I'll be running away from home in the next few weeks. Yup, just like when I was six or seven and had decided that I was going to move into the oak tree in the front yard next to the Crepe Myrtles. I brought my most important possessions with me: my favorite headband, my "Grease" t-shirt with John Travolta decal (or as my dad called him, "Johnny Revolting") and some sort of stick for hunting birds or squirrels, though I was more interested in befriending them than in killing them, but a runaway gal's gotta eat. Also, if you look in the upper right corner of the photographic evidence of this moment, you'll see there is what appears to be a tambourine. I think I thought I could earn money by performing Linda McCartney-style musical routines from the tree. In this my upcoming new version of a runaway adventure, my treehouse will be a fifth floor walk up in the East Village and I'll be bringing my knives and leaving my headbands at home (my Bangs-Not-Botox make a headband wholly unnecessary). And John Travolta won't be an iron-on on my shirt, but probably will be in a bathhouse getting an erotic massage in Chelsea. Oh how life has changed in 33-34 years!

Hopefully I'll have some funny kitchen tales from my three weeks away from home, and I fully intend to bore you endlessly with iPhone photos and tales of accidentally grating my fingers along with the parmesan cheese, so do stay posted for the live blogging of my kitchen humbling.

But until then I'm teenager sitting in the Pacific Palisades. And nothing, absolutely nothing, brings on feelings of finite mortality quite like being responsible for a now-almost-grown-but-still-kind-of-useless human being that you've known since he was two. Well, that and the RadioLab meditations on death and dying that I heard on my way over to his parents' house on Sunday. And the fact that I'm forty and I'm so untethered that I'm even available and desperate enough to housesit for someone else. I'm clearly the Jerri Blank of the 90272.

Even before I got to the beautiful house with a pool (yes, I'm caring for a kid, but I'm so totally also getting a tan), before I even left the parking lot of my loft for this quick two week detour, I was already feeling anxious and a little sad...