I have some good news: I'm having a photography show, sort of. It's not in a gallery, but in a nice restaurant, so maybe it's not technically a show. Or it's a show designed specifically with hungry people in mind. Anyway, I'm excited, in part because I finally went through with it, after originally talking to the owner about it more than a year ago. I don't know what took me so long, apart from the long list of pretty good excuses I've come up with.

The restaurant (/bar) is one of the first places I used to hang out shortly after I moved to my neighborhood three years ago. At the time I didn't know many people in New York, so I'd head there alone and sit next to other solo people, and eventually those strangers became familiars or friends, or people on the other side of the bar who would give me discounts or let me hang out after closing hours. I've also been fortunate enough to witness the owner dancing to REO Speedwagon (turned up very loud), the return of my missing wallet from the friendly and honest dishwasher, watching the dancefloor clear when my German New Wave requests were answered, the smelling salts incident, and hip hop karaoke (which is terrifying but still pretty awesome). I'm glad that my first show will be at a place I really like.

Late Tuesday night I worked on my portfolio until I ran out of both ink and paper, and as soon as I was done, I headed to the restaurant to approach the owner with my work, to finally find out whether she'd like to display it. It felt kind of crazy, leaving the house after midnight for an impromptu meeting. When I walked through the restaurant door with my portfolio in hand, the owner looked at me and said, "It's about time."

(My show goes up in January. I'll give details when the date gets closer.)

Beauty, particularly landscape beauty, is hard for me to completely enjoy sometimes, because I don't know what to do with it. I don't have that problem with, say, chocolate cake, which I can devour once I'm finished admiring it. It's possible to hug a person, pet an animal, or chug a glass of wine. Even music isn't difficult, because I can turn it up, or (even better, somehow) I can kill the insatiable feeling, simply by playing the song over and over again until it loses its initial secret.

I kept thinking about that when we were driving a convertible (!) along the California coast, and the landscape was so good-looking that it seemed almost unfair. I took pictures of it, but the small, flat, digitized version of the world isn't quite the same, and it doesn't at all capture the feeling of driving around a bend and being wholly impressed by what you see in front of you, so much so that all you can do is grunt, "Look." and point at the windshield.

My favorite part of the trip was between destinations, and although I like San Francisco and the people we saw there, I didn't want to arrive, partly because the drive included things like eating freshly picked road strawberries, standing on the edge of the continent and dodging salty wave debris, getting lost for an hour in a giant maze made of straw, and visiting an ornate and tacky hotel where the men's urinal is a laser-operated man-made waterfall.

***

Unrelated to anything, Scott P. told me that the students in his class just voted on the name of their class hamster. One kid suggested the name "Lisa," which got two votes, but it ultimately lost to "Candy Shop."

I don't understand the valet system in Los Angeles. It's a formality, it seems, rather than a practicality, since I was often required to walk past my (rented) car and wait in line just to be allowed to retrieve it. Upon receiving the vehicle, which was presented to me with all its doors open like a splayed out Swiss Army knife, I would then have to awkwardly place a couple dollars in the valet's palm in exchange for the "service." I was tempted to ask whether I could pay to him up front and just take the keys, but I hate being difficult more than I hate the valet system, so I kept quiet.

It was while standing in a valet line that I saw Topher Grace, one of the six or so celebrities that were pointed out to me while I was in LA. I only saw one of them on my own, Bill Murray, who stood out because he was wearing a bright pink shirt and was standing right in front of me. Occasionally I reported to Todd that I might've seen someone famous, a conclusion based only on what I considered to be a person's distinguished look, and the fact that one in five people in LA is a major star. (right?) When Todd inevitably asked who it was I'd seen, I could only tell him that the stranger had a certain Tom Waits look about him, but I had no idea which famous person it was. Todd, on the other hand, recognized people I'd never heard of, and spotted them even when he was looking the other way.

After the accident, it took about a month of careful consideration for my laptop to give up on our relationship (a moment it signaled with a chorus of loud, angry beeps). As a result, I had plenty of time to load it with hundreds of uncloned documents, items that it would keep for itself when the final moment came, like the sweatshirt and books you never recovered from your ex-boyfriend.

Even so, I'm pretty sure there were only two documents that got taken, two documents that I honestly didn't care much about when they existed. (lucky!) That has not stopped me, however, from desperately trying to recover those documents, going as far as to mindlessly turn my computer on and off in vain while I watched an entire movie and paid bills one-handed.

On the bright side, I've been pleasantly surprised the extent that I've enjoyed my recent computerless evenings (particularly the distinct lack of obligation I've felt), and I've been remarkably less overwhelmed. Not unrelated, I'm also surprised that I'm not as excited to have my computer back as I figured I would be. Hm. Never happy.

Um, hi. I have a good excuse! I've been in California, driving up the coast and stuff. Also, I ruined my hard drive by hospitably offering my laptop a full glass of water. I can't decide whether that's lucky or not, as just seconds before the incident, I backed up my hard drive, twice.

In any case, I hope to be back in operation soon. Thanks for being patient?