furiously noshing on challah, i am home, having eaten nothing but saltines since waking at 3:45 this morning and flying southwest all day; the merest suggestion of covertly brought muffin from yesterday's breakfast buffet enough to make me ill, in which state i spent much of this otherwise lovely trip to san diego. well, the weather also left something to be desired. i have rotten luck with gorgeous climates: they seem to clam up whenever i'm around. unswayed, my mother and i tootled around in our rented white minivan, pausing to hike torrey pines, walk the pacific coastline, and admire the zoo.

the bat mitzvah itself was for a cousin of mine whose family only moved from our coast to the Other a few years ago. as far as we could tell, they are thriving in del mar as they never thrived in mclean, a VA region to whose ritziness their old neighbors and friends who flew cross-country could attest. never had i been surrounded by so many bright women with even brighter diamond rings and no jobs. country club ladies, to a one, with grown children and their freedom hanging heavily on their manicured hands. i was wearing, as per my father's instructions/entreaties, a lapus lazuli bracelet he'd pulled from the vault -- i almost never wear jewelry of any kind and it reminded me how constraining -- literally -- the stuff is, and i didn't begin to compare to the women around me.

our first day in CA, my mother and i brunched at an airy, festive coffeeshop, the kind i'd love to be a regular of, and afterwards moseyed nextdoor to an independent bookstore where mom threw caution to the winds and emerged with three books. one, rachel simmons' Odd Girl Out, i started reading later that day in the hotel and it sparked numerous interesting conversations between my mother and me cuz i kept shouting, "of course!" and being reminded of my own stories. it's terrific. it should be required reading for high skoolers and highskool teachers alike. as i wrote lana, who knows miss simmons, (i only know her mother, the luminous and terrifying mrs. simmons, who taught 12th grade jewish history and then marched us through poland) i want to email her, work with her, shake her hand, and have her children. in that order.