Blu Jam Cafe | Los Angeles, California

So apparently when I go to Los Angeles I turn into a completely different human being and actively seek out things like carrot-celery-cucumber juice. (The most annoying part? The damn juice tasted like heaven on toast, thereby very much not supporting my lifelong theory that healthy rabbitish food of the sort typically eaten by denizens of the Organic Coast tastes like sandpaper. Ugh.)

Francesca and I went to breakfast at the Blu Jam, in West Hollywood, because we were in need of blueberry pancakes...but then I (completely inexplicably) ordered that carrot-celery-cucumber juice. And so I figured what the hell, while I was at it I might as well get super weird and get The Ginger Shot, because I'm at the start of a cold and Francesca assured me that the shot would fix it.

Erin and I were making pizzas for dinner the other day and she said, "Oh, we should use the extra dough to make calzones for lunch tomorrow." And when I replied, all offhand-like, "Sure, that sounds good. I've never had one before," there was this long silence, and I looked over to see Erin staring at me like I had just burst out into a rousing rendition of "Don't Rain On My Parade."

So apparently never having eaten a calzone is kind of strange. And apparently it's extremely strange for someone who spent the bulk of her life living in various New York City apartments, all of which were located approximately ten feet away from a pizza place (or three).

(If we're being totally honest here, I'm not even sure I could have told you what a calzone looks like. I had a vague impression of it being lumpy and bready with...something or another inside, but I think that's also a decent description of a gyro, a.k.a. another thing that I couldn't have described very well even upon pain of death until five minutes ago, when I googled it. And since we're tangentially on the topic of gyros, I also feel that it's important to let you know that up until the age of twelve I confused the word "gyro" with the word "orgy," which means that I had an extremely skewed interpretation of that photo of a woman eating a meat-filled sandwichy-thing that's posted on the door of every Italian to-go place in New York.)