We're still getting cool mornings in Los Angeles. May Gray, we tell each other, reminding ourselves that this is how it always is. And now, June Gloom. I've been craving sun. I slink out on the porch and find that beam that hits the chair right around noon, when the marine layer burns off. If it burns off.

I should buy a sun hat. Shouldn't let that high noon hit my face.

Is there such thing as a cool sun hat? Not on me. I had a hat, a floppy straw one I found for that cross-country shoot three years ago, after much ordering and returning and hand-wringing. I wore it dutifully in Arizona, up into Utah, and for ten straight days in Mississippi, but I kept getting icky compliments from the crew. "Cute hat!" someone would say every day, in that, like, you-look-adorable tone. (Honestly, if you tell me anything I'm wearing is cute, I will second-guess it for the rest of time. Don't. Wanna. Look. CUTE.) And so one day in Vermont, I very roughly smashed my cute hat into my backpack and oops I ruined it.

☀️🙄

But what am I even. You're here for the taco!

On a blustery Tuesday last week, R took me to Bar Ama for lunch. We had the place to ourselves. I'd been there for dinner a few years before, and I remembered it being delicious. Crowded. Good cocktails. I guess I didn't have a taco, because it never landed on the map. But then, recently, I happened to hear a rumor about Bar Ama's off-menu puffy taco, and I got obsessed.