Traveling to foreign lands at home.

Yes, I'll put up more pix of the cruise, I promise. Just thought I'd share some of my local travels since I've been home. I had sent out an email to the Party List, saying I'm up for visiting any local clubs they may have stumbled upon and I got, from a list of over 700 people, two suggestions. Two. Not so much night life in Los Angeles, apparently.

One of the suggestioned places was described by my Party List Guy as "They have country bands, Friday and Saturday no cover. It is a very fun place." It's been a tough week for me, kinda going through a post-vacation-real-life-sucks mood, so I was happy to visit a new fun place. I downloaded the directions from Yahoo maps and my scout and I set out for an adventure.

We get off the freeway, turn left, and we're in the mountains. It's dark, it's really dark, and we can barely see, much less read, a street sign. We pass a sign welcoming us to a forest, and we're thinking we're lost. Up and up the mountain road we go, way past civilization, trees and hills on either side of us when, finally, I spot the sign of the club on my right. We screech to a stop, not worrying about other cars since we hadn't seen one in quite a while, turn around and head back to the driveway, which we can't see from the road. But we finally see it, notice a total lack of cars in what seems to be a parking lot, and a very short and wide guy pacing around in a black shirt with "Security" on the back.

OK, we've put on make-up, done our hair, found the place, and we're going in. We hear music, a good sign, and open the door and see a bar, five people sitting on bar stools, and one bartender. We make our way over the the other side of the bar, passing the room with the band, and settle on a few seats near the pool tables. We order our drinks, noting that they don't take credit cards, and survey our surroundings. The band stops for a break and the musicians, tall, skinny, tattooed, and with long hair, pass us and go out a door a few feet away. Turns out the men's bathroom is outside in the patio with all the cactus. We're trying hard to be polite, but we can't help cracking up at this place. Not 5-star, for sure, but a down-home country bar with happy people and live music.

So the band starts another set and we decide to take our drinks to the chairs on the dance floor. There's a family in the other chairs, mom and dad and grown kids and their friends, all six of them having a good time, tapping their feet and clapping along with the music. And the music? Nice sounding country band for sure with a decidedly eclectic play list. Picture a Johnny Cash song, then "Come Together" by the Beatles, then a song about a guy picking up his girl and a bottle of wine and candles and them settling down on the couch and saying, "Don't touch my willie, I don't know you that well. Don't touch my willie, and we'll get along just fine." What? OK, then "Pretty Woman" and then "Achy-Breaky Heart" and then "Knights in White Satin" and then another country tune with the lyrics, "Beer, bait, and apples, and everything in-between." And then the band announces another break, saying "Don't forget, the more you drink, the better we sound."

Did I mention the decorations? A head of a deer on the wall above us, right across from a TV on the ceiling above the band, antlers and beer signs all over the walls, and unmatching chairs and tables everywhere. An ATM machine near the bar and a trash can next to it. And, I can't forget a small, colorful disco ball rotating on the floor in front of the band, right next to the "Tip" bucket, yes bucket.

But did we have fun? Yep. We enjoyed the music, every song. Even the couple on the dance floor, holding each other to a slow song, the guy kinda bent over at the waist toward the woman, with his butt about two feet from us, him leaning in every few seconds to kiss or bite the neck of his partner who was doing some sort of dance step while he swayed. I said to my friend "I feel like I'm intruding," and she started cracking up and I started cracking up and then she started snorting and I couldn't stop laughing and, thankfully, the dancing couple was oblivious to our bad behavior, enjoying themselves like we weren't there.

So definitely a dive, but we had a great time. Would I go there again? If I wanted to listen to some cool music without a crowd, yes. See, there's fun places to visit right here at home!

Come with me to Capri.

Travel is life-changing, seeing foreign lands, meeting new people, seeing different cultures. Our first stop was in Capri, Italy, this beautiful beachside town. Being in each port for only part of one day didn't allow us to see inland sights, but here's what we saw of what we could walk to on this lovely island on the south side of the Gulf of Naples in southern Italy. It has a long history you can read about at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capri,_Italy.

A sea of gorgeous men.

I post this for all of you who are, or will be, asking "Did you meet any men on your cruise?" Yes, there they are, fun and funny and smart and great company, all on my cruise, at my dinner table, kidding me at the cruise bars, and joining me on shore excursions. And yes, that's me and Bev in the midst of them. I think I fell in love with each and every one.

George and Ken live in Florida. Ken does philanthropic work and his partner George is a non-dispensing pharmacist for a major drugstore who manages meds for AIDS patients. George is the expert cook and Ken makes sure he has the best cooking equipment and together they have a beautiful Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. Emilio and Scott live together in Hollywood, Florida and own a B&B and multiple rental properties. They've traveled extensively and told stories about people they've met all over the world. Emilio is thoughtful and a good listener; Scott is more lighthearted and silly. Emilio's god-son Eric works for the cruise line and was on a working vacation on the cruise; Emilio and Scott clearly enjoyed his company and extended the end of their vacation to spend a few days in Rome with him. Stephen lives in Toluca Lake and his friend Bob lives in West Hollywood; they met while working at one of the major TV studios. Stephen is now in the travel business and Bob is retired, enjoying TV now as a watcher only. Randy is the organizer of the Seminar at Sea and invited Bev and the other travel agents to participate in this cruise. After law school and passing the bar, he chose the travel business because he loved it and it shows.

I can't remember having this much fun with this many men ever. They were charming and delightful and welcomed us into their circle with open arms. I promise to write all about the trip to Italy, Greece, Turkey, and Egypt in the coming days and put up pix, I do. As much as I enjoyed visiting these amazing sites, one of the best parts of the trip was meeting and enjoying the company of these terrific men. Now if I can only find a straight guy that's nearly as fine!

Surprises

We live our lives, day by day doing the same things. We have our routines, getting up at a certain time each day, driving to the same office, shopping at the same stores, even ordering the same food at our usual restaurants. We live in a chaotic world, and we appreciate the order and comfort of life's daily routines. It's been said that change is the thing that our subconscious fights the most. Our routines protect us against the discomfort that change can bring.

So we follow our routines. We might miss out on a delicious meal at a restaurant because we're fearful to try it. We keep the same job, even when it's awful, because it's familiar and we like that. We stay in relationships that cause us grief for fear of the unknown. Change is scary.

What brings this up for me? Two things. One, I'm going away for two weeks, the longest vacation I have taken in decades and to places I've never been. It's a long time to be away from family and work and friends, so I admit I've been a bit nervous off and on, thinking about it. Of course I'll have fun and enjoy myself and the new people, but we often fear the unknown and that's what it probably is for me.

The second thing is something I noticed growing over the fence in my yard. It's that vegetable in the picture above, a pumpkin or a watermelon or what, I don't know. I would not have even noticed it if I had not looked at a portion of the fence I rarely see, this lovely surprise of new life. I watch it grow every day, still not knowing what it will become. I didn't plant it, it just grew over the fence, sending its tendrils outward to seek places to attach, providing a secure place for its fruit to grow.

This gift of surprising new life is like a nudge to me to remember to enjoy whatever surprises my trip will bring. To think of this as a great adventure, taking me to sights I've never seen, historical sites that have existed for hundreds and thousands of years, just sitting there waiting for me to enjoy. And that beauty and wonder are there for me to experience, both near and far, if I'll allow myself to see it.

I'm going to Greece.

To those whose emails I haven't answered and phone calls I haven't returned, I am sorry. It's not a good excuse, but I'm kinda busy lately. I'm getting ready to take a two week vacation (I know that's unheard of for me) and my best and longest friend is sick and visiting, getting ready for a serious surgery. So that's my excuse. I'm distracted but I still love you.

I was invited to take what I call A Trip of a Lifetime, a 12-night Greece and Eastern Mediterranean Cruise. I'm going to visit places with names I've never heard. Corfu? Lindos? And apparently I will stand before the Sphinx. To say I'm thrilled is quite an understatement. Except for one trip to Paris and Venice with a boyfriend traveling on business, I've really never had any grand trips. Just not on my budget. Oh, there was that wonderful trip to Hawaii planned by my daughter, twenty-two years after I lived there before she was born. And I've enjoyed the trips to Laughlin and Cottonwood Cove when I was married and had a motorhome and a boat. And the road trips with girlfriends, all of us laughing in the car and getting lost, were lots of fun. But Greece and Eqypt and Corfu? Just amazing.

And my best friend, Auntie Sharon, is visiting from Georgia, where she fled years ago to start a new life. We have been friends and actually sister-in-laws for forty years, having married brothers the same year, having baby girls the same year, getting divorced the same year, and then living together for a few years. She's family and like a sister to me and sometimes I feel motherly to her and sometimes she likes to boss me around, but I have deep feelings that are hard to describe for this woman who is so part of my heart. She's here for surgery, which I hope goes well and she recovers quickly, but I worry. So, I'm taking her on a road trip this weekend, just up to Solvang and the Chumash Casino above Santa Barbara, so we can laugh and catch up and just have some time to breathe and relax and hopefully take our minds off what is to come.

And, of course, I'm trying at work to get all my September work done ahead of time, like taxes and payroll and billing and booking surgeries and collections keeping the staff and docs happy and on and on. I know it's silly to push so hard and I catch myself feeling like I'm running on a treadmill and then I just take a deep breath and calm down and feel better. Until I get panicky again. And there's shopping for the cruise and packing, getting my house ready for the housesitter, seeing my daughter and grandchildren and getting enough sleep. And where the heck is my passport?!?

So the point here? Thanks for being patient with me when I don't write or answer emails and phone calls. I promise to make time for you when I get back. Not just to be polite, but I miss you and your company. See you soon, I promise!

Men and Movies.

I'm picky about movies. I don't like gratuitous violence, yet one of my favorite movies is Pulp Fiction and I saw Public Enemy recently and enjoyed it. I like movies with a heart, with characters I grow to love, and that teach me something about life. I like to avoid movies that make people look stupid, but I really enjoy the new Bromance style movies, like Hangover and I Love You Man, that show men's shortcomings yet make them seem human and loveable.

But I should have skipped The Ugly Truth, a movie so predictable that I could have told you the whole plot and the ending within the first few minutes. Listen, we're all human, we screw up and make mistakes and sometimes we embarass ourselves, but this movie made both men and women look bad. Really bad. Granted, there were some laughs, but mostly at the expense of the main characters and I found myself squirming in my seat as I watched them make fools of themselves and then, of course, fall in love. Actually, the guy started out being a real jerk and turned out to be a nice guy and the woman pretended to be sweet and nice and was really a "psycho controlling" b**tch.

So why write about it? I think about my last post where I wrote that it's important while dating to be real, to be honest, to be sincere. And then I think about how, in these movies, we seem to enjoy it the most when we see people at their worst. Is it that we feel bad about ourselves sometimes and laughing at another's goof-ups makes us feel superior? Is it that we are really mean and enjoy seeing people being harmed? Or is it that we are raised watching violent acts on TV and the movies and are so desensitized that we now laugh at another's pain? Geez, I see the billboards for a new children's movie that shows small rodents carrying machine guns and I am horrified.

So what makes me write about this, you say? I hear about my women friends' dating experiences and it just seems so frustrating, how we want to meet someone with good values and similar interests, yet we rule them out for superficial things, like being very overweight or having bad teeth. Yet, we're human and mating seems to harken back to the cavemen times when we women picked the men who we thought would be the best providers and protectors. And don't forget that the men apparently mated with a lot of women in those days, spreading their seed far and wide to keep the species intact. But we're past that, aren't we, and all of my women friends are self-supporting and don't need a man to support us. But still, it would be nice to have someone open the door and tell me I'm beautiful, no question about it.

So I really wrote this rambling post to say that, no, the Guy Panel won't happen this month because I was unable to find enough guys willing to participate. And the Wow meetings have been on hiatus for a few months, after my being sick for the beginning of the year and recently taking a vacation and planning another one and having my best friend visit soon. So who really needs a guy, after all, since we ladies have family and grandchildren and good friends? No, we don't need one, but it might just be really nice to have one around, anyway.

A Guy's Point of View - A Guest Post.

Honest or not, here I come.....

....I'm considering that as my new tag line for online dating profiles. I want to talk about honesty and internet dating. Although I consider myself more honest than some people, I am still not perfect. So standing here waving the mighty banner of Honesty makes me squirm a little.

Honesty is the best policy, as Franklin originally said. So why is it so often replaced by some other policy? I think fear and shortsightedness combine to sabotage honesty. Your online dating profile is a blank slate, and you must supply all the "facts". It's inevitable that you'll consider the consequences of choosing one fact over another. Gee, am I five-eight or five-nine? I know which one sounds better (OK, that one hits a little too close to home.) With no one to stop you, and visions of your Prospective Mate selecting or discarding your profile, you choose the better-looking fact, and the first little chunk of honesty erodes.

The web sites sometimes are complicit in this, too. PlentyOfFish.com has many checklists where you must choose a value. For drinking and drug use, your choices are "Often", "Socially", or "No". So if you have one glass of wine with dinner every day, you're an "Often" drinker. Someone who gets blitzed twice a week drinks "Socially". There's a certain lack of precision in all this. In my case, I smoked marijuana once in 2005, in Amsterdam (I was led to believe that it was a cultural requirement), and twice in 2008. "No" is certainly not the honest answer to "drug use" for me. But "Socially" makes it look like I get high and listen to Hendrix every Friday night. Many other users on that web site see it in those terms, and one of the most frequent messages I got was basically "Nice profile, but what's with that drug use?" I would trade a couple of messages explaining my extreme lightweightness, and the explanation would be accepted. Sort of. (It's harder to detect a fisheyed expression in cyberspace.)

So guess what? My profile now says "No" for drug use. I will still be explaining my oh-so-infrequent tokes to my Potential Mate, but I'll be doing it face-to-face now, not in some ham-handed way with email. I'm not afraid of my actual record; I just want a chance to present it fairly.

But that's a slippery slope. Do I fudge the height thing, trusting that when I show up I'll be so charming that my blatant error of fact will be excused? What about age? Weight? Misleading photos? These things are so common in internet dating that they are practically clichés, and these lies all fly to pieces at the first meeting or soon thereafter. Why would people risk such severe consequences? The new relationship, even if it survives that shock, now has to deal with distrust right from the start.

I don't know why, but I'm guessing that fear drives these poor decisions. You envision the Potential Mate scanning profiles, trying to choose one to respond to, and weighing the "facts" in each one. You're very afraid that you might not make the cut, and better "facts" mean that you have a better chance to make the cut. The shortsightedness lets you see the Potential Mate going through this process, but doesn't let you see the Potential Mate freaking out when they find out they've been lied to.

While most people are afraid of missing the cut, I think I'm more afraid of letting someone down. I struggled with the best way to present my marijuana experimentation, and came up with an approach that I can live with, while knowing that it's not purely honest. In other respects, my profile is pretty darned accurate. Bottom line: I don't want to waste my time or the time of women who are attracted to my profile, but not to the real me. I'm in it for the long haul, and I don't want the tension of some discovered or undiscovered lie hanging over what is an increasingly good relationship. I want to be at peace with myself and with my sweetheart.

Oh, and that height thing? I have an inversion table at home, and after a few minutes of hanging I can get to five-foot-nine and a half! However, it's very difficult to drag that thing around to restaurants for first meetings.