• Just got back from Denver and I must say: Men! I take back all the bad things I've said about you recently. You are all so pleasant and nice, putting my heavy carry-on in the overhead bin. I promise to give you the benefit of the doubt from now on (yes, even FLG, though he doesn't read this blog anymore).
  

• This is my new favorite blog. For those who question my love of shoes, I direct you here. I also have much love for her post on dinner at Per Se: "Once all this was through we transitioned to dessert via the cheese course -- Brillat Savarin (a soft cows-milk cheese vaguely reminiscent of brie, named after the late eighteenth/early nineteenth-century gastronome whose biography I started to tell at the table and then I checked myself because honestly, Helen, shut up."

• I am finally reading Middlemarch, formerly the book I was most ashamed to have never read. I can't say why it has taken me so long to get to it. For one thing, it has just the kind of heroine I like: insufferable and priggish. (Oh, how I love you, Mansfield Park!) Secondly (and most important), I love Edith Wharton; Edith Wharton loves George Eliot; hence, I will love George Eliot. The only obstacle was Adam Bede, which I read in college and detested. So far Middlemarch is much better, but I'm only a hundred pages in. There are 800 more pages for it to go downhill.

• Lastly, I am making this pasta for a girl's night in this evening. After, we will watch Breakfast at Tiffany's and eat cookies. What a wonderful world.
  

Labels: I heart EW, lit crit, the arts, travels

• L.A. cabs are expensive. Also, you have to wait forever to get one. Spent much of the trip ruing my inability to drive.

• Toured the California Cryobank, the largest sperm bank in the world!
  

• Interviewed the fabulous Amy Alkon, a.k.a. the Advice Goddess, for Doublethink. My tape recorder decided to give up the ghost during the interview so I was forced to use the expensive digital recorder I had Phillips buy me but have always been too afraid to use. (Something about seeing the tape wheels spin is very comforting to me.) Amy, being awesome, made a backup recording for me with her own recorder.
  

• Bought two dresses on Main St. in Santa Monica. Sadly missed the "better" (read: more expensive) shopping on Abbot Kinney, which is probably for the best since I would have bought two dresses anyway and been much poorer for it. (Also last weekend I went on a shoe-buying binge and bought these so I'm now as broke as Ezra Klein's commenters.)
  

• Saw Mickey Kaus dining a few tables away from me. (Just last week, I spied Christopher Hitchens at Bistro du Coin. It's like a lamer than usual Gawker Stalker post!) We left at the same time so I ventured a quick "hello--love the blog." This was a mistake. Normally, I wouldn't have said anything, but I thought, "It's L.A., and it's not like he's Brad Pitt so probably he'd be gratified--rather than weirded out--by a quick hello." Not so much--although he was very polite. His companion asked if I recognized him from BloggingHeads. I made a somewhat snotty comment; Mickey was not amused. To try to save the situation, I dropped the name of my old boss. (Sorry old boss!) It might have worked if my old boss was Mark Krikorian. Sadly, no. Waited another 20 minutes for a taxi. Rued once more my inability to drive.
  

• Spent plane trip back sitting next to two crying babies and a class of high school students going on a field trip. Alas.
  

Labels: travels