This is the part where I look like an asshole.

That novel? Didn’t happen. Not over Thanksgiving, not in 30 days—not not not. I don’t see it happening in the near future, either, and not because it’s hard to see what’s coming down the pike through all this egg on my face.

I had a long talk about the novel during my last Seattle trip with my Hillbilly-Jewish Cousin. We talked about fear (did I have any around writing this book) and love (did I love the idea of writing this book).

Fear? No.

I’m not afraid of writing a book, and I’m certainly not afraid about being upfront with the gnarly details of living with Crohn’s disease. I love the idea of a book that potentially adds to the greater good (and is hilarious) rather than a book (even if it is hilarious) that adds to the coffers of me and some publishing house and, down the road—if we’re lucky, and the stars align—a movie studio.

Not that I have anything against money! (More—much, much more—on that later this month.) Money is awesome! It lets you do stuff. It gives you choices. At its best, it’s magical, time-shifted energy: an ingenious, asynchronous exchange of me for you. And you know what? After many years of misanthropy and almost as many of self-loathing, I really like both of us: we’re awesome, just like money! In fact, we are money, as the man said when he was still young, slim and unafflicted by the burden of too much energy-as-money and no good way to channel it into something meaningful.

But love? Ah. Love is a different story.

I have love in my heart for this fictional girl and her story, and for all real girls still in the process of writing their own real stories. Last week, I spent some more time with a group of women who totally get that: Keren Taylor and the amazing volunteers and mentors at WriteGirl, who work with girls from at-risk situations and turn them into fire-breathing powerhouses of take-no-prisoners fabulosity.

Well, actually, they use writing as a way to help the girls strengthen their voices and understand what it’s like to feel empowered, as well as doing tangible stuff like getting them into print and into college. If you’re looking for a great place to dump some of your extra time or money, you could do a lot worse than forking it over to Keren and WriteGirl. More on that and other great places to rid yourself of that pesky extra money (Vince Vaughan, are you listening?) later this month, as well.

What the hell was I doing, then, in this month off from writing publicly? A whole lot of thinking. And hashing out. And bouncing stuff off of various trusted resources. I laid out my fears and hopes and baby dreams, my ideas and tentative to-do list, my wildly burdensome sackful of unfulfilled obligations and bad karmic debts.

Here’s what I found: I am only interested in what I am interested in. And I cannot be interested in spending one second of the 40-some-odd years I have left (if I’m lucky) doing something that compromises my own voice.

I get that for as many champions as I had at the publishing house for those first few sample chapters filled with poop and laughs, I had an equal amount of detractors, and I get why: it was filled with at least as much poop as it was laughs, and that is starkly terrifying for some people. The truth, and certainly my truth (which, in fairness to me, is what I’d been asked to share), but no less terrifying for being so.

It is scary to sign on for the truth; it can be imprudent. Risk is always, um, risky. That’s why it’s called “risk,” right? Risk can seem especially risky in uncertain economic times. Unfortunately, there is no real living without risk. No growth, no change and certainly, no love.

So for now, I am going to be That Asshole who is not following up on the incredibly unusual, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to float a novel out there at the request of an Actual Publisher. I have a plan, though, for a lot of other cool, growth-oriented, change-promoting, fabulosity-increasing stuff. A BIG plan, which will start to unfold in posts on this very site over the course of December and through the next year.

• I’m going to start sharing more excellent resources here, like I do in my beloved (by me and a growing number of readers) newsletters.
• I’m going to lighten the fuck up a little, like I used to do, because sweet baby jesus on a bouncing kangaroo, if ever we needed more lightness, we need it now.
• I’m going to post more plain, old useful tutorials here—about communications tools and how to feel the opposite of useless and maybe even ways of attracting a little more plain, old-fashioned love into your life. Because the more of us who are making meaningful contact and changing the world with our unique gifts and yes, goddammit, getting laid, the better off we’re going to be.

I’m also going to be dramatically shifting the direction of my work-for-hire life. And making it public, and maybe even soliciting your help in getting the word out. Because (say it with me) MONEY IS AWESOME! and while my now almost-year-long almost-sabbatical has been awesome in its own way, it’s time to get down with the facts that: (a) I can’t do everything for free forever; and (b) if I can support myself in a modest way that also allows for the flexibility of a great deal more travel, I can get out there in the real world like I did in October and November, and meet more of you in person, Southwest be damned!

In the meantime, since you’re a loyal reader of the blog (or one of the few lost souls who has found his way here looking for something of an entirely different nature—and so you know, that last link is 100% not safe for work), I’m going to share with you a work-in-progress preview of my formal “Hire Colleen!” page:

Colleen’s Super-Secret, Hire-the-Communicatrix Page

I will still be available for design work in 2009, but only for a select few projects and only after we’ve gone through an initial consulting thingamajiggy. I’m a fair-to-middling designer—good, even, when inspired. Thing is, I’ve been inspired less and less to use my design skills and more and more to do what I truly love: to help provide marketing focus to overwhelmed, go-getting, world-changing rockstars, particularly by showing you how to manage the increasingly complex (but brilliantly cheap and flexible) social media space.

Again, as with so much of this, more on that later. But really, for the first time in well over a year, I’m really clear on what I want to be doing, and thus really, REALLY excited about doing it.

With a vengeance.

With bells on.

With all the excitement and fervor and, let’s face it, sense of urgency that starting a major phase of work life at age 47 entails.

I thank you for the amazing support I’ve received so far. I hope to take it less for granted moving forward, and to do more stuff that is more fun and more useful for you and the rest of the world (a.k.a. those people who don’t know about us yet).

Finally, if you have any thoughts, ideas or questions—tutorials you’d like me to write, issues you’d like me to address—please do leave them in the comments, or if they’re of a very personal nature, you can email them to me via the gmail.

I cannot WAIT for all of this to start. And fortunately, I don’t have to. Because it just did…

xxx
c

Image by Carolyn Coles via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Mary Ellen called it in the comments of the last post: I have my life set up, like it or not, around accountability.

I make appointments and agreements out loud and publicly to keep myself on track and actually producing, rather than just musing about it. It’s why I started this blog four years ago today—to externalize my process, in the hope of getting clear on my own inner workings. And to (hopefully) be helpful by sharing some of this knowledge I gained so, so late in the goddamned game. (No prodigy, I.)

I also did it to become a better writer, by which I mean a writer who is particularly good at it in her own, particular way, and also a writer who actually writes. Because a writer who doesn’t write is just another schmuck who ought to go do something of actual utility, like raising responsible citizens who engage in critical thinking, or scrubbing toilets at a 99-seat theater, or raising money for starving people in ravaged parts of the world.

I’m kind of stuck being a writer—or a communicator, or the communicatrix, rather—because I’m not that all-fire great at being anything else. I’m a decent designer and an okay actress, but the amount of energy I need to expend to do those things at any level of excellence makes them a lousy ROI for me and, I’m feeling more and more, the world. We’ve all of us got to figure out what we’re the very, very best at, and what we’re here to do to make the world a better place, and just do the hell out of that thing. Did I wish I was a genius designer? Oh, yes. Did I hope to change the world from a slightly raised proscenium? Damned straight.

Alas, those were not to be my platforms. They were great training grounds for picking up necessary skills, but they’re not the Big Show.

This is the big show. This—this. For better or for worse, externalizing my process. And, with a little continued good fortune in the right direction, helping other people to discover and disseminate their own fabulosity*.

So in the same way that I use Arno J. to help me in my practice of morning reflection, my shrink to help me in my practice of emotional honesty and my marketing coach to help me in my practice of business, I have decided to engage a little external help to kickstart my writing practice. That’s right, those of you who clicked that last link: I’ve joined the ranks of the NaNoWriMo-heads, and am going to slam out a shitty first draft of a novel I was asked to write over a year ago.

Asked to write. By a major publishing house. On a theme wildly dear to my heart. Over a year ago.

Sometimes, I have to pause to reflect on how truly asinine I can be. Because really, it’s spectacular, albeit in a horrifying way.

I actually turned in sample chapters at the beginning of this year, which were, to my surprise and delight, much beloved by the editorial team. But the people who would actually have had to sell the book? Let’s just say I got a big “yes” on the voice, and a not-so-much on the execution.

I’ve put it off long enough. Now I either do it or dump it off the “to-do” list for the foreseeable future, and move on. And, as Marketing Coach sez, that’s asinine. No one gets asked to write a novel. No one who’s never written a proven one, anyway.

So I will sign off for now, as I have a great deal of writing to do. I will not sign off for a month, though if I write less of substance here, perhaps you will be understanding and forgiving.

I will, of course, continue observing my current writing obligations, including the monthly newsletter (next issue out this Wednesday—subscribe here) and the monthly acting column.

Wish me luck. Stay in touch. Keep on living your life out loud.

xxx
c

Image of a geranium, the fourth-anniversary flower, by Swami Stream via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

*That’s also very much writing-related, but also involves moving increasingly into speaking and consulting. Which I’m doing, but which is not the particular focus of this piece. If you’re interested in either of those things:

• me, coming to speak to your group about how to use marketing and social media to get your message to the Peoples or…
• me, working with you in a consulting-type fashion, to help you sort out what message you’re trying to put out to the world and how to make sure it’s elegant, accessible, “you” and focused like a motherfucking laser beam…

…you should email me. Seriously. All these crazy skillz I picked up during my travels through advertising, performing and graphic-designing are proving extraordinarily useful at helping people sort out their shit in a non-painful, actually-fun sort of way.

There’s a terror in doing something for the first time, of course.

Will I do well? Will I do it “right”? Will I even make it through to the end in one piece? Will they like me?

What is more terrifying, by far, is to do the next thing. Even if you do well. Especially if you happen to do it well.

There are no expectations the first time around; if there are, they’re served up with a healthy side of slack. Or an outright escape hatch. It was her first time; she didn’t know what she was doing. What’s your excuse the second time, though? Or the third, or the fourth?

Or do you just quit while you’re ahead?

The technical term for it is sophomore slump: the almost-inevitable let-down of the follow-up. After all, you have your whole life to make your first album, and 12 months to make the next. God help you if you break world records out of the gate, because what next? Do you break your own record? Do you jump into a new game?

I go through a minor version of this every time I write a post that goes over fairly well; after a series that goes well, my performance anxiety becomes almost crippling. And this is me, writing for (at most) a thousand or so souls. What is it like to be Stephen King? Or even Anne Lamott? No wonder Heather Armstrong feels like pulling down the shades and crawling under the table sometimes.

The deeper I get into doing any kind of “real” writing, the more I understand the need for a daily practice for anyone passionate about his work. You’ve got to keep the gears oiled, yes, but it’s also about not getting precious with your output. No, lightning may not strike twice in the same place, but were you doing it for that flash that lights up the sky and disappears just as quickly, or were you doing it because it was something in you that needed expressing—even better, was it something outside of you that needed to move through you to find expression in that moment, in that way.

My job, just like your job, just like everyone’s job, is to keep myself oiled and ready, flexible and light on my feet, in the best possible shape to let the spirit (or whatever) move freely through me. I’m only human, and just like the next gal, I get hung up on stats and kudos and other public endorsements of my fabulosity (which really isn’t mine at all). But that is frippery; it’s not a job.

Buddhists sit every day not to achieve a state of enlightenment or bliss, but because it is good practice to sit every day. The learning comes through the sitting, but the learning is also the sitting itself: the sitting down to practice, the discipline of doing it daily, the humility of seeing a string of days, stretching out into infinity.

Well, your idea of infinity; we’re all of us pretty damned finite, when you get down to it.

Before the nudges among you get all fired up, no, this does not mean I will be writing in here every day from now on. I am thinking, however, that it’s time to get much more disciplined about writing every day from now on. Finite time, limited resources.

Some days, I will hit the bullseye. Most days, I will most likely truck along, holding my own, doing fine.

What I pray for—or would, if I was a prayin’ woman—is the courage to fail gloriously.

Then? I’d know I was getting somewhere…

xxx
c

I do likes me a grand finale. Yes, I do.

For mine, I pulled off a 60-minute presentation with nothing but my bare hands and a stack of index cards. You shoulda been there. (Well, some of you were. Hi! It was kinda fun, huh? Just rolling with it?)

Somewhere along the line, I taught myself how to improvise. Some of it was intentional; some of it was…well…not. But it really is all good.

Every piece of goodness and weirdness and what-the-hell-is-this-ness can move forward with us to inform the next thing. Do your work. Prepare like a motherfucker. Then let the hell go.

Because as one who’s planned a wedding and a career path and countless other Virgo-type Things with Outcomes, I’ll tell you flat-out: you cannot control what will happen.

The restaurateur will use your carefully thought-out seating plan as a coaster and set up whatever two-, six- and 12-tops his people feel like. You will be waved onto the express lane for success and find the speeds make you carsick.

Thank god. The good stuff is what happens in the in-between spaces. The stuff you plan for, not the stuff you plan.

Three weeks of so much unexpected good stuff. Months (I hope) of unpacking ahead of me.

Thank you, Seattle. Thank you everyone along the way, and here and there, and everywhere, who came along for the ride.

Let’s see what kind of trouble we can stir up on our respective home fronts, shall we?

xxx
c

This is the mug that stares back at me every time I pick up my phone.

It never fails to cheer, but for the past few days, it’s also filled me with homesick longing.

There’s no question about it: Seattle is a great town. It feels about as warm and welcoming as a place could be. I’ve made scads of new acquaintances, reconnected with old ones and even run into a few random L.A. types also up here escaping the desert heat.

And this trip itself has been wildly invigorating and deeply gratifying. I’d come hoping for some perspective and was rewarded not only with that (and in spades), but absolute confirmation that direction I’ve come out of this year of wandering with is the right one.

No wonder this place has started to feel like home.

Today, though, for the first time, the pull to go home-home felt stronger than the desire to stay here. I don’t doubt that The BF having to cancel his plans to fly up, hang out, and drive back has something to do with it. We’ve been apart for a month today, and that’s too long for people who have some kind of choice in the matter.

I’m also fairly sure that actual sickness has something to do with it. I went to bed last night feeling not-great and woke up feeling even worse: a return of the exact same symptoms I had before starting this trip. That kind of symmetry I can do without.

When you’re physically low—a little sick, a little tired, a little cold, a little hot—whatever small thing you might be going through seems magnified. And when you’re a little homesick and a little sick into the mix? You miss your babies something fierce. Technically, I don’t have to vacate the Fabulous (Temporary) Bachelorette Pad until Monday. But given the circumstances, I’m cutting it short by a couple of days and heading back Saturday.

Wave to me on the I-5.

Oh—and wish me luck on my last day at home before I go home…

xxx
c

Sometimes, the only way you get stuff done is just to commit to it and make a leap of faith.

Like this presentation I’m giving on Friday.

Hell—like this entire trip, while we’re at it.

You form an intention, you get as organized and prepared as you can, and then…

You jump.

It’s what I’ll be talking about on Friday, when I share what I’ve learned about connecting with people online with a bunch of people in the Actual Real World. Am I the king-god-be-all of Internet fabulosity? Please.

On the other hand, I went in with the vaguest of intentions—to develop my voice, to share what I knew—and made it work, so I figure that if these people have some clear objectives and can fold in the stuff I’ve learned? Soufflé time, baby.

Right now, the chef’s gotta get back to the kitchen.

More soon…

xxx
c

I suppose it’s a sign of how fantastically, beyond-my-wildest-dreams awesome this trip has been that the little bit of rain I got sprinkled with today so thoroughly dampened my spirits.

Truth be told, I didn’t have too many dreams coming up here. Expectations, either. I suspected that this would be a trip that would give me some perspective, and it has. I suspected that it would force me out of the rut I’d gotten into, and it has: in a thousand tiny ways, I’ve been forced out of my comfort zone.

In a thousand other ways, though, I’ve felt myself slipping back in.

Witness the red* card in the picture above.

I’ve been here, in Seattle, for 18 days now. Hawk-eyed viewers will note there are 12 punches on the card; I turned it in today for my 13th cup, free. That’s 13 cups of coffee at the same place 18 days.

Yes, I’ve sampled coffee in lots of other Seattle establishments. A couple of Portland ones, too. That’s still 13** cups of coffee in one place, in a town that’s lousy with exceptional coffee.

I’ve eaten at proportionally more places, but have still managed to eat the same (fantastic) Greek salad topped with gyros from the same neighborhood restaurant three times now***.

The forces of habit are, shall we say, exceptionally forceful. You can run from them, but you cannot hide; they run faster, and I’m pretty sure they all have GPS. So it was with a sick sense of recognition that I felt fury rise in me this afternoon when confronted with what is, in the face of all the horrific shit going down in the world today, a ridiculously small disappointment: The BF has to cancel his trip up here.

It means no BF until I get back, and very little of him before he heads to the Midwest for his selfless volunteer tour of duty as Driver-of-Early-Voters-to-the-Polls-in-a-Swing-State (plus seeing his kids who, let’s face it, really need to see him much more than we need to see each other.)

It means the happy pictures I’d painted of us tromping around Seattle for a couple of days are melting away like so many (fairly elaborate, but still) chalk paintings on the sidewalk. It means being apart on his birthday. It means driving the 1,100 miles back home alone.

It means things changed, just like things change all the time. Just like things have changed moment to moment, day to day on my entire trip. Only instead of rolling with the changes like I’ve been doing so far, turning into them to see what new fabulosity lies around the corner, I have, for some reason, clung stubbornly to my vision of how things were supposed to be.

Supposed to be? Nothing on this trip so far has unfolded like it was supposed to: that is what’s made it so fantastic.

The good news here (among much other good news received today, including the speedier-than-expected recovery of a dear friend from a serious surgery, while we’re putting things into perspective) is that I was able to deploy my ninja skillz of bullshit-dispelling to great effect, with relative ease. I leaned into the disappointment hard, then took my sorry, self-pitying ass for a vigorous, uphill walk. By the time I’d reached the top of the hill and headed back, I had things back in their proper perspective. Well, pretty much.

I still don’t know what will happen next, but I know I will not cling to what I believed might happen before.

It is harder to be in flow than you think.

It is easier to get back in than you give yourself credit for.

It’s good to remember both of those things.

xxx
c

*Which, shot as it was with the world’s greatest handheld computational device, admittedly looks more orange than red. The iPhone makes a much better computational device than it does a camera.

**Maybe more. I had a several cups at this place before I discovered they had punch cards, and while I did ask for a few retroactive punches, I was too embarrassed to ask for all of them. Junkies get defensive and shit.

***And have the ill-fitting pants to prove it.

You know you have made yourself at home when…

…the coffee people start making your order as you walk in.

…people on the street ask you for directions.

…you finally coax a Los Angeles omelet from your friend’s Seattle stovetop.

Two weeks down; one week to go.

Here.

And then?

The rest of my life, just like here.

“Here” being “wherever it takes me”…

xxx
c

The whole of the Pacific Northwest is pretty beautiful, and the bits around Seattle especially so, but there’s something about Portland that says “home” to me.

It may be because of its size: Seattle is smaller than New York, Chicago or Los Angeles, but it still feels like a big city.

It’s also a little fancier than its sister to the South. Okay—a lot fancier. It’s not formal, by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s a little more decked out, a little less grubby. Fancy.

Portland, on the other hand, reminds a great deal of Chicago—specifically, the tiny, homey Chicago of my childhood. 1960s Chicago, when we had three good restaurants and the Loop and a big, fat chip on our collective Big Shoulder because we weren’t New York. Only Portland doesn’t feel like it has a chip. It feels a little working class, a little crunchy, a little fanatical (hello, foodies! hello, bikers! I’m talkin’ to you!) and okay with it. My pal, Robert, who’s lived there for some time now, says it’s really just a grimy old port town that got classed up. So is Seattle, for that matter, but I guess there’s a lot more money up here, because there’s a lot more visible class.

Anyway, if it felt incredibly wrong to blow by Portland on my way up the I-5, it felt truly thrilling to take a little side trip back down there in the middle of my stay up here.

First, there’s the middling-longish drive there: three hours each way. Yeah, I’m a lousy citizen, burning extra dinosaur bones rather than hitting it on the way up or back, but I haven’t found the thing yet that jogs stuff loose in my brain like a middling-longish drive.

And after a couple of weeks of doing new stuff here, believe it or not, I’d fallen into a groove. It felt good to jump out of it, and really good to jump back into PDX to change it up. I stayed in the same hotel, walked the same streets, went to the same restaurant (sweet baby jeebus, that place is good), shopped in the same bookstore. I did meet one new former imaginary Internet friend, but hung out with two old ones, including my first shrink/astrologer. I talked change with my shrink, who has known me over 20 years now; I talked shop with Havi, whom I’ve known for about 20 weeks, I think. (I talked about everything from sex to writing to money with Robert, but we are weird.)

More than anything, I’m realizing this an idea-collecting trip. Or maybe an idea-coalescing trip. Or maybe both. I needed this distance from my L.A. surroundings and routine to start seeing how all these pieces of things I’ve been toying with for the past 12 months fit together. I’ll be heading back in about a week, but it will be a back that’s forward.

New business plan. New project order. New excitement for life in general.

Backwards to go forwards. Or just stopping, so you can go, period.

Remind me of this when I’m home, would you?

xxx
c

I’m an extreme creature of habit—part of the reason for my current Shake Things Up in ‘08 Tour. so when I decided to take a side trip to Portland, I pretty much resigned myself to staying where The BF and I stayed last year, the ultra-groovy Jupiter Hotel, with its Hipster Seal of Approval™.

I say “resigned” because as a certified Cranky Old Lady, I had a few problems with the Jupiter the first time we stayed there. Like the room that was so small, I could touch the door and the window/wall from the bed by pointing my toes and stretching. Like the party vibe, college dorm fraternizing vibe and noise levels. To be fair, they warn that it’s a “high energy” hotel, but until you have to be peeled off the ceiling at 3am by your boyfriend because a drunk, albeit friendly hipster with a 12-pack of PBRs who doesn’t realize that the party is not, in fact, in your room or that his very loud knock mere millimeters from your head sounded like a home invasion, you have no idea. Really.

Still, in true Adult Child of an Alcoholic fashion, the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t. Plus, I was going to be having dinner with my former shrink/astrologer at the awesome Le Pigeon (foie gras profiteroles! lamb heart flatbread!), right across the street. Plus, I knew how to get there from the freeway. Er, sort of.

So I logged onto their website and booked me an expensive, fancy motel room. And then, stung a bit by sticker shock (it was definitely cheaper when we booked last year—by a lot), I made the fatal mistake of searching for better rates on a few travel sites, and discovered one for NINE DOLLARS LESS!

I do not take these things lying down anymore, so I immediately dashed off a sweet plea to Whom It May Concern at Jupiter:

I just booked through your site and then saw on Kayak.com that I could have saved a whopping NINE BUCKS on the room. Which ain’t the end of the world and you’re nice and all, but really, these are hard times and nine bucks is nine bucks.

So do you think you could just throw in parking for that one night, and we’ll call it even? (Happy to give you the extra buck.) Seems much easier than cancelling the reso and rebooking.

Thanks!

xxx
c

P.S. Stayed here last year, if that gets me anything. Probably not, but what the hell.

Imagine my surprise when, just a few minutes later, I received this lovely, accommodating email from on Al Munguia, the Actual General Manager of the Joint!

you got it.. free parking.. and i’ll throw in a bottle of voss water as well.

Figuring I might as well go for the Full Monty and leverage my incredible popularity as a Blogger of Creative Nonfiction, I fired off one more email:

Upgrade this old bag to a room that the drunk hipsters will steer clear of and there’s a sweet blog post in it for you. (We had an, um, interesting 3am visitor last time. It was like getting the EMT paddles, boy howdy.)

Unfortunately, I did not hear back from my pal, Al, so I started girding my loins for the inevitable 3am visit from one of my Higher Energy fellow hotel guests, figuring that was that.

How delighted was I, then, upon my arrival to find that not only had my parking been comped, but that I’d been upgraded to a bigger room! This one had a desk, a closet area and a sleeping area all in different quadrants, and there was an actual walk from the bed to the door. SCORE!

I’d never had an issue with the taste level of the place or the niceness level of the employees. They are all super-great, and the place is about ninety times cooler than any home of mine will ever be. They have groovy amenities like free apples and coffee, if you are old and cranky, and the ultra-fab Doug Fir Lounge, host to many hipster musical acts, if you are not. The beds are extra-comfy with good mattresses and nice bedding: I slept like a log in my Bed that Was A Walk From the Door, although I took the preventive measure of (free) earplugs this time, too; you can see them, here, in the desk drawer, alongside the in-room copy of The Four Agreements, which I call the world’s most genius hipster replacement for the Gideon bible.

For all I like to knock the noise, the Jupiter puts the same level of care and attention to detail into your experience as the Four Seasons does, albeit with funkier style and at a (much) lower price point. Eco-cool toiletries, great copy on everything from the website to the guest feedback card, Muppet-skin slipcover on the bolster.

So it’s kind of baffling when they hand you your impeccably designed Windshield Parking Pass that they don’t explain the tiny garage will most likely be full, and that you can park in an overflow lot across the street from it. (The nice girl explained that part to me when I checked out.) Or that, since there were no spots, you tell them, and you parked on the street, they offered to take the parking charge off your bill which had been comped when you checked in. (Huh?)

Or, for that matter, the lack of a TV remote. Looked up and down for that sucker; maybe hipsters like their TV old skool.

But I quibble. If you’re 30 or under and aren’t from the Bible Belt (on purpose, anyway), you’ll probably love it. A young 30 to 40? Ditto.

40+? Well, The BF loved it. He is a young almost-46. I was an old 26, so I’m probably not the best judge.

I am, despite all signs that I might not be, a fan. Al, I’ll be back.

Although next time, I really, really want one of those parking spaces…

xxx
c