ben and i just returned from boca raton last night. it was my step-father's 70th birthday and my 59-yr-old mother threw a huge party for him. ben and i were basically going for the sunshine but it ending up being my chance to out him and my mother's chance to out me. until this weekend, i have been the mythological daughter dancing around the globe. and then i became the mythological heroine who returned to the advertising world while helping save her father's life. and since a bunch of my relatives were also there, it was a great chance for ben to see what he's really getting into.

i don't know if any of you plan on retiring in boca or west palm beach, but i suggest you only do so if you want to spend your final years in hell-- in a never ending quilt of identical, gated-community, flat land, golf club hell. mostly we sat by the pool and played scrabble and hung out with my pregnant sister and her hubby. crossword puzzles, scrabble, and a little bit of booze.

it was more sun than i've seen in almost 5 months. how sick is that. but getting me out of the NYC prison i was in gave ben an opportunity to see that i'm not just a crazy fragile monster.

my mom can be a fucking gem when she is relaxed and she scheduled massages for ben and i to have at the same time. it was amazing and yet, as a by-product of my life, it would take ten massages per week to begin to open this meticulously tweaked, theoretically sacred cage i call a body. but the immediate release of the deep tissue work forced ben and i on to the floor of our shower where we collapsed as quietly as possible into a deserved ecstacy, while my step dad took the next massage in the adjacent living room.

our return flight was the exact duration of "i heart huckabees" so it really felt like a sunday night at the movies where we entered the theater in west palm beach, and got out in NYC. much different than i'm used to. and much easier for this crazy fragile monster to handle.

< yeah >