Vacation from a vacation: Palm Springs

Do you ever feel like you need another vacation right after you've come home from one? Despite loving the holidays, I came back to LA feeling a little frazzled and stressed as I thought about the coming "back to work" days. Why can't we be on vacation for-ev-er? Thankfully, after completing a little over a week of reality, hubs and I took off for a mini-getaway to reward ourselves. I had a positive meeting with my advisor and he had been rather productive. Both excellent reasons to head out east to the desert.

Palm Springs is one of my favorite places to hide. It's gone through many phases from swinging hotspot in the 50s and 60s to kind of passe retirement community in the 80s. Now, it's getting rather caliente again. The best part is that there's so little going on in the "downtown" that you can lay by a pool all day, indulging in the lastest trashy mag, completely guiltlessly. Every once in a while, someone brings you a drink or sprays a mist of cool water upon your warm skin. It's heaven. Especially when it's on someone else's dime.

We're out here now, doing just that, lounging by a pool and sipping on cocktails...as I blog, of course. The Palm Springs International Film Festival is in full swing, which is nice because it adds just a little bit of excitement to the atmosphere. Or so I thought. Our hotel is actually hosting a "private event" this afternoon...by the pool...where I am supposed to lounge and relax. Incredibly annoying "lounge" music, which can be more accurately defined as sad euro-pop easy listening is playing over and over but unsuccessfully covering up the din from the "private event". As I sit here in the sun watching the schmoozfest, I am coming up with my own super cool indie flick that will be the talk of the festival circuit next year. It's about a demure intellectual writer-type woman who escapes to Palm Springs to relax and perhaps get inspired. But there's this convention in town, the International Narcissists Annual Meeting. They take over the town and the demure woman has no where to go, to respite from the constant drone of self aggrandizement. The story leads up to her losing her mind and going postal on the party being hosted at her hotel. And by postal, I mean literally postal. She runs around sticking stamps on everyone's foreheads and has a US postal service truck pull up to pick up all of the annoying people and ship them to Naples...because Naples is hell on earth. Hee, hee.

Actually, hubs and I read a hilarious article this morning about this infamous gangster that was fugitive for some time. He apparent got so much sick joy out of killing people that a judge sentenced him to death. The best part was that he was a member of the Toonville gang of....the greater Burbank/Glendale area! We're going to write "The Glendale Gansta" together. (Called it!! ) Who needs another Mojito?