The Taco Traveler

She's massaging my scalp. She was cute when I walked in, and now, with a warm towel over my eyes, another with a light menthol scent covering my chin, her strong fingers rubbing my hair, mussing, tangling and then pulling those tangles smooth as she brings my hair to a point of concentration at the back of my neck where the water drips into the bowl, her wrists abrading on my two-day beard, she is more beautiful than ever.

She pulls off the eye-towel and leans me up in my chair, and I come groggily back to reality. "Wow. You should have a deal with InSpa," I say. "Like crack, you know... the first little bit is included with your haircut but walk on down to our partner for a full hour of bliss." She smiles, says something awkward about there being an InSpa right down the street (which is why I mentioned it in the first place), and I'm brought back to an idea I've wondered about for a while now -- whether my conversation/flirting creates an awkwardness more often for good reasons or for bad.

It's a little of both, to be sure -- I just wish I were better able to tell when I should shut up and when they want me to continue. There are women I talk to who seem to be attracted, and the awkwardness there is a shyness, maybe something they're unable or unprepared to deal with for whatever reason, or maybe their shyness is their way of dealing with it (works for me), yet they apparently enjoy the things I say or the way I look at them. Then there are the women who are clearly thinking "As if!" and the awkwardness comes from their inability to tell me off because they're in a position where they're supposed to be nice, which makes conversing with waitresses and hair stylists tricky.

I'm a smiler, an observer, a conversationalist and a flirt. I love making a day brighter with a smile, and a beautiful smile returned can make my whole week. But I hate those occasional times when I seem to make a girl uncomfortable with my flirting eyes or some other sort of apparently unwanted sentiment. I'm not a big fan of boundaries, but not a day goes by that I don't wish someone would invent a pair of super-infrared (or super-something) glasses, like the spray that reveals a laser beam alarm tripline, that would help me figure out where the invisible boundaries lie before I cross them. I'd pay thousands for those glasses.

I wrote a lot in college, but that was way before blogs so I have notebooks somewhere crammed full of ink. I worked at the downtown San Diego Marriott Hotel & Marina, and I'd head down to work early and sit at The Upstart Crow Bookstore & Coffeehouse, next door at the touristy shopping village, and amongst the books, at a table between the poetry and the philosophy, I'd write about everything. I'd describe people and the things they were doing as practice in observation and detail. I'd pull a Bukowski off the shelf and read and then I'd scribble my own odd and over-caffeinated poetic ramblings. Then I'd go to work and serve expensive wine and nice meals to tourists and business travelers in crystal goblets and on bone china plates.

After graduate school when I got all technical and started making money from being all technical, I quit writing for the most part, and only really took it up again after my divorce a few years ago. In recognition of this return to something that really makes me happy, my ex-wife bought me a divorce gift: an onyx and silver Mont Blanc pen. When she gave me this pen she said: "Someday you'll be sitting in a coffee shop or something and this pen will be a conversation starter. A pretty girl will see it in your hand or in your shirt pocket. She'll see that little white peak and she'll know it's a Mont Blanc." Sure, it's a little bit pretentious to assume that a $200 pen would make a significant difference, but it's just a simple fact that I like more sophisticated, more wordly girls. Maybe it's not a key indicator of worldliness and sophistication, but it's an indicator nonetheless.

I've used that pen for three years now, both sailing and ashore. My notebook and my pen are my loneliness crutches -- they're what I did while alone on my boat or now when I'm alone in a cafe or a restaurant and want to keep myself busy and not just stare at my phone or a bar's television. I've filled notebooks, ships logs and travel journals with roughed-out blog entries, sailing adventures, poems, screenplay ideas and even some novel outlines. I've done a lot of writing practice and when offshore I've even pre-written emails I'd transcribe later when I felt like turning on my computer. I've gone through six or seven refills.

This re-immersion in writing and creativity has made me an exceptional online date. I have a great story that includes lots of travel, passion, adventure and the pursuit of a better sort of life. I can write and talk about almost anything; I said in a dating profile once I can talk "from huntin' to Hemingway, Joseph Campbell to nanoscience, which makes me great arm candy at holiday parties. Plus, I own my own tux!" I photograph fairly well (from some angles better than others). I'm kind and generally friendly, and when I'm intrigued I can talk on the phone for hours like a teen-aged girl.

So what's the problem? The problem is I'm actually too good at online dating - at sharing my cool story and listening to cool stories, becoming too interested too soon in someone I've yet to meet, and twice now in the last few years I've flown to different corners of the country to meet girls I've been fascinated by in email, IM, text, phone... only to find at the very first glance (or smell, or touch) that there was absolutely no chance of anything working out longer-term. And in the end, the in-person failure of this deep virtual connection always hurts one or both of us.

I was in San Diego, November of 2007, when I saw S_'s online profile at Match.com. She looked amazing -- cute and sassy with her perfectly-formed sentences and textual wit. She appeared on my screen as a suggested match after I'd written someone else ("Here are some other users you might like..."). But she was all the way back in Seattle. I read her profile and was intrigued but bummed that I hadn't seen her profile before I'd left Seattle. But I emailed her anyway, something to the effect of: "I'm out of your range, both age-wise and distance (I just left Seattle a month ago on my way down the coast), but I just wanted to let you know your profile made me smile. You sound amazing and cool and sweet. Best of luck to you. Take care." And she wrote me back, her tone almost arms-crossed-pouty, harumph (which is the perfect way to get to me) about how it wasn't fair to write her something so nice but to be so far away and on my way farther.

But we didn't let it go. We emailed a few times, and email led to instant messaging, which led to texting (drunk-texting, even), and finally, while IM-ing and wondering what we'd think of each others' voices, I just called her. For the next few weeks we talked nightly, sometimes for hours, or sometimes she'd not talk at all and just listen as I rattled off anything -- I'd make up a story about nothing or I'd recount a sailing adventure as she drifted off to sleep. She loved my voice and wouldn't let me stop. She'd sigh contentedly and I'd lay there on my boat and enjoy the sound of her contentedness.

I was visiting my boys in Florida when S_ and I decided we'd had enough -- we absolutely had to meet. It had been five or six weeks of... yes, really, falling in love without even ever having seen the other person. I wrote her a poem because she'd never had one written for her, which I thought an injustice; every girl, by the age of 29, deserves at least one poem. This was hers:

And another, an untitled, never-delivered haiku:

I re-routed my return trip to San Diego to make a three-night stop in Seattle to meet S_ and also get into the office. Because we had a meeting with investors my company even picked up the hotel room.

When I first saw her at the airport, she was amazing -- everything I'd hoped. She was wearing white jeans and a light blue shirt. She had big gorgeous brown eyes and amazing hair to match. She was just as fit and as glowingly beautiful as she appeared in her photos. I could go on and describe every detail, but the only detail that mattered, ultimately, was this: upon the first kiss and the follow-up first hug, I knew immediately that I didn't like her smell. And it wasn't her fault -- she wasn't dirty or neglectful. It wasn't her perfume, shampoo or soap. It was pheromones, body. It was smell you can't wash off or cover.

There was some research done that I'm too lazy to look up right now, but basically there were ten women and ten men. The men worked out in these t-shirts and when the shirts were good and sweaty, they handed them over and the researchers had the women smell them one-by-one and rate the attractiveness of the man who'd worn it. There were some likes, some loves, some ho-hums and some turn ons, but one result was surprising because of how utterly distasteful this smell was to the woman. It turns out the woman and the man were related.

I'm positive I wasn't related to S_. I didn't recoil and I wasn't even offended, but there was something about that most key of senses that wasn't working for me. I tried my best to work through it because I so wanted her to be as perfect there as she was in every other way, but in the end I had to end it because it felt somehow like nature was trying to tell me something. How do you tell someone "I don't like your smell"? Well... you don't. You spoil the night and the weekend at 11:45 on a drunken New Year's Eve, after she'd taken the train down from her family's visit to LA to see your boat, your home. You tell her that you've decided for certain that you don't want to have any more kids.

Since I've been here in Panama City, Florida, I haven't met a single girl I've been interested in dating. This is an exceptionally churchy town in a county that voted 70% for McCain this past presidential election. Those are two fairly significant impediments to finding a girl who won't despise me and my beliefs, let alone be a soul mate. So I set up a profile online and set my location to Washington D.C. (which is where I'll be, starting sometime around mid-June).

Less than a week after I set up that profile, I started talking with E_. Smart and artistic, we hit it off right away, and in less than a week we'd already exchanged enough emails to believe that there was something good there. We talked for hours on the phone, and after just two weeks I cashed in some miles and flew to D.C. to see the city I'll be moving to soon and to meet a girl. It was almost like I'd completely forgotten about S_ and the whole idea that you simply cannot fall for someone until you explore way more than what you can share in text or voice. This first meeting, too, in the metro station outside the airport, was much less than expected, and this time without even a hint of physical attraction.

So after all of this, once again I've got mixed feelings about the whole idea of connection-creation via remote communication. It would be great if someday those over-blown expectations would be met, but I've taken a significant step backward and modified my approach (if you can call it an "approach" at all). I hid my D.C. profile and have decided to just stick it out here in Florida, solo and content until the actual move. But if nothing else, my trip to D.C. for that date showed me what a great city and what amazing and beautiful people await me. After the failed date I spent two days walking around the National Mall, seeing the sights and museums like a tourist but feeling like that city -- if it were a bit warmer -- would be just the place for me.

I heard the sounds and smelled the smells of a city, my good shoes clomping past drum-beat buskers on the Chinatown sidewalk and Rodin busts at the Hirshhorn. I felt the echoes and marble-slab vibrations at the Lincoln Memorial.

And yes, of course, while out at dinner one night I even met a real-live girl. Beautiful and brilliant and even more world-aware than myself, she was there with a friend as I sat down a couple seats away at the sushi bar. I pulled out my journal and my pen and began working on something -- maybe it was the beginning of this entry, which started as simple frustration over yet again unfulfilled expectations. At one point her friend went to the restroom and I said something about the fact that they'd been speaking Spanish. Maybe I said something about Mexico. We talked for a couple of minutes and I told her I was in town for a failed blind date but happily looking around anyway as I'd be moving there soon. Her friend returned and they got back to their food and their conversation; I got back to my writing.

A little while later, as she and her friend were trying to sign their checks, rushing to make a late-night movie, the waiter's pen failed them. "May I borrow your Mont Blanc?" she asked, saying Mont Blanc with a perfect French accent.

She signed her check, pulled out a business card and wrote her number on the back. "That's my non-work number, if you have any questions about the neighborhood...."

I smiled, thanked her, and remembered how nice it is to meet a real person as the first step towards connection -- to know right away that the attraction part is there. Most of all, it's nice to know that no matter how meaningful the words may be later, how sweet the voice on the phone if that happens, how pretty the two-dimensional photo, how perfect the giggle, there's a real, physical frame of reference that your nose, your eyes and your body have already pre-approved.

TT

She was on the cover of InStyle magazine, a special new issue called "Look Your Best," and she did - she looked better than I've ever seen her. From Kelly Bundy to Jesse Warner (seriously, I was sad when that show ended), to the last time I saw her as Ron Burgundy's love interest in Anchorman..., she's always been amazing, but it's not until you actually read InStyle that you remember how cool she actually is (yes, I'd known it before, somehow, but I can't remember exactly how I knew she was smart and cool). She's a girl whose look says she knows more than you do about what you know, and she's right. She looks especially brilliant in contrast with the girl in the Calvin Klein ad in the same magazine (page 3), who comes out of the ocean with a look on her face (in her parted lips) that says "Um, okay, to make you feel even more ridiculous I'm going to say this in the sexiest way possible: Like, no way will I even go get coffee with you, dork." Is that Eva Mendes? Who cares.

What's funny about this new thing, this new crush, is that the only other celebrity crush I've ever written about (I think), was with Jennifer Aniston, and Christina played her sister on a few episodes of Friends. Mmmmmmm, sisters... I hope they find a way to remain close after our pretend love triangle. No, you'll never see what I wrote about Jen because I can't find it and have no idea what I said, but it was a stupid poem I posted to the Usenet long long ago praising her on rec.tv.friends or something like that. I'm over her, though. Jen, though she exudes smarts, coolness and class at the same time, seems now to carry with her a sort of sadness. Give me a girl who likes wearing jeans and hanging' out at home, who does crosswords and reads David Sedaris. Give me a girl who can look Audrey Hepburn stunning and be Jenny McCarthy crazy. And maybe (CAA interns, you there to pass this on?), just maybe, give me a girl like this who feels like going for a long sail.

TT

[Ed. Update: I just realized another reason she's so awesome - she was a key member of one of the greatest Saturday Night Live skits of all time, the "Van Down by the River" skit with Chris Farley. Also, if you read celeb news at all, you've heard she's beat it, but to ensure she remains cancer-free she had a double mastectomy. She says, though, "I'm going to have cute boobs 'til I'm 90, so there’s that" How awesome is that quote? I wish her all the best. Now... back to my Chris Farley DVD where the Chippendale's skit is starting.]

This content is copyright Sean Anderson 2007-2010, reprinted via site feed. Original content at http://www.tacotraveler.com.

No, you won't be using eHarmony any more to search for the perfect girl. Not that you can search for anyone, anyway, but you know.... Or maybe you don't? To explain: For a while, eHarmony is fun. It's so easy and pressure-free. You spent 20 minutes, months ago, filling out a detailed multiple-choice personality analysis, then another 30 minutes to fill out your profile and upload some photos, and they magically matched you up with women who are supposed to be your perfect companion. Well... after eight months you met only one girl in person.

With Amy you raced through the eHarmony steps in two days and a couple weeks later you had an amazing first date. You spent four hours at Purple Cafe in Seattle drinking too much wine and eating too much steak and cheese and chocolate and then the kiss goodbye.... But on the second it was obvious to both of you that the wine and the nighttime was responsible; the chemistry wasn't there in the daytime. You exchanged emails / phone calls / texts with only one other person, and with her the interest just sort of withered over time as she traveled one way, you traveled the other, and you both got tired of the effort.

You completely understand that your profile isn't for everyone. You're in Mexico eighty percent of the time and with your boys the other twenty. Most damaging: you probably don't want more kids, but you like the sort of girl who wants kids. Or maybe deep down you want more kids but you just want the right girl to convince you. At the same time there are some interesting things in that profile, too. You're adventurous, happy, travel-y and since you left the desk and office behind you're in better shape than you've been since college, and your eyes aren't nearly so puffy.

So, outside of the two aforementioned eHarmony "relationships," here's what a day on eHarmony looks like:

1) Wake up to six new emails describing new girls chosen for you because of your high mutual compatibility.

2) See that two of the six have already looked at your profile but chose neither to reject you nor contact you. Sickeningly traditional dating simile #1: as the man, you'll almost always have to initiate contact.

3) Read through the profiles (or sometimes, admitedly, just stop on the photos) and determine whether this girl really is a compatible match. If she's not, reject her ("Close" her) by selecting a radio button, clicking a button, and your scientifically chosen compatible match is gone forever. As for the radio buttons, select either "Based on statements in their profile...," "Other" or "I'd like to pursue other matches at eHarmony." Try not to select "Other" if she's unattractive.

4) Reject any outright if, for the profile section "Share something only your best friends know about you," she shows absolutely no creativity or self-awareness whatsoever and shares something to the effect of "Well, only my best friends are supposed to know that. Tee hee." Unless she's hot.

5) If she seems friendly, smart, outgoing, happy, adventurous, she knows how to construct a sentence and you think her pictures are nice (or maybe she just doesn't photograph well?), send some multiple-choice / short answer questions sometimes tailored to her but mostly just the five you always send.

6) Glance at the list of the other twenty-five women in the queue who are stuck on "Waiting for her answers." Close out any who haven't gotten to selecting their radio button answers for at least 10 days. If she's really got potential, send her a "nudge" but realize by saying "Hey, remember when I sent you those multiple choice questions ten days ago? Could you, um, answer them?" you'll probably seem desperate. No, you can't customize the message to make it funny or make yourself seem intersting enough to make them want to respond, either. That would bring too much personality into the process. eHarmony will create the message for you. You'll never know what that message says; you were never nudged because like the rest of the world you're almost always online and you never had a problem answering questions. Sickeningly traditional dating simile #2: wait X (or XX!?) days to respond, so you don't seem too desparate.

7) Repeat #6 for the other three stages before you get to "Open Communication." Read the final, congratulatory and cautionary message from the good doctor and begin falling in love, or not. Reach this stage with exactly three of the five-hundred and sixty three women chosen as highly compatible matches for you based scientifically on eHarmony's 29 Dimensions of Compatibility.

8) Regret all the time you spent: the real-life girls you never met, the words you didn't write, the hundred-million-dollar websites you didn't create because you spent fifteen minutes a day (3 or 4 days a week, anyway) for eight months clicking radio buttons and wondering what everyone was doing instead of either rejecting you or answering your questions.

So... yeah, you could say that you're frustrated with the general attitude there, and the fact that the scientific nature of the process makes it nearly impossible to develop any chemistry (heh) or generate any true excitement about the person (or, if it's there, you certainly can't sense it). What's better? Well, because you can write, you love match.com where you can search for anyone in the world and browse through profiles. When you see a profile that seems interesting or makes you smile, whether she's compatible or not, you can send her an email and let her know you liked her profile. Or, you know, you usually say more than that, but the bottom line is it's a very well-populated site that doesn't take the excitement out of the process by making it all just eButtony.

And yes, you realize that the second-person perspective is hard to pull off and can really get annoying.

TT

Preamble: Yes, this is (currently) 12 years old, and my youngest son is almost the age of the little boy in the story. Wow, time flies....
 

Post Long-Distance Blind Date Ramblings
For all my friends because I'm a big fat blabber-mouth.

03/21/96 9:17 PM

Okay, I'm going to ramble for a while here because I promised a full report to many of you regarding the blind date I just flew to Boise for. But because I've got such an overwhelming feeling of goodness right now (sorry about that), and because that feeling isn't necessarily because of the date, itself, I have to go beyond the date's scope. Please, either be patient or delete - I have to get this stuff out. I'll try to keep it clear, but I'm also trying to keep Edgar happy by returning his clicks, "rerro"s and "whayadoon"s over my shoulder, so I may get scrambled. There - I just gave him a peanut, so he should be okay for a little while.

I've had three major spurts of writing in my life. The first was when I first fell in love, and I kept a journal in which I wrote sappy stuff that back then I called "poetry:"

. . .
I try to keep my thoughts at bay,
At least until that Summer soon.
When I see her beginning June. . .
Thoughts spoken on that longer stay.
. . .

When that kind of writing was over, I didn't write again until the relationship that started that writing was over. I wrote essays instead of journal entries, and fairly good poems instead of bad (I think they were better because they were darker and more black-turtleneck coffeeshop kind of poems). The third time is now, and the reason I feel like writing now and lately is that I feel, more and more, that my life would make a fairly comical screenplay, where the first and last scenes look something like this:

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SCENE ONE

Players:

Lauren: Sister, 28-ish.
Rochelle: Sister, 24-ish.
Me: 27-ish.
Parents cleaning up in the kitchen or something; they never appear, but we know they're there.

Fade in to a Christmas scene - wrapping paper and ribbons strewn about; decorated tree drying out by the fire.

L & R are huddled around S - with the passing of the scene below, they grow more and more excited, talking over each other as they realize the are visualizing the same scene. As they begin describing what they see, the imaginary scene takes over in a cloudy, dreamy frame.

R: Well, I see you with someone very specific: she's got dark brown hair, straight and kinda shoulder length, like Phoebe Cates . . .

L: And blue or green eyes, very pretty . . .

S: (smiling, but with sarcasm) But on the Ouija board Elvis said she'd be a brown-eyed blonde.

L: I'm serious! And she's really smart . . .

R: And she's like, reading a book on a white sofa with her legs tucked beneath her

L: . . . in a metropolitan flat, and you can see a sky-line out these big huge picture windows.

R: And she's wearing academic-looking glasses, and satiny pajamas.

L: And she's drinking a glass of red wine.

R: (dreamily) Yeah. . . .

SCENE THE LAST

Begin airplane noises (blind date was previously discussed in film: father met this girl on a plane trip ("Are you single?" "I have a son. . . .")

Fade in to close-up of , well, Me. Just like Dustin Hoffman at the beginning of "The Graduate," looking kind of numb/worried/open-eyed-unconscious.

Ride from Boise airport to the Airport Holiday Inn.

Check in. Long walk to room.

Call The Date, Michelle. Phone conversation is casual, as they've spoken several times before.

S: Hi!
M: You here?
S: Yep. You ready?
M: Mmm hmm.
S: Wanna meet in the bar?
M: You still wouldn't recognize me. I have your picture.
S: Oh. Yeah.
M: What number are you in?
S: 505
M: 505 - Wow! You're way over there. Why don't you come to my room?
S: Okay. Number. . .
M: 215
S: Be right there.

Hair check, tooth-brush, armpit-check. Deep breath. Begin purposeful walk down endlessly long corridor to her room. Pan to numbers on doors as they flash by: 257-255-253. Amplify breathing. Pan other side of hallway: 230-228-226. Close-up: bead of sweat. 221-219-217 . . . Gasp - as the door that should be 215 has no number - it's a housekeeping closet. Two more steps: 215.

Two quick knocks. Peephole goes dark and then light again as the chain is unchained. Door opens. It's the girl from L & R's imagination in Scene One.

M: Hi.

Face shot of, well, Me. Grin grows wider. Much blushing, joy, & merriment are had by all. Happy Hollywood ending.

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So, you know what? Things don't always go like they do in the movies. Michelle wasn't really The One, though she is really super-nice and we managed to get along great and keep the awkward lapses in conversation to a minimum. The long walk down the corridor is totally true, right down to the housekeeping closet that freaked me out because it's where 215 should have been. We had dinner at Olive Garden and then went searching for a movie to see, since there was nothing else going on in Boise (this morning, I asked the girl at the front desk if she had a rack of those brochures full of things to do in Boise, and she said "Sure!" and went around a corner and came back with two brochures, both of which told me the best places to go shopping. One brochure was actually entitled: "OUTLET SHOPPING IN BOISE!"). We couldn't find a movie we wanted to see, so we ended up just sitting in her room (cause she had a business-person's kind of suite with a couch), drinking a bottle of chardonnay, and watching Sylvester Stallone's "Assassins" on Pay-Per-View. No romance - just getting to know each other.

Today I woke up at 8 and went to her room, then we went down to breakfast. Then she went to work (she's a traveling salesperson - I've got a whole heapin' handful of CIBA contact lens eye drops if anyone wants a bottle) while I sat around writing and playing pool in the Holiday Inn Holodome: wooooo!

When she got back from visiting her opthamologists we went and played miniature golf and HORSE (basketball). We split the golf (I won one round; she won the other), and I crushed her mercilessly at HORSE.

We had lunch at Red Robin (I had a guacamole burger; she had a chicken Caesar), and then we sat around talking at the airport for an hour or so before her flight. She said (only half-joking, I think) that I should meet her next week when she goes to Missoula. I said "Right. Let me know when business takes you to Las Vegas." I told her I was planning a big tour of all my buddies in California late in the summer after my Jeep comes in, and that I'd divert my course to Utah because there's some great 4x4 trails there.

In sum: I'm sure we'll just be long-distance buddies.

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The best part of this trip came on the plane-ride home, where I sat next to this little dude named Michael: a cute little guy, 5 or 6 years old and really smart, polite, and talkative. His dad put him on the plane to go visit his mom in Seattle, and I ended up being essentially his babysitter for the hour-and-a-half flight. A beautiful young stewardess came by and gave him a couple coloring/activity books and Michael and I spent the entire plane ride talking about stuff like Jurassic Park and the virtues of Sega over Nintendo. (The stewardess--to answer your question--though she seemed impressed by how well I got along with Michael, also had a humongous rock on her finger). Michael insisted that his grandma has seen live dinosaurs because she's almost a hundred years old. He said this just after he also acknowledged that dinosaurs went extinct 10 million years ago:

"She's seen 'em! In cages!"

"Like in a zoo?"

"Yeah. And the T-Rex almost got out. He was like: Rrrraaaagh! against the cage when she was there. But the Stegasaurus just walks around."

"Oh. He's tame, and people like, pet him?"

"Yeah." He takes a big gulp of Pepsi, finishing it off.

"You know what?" he asks.

"Huh?"

"I like riding in riding in riding in planes cause you get to do stuff like like. . . like. I'm not sposed to have pop. Mom says it makes me crrrrrraaaaAAAYYYYZEEEEEE!"

Here's what's put me in such a good mood, and made me decide to write all this stuff down tonight: I was showing Michael how to apply the tattoos that come on the wrappers of his Fruit Stripe Gum (I told him: "When you see your mom at the gate, say 'Look, Mom! I love you so much I got tattoos for you!"). At one point he said to me, out of the blue: "You're the nicest person in the whole world. I can't wait to see my mom and say 'Hey, Mom, this is my friend.'"

Near touch-down, Michael saw a lady across the aisle putting on lipstick, and he pointed her out to me. He said: "I think girls are pretty when they put lipstick and stuff on."

I said: "Yeah, I think so, too, but I also think they're pretty when they don't put lipstick and stuff on. You know what, though? I bet that lipstick would make a really good, bright-red tattoo for you to show your mom." He looked more intently at the woman putting on the lipstick. He seemed distant and dreamy, maybe appreciative.

"Yeah," he said.

First we see the bubbles and know she's coming, but she brings her arms above her head to give the lobsters a couple seconds of sunshine and fame before her head breaks the surface. She removes her regulator and begins to explain excitedly to the viewers at home about the chase or the capture or the rock crag she had to crawl into to get these guys, but you motion for her first to remove her goggles. In her goggles she’s just another scuba diver who hauled up a couple of beautiful lobsters, but when she removes them it’s clear that she’s the star of this show. Not discounting your wit or sailing skills or your pseudo-Spanish as you interview the tortilla lady in her dark little shack (huddled over the hot stone and pat-pat-patting your flour lobster wrappers), the viewers don’t want to see you or hear you or even know you’re there. And truthfully, you’d rather be behind the camera anyway, showing the world what you get to see every day. Not just her but her in her world.

Her world is your boat and the ocean it travels upon. The yellowfin you hooked just outside Cabo and ate right there on the deck with wasabi and soy, not five minutes after you pulled it from the sea. Each week, this same time, this same channel, she shows us how to live: how she makes friends with her smile; how to be; how to, as Thoreau said, suck out all the marrow of life. And how, when eating life on camera, to never take an unattractive bite. And when the mega-resorts hail you on the SSB and ask you to stop by their docks for a couple days of golf and spa and their fish tacos and their finest cabaña, a poolside margarita or two (to ensure their grounds get enough exposure)… then she’ll live a little luxury too. Well, a massage is a requirement after enough time on a 43 foot sailboat!

You share your adventure in High Definition as you circle around the countries where seafood and tacos just work: Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, Panama, and through the canal to some of them again and Belize and then Mexico again. Filming Cuba as you pass her by, the required ten miles out, wishing you could make just a few brief stops to talk to the people and eat their food and taste their adventures, smoke their cigars.

After enough episodes you’ll return to land and work out a deal for the next season, when the show starts as The Taco Traveler in Key West and ends somewhere in the Mediterranean, maybe with something like tacos, but also with lots of cheese and wine, olives, puntillitas.... You and your star become The Tapas Travelers.