Gutter Mouth

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.

Highlight Reel

30! So far so good.

Stop It

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.

Road Trip!

The blue-eyed guy is taking me on a surprise mini-break this weekend! My best guesses so far are the Queen Mary or the outlets in Cabazon (what else could it be if the packing instructions are, "Bring both warm and cool clothes, because we'll be going between outside and inside. And bring trainers because we'll be doing a lot of walking. And you only need casual clothes." Plus, if anyone loves bargain shopping more than I do, it's my man.) Or maybe it's bowling? No, wait, probably not, but we are into bowling these days. (And the first time I played Nintendo Wii, I "bowled" a 212.) Anyway, I like saying "mini-break" because it reminds me of reading Bridget Jones on the 21 Hayes bus in San Francisco, and those were the days. At any rate, this surprise mini-break business: fun game! Stay tuned.

Up and Away

Sometimes you have those days when you just bum around and do nothing.


Then sometimes you have a day when you look at the clock and shoot! It’s 6:01 and you were supposed to be in the lobby at 6AM for your drive to the hot air ballooning launch site, so you’re late but you make it anyway, and then you go up on the balloon and it’s lovely down there and the morning mist is drifting over the farmland, and then when you land you have mimosas and you get pushed on the swing on a nearby jungle gym so you sail very high and then get your sandals all muddy when you try to stop yourself with your feet to slow down, and then you get in a Jeep and drive through the country to a cattle round up where you see calves being immunized and cows being branded, smoke coming off their seared skin and hair. Then you tour a citrus processing plant, and wander around the orchards, and then it’s only 9 AM and you’re kind of ready for bed, but then it’s back in the car to tour another hotel, the restaurant at which supplies you with a skim latte and that helps a little bit. Then you’ve got 45 minutes to shower and check out of the hotel before lunch, where you eat so much because you’re so hungry that the effect is very soporific, and you didn’t really need that since it’s only 2 PM and you already feel like you’ve been up for a month, and plus you didn’t get any sleep the night before on account of one delayed flight, one overactive brain, one bedmate who snores, and the knowledge you had to wake up at 5:30 for the balloon flight, which you didn’t manage to do quite. So then after lunch you view a lovely craftsman-style hotel room with a Tempurpedic bed and a rocking chair and an ocean view that makes you never want to leave, but you have to keep moving, and you go to a museum with a cowboy exhibit, and then you wander around a nearby street fair, and a tangle of local antique shops and then you’re so tired the whole thing is extra surreal, and on the walk back to the car you stop and stare at the pier and the majesty of the Pacific Ocean as the waves roll in along the coast.

Finally somehow you drag yourself to the car and you’re not seven miles into the drive home when you decide to stop at the Wagon Wheel bowling alley you’d spotted on the way into town and it just looks so folksy that it draws you in and makes you want to bowl a game for the first time in maybe eight years, when you bowled at Albany Bowl in the East Bay, where they served Bud in pin-shaped bottles in the Spare Room. (You bowl a 79, which you think is OK for your first try in ages; your partner gets a turkey in the second through fourth frames, and you’re impressed.) Now you’re really tired, so it’s back in the car, but it’s only a few more miles before you see the outlet mall and its Barneys, Betsey, and Restoration call to you from the highway, so you have to stop and you try on a Marc Jacobs coat, which you can’t justify since you live in Los Angeles now, so you let it go, and get back in a car to listen to Cal versus UCLA on AM 570. You pick up some tofu and get home in time to watch the last 10 minutes on TV, and your team is victorious, and that’s great, and then since it’s only 8 PM you make jokes about changing clothes and going to a rave in Hollywood, but instead you sit down to watch a movie and are fast asleep within seconds, and then you turn off the movie and try to watch CSI: Miami instead, but the only scene you see is the investigator popping a bloated corpse so it doesn’t blow up on its own in the van when it’s being transmitted to the morgue, and that’s really gross, and then you finally force yourself to go upstairs to bed and you sleep like a log and wonder how many days in a girl’s life she’ll ever spend like that.