I was about an hour outside of Dallas when I saw the flashing lights in my rear view mirror. The police car was an SUV, and the lights swooped like a party van. I felt weirdly humble in that moment. Surely all that fuss is not for me.

Turns out, it was.

“You were going 83 in a 65,” the cop said after we pulled onto the shoulder of the road. “Is there a reason you’re speeding right now?”

I had been on the road for 11 hours. I was so tired. I missed my cat. My back hurt. Sometimes, when I’m singing a song, my foot presses harder on the accelerator pedal. “Not a good one,” I said. I handed him my license and registration. He had a mustache. Pink cheeks and jowly. The buttons of his shirt strained as he bent over. If this sounds like a cop stereotype, I’m sorry. It’s actually an accurate description.

“Where you coming from?” he asked.

“Alpine, Texas,” I said. I’d spent the last four days having a great visit with Julie and her family. That morning, I’d hugged her goodbye at 7:30am, hit the road, and about 60 miles later, veered onto the wrong interstate. This is an easy mistake to make. At least, that’s what I told myself as I wound through dusty farm roads, trying to get back on track. The screw-up lost me valuable time. A nine-hour trip became a 10-hour trip. After lunch, I had to stop in Abilene for two hours to do some work at a Huddle House. I wanted so badly to be home.

“What were you doing in Alpine?” he asked.

“Visiting my friend,” I said. I had that dizzy sensation that comes with nervousness. I felt like I was lying, even though I was telling the truth. He went back to his SUV and when he returned, motioned me out of the car. I stepped along the shoulder to where he stood, the air breezy with passing cars. He and another jowly and mustachioed officer stood there, both holding flashlights, though it was not yet dark.

“Ma’am, do you mind if we search your vehicle?”

“Oh, no, sure. Go ahead.”

That’s how it happened. It was that fast, and that casual. It’s like he was saying, “Ma’am, can I get this fuzz off your shirt?” Or, “Ma’am, do you want to see a picture of my son?” And my response was so instinctual and blase. Of course you can search my vehicle. Why wouldn’t I let two cops search my vehicle? We’re all friends here, on this random shoulder off I-20. 

I watched as Cop #2 dug in my purse, and flopped open my wallet. He rifled through my glove compartment, picking through my CDs like a friend in the passenger seat trying to figure out our next jams. Cop #1 was in my trunk, where my bags were kept. His hands ran along my jacket, my tank tops folded and squished in a suitcase. He unscrewed a metal jar that contained handmade goat’s milk soap — a gift from Julie’s friend Amanda — and sniffed it. I know for a fact that it smelled delicious: Peppermint and rosemary.

But my heart was pounding. I felt (the only word that came to me) violated. Why had I allowed him to do this? What kind of journalist was I?

I was not afraid they would find drugs. I don’t do drugs. Even when I was a hopeless little lush, passing out in the back of taxi cabs, I did not do drugs. I’ve gotten stoned maybe four times. Maybe six. The last time, I forgot the word for “table,” and I thought: Never again. This is some bullshit. So I knew for a fact I did not have any drugs in my car. But my mind was rolodexing through the names of everyone I have ever given a ride to, who might have accidentally/purposefully-because-it-happens-in-movies left some drug-type residue thing in my car. What else might the cops find? There are a lot of illegal things in this universe. There are a lot of embarrassing things in the universe.

I watched Cop #2 dig his hand along the bucket on the side door and it occurred to me how easy it would be to plant something there. Do I sound paranoid? Next time your car is randomly searched, see if it doesn’t activate a little paranoia in you.

I crossed my arms. I sighed. I cringed. Finally, I couldn’t stay silent anymore. “I’m sorry, but is there a reason you’re searching my vehicle? Was I suspicious in some way?”

The first cop looked at me with irritation. I think, some days, he wishes he had a different job. “Ma’am, we’ve had a lot of problems with people bringing narcotics over the border. I search nearly every vehicle I stop.”

The absurdity of this plunked me on the nose: I search nearly every vehicle I stop. For what? For a spliff and an old roach? I’m not going to pretend to know the complexities of the narcotics trade and its significance to the uniformed men of Whatever County Off I-20, but surely they have something better to do with their time than this? I thought of all the fast food containers that man has to stick his nose in, all the confrontations on the side of the road. All the huffy drivers crossing their arms. Do each of them submit as easily as I did?

I took a deep breath. “I’m just nervous watching you go through my stuff,” I said.

He gave me a look, almost like: A-ha! You’re nervous! That means you’re guilty! But we locked eyes, his hands on my nightslip, and then he said, “Yes, I understand,” and zipped my suitcase back up.

Eventually, they were done. “I’m going to leave you with a verbal warning,” the cop said. I was relieved. But as I drove away, I felt rattled. Later Julie would warn me to never consent to a search. She is a smart lawyer whose experience has taught her it is not a good idea. I value her judgement. Of course, I would have almost certainly gotten a ticket. But I wouldn’t have left with the guilty feeling that someone walked over me.

Now, I’m too tired to think. Twelve hours on the road. Back still cranked. I’m wearing the nightslip the cop stuffed back in my suitcase. But my cat is curled up at my feet. And I got what I wanted: I’m home now.

I wrote a story about quinceanera dresses, the fancy gowns worn by Hispanic girls on their 15th birthday. It is a story about the cultural evolution of Dallas, and about the tricky tensions of gentrification, but also, it is about dresses.

I spent a lot of time staring at those quinceanera dresses. At first I was like, “Those dresses are pretty.” And then I was like, “I think I might try on one of those dresses.” And then I was like, “GIMME THOSE DRESSES NOW!!” This might be akin to the fever of a new bride, or a spoiled teen gearing up for her big party, or Beyonce at the Grammys, but I am not any of those things. I’m just a 38 year old reporter who likes to play dress-up in sparkly things.

I went to this store in Oak Cliff called LA Glitter. Those dresses are spectacular. I recommend every 38-year-old who ever dreamed of attending the Oscars stop in there. It’s like a movie set. And the owner and designer, Jose Cerda, let me try on this beautiful red dress, and he posed me on a step so that I looked like a dainty little cupcake.

If you’re wondering if that’s my bra, it is. Sorry, mom.

You can read it here. This pretty much blows my chances at an invite to the Palm Beach Tan summer party.

I was lying in bed one Friday afternoon, typing on my laptop in a cocoon of happiness, when I discovered that my website had been hacked. There wasn’t much of a discovery process, really. My friend Aaron wrote an email with the subject line: “I think your website has been hacked.”

“Hacked” is such a violent word. Like something done with a battle ax. Or a scimitar blade that leaves limbs stumped and bloody. But mine was a simple attack of letters and numbers, deployed by a computer that probably looked similar to my own. Splattered with coffee stains. Weird fuzz between the keys.

I wandered over to my website, my sweet little website, and a red and gray warning exploded onto my screen. This site might harm your computer. It was like returning from vacation to find your house wrapped in CAUTION DO NOT CROSS tape with helicopters overhead. What the hell happened? I had no idea. Over the next few days, I got emails that echoed this sense of danger and catastrophe. “Your blog is attacking me!” one reader told me. Julie said: “It is scary when I visit your website. It is like someone is going to kill you.”

It was not supposed to be like this. For more than 10 years, I’ve been building that sweet little website, planting stories of hope and silliness into the soil outside the crooked green door, inside the rusty bars of the garden gate, hoping they might grow like sunflowers for you to stumble across one dreary afternoon on a walk through the world wide web. And now, visitors to my sweet little website were getting tackled into a dark alley and duct taped to a chair.

Of course, this happens all the time. Websites get hacked every day. In his original email, Aaron sent a link to a site that offered ways to fix the problem. I didn’t understand them. I didn’t understand any of it, which gave me a helpless, stammering feeling, like the house had all that CAUTION tape and the flutter of the choppers in the sky but no police had shown up to do anything about it. The whole block was waiting for me to bust down the door and handle the situation myself. Here, kid, take this gun.

I felt the sting of embarrassment that I have experienced before – that I have written about on this site before – for the way I didn’t really know how to operate my sweet little website. Rooms had been lightless for years. I could only perform the most basic operations. I kicked myself, because kicking myself is a familiar muscle movement. Why would I ______? How did I get this ______? Somehow, on the long and winding road that leads to 38 years old, I became an expert at diagnosing my deficiencies, but I am still a rank amateur when it comes to doing anything about them. I pouted. I sought sympathy on Facebook. I complained to friends. Can you believe? Why would anyone? I sat inside that CAUTION tape with a tear-streaked face, hoping some kind stranger might stop by and help. But kind strangers with skeleton keys to sweet little websites are very hard to come by these days.

My old buddy Mike, the person who set up that website for me way back in 2001, suggested I call the web hosting service (which had changed names three times during my tenure, never a good sign). It had not even occurred to me. One morning at 4am, when I couldn’t sleep, I spoke on the phone with a very nice man who had a Minnesota accent. He was not a Mac guy. He knew PCs. But he wanted to be useful, and he spent more than an hour on the phone with me trying to troubleshoot the situation, walking between the Mac on the other side of the office and the PC in front of him so that he could better narrate what was turning out to be a very confusing journey. In the end, it didn’t work. We sat on the phone in disappointed silence.

“Is there anything else I could help you with this evening?” he asked, and I had half a mind to ask him about his family, about his childhood, how he came to answer tech calls at the web hosting place, because it was 5am and we had been brought together by a technological disaster and an iPhone and I was ready to bond.

“No,” I said. “You were nice to stay with me so long.”

I missed him weirdly after we hung up. His voice made me feel a little less alone in that cocoon on my bed, with the laptop and its weird fuzz and its unsolved mysteries.

Weeks passed. Nothing happened. These two things have a way of going together.

Finally – finally! – I reached out to my friend Trey. He was one of the people who had offered to help me via Facebook, and eventually, I was smart enough to contract him to do that. Over the next week, he went about taking down all that CAUTION tape, clearing the hallways of suspicious activity. The birds started chirping again. The helicopters disappeared from above. It was such a relief when they were gone, to see the blue sky sparkling above me. So odd how your ears can adjust to such a hideous drone.

And now: My sweet little website is back. You see it on your screen right now. There are some changes. There will be more. Much like me, it is a work in progress. But don’t worry: We won’t really change. Here at Sarahhepola.com, we maintain a commitment to inconsistent postings and overlong preambles and random use of editorial “we.” Same shit, different font. You know?

I never learned why I was hacked. I don’t think it matters. I changed servers, made updates, installed new locks. Asteroids hit the earth sometimes. You cannot plan for them. What matters is what you do afterward. How you move forward. How you learn.

And I did learn a few things in my time away. I learned that my friends are there to help. I learned that help is always possible. I learned that beating myself up wastes energy that could be spent playing guitar in my kitchen, and reading short stories in bed, and planting sunflowers outside a crooked green door for some kind stranger to find one day at 4am, when they cannot sleep and would like to be reminded that they are not alone.

I learned that people missed me. And I missed them, too.

Maybe you saw the piece in the Atlantic with the subhead, “How online dating is threatening monogamy.” Of course, online dating is not threatening monogamy, but the clever bears at Atlantic Monthly knew we’d all get into a lather if they suggested it was. The truth is, online dating is too vast and popular to be doing any ONE thing. It’s just how we date now. So: Is dating ruining monogamy? I mean, it is certainly ruining my nights spent in pajamas watching “Storage Wars.”  Like all of human experience, dating can be strange and wonderful and disappointing. I wrote a piece about online dating — or just dating — in Dallas. You can read it here.

… from an interview he gave to Terry Gross on Fresh Air in 2002. He said, “I love beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.” And when I heard him say that, I picked up a notepad, wrote it down, and more than a decade later, I found it and put it here. And now, here is a picture of Bubba.

It was the fall of 2011 that I first started eating salted caramel gelato. I had gone into Paciugo a few blocks from my house on a whim. All those exotic flavors in deep metal vats. Black raspberry crème broulee. Black pepper olive oil. When I was a kid, I ate pink bubble gum ice cream. I wanted all the candy in my mouth at once. But sweets are more sophisticated now. Not ice cream, but gelato. Not bubble gum, but orange saffron, chocolate jalapeno.

The flavor was called Mediterranean Sea Salt Caramel. It was so, so good. I never paid much attention to the term “mouth-watering,” one of those phrases worn out by overuse, like “knee-weakening.” But then you eat something so luscious, such a perfect balance of savory and sweet that it floods your mouth with saliva, because your body craves the taste of it so badly. (Like when you kiss a man you are crazy about, and your knees practically buckle out from underneath you.) And you go: Oh! Oh, OK. That word isn’t just a cliché. That word has meaning.

All through the fall and into the winter of 2012, I would return to the gelato place. My mouth would start to water as I watched the teenager behind the counter working the gelato like cake frosting, smooshing it around with that flat trowel, like a gardening tool. They handed me the dainty cup, and my tongue would begin working the sides before I even paid, smoothing the scoop into a dome, finding any drips before they escaped.

“What’s your most popular flavor?” I asked one of the employees once. Typical journalist banter.

“Oh the sea salt caramel, for sure,” he said. “People would riot if we didn’t have it.” And I was weirdly bummed out by this, the strange deflation of discovering just how ordinary you are. Here I thought sea salted caramel was my thing. And it turned out – it was everybody’s.

I was in middle school when I first got turned on to salty-sweet. Reese’s peanut butter cups: The gateway drug. Once you discover that delicious contrast, you want to create it again and again. In the quiet hours after school got out and before my parents got home from work, I experimented with combinations in the kitchen cabinet: Brown sugar and peanut butter. Honey and butter. Molasses and graham crackers. At 11, I learned how to make pralines from the back of a brown sugar box, and I was fascinated by the wizardry: You can burn something, and it becomes even more delicious. I have always loved caramel, even when I didn’t quite realize it. Caramel sundaes. Kraft caramels. Sugar with a kick. Sugar with a dark side.

Over the course of 2012, I saw salted caramel everywhere. Dessert menus. Starbucks lattes. After dinner at my friend Aaron and Jennifer’s house, they brought out a salted caramel gelato that was even better than the one served at the place near my house. Rich, impossibly creamy, filled with chocolate-caramel nuggets the size of pebbles. Talenti salted caramel. They sell it at Whole Foods, and the next week I went, only to discover it had sold out.

“That flavor goes fast,” the guy in the apron said, and I think my face fell like I’d just missed the last Cabbage Patch doll. “We’ll get a new shipment in a couple days,” he assured me.

I was confused. Had everyone known about salted caramel, and I was just now catching on? How long had this been happening? There was a time when I felt cultural shifts as though I were straddling the fault lines, every tremor rocketing through my system, but now I was tucked away on some distant mountain range, news arriving by carrier pigeon. So wait, who is Frank Ocean? What’s happening on “Home Land”? What the hell is “Gangnam Style”? I began to dread any sentence that started with, “I’m sure you’ve heard about such-and-such” because the chances were that I had not heard about such-and-such, and I was going to feel doubly stupid for admitting it.

It was some combination of moving to Dallas, being 38 years old, and working on a book that arrived in my fingertips at roughly the pace of caramelized sugar pouring from a deep metal vat. And I was, indeed, quite late to the trend of salted caramel. The New York Times called the trend way back in 2008, in an article that tracked the flavor’s rise from Parisian pastry chefs to high-end New York restaurants to the shelves of Wal-Mart.

But it takes years for a trend to reach saturation point. For something novel to become a cliché. And it was not until 2012 that the phrase “sea salt” became so ubiquitous on food shelves that it was nearly overtaking “organic” and “gluten-free.” Mediterranean sea-salt potato chips. Sea-salt chocolate truffles. Leave it to the marketing geniuses of America to turn something as commonplace as salt into a specialty product.

“I’m going to introduce my new product, mountain pepper,” my brother joked with me one night.

“Oooh, good. It’ll be a hit in the restaurants. Would you like some freshly cracked mountain pepper?”

He took on the air of a snooty waiter. “Yes, this is the finest mountain pepper around. Himalayan Mountain Pepper.”

It was satire, our own silliness. But at dinner, he and I never reached for the pepper. We reached for the salt. Pepper was embellishment, but salt was essence. It was the electric current that ran through food. Too much of it left you thirsty. Too little left you longing for the kick.

It was some kind of life challenge, to find the perfect amount of salt, and how lucky to find it delivered so seamlessly in a product engineered for the yuppie tastes of the 21st century, when our tongues had grown too refined for the simple pleasures of chocolate and vanilla, the processed fluff of a Twinkie. What did the rise of salted caramel say about us? What did it mean? I wasn’t sure. But in a year when words could frustrate my fingertips, in a year when things could be tough and lonely (but mostly they were awesome and amazing), there are far worse fates than discovering the perfect gelato is sold right around the corner from your house, and everyone loved it, and they always made more.

In November, I wrote a story for my “Smart Blonde” column about white jeans, which have become a kind of uniform in Dallas for skinny women with expensive purses and chunky jewelry. Like any good journalist, I went to Neiman-Marcus one afternoon to try on a few pair and creep out the salespeople by taking pictures of myself in a dressing room. Most of those jeans looked horrible on me. Like a frowny face drawn on my entire lower half. These jeans looked decent. They were $240, and that is about $220 more than I plan to spend on jeans, especially jeans that are best described as “not that bad.”

In my December column, I wrote about NorthPark Mall, which is a special place where I go when I am feeling blue. I suspect people who did not grow up in Dallas might find it pathetic and possibly insane that I love a mall so much. Those of us who grew up loving the penguins and running our grubby little hands over all the promise contained on the racks of Limited Express and Judy’s and Claire’s Boutiques might understand.

For my January column, I failed my first juice cleanse. So for 2013, white jeans are definitely out.

I wrote a story about the moles on my back for a new personal essays series we’ve launched on Salon. Here is part of it:

I remember the anxiety of a bathing suit, how I walked to the diving board with my head raised skyward, hoping my wet hair would drape down my back and provide cover. It’s so poignant how a person can make themselves more conspicuous just trying to hide. Tugging at the skirt that’s too tight. Hands fluttering to the blemish on the chin. I’m not sure who would have noticed those moles on my back, but I’m pretty sure passersby wondered why that kid kept walking around with her head turned up. What was she looking at? What did she see up there?

You can read the rest here.

Back when I was a kid, and we went on long car drives from Dallas to Kalamazoo, Michigan – the five of us cousins stuffed in an overheated station wagon, competing for elbow room – we used to kill time playing a game called “I am going on a trip.”

“I am going on a trip” was a memory game. You’d go around in a circle and each person added an item to a growing list that had to be rattled off from the start of every turn. Were the items alphabetical? Was there some greater pattern? I can’t recall now. I remember it as a jumble: I am going on a trip, and I’m going to bring a toad, a banana, a knife, a water balloon, a Pterodactyl. And by the end of it you’d wonder: Who the hell is this banana-loving, reptile-worshiping adventurer who has assembled such a bizarre tool kit? And where is she headed?

Well, I am going on a trip. I’m going on a trip to a lake in East Texas to be by myself and try to shake some lightning loose from my fingertips in the quiet dawn. And I am going to bring a laptop, a guitar, a collection of David Foster Wallace interviews, a pair of jeans, a few flannel shirts, a jar of peanut butter, a squirt bottle of honey shaped like a bear, and bananas. I am NOT going to bring: My makeup, my minor obsession with Facebook, my pretty dresses, my tremendous email habit, my heels, the expensive lotion I use after I get out of the bath, my voluminous collection of “Wire” and “Mad Men” DVDS, or my secret password for this blog.

I’m turning out the light for a week. Don’t miss me too much.