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line at The Comedy Store ? (“That was fine. But what really hurt was when she entered it in America’s Cup – and won.”) BA DA BING. Try the veal . I won’t be here till Friday.
    In fact , I was the first one on that 2008 plane out of Seattle , minimal luggage in hand. Destination: Los Angeles. Home.

DON’T BE A VICTIM
     
    Tom Wolfe said you can't go home again, but I did and found it strangely changed. The outer trappings were the same: same old halted traffic; same dusty, trash-strewn Valley; same sun – glorious sun – spotlighting this desert and making it a place with More Stars Than There Are In Heaven . Koreans still rubbed sho ulders with African-Americans ( and sometimes shot at them ) ; Latino gardeners staged hunger strikes for the right to rev their leaf blowers; and multimillion dollar Venice townhouses stood a stone' s throw from junkies who threw needles over the walls.
    I had been gone for five years, and essentially forgotten. I had missed so many Hanukkahs , Birthdays, Fourth of Julys , that I had fallen off the A - list and couldn't crash a D- list party. My friends were still around but in L.A., you rarely saw people even if you lived next door. It was a silo ed society, each container holding a house/cocoon with a home theatre, and a similarly insulating SUV. The sense of what Joan Didion had called "a form of secular communion" – driving – barely existed anymore, unless you were running someone off the road.
    So back I ca me, the prodigal daughter, permitted to stay in my sister ’s 7,2 00 square- foot house for the duration of two month s . These were her rules, and s he was Queen o f Her Domain. I tried to be as unobtru sive as possible, staying in the guest Blue Room with its ceiling-mounted TV (what I really wanted was a light so I could read). At night, I walked an enormous distance from the bed to the bath room (of which there were four , to paraphrase Mr. Collins of P&P ).
    Unlike Nigel, the first thing I did was to try to find a job. My ex-boss Dale put me in touch with his ex-partner, Doreen, who had a small FileMaker business. FileMaker is a client/server database (I know this is fascinating), in which , once upon a time, I was expert. But five years away from the software had made me as clumsy as the S carecrow on his way to Oz.
    With typical hubris, I plunged into several of Doreen's projects. She knew a lot, and was a n excellent teacher. A little erratic, but who wasn't in this town?
    I noticed a strange phenomenon. Every morning, setti ng out in my Rent A Wreck from Rachel’s Castle On the Hill , I had to hold back tears. A great sadness would well up inside me, and not even the estrogen I was taking – post-hysterectomy – could damp it down. What was this about? Was I missing Nigel and Aurora? Hell no! I was in mourning for WaMu, my last warm, safe port o' call. Now I was surfing boardless on a cresting wave, a n d where and how it would break was anybody’s guess.
    I worked hard for Doreen , trying to untangle the spaghetti code of others, but ended up b eing hit in the face by a big bowl of same . I had simply been away too long, had missed too many releases , d espite my twenty years’ experience. In short, I – she of the Regents Scholarship and 4.0 average; she who had understood the meaning of Ulysses – stunk. I mana ged to fuck up one database big time.
    "Hello?" I was sitting in the San Francisco airport, en route to Seattle, when Doreen called. She was pissed.
    "This whole project is hosed! You used the wrong tables and I sent this to the client! I ju st hope I don't lose them! Dale said you were good – I expected a lot more."
    I cowered in my seat, as if she were going to swoop through the phone like a Death Eater . For a compulsive perfectionist like me, you cannot imagine how those words stung. I felt a flush – over my entire body. My hands went numb.
    "I'm sorry Doreen I really am. I'll fix it when I get back."
    "D on't bother." For the first time