Going with the flow
So, all thirty-one of you, my dedicated fans, might have noticed the construction going on around here. Keep your hardhats on when you lurk around: Things are far from complete and the hammers will be pounding for a bit longer. Your safety is my utmost concern and I wouldn’t want anyone to have a 2×4 fall on their head or anything. I’m all about my readers.
I do beg for your patience if things aren’t so pretty for a while, if pics are slow to upload or if navigating isn’t exactly intuitive. Of course, I won’t blame you if you move on to something more exciting. And regular. I know I’ve been less than stellar in my posting. But I should have everything cleaned up and worthy of visitors soon enough and I will (hopefully) feel inspired to dig into all of my parental, wifely, womanly angst to give you something worth reading. If that doesn’t work then I may just resort to more nude pictures of myself.
In the meantime, let me tell you about my annual Girls Only vacay that transpired this past weekend and which began in a taxi driven by what had to be the only black Republican cabbie in the universe. I swear. I tried to blow it off. I bit my tongue for as much of his diatribe as I possibly could until a final exasperated guffaw fell from my mouth as I fumbled to exit his car as quickly as I could. I do believe Rachel laughed out loud at him toward the end. But only in the most respectful of ways; she’s solid like that.
Rachel and I decided to try something a little different this year and abandoned our hearts in San Francisco for a flirt with Santa Barbara. Does anyone have alarm bells going off in their heads after reading that sentence? Yes? Well you’re not imagining things. There are bells ringing. Five-alarm-type bells, to be precise. But I’ll get to that in a sec.
My ever so capable partner in crime packed us a lovely picnic of hummus and carrots, crackers and aged cheese and wine and a deck of cards. All I had to do was show up. I swear, she enables the sloth in me and for that, I’m grateful. We chatted, we read. We got hungry. We ate and we drank and then, Rachel repeatedly thumped me in round after round of Gin.
It was demoralizing. I like to win. Losing sucks. But she packed the perfect lunch and took care of all the reservatioins so what could I do but be graceful about it? I only kicked her under the table twice. Other than that, I smiled and pretended I was cool with being a loser.
We arrived in Santa Barbara with a couple hours of daylight left for us to stroll and then drink more wine in a street-side cafe. The light was brilliant, everything seemed to be glowing. We were getting in the groove of being free of obligation for three days.
At my urging, Rachel bought a dress that she’ll be wearing until she’s 90. Or until she’s dead, whichever comes first (hopefully the former). It’s so timeless and elegant that she can be buried in it and be a fashion forward corpse. She’ll be thanking me from the grave, I tell you. I don’t have a picture of her in it but I do have a picture of the sky as the sun was setting and it was only slightly more fantastic than our day.
Everything was perfect.
And then… there… was… this:
Dang! We knew our time in Santa Barbara was limited. We lost power in the hotel room and in fact, the only places in town that had power were a RadioShack–where we purchased a flashlight–and a restaurant aptly called Ruby’s. We brushed the ash off ourselves and settled in for dinner and margaritas while formulating Plan B. We talked about catching a flight to San Francisco but we’d packed all wrong for November weather up north. We talked about Disneyland but decided we’d rather spend a weekend sealing all the grout in my house.
We are not part of the Mickey Mouse Club.
Because Rachel had packed every last necessity except particulate masks, we headed back to San Diego the next morning, left our luggage at the train station and headed directly to the Nordstrom Half-Yearly sale. What else do you do when the world is on fire and the economy is collapsing? We had an early dinner at Café Chloe where we were chatted up by a Republican in granola clothing. I never knew Tevas could be so very misleading. The guy had a haircut exactly like my Javier did in “No Country For Old Men” but he was no Javier under that mop. Indeed, he was a bookend to our friendly neighborhood cabbie. The two of them can cry in their soup for the next four years as far as I’m concerned, because this year? My team won!
Not ready to return to reality, we checked into the darling, wonderful Hotel Sofia on Broadway (used to be the Pickwick and has been renovated, for any locals looking for a getaway). Then we fetched our bags, showered and went out on the town as if we were tourists. We settled for some blues because this town is more pathetic than supporters of Proposition 8 when it comes to live jazz. Still, we had a great time and got to do a little bit of swing dancing. Certainly the highlight of the evening but a dangerous one since we’d both gone commando beneath our dresses and the guy twirling us around really liked to dip. Fortunately, we’re old enough to be properly cautious. Unlike the beautiful girl in the purple shift lying on the floor of the bar.
In the morning, we had breakfast out, revisited the half-yearly sale (since we couldn’t do it all in one stop), then decided to call it a vacation, one day early. I got a nasty head cold later that day and my Ray-Ray got some gastrointestinal thing that I won’t talk about since I don’t discuss such things. Even with her. I simply called to check in on her, made sure she was okay, wished her well and told her I’d go to the ends of the scorched earth with her. Even if it means Disneyland is somewhere in our gallavanting future.
Summer vacation: It’s good to be home but I love being gone, too
Wanderlust compelled me to cash in Ruby’s burgeoning college fund for two tickets to Europe. That’s right. Only two. Last month, Sam and I left the kid behind with her grandparents wrapped around her finger. Of course, I’m only kidding about spending her life savings; her tuition coffer is intact. But sacrifices were necessary for such an obscene extravagance: I had to give up all thoughts of purchasing any new and badly needed bras in 2008 and—le sigh—I had to forfeit my shoe allowance for the remainder of the decade.
But I’ll go barefoot any day of the week if it means I get a front row seat at the worldwide freak show. Being freaks ourselves, we began our trip by sharing a very special brownie not two feet away from the only other passenger on an airport shuttle, a U.S. Homeland Security agent. I’m here to report that I’ve never felt safer.
Relaxed and stoned from a glorious combination of weed and Ambien, we flew to London, where we waited in a hot, snaking immigration line at Heathrow International Airport. Upon reaching the front of the queue, we immediately had our wrists slapped by a humorless immigration agent for not dotting an “i” on our visitor’s card. It was a cold welcome, but immigration agents—like their counterparts in parking enforcement—aren’t hired because they’re cordial.
We were shoved around, elbowed and swarmed by commuters in the hyper-busy vortex of Paddington station. Thousands of people seemed to know exactly where they were going and needed to trample us to get there. We were baggage-laden, lost and fumbling with the map, barely able to figure out which direction was forward. I felt insignificant and lost and admit to relief when I spotted the sweet face of my friend who met us at the turnstiles.
We spent a few days with my friend, enjoying the activity along the South Bank and at the Tate Modern and visiting a few spots tourists would never otherwise find. We drank at her local pub where Bam-Bam (“I don’t want the locals to know my real name!”), a voluptuous woman with tri-colored hair, crooked teeth and tons of buttery cleavage, served me the best vodka tonic I’ve ever had.
We ate traditional English pasties in Trafalgar Square, walked the length of Pall Mall (who knew it wasn’t just a cigarette?) and took pictures of the implacable soldiers at Prince Charles’ back door with other friends—lifelong Londoners—who until then I’d known only in the virtual world. They opened their hearts to us as we discussed love, life and a particularly painful loss. I cried on the platform when the time came to say goodbye.
We left for Paris on the Eurostar, where the waitress insisted in a whispery French accent that we drink champagne and then wine—red, white, rosé?—during our quick ride beneath the English Channel. We navigated the Metro with ease, found our rented flat and then—pfffft!—my confidence dissipated like air from an unknotted balloon as I bungled the language during my first interaction with a restaurant hostess who promptly brushed me off.
Flustered and intimidated, I was frozen with embarrassment and tempted to use only English for the week. But that hostess was no ruder than the staff at a certain popular restaurant in North Park (I won’t name it because the food rocks), so I shrugged off my insecurity and kept conjugating verbs. As my favorite travel guru, Rick Steves, advises, “If something is not to your liking, change your liking.” It’s an unbeatable coping strategy for travel and, therefore, life.
Sam and I made the most of our time in The City of Light: We stood in the hot sun on the Champs Elysée cheering the blur of cyclists on their last leg of the Tour de France. We lingered in cafés where we watched as old women passed on bicycles and young women pushed strollers, and most of them rocked a panty-line in a manner utterly impossible in the states (It’s true: French women can make just about anything look sexy). We engaged with the nicest shopkeepers, baristas, wine sellers and cheese purveyors. I was teased mercilessly by a crepe-maker whose use of three languages left me without my usual escape route of clever retort.
We watched an evening rainstorm from the fourth-story window ledge of our flat. Every day we got lost in winding neighborhoods, several times opting for a park bench as a lunch spot. We walked the length of the Champs de Mars at sunset—around 10 p.m.—surrounded by the bubbling sound of thousands of celebratory evening picnickers. The occasion was Tuesday.
We stood beneath the blue-lit Eiffel tower at midnight on my birthday. We revisited the place where we were married.
I’m a believer in the importance of globetrotting. It’s good for the character (I write this at the airport after enduring throngs of line-cutters). Sure, anyone can see Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, view the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, or float down the Seine on a summer afternoon by turning the television to PBS. Basic cable access delivers such sights directly to the living rooms of millions, no passport or security clearance required. And thanks to the Internet, we can forge meaningful friendships with folks from other countries without ever having to decipher their accented vocabulary or make fumbling attempts to speak in their language.
But you can’t learn patience by watching people mob the startlingly puny Mona Lisa from the comfort of your couch. You can’t be moved to tears by the layered notes of a street performer’s accordion accompanied only by the screeching brakes of a roaring subway car. You can’t inhale the distinctive perfume of stylish Parisian women that mixes equally well with unforgiving summer heat or cigarette smoke or sweat or coffee.
Travel tests my stamina, stretches my limits and forces me to consider other ways of being (sort of like parenting but with a better view). It can be cutthroat and frustrating—Sam likes to say there’s no sportsmanship in travel—but it’s also mind-opening and necessarily humbling. Leaving home never fails to confirm for me the fundamental sameness of the human experience in all of its oddity and loveliness, freakishness and radiance, ugliness and compassion, entitlement and kindness, impatience and vibrancy.
I love being reminded that I’m not all that important. With or without shoes, I’m only another miniscule part of it.
(As published on Wednesday in San Diego CityBeat.)
I only had to click my heels three times
We’re back home and trying to readjust to the time zone. I’m wiped out—a chocolate mess, as The Gaydi Project would say. I can hardly form coherent sentences. Then again, maybe synaptic lapses are due to ingesting toxic amounts of butter and cheese.
Tonight we went for sushi with Ruby and Sam’s parents, who are staying through the weekend. As I was helping Ruby out of the car, she started to giggle that silly, round-edged toddler giggle that sort of burbles up from deep in the throat. “I got no panties on, Mama!” she said through laughter as she lifted her dress in the parking lot. I’d forgotten to put them back on after she’d used the loo earlier in the day.
Tonight, I begged my mother-in-law to change her plane ticket and stay for the month of August because the house has never been so clean and parenting never so easy. She said yes. My father-in-law said no. I pointed out that I wasn’t inviting him to stay on. Just his wife. He drew his line in the sand and I’m hoping I’ll be thankful to him by Monday morning.
And if all of that isn’t enough of an indicator of how mentally non-functional I am, I actually told the in-laws that they should sell their house and buy one here that’s big enough for all of us to live in together.
Jet lag is some serious fucking shit, people. There should be a warning label on it.
Satisfying my wanderlust
Only robbers and gypsies say that one must never return where one has once been. -Kierkegaard
As I stood in the travel store watching Ruby thumb through a book on India, followed by one on Japan and yet another on Myanmar, it occurred to me as it often does before I travel, that there are so many places I want to see in the world before I die. And dammit if there isn’t enough time.
Given this realization, it seems thoughtless to revisit an old favorite (or two). But I couldn’t help myself this time around. Planets aligned and a certain corner of the world beckoned. Is it so wrong to spend our daughter’s college fund on a nine day vacation that doesn’t include her? If it means lots of Guiness and red wine and baguettes and uninhibited public tongue kissing, then the answer is NO! No it’s not wrong! Not only is it not wrong, it’s more right than Grover Norquist.
In just over 36 hours, these hands will be welcoming me to London.
See how they glow like that? That’s from the inside.
After a few days of laughing, talking, photographing, photographing, laughing and photographing, she’ll send me off to Paris. She’ll be a little sad to see me go.
Okay. She’ll be a lot sad. So she’ll give Sam and me some time together before hopping on a train with her family and arriving in time to celebrate my birthday in a manner that will surely ease the vertigo caused by standing at the precipice of forty.
PROMPTuesday: Exercise #3
(This is my 150-word, written-in-10-minutes-or-less exercise about what’s behind that door.)
She sets her right hand on the door, palm flat against the warm wood. She gives it a push. She finds the door to be much heavier than she’d anticipated. She leans one tanned shoulder against it and puts all of her weight against that shoulder, sweating under the still-hot afternoon sun. The door opens, slowly, quietly to reveal a broad room. The saltillo tiled floors are cool beneath her bare feet. There is no wall on the opposite side. Nothing but ocean down there. Twenty or forty feet in front of her—she’s no good with distances—there is one shallow step down to another level of the room. Another forty feet, another step, a pool with no edge. Just the light blue of the water meeting the dark blue of the ocean meeting the pink blue of the sky, twenty or forty or thousands of feet away.
Oasis
I’ve written before about my skepticism of the validity of relationships formed online. Before I became addicted to the glow of my computer screen, in the days before I became a victim of the irresistible Upload Urge, I didn’t understand how you could meet someone in the virtual world and subsequently become friends with them.
Lo, how things change: I’ve spent the last three days immersed in the company of friends made primarily via the interwebs. With the exception of JesshiCA!—as Ruby calls her—all the other women I’m mentioning here were cyber-friends before they were flesh-and-blood friends.
On Saturday, JesshiCA! and I drove to Palm Desert in her husband’s really fast and really fancy car (that he is selling so JesshiCA can buy a Prius). I did not take a picture of it because I was afraid of appearing pretentious by posting a photo of me in a Porsche Cayman. Instead, I decided to be pretentious by writing about the fact that I got to ride in a Porsche Cayman. It was fast and fancy and caused funny noises to come out of my mouth as we swerved down the mountain pass into the desert. Mostly though, it was the conversation during the ride that made me giggle. I wanted to lean across the console, lick JesshiCA!s cheek and purr in her ear, I was so overwhelmed with the love you can only get from your close girlfriends.
We spent Saturday kicking around Palm Desert, watching the sweater-over-the-shoulder crowd. Saturday night we ate Katie’s delicious Chicken Tortialla soup poolside, while Susan’s neighbor offered us bong hits for Obama. And really, who can say no to that?
All but one of us, that’s who. I’ll let the partaker remain anonymous.
On Sunday, we took full advantage of Susan’s husband’s generosity and, in my case, his reputation. Like last spring, Doug hosted all of the ladies at the Country Club, even as he was hours away, toiling as men toil. Which is to say, sitting on the couch watching college hoops. Or something. Of course, I have no buisness even looking in the direction of a Country Club, much less dining in one. God forbid should I do something inappropriate like crawl around on the floor of the lobby.
I do think I deserve props for my extra effort in meeting dress code requirements: I did not wear my ball gag or bring with me my dominatrix whip, and I actually went so far as to wear white capri pants. Which is saying something. It’s majorly saying something. It’s saying, “I belong here! I belong here and right after I leave here, I’m going to run the kidies to the soccer field and then slip into CostCo to stock up on bulk goods!” That’s what white capri pants say. They also say something else when worn by a person who will go to any length for the perfect shot.
It doesn’t take a gynecologist to see what’s gone terribly wrong here. Let this be a lesson to each of you, my dear photographer friends.
The lovely ladies who lunch are Susan, JesshiCA! , Katie, Margot and Tiny Tam. They are no fun at all. Nope. Not a bit.
And as if this self-indulgent weekend wasn’t enough for me, I took Ruby to a pre-Bossy Road Trip dinner last night. Alas, I didn’t bring my camera because I was running late, as usual, and instead of driving around the block to retrieve it, I drove around the block to retreive a bottle of wine for my hostess. Turns out there was plenty of wine and simply not enough cameras, as there were only five. You may see photos of the gathering over here, here, here, here and here. I want to write more but WordPress is being eeeee-ville and I can’t beat the bitch into submission.
SOS, Mr. Administrator…
Heaven on earth
It’s impossible not to experience love in this city.
Impossible. Just look at this sunrise, taken from Sausalito…
It didn’t rain. In fact, it was the best weather I’ve ever experienced in San Francisco. It was San Diego weather. And texasgurl didn’t give a fuck about whether her hair got wet or windblown or whatever. 679 digital images, 40 Polaroids and 3 rolls from Holga later—and that’s just my lot—it’s safe to say that we may have been separated at birth. Thank you, internets, for bringing us together.
Fool me twice
The one and only blind date I’ve ever been on was with Mark Kazarian. I have no idea if that’s how his last name is spelled but I’ll never forget it because it’s fun to say really fast. It was late October in 1990 or ’91 or possibly ’92; the exact year escapes me because I was very busy being self-indulgent then and now I’m old, a fried-brain combination not conducive to accuracy.
I knew the second I opened the door that there was no future for Mark Kazarian and me. His face was fine, I guess, but it was the stuff surrounding it that put me off. He had dark hair that fell in perfectly greased ringlets to his shoulders, shoulders that were shielded from a torrential rain storm by a leather jacket similar to the one made famous by Michael Jackson. And he was a Sigma Whatever or Something Nu and I was an Anything But.
Had I the wisdom of my 37 years, I would have kindly told Kenny G that we were clearly not each other’s density and saved us both the hassle. Especially since I’d opted for the date instead of attending what was sure to be an outrageously memorable Halloween party thrown by artist friends of The Gaydi Project. But no: I was young and insecure and had a nasty little habit of defining my self-worth through the eyes of boys I dated, and therefore often chose them over my friends. (A difficult admission, to be sure, and to those people relegated to the B-List during that time, I apologize.) This being the case, and despite being aware that I would spend the night regretting my choice, I grabbed my coat and made my defeated exit with this frat boy.
Only, once we left my apartment building, I found myself standing on the stairs, alone in the rain, while a silhouetted Mark Kazarian was sprinting full speed down the sidewalk without so much as a whisper to me. I watched him dash and splash in his loafers for more than half a block before he leaped off the curb between two parked cars, cut sharply to his right and slid himself into his cherry red Saab. I followed him, being the silly girl that I was, and got to the car just as he was leaning over to unlock the door for me. How chivalrous, I thought.
When I got in, he was looking at himself in the rear view mirror and gently patting his head with open palms. “Sorry,” he told me as he fixed his coif and waded in the sheer fineness of his reflection. “I didn’t want to get my hair wet.”
I knew immediately that I wasn’t going to be defined by him. I knew it was over and I knew I had an out. I convinced him to swing us by the Halloween party and, as Auntie Mame likes to say, Jackpot!
This gig was way too alternative for a smooth jazz man with a penchant for secret handshakes. Perhaps it was the numerous televisions playing loops of Eraserhead. Or maybe it was the food, appetizingly displayed as the internal organs of a dead man on a banquet table, each splayed rib of the deceased pierced through with luscious cherry tomatoes. Or it could have been the Tide laundry detergent poured purposely over concrete floors to make—beneath the black lights—a shallow, glowing puddle, an iridescent liquid runway for a transsexual’s angst filled strip tease. Yes. I think it was that. The poor guy bolted with as much communication and even more speed than that which he’d previously exhibited. Every hair on his head was still neatly in it’s place as he left me there at that party, where I would later consummate some seriously unrequited love with a magical kiss in the rain-turned-to-snow. After that, I swore I’d never go on a blind date again.
I’m so fickle: I am, today, on the verge of my second blind date. It’s a little different this time around. It’s not a romantic date and I’m taking Holga, my bodyguard, with me. I’m going to meet this woman—and her entire family—in San Francisco. I cross my fingers that it doesn’t rain. But if it does, I hope she wants to run and play in it with me.