“A baseball game is nothing but a great, slow contraption for getting you to pay attention to the cadence of a summer day.”

I’m listening to Summerland. The book-on-tape (or CD, as it were) is read by its author, Michael Chabon–one of my favorite authors who reminds me why and how I want to write. It’s a fairy tale, a fantasy about baseball and the adventures kids have and how things got to be the way they are; it’s swirling and ridiculous and it’s silly, but so appropriate as a backdrop for my drives and criss-crossings all over Los Angeles County.

It is summerland, now, these days; all around, hazy-slow, full of summerland things that exist equally as memories as present happenings.

We used to go to the grocery store every Sunday, the mom, the sis, and I, and in the summers, we would buy pints of Dryers ice cream. Mint chocolate chip, and when we would get it home, before it was put in the freezer, we’d peel off the cardboard lid, hover over the pint with heavy spoons, and scoop out great heaps of the delicious foamy ice cream. “Girls, wait for dinner,” Mom would say; “But. It’s the foam!” we’d say. Because, of course, the only time you would find this foam-cream top of mint-chip was in the afternoon, on a 90 degree day, when the ice cream was fresh from the store, fresh from a hot car ride home. You couldn’t just take the pint out of the freezer and let it melt; it’d get goopy. Only now.

Well you can see where this is going. I bought a pint of Dryers Chocolate-Brownie Frozen Yogurt today (when I was a kid I never read nutritional labels, but sadly I now do.) And, an eight minute drive home later, there was a perfect layer of dense-fluffy chocolate summerland foam. And, so I didn’t wait for dinner, and I didn’t get a bowl, but stood there in the kitchen with a spoon and scooped the layer of foam right out of the pint.

Summerland is also Sunday sunset runs (at 8 p.m., in new running shoes!) and banana peanut-butter smoothies. Poolside heat, flying off a springy diving board, crashing into water. Friends and late beers on warm nights, and the hydrangeas blooming and then wilting into sweet brown mush. Maybe summer itself–expansive days and slanting light–is the contraption for getting us to pay attention to the cadence of a day, of any day.

I’m at Starbucks, enjoying their newly instated, free wireless internet (’bout time) and I have just heard the fourth person this afternoon discuss 7-11′s slurpee giveaway tomorrow from 7 to 11 a.m., in honor of July 11.

This afternoon, while I was visiting a hostel in San Diego for an article I’m writing about hostels (saying that just doesn’t get old–”an article I’m writing”), a syrup-accented guest from Furt Wurth, Texas asked, in a panic, if there was a 7-11 close to the hostel. Yes? Matt, the front desk attendant told her. There’s one on Rosecrans? Whew, she said. Because tomorrow is free slur-pee day.

Just a moment ago, the cashier at a Starbucks in Del Mar reminded me of free slurpee day after I had inquired about their free wi-fi. Now, I am painfully aware of how elitist this makes me sound, and I don’t mean to be rude, but… Lady. We are in Del Mar, Calif. I just ordered a double-tall soy latte. How many of your customers do you really think are planning to partake in this slurpee bonanza; are planning their Sundays around 32 ounces of sugar and ice?

I admit. I have planned days around free things. In college, I almost wrapped myself entirely in tin foil to get a free Chipotle burrito but, alas, the only store in biking distance had run out of tin foil. The thing about free food–and free things generally, which I am most certainly a fan of–is that they are only good and fun when the free thing is something you would have paid for anyway. Say, a free chocolate chip cookie. Or a free pair of extra-long jeans (which doesn’t happen, but sometimes they are deeply discounted, and it doesn’t get better than that–half-off what you would have paid full price for). In the food realm, I’ve recently decided that, though I am not made of money, it is generally good practice not to eat something for free that I wouldn’t consider worthy to pay for in the first place. Though, I don’t mind paying for Chipotle burritos, because they are delicious, so that particular anecdote does not my point prove.

Bravo to you, folks at 7-11, and to all you people who give things away for free–splendid marketing.

What’s that saying? There’s no such thing as a free slurpee?

San Francisco Pride turns forty

San Francisco’s two-day Lesbian, Gay, Bi-sexual, Transgender Pride Parade and Celebration officially became middle-aged this year, turning “Forty and Fabulous” on Sunday, June 27.

Billed as the largest Pride gathering in the U.S., the two-day festival hosted 300 exhibitors, 200 parade contingents, and performers including the Backstreet Boys, the drag-queen dance group Cockatelia, and a pre-filmed speech by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

The parade marched, danced, and spun along Market Street, from the Financial District to the Civic Center in Downtown San Francisco, and spectators braved the unusual heat, crowding 10-deep along the route. Parade contingents ranged from the whimsical—giant cupcakes on wheels spinning like Alice in Wonderland’s teacups at Disneyland—to more serious protests against Proposition 8, which prohibits same-sex couples from marrying. “We must also end discrimination as it relates to the right to marry. We will continue to fight until all loving couples can get married,” said Nancy Pelosi in her pre-recorded speech, which was broadcast after the parade at the Civic Center.

Though flamboyant as ever, the parade was just as much about the outrageous outfits (or lack thereof, in the case of a few exhibitionists) as the jeans and t-shirts crowd who strolled along the parade route and gathered at the Civic Center. While in 1970, when the parade consisted of a few hundred people in the LGBT marching down Polk Street, forty years later, on the main thoroughfare through the city, San Francisco Pride has become an area-wide celebration, attended by gay and straight, young and old.

[note: originally written for LAT travel blog, but, alas, did not make it up... so, here it is! Accompanied by my first picture slideshow!]

I often think when I’m in airports that I should be a flight attendant. I like airports. There’s a hassle associated with travel, but I think it’s mostly in the getting-started bit. The challenge is in the inertia of getting going—packing and fretting over details, over not forgetting your keys or a coat or underwear; over how to get to the airport and where to park and find your terminal and your gate and then–security. But, once my shoes are tied, my belt is back on, and my government issued ID is put away, I like airports. I like the hustle of people, of so many different people, of all the differences but all of us together in this in-between space of travel. We’re discombobulated, which is perhaps why we’re so grumpy—no one belongs here. I love the choice of Starbucks by Gate 44 or 64. The magazines and bookstores. Oh how I love airport bookstores—I suppose that airports might be the only place that lots of people ever go into bookstores anymore, the only time when we have the forced and imposed luxury of time to browse and muse.

I left home Friday morning at 6:00 a.m. for work, fretted that I forgot to let the dog out of the house, got lost finding my pre-paid assigned parking lot, and inched along behind some very crabby people in the security line. But, I got myself a coffee and a bran muffin at the second Starbucks and found an empty seat next to two gabbing flight attendants. (From my use of the word ‘gabbing’ you might guess these flight attendants were stewardesses, but isn’t that a nice gender-neutral noun.) They planned the routes they’d get on next month—”Oh, I love the Mexico City overnight! I want to get on that one again.”

Granted, I don’t really want to be a flight attendant for many a reason. Most notably, however, because, now, as I sit in my window seat—the window seat and an iPod, the best part of travel, tranquil—and as I watch the California coastline unfurl below, they’re hard at work, cracking open crisp bottle of ginger ale and Bloody Mary mix. (Incidentally, United Airlines now gives out mini tins of sugar-free Altoids rather than peanuts. Amazing. Why has no other airline though of this?)

I recall reading that when Ahrnold became our governor, he chartered a plane to fly over the entire span of California, top to bottom. It’s opulent and odd, but… I get it. It’s a totally different way to conceptualize a place–a state as land rather than an economy.

And then we landed on a clear day in San Francisco: Golden Gate Bridge and a green bay, and I began my first weekend as a “travel writer” with an assignment.

I checked into my first hostel, snapped some awkward photos, and went a’wandering. I bought myself a camera case for a fancy new camera. I looked, high and low—literally, those darn hills—for a grocery store where I could buy food to make dinner in a bright and clean communal kitchen. As you might guess, Downtown San Francisco does not offer a plethora of produce markets, but rather a glut of wine-and-cereal corner stores. So, I went into the Urban Tavern—sounded earthy but was very chi-chi—took a seat at the bar, ordered myself a beer, and had a lovely vegetarian cassoule while planning my route for the next day. I made friends with the gents sitting next to me who, I suspected from my eavesdropping, were on their third date, and they recommended a place in the Mission I just had to see.

Hostel to hostel I bumped. Picture after picture I snapped. People either thought I was really cool—a travel writer! yes please, let me show you around—or, really weird—”can I see some credentials please?” one particularly sketchy owner asked me.

While I enjoyed buzzing around by myself, power walking up hills and “scouting out” neighborhoods, I did have moments when I realized I had more in common with the homeless, stringy-haired woman muttering to herself a street corner than the hip aussie backpackers I was supposed to be hob-nobbing with. Monday after traipsing over to the windswept Fisherman’s Wharf, I clambered around North Beach and, famished, found an Italian restaurant that served late brunch (on a Monday, no less! I love brunch.) I plopped down in my seat and ordered from a cute blond with a perky yellow flower in her hair only to realize my cardigan was buttoned the wrong way and my braid had unravelled and frayed until it resembled a fuzzy vine of ferns.

Though, in the end, my Italian frittata was stellar, as was the blueberry coffee cake I got for dessert.

After spending four days with travelers, four days interviewing travelers and asking about where to and where from, and what next and what before, when I descended into Los Angeles—when I descended into Los Angeles at sunset—I really began to appreciate living in the city where I’m from.