Iced Iced. Baby.

This morning, I left my apartment building to take Stefen to daycare and came upon this:



I got iced!



I'm not a bro so I didn't take a knee (!!!), but Stefen's a bro, so I was all, "Um, he can't hold himself up independently." My friend Noelle Who Climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro says that babies don't really have knees, so he's exempt. I looked around for the person who may have iced us, saw nobody, took some photos, and headed to daycare. When I returned a half hour later, the bottle was gone, and when I went inside and checked the Bros Icing Bros website, it was down because Smirnoff has no sense of humor.

Later, at work, my friend Chris asked me if I'd heard of vodka eyeballing. I was stupid enough to say, "No! What is it?" Here's what vodka eyeballing is:

Say you're drunk to the point where you've lost any good judgment but not drunk enough that you've lost all your coordination, and you want to be drunker. So, naturally, you take a shot of vodka and POUR IT INTO YOUR EYE SO IT GOES STRAIGHT TO YOUR BRAIN.

"It can cause instantaneous blindness," said Chris. "Seizures. Like, grand mal seizures. It's the most horrible of things. But it's the new trend in frat douchery."

People:

What the fuck?

I've done several stupid things while drunk. I kissed many boys I oughtn't have. I sat on a giant rock and cried for two hours. I threw a glass of water in my friend's face when she got upset after seeing her ex-boyfriend with this girl we knew who was wack-a-doo and not just a little bit of a slut. I fell asleep in a bathtub. I took a picture with a dude who had — tops — four teeth in his entire head and the ones that were left were metal-ish, and I looked like it was the happiest day of my life. I did these things. I went to a Big 10 school.

But these are mild things. I have not played Century Club (take one shot every minute, trying to get to 100). Nobody has held me upside down in order to experience beer. I've never shotgunned anything because I do not enjoy when liquid of any kind comes out my nose. I know that people do these things, and perhaps I'm boring or sheltered or, I don't know, not enough of a giant ass in the head to pour booze into my eye, but I just don't understand people who think it's a rite of passage to escape alcohol-induced blindness. Graduating college: That's a rite of passage. My bat mitzvah was a rite of passage and our bar bill was only $75 (somebody put two trees in front of the bar and nobody saw it; also, my ragin' party was on a Sunday afternoon, and Jews don't drink before 6 p.m. [in public, anyway]).

All of my sanctimony, though, and my 14-week-old child has already participated in his first drinking game. He would be so popular at Michigan State.


TODAY'S OBSERVATION IN PARENTING

Did you know that some mothers refer to their children as their "precious gifts"? If you were stuck in a conversation with one of these women, what would you even say? I don't know that I would say anything. She would be all, "Hello! Are you a new mommy? Isn't your little boy your most precious gift?" And I would just snap her bra and run away.

Comfy

While I was waiting for the train last Tuesday, my first day back at work from maternity leave, I turned on my iPod. The first song it played was Talking Heads' "This Must Be the Place":

Home is where I want to be
Pick me up and turn me round
I feel numb — born with a weak heart
I guess I must be having fun
The less we say about it the better
Make it up as we go along
Feet on the ground
Head in the sky
It's OK, I know nothing's wrong ... nothing

Related tangent, and I'll get to the point in a second:

A couple weeks ago, I got a haircut. My hairdresser is in Williamsburg, the Brooklyn neighborhood known widely as being a hipster Mecca that is as inconveniently located from my own Brooklyn neighborhood as a place can be. It's actually more direct to fly to Detroit than to go from Park Slope to Williamsburg. Anyway, it was a gorgeous, cloudless day. Sixty-seven degrees. In true Williamsburg form, I walked past a busker in the subway playing Richard Marx's "Right Here Waiting" on the pan flute. A woman sitting on the sidewalk next to a bed sheet covered with old shoes for sale was strumming a ukulele. While I was buying an iced coffee and a marble muffin (first of all: yum), a permanently assfaced woman standing behind me with her giant iced coffee was bitching to her unfortunate and unamused companion about somebody else's coffee habits: "If you're going to do that, just go to Starbucks. GAH. They're a giant corporation. UGH. Um, can I have a separate shot of wheatgrass?" On the way back to the train, I followed a person of indeterminate gender wearing a prison-issue jumpsuit. Dark blue, not orange. I wondered how s/he got it out of the joint. So all in all, amazing people-watching. And getting my hair cut felt fabulous. It was the first time I'd felt normal in more than two months. All the stringiness and cumbersome length that grew on my head since having a baby were left on the floor. Josh had told me to take the afternoon for myself and enjoy the day on my own terms, but I high-tailed it back to Park Slope.

Like a codependent cliché, all I wanted to do was go home to my boys.

On March 9, at 5:14 a.m., I gave birth to Stefen Robert Garfield Banks. He was three weeks early. I was so unprepared that I didn't have my cellphone charger with me. I didn't have a camera. Nothing. I went to work and came home with a baby.









Basically, here's how it went down:

March 7 was Oscar night, a.k.a. the last time anybody thought Jesse James seemed like a good guy. It never matters how horrible or long the show has gotten; for me, it is a holy night of observance. This year, though, the boredom was crippling. So boring, Oscars; you have gotten so boring. I think that's when my water broke — it probably did so to pass the time, or maybe my body started crying — but because I'm an idiot, I didn't know my water had broken. So I kept watching the Oscars, went to bed around 1, couldn't sleep at all, and after what was basically a two-hour nap, woke up at 5:30 a.m. on Monday the 8th to go to work. Every Oscar Monday, I have to be at work at 7:30, but I get to go home early. I scheduled a crew to come to the apartment the next morning — Tuesday — to do a deep clean to prepare the place for the baby, who was due March 26. The apartment had just been painted, patched, fixed and improved, and things were coming together for the arrival of Comfy.

Here's the deal with not knowing your water has broken, because I promise that I may be dim sometimes, but I'm really not as stupid as this all sounds:

When you're pregnant, all kinds of klassy things happen to your body. One of these things can be a change in the characteristics of your body fluids. About a month before, I ended up in the hospital because I thought my water had broken, and it just turned out to be regular, garden-variety fluids that had gotten ... leaky. Great. Sweet. Awesome. Hot. Whatever. The doctors said that that would be my new normal, that until I had the baby, I'd be leaky and if it got heavier, I should see my OB. So, fine. I went about my life.

While I was watching the Oscars, it did get a little bit heavier but not enough to be alarming. By the next morning, though, it was heavier, and by the time I got to work, I was beginning to panic. I was underslept, hormonal, and stressed. I closed the early page I was working on around noon, went to the bathroom, saw a tiny pinpoint of blood, and just burst into tears. But it still never occurred to me that it would have been my water breaking. I don't know if it was denial or shock or brain-freeze. We're all led to believe that when your water breaks, it's a torrential gush that soaks your Manolos and you immediately launch into contractions and while you're huffing and puffing, somebody puts you in a cab and the driver panics and while he's speeding you to the hospital, you have a near-miss with a baby carriage that's actually filled with soda cans and you careen around a solemnly strolling group of nuns, because that's what happens in movies and on TV and everything in movies and on TV is true. Reality: Sometimes when your water breaks, it's a trickle and that's it. And you don't always go into labor afterward. Nothing is self-explanatory in pregnancy except the fatness, and even that isn't self-explanatory because I didn't get fat(ter) until my seventh month. Go figure.

Once I saw the blood, I went to the doctor. I figured I'd be back at the office within two hours, so I left my computer on, didn't really say goodbye to anyone, and hopped into a cab. I was still crying, I could not stop no matter how hard I tried, so I called Josh and asked him to meet me at my OB's office — something I never do. I just couldn't calm down, and I was so angry and embarrassed that I'd cried at work. I was convinced this whole thing was nothing, and I was pissed at my hormones for making me all histrionic. Josh left his bag at work, grabbed his wallet and his phone and headed uptown to my doctor's office. Between the two of us, we did not have a whole phone's worth of battery power — and no charger.

When I got out of the cab, I looked across the street. My doctor's office faces the Museum of Natural History, my favorite building in New York, and on a bench in front of the side entrance sat Glenn Close filming an episode of Damages. I'm still convinced that means something. So there I am, crying, with godknowswhat running down my leg, and I walked up to a production assistant, all, "What are they filming?" I actually contemplated waiting around to watch Glenn Close act. Because I am stupid. But you would do the same thing because Glenn Close is awesome.

Within five minutes of walking into the exam room, the doctor (not my own; as luck would have it, my doctor was on call at the hospital) told me I'd ruptured and they were sending me to the hospital. I was all, "Um, I wasn't planning on having a baby today." She laughed, of course, because to people who don't go to work and end up in labor three weeks early, this is funny and charming. I dried off my legs, got dressed, and paced the hallway until Josh arrived.

After that, everything moved quickly. At around 1 p.m., we got to the hospital, where my doctor told me they estimated that my water had been broken for 12 hours, maybe longer, so they wanted to induce labor to avoid infection. (Once your water has broken, the baby's barrier from germs in the outside world is gone.) Around then I started feeling movement and light cramping; at 3:30, they put me on Pitocin, the drug that induces labor; at 12:30 a.m. Tuesday morning, I finally decided not to be a hero with the pain and asked for the epidural; and I fell asleep until 3:30 a.m. My doctor checked on me then, I still had not dilated past 3 centimeters, the baby had not dropped, and the cord was loosely wrapped around the neck. They decided to do a c-section, and at around 5 a.m., I was wheeled in. In the meantime, my dad was in a car en route to New York from Detroit and my mother landed in New York in a hot second, insisting she'd stay at my apartment on Tuesday so I didn't have to cancel the cleaning crew ("That baby has to come home to a clean apartment!").

Three things:

1. This sounds certifiable, but I wanted to go as long as possible without the epidural because it was important to me to know what labor feels like. I had a good nine hours of considerable pain, and once I could no longer concentrate on my breathing or get distracted, that shot could not show up fast enough. You wait and wait and wait to ask for it, and the second you do, you are beside yourself that it hasn't happened yesterday. The most uncomfortable part of getting the epidural is putting yourself into position for the shot. You have to drop your shoulders just so, jut out your back just so, and you still have a baby in your body who's trying to get out and you're having contractions. It is a feat. And then you go numb and fall asleep.

2. Despite all predictions to the contrary in my previous post, I did not wig during labor. I actually did most of it pretty quietly while Josh dozed in a chair beside the bed. I didn't want to wake him because I figured we had a long, long night ahead of us and someone should be allowed to get some sleep. For the most part, I worked through the contractions on my own without too much drama. When I finally needed help focusing, I woke Josh up and he talked to me and squeezed my ankles to redirect the pain. He later said, "Your labor wasn't too bad, huh? I didn't hear you at all." I said, "Just because you didn't hear me doesn't mean it didn't hurt." I have to say, I was awesome.

3. I don't know why this was surprising to me, but when you have a c-section, you are drugged out of your tree. You're awake but numb from the chest down. Which means you're groggy. Which means that during the birth of your child, you are pretty much guaranteed to fall asleep. I remember asking the doctors, "Am I seriously going to fall asleep during the birth of my baby?" I was so out of it that, when the anesthesiologist asked Josh if I was sleeping and all I heard him say was, "Oh, yeah, she's out," my eyes flew open and I yelled, "WE HAVE A GIRL?!?"

At 5:14, I felt some shaking, heard a cry, and then ... nobody told me what flavor the baby was. I kept asking, but, naturally, everyone was focused on the kid. Finally, my doctor said, "Josh, do you want to tell her what you have?" He said, "Oh, yeah. Uh, it's a boy." I paused and asked, totally bewildered, "Really?" I was so convinced we were having a girl. Worst maternal instincts ever.

They cleaned him off, closed me up, and moved me into recovery, where I finally saw him. My son was ...

... totally busted.

I firmly believe that the world would be a better place if people would admit when their babies are ugly. Most newborns are shriveled and purple and swollen, and babies born vaginally have coneheads. But c-section babies can be quite pretty. My nephew, Alex, was the most beautiful newborn I'd ever seen, but then again, at more than 9 pounds and four days late, he was basically a full-grown adult.

Stefen was not that. Stefen was 6 pounds, 2 ounces, 21 inches long, and all lips and nose. Seriously, the lip-to-nose ratio, it was not good. He was hairy. (Babies in the womb are covered with protective hair called lanugo that falls out if not soon before birth, then soon after. Stefen was early, so he was a little ... tufty.) He just wasn't done cooking, is all. But I was terrified that when I sent the e-mail announcing his birth, people would forward the photo to their friends saying, "Oh my god, you have to see this picture. My coworker had the ugliest baby." I mean, he wasn't ugly ugly, but basically, he looked like an old Jewish man. I started calling him Irving, and Irving goes to Battery Park to play chess with his pal from the war Morty, and they wear their pants really high and feed pigeons and Morty always cheats at chess but Irving lets him because of what went on during the war. There's no pal like Morty.

And it's not that he wasn't beautiful. The kid had some great angles; he just needed to grow into his face, which he did, and a week later, he was a total looker.



Ultimately, you're lying there in recovery and someone hands you a baby — your baby — and it's the most surreal moment of your life. And you try to figure out how this person is part of you, and Stefen looked nothing like me or like any baby I thought I'd have because when you picture your baby, you picture you as a baby, so I couldn't identify at all. He's the spitting image of Josh, who is a gorgeous adult but his adult face does not belong on an infant. Stefen looked so much like Josh that I might as well have not had any part in the creation of this boy. It was so surreal and scary and wonderful, but I was too tired to feel happy or excited or anything other than just ... mesmerized and overwhelmed.

He was in an incubator for a day and a half to correct jaundice, so I was able to go into the nursery and feed him alone in a storage closet. I loved that time. In our storage closet. He was so little, and the only responsibility I had right then was to feed my son, study his long fingers and his face, and try to understand him. In the following weeks, I mourned the lost weeks of my pregnancy — I really loved being pregnant but only showed for a short time and then I delivered early, so I had to grapple with losing part of that experience — and just adjusted while going from feeding to feeding, walks around the block, and trying to remember appropriate songs to sing to him at 3 a.m. I found that very few songs aren't totally sadistic or depressing. Lullabies are violent, the only song I sing on key is "Do That to Me One More Time" by Captain & Tennille, and camp songs are insane. Here's one from summer camp that kept popping into my head but I refused to sing:

A Tamarack goat
Was feeling fine
Ate three red shirts
Right off the line
A boy named Jack
Gave him a whack
And tied him to
A railroad track
And when that train
Came roarin' by
That Tamarack goat
Was doomed to die
He gave three shrieks
Of awful pain
Coughed up those shirts
And flagged the train
The train didn't stop
SQUISH!

Just like anybody else, before I got pregnant, I was terrified I didn't have what it takes to take care of a baby. I was 10 when Lauren was born, but I didn't raise her. I thought I wouldn't be able to handle the sleeplessness or the constant activity or the keeping on top of things. It was never automatic for me that I wanted children, so I didn't know what kind of instinct I'd have. But it's so true that the things you have to do you just do. It's automatic. And now, with very little guidance from me, my son is smiling and grabbing my hair. He laughs at his own poop. He rubs his eyes when he's tired. He has more than doubled in size.







He holds his head up. He grins in his sleep. He launches himself over pillows and propels himself around in circles on the floor. He sleeps through the night. He pushes his face into the wind and sunshine. He has a few super-cool pals who we met during the post-fog weeks of my maternity leave, and we all have a standing date to meet at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens every Tuesday (I don't work on Tuesdays) until the rest of the moms go back to work because it's dreamy there and we all really like each other. And he just started going to daycare. Josh and I are in a basically permanent state of shock, but we're doing it. The past 13 weeks have been the absolute fastest of my life — to the point where I feel like I left work pregnant and came back the next day no different other than I am minus an occupant — but I'm glad to be at the office even though I miss my son every second. I now understand why parents put so many pictures of their kids on their desks.

I miss maternity leave.

Spring is the best time on the planet to have a kid, but all the change can be disarming. The first time I left the apartment after bringing him home was the first time I'd left the apartment since going to work the morning I went into labor. Which means on March 8, it was chilly, I was pregnant, there were gloves and a hat in my bag. A week later, it was warm, I was no longer pregnant, and I was somebody's mother.

The amount of laundry that has to be done is staggering.

Josh and my big idea to spell Stefen's name phonetically so nobody would mispronounce it failed like a big fat fucking fat failure. It's Steff-in, not Steff-ahn. Not Steven. IT'S STEFEN, PEOPLE. Also, Stefen was the only name Josh and I could agree on. (He's named after my grandfather Sidney.) We decided Stefen Banks sounds Scandinavian, which we are not, so we loved it. It suits him.

I am a much more relaxed mother than I ever thought I'd be. I think it's because I'm old.

This whole thing has shown me how really on-the-same-page (to overuse an overused term) Josh and I are. I think it's because we're equally clueless.

If you paint your apartment before you have a baby, make sure you use washable paint. If you have a boy, he will pee on the wall.

All the anal-retentive research was worth it.

Josh's and my parents have been amazing, We haven't had to worry about food, childcare, anything, for three months.





When I had this baby, I did not have a change of clothes, juice in my phone, a camera, or a pediatrician lined up. But things do work out anyway. People make it so.

I'm still waiting for this boy's parents to come pick him up. It was so nice of them to let us take care of their lovely son for so long.

My problem with Miley Cyrus prancing around half-naked isn't that she's a teenager, it's that she's fug.

The Betty White episode of Saturday Night Live was epic.

The 15 minutes between the time Josh took Stefen to daycare yesterday and the time I left for work was the first time I'd been in the apartment alone in three months.

I still think those women who say parenthood is "the most important work we do," meaning women as a whole, are insufferable. It belittles other important work, and it discounts people who don't have children. Parenthood is a choice, and we're not saving the world, we're actually overpopulating it. When it comes down to it, Josh and I wanted to make a family and it worked out for us. It's not any kind of higher plane. It's not unimportant, of course, but it's pretty much important only to us and the people closest to us (regardless of what the length of this post might convey; it certainly appears I think this baby should be monumentally important to you too). Raising Stefen is the most important thing to me, yes. I'm madly in love with him. I chose to have this baby and I chose to take on the responsibility of raising a good person. But I don't like the idea that just because I have a child now, I have a greater role on the planet. Maybe it's too much pressure on him. I just think that, like anything important to you, you just want to do a good job, be happy, and make the people you love happy.

So far, so good.

Just another day outside the office.

Les Photos, Part Deux

I feel like being French today. Ooh là là!

SO:

To continue ...

Have you heard about what the new transportation commissioner of New York City has been doing? Her name is Janette Sadik-Khan, and although she's in charge of the New York City Department of Transportation, she's all about ... reducing transportation. From what I've read, she's more motivated by the citizens' health and pedestrian accessibility than anything else, so she's consulted heavily with urban planners in pedestrian-friendly cities like Copenhagen to redesign how the roads are used here. The first big project happened this summer: Traffic lanes were closed along Broadway in both Times Square and in the shopping district around Macy's, and tables and chairs were put in the middle of the street. The idea is that if you create lanes for cars, then cars will come to fill them; six-lane expressways around major metropolitan areas do not cut down on traffic. Likewise, if you take away those lanes, the drivers will acclimate. As far as I can tell — although I don't drive here — the rerouting has gone relatively smoothly. The biggest concern was for shop owners in terms of how they were going to get their deliveries by truck. I don't know how that's working out.

This being New York City, it's going to take a while for these pedestrian plazas to become beautiful, so the chairs in the middle of Broadway are just place-holders until the redesign is made permanent. Meaning, the chairs are ... lawn chairs. And this being New York City, many of the lawn chairs were stolen pretty much out of the gate.

In June, Josh and I went to Times Square to check out the scene. And you know this is a big deal because people who live in New York never go to Times Square. Not even under extreme physical duress. Feh.







We couldn't stop laughing. The look of it was so bizarre, but we love the idea. And I'm amused by the thought of tourists walking around midtown with Belgian waffle–like imprints on the backs of their thighs.

In mid-June, my friend Kristina Riggle's first novel, Real Life & Liars, came out. I just finished it and couldn't stop crying. It's a beautiful, beautiful book and you should go buy it and read it and love it, and then tell the good readers in your life to do the same.

Anyway, the day it came out, I headed to Barnes & Noble in Union Square to pick it up. I decided it needed to be put in its rightful place of prominence:



This is what it's like to try to do freelance work in my house:



This is the kind of thing you see all too rarely nowadays on the streets of New York:



The hot dog weighed 150 pounds. These guys had walked it all the way from where they bought it down in Chinatown, up more than 60 blocks past the Port Authority (where I took this photo) and were heading over to their house in ... New Jersey.

Me: What are you going to do with it?
Hot Dog Guy #1: We have a barbecue area in our backyard. It's gonna go there.
Me: You know what this means. You have to get a matching giant jar of pickles. And, like, a burger.
Hot Dog Guy #2: We already found the burger. That's next.

My birthday was June 27. I'm 35. Thirty-five! Thirty-five. Thirty-five! When the hell did that happen?!? Anyway, Josh planned a lovely day on Governors Island. Governors Island sits in New York Harbor right at the tip of Manhattan, near downtown Brooklyn and within spitting distance of the Statue of Liberty. For years it was an Army and Coast Guard base, and then went unused. Eventually, the city of New York bought it from the government for $1 and the island has slowly been turned into parkland and gallery and entertainment space. Right now it's just a really lovely green space with historical homes, buildings and forts and shady trees to lie underneath. And there's a mini-golf course.

It was a damn miracle we could go. I don't know where you live, but our summer has sucked in terms of weather — there has been no summer to speak of because it's either pissing rain or steaming hot and humid — and in the month of June alone it rained something like 25 days. As luck would have it, June 27 was gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous. So we took advantage.

The Fulton Ferry Landing and Brooklyn Bridge:





The plants and flowers on Governors Island were incredible. Huge and lush. These hydrangeas were the size of bowling balls.







Inside the former home of an admiral, this safe was installed into a wall, and on the front of the safe was the combination.



Stuck to the back wall inside the safe was this Post-it:



Apparently, Bill and Ted also think Governors Island is awesome.



I covet these bookcases:





We spent our last hour lying on a bedsheet on a lawn surrounded by chatting visitors and beautiful old homes.



After taking the ferry back to Brooklyn, we walked around the DUMBO neighborhood (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass; don't ask). It has always been an industrial area and has become more gentrified in recent years, with delicious restaurants, hopping bars, good shopping and condos popping up. It's making the neighborhood unaffordable, of course, but that's the nature of the city. There are so few pockets that are affordable anymore.

We wandered into the P.S. Bookstore, which was heaven. Really well organized, a good selection, comfortable and not stuffy, and look! A Hebrew section!



On the way out, I saw this:



Holy moly, that book was my youth. When I was in elementary school, there were two books I repeatedly checked out of the library: this one, and On Stage, Please by Veronica Tennant. I was obsessed with ice skaters and ballerinas when I was little, and the fact that this book gave a close-up look at the life of an ice skater, well, I was beside myself every time I read it. I was later thrilled to find that Katherine Healy, the skater in the Jill Krementz book, starred in the 1982 Dudley Moore/Mary Tyler Moore film Six Weeks. She died in it. Alas.

And I was too young to appreciate it then, but Jill Krementz was married to Kurt Vonnegut. It was meant to be that I own this book. I picked it up off the shelf.

It cost $82.

I did not buy the book. Alas alas.

We were in such a zone while we were in the bookstore that we didn't realize it had rained. We came out to this:



It was a helluva birthday.



The next day, we headed back to DUMBO for dinner. Between the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges, there are both a farmers' market and Brooklyn Flea, a huge, excellent flea market.

It makes me sad that radishes are flavorless, because they're so damn pretty:



I'm kind of loving the yellow shoes on the left:











In mid-July, I went to California. This vacation was stellar. It was Bass's first birthday, so I knew I'd be heading up to San Francisco to celebrate with Stacy, but it had been a long time since I'd been to L.A., and I have friends and family I hadn't seen in a long, long time who live there. Let me say this: I hate L.A. But I used to go a lot when I was a kid to see my cousins, and as adults, our relationship has faded. I really wanted to reconnect. And my friend Mark now has two children who I'd never met and I just thought, Enough. So thank god for Virgin America, because I flew from New York to L.A. to San Francisco and back to New York for $400. Recession, you rule!

My mom met me in L.A. so she could see her family too. We rented a car and ended up with a ... Chrysler PT Cruiser.



My dad had a PT Cruiser. It was black. We called it The Hearse. And not only did it look like a hearse, but the blind spots were so huge that you couldn't see behind you and your chances of dying increased thirtyfold. But the two of us, we two ladies, we showed L.A. how it's done in our ... PT Cruiser. Awwww, yeahhhh ...

We immediately headed to Van Nuys to see my mom's aunt Shirley, who is turning 101 in October. My mom's cousin Debbie was there, as was Debbie's sister, Susan, Susan's husband, Michael, and their son Damion, who is a year younger than me. I was close with Damion when we were kids but I hadn't seen him since Lauren's bat mitzvah in 1997. Seeing him in L.A. in July with his beautiful wife (who's pregnant!), Elisa, was better than I even hoped. It was just excellent. Last time I hung out with him in L.A., it was his bar mitzvah, during which I snuck away and French-kissed one of his friends in a phone booth. I was such a floozy.

Santa Monica:



I spent the next two nights at my friend Mark's house. Mark lives in Pasadena with his wife, Asha, and their two kids. Mark and I used to work together at an advertising agency in Warren, Michigan, right after I graduated from college. I hadn't seen him in, I think, three years, and I think the main reason why I had to visit him in California was because I needed to actually see him with two children to believe it. So much can happen in three years, and there's a slight suspension of disbelief when you're communicating solely over phone and e-mail, I think. But they're all doing great and it was just a really, really nice visit. I shared a bedroom with their 2-year-old son, Callan, who woke me up in the morning by reaching through the slats of his crib and tickling the bottoms of my feet. It was maybe the cutest thing that had ever happened to me.

Mark took me to Huntington Gardens, these tremendous, unbelievably beautiful botanical gardens in Pasadena. Oh my god.





Mark insisted on taking a picture of me in front of a cluster of prickly phalluses. And yet he still wondered why I couldn't get my head around the fact that he has two children.











I loved that it was 100,000 degrees in southern California and the middle of July, but flowers were still blooming:











The Huntington Garden also has an impressive art museum and a print archive that has texts you wouldn't believe. Isaac Newton books actually owned by Sir Isaac Newton! A Gutenberg Bible! Mark and I both really love Edward Hopper, so we took a bunch of photos of this painting for Mark's iPhone screen saver until the security guard yelled at us.





Mark and Asha were planning one of their children's birthday parties, so Mark and I went to Party City to scope out what they had. He came up with some ideas for the party, but even more valuable was what we found that was totally unrelated to the party.

Like this:



I just don't know that it bodes well for any couple that the bride's arms are ripped off.

And this:



The most miserable-looking couple ever.

Nothing gives a cake more meaning than sacrilegious candle packaging:



And then there was this:



Me: Why is Jewy stationery always so maudlin? We're the chosen people! Why can't we have invitations in colors other than blue, white and silver?
Mark: That's not so bad, I just don't know about the wording.
Me: "Please Join Us."
Mark: It's more like, Please join us. Be one of us.
Me: It's not like we need an invitation for that. We'll take anybody.
Mark: Yeah, but doesn't converting take forever? You have to take classes and stuff.
Me: Yeah, that's true. And if you're not circumcised yet ...
Mark: Forget that.
Me: Yes.



Up in Marin County, Stacy found out she had a few days off from work coming to her, so she planned three of the most excellent days for us. We spent the first afternoon in San Francisco. I've spent a total of maybe three hours in the city in my life, and Stacy hasn't spent much time there since moving to Marin, so we were both really excited and had the hardest time ruling out places to go.

One of the many cool things about where Stacy lives is that you can take a ferry into the city. It's a beautiful ride, and on a ferry, you're not stuck on a bridge when The Big One hits. And all I can think of when I'm in San Francisco is earthquakes, so this was much appreciated.

I took a picture of San Quentin for Josh because he likes crime. Say hello to Scott Peterson, everybody!

Hi, Scott Peterson!





The Bay Bridge



Being the tourists we were, when we got off the ferry, we climbed onto a cable car and headed straight for Chinatown. I've lived in New York and London; Stacy's lived in Jerusalem, New York and Chicago. And just like that, with one act of tourism cliché, all our street cred — gone. We didn't care. It was great fun.















In front of the City Lights bookshop





Another tourism rite of passage: Stacy and I walked up this hill:



At the top of the hill was a cable car. We took that to another tourism rite of passage, Fisherman's Wharf.



It should be noted that on that day, Stacy and I managed to take the worst picture we've ever taken together. It took 29 years to do it, and whoo boy, did we make up for the lag. It will not be posted here, but trust: It's heinous.

We capped the day with dim sum and a slow walk through the truly excellent ferry building. We hopped on the boat and headed back to Marin in time for my acupuncture appointment. I'd never done acupuncture before but I've needed holistic assistance with my very moody stomach, and it was fabulous. It was relaxing and fascinating and terribly helpful, and I'd recommend it for anybody.

This was in the waiting area:



The next day, we drove out to Point Reyes National Seashore. It's so beautiful out there. It's just a giant, giant area with mountains and redwoods and fields and animal preserves and small towns and the ocean. The air is clean, the sun is bright, the fog wraps itself around you like a blanket.... It's ridiculous.





This was an old creamery adjacent to an elk preserve:





We went hiking, first toward the end point that juts into the water, and then down a slope to the ocean.











That night we saw the latest Harry Potter, and happiness was felt by all.

Stacy wanted to plan a day for my birthday present, and holy crap, did she ever. We woke up that Friday morning and drove up to Sonoma, which, gorgeous. She said she knew I'm not into wine, so she thought of what we could do in terms of fun Sonoma tastings. And then she found the Wild Flour Bread bakery. When she first told me about it, she sent me an e-mail with a link to the Web site, and I wanted to eat it. So it was safe to think this was a really good idea. She thought we'd start the day there, tasting different kinds of breads and bringing home some snacks for her husband, Mark, and his friend in from out of town, Julia.

When we walked in, I wanted to lie down on the floor and sleep there forever. The smell was divine.



They allow you to taste the available breads, which we did heartily. We ended up buying three kinds for us:

A sticky bun bigger than my head



A chocolate, lavender and apple scone that was so light, the strongest flavor was the lavender



And the three-cheese fougasse, which also has hints of garlic and rosemary, and why do I want to say mushroom? Anyway, amazing.



The smell alone was perfection, but then we drove down the road to Osmosis Day Spa, and really, how could the day get any better? Well I'll tell you. It got better. Osmosis is known for their Cedar-Enzyme Bath, which is a large square tub filled with cedar shavings and hundreds of different kinds of enzymes that, combined with your body temperature, creates heat. It's a dry steam bath, no water at all. You climb into this thing and it's soft and cushy, and the Osmosis therapist piles the cedar around you to your comfort. It's the most comfortable blanket feeling I've ever experienced. You stay in for 10 or 20 minutes, and then you shower off and are taken to a meditation room, where you lie on a bed, put on headphones, and they pipe in relaxing music for 30 minutes. After that, still smelling like cedar and fougasse, we got dressed and spent some time in the beautiful meditation garden, where giant orange dragonflies buzzed around the pond.



In the locker room when we got dressed, Stacy opened her bag where she had stowed the bread she was bringing home, obviously not wanting to leave it in the hot car, and looked worried.

Stacy: Oh no. I made the whole locker room smell like bread.
Me: You say that like it's a bad thing.
Stacy: True.
Me: It smells delicious.

We had lunch in Occidental, a western town that time forgot. We drove the Bohemian Highway. We bought pluots and cherries at a fruit stand manned by a woman whose daughter usually runs it; it's how her daughter is financing her college education.





I don't even know what to say about that day. It was absurd. Driving around some of the most beautiful scenery I've ever taken in with my oldest friend, eating bread and spa-going and buying local fruit and homemade pies ... It was the perfect day. The perfect perfect day. Every two minutes I kept saying, "I don't believe this. This is ridiculous. You live here." I felt like I'd been there for a month, I was so relaxed.

And then, of course, the most important part of the whole visit: Stacy's son, Bass, turned 1 that Saturday. She organized a really lovely party in a local park, and her friends and all their babies came. It was a riot. I hadn't seen Bass since last summer, when he was 2 months old, and it's really spectacular to see a kid grow and change like that. He's on the verge of walking, he very enthusiastically says "Bye!" and he made his first art project. He's such a cool kid.

Bass's bass cake, made from individual cupcakes that were iced as one cake on top — genius:







Bass has a friend who has the best barrettes. I met her at a farmers' market picnic, where she was wearing a knit watermelon one. This is her party cupcake:



Stacy very brilliantly, for party favors, bought a bunch of bouncy rubber balls for the kids that were a huge hit. She brought a big basket for them. Bass most enjoyed taking the basket with the balls in it and dumping it over his head.



It was both hilarious and awesome.

My last morning, Stace took me to a huge farmers' market in San Anselmo. It was unbelievable. Row after row of flowers, produce, pickles, homemade lotions and juices; handmade purses and belts and picture frames; trucks with fish and pizza and breakfast food and meats. All locally grown and made. The produce in California is superior to anywhere.

These were the biggest blackberries I've ever seen:

















This is Chinese zucchini:



As glorious as the sunlight was in California (especially since it's been grey as smoke here all summer), it's unfortunate it was so bright when I took this photo, because the electric purple color of the zucchini was stunning and you can't really tell with the glare in the picture. I never knew a color like that purple could exist in nature.

And then I went home, sad to leave and totally content from the perfect visit. It's been a loss of a summer for the most part, so posting these photos has actually reminded me that I actually did do something like leave the house and, uh, experience things. This week, Josh and I are off to Fire Island where we'll be watching some mad waves from the remnants of Hurricane Bill and breathing in some ocean air.

Beyond that, after not having watched a second of TV since May, I'm alarmed by my date book, which is filled with the premieres of fall TV shows. I think I'm becoming that person, but I don't think I'm wrong in believing that life is always better when Dexter is on.