On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 11:52 AM, Vi Le wrote:

Re: If by "real" you mean...

Taking a refurbished Blue Bird school bus painted green and yellow on a dirt road while reading a book standing up in the aisle, then this is real! ;p missed the direct to Nosara this morning by ten min, so took a bus to Nicoya instead. Had pitiful conversation with Malbin, who typed on my comp when I couldn't understand him (this was often). His wife is a systems engineer and I told him about the beaches of Los Angeles. Hopped off at Nicoya, got directions to the terminal from two policia, and tried on a dress while waiting for the Nosara bus. I told the saleslady it was too big; she pointed to my chest and gestured while nodding sympathetically. Scenery can't be beat; canyons and fields and lushly forested hillsides interspersed w pastel roadside homes and stores and shacks only marginally more well appointed than Vietnam's countryside dwellings.

A blog post...

is like a soap bubble, only meant to last a moment or two.

Nora Ephron died today, of leukemia. I was surprised--the last movie she directed was "Julie and Julia", just three years ago. The news broke suddenly midday, tweets that she was dead, then reports confirming that she was alive, but on her deathbed. She had kept the diagnosis secret, and only now it was leaking out.

I checked out "I Feed Bad About My Neck" a few years ago from the library. It was breezy and frothy--I classed it with Grace Paley and Tina Fey. Funny, in that assertive, acidic way I was beginning to associate with women from New York.(And add Mindy Kaling and Lena Dunham to their ranks). (Hannah Horvath - "You are from New York, therefore you are just naturally interesting.")

She directed "You've Got Mail", the first movie I saw in a theater by myself. Mindy Kaling fell in love with it, and romantic comedies--it catalyzed her career as a comedy writer for "The Office". I ran into Mindy at the Virgin America terminal LAX years later, when I first moved to the city. She was my first celebrity encounter, if you didn't count Corey Feldman. Nobody did.