Small Wonders

Things sure to take a late-summer heat wave to new levels of torture: Woolen long-johns. A car without air-conditioning. Ten manic girls camped out in your living room. Last week we entertained a gaggle of princesses for our 9-year-old's sleepover birthday. Have you noticed how kids' birthdays seem to last an entire week? Seven days early: “My birthday is this week! Can I open a present?” The day before: “It's my birthday eve. Can I open a present?” At 11:50 p.m. that night: “I can't sleep.

Writing about my summer vacation or the random thoughts on being human that cross my mind each week doesn't always generate a lot of feedback. But open a debate on religion and politics and the flood gates open. Last week I posed a sensitive question: With many conservative evangelical Christians having historically labeled the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as a cult, how can they support a presidential candidate who is Mormon? Many devout Christians guided, above all else, by their faith find themselves having to decide whether voting for a Mormon legitimizes an institution they have long vilified and with which their doctrine is fundamentally at odds.

History is the chronicle of divorces between creed and deed .  - Louis Fischer As recently as 2004, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints - Mormons - were excluded from participating in events organized by the National Day of Prayer Task Force, the largest Christian grassroots organizer of annual National Day of Prayer observances. The task force is chaired by Shirley Dobson, wife of James Dobson, founder of the conservative Christian activist group Focus on the Family.

Dear Hollywood, As a lifelong admirer, consumer of your work and member of your workforce, now that the summer movie season is over, I feel it is my responsibility to make the following request: Please stop making Spider-Man movies! Seriously. Use your spidey-sense to think of something else to do with $200 million. In 2002 you brought us “Spider-Man.” Fine. In 2004 its sequel, “Spider-Man 2.” Expected. And since all successful franchises and celebrity deaths come in threes, in 2007 you gave us “Spider-Man 3.” You had to do it. We understand.

Words fail sometimes. I stood in the doorway of my next-door neighbors' house Tuesday morning, saying goodbye to a family of friends as they prepared to move across the country, and suddenly lacked all the important things that should be said in such word-worthy moments. That's the trouble with people that call themselves writers. They're often better on the page than in person. Ask anyone who knows me. But, we also get the chance to say on paper what we could not in person.

I met my deadline this week. I turned in a particularly entertaining rant about Hollywood and her lack of creativity. Then we got news about the shooting in an Aurora, Colo., movie theater that left 12 dead and dozens more wounded. So we'll save my original column for another time and take a breath to reflect on one more senseless massacre. In the face of these kinds of tragedies, it's natural for us to wonder, “what if that was me or my child in that theater?” I'm already hearing people say that their kid or friend went to one of the many midnight premieres across the country or how they know someone who lives in Aurora.

I'm tired. So very tired. You could say I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore. But I won't be beckoning you to your windows to curse the world. I don't know what good that would do anyway. Some months ago, I told myself I was going to avoid writing politically charged columns because I'm the “feel-good” columnist and have a pathological need to be liked. A recent personality profile said my communication style was “considerate.” That may or may not be true.

You learn something new every day. Every second, in fact. I was sitting in a meeting at work recently, in a gilded conference room high above our haze-shrouded city, surrounded by some of the most frighteningly intelligent minds in the entertainment industry: broadcast engineers. These are the men and women who find joy in tracking and configuring satellite uplinks, manipulating the traffic of media files through vast chasms of servers and transmitters into our homes. They play chess with rocket scientists and brain surgeons.

The kids are out of school, and the world is beginning to smell like hot pavement. Morning gloom gives way to hazy blue and long summer afternoons spent in the swimming hole. It may be the pool in your backyard, or your neighbor's; maybe the community pool, the beach, a pond or creek in the woods. For me, it's the pool at the private country club near my childhood home. But before pictures form in your mind of haughty exclusivity, caddies and pretentiousness, know that I am talking about the Chevy Chase Country Club.

There is a place in the borderlands between Burbank and Glendale, in the seam that's neither city, though some map surely has decided, where food and life intersect. Not here nor there, it's tucked in the corner of a strip mall, defying limits, definition and time, in the way old friendships should. And it's here, at Sushi Nishi-Ya while on a “man date” with an old friend, that I discovered a new word for friendship and for food: Omakase. “Chef's choice.” “Just tell me what you don't like,” the signs on the window and wall above the bar exclaim.