Domestic Travel

In an effort to lighten the mood around here, I'm giving up whining for awhile.  I'm real tired of myself, real tired of blah-blah-blah-ing about being unhappy.  So I got shit going on, who doesn't? I remembered something Cheri Huber wrote in one of her books, "If you want to be happy, be happy."  Which is actually so simple, so true, it's almost laughable.  And I remember something else, it's a CHOICE.

Holy shit, remember when I used to be FUN? I take it back. I'm still fun. I just gotta stop twisting myself in knots because I'm afraid I'm not going to be perfect at being in a relationship. It makes me think of what it was like when I started riding my bike -- for the one of the first times in my life, I was confronted with the reality that I was never going to be a "great" cyclist, one of those lean and stringy people you see zipping up hills.  Me, I was always the slowest person up the hill, but I got to enjoy more of the scenery.  It was a ride, not a race.  Plus, things were much more sociable at the back of the pack.

So I'm doing what I do best, burying myself heads-down in work, which makes me contented and all that good stuff, and making plans to do stuff with friends this weekend before I leave for 2 weeks. You know, go to a wine tasting tomorrow night at a spiffy Soho jernt, and try to find just the right Steelers bar to watch the football game on Sunday without partying too hard or getting too shitfaced, since my flight on Monday is at 6:30 am.

I'd be a terrible lady who lunches.

I'm really looking forward to the next two weeks, when I will get to escape from my life in order to work in different cities. I'll get to LA twice, where according to the old weather.com, it looks to be one balmy 70-some degree day after another for the next 10 days or so.  Well, at least in Beverly Hills, it is.  Oh, come on, admit it, when you want to know the weather in LA, you plunk in "90210" for the ZIP code. I don't know about you, but it's the only one I can remember off the top of my head.

I think I will take my bathing suit and if I get any free hours, I will try to get some beach time in.  Though I'm looking decidedly, um, post-holiday right now, and a little, how do you sayyyyy, carby?

I've already extracted a promise from Judy that she will take me to In-N-Out Burger.  She merely shook her head at me, but then she perked up when I also requested a visit to Jessica in Beverly Hills, because my hobbit hooves need some lovin' care and a good dose of abuse heaped upon them by a snarling Eastern European mama. Judy will considerately schedule my press okays around the redheaded pressman, so as to minimize any embarrassment, but I'm sure we will run into each other at some point, smile politely, and we'll each pretend we don't know what the other looks like naked.


I'll do a pass through Houston, just to visit Dood, then back to LA.  The less said about Houston, the better.  My sister lived there for awhile, and her boyfriend, who was born in Queens, had the nickname "Yankee."  I visited her one Easter weekend in 1991 (I remember it because our "boys" were all over the airports coming home from the first Desert Whatever Hoo-Hah in Iraq, you know, the 4-month one where all the soldiers who took the "special" course of medicines before shipping out ended up with Gulf War Syndrome.) You know what I remember most about Houston in April?  It was steamy and it smelled bad. Oh, and titty bars. Every other building seemed to be a titty bar. (Quoth Chris Rock: "Dads, if your daughter's wearing clear heels, you fucked up!")  And some asshole in boots and a cowboy hat in some honky tonk stood next to me at the bar, looked me over for a long time, then said, "How come a pretty gal like you wants to cut your hay-er so short? You'd be so pretty if you didden have short hay-er." Those are my memories of Houston, that and dancing in the nightclub my sister managed (something called R-n-R, I believe, do they still exist?) with some Oiler (my sister pulled me aside and warned me to watch out for the ballplayers, because they were grabby and felt entitled to be that way. This was before the era of million-dollar he-sent-me-pictures-of-his-walter-payton out of court settlements) and drunkenly making out in the parking lot with some guy named Breeze.  I still have the pictures, Breeze was rockin' a serious mullet. It wasn't Jagr-quality, but still.

Anyway, what can I say about Houston? Shit, I am going to make Dood take me to the Rothko Chapel; from what he's told me, the full extent of any culture he's been exposed to since he's been there has been, "This is our mall. And this is our other mall. Here's our Wal-Mart, and this is Best Buy."  (Americans, what's up with you people and all the stuff you need to buy? Face it, as human beings, we're just gross.)

But enough about that.  Today, I leave you with someone else's take on Houston:

July 4 was not the time of year for anyone to be introduced to Houston, Texas, although just what the right time would be was hard to say. For eight months Houston was an unbelievably torrid effluvial sump with a mass of mushy asphalt, known as Downtown, set in the middle. Then for two months, starting in November, the most amazing winds came sweeping down from Canada, as if down a pipe, and the humid torpor turned into a wet chill.  The remaining two months were the moderate ones, although not exactly what you would call spring.  The clouds closed in like a lid, and the oil refineries over by Galveston Bay saturated the air, the nose, the lungs, the heart, and the soul with the gassy smell of oil funk. There were bays, canals, lakes, lagoons, bayous everywhere, all of them so greasy and toxic that if you trailed your hand in the water off the back of your rowboat you would lose a knuckle. The fishermen used to like to tell the weekenders: "Don't smoke out there or you'll set the bay on fire." All the poisonous snakes known to North America were in residence there: rattlers, copperheads, cottonmouths, and corals.

Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff

And now, I have to go and try to do something about this carbuncle on my chin.