OK. Maybe this is not why we love Jeffrey, after all.

Sometimes I wish for this: traveling all around Europe and Eastern Europe and maybe even past that by myself and then blogging about it. I do want it, I think it would be really cool, and weird, and scary and also, fun to do this. But then I end up by myself for a few days and I start to rethink that plan.

I guess I can’t really compare Irving, Texas to Stockholm or some random Greek Island, but I do have to say that sometimes I get insanely, overwhelmingly lonely on the road. I can’t really say it is one place over the other, because I have spent too much time in other places (even horrible places) and not become too lonely. I travel to so many weird, sometimes desolate places for work that I just try to find the beauty there, and usually there is something – at least one thing – that I can call beautiful.

But Irving, Texas. It’s awful here. It’s been hot, it’s been muggy, and today it is raining AND hot and muggy. I am trapped in the Four Seasons wishing my guts out that I could leave right now for the airport. It’s dry here, meaning you can’t buy a bottle of wine at the store. You can’t buy a bottle of wine at the grocery store! This is the 21st century, people! What’s next, no pudding?

Thankfully I was able to scam a couple of open bottles left over from a tasting yesterday, otherwise I probably would have called the airline and paid the hundred bucks to get out of here as soon as possible.

Oh, you can get a glass of wine at the Four Seasons, but it is $10 for a glass of Whitehaven Sauvignon Blanc ($7.50? I think, at The Vine) AND they tack a 17% service charge on every bill. Now, I totally would have tipped more than that anyway, but the fact that they add it and then leave a space for “additional gratuity” just galls me to no end.

Anyhow. It’s not all that bad here if you like staying in a sprawling business park type setting. Sometimes people say “oh, it’s so cool you get to travel for work.” Yeah, sometimes. But then there are those times when you are trapped in a Holiday Inn Express with no car and nothing around you and are forced to watch Jon Benet Ramsey’s “killer” fly from Long Beach to Boulder Colorado over, and over, and over.

I guess I could read. But places like this make me so brain dead that I find myself reading the same paragraph over, and over, and over like it’s the same CNN loop entrenched firmly in my brain.

It’s not what I expected, really, but there is this: I never got Texans, and they’ll never get me.

Yesterday, I went to a party in my hometown of Half Moon Bay, California. Going to parties where you don’t know anyone is hard. I know that I seem like an outgoing sort of person but really, I am not. I am super shy and like to hide in the shadows (near the bar) when I don’t know anyone. I did talk to people and there were lots of cool people there but it was a birthday party for a 27 year old and I just felt hella old (even though I was wearing my Radiohead shirt and my Sigur Ros hoodie and jeans and Pumas, which is sort of a younger persons outfit.) Also I have found that when you get a lot of women (or men) that have known each other forever together, it is really hard to infiltrate especially if you are a shy, in-the-shadows wallflower like me.

Yesterday’s experience just drove home the success of Saturday’s party. At Saturday’s party, I was one of the ones that has known everyone forever. Though I think it was probably easier for the newcomers to infiltrate. The party was for the 5th anniversary of slowtrav.com and it was a killer day – at a beautiful park in the Oakland hills, with redwoods and shade and a massive amount of really great food and more wine than we could drink, plus great company. I kind of miss Northern California on days like that. Those warm, sultry afternoons in redwood forests. Though I definitely DO NOT miss the fog in Half Moon Bay. It was friggen FREEZING there.

Other than that I hung out with Baby Ryan and Jay and Carrie, watched the World Cup (I am still trying to figure out that whole head-butting thing, why would someone do that? It was just weird.) And also, got a little freaked out about the Left Behind video game. I am hopelessly out of the loop, clearly, and just this weekend saw something on TV about this video game where Christians run around New York City killing non-believers. Um, that is freaky. In fact, TV is freaky, video games are freaky, I guess everything is freaky. But not slowtrav parties, those are not freaky. So maybe I had better concentrate on them.

I was very jealous of all the girls at the party yesterday who took over my duties as auntie of Ryan. I was JEALOUS! Later though, me and Jay had him run through a couple of Radiohead songs with us, specifically 2 + 2 = 5 and Morning Bell. Carrie was not amused, but me and Jay sure were.

Today is the first day of Summer, though I have been feeling like it’s been Summer for a while now. Living at the beach in San Diego, it’s sort of hard to identify “Spring.” You can kind of identify Winter, and you can sort of identify Fall. But it is always easy to identify Summer here in Ocean Beach, because, basically, it is the worst time of the year to be here.

I think it is pretty obvious to anyone who reads my blog on any sort of a regular basis that I adore where I live. But, I have to say, and especially on the eve of the real and true Summer, that it can get pretty tiresome around these parts this time of year. I suppose it is the same on the Jersey shore, and I reckon that the locals on the Amalfi Coast are pretty happy when October 1st arrives. In Summer, if you are where people want to spend time in the Summer, you are going to suffer. Your city or village or town isn’t yours anymore.

I guess I am kind of cranky because last night there was a riotous party on my street. On a Tuesday night! There is a group of four ugly two-story houses that stay empty for most of the year until the owner can price gouge a bunch of youngsters who want to live by the beach for a while. Now there are twenty? thirty? fratty types milling about down there. Last night, it sounded like they were all bobbing for apples with a bunch of porn stars or something. It was LOUD. And I am laying in bed at midnight thinking, oh fuck. Here we go again. Summertime. It’s just too damned hot to close the window and shut them out. Trapped with the whoo hoo’s of the Duh Generation for at least two months.

There are, of course, lots of good things about living here in the Summer…. the warm nights sitting by the ocean with that salty spray hitting your face, that lethal but super-fun combination of wine and heat, watching the sunburnt tourists and the setting sun through the windows of The Vine. The sound of fireworks at Sea World. Really tan, practically naked young men walking down the street. Girls, too. And I guess I sometimes wonder, was I as clueless as these kids when I was their age? Was I as loud or as unconscious of my ripple effect on the world around me? I don’t think I was, but I could be wrong.

I’ll get used to it all over again, and then the cool wind of October will blow, and I will once again walk down the street in my own town again. I’ll never stop smiling, living here. But then, that first day when I know they are all gone, I’ll look like the fucking Joker.

I am in Portland. I got here last night and to be totally honest it would have been better to get here today. Last night was, kind of, well, lame. I don’t know where I got it in my head that Portland is this uber-cool city with a fantastic bistro on every corner.

I had to go through Oakland and had over an hour to kill so I went to the bar, which was packed and had a slow-as-molassas server. I mean, she was SLOW. After twenty minutes I got a drink, but in the meantime struck up a conversation from some businessman from Seattle. “Service with a smile,” he said. “I don’t care if there is a smile as long as there is service,” I said. Well this comment was going to bite me in the ass later.

In the seventh grade, in social studies, we had this project to design a city. In the city I designed, the airport was outside the city and there was a train connecting the airport to the city. Now for me, having only been to the airports in San Francisco and Orange County, this was pretty cool thinking, I thought. I didn’t know other cities actually have this. And if there is one really great thing about flying into Portland Airport, it is that you can walk out the door and get on a light rail that takes you right into town. The thing dropped me off in front of my hotel! Awesome.

I didn’t get here until almost nine and I was starving, so I immediately went out to eat something. There is a giant mall across the street. A MALL. Where am I again? The girl at the front desk had given me a really horrible mimeographed map of the area with all manner of fast food places on it. Quigno’s subs? Not. So I walked past the mall trying to find something else. I passed an Applebees that was packed. “No way” I said to myself. “I am NOT eating at fucking Applebees.” Do you sometimes feel that the hip neighborhood is very close, that if you maybe walk two more blocks there it would be, but in which direction? That is how I felt last night.

Finally I found a street with some coffeeshops and a pizza place and a pasta restaurant. The pasta place looked pretty good so I went in. Everything on the menu looked really good. And the server was not only great, he was also smiling. He did everything absolutely perfectly (like get me a second glass of wine right when the first was done, and not fire my pasta until my salad was done, because I eat slow). So when my pasta came out and it was total crap, I couldn’t send it back. Unfortunately, I had let him choose for me. It sounded good – linguini with marsala and cream, tomatoes and mushrooms. But it tasted like plain pasta. I couldn’t taste any marsala or cream, all I could taste was stale pasta water. I dumped half a pound of Parmesan cheese on it and that made it at least edible. Leaving there, I walked back past the Applebees, which was still packed. “Oh how I wish I would have eaten at fucking Applebees,” I thought.

The night wasn’t a total loss. Franz Ferdinand was on Austin City Limits and they were AWESOME. I always wondered what the big deal was about that band and now I know. I am gonna go and buy all their records.

I guess there is a carnival by the river today. I am going to try to go there. I saw it on the news, because they were showing how everyone is getting their bags searched before entry. “Makes everyone feel much safer” one dude said. “No one will get their pockets picked now.” Huh? How did that one make it past the cutting room floor?

Somewhere there is a great wine bar calling my name… I just have to find it.

Tonight is the last episode of Top Chef. Is it just me, or is it kind of anticlimatic all of a sudden? They should have done the two-hour finale in one night.

I won’t be here to watch it because I am about to head out to San Diego State for Independence Jam. I’ll have to watch it tomorrow at 5:00 and therefore I’ll have to avoid the internet all day as to not find out the winner prematurely (Harold.)

Something crazy happened today – I got mega-spammed. Spammers got me from a gazillion servers all over the place at the same time. All comments have to be approved by me, and when I checked my email I had over 300 comments waiting to be approved! I started banning ISPs and commentors like crazy but in the meantime they were firing spam comments at the rate of something like five a minute. I had to turn off comments for a while just to breathe. Anyhow now everyone who comments has to be authenicated first. Sorry… maybe down the road I will change it back, but it took a couple of hours to deal with. It was really and truly insane and in the end I deleted over a thousand comments. Holy fuck.

I guess computers spew that stuff – I wonder if the Cambridge Institute of Technology knows that their ISP is sending out spam that looks like this: “Your website is wonderfull. I’ll come visit again. standard table becomes full girl in final” by commentor “big is feature of memorizing corner.”

Well now I get to chill with a hot dog, a glass of cheap red wine and four bands. It could be a lot worse.

I have never, ever been into reality TV (except for maybe that brief exploration of Bobby Brown Territory). Until now. Now, I am totally fascinated, all of a sudden, by the crazy, messed up, marred-with-cuss-words glimpse of both the bright and dark sides of the food business – Top Chef.

Inevitably I am always one of the last to find out about something really cool. Well, actually, I DID see an episode a couple of weeks ago, and sort of got into it. But last week when I was in San Francisco at my old pad with Leigh and Laurie, they were like “have you seen Top Chef? YOU should BE in Top Chef.” So this week I have been watching all the episodes, and this is easy, because they are on, like, all the time. At least this week they were.

Anyhow. For the uninitiated, this is a show that pits people against each other in a culinary environment. The people, and the environment (or, I guess, the challenges faced) are both a little wacked. Let’s see… cook a bunch of really hard dishes, for a wedding of two dudes named Scott and Scott, in less than 24 hours. Or create a restaurant concept, the dining room, food, and wine, for less than a thousand dollars. Or make a palatable dish out of ingredients found in a gas station mini mart (the one thing I might have been able to pull off.)

For anyone ever remotely interested in food it is pretty cool stuff. For anyone that ever stepped foot in a restaurant, even as a dishwasher, it is totally riveting.

The contestants on this show are funny.

Miguel is long gone but I was sort of sad to see him go, just for the “I am going to kill you” squinty eyes everytime someone dissed on him.

Of course I want Harold to win.

Though his whining through so many challenges (“I am a CHEF. I am not happy about trying to cook with popcorn”) sort of bugs a little, let’s face it, he is a cool guy who gets along with everyone, his food always looks awesome, he says “va fangool” all the time, and he is good looking too. He even got along with Stephen. Now I know everyone hates Stephen and he is kind of a tool on the show but I sort of liked him just because he was so bizarre. He reminds me of so many wine nerds who don’t realize there is another, more real world outside the wine one. The guy is only 24 years old. Let the real world toss him around a little, and not the reality TV world. If there is one person from Top Chef that I would love to sit at a bar with for a few hours (besides Harold) it would be Stephen. All you would have to do is say, “Stephen, tell us a little about yourself.” That would be good for HOURS of entertainment.

Plus, homeboy looks like a young Mickey Rourke.

Last night’s episode was one of the best so far. There are only four people left. And they are going to Napa to match a meal using truffles to a bottle of Shafer Cabernet.

Who’s left? Dave, Tiffani, Lee Anne and Harold. Three of them get to go to the finale at the end. Who deserves to win? Let’s just say that at the end, one that deserves to win, is not going to win. And one that totally does NOT deserve to win, is going to win.

Tiffani, even though she is a bitch, does deserve to go on to the finale. She is like the female version of Stephen. Last night was pretty telling. When they were tasting some of the Shafer Cab to see what to cook with it, she actually said “I like this wine. It has nice LEGS.” She said it without even looking at it. Does she think you TASTE the legs? It was clear she didn’t have a clue. But whateves, she is a talented cook and she definitely deserves to be one of the winners.

Dave. Oh, Dave. You got here by luck, homeboy. Luck and by being the front of the house in the restaurant concept episode. You big, teary-eyed queen you! And last night, maybe without even knowing it, you put yourself into the pocket of all those Napa Valley chefs by making their favorite food: Macaroni & Cheese.

I was just in Napa last week, and they had Macaroni and Cheese everywhere, even the continental breakfast at the Travelodge in downtown Napa. Well, not really, but you get the idea. In the Napa Valley, Mac and Cheese is sort of like those wine stoppers with the golfers on top. And Dave, harried queen of the soggy nacho, serves up some Mac and Cheese with a whole truffle at the bottom of each dish. And WINS. He’s going to Vegas. Because of Macaroni and Cheese. Awesome.

Poor Lee Anne. She SO deserved to be one of the winners.

Next week, there are casting calls for the next season of Top Chef, in Las Vegas, where I will just happen to be. But I could never be on this show. Brian from The Vine could be on this show. Brian, in fact, would be PERFECT. He’s got the talent, the balls, the experience, and the tattoos. Also, the confidence – or should I say, borderline arrogance – that a Top Chef needs. Think about it, Brian. You’d get a hundred grand in the end. I’ll try out if you will.

This Saturday there will be a seven-hour marathon of Top Chef. Check it out.

In this world we live in it is easy to move between two continents quite quickly, so quickly that one day you can be eating pasta and saying grazie and the next, eating tacos and trying NOT to say grazie because, face it, homegirl, you aren’t in Italy anymore and saying grazie is just going to come off as pretentious, or weird. Never mind that your brain hasn’t caught up with your body quite yet.

Hurtling through space in a tube is weird. Every time I do it, I sort of cover myself in an emotional lip balm, telling myself this is what I have to do, in order to get over, in order to get back. But let’s face it, a day, or a day and a half, or two days, in transit via air is a bizarre way to spend your time, no matter how glamorous or appealing the destination might be. You spend this time in silence with a people you are already suspicious of in the boarding line (are they going to sit next to me? Keep me up all night? Maybe blow up the plane? Will I live through this?) and the workers of the flight, who are always saying hello, thank you, danke, arrivederci or whatever on boarding or departing, but who don’t really have that exact same embracing attitude for the other nine hours of the flight (at least not in coach.) Not to say that they aren’t nice. I probably don’t ask, so I shouldn’t expect.

Sometimes, flying over Greenland or wherever, I wish it was a hundred years ago and I was on a ship going to Europe. The ship would take a week to cross the Atlantic, and it wouldn’t be a tube full of bad smells. But the reality is, I could easily be in coach on a ship (third class) and that would kind of suck. It probably wouldn’t be like all those fun cool peasants dancing on Titanic – it would be a slovenly rat infested pit of hell. On an airline, the classes of service are only differentiated by the airline attendants announcement not to cross over into Business class. But the people in Business have mostly upgraded from coach, or their companies paid for the ticket. The bounderies are pretty loose, these days. I like that the class barrier has almost completely been broken down, unless maybe you are traveling on the Orient Express or something.

But still, in coach, I put myself in a mode that is: just get though it for the next eighteen hours. And then I do and I am home and it is good and like it never happened, but I have also seen some movies I never would have seen, a few that I might remember, a few that I can’t today, even though I flew just yesterday. Valium, red wine, that slow hum. Moving into the unconscience while remaining sort of conscience. That, is flying.

I’m home now. It’s taking me some time to recover. I feel like I have been traveling non-stop for months. Well, I guess I have. Now I can rest, but only for a little while. The next time I go, it will be back to Italy, and that doesn’t suck. It is really hard to believe that it has been a year exactly since I landed in Palermo.

This trip won’t be like that one. That one was five weeks long and it was all play. This one is two weeks long and involves major hardships like eating and drinking and leading people on pub crawls around Venice. It sucks, I know, but someone has to do it.

I think I can, at this point, go just about anywhere and have a good time. I am serious. I have some really bad qualities but one good one that I do have is, I can go anywhere, I never shy away from it, and I always find something, at least one thing, to like. Like Oklahoma. Everyone disses on it, but it’s pretty there. Indian Country. Lots of lakes, lots of sky. I went to the bathroom at a truck stop and some of the diner tables had plaques that read “reserved for truckers.” Imagine a place where a trucker has priority. I, for one, think that is hella cool. The highways are long and there is no one on them. On my way to a winery in Haskell, I passed through living ghost towns. So many broken down, boarded up houses, but people still live in these towns. There were bars in structures made out of some kind of thin metal. Budweiser is cheap, and I didn’t see even one cop. You can buy a house for sixty-five thousand dollars and there is no smell of coffee, only lawlessness.

I visited my old friend Prentiss in Muscogee, and then we went to Tulsa, where we rented a little hotel studio with a kitchen and I cooked for Prentiss and his boyfriend Rob and his friends from Tulsa, Mark and Mark. On a tiny stove in a tiny room, we had an eight-foot table, candles, flowers, tons of wine, my IPod, Mark’s CD player, opera, Sigur Ros, Macaroni and Cheese, Italian Sausage that I bought in the Italian town of Krebs, and a lot of laughter. Then we went to Mark Michael’s where he played the piano and it was really, truly beautiful. The other Mark took us around in his car the next day, to see Tulsa. On a Sunday, no one out. Killer art deco skyscrapers.

Then home. I’ll admit, I am weary. But also in love, really in love, with Cat Power’s new record The Greatest. I LOVE it. I lost my very favorite close to my heart Black Fly sunglasses that I had for 10 years on this trip, but listening to Cat Power I can kind of get over it. Kind of. Listen to the sample of “Love and Communication.” The strings on that one song are enough to slay me with happiness.

When I was 23 years old, I lived in a little apartment on Nob Hill that was directly above a real estate office. I’ll admit it right here and now – I was obnoxious. I didn’t have any regard for the guy downstairs and used to play my music really loud during business hours. The real estate guy used to have to call me and ask me to turn it down all the time. He most likely hated me.

One day, I was obsessed with a high tempo New Order song. I can’t remember the name of it but on that particular day I played it over and over, and then I put it on my answering machine, so that whenever anyone called they would just hear about 20 seconds of this song, really loud. So, I was playing the song, super loud, and then I jumped in the shower. I came out to this loud banging on my door. It was the real estate guy, and his face was all red, and he was so pissed off and angry that he could barely speak. He sort of just spit noises at me. He was sick of listening to the same New Order song, played loudly over and over, and then when he called to complain, what did he hear? The same fucking song! I practically gave the guy a heart attack.

This is what it is like for me, driving through Texas. It’s hot, it’s dusty, and it’s always a three hour drive. No matter where you are going, it will take three hours. Have you ever wondered if there is a corner of the country where there is no Starbucks? I have the answer – yes, and that corner is Bryan, Texas. I searched in vain for way too long and finally bought a cup of caramel colored hot water at a donut shop. I never thought I could want Starbucks so bad. We are spoiled rotten in the other 49 states.

I’m in Dallas now. It’s hot, it’s dusty, and there is a lot of traffic. But my hotel also has a computer and decent coffee so that is a plus. My ex-husband Sean and his wife Christi live here, so I went to their place last night. One good thing about Dallas – you can buy a huge house for the same price as a trailer home in Escondido would cost back in Cali. They have one room with only a BAR in it! It’s totally awesome. Plus they have the cutest, smartest little kid. She is only three but she looks, and acts like five. She told me her favorite color is pink so I was like, so you can get pink hair, like me! Then she changed her mind. “My favorite color is actually brown,” she said.

Me and Sean and Christi sat outside until way too late, talking. They told me how in the summer, it never ever cools down, not even at night, and then you get into a pool and it is the same temperature as the air. So there is no relief, like the real estate guy and the New Order song.

Sigur Ros and Austin seem a million miles away. We waited around for two hours after the show and I got a poptarticus shirt signed by the band. Soon I will be in Oklahoma. I wonder if there is a Starbucks there?