00.000-08:00

There were a total of five of us in the class—three super-athletic looking dudes in muscle shirts, one six-foot-tall gal in a black sports bra with six-pack abs and a 24-inch waist, and me. But nothing is more inspiring than fear.

Side note. I have often said that, if I write my memoir, it might be called, Motivated by Coffee: The AD Story. In response, my best friend from J-school once told me, "Mine would be called Motivated by Fear, Fueled by Coffee: The JB Story." Touché.

Side note part deux. Tonight I was reminded of when I used to take boxing class in Berkeley, and I really wanted to buy those pink Ringside boxing gloves, but I felt like I would be a poser if I got them just because they were rad if I wasn't really serious about the class. So I got serious, I got the gloves, and then they became lamp decoration in the hard-drinking (although it was all relative, of course) New York years.

So tonight I was back at it. And it was a major, major undertaking. In boxing class, you just have to drop and do push-ups. You just drop to the hard-ass floor—in gloves no less—and do your push-ups, with your hands in fists, in the wraps, under the gloves. None of this "OK, everyone get your mats..." to soften the experience business that they chatter about in other classes that I always thought were hard. I was thinking Is you out your damn mind...? (And BTW at the end of boxing class, you are not guided through even 60 seconds of stretching, because apparently that is for sissies—you just run like hell into the night. Or at least I did.)

But I did it. I punched the heck out of that bag, I jump roped until I was all rosaceaed out, and I ran in a loop around the gym with my fists flying in punches. And now I feel amazing (although I may never use my arms again). Best. Therapy. Ever.

My only wish is that I had been able to wear my trusty Polar heart rate monitor (the gloves prohibited wearing the wrist part). Because I swear to you I burned at least, like, five million calories, no joke.

If I May Dork Out For a Moment

2008-02-05T17:04:00.000-08:00

I just voted. And it felt great.

I was so looking forward all day to the experience, to the ritual of taking the walk over to the polling place, to the little chik-chung of pushing the poker into the ballot, to the smug walk home. I remember this little march fondly from the days when I used to do it hand in hand with my folks (very fine and interested role models for astute political opinion and, in my mom's case, involvement).

In fifth grade, I remember being traumatized by a Newsweek article (I was always, always news obsessed) in which were portrayed graphic crime-scene photos of a slaughter of voters in a Haitian polling place, and even then I remember feeling assured that America was not the kind of place where that sort of terrible thing could happen. I folded the paper in sixteenths and stapled it to itself a million times so I would never be templed to look at it again. (Why I didn't just throw it out is another story; I must have known I couldn't make it go away regardless.)

Back to Super Tuesday, 2008. I had signed up to vote by mail, but had been undecided while the postmark deadline came and went. So when I got to the polling place, I had asked a little bit meekly if it would be OK to vote in person instead. The poll workers asked if I had my physical ballot with me and I did not (left it at work), but they let me vote anyway—because this is America! And here you always get to vote! I had to do it provisionally under the circumstances, but a vote is a vote, and mine will be counted.

Maybe I get so excited about this because we are not Mayflower-type people; I come from immigrants, who spent their entire lives in pursuit of a path that would allow their grandchildren to have nice things, and to vote. And because it's a thrilling election year. And also because it occurs to me especially when I vote that being a U.S. citizen is a privilege and a blessing, like having your health and having friends.

So, like most people I know, regardless of what Democrat they voted for (what, like I know any Republicans?), I will be wearing my "I Voted" sticker tonight in fully dorky American pride. You just can't beat it. You can't.

Things I Thought About During Yoga Class Tonight

2008-01-28T21:10:00.000-08:00

work
house paint
spinach (whole wheat pasta with)
sweatbands (useful?)
blue-eyed boy
the Ashram (curious)
Super Bowl
Pasadena
TMZ
work
check-engine light
glasses
dry cleaning
rain (unhappy with)
mom
working out (tomorrow)
friend (AE, moving)
positivity (striving for)
work
restaurant recommendations (Grove adjacent)
friend (LP, studying Final Cut Pro)
tomatoes
vacation (Mexican Riviera cruise?)
vacation (Turkey?)
this list (making)
Valentine's Day
PBS
vacation (San Simeon?)
Coachella
wine
working out (last Thursday)
friend (MG, feathered haircut)
New York (Capella, moving to)
New York (work, traveling for)
steam cleaning (carpet)
Project Runway
Devon Aoki
Lululemon
headlines (punchy)
Obama
Dubai (L.A. Times article on)
Santa Barbara
sister (birthday, Wednesday)
Essie polish in Wicked
yogi rhetoric (vs. stereotypic California rhetoric)
Huell Howser
friend (MW, cute glasses)
looseleaf paper (notes from 1992 to EW on)
work
blue-eyed boy (cold, coming down with)
Ikea
Times Square
new dress (bras to wear with)
Zicam
Home Depot
donuts (I wish)
Bed Head mousse (integrate?)
State of the Union

Is anyone in here really getting close to achieving transcendence? Man, honestly, that must be amazing.

Elements of Style

2008-01-23T10:51:00.002-08:00

I must have managed sleep, because I dreamed the most awful of dreams. I dreamed that, for some reason I couldn't identify, there had been a public exposé of the em dash—that it had fallen somehow out of favor, and that it was not to be used ever again acceptably in written language. And I was seriously crushed—not to mention embarrassed, since I have used the thing semi-obsessively for years—and honestly wondered how I was ever going to write again with any flair (or at least I fancy I’ve ever written with some flair anyway).

I lean so hard on that beloved em dash; I think it has something to do with the Emily Dickinson class I took at Berkeley, in which we dissected—and I savored—Dickinson’s use of handwritten dashes of all lengths and angles in her manuscripts. And I like to think that my own proclivity to the em dash gestures toward that expressiveness. Not that I think I can fairly compare myself to Emily Dickinson, but you get the gist. (Also in my dream, parentheses were déclassé, and then I knew I was really screwed.)

California's Gold

2008-01-20T21:35:00.001-08:00

I was bummed when I thought I didn't have a bona fide hobby, but of course I've since realized I have a handful of great ones. At the top of my list lately has been exploring California.

When I talk about California, I get a super dork-out expression on my face, like I'm talking in a thick old-country accent about how the gold-paved U.S. opened its arms to me after I fled the pogroms, and it's not uncommon for me to tear up—no kidding. I even got emotional putting the new tags on my California plates this morning (I know, I know). In general my joy quotient has soared since I moved back almost two years ago. I've spent chunks of time in San Diego, Ventura, Lake Tahoe, Catalina, Palm Springs, Yosemite, and wine country, plus toured endlessly around the bay area and all manner of L.A. neighborhoods—and even enjoyed a quality summer afternoon in the Inland Empire. I really can't get enough, and it's inexhaustible anyway.

My latest thing is reading guidebooks even for places with which I thought I was already familiar; it's fun to drive around your own city and look things up in the index (plus it informs my Southern California-specific job, and my general knowledge base for living). This weekend was very guidebook-able, with a hike Saturday in Temescal Canyon, and then an impromptu Pasadena tour on Sunday, including the Norton Simon museum, Gamble house, and the Doo-Dah parade (OK, that one kind of got old, but the ease of access to the noodle shop and French Connection on the closed-to-traffic Colorado Boulevard broke up the monotony).

We were so touristed-out by the end of the day that we might have made our patented fake-snoring noise (I don't know how to render it in type, but it's something like chuuuh-syooo with a little whistle at the end) discretely in the 15th-century gallery shortly before museum-closing time. (And then we went to Home Depot. These days I find that it's best to be utterly physically exhausted by the end of the day if I want to have a prayer at beating my insomnia once I drop into bed.) And it was so worth it.

Incidentally, I came home to see that Huell Howser was also exploring Pasadena on his show. I'm kind of obsessed with Huell, and always think about what his reactions would be to things I see, mostly along the lines of "wow" and "that's amazing," and I imagine the sound of his silly voice and feel totally comforted. I could watch Huell on loop all day, every day. (I could do the same with First 48 and Forensic Files—R.I.P. Court TV—but those are indefensible.)

At any rate, at the risk of being too pat, I think we can all learn an important thing about enjoying life and about adventuring from the wide-eyed, voracious view-slurping Huell Howser.

And that's California's gold, for real.

Reservation Mode

2008-01-16T11:34:00.001-08:00

I had to laugh last night when the blue-eyed boy said, "Uh-oh. My baby's going into reservation mode."

I was beginning to look into hotels for a work-related trip to cover the film festival in Santa Barbara at the end of the month, and I had picked up the phone to call a particular hotel, after that hotel's Web site had revealed there was no availability. This is what I do.

If I may say so, I think I am a fine vacation planner. I am an excellent researcher (derived from both my job as a reporter and my inability to accept any first answer I'm given), plus an indefatigable bargain hunter, but one with uncompromising hotel tastes. By no means does everyone believe this is the right way to plan or to spend a vacation. But it works for me, and so I descend (or ascend) into "reservation mode" when I am getting ready to go away. That means I:

1. Call every hotel whose Web site I have checked, and vice versa, to make sure that the information I have been quoted is the most accurate, and includes the lowest price for the best available room.
2. Search every individual airline's Web site, in addition to the travel search engines, because you never know what you will find. (And then I call each.)
3. Ask for a AAA discount anywhere. You may be shocked to find that I got 10 percent off at our likkle house on the relatively remote South coast of Jamaica.
4. Call back several times and continue to check Web sites of hotels at which I am already booked, just in case I can improve the rate or swap it to a better room.
5. Book multiple hotels at one time, if each can be canceled, in the event that any of the above pans out. (I know what you're thinking, but I never forget to cancel anything because I keep meticulous electronic records.)

If I ever decide to change professions, I have always said that eBay entrepreneur is my next calling. But I swear I'd be good too at planning vacations (for myself, under my own terms, so this would require some sort of lottery winnings).

By Any Other Name

2008-01-11T18:52:00.000-08:00

It really used to peeve my dad, when my sister and I were small, when we would refer to my mom in her presence by the female pronoun instead of as "mom."

She said we could do that and now she's saying no!
She won't let me!
She doesn't understand anything!

I never really got why that bugged him so much, but every now and then I will hear myself reduced to a pronoun, and I get it now.

Gym Dandy, Part Deux

2008-01-10T20:30:00.000-08:00

Update! To the list of celebrity-type people I've spotted working out at my gym, which includes:

1. Mark McGrath and
2. Fabio

...I can add with pleasure:

3. Mr. Big! Whose real name I had to Google but is apparently Chris Noth!

This is the most exciting gym news since they added the 10:15 Beautiful Booty class on Saturday mornings. (The 9:30 Cardio Core Ball slot always felt a touch too early.)

Like sands through the hourglass, these are the days of my life.

Thirty Mile Zone

2008-01-08T14:42:00.000-08:00

I should first disclaim this post by saying that the idea I might be foreshadowing my own harm pains me. But, god forbid, in case anything happens, keinahora, you will have heard the truth behind it.

I work on a stretch of Sunset Boulevard (at Sunset Plaza on the strip) that is a nightmare for pedestrians. Every time I try to cross the street to get my salad (Chinese chicken salad, substitute soft tofu for chicken, light dressing) from Chin Chin, or go to the gym, or browse H&M at lunch, I take my life into my hands. There is a particular crosswalk that is marked as such, but has no light to indicate right of way, so motorists have to get a clue that they're supposed to stop when you are crossing the street because it's the freakin law. Instead, they whiz by you at light speed as you register terror in your eyes. Before walking ahead, I always try to make eye contact with drivers so that I can make sure they have seen me. Sometimes this works, but often when the mutual eye contact is made, drivers become more confident that I will stop, and hit the gas with that knowledge.

Now, this place where I work happens to be right next door to perennial paparazzi magnet Il Sole, and also next to Cravings and Le Petit Four and One Sunset, which are places where celebrities seem to like to eat when they are not on Robertson. So there seem to be a lot of cameras around here during most hours of the day.

A few months ago, while under agonizing deadline pressure, I had run across the street to feed the meter. On the way back to the office, no drivers would stop for me, and I felt like Frogger—either about to be squished, or if not then at least helpless and pathetic. The eye contact trick was not working. Finally, I lost what was left of my composure and started hollering expletive-laden gems into traffic. "It's a freakin crosswalk, you freakin @#$%*&s, that means you're supposed to freakin stop, you freakin @#$%*&s!" Only I did not say freakin or @#$%*&.

Come to see when I turn around that there are at least three cameras trained on red-faced me in the middle of the street. Maybe it was a slow day for TMZ news and they were looking for some crazy-lady-ranting action to steam things up. Alas, my cameo never made the site, y'all, ding dang!

Shake Ya Tail Feather

2008-01-07T19:57:00.000-08:00

Who among you has had a tailbone injury? I have learned, in the week since I earned mine after making rather abrupt contact with a Lake Tahoe mountainside, that this injury is known for its tenacity and painfulness. I have learned this not just from my own experience, but from sharing my story with most people I encounter (you know how I do). The instructor teaching the new class at the gym on Friday told me she's never been able to sit in the same spot for more than half an hour since she landed awkwardly after going down a playground slide when she was five. I have heard at least three similar stories, and this is not encouraging.

Let me also tell you what you look like when you walk if your lower back area aches. You look like a nine-months-pregnant lady, trying in vain to protect her back while she manages a waddle. And when you try to pick something up, you look like a very old woman, the kind who pushes a wheelie cart around and wears a head scarf. This is the most scarring part of the experience—this feeling like an old lady—because deep down I know I am really still wild at 30. Still wild, with a bit of a limp maybe. And plus, I bruised my tailbone sledding, dude. What's better than that at 30?

On Saturday night, we had drinks with a bunch of miscellaneous people I mostly didn't know. One of them was a 29 year old who attributed his baby face to his Asian genes, and the fact that he still acts like he's 12. He works in some way in the extreme sports field, and said that he loves to snowboard rails and has had concussions and even vomited blood after wiping out, but "whatever dude, I have life insurance, so at least my parents will get rich." He also said, "I figure one day my friends will just be like, 'Oh what happened to that dude? He's no longer with us—figures.'" He said all of this with a whatever-bro giggle. It was amazing. It's like the exact opposite of anything I would say, or any way I could possibly behave with this Jewish upbringing. It's fun to be reminded of all the differences in perspectives out there.

Really, I was like, huh. You're an alien. I am terrified for your poor parents, oy, and I don't know what they've done to deserve this. But you sure sound like you have a lot of fun.

Medical Mystery

2008-01-04T17:30:00.000-08:00

That's me. The good news is, if you go somewhere with me, I'm the one likely to end up with the weird injury, not you. I am like the magnet that sucks them into my field. A few samples that spring immediately to mind:

Sledding incident, Lake Tahoe, December 2007.
All I know is that we caught air off some impromptu roadside jumps during several solid but fear-inspiring runs. At some point I said, "I think we got our $15 worth out of this plastic sled from Raley's and we should quit while we're ahead," and that this did not happen. Yada yada, I am still limping a week later from the tailbone bruise that won't quit. Blue-eyed boy, also on the sled, uninjured.

Toxic reaction, South coast of Jamaica, August 2007.
Right thigh and hand start to tingle and develop abraded-looking red bumps after contact with some kelp or something while snorkeling. Come to shore and receive treatment in medical shack. Therapy involves Jamaican version of Chris Rock's "...just put a little 'tussin on it." Three girlfriends, snorkeling in same area, do not suffer skin reactions (but get a good giggle out of the fulfilled predictability that I would and they wouldn't).

Friction overdose, Oakland, circa 2002.
Why did we think we could just swoosh down that concrete facsimile of a playground slide (looking back, it was probably a drain pipe) without drawing blood from thighs and elbows? (Oh right, all that champagne.) Hello, I was wearing a skirt. It's almost like I never qualified for those highly gifted magnet schools...

Grotesquely inflamed bee stings on notable body parts:

Tongue (while licking Popsicle, circa 1985, Camp Hollywoodland. Counselors administered second Popsicle in attempt to reduce swelling.)
Bottom of foot (stepped on bee in college, circa 1995, Berkeley. Resulted in preferential handicapped parking at Cal/SC football game. Score!)
Middle finger, right hand (after finally gathering nerve to relieve self discreetly under cover of draped blanket in Golden Gate park, October 2007, San Francisco.)

I'm sure I'll think of a million more, but I find it's better not to search my mental database for these painful (or itchy or otherwise crippling) memories. Meanwhile, I am continuing to stock the drawer labeled "Pain/Wound Care" in my bathroom.*

*Yes, this is true. One day, in a fit of productivity, I got out the label maker and marked the inside of every drawer in the house. There is hope for '08's resolutions yet!

Auld Lang Syne Language

2008-01-02T21:58:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year, lovelies! I thoroughly enjoyed the last couple weeks of 2007, which involved a lot of friend time, and family time, and a lot of touring around California, which—and I know I repeat myself—you just can't beat. It's so breathtaking, our state.
On New Year's Eve, in a friend's Russian Hill apartment in San Francisco, MT innocently inquired as to my hobbies (no doubt after I'd said something snotty about how busy I am and how robust my blessed life already is, dang, lay off). All I could think of to say on the spot was "working out" (which might be a kind of lame cop-out L.A. answer), and "blogging" (which is also kind of a cop-out, since my Internet self is a more composed, less-interesting, anecdotified version of my real-life self and adventures, and I haven't blogged much lately anyway, like I'm Princess Melissa or something). Then of course there is watching Project Runway while texting, but you don't have to tell me that's not a hobby. And hair is not a hobby; it's damage control executed with scientific precision. I like to think I am a good and dutiful friend to many among a close-knit but large group of folks, and I know good friends are an earned privilege. But a hobby? Not so much, I guess.

And of course there's work, which I have resolved to remember in 2008 is not a hobby, but a job—albeit one that happens to consume most of my time including evenings and weekends on account of events, and one that not coincidentally combines things that I deeply care about: writing, photography, and career. Still, how did I come up job-swamped and hobby-free in the waning weeks of 2007? The Sassy-reading 1989 version of me would not have seen that coming.

So I'm putting this out there to friends and strangers, this question of what my new hobby will be in 2008. Can you help me with a suggestion? I always lean toward hobbies that I can parlay/multi-task into being, say, money making as well as fitness promoting, or perhaps crafty and meditative and entrepreneurial and tummy flattening all at once. I'm into free-time efficiencies. But of course, I'm open to any constructive or fun ideas. Whether you know me or not and you've got one, hit me.

[Current potential hobby front runners are Italian language refreshing, healthy vegetarian cooking at a higher level, volleyball (which seems like cheating, because it's one of the blue-eyed boy's existing hobbies, and he'd be coaching me), tennis (same deal), hiking (fab, but achingly obvious)...]

I thank you in advance for your ideas. And I wish all of us more joy in 2008 than we possibly could have known was coming. Then bam—you got it.

Gym Dandy

2007-12-13T23:30:00.000-08:00

Short list of celebrity nobodies I have so far spotted working out at my gym:

1. Mark McGrath
2. Fabio

Check back for new additions as I discover them!

I took a meditation class tonight, but not on purpose. It turned out to be the second half hour of what I thought was an hourlong abs class, so I stayed. I didn't let my mind be free or whatever, because that's not really my forte, particularly after a stressful day at work. But I did enjoy the two-second temple massage with lavender oil at the end, and I enjoyed what turned out to be a weird sermon given by the instructor as we moved gently with our eyes closed.

The instructor is gorgeous, and built like any ripped male actor you might see snapped on the beach in the pages of Us Weekly (which you would only see when you are getting your nails done, because that's the only time you read it). And he kept talking about how we all are rich and fancy (?) and how we all live such glamorous Hollywood lives as actors or dancers (?) and how it's hard not to get caught up in all that (I'm pretty sure he was mostly talking to himself). Then he said something about having watched a really touching moment on Oprah where a woman was crying and crying after she cheated on her husband, but that Oprah pointed out that tears weren't really significant compared to a pureness of heart or some such? He had long stopped making sense by then, but his voice was really soothing and powerful and reassuring in the most fake-hippie way.

Oh and he said something about how we're all bigger than our Gucci bags and Land Rovers. And I'm like gurrrl, please, there's nothing bigger than a Land Rover.

For Real? Huh.

2007-12-06T21:34:00.001-08:00

Look, I don't want to get all uppity, but.

In the mail room of my building, there is always a stack of Beverly Hills 213 magazines, apparently distributed for free in this area. I never take one upstairs to read it, but the coverlines are always maddeningly sycophantic and lame. I give you this:

"Drew Lachey: Great Talent, Great Father"

I mean really. Really.

Newsflash: Heidi Klum's Trainer Probably Does Not Support Your Eating Habits

2007-12-04T23:39:00.000-08:00

The year I moved to Los Angeles from New York, so did the Victoria's Secret fashion show—a plus for me, since it's one of my favorite events to cover. Watching the televised version tonight of this year's spectacle jogged my memory to a moment I'd spent at the show's after-party in 2005 at the armory.

It was pouring rain outside. Inside, I was dutifully noshing on hors d'oeuvres with an event-world friend who introduced me in a conversation circle to a man who was apparently in the stable of top trainers charged with maintaining those supermodels' bodies. I must have made some off-the-cuff remark about how I figured a little risotto ball or two never killed anyone, and how I drink my vodka with soda water so as not to take on too many of the unnecessary calories associated with sugary mixers anyway.

But this man was palpably, unapologetically disgusted by my unforgivable lack of restraint. He was shocked—shocked!—to learn that someone currently sharing his air might indulge in one microgram of risotto. There was no discernible irony on his face when he turned around—as if toward a pit of photogs snapping flashbulbs—then it was pivot, poof, gone.

Fortunately or unfortunately, I have to rely on things other than my perfect body to earn my living—like reporting on events, where risotto balls come with the territory.

If My Poor Friends Must Suffer Crises, I'm Glad They Weave Them Into Funny Emails

2007-11-29T11:42:00.000-08:00

"I think I may need to call it all off. I already wrote essentially a Dear John letter and have it sitting in my desk drawer at home. It's like having a loaded pistol in my desk with no gun lock, safety off, while Dick Cheney is rooting around my stuff."

Thanks Giving

2007-11-19T18:39:00.000-08:00

To everyone who blesses my lucky life: thank you a million times, plus infinity squared.

Gutter Mouth

2007-11-11T20:24:00.000-08:00

Saturday night, after our teams both lost, we went bowling. (I was in a Cal T-shirt; the blue-eyed boy was in the letterman jacket his father had earned for hockey when he had gone to Ohio State decades before his son, and which is emblazoned with his old nickname "Dutch," which has no significant explanation that I can discern).

When we go to the bowling alley in Mar Vista, it always feels like observing a social experiment, only we're participating alongside the subjects as we study. I always wonder who all these people are, because I will swear I don't see them every day around Los Angeles, and I'm not talking about one speicific sort of person either. It's all sorts of people, who mainly have in common that they seem to keep their kids up too late and curse around them.

Shortly before we'd showed up for bowling, I'd called the alley and they'd said it would be about a 45-minute wait for a lane. (That surprises me every time, that bowling lanes are so coveted in our there's-everything-to-do-here town of Los Angeles. What are all these folks' stories?) When we got there, a very robust woman said it would be two hours—it was so busy, couldn't we see that?—and that she didn't care what they told me on the phone, and that furthermore there was no list to which we could add our names, but that we could sit at one of those tables and wait to be called. She reminded me of a woman to whom MM and I used to refer—only among ourselves, of course, and with some fear and reverence—as the Javits Coffee Lady; one time, years ago in New York, we were at a convention at the Javits Center and we'd gone to get coffee in the cafe there, and the woman working the counter had made some very heavy-handed remarks about having to work at Javits and not taking any smack from nobody mmmmhmmmm.

Told about the two-hour wait time, I got a little bit indignant, and then stopped myself from broadcasting that scorn on my face because I thought this woman might be the type to shank me from her post behind the counter and not think twice. The blue-eyed boy and I got a drink in the bowling alley's bar (where an older lady was performing a shockingly effusive version of "Proud Mary" in an apparent karaoke contest), and then went to play a round of Lord of the Rings pinball. From where we were loitering in front of the pinball machine, the big lady could see us, and hollered at the blue-eyed boy, "Hey, red jacket," and gestured for him to come over, and told him a lane was available (all while I was not looking). Five minutes had elapsed since she'd told us two hours.

I waited until we were putting on our bowling shoes out of ear shot, and then I told the blue-eyed boy that I knew she'd had it out for me from the moment we'd walked in, but then had apparently decided not to punish him just because she didn't like me. He does have a gentle face, and looks (and is) wholly nonconfrontational, and I do have a tendency to do the neck roll and suck my tongue in the face of irritating customer-service people and drivers who cut me off. "What's the expression?" asked the blue-eyed boy, innocently, so as not to rile me. "You can catch more flies with..." I told him it was vinegar; and he's right.

I'd really wanted to break 100, but I bowled a 98 on account of a distracted gutter ball in the last frame. Next time.

Bourgeois Ennui

2007-11-09T15:39:00.000-08:00

CJ: my neck hurts and im not in the mood for japan
me: wait when are you going to japan?
you are hella fancy and you're always like jetting off to milan paris tokyo london
CJ: ha
its so not fun tho
im soooo tired
me: i feel you
CJ: i had lunch with [redacted] today
me: how is she
CJ: shes good
still exactly the same
shes booed up with another lawyer
wait
i think
i wasnt listening

Denim Warrior

2007-11-01T15:54:00.001-07:00

The best thing about my new jeans is that they give me the silhouette of that leggy Daily Candy illustration girl, whose figure I have always admired. Rules.

And that's one to grow on. [Not really, but that's my version of those sassy Daily Candy kickers I also admire.]

My So-Called Life

2007-10-26T20:12:00.001-07:00

A girl tries to go to the gym, because she figures it's probably the right thing to do to cap off a hell of a week following a catastrophic hard drive crash and the subsequent clamor toward recovery. The girl is so stressed about her job when she's leaving the parking lot after her workout, she's telling fer friend all about it on the phone, while backing up through the maze of Land Rovers and H3s and Lexuses (Lexi?) in the fancy gym parking lot. You know what happens next.

But it's the part after I hit the parked Mercedes E320 that was surprising. After I called mom ("You're alive, you're ok, these things happen..." Thank god for moms, I swear), I pulled out my reporter's notebook and scribbled, "Sorry. Call to discuss," on a leaf and tucked it under the Mercedes' windshield wiper. So happens, just then the other driver came back, so I got back out of my car to meet him and explain. Of course, I was instantly in tears, mascara streaming. That's not the surprising part yet (duh).

Here's the part. It was when he started in: "Are you ok? What's upsetting you so much? Work? Listen, I'm a litigator, and I know maybe better than anyone that all you have at the end of the day is your peace of mind. You can't stress out about work that much; it will bury you. This is nothing...it's a piece of metal..." (And he threw in, "You're a beautiful girl," for good measure, which was nice—or more to the point, it might have been why he was so forgiving.) (But really? All schmutzy and sweaty? Dang, thanks!)

So here was a guy, whose immaculate white Mercedes I just hit, counseling me and consoling me for 10 minutes. Being more gracious and generous with me than I could have ever predicted. Far more gracious, in fact, than I typically am with people who haven't just absentmindedly collided with my car. There is a lesson there, truly.

...Unless he calls me tomorrow and says, "Remember me? The litigator? You owe me a million dollars, you freakish stress case."

Fingers crossed.

Oh No I Di'int (I Did)

2007-10-22T19:53:00.000-07:00

Let me tell you what happens when you ask someone who is not pregnant if she is pregnant. Told of your error, you want to run screaming from the room, although it is a very attractive room at a stylish desert hotel, where you are attending a wedding of a dear old college friend. You wonder if you could somehow exchange all the money you've amassed in your Citibank savings account just to take it back, because surely you would do that gladly. You back peddle to a degree that becomes more humiliating (if that were possible), explaining that you're a reporter, and you just noticed that her dress was a little different from those of the other bridesmaids', and you thought you might be getting a scoop, based on the subtle nuance of the ribbon used to fasten the back of the dress, not based at all on her body type, because of course she looks lovely—and trim!—tonight. You think about how the mistake you just made sounds like some kind of sanitized Glamour my-most-embarrassing-moment story, which shouldn't be embarrassing enough to keep you up at night for the next two days in real life, but it does (and you are grateful for your new Ambien prescription). You wonder what the hell got into you, and woman, were you raised in a barn? You vow that as long as you live you will never, never, never, confront anyone with that question again, even if her belly is as big as a house or even two houses, and instead you will just ask, "So, nu, how have you been?" and if she is really pregnant, then for god's sake she will volunteer that information.

He's The One I Blame For My Treo Dependency

2007-09-12T16:25:00.000-07:00

me: covering gq's vma party @ the mirage. soo wish u were here. smooch times infinity squared. luv u like soja luvs freedom.

CJ: no justice no peace. i'm sitting on the floor at anna sui taking polaroids of my shoe. isn't fashion so glamorous?

me: wait wish u were here 2 c this 1 lothlorien girl in a hemp anklet doing the robot w/her casa z man on the dance floor. like 1 of these kids is not like the others.

CJ: BIG THANGS POPPIN IN 5768. SHOFAR SO GOOD. APPLES AND HONIES. CHALLAH BACK.

**
L'shana tova tikatevu, homies.

I Can't Believe It Was Six Years Ago

2007-09-11T21:39:00.000-07:00

Notes on Nascar

2007-09-03T10:21:00.000-07:00

I knew nothing about Nascar until I went to my first race yesterday, in the desert, where it was 112 degrees when we arrived (although the guy driving the tram from the parking lot said we were lucky; it had reached 121 the day before). Some observations:

1. I had been picturing a track surrounded by seating, like you'd find at any football or baseball stadium. Instead, it's a two-mile loop with bleacher seating on only one side--maybe a three-quarter-of-a-mile-long stretch of towering bleacher seats exposed to full sun. I don't know where all those spectators came from, but I never saw anyone like that before in Southern California. In some ways, it felt like being on vacation in another state, checking out how other folks live. (Just off the freeway on the way to the speedway, we'd seen a massive bass pro shop super store the size of Manhattan island. Or maybe Texas would be a better comparison. Anyway, it seemed like foreign territory, not even 75 miles from home.) Not a black person in sight. The blue-eyed boy was wearing a grey wife beater, because, you know, when in Rome. (N.B. If I were in the Hipster Olympics, I would select the tiny tee emblazoned with "Dale Jr." in pink script for the ironic T-shirt portion of the competition. Those tees and tank tops were plentiful at the race, often barely covering the spilled-over bosoms of big ladies who don't care about sunscreen.)

2. It was really, really loud. I mean, duh, right? But seriously it was so loud that it hurt. We tore up bits of napkins and put them in our ears, and it helped (although I already had a headache from dehydration and infernal heat). But most of the fans around us had these sophisticated headphone/walkie-talkie-looking contraptions. I'm still not exactly sure what these were, but I think they had a bit of a noise-canceling effect, and allowed you to listen to race commentary at the same time, and even see footage from dash cams on the high-tech versions. Some people wore no headphones, earplugs, or even bits of napkins at all; I can only imagine how they fared, but I'm too old for that experiment personally.

3. I think that yesterday I finally found my too-hot threshold. I love extreme heat, but, seriously, people; 112 feels like death after a while. People at Nascar races binge drink in that heat, and it leads to very gruesome results. I saw a guy hunched over a table who had vomited more volume than I eat in a typical month. It was memorable.

4. Speaking of snacks, the guys sitting behind me eating sunflower seeds at one point spit a shell right on the back of my arm in a cascade of suspicious wetness. I went for my purse to bust out the antibacterial gel and it was then I noticed I had dirt all up under my fingernails. How did that even happen? I looked at the blue-eyed guy with some shock in my eyes, and he told me it was OK, that I also had dirt or debris all over my forehead. What was all this dirt? It was grit-fest '07 out there, people. Shvitz and grit. (Shvitz-n-grit has a nice fish-n-chips style cadence to it, doesn't it?) When we came home, we took showers almost as good as those first ones post-Half Dome.

5. It was really hard to keep up with who was winning or losing at a given time because the cars whiz by like bullets. (When we first entered the speedway, it was during a yellow flag, and I remarked, "I don't know; these cars don't look like they're going that fast to me." Duh, Dubin.) Highlights were when the occasional car would catch on fire, or clip a wall or another car, and everyone would get excited and point to the giant plume of smoke originating on the track, which would soon hit us in the face with the smell of burning rubber and toxins. That's pretty fun, and admittedly more interactive than being a football spectator. In the end, apparently this guy from El Cajon called Jimmie Johnson won the 250-lap race. Then, fireworks went off, and he did some donuts on the grass between the track and the pits. That was good stuff.

So there you have it, folks. Notes from a naif on the second-most watched sport on American television.

(And as to the first-most watched sport? My heart will be forever with Cal Bears football. How ya like them apples, SEC?)

Love Ya! Mean It!

2007-08-31T12:17:00.000-07:00

Here's one thing that makes me laugh: when publicists I've never met get all cutesy in emails.

I just got one (from a dude publicist, no less) that starts out, "Hi babe!" and ends with "xo!" I very often get stuff like "Hey doll face," or "sweetie" from girl publicists, and most of those end with, "xx," (which is the new "xo," if you hadn't noticed.) This should probably annoy me, but I find it kind of adorable and endearing for some reason. I mean, heck, if you have a job, you might as well have one where you can exchange smoochy-face emails with strangers.

I covered a party in Hollywood a while back at which one New York publicist gave me a personal tour of the space. Walking down the red carpet, which was lined with wildflowers in shabby-ish boxes, he was telling me,

Ooooh, gurrrrl, could you just die? Are these flowers so cute and so adorable you could just die? I'm dying. I mean, look at this goooorgeous place. I'm going to jump off a bridge and die, it's so darling! Gurrrl, are you dying? I'm dying...

Did I mention this guy has super precious pressed hair, and if I recall, was wearing ballet flats?

It's a living, y'all.

Mini-Break Safari

2007-08-29T22:44:00.001-07:00

The San Diego Wild Animal Park is awesome because you get to see things like giraffes, just running around. (Well, more like standing around and noshing. Who could blame them?) You know what a giraffe looks like because you have grown up looking at his likeness in magazines and logos and photos and things. But how many times in your life will you see a real giraffe?

Or this rad-looking guy?

Memba Wa Day Weh Wi Dweet?

2007-08-07T15:58:00.000-07:00

I want to tell you what a soundsystem party is like in Jamaica.

Actually, I think soundsystem is the general term the Jamaicans use to describe any mobile party at which gigantic towers of speakers are brought to bear on a typically vacant space, and people come and listen. But I'll tell you about a soundsystem party near Treasure Beach, on the remote, virtually tourist-free south coast of Jamaica.

So we're there, last week, in Jamaica, four whiteys. Normally I would not call Mexican-American MG a whitey, nor would I call Russian-American AE a whitey, nor would I even typically consider my ethnic Jewish self a whitey, but we were all whiteys down there, relatively speaking. (We even got called whiteys a couple of times, but I'm pretty sure those remarks were only observations, not meant as judgments or disdain.)

We met a friend called Andy who told us he was going to take us to this party around 10:30 if we were interested. So we pile in his right-side-driver's-seat car, with his friend Ruell, and drive a ways to a parking lot where we hear loud music, and see lots of totally mild-tempered Jamaicans hanging around, drinking and smoking. The whole thing was very Heavy Metal Parking Lot, only different in the obvious ways.

Across the street, there's an outdoor staircase leading to a bar (N.B.: much of Jamaica doesn't really have wet bars--more like rooms with painted signs and wooden counters decked with bottles, and coolers full of ice) where folks make their way for Red Stripes and delightful Appleton rum drinks in plastic cups and some sort of gross energy drink/malt liquor hybrid called Magnum, which tastes like Dimetapp that's been in the fridge since 1981 plus moth ball juice.

So we're sticking fairly close to Andy and Ruell (ourselves being whiteys and all), and we're drinking, and trying to fit in (ha!) and lots of time passes, and we're still in the parking lot, and the whiteys start to wonder aloud to each other whether this parking lot is indeed the soundsystem itself. I mean, there seemed to be people, and music coming from somewhere, but no one was dancing, and WTF? We inquired with Andy, and he said we were just "waiting for the right time" to go "in." It was probably 1 a.m.

At some point, it became the right time. Andy gestured to us that we should follow him to a parked Corolla (which I guess belonged to the soundsystem's promoter) and each pay $200 Jamaican (about $3 U.S.) in exchange for wristbands that would get us into the actual soundsystem.

Someone opened a gate in a chain link fence, and we were inside. But it was still a parking lot. But it was the other side of the parking lot, the one with the giant towers of speakers emblazoned "Stone Love" and the DJ spinning mostly reggae and dancehall. Loud. Us whiteys figured we better put torn-up bits of napkins in our ears, which we did. Discretely, of course, mon.

We were all excited to see Jamaican girls dressed in bright colors dancing the night away. But we didn't, really. First off, it was mostly men. But more importantly, no one was really dancing yet. Apparently, the girls don't heed Sean Paul's call to shaaa-aaake their thiii-iiings until the sun comes up.

So when we crossed the chain link threshold again to go home, maybe around 3 a.m, we saw a sea of Jamaicans in the parking lot, their numbers tripled or more since we'd gone in, all angled toward the gate, waiting for the "right time." It was like Night of the Living Dead, the Caribbean version.

Anyway, bredrin, that's the story of the great south coast soundsystem of the summer of 2007.

Likkle more.

So Sorry to All I May Have Led Astray Over My Years of Misusing the Word

2007-07-29T21:53:00.001-07:00

...but this just in from the source:

"All this time, it's gavone, not cavone. Oooops."

So for example: "I was sweating like a gavone in a bust-out whorehouse in Texas in August."

I don't see how I'll ever break the habit.

She's Back!

2007-07-20T19:50:00.000-07:00

[Breathlessly.] The pregnant girl! At the gym! She's back!

There used to be this super-skinny girl at the gym who kind of killed me with her matchy-matchy purple sports bra/contrast-band pants/shoes combo, always folding right in half when she stretched before class, which killed me, because I could only fold in half if I got flattened by a truck. Then one day I noticed she was a tiny bit pregnant, and I snickered to myself that she'd never be so skinny again. (Yes, I snickered to myself because I am mean, apparently, I have no defense; but don't ack like you wouldn't do the same.) After a few weeks, she disappeared, and I thought she'd gone off to do the only reasonable thing: eat ice cream, not in the gym. G'on, gurrrl. That's respectable.

But tonight she was back, with her adorable little figure with a bump in the belly part. She's maybe six, seven months. And she's back in Brand New Booty class! Now granted, most pregnant woman get brand new booties, but usually it's not the same variety of brand new booty as I've been working on for months in Brand New Booty. And that class is really hard, y'all!

I'm just saying.

Dress Distress

2007-07-19T17:23:00.000-07:00

me: my shirt has cali's hair all over it and my shorts are too short and my shoes are ug and i look trashy today
oops
girl needs better lighting in her dressing area
sis: i looked trashy yesterday, but different trashy, like I belonged on COPS
me: cops?!
sis: i was wearing a marines tshirt and track pants and flipflops and had a baby attached to me
me: DANG girl
sis: all i needed was curlers
me: why do you even own a marines t shirt?
sis: who knows
i have no clothes and here's why
1. maternity clothes - don't fit, duh
2. pre-maternity clothes: i boxed them up for a few months and now i'm too lazy to go dig them out
me: nice
you are officially a mom
but what's my excuse today?
i have no bebe to blame for my bad outfit (and by bebe i'm not referring to a bejeweled velour track suit either)
sis: now that you realized you have nice legs, you pushed it too far?
me: yup
must be it
sis: understandable
me: always taking it too far, that's me
sis: if short is good, shortest must be better
me: riii-eeeght?
sis: seems logical
me: and i'm nothing if not perfectly logical

Highlight Reel

2007-07-16T13:26:00.000-07:00

30! So far so good.

State of Self on Waning Days of Twenties

2007-07-12T15:06:00.000-07:00

Spazzy, blessed, awesome. Not sure. Changeable.

Sometime early this week, I changed the course of my spazz attack (which was the standard no-baby-plans-yet boilerplate) to the wait, I'm too young to grow up, look how young I am, woooo!-variety spazz. Didn't see that coming.

In addition to my girls-only Jamaica trip at the end of the month, the blue-eyed boy had made plans for my upcoming birthday weekend involving sea kayaking in the Channel Islands near Ventura (an idea which, if I recall, I might have instigated after we watched a California's Gold episode about it, and, basically, if Huell Howser jumped off a cliff, I would do it too). But then I decided that sea kayaking seems like something staid that families do, and we're not a family, we're crazy fun young people, woooo, and we should go to Vegas instead and wear tiny, besequined dresses and bikinis with gold hardware (at least I should), and throw dice and be rowdy, and shop shop shop indiscriminately, and let it ride on red number 30, woooo! Because that's what the kids do! And that's essentially what I've wanted to do for most birthdays since I turned 21 (19).

Well, what happens when you think you might want to change plans a scant few days before your existing plans, is that airfare goes up so high that it's prohibitive, and who wants to drive into the desert during Friday rush hour, and then back all day Sunday when it's your birthday and you're sitting in the car with a hangover getting blasted in the face by the AC, eating Gardetto's party mix and Crystal Light Slurpees from the 7-11 on the interstate? So driving and flying are both out, which means Vegas is out for my 30th birthday this weekend.

So that locks us into our original kayaking plans, which I think will be awesome after all (if it had been viable to go to Vegas, I probably would have freaked out and insisted on reinstating the kayaking based on some impromptu consciousness shift) (hey, at least I know myself), and it will be good to feel healthy and alive out there on the pacific Pacific. I'm back on my eat-right/work-out kick (after a dastardly post-Half Dome June) and I've been all kinds of sore this week thanks to serious gym commitment. And I like the idea of feeling healthy and strong as I kiss 29 goodbye. (Sea kayaking Saturday + bowling birthday party Sunday clearly = monastically disciplined fitness regime, non?)

Today, I am wearing tiny shorts and sky-high sandals, and I got a few whistles from passing cars on my way to and fro Subway (veggie delight on wheat, bag of apples, Diet Coke) down Sunset Boulevard. Whether or not I am still wild at 30, apparently my legs still look good. (Actually, note to self: legs are bona fide asset. Why have never noticed?)

Last night at the after-party for the Espy awards, I told the blue-eyed boy I would not be morally averse to any procedure that would perk up my eye area a bit. It took him like four minutes too long, but he got around to saying, "You're perfect!" I think he's onto something.

...best and most supportive friends and fam ever, a job that is fun and challenging and full of perks and never boring, great condo with a separate walk-in closet just for shoes and accessories...

So, au revoir, twenties. I will miss the halcyon Berkeley years, and the New York years (although they were not hardly halcyon), but thank heaven I will not have to miss my woooo! wild friends, because I've still got em. See ya in sequins, girls...*

*Somebody please take me to Vegas in August, though, for real.

R.I.P.

2007-07-09T12:52:00.000-07:00

Jane magazine, 1997-2007.

Stop It

2007-06-22T11:39:00.001-07:00

The people over at Evite need to check themselves. I thought it might be nice to celebrate my 30th birthday in a similar fashion to the way I might have celebrated when I turned 8: at the bowling alley. So I'm on Evite just now looking for an appropriate invitation to my party, and when I search "30," I get cards that say It's all over now! Look who's turning 30! (We're gonna need a bigger cake!) and even Still wild at 30!, which is the same thing it said on the Mylar balloon given to my sister on her 30th birthday that made her want to jump out the window at an otherwise innocuous celebration. Whatever, dude, my bowling birthday party is going to rock, and so is the big girls-only Jamaica trip that follows it. Jeal-o much, Evite? Heeeeeeeeeeeeey.

See, People?!

2007-06-18T17:31:00.000-07:00

Folks tease me because I worry, but stuff happens!

(On a related note:

1. I've been riding a two-week-long food bender using the I-burned-6,000-calories-in-a-single-day-hiking-Half-Dome defense. I guess it's time to stop that. and

2. Post-hike toenail update: Just took off the red polish, and verified the right big toenail is indeed all black and blue underneath. Will I lose it, or will it hang on? Stay tuned!)

Cabin Pressure

2007-06-18T16:58:00.000-07:00

Six days after my nephew was born, I got on a plane at PHL and headed home to LAX. Since having said goodbye to my sister at her house the day before, I'd hardly stopped crying. Part of it was the obvious: Because I'd decided to fulfill my commitment to attend the wedding of a dear friend in L.A., I'd left Philadelphia before my nephew's bris. This had been a rending choice. Part of the reason I was sad was that I didn't know when I’d see my sister again, or the baby, and “time marches on,” as my dad is so fond of saying. And I hate that it does.

The other reasons for the tears were more abstract. Everything had been hyper-poignant in Philadelphia. Like when I ate with my folks at City Tavern and my dad’s salad came with a purple orchid on top, and my mom was so determined that she should take this little second-hand flower to my sister. She dusted off the blossom and asked the waitress for a Styrofoam cup to transport it in. My dad poured a half inch of water into the cup, and my mom placed the bud inside, and we kept it in the cup holder of the rental car until it could safely be delivered to my sister. The way my mom was so precious about how this flower must be taken to her daughter—this killed me. There are lots of other reasons too, but my Internet self is not nearly honest enough to dissect them here.

I hardly slept a wink before I got on the plane, and then got up at 6 AM to head to the airport, where the security line was a hundred miles long and I barely got in Southwest's nightmarish B line in time to get an aisle seat directly in front of a screaming baby, for whose parents I should have had sympathy, particularly under the circumstances of our own family’s developments, but didn't because I was so dang tired. Seeing the tears, the girl sitting in the window seat asked with genuine concern if I was OK, and I really believed she was interested in the answer—which I would have told her with details, because I am the type, but it’s so complicated and I’m not even sure what it is.

Something about my mom handling an orchid from my dad’s salad with extreme care because it was for her daughter who is recovering from surgery, and because my mom would have always done anything for her daughters? Something about how I have a tiny new nephew who weighs five pounds less than my cat, and who could be god-knows-how-old before I see him again because we live far apart and that sucks? Something about how I’m going to turn 30 in a month and people in Philadelphia seem to be doing different things at 30 than people in New York or L.A., and how that complicates the value system in my head?

Meanwhile, the guy in the middle seat, who was wearing a ball cap that was brown mesh in the back and fake woven wicker on the brim, was oblivious to my--er--lack of composure. And he had a lot to say to me about his cat Daisy and the dog who’s name I can’t remember, and the crawfish his wife found in a pond and put in their daughter’s aquarium. (The wife, who goes by “All-Biz Liz” because she makes the family's decisions, and has no faith in her husband's decision-making abilities, had trouble carrying, which is why they had their daughter so late in life. So I was told.) This man had no idea that I was not really in the right emotional space to be on board with his idea that the way to make a million quick is to be a child’s birthday party entertainer, like this Safari Lady who came to one of his daughter’s friends’ parties and got $200 for entertaining the kids with goats and snakes for an hour. Can you imagine? $200! Get a couple of those bookings in a day—maybe four in a weekend—and you’re so set! That's the way to do it, boy, I tell you.

I tried to cover my head with the blue Southwest “blanket,” so I could “sleep,” but its mystery fibers were asphyxiating me, so I moved it aside from my face just as a stewardess walked down the aisle. She asked me did I need a hug, and gave me one, and seemed to really, really mean it. She offered me a drink on the house (which I wouldn’t normally have declined, but I had to somehow get myself to the rehearsal dinner in Pasadena without falling asleep at the wheel) and came back instead with some water and a box of tissues. Women have this ability to give hugs and make people feel better. It’s amazing how many men don’t (all due respect to those who do).

And my inability to understand their reasons for that must come from the same Mars/Venus schism that ultimately results in the husband wearing a shirt that says, “I’d rather be fishing but my wife’s nagging would scare away the bass." Or what have you.

Anyway, I was all prepared to come home alone in a taxi (the blue-eyed guy was in Cleveland, and my parents were in Atlantic City on a day trip from Philadelphia, so who would come get me?), and was prepared to miss the noise terribly. But when the wheels touched down and I turned on the ol' Treo, there was a message from AE and oh my god she totally missed me and she's checked my flight status online and knows I'm early and is on her way to pick me up and we'll have lunch and discuss, it's all good, girl, for real.

Thank heaven for friends. For real, girl.

I'm an Auntie!

2007-06-10T07:58:00.000-07:00

"Dean"

eight pounds, two ounces

via emergency c-section (sister fully morphined, but OK!)

Pennsylvania Hospital, Philadelphia

12:24 PM EST, Saturday, June 9, 2007

The Half Dome Report

2007-06-03T23:31:00.000-07:00

Our group of 10 adventurers is back from Yosemite where we embarked yesterday on our big, much-anticipated Half Dome hike. Just got back now, in fact. I walked in the door, took a fabulously long shower (if only it never had to end), and emerged with about 32 ounces of leave-in conditioner in the ol’ mane—which was desperately worse for the wear. And I’m utterly exhausted, but I thought it would be the most honest and raw time to write about the experience, so here goes.

Some background for those readers who may have come upon this by Googling “hiking Half Dome” or the like: I am 29 and do four to five rigorous weight training and cardio workouts per week in the gym, but I’m not known for being outdoorsy or a hiker. I am fond of clean fingernails and so forth, but I was eager to take on this challenge because LP was such a dutiful and excited leader (this adventure having been on her to-do list forever) and I was grateful for the opportunity to try something I would not likely initiate myself. It goes without saying, but my experience was not identical to the other hikers in my group, and this is only my tale of the intense journey undertaken alongside them.

I’d read so many blogs about the hike before attempting it, and I found that nearly all of the writers focused on the physical experience, with little mention of the emotional one, so that’s much of what I’ll write here (which should come as no surprise to anyone who knows me in real life). I also hope I’ll get the chronology of trail milestones right, because many of them have already merged together in my memory.

***
We awoke at 5 AM yesterday, and made it to the trail head at about 7:45 AM. (We’d already walked an easy mile from the car to that point.) We took the Mist Trail up the first couple miles, which takes you past Vernal Falls via an intense stretch of granite stairs. Per the trail’s name, it was wet and we were prepared with windbreakers (although it was the beginning of the end for my hair). I was wearing a heart rate monitor, and noticed I was really coming close to my maximum heart rate even in this first stretch (although I’m convinced my heart rate at rest has increased by 10+ BPM in the last few months due to work-related stress, so that was probably not an unrelated factor in the high reading). I’m sure we were all feeling exerted, but I really felt fine and recharged after a short Power Bar rest to enjoy the fantastic view. At this point, DL had a bit of a nose bleed, which may have already been an altitude issue, since we’d come from Los Angeles and the Yosemite Valley floor is at 4,000 feet—and I believe we’d already climbed about 2,000 feet from there. (The blue-eyed guy later told me that it was around here that he saw a woman vomiting from exertion off to the side. When her hat fell off her head, her boyfriend, who was cautiously standing paces away said, “Ah, your hat fell.” Nice guy.) A bit further up, an arcing rainbow spanned the notch view through the granite. Spectacular.

More granite steps upon more and more, and I was managing, but a few of us stopped to the side to wait for another to catch up. We ate some more trail mix and pressed on. Keep in mind that this hike is more than eight miles to the top, and nearly all of it is accomplished by going continually up, up, up.

But there is one sandy stretch of about a mile that is roughly flat, which we encountered next. This is such a nice relief. The Merced River runs next to it, the pine smell pervades, and some wildflowers grow. And it’s perhaps the first time I could really appreciate those things because I wasn’t just focusing on the work involved with ascent. There’s a bathroom here with a composting toilet (if I recall that’s the last stop before the squat-behind-a-tree method becomes the go-to relief). Also around here you get your first glimpse of the dome, but it’s sort of a meaningless gauge of distance because there are so many switchbacks over about five miles still between you and it. But with the extreme zoom on my camera I was able to catch my first sight of the folks climbing up the cables at the very top.

At this point, I’d already drank two liters of water from my Platypus (I’d found it hard to ration since you can’t see how much remains in your backpack), but our group had use of a filter and pumped water at the next stream we encountered, which, it turned out was the last filterable water I remember seeing. According to my Polar heart rate monitor (which I have tested and believe is fully reliable), I’d already burned close to 2,000 calories at this point. And we saw a very pretty little butterfly alight near the spring.

At some point we saw a sign that said 2.0 miles to Half Dome, and I mistakenly allowed myself to feel like we were almost there. (Ha.) (HA!) This was a particularly treacherous stretch, and my heart rate monitor was flashing at me (I never read the manual, of course, but I assume the flashing heart means cease and desist. SE suggested I apply more sunscreen because my chest was getting pink, but I’m like, “Girl, I think that’s just my heart trying to leap out of my chest…” I believe most of us girls, who had clustered together at this point, were in roughly the same condition.) Five of us gals sat down to rest on a fallen tree. Another girl, a stranger, passed us and said, “FYI, there are termites all over that log.” And we all just looked at her and managed a giggle when we realized that no mere termite swarm in the vicinity of our shorts-clad bums was going to deprive us of this little rest.

The blue-eyed guy, whom I hadn’t seen for miles—and ended up being somewhat of a dark horse master of this hike—came bounding down the hill to pick up my pack for me and carry it a few dozen paces, since he’d already been up further and mysteriously had energy to spare. Not too much further up and we came to a clearing where for the first time we could see—everything. Everything! The valley floor thousands of feet below, snow left on other peaks, waterfalls. And to the left and up, Half Dome. There we could clearly see the treacherous cables that guide hikers up the last 1,000 or so nearly vertical feet (I’ve read it’s a 45-degree grade, but it looks like, er, 9 million degrees) to the top—the cables about which I’d read so much and knew I was going to have to overcome tremendous fear to conquer. But what we also saw below the cables were a bunch of folks scurrying up a cable-less stretch of granite in a way that seemed, at least from where we were standing, to defy gravity. Looking at those hikers, I said to LP, “I don’t get it.” And she goes, “I absolutely don’t get it either. How…?”

Pressing on, we got to that stretch next. It’s a series of switchback steps cut into the granite, which I either had not read about, or had not understood the severity of. So up, up, up I’m heading, facing straight into the rock, until I heard the woman right in front of me say to her friend, “I need to go back down right now,” with an urgency that flipped a switch in me. I looked down. And then, in Hitchcockian fashion (perhaps not, but I like the film-school drama of saying so), my view got all distorted and foreshortened and vertiginous. And I started to panic. I wanted to train my brain to keep the fear at bay, but my physical body betrayed me and I began to hyperventilate. I moved off to the side of the path and clutched on to a bit of granite (natch—what else?), and three of the girls in my crew caught up with me and comforted me.

And then I heard a man’s voice from a few paces above say, “You need some of this?” And there was a guy clutching onto a small pine tree with his right arm and holding out a bottle of Jack with his left. Turned out he’d experienced a spell of the same vertigo and his girlfriend had gone ahead without him. He was essentially paralyzed with fear—clutching some flora and a bottle in desperation. (Which I admit is at least a little bit hilarious in retrospect. But I didn't agree that drinking on the side of a mountain could help one get either up or down safely.) Somehow, inspired by the girls’ pep talks, and my determination to press on in spite of the fear, (oh, and a small blue anti-anxiety pill from the bejeweled pill box in my backpack—what, like I was leaving camp without it?), we all headed up the switchbacks and our new friend put away the bottle and followed suit. I was holding onto the rocks instead of walking fully upright—leaning in gave me more confidence. Seeing my condition (and hearing my loud hyperventilation) I got a lot of encouragement from hikers passing us on the way down. “One hundred more yards—you’re there. Right where those two trees are—you’re so there…” someone said. I looked up and saw the blue-eyed guy standing by two trees and I mustered all my strength to hustle up toward him. In this stretch, though, there were no steps at all—just an impossibly steep slab of granite that is more than a little bit sandy.

I scrambled up quickly ahead of the others knowing I had to do it in one fell swoop—like ripping off a band-aid—if I was going to do it at all.

At the top, the girls sat down next to me, and I put my head in the blue-eyed guy’s lap and cried a little bit. I had read in several other blogs that this hike provoked tears in others for a number of reasons—exertion, elation, and convoluted feelings of triumph and insignificance in the face of, “this giant whirling rock [that is our earth] and how we're all going to die,” to quote a j-school buddy and commenter on this blog.

Tracing his fingers around the dirt and rocks, the blue-eyed guy discovered a left-behind ring and gave it to me. It has a silvery pearl in the center and some brown stones beside and, by the looks of it, it was probably owned by a hiker who uses rock crystal deodorant and wears Tevas, but it fits me just fine and I adore it.

We were at 8,000 feet now. Although the cables still remained, I felt I’d made it. I’d overcome the panic on the switchbacks and was content to wait with many other hikers (including our new pal with the Jack Daniels) who also waited for friends to make that last ascent. But the more I sat (along with another member of our own group), the more I battled the decision to go on. (Even trip organizer LP had looked at that daunting path of cables and said, "I'm not even sure that I want to..." but the hesitation passed and she boldly went on.) The line to get to the cables was actually nearly an hour long (Yosemite rush hour!) and I had a lot of time to contemplate whether I should join back up with my crew and head on up the cliff. I was looking for a sign. At some point, it was too late because those members of our group who were going had already headed up, and I was in absolutely no place to tackle that without support—given that I was not sure I was in any place to tackle it with support. Then some disappointment set in because I knew—I know for sure—I had the strength (mostly upper body is required) to make it, but the height held me back. And the times I saw an unsecured hat or water bottle skitter off the side of that cliff and clang down into oblivion—well, I was relieved with my choice.

MJ and I waited near the cables for a while, and then decided to make our way slowly down the switchbacks and meet our crew at the clearing below; that would give us time to tackle the challenge at our own pace. I found this actually far less disconcerting on the way down than on the way up—in fact, hardly disconcerting at all (small blue pill at work, perhaps? I wondered if I should have taken it a little sooner). We met up with the crew after they returned from the summit, and I continued to bite back some disappointment on the way down that I hadn’t attempted the cables. (Although—notwithstanding my confidence in my upper body strength from those “Armed and Dangerous” classes at the gym—I’m not sure how a Jewish girl with a Jewish mom and a piano-drop mindset* could really ever do that part, but I'm sure it happens. In fact, AE was a fine example yesterday! Although her outlook is generally more sunny-side than piano-drop, bless her heart for it.)

It was after 4 PM now and getting late to start down. All the blogs that I read that said going down was not easier on the body than going up, but that was far from true in our experience. We took the John Muir trail—longer in distance but with fewer granite steps—and made it all the way to the bottom in about three and a half hours and my heart rate never went above 134 in those 8.6 or so downhill miles. We were able to filter some more water from the river (I drank three liters on the way up and had been plum out for the way down) and I managed to get in some good heart-to-heart convos (or was it just altitude/exertion/spiritual experience-induced T.M.I.?) with each the blue-eyed guy and dear old friend LP on the way.

We did pass one other hiker who asked us how our day had been and of course we said it was amazing, even through our exhaustion—because indeed it had been so incredible—and she said, “I stopped having fun hours ago.” Hmm, I felt bad for the friend walking with her who must have had to listen to those complaints for about 15 miles. Later, we passed a charming group of deer, and a bit further down, I got a “Go Bears!” from a gal who saw the Cal logo on my visor, which tickled me to no end (natch). And somehow, even though I had visible dirt caked everywhere and a blond afro roughly the size of Manhattan island, some Stanford alum tried to pick me up on the way down the mountain. Of course, I have a boyfriend. And, importantly (with only one notable exception)—Cal girls worth their blue and gold don’t date Stanford boys anyway.

Then, just as dark was setting in around 8 PM, we made it to the bottom.

The blue-eyed boy was driving my car back to camp. I got in the passenger’s seat and, without warning, fell right to sleep mid-sentence. Back at Wawona, I was so exhausted that I flung myself about haphazardly like a pinball in the tent trying to change into my sweats and out of my hiking gear. By the light of the flashlight, I noticed blood caked in the inside of my white sock, but was in no state to investigate. I was like, “I’ll just file this under T for ‘deal with it tomorrow’…”

I dragged myself to the campfire, fairly catatonic from exhaustion—but strangely not at all hungry or thirsty. (I think the adrenaline had suppressed my hunger all day, since I never had felt like eating and had only forced myself. N.B.: According to my trusty heart rate monitor, I burned close to 6,000 calories all told, far more than the 2,500 or so some other bloggers have suggested.) It all gets very blurry here—I thought it was from fatigue, but it likely also had something to do with the high ratio of whiskey to hot chocolate in my mug—but we laughed and carried on and congratulated ourselves on doing this tremendous thing. I was seriously touched when KB produced a piece of my hair from who knows where and told me he’d brought it to the top so my DNA made it up the cables indeed even if I didn’t. That sounds like some kind of yarn, but if it’s really true, I think it’s adorable.

Yada, yada, veggie sausages, s’mores, popcorn, putting stuff on the fire to see if it would explode—details are sketchy. At some point we were back in the tent, but couldn’t sleep right away—and not just because of the ongoing revelry around the fire outside. The blue-eyed boy said to me, “All I see is granite when I close my eyes.” And it was just what I had been thinking too.

This morning I woke up with a headache (dehydration? whiskey hangover? combo?) and sore hip flexors and calves. A very, very cold river runs near the Wawona camp grounds, and after we all took an excruciating dip, I swear I came out feeling perfectly good as new. I said, “I feel just like I had a bit of a tough workout at the gym yesterday—nothing more than that!” [Spoiler alert: that was foreshadowing.]

We packed up camp, took a series of fabulously goofy group photos, said our goodbyes, and headed out. (Sniff…I hate when wonderful things have to end.)

Afterward, the blue-eyed guy and I had a 300-mile drive home, and we stopped periodically—once for gas, once to get lost in a very lousy part of Fresno, once for pea soup at a place shaped like a big windmill, and once for coffee and Half Dome postcards. And each time I got out of the car my legs betrayed me and threatned to collapse under me like foldable tent poles and it was like learning to walk from scratch. The blue-eyed guy said, “Aw. You’re just like a little fawn.” A totally fair comparison (but he was limping too).

And so, over the Grapevine and through the woods, I just hours ago made it back home to good ol’ Westwood and my clothes-eating cat. Scanning the weekend mail, I pulled out an envelope containing my renewed passport. How’s that for well-timed poetry? One massive hike tackled in an ineffably beautiful national park, zillions of new adventures to go.

*From Aimee Bender's essay "House of Love and Bragging" in The Modern Jewish Girl's Guide to Guilt:

"Here is the scene. Something good just happened. I am happy about it. Maybe it was a good writing day, or I am in a good relationship, or I have helped someone, or I feel a sense of self in a true, deep way. I am walking to the market, to buy myself a peach and fizzy water. It's a beautiful blue day. Or it's not, but my mood is so high that it doesn't matter. I myself am a beautful blue day.
Little do I know that the piano shipment in the freight airplane high above me has had a mishap. The baby grand piano, which was right at the bottom of the aircraft, has come loose. Someone didn't lock that airplane door. He was drunk. He was in a bad mood. The piano wasn't tied properly. It has been hanging there, by three legs—by two legs—by one leg and now it has tumbled out of the airplane. I am still walking to the store. Whistle, whistle. I do a little skip.
Miles above me, whirring through the air, is this giant black paino, gaining speed as it goes. Free-falling. I am thinking about the good thing that has happened today, thinking about it. How nice I feel. How glad I am today. You'd think I would look up at the whirring sound, and maybe cars honk at me to look up, but I am oblivious, content, and proud. I step right into the path, and the piano flattens me into a pancake.
Better keep my eyes up. Better be vigilant, particularly on those good days. Any good day not marked by worry and vigilance will be met with tragedy. It exhausts me even to write it.
Secular me? Ha."

Yo Ho, Yo Ho...

2007-05-21T19:51:00.000-07:00

A while back, I spent a day with the blue-eyed guy that started with a hot air balloon flight, and proceeded with a back-country Jeep ride, a cattle round-up, two games at Wagon Wheel bowl, and a trip to the outlet mall. (It was what my mom would call "over-defining the situation," which is funny because she first defined that phrase, then coined it.) It was totally surreal and fun.

We kind of had a day like that on Saturday. We went for a hike in Franklin Canyon, which was only slightly laughable because we're the two city kids looking at each other semi-retardedly like, huh, check us out here in nature! even while we were in full view of the valley. But we got in some good Half Dome training (albeit about 90-minutes worth, but it's a start), and, importantly, we tested out our backpacks and shoes to see how sturdy our gear is before the crajor* hike, now just 12 days away. So far so good, but I'm totally buying one of those water-to-mouth-hosey things, because regular old water bottles aren't going to cut it apparently. Also I seem to have developed a late-life heavy-face-sweating issue, but that's neither here nor there.

Afterward, still in our grubby outdoorsy gear, we stopped at an estate sale in Holmby Hills on Mapleton, sandwiched between the Aaron Spelling estate and the Playboy Mansion. It definitely had its share of $50K furniture and paintings, but it also offered walk-in closets full of vintage duds and other semi-affordable finds. Sounds gold mine-ish, I know, but for some reason it wasn't quite. There was no evidence that this woman had done any shopping since the late 1960's, and most of her gowns were labled Bullocks Wilshire and I. Magnin. Kind of rad, but also kind of ugly. Plus, her feet were much smaller than mine (pity--some good nude peep-toe Ferragmos on that rack; just what I've been looking for) and she seemed to have had a tiny waist and outsized bust. How lovely that must have been for her! Moving on.

So then we went home and changed into our best pirate gear (no we didn't, but we should have) and headed out to Anaheim for the Pirates of the Caribbean premiere. Hello, it was awesome. I didn't realize how long it had been since I'd been to Disneyland until I realized how gleefully I was tugging onto the blue-eyed guy's sleeve, begging can we please puh-leeeeease go on Splash Mountain even though it's nighttime and cold, please, we can sit in the middle so we don't get wet, come on, it will be fun, please? And then I ate churros like it was my job (actually, I guess it kind of is my job in this context--sweet) and watched the movie and saw fireworks and wore my Mickey ears with the pirate earring all night long, until I fell asleep in the car on the way home. I figure, if this is what turning 30 feels like, I can totally dig it.

*Crajor = crazy + major. I made that up while writing a comment on my sister's blog and now I'm trying to get it to stick. Anyone with me?

Can I Help it That my Future's so Bright?

2007-05-17T21:35:00.000-07:00

This one time I took the Chinatown bus from New York to visit my sister in Philadelphia. It was hella hot outside and we went to catch the end of the Live 8 concert with Stevie. So we're walking and this guy stops us on the street and says to me, "You look like that one singer--what's her name? Mariah Carey!" And after he walks away, I go to big Dubin, "I don't think I really look like Mariah Carey, do you?" And she goes, "No. It's just that nobody in Philadelphia wears sunglasses that big."

Ain't No Mountain High Enough

2007-05-14T08:30:00.000-07:00

You know how if, like, your arm hurts, and you start looking on the Internet for all the reasons your arm could hurt, then you end up determining that you're going to die in an instant and you probably have the flesh-eating bacteria or cancer? The Internet is scary like that.

I'm experiencing a similar thing the more I read about the Half Dome hike, now less than three weeks away. I have yet to find a blogger writing about the experience who doesn't mention that training in the gym won't prepare you, and that going down is not easier on your body than going up, and that this will be a 12-hour ordeal so if we don't manage to start right at daybreak, well, then, we're basically screwed. All scary points, but manageable.

But here's the detail that got way under my skin this weekend: the matter of the last quarter mile, the bit where you climb at a 45-degree grade using the Yosemite-provided cables, which will shred your hands as you hold on for dear life, so you better bring gloves. The upper-body-strength requirement doesn't scare me so much here (although I'm sure it should) but it's the fear-inspiring height that I hadn't spent much time thinking about before this weekend. Apparently, according to bloggers who have done the hike, many hikers panic when faced with the cables and don't make the ascent. It could only be a very daunting thing that could make a hiker turn back just shy of the summit, after he has already made it 4,000 vertical feet over eight miles and six hours or so.

Anyway, note to self. If you know you suffer from insomnia, don't read a blog that includes this comment right before you try to go to bed:

The cables are intimidating because: If you slip, you will fall to your death, no doubt about it.

Update: Did it on June 2, 2007! Read my story here.

Holding out for a Hero

2007-05-09T08:54:00.000-07:00

(In further sycophantic praise of my gym,) I took an awesome workout class yesterday: Super Hero Training Camp. There was much leaping and bounding and crawling Spidey-style on fingertips across impossibly long stretches of gym floor and partnering up as hero and villain and trying to knock each other off the Bosu. It was so much fun and there was a lot of perverse sweating and hooting and hollering in glee/pain. And if I'd been forced to do something like this in junior high P.E. class--particularly the partnering-up bit--I probably would have been awake with night sweats for a week in anticipation of the living nightmare it would have been.

I hope this sort of thing is preparing me for the great Half Dome hike that is now looming only three weeks down the horizon. There will be camping involved (which is "for homeless people," if you ask the blue-eyed guy, and I generally agree but am trying to be positive and strong and fearless and stuff) and I hope I don't lose a toenail because they don't give discounts on nine-toe pedicures. Oy, I'm excited, but scared. I suppose that's how you know you're alive.

$41.09

2007-05-07T17:00:00.000-07:00

That's how much it cost to fill the 12-gallon tank of my modest little Mazda3. And that's even before the orange light came on. And you know I passed up like four gas stations before I found one with regular unleaded for $3.59. To borrow a phrase from my Arafat-hankie-wearing casting director pal in New York, "Dang, y'all, gas prices don't play, mmmm-kay?!"

Student of Life

2007-05-02T00:04:00.000-07:00

Who wants to bet this kid goes to U.C. Berkeley?

Thanks For the Memories, Coachella 2007!

2007-05-01T14:57:00.000-07:00

Sis: where exactly were you guys staying?
me: we stayed at the quality inn in indio
in a king smoking room with a pullout sofa bed
very glamorous
Sis: whoa, so it smelled like smoking and air conditioner and stuff?
me: yeah
it was kinda ghett
or "bust out" as [my Brooklyn-by-way-of-Youngstown-Ohio friend] would say
but everything was crazy sold out
Sis: "bust out" means ghet?
me: even our room was $224/night with our AAA discount!
and it was kind of a coup to even get it
yeah
bust out is good, right? i'm trying to implement
Sis: wait: 2 things
me: k
shoot
Sis: 1) 224 a night????
even with the three As?
me: yes. for a smoking room at the quality inn with one bed and a AAA discount. and a small bug problem.
Sis: because of coachella, right? i mean, not normally
me: because all the cool kids with bangs flock to town and grab the rooms
right
totally because of coachella
Sis: ok also, you're trying to implement bust out - is bust out an adjective? That's so bust out?
me: yes
like: "our room at the quality inn was bust out, but at least it was close to the concerts."
or for another example:
it was so hot that [the Mexican architect] was fanning herself with her dirty-ass flip-flop. that was hella bust out
Sis: ok
me: or we saw a girl on sunday night walking out of the venue with a plastic bag tied to one foot because she apparently had lost a shoe. that was mad bust out
yeah
Sis: ok whatev you say but it's not totally intuitive

On Posterity

2007-04-17T22:36:00.000-07:00

Job posting:
[Our magazine] is assembling a team of energetic photographers to shoot the likes of portraits, venues, and event design/décor in the Southern California region. Per-shoot compensation may be about $100 to $250, and strong images are likely to get prominent placement. Prompt turnaround essential. To apply, please send a cover letter, resume, and a few low-res digital samples to Southern California bureau chief [me] with ''PHOTOGRAPHER'' in the subject line.

*****

From: [redacted]
To: Me
Subject: $100?
Shove it up your ass.

*****

From: Me
To: [Redacted]
Subject: Re: 100?
I can't actually believe I'm dignifying your email with a response, but clearly I put the fee right in the posting because I am dealing with a very small budget myself and didn't want to waste anyone's time. Needless to say, I got about 100 qualified resumes anyway. I would gladly pay photogs $10K/day if I could magically manufacture that kind of budget. But you sound like an understanding guy, so I'm sure you know what I mean.
Respectfully,
Me

*****

From: [redacted]
To: Me
Subject: Re: Re: $100?
I apologize, for what it's worth. My IQ seems to run up and down on some kind of rollercoaster, and I sometimes forget that an actual person may read corporate emails. There's something really fine about your response, and even in the fact that you reponded.

I keep this pseudonymous address for sending nuisance emails to corporations, corporate media pooh-bahs, and corporate politicians, and 99.99% of them richly deserve whatever miniscule annoyance I can inject into their day: " Aber die Herrschenden Saßen ohne mich sicherer, das hoffte ich."

Of course it's ridiculous to quote Brecht in the context of nuisance emails, but it's even more ridiculous to do nothing because you can't do more, and I do a little more, when I can. This sounds like a collateral-damage defense: "I dropped a bomb on that email because I thought there were enemy combatants in it." Well... That's exactly what it is, but as a defense it always sounds a little better when it's packaged with some sort of compensation. Nothing perfectly appropriate occurs to me, so... the rest of this email is an English version of the great and beautiful poem To Posterity by Brecht. I hope it washes away the unfortunate impression I made on you when I was aiming at some generic corporate persona.

To Posterity
by Bertold Brecht(translated from German by H. R. Hays)

1.
Indeed I live in the dark ages!
A guileless word is an absurdity. A smooth forehead betokens
A hard heart. He who laughs
Has not yet heard
The terrible tidings.

Ah, what an age it is
When to speak of trees is almost a crime
For it is a kind of silence about injustice!
And he who walks calmly across the street,
Is he not out of reach of his friends
In trouble?

It is true: I earn my living
But, believe me, it is only an accident.
Nothing that I do entitles me to eat my fill.
By chance I was spared. (If my luck leaves me
I am lost.)

They tell me: eat and drink.
Be glad you have it! But how can I eat and drink
When my food is snatched from the hungry
And my glass of water belongs to the thirsty?
And yet I eat and drink.

I would gladly be wise.
The old books tell us what wisdom is:
Avoid the strife of the world
Live out your little time
Fearing no one
Using no violence
Returning good for evil --
Not fulfillment of desire but forgetfulness
Passes for wisdom.
I can do none of this:
Indeed I live in the dark ages!

2.
I came to the cities in a time of disorder
When hunger ruled.
I came among men in a time of uprising
And I revolted with them.
So the time passed away
Which on earth was given me.

I ate my food between massacres.
The shadow of murder lay upon my sleep.
And when I loved, I loved with indifference.
I looked upon nature with impatience.
So the time passed away
Which on earth was given me.
In my time streets led to the quicksand.
Speech betrayed me to the slaughterer.
There was little I could do. But without me
The rulers would have been more secure. This was my hope.
So the time passed away
Which on earth was given me.

3.
You, who shall emerge from the flood
In which we are sinking,
Think --When you speak of our weaknesses,
Also of the dark time
That brought them forth.
For we went,changing our country more often than our shoes.
In the class war, despairing
When there was only injustice and no resistance.

For we knew only too well:
Even the hatred of squalor
Makes the brow grow stern.
Even anger against injustice
Makes the voice grow harsh. Alas, we
Who wished to lay the foundations of kindness
Could not ourselves be kind.

But you, when at last it comes to pass
That man can help his fellow man,
Do not judge us
Too harshly.