Lighten Up

I've just been in California. I don't get there nearly enough and every time I visit I wonder why I don't just go ahead and vacation there. Why do I always feel I have to go abroad instead of packing up a Dodge Neon from Hertz and heading down the coast to sample tangerine olive oil and ride a bicycle barefoot in some funky yet upscale beach town?

Sadly, this was a work trip and I was stationed in the positively standard Hilton in Oakland. I found myself taking breakfast at that absurd business travel hour of the morning along with all the casual businessmen wearing cotton golf shirts, forced to listen to them talk about Body for Life over grapefruit.

I had some time to kill in the afternoon so I walked to Wal-Mart in hopes of finding beer to take back to my room. All I found was Red Bull and some diet tea with creatine that made me super edgy during an episode of Locked Up Abroad that I watched later from my flowered bedspread. If I were a real business traveler I'd be an alcoholic.

After a few hours trapped in depressive Hilton anonymity, I decided it was time to head for San Francisco. I arrived just as the sun was melting over the tops of the palms. I felt the familiar feeling I always have in California--slightly starstruck, oohhing and aahhing inside over the way the sun reflects off a particular window or a piece of fruit sits high in a tree.

From the moment the taxi picked me up at the airport and I scoffed at the driver's suggestion that I wait for the Hilton shuttle, I felt my east coast cliches slicing through that quality Cali air like a million little X-Acto knives. Hurry, hurry, gotta get to my supremely lonely hotel room so I can sit and watch crime television in the dark. As I walked up and down the gorgeous San Francisco streets carrying my unnecessarily large platinum patent purse I suddenly felt so...sullen. There I was, wearing all black in the middle of a shimmering San Francisco street. No light reflecting off of me, that's for sure. Proof of the sullen suspicion came when I reached Fisherman's Wharf and a "tourist sheriff" tried to arrest me for not smiling.

Since I've been back in the gritty city I've had this urge to shake off the darkness. It was pretty shocking to go somewhere else and act as wound up as people always say New Yorkers are. I do love me some edgy urban intensity, I do. But lately I'm finding myself fantasizing about Cate Blanchett's hair in The Talented Mr. Ripley--California crystal blonde. What if I just lightened up a bit?

(P.S. I got that little raise I asked for. It was little. And way more than a little late. But it might pay for a bleach job)