No, No. I'm Home Tonight.

I'm not in Austin for the Defending the Dream Conference.

I'm not in San Francisco for the BlogHer Conference. (But please—call that city "Frisco." It makes people from the Bay Area go all red in the face, and it's fun to watch. Like anthropomorphized lava lamps, all of 'em.)

On the other hand, I will be in San Diego next week for Comic-Con (no, I'm not a fangirl; I will be there, as Joan Didion once wrote about the experience of going to college and thereby exploring the realm of the abstract, "on a forged passport"). But I'll be digging it anyway: I love the SD convention center, and the nearby gas lamp district with all those bitchin' art galleries. I'll be breaking in my new videocam at the convention, though I cannot vouch in advance for the quality of the footage.

But let me know if you'll be nearby and might feel an overwhelming urge to buy me a good cup of coffee (or a martini, for that matter). It's what you'd expect: there are certain parties I must attend, and those that I can blow off. So try me.

And I'll most definitely be at Siggraph this August. (Though the Free Pass Fairy hasn't been here yet. Hm. Free Pass Fairy, are you reading? Chop, chop.) I've been trying to talk the other locals into getting a room/suite for one night downtown so I can crash in his/her/their/its room instead of having to drive back home. But none of my friends seem to understand that my need to party trumps that $200 or whatever it is that's burning a hole in their pocket. (I have no idea what rooms cost in downtown Los Angeles. I don't care. I only know that I'm being asked to engage in mature behavior by attenuating my drinking, and that the very idea is offensive to me. Someone was supposed to simply take care of that problem, and I'm suffering. Suffering.)

So if you're going to be in L.A. for that computer graphics thingamabob in August, let me know. Especially if you've got a room. I'll be by around 2:30 a.m. with a sleeping bag and a bad case of the giggles. If you try to cop a feel, I'll blow your brains out with my Glock. But in the friendly way. The good way. I happen to b a great shot when I'm in my cups.

Where I am, tonight, if you must know, is in Glendale, California: I'm playing The Slider Game. The Slider Game is that fun little romp in which one opens various windows in the condominium, figuring out which ones will let in the most noise. Or, rather, the least amount of noise, but the maximum amount of air. This involves computing the way voices bounce off of the neighborhood's closest swimming pools and various external walls. At least, it would if I were one of you engineering types—but I'm not. Instead, I'm employing the Empirical Method to see how well I can cross-ventilate this place without enduring too many screams of childish laughter from the local kids, or too many earnest discussions over strong coffee in Armenian. (Because earnest people make me cranky, no matter what language they are speaking.)

Now some idiot is going to suggest that I turn on the A/C. No. We do not turn on the A/C unless the temperature reaches 100 degrees. Did my forebears, crossing the Oregon Trail in their covered wagons, go around turning on the air when the ambient temperatures were in the double-digits? They did not. They merely had an extra glass of pinot grigio that afternoon as they watered the horses. Or, if all their friends were having fun in Austin, TX, or in SF, CA at some sort of blog-related conference, they treated themselves to an extra olive in their martinis that evening as they circled the wagons.

The next morning, they started out again, ferrying the rest of their charges out here to the West Coast for whatever reasons people came West in those days. (Gold, or agriculture, or filmmaking, or computer programming, or defense subcontracting/space exploration: it's all the same, no?)

I come from pioneer stock, and I'm tough. No air-conditioning for me. It's cooling down, anyway. I might have some mango-pineapple juice, though. The white-trash-WASP forebears were way into that stuff as well.