Bread and Bread

My new time suck is not actually new, just new to me. There was a long New Yorker article about it a couple of years ago, and for all its thoroughness, the New Yorker doesn’t really catch things at the very beginning of their ascent. I think they accurately described Polyvore as “paper dolls for grownups.” At the time I thought, Wow, I should make sure to never try that out because it could be a huge time suck. The site lets you create “sets”—fashion or design collages a la magazine spreads but without words as more than an accent or placeholder. (See where our world is headed! Aaaaah!) You can choose from the site’s vast catalog of dresses, outerwear, tops, pants, skirts, accessories, jewelry and visual embellishments, or you can upload your own stuff, but I haven’t bothered with that. Yet. Since Friday I’ve made like a dozen of these things . I wanted to limit myself to two a day, but so far that hasn’t happened. I’ll set some boundaries…tomorrow. In the meantime, it...

Since AK has been in school, our church-going has gotten way less frequent. This became extra clear yesterday when I saw a guy walk into Starbucks and found myself thinking, What is on his forehead? An extra eyeball? Some kind of medical implant? He doesn’t look like the kind of guy who’d be rocking a face tattoo. Don’t stare! Don’t stare! Then I realized it was Ash Wednesday. Today being, what, Freshly Scrubbed Thursday?, I’m a little late to the Lent game, but I’m going to play anyway. Here’s what I’m giving up. 1. Changing the subject to myself. This is an extension of my “listen and lurk” New Year’s resolution, which I’ve been plugging away at with mixed results. Did I ever tell you about the time my favorite college roommate Amber told me I had a habit of interrupting people to tell stories about myself? (I realize I just told you a story about myself, but you clicked something to get here—I’m not interrupting anything except whatever you should be doing instead of fu...

Right now I’m reading (well, listening to) The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie , about a Spokane Indian kid who makes the radical decision to attend high school in a farm town outside the reservation. I’ll try not to give too much away, but there’s a scene where Arnold, the protagonist, finds out about a death in the family—the third in a string of senseless losses. His dad is due to pick him up from school, and when he doesn’t show up on time, Arnold becomes convinced he crashed his truck on the icy roads. He descends into a desperate dialogue with God, pretty much just chanting, Don’t let my daddy die. Arnold comes from the kind of community where it is not rare to have attended 42 funerals by the time one is 14 years old. I’m 34 and I’ve been to six. That includes the funeral of AK’s coworker’s 80-year-old husband, whom I never met. Still, I get it. How loss makes you crazy. Or maybe in my case it’s more accurate to say, brings out the crazy that ...

Wednesday night I read in the Writers’ Row series at The Last Bookstore , an old bank converted to a big used bookstore, with shelves salvaged from a dead Borders and a wall clock that leaps forward every hour but is always wrong (well, except for twice a day, I guess? Its marginal functionality confuses me). You cannot get much more Downtown L.A. In 2012 than that. I was a little nervous because Jean and Linda, coworker and former coworker from New York, were there. They’d been to Really Important Readings at Really Famous Places. Would L.A. represent? Open mics are a little crazy. I probably don’t need to tell you that. But my nervousness reached a whole different level when an unbathed-but-not-exactly-homeless-looking guy took the stage with a hard black plastic case. He spoke into the microphone—something about breathing, about making the choice to breathe every day—but he kept wandering away from the mic and fiddling with the case. His eyes darted around, and he ran his ...

If you read my everyone’s a critic post, you can probably guess how much I loved this post on Bluebird Blvd. , in which Courtenay Bluebird assumes the persona of all those magazines that profess to make us (us = especially women) feel better and usually have the opposite effect . It’s enough to make a girl want to retreat to a cabin in the woods and light a giant fireplace fire with magazines as kindling.* Except then I’d get bored and wish for something to read. Can I make a humble addition to Bluebird’s list from my own monthly mail pile? Hi, I’m REDBOOK . I’m a gift from your really nice sister, whose generosity you totally appreciate . I make you feel weirdly middlebrow—and therefore snobby about feeling not good about feeling middlebrow—whenever you read me. Also, old. And then ageist about feeling not good about feeling old. Sometimes I have refreshing, if mildly simplistic, articles about transgender issues and infertility. But this month is my “Confess...

Factory Girl is one of those movies I added to our Netflix queue a million years ago and felt kind of meh about when it showed up (this is why we recently downgraded our subscription—our moods change too fast for the USPS to keep up). But I also wasn’t ready to totally give up on it, so last night we watched it as AK continued to recover from food poisoning from (probably) Friday night’s veggie pho. The movie is a biopic of Edie Sedgwick and the time she spent in the gaze of Andy Warhol and his camera. Sienna Miller is a great Edie (I say this having almost zero familiarity with the actual Edie, so take my praise with a grain of salt)—all big eyes and deep dimples, somehow both kind and carefree. Guy Pearce’s Andy is a childlike genius whose natural curiosity makes him a star and whose jealousy brings him down. When Andy and Edie slide in and out of each other’s spotlights—showering genuine love but playing stupid games—the movie is a long, glorious, tragic music video. But t...

Here’s a Note To Self that I have to write to myself over and over: Don’t try to do a zillion things in one day. It will make you bitchy. Yesterday I cleaned the house, including the billows of cat hair under the bed (made me miss T-Mec, in all her furry glory); went to My Life is Poetry , a reading of work by LGBT seniors (inspiring!); went to book club (debate-y!); and went dancing in WeHo (Britney-y!). Each thing was fun on its own, but I was pretty much exhausted from 4 p.m. on. When I was trying to wrap up book club so we could meet Nicole and Kimberly and friends in WeHo, I kept hushing side discussions so we could choose the book for next time. Two people kept talking, so I just stared at them until they were quiet. “Sorry, I went all teacher on you,” I laughed. “Yeah, I can totally tell you’re a teacher!” said Sunshine, a new member. “I’m not a teacher,” I snapped. Anyway, here’s what I read in January: Widow Basquiat by Jennifer Clement: An odd and g...

It turns out that Wednesday night is a much more popular time to take Aerial Fitness than Saturday at 8:30 a.m. Saturday class = a half-dozen students and lots of individual attention from Rick and Rob. Rick is built like a gymnast and likes to say things like, “Open your legs, honey. If I had a nickel for every time I said that to a girl, I’d have a nickel.” Rob has a striped mohawk and likes to fall on the ground and pantomime swordfights. Wednesday night = three classes going on simultaneously, a dozen Aerial Fitness students who all just happen to be at least six years younger and 15 pounds hotter than me, and instructions from the distracted teacher such as, “Foot lock—go!” Huh? If the Saturday classes reminded me of my gymnastics years in a good way, Wednesday’s reminded me of them in a…less good way. There was always one rotation I kind of sucked at (then vault, now silks). There was always one teacher who was a little mean (I think I’ve blocked out my mean gymnastics...