vi...vi...victorious

Unevenly sunburnt, I have returned in tact from the wilderness and having finally gone camping, I can't recall what I imagined it to be before I left the city. What I remember from the weekend is a relaxed haze of sun and sand and tents and portable stovetops.

The night before we left, stops were made at Home Depot for charcoal and mosquitoe repellent and Ralph's for ice and baked beans. The boyfriend and I had tried to pack up my car with the necessary provisions but found the task to be confounding, even for two college graduates. I feared that I would have to make the trip with a tent in my rear-view mirror. Nevertheless, we set out on Saturday morning with bagels and croissants balanced on our laps and all our supplies packed neatly like groupies backstage.

If you've ever driven down the 5 freeway from Los Angeles to San Diego, you'll know that about half way there are two huge domes that sit west of the freeway. They look at once like observatories and gigantic cement boobs and they are part of the Southern California Edison nuclear power plant. That's where you will find San Onofre State Beach, a popular place for surfers because the plant uses water to cool the nuclear reactors which is then flushed into the ocean making it nice and warm. As if it has been freshly peed in. Great for catching waves.

We arrived at the beach around noon and found our friends staked out next to a cliffside path marked Beach Trail #6. A blue canopy shielded a couple of guys watching FIFA soccer on a tiny television while the ladies laid out on towels, bronzing in the sun. Immediately, the boyfriend and I threw off our clothes and shone bright and pale for all to see. Somewhere, a coastal fishing boat thought they saw a lighthouse. The responsible me began applying SPF 45 to preserve my skin's "freshly fallen snow" look which I love so much. However, the incompetent me who cannot complete the simplest of tasks neglected to reach every part of my back; an oversight which I did not discover until the next day when I awoke to a burning patch on my skin. More on that later. The afternoon was spent turning over, eating hot dogs, taking photos, watching shirtless boys with bellies playing wiffle ball, playing smash ball on a precariously pebbly beach, hiking up a cliff to pee and surfing, or what the people who observed me trying to surf might call "getting your ass beat by an angry saltwater Mike Tyson." This was one of the highlights of my trip.

Our friends Bobby and Kim kindly lent the boyfriend and me their surfboards and gear. I have taken one surfing lesson in my life and it was in Hawaii with a private instructor and it was on a longboard which is essentially like a raft. The waves were calm and I felt pretty confident that that one one-hour lesson would qualify me as a Blue Crush pro. I pulled a borrowed moist Roxy rash guard over my arms and felt its cool cling against my body. I grabbed a surfboard and headed into the sea. The waves were of a good size but they were breaking in twenty second intervals. The boyfriend forged ahead, never having taken a lesson but being brave and living up to his shaggy haircut's beach bum first impression. The sand gave way to small stones which were a bit painful to walk on which in turn became smoother stones and finally sand again. I held onto the board and jumped into wave after wave, trying to reach the calm surface I could see just a few lengths away. My master plan: reach the calm swell between waves, turn the board toward the shore, paddle paddle paddle, pop (up), ride to glory. I never made it through those waves. On more than a few dozen occasions, the waves enveloped me with their saline arms and essentially clotheslined me into the rocks. I refused to give up and was slammed repeatedly onto my ass, my back, my front; the ocean proclaiming me its bitch and me, too disoriented to protest. The surfboard was flung to the end of its leash attached to my ankle. I retrieved it time and again until after one particularly strong wave, it sailed above my head and came back to smack me in the face. I can still feel the bruise on my cheek and hear Bobby's sympathetic laughter. He served as the sole witness to my marine ass kicking. The boyfriend came back unscathed.

The caravan packed up around 6pm and we trudged up the cliff to our cars and headed to the campsite which was further east. Over six hours in the sun had taken its toll on the campers and everyone muddled through their showers and assembled around the unlit campfire to relax before dinner. I, too, took a shower and found it to be infinitely more pleasant than I had expected. The tiles were a mix of brown and yellow, a color-scheme indubitably selected to mask the assorted human stains to be worn in through years of public use. The water temperature was perfect though and I stood under the stream of my 50 cents worth for a few extra minutes even though I was finished with the actual cleaning portion of my shower. It may have been during that moment that I lost my resolve to be anti-germ. I realized that I possessed only a finite amount of energy to be expended during the trip and that I shouldn't be wasting it on worrying about dirt. I emerged from the stall a changed person. And then I quickly zipped myself up in our tent and hot boxed it with a can of aerosol mosquito repellent.

A roaring fire was lit in the heavy steel cauldron that was in the center of the campsite. The sun left the sky and the fire warmed the ground. Those who could muster the energy, milled around the makeshift kitchen and cooked up a fantastic dinner. We feasted on asparagus wrapped in proscuitto, burgers on toasted sesame seed buns, homemade coleslaw and pasta salad, red potatoes roasted with butter and rosemary, satanic Bush's baked beans and the requisite S'mores for dessert. It was a gourmet spread. A lull settled over the group as each person finished their meal and reflected on the day's events. It was a comfortable time with a lot of silent moments. Odd perhaps for the number of people, but a sign of secure friendships or possibly sunstroke.

A few members of the group returned to the city. A few fell asleep in their chairs as the fire crackled before us. A few left the circle to retire to their tents. It was a peaceful evening. No one checked their watch. A log or two was added to the fire. The boyfriend and I stayed up the latest with another friend, talking about the old days in college and the days to come. We were the last to go to sleep. I had been delaying my bedtime as much as possible so that I would be so uncontrollably exhausted that I would simply faint my way into the night's slumber. No such luck. The boyfriend and I climbed into our tent followed by a few curious insects with crunchy exoskeletons that could not be squished. I had to grab one with a sweatshirt and deposit him outside the zippered flap which was our front (or back) door. The boyfriend and I said goodnight, me on my foam fold-out mattress and he on the solid earth. Within moments, were again outside the tent, having realized that we needed to pee once more before turning in. There we stood, in the darkness, in our underwear, peeing in the woods while our friends slept a few feet away. I squatted next to him and giggled, my laughter weaving into the symphony of crickets in the brush around us. He tried not to splatter me with urine.

In the deep greyness of night, I laid awake in our tent. There was peace and calm in the air. The insects called to each other. In the very far distance, I could hear the faint hum of civilization. In the next tent, I could hear Bobby snoring. I stared at the outline of the boyfriend until my eyes adjusted to his shape. I snuggled next to him as best I could, compensating for the height difference of my foam mat.
"Is it hard?" I asked, hoping he was comfortable.
"NO!" he retorted with "don't flatter yourself" disdain. A very puzzling response. It took me a moment but then I realized he had mistaken my inquiry as a seductive advance.
"The ground," I asserted. What a cocky bastard. I looked up at the shadows of the tent slanting towards my head and put in my earplugs. I fell asleep soon after.

I was one of the first people to wake up the next morning. Probably because the evidence of my inept sunscreen application had finally risen to the epidermal layer and caused me considerable pain. I looked at the red marks with curiosity. It was positively tribal. I emerged from the tent and soon the picnic table kitchen was bustling again with the sounds of eggs being cracked and scrambled. The campers emerged from their domes and rubbed their eyes to a new day in the woods. After breakfast burritos and coffee, the caravan was again mounted and we returned to the city with smokey hair and uneven sunburns. Badges to prove our victory over our self-imposed hardship. Veni, vidi, campy.

my father

Yesterday I made a trip to BIG LOTS! (their exclamation point, not mine) to hunt down a cooler for the big camping test tomorrow. The store is an amazment to me with its stoic fluorescent lighting and half its merchandise strewn about on the floor. As I carefully stepped over all manner of items, I walked through rows of silk plants next to hardwares next to women's undergarments next to a recliner next to Tiki lamps next to blank CDs next to a BBQ grill, all of which looked stolen. Yet, paying the most discounted of discounted amounts for items which sell for more elsewhere did bring me a secret glee and this made me think of my father, the man who loves a bargain. My father could make you an amusement park pressed penny with his thumb and index finger and then dismiss you when you complained that the pattern of his fingerprints wasn't a worthy souvenir.

My father grew up with very little. As a child in China, he played in the dirt with dirt toys. He ate scant meals and shared a bed with my aunts and uncle. When they moved to Hong Kong, life improved slowly but it was still 6 people to a one room apartment. When he met my mother and they married and moved to Canada followed by the United States, fur coats and Bloomingdale's were not in his dreams. I never asked him explicitly but, I think he dreamt of a home and a job and dinners with his family. He achieved those dreams and then some. So, when he goes to BIG LOTS! (the exclamation point is so obnoxious) the abundance of the shelves is enough to make him feel like a very rich man. He knows nothing of Williams Sonoma or Thomas Pink. That he finds a few necessities for a few dollars makes him smile. And recently, I found out that he enjoys camping. The memory of swimming at night with his buddies, fishing and cooking up their catch in a pan makes him smile. Picky daughter who complains about having to rough it makes him frown. He never went to a campground with "A wha? What public shower!?" They used the ocean. Ew.

I went in for a cooler. I found one. It holds 38 cans of whatever makes it easier for you to deal with being in the middle of nowhere. It's blue and it wobbles a bit but hey, it's from BIG LOTS and it don't fall down. At $18.99, it was not a lot to pay for a reminder that my father worked very hard to provide for me and my sisters. A reminder that he can turn nothing into a life and anything into something that makes our home a more comfortable place. He doesn't require fancy things to feel special because he doesn't need to feel special at all. And that's what makes him a great man.

why i do not have a hard-on for camping

I have never gone camping. But, knowing what I know about myself: that I do not enjoy the outdoors when it doesn't involve a white canopy and tea sandwiches; that I do not like the sticky sweetness of sunscreen on my skin; that I have difficulty falling sleep in unfamiliar beds (or sleeping bags...what an ironic name); that I have to shower and perform a 30-minute face-washing-contact-removing-teeth-flossing-teeth-brushing-facial-moisturzing ritual every night before I hop into bed; that I have a senseless fear of insects; knowing all this, I know that I do not like camping. But that's not going to stop me.

This weekend, I am going on my first ever camping expedition with the boyfriend and six other couples (barf!). Two campsites have been reserved at the San Onofre State Beach and it is there that I will put my mettle to the test.

The boyfriend and I have been tasked with ferrying the following items to the campsite:
Ice
Charcoal
Firewood
Bush's baked beans (for 14)
Eggs (1 dozen)

Mixed green salads and seared ahi are not on the menu so I may have to substitute those items for Bush's baked beans. Bush's baked beans. I would be very curious to see a Food Network behind-the-scenes segment on Bush's baked beans as I am skeptical that they are actually baked and that they are actually beans. I think it is unlikely that Bush's baked beans have any redeeming nutritional value other than Vitamin Convenientium. Not really looking forward to scraping the ridged walls of the aluminum can for them.

Aside from eating canned foods and individually wrapped meat products, if there are 14 hours of light on which to be capitalized, there will be plenty of time for "camping activities" like sitting, trying not to sweat, watching the ocean, applying sunscreen, signaling for help. Other than that, I will be hiding under the car. The boyfriend tried to sell me on hiking or playing volleyball or "just being oustide" to which I responded with going back into the bathroom to finish crying.

Speaking of bathrooms, as of now, I can barely orient myself in a public restroom and I don't mean the pretty bubblegum scented ones at Nordstrom. I'm referring to the cinderblock shed at the park that has no door, just a carefully constructed view-obstructor, open air vents where the walls meet the patchwork roof and metal toilets that are consistently surrounded by a wet floor, a mixture of reclaimed water and the poorly aimed pee of small children. Males do not appreciate their efficient and anti-septic anatomy. Their asses rarely making contact with the cold, stained steel bowls of these public "restrooms." Don't be fooled, there is no "rest" in there nor is there flimsy toilet paper thick enough to protect my mind from thoughts of imaginary bacteria. Not only will I have to relieve myself in these facilities, I will have to shower in them. This means being naked and the possibility of my bare skin brushing against the government-maintained tiles of a public shower stall. If I am feeling brazen, I may skip my nightly shower and just leave early the next day, say around 3am. But if I am truly disgusting, for the sake of cleanliness I will have to put a flip-flopped toe into the cesspool and hope to emerge cleaner than when I stepped in.

If I am exhausted by the day's events like the grueling "Pick-sand-out-of-your-hamburger" game, I may be too weak to fight the suffocating tent and the claustrophobia-inducing bag of sleep. I will bring ear plugs to muffle the sounds of nature and the vast outdoor universe of this planet we call earth. The grunting of couples having in tents sex. The blood-thirsty howl of coyotes coming to devour our unconscious, beer soaked bodies. The heavy clumping of a murderer's boots trudging towards us at a painstakingly slow gait to avoid detection.
"What about killers?" I asked. "Anyone can just come rip through the tent and hack us to pieces! How do you know that won't happen?"
"Because there are people around," replied the boyfriend.
"Yes, people to be killed."

I have experienced considerable anxiety this week as the trip approaches. The uneasiness has manifested in vivid dreams of (and I shit you not) covering a public restroom toilet with a thick, vinyl FUR-LINED cover so that I could sit on it and a separate dream in which the boyfriend helped me caulk the crevices of a tent-like structure a gel roach repellent. Of course, I was micro-managing the application of the gel with a stern "No, you're using too much over there. Save some for over here."

You may be wondering why I am submitting myself to such personal torture. Am I a masochist? No. Of the things I fear about a camping and the things I know about myself, I also know that I can only grow if I push myself out of my comfort zone. I enjoy trying new things if not the new thing itself, even if they may be uncomfortable or uncomfortable to even contemplate. I have built up the pitfalls of camping to such a grand scale that this trip will serve to disprove these notions. The couples (again, barf) who are going are all great people even if the girls are all between size 0 and 4. The prospect of wearing my bathing suit around them makes me want to shrink and disappear (to a size 10 maybe.) However, they are all smart, kind and funny women whom I'm excited to spend time with. Their respective boyfriends are also a hoot. The laughs and the hijinks and the camraderie we will have may just negate all the hygienic and safety concerns I'm clutching. Maybe it will be one of the best experiences I've ever had. Maybe I will pitch a tent for camping.

memorial day memories

[Disclaimer: There is nothing funny about this post. If you came to be entertained, please check back another time.]

It's been two weeks since I returned from the sweaty city of New York and I haven't stolen a moment to update the blog with tales of cupcake-laden debauchery until now! I've been a very naughty (read: busy) girl. Enough is enough. Let me tell you a tale of Memorial Day.

The boyfriend and I arrived at the crack of dawn on Friday morning and were very generously met at the airport by my friend Ed who dropped us off in Brooklyn at the apartment of our friend Molly, redheaded siren of quick wit and resilient liver. So, while Molly, worker bee that she is, had to spend the day in the office, the bleary-eyed boyfriend and I slept until past noon and headed into the city to pay a quick visit to the newly re-designed and unexpectedly packed for a Friday night at 5:30pm MoMA. One of the reasons I love New York is that people care about art. On the first eve of a long weekend, the museum was crowded with tourists and city folk alike. The art and the patrons were mesmerizing. I only recently learned that museum admission is FREE on Fridays after 4pm (we snuck in using our friend's membership.) This made me feel a tad sheepish. A tad.

After our stop at the MoMa, we met with our friend and kind chauffeur Ed at Aki where we dined on (among other delectable items) tuna mille-feuille: layered slices of fuji apple, avocado and ahi tuna drizzled with a white wine vinaigrette. As we left the restaurant, a woman stopped us to ask about the mille-feuille appetizer. The conversation veered left and right and was surprisingly pleasant. I had long held on to the notion that New Yorkers were strained and indifferent. Perhaps 9/11 has instilled the community with a new sense of camraderie. Or maybe she was in a rare good mood because she got free admission to the Museum of Modern Art.

I'm sad to report that I was not able to eat my way through Manhattan as I had planned. From Aki, we walked to the famed Magnolia Bakery. It was around 10pm and the line was around the corner. FOR CUPCAKES! The boys and I bought a big box of cupcakes and met our friends in SoHo, first at a bar named Bouche and then at ACE named after the subway lines A, C and E. It was there that the innocent looking vanilla cupcake I made out with at Bouche decided to give me, um, let's say "a kick in the pants." I had planned on going to Sugar Sweet Sunshine but never made it there due to my freshly learned response of nausea upon visual confirmation of cupcakes. Psychologists call it "taste aversion" but it's really more like a cruel joke between my carbohydrate desires and my mild intolerance of lactose. It doesn't happen all the time but of all the times it had to happen, it happened on the first day of my gastronomic expedition and it lasted the entire trip.

For the rest of the weekend, food became something of an annoyance. I did make a noble effort to proceed with the same moxie I had on our first day only my enjoyment of our many meals both carefully planned and spontaneously assembled was dampened by a loss of appetite and frequent trips to the restroom. Normally, a belly (of pork), lettuce and tomato sandwich at Saturday brunch would have made me get down on one knee and propose to it. The one I had, although delicious, was so poorly timed that it may have turned me off of bacon forever. A fate worse than death. A spotted dick dessert at a British pub has made custard my enemy. When dinner at Lupa finally rolled around, the nausea had faded but I was exhausted from teetering on the verge of vomiting all day. So I was half-asleep during the meal but actually enjoying bites of food. They served a delectable pickled beet appetizer with pistachio butter which perked me up. I followed it with peppered skate wing on broccoli and a sharp lemon sorbetto. The evening wound down at Vaughn where friends new and old sat around a small table and chatted away scotch on the rocks and beers.

On Sunday, the boyfriend and I ventured to the East Village where we randomly stopped in on a bakery/ panini shop and told his friend to meet us there. The friend showed and I sat listlessly as they talked of college days and new jobs. I was still in the throes of food-hate. I nibbled the boyfriend's proscuitto and mozzarella panini which was incredibly delicious but I just couldn't eat all that much. Another friend of theirs joined the table and I excused myself to go to Herald Square for some solitary girlie time. I shamelessly went shopping at one of my favorite stores in New York, Daffy's. Daffy's is like Loehmann's but eons better and a lot cheaper. It was air conditioned heaven. I thought I had allowed enough time to adequately evaluate each item in the store before having to meet up with the boyfriend but it took multiple calls from him to get me to leave the store and hop a train to SoHo (our meeting spot.) We took the train back to Brooklyn and had dinner at Peter Luger's with Molly and Ed. When we sat down at the table, the waiter essentially told us how much steak we wanted: "steak for four, medium rare, creamed spinach and potato hash on the side." We also got bacon as an appetizer. I was relieved when I ate the entire slab of bacon without fear. The bacon and the steak were delicious. The porterhouse was fatty and juicy and apparently, chosen by wizened Italian ladies who work exclusively for Peter Luger's. They go to the meat market before it opens to other restaurant buyers and they stamp the cuts they deem worthy of the Luger grill. That's some pull, if you ask me. We finished the meal with Ferrara's cheesecake which was fluffy and awesome. One could understand why they call it New York cheesecake.

From Luger's we went to The Levee in Williamsburg, a divey bar which allowed pets (our friend brought his golden retreiver Marley) and had bowls of cheese puffs on the counter. There, Molly commandeered the Harley Davidson pinball machine. I can't say I know a lot of about pinball games or that I had ever really evaluated one but, this one was quite amusing. When you ended a level, there was a "magic" number that you had to match in order to proceed or receive another credit for another go-round. Fate was revealed on an orange LED display that showed a zoom-in on the lower back of a biker babe upon which the "magic" number was tattooed. Someone pinch me! We played darts and photo hunt which yielded the most amusing story of our entire trip. I know, you've suffered through eight paragraphs of food drivel but now, it will soon all be worth it. Molly and I took to the photo hunt machine to play naughty naked lady photo hunt. For those who do not know the glorious game of photo hunt, imagine if you will, a touch screen with two photos side by side. The goal is to tap the screen where there are differences between the photos; five differences per pair. Sometimes it's a missing railing on the staircase, sometimes it's a gloved vs. ungloved hand clutching a breast, etc. etc. There is a time limit that speeds up if you just start molesting the screen without accuracy. So there we were, Molly and I, scanning the 80s-cheese nudie photos of women with teased hair reclining on zebra print sofas when behind us appeared an older gentleman stylishly sporting red warm-up gear. He was shorter than the two of us. By way of introduction he said "I love that game" and "I know that machine very well." He seemed cheerful enough. As we continued to play and pick out the discrepancies of green thongs and blue thongs, with every correct pick he let out a restrained yet victorious "Yes." I tried to block him out and Molly later told me that I missed his instructions to us: "Touch it."

Our final day in the city was the most classic New York day. We took the train to 57th street and grabbed bagels from Pick-A-Bagel and headed to Central Park. We watched cyclists yell at pedestrians, pedestrians discuss horse-drawn carriages and a crazy old man riding his be-streamered bike with a tinny sounding cassette deck playing these monstrous classical Russian overtures. From the park, we took a train to the Village to visit Jacques Torres' Chocolate Haven. We picked up treats to bring back to LA and had a frozen hot chocolate which was perfect for the heat. I neglected to mention that for the entire duration of the trip, the weather was sunny and 90 degrees Fahrenheit. The temperature was perfect for New Yorkers but sweltering for one particular Angeleno who had been misled by the weatherman to believe that it would be 70 degrees. I had no choice but to buy a dress to combat the steam. We walked to SoHo and the boyfriend sat through a marathon H&M session wherein I asked two sales people for help finding a specific dress after trying unsuccessfully to locate it myself. I found it and after paying for it, immediately stripped in a corner of the men's section and put it on. My skin had never been so grateful.

Our departure was drawing near and to finish off the day, we went to Prospect Park for a barbeque with a few friends. These people did not skimp. Burgers were shaped with raw beef and chopped onions, the cheese for them carved from a block of cheedar. Cobs of corn were roasted. Potatoes were wrapped in foil and baked. Marley was let off his leash and coaxed into the small pond. As he shook off the water, little Puerto Rican children gathered around and shrieked with delight. I was lucky enough to get a photo. We left the park and headed to the airport. As we taxied on the runway, it began to rain. It was as if New York was bidding us a tearful goodbye. See you again soon, NY.



For more photos, click here.