Bread and Bread

If you’re like me and make the daily mistake of listening to commercial radio , perhaps you’ve heard the Taco Bell commercial for their new Locos Tacos . Believe it or not, I’m not here to question the edibility of a taco made out of Doritos. We all grew up eating those finger-dying orange chips, so filling them with meat (or “meat”) and other “food” isn’t really a big leap. They probably taste pretty decent, in a 49-cents sort of way. I am a little concerned with the name: We should call them Tacos Locos if we want to stay true to the Spanish language and Mexican culture, which, as we know, Taco Bell is devoted to doing. If we want to acknowledge the inherent and sometimes positive hybridization that happens when two cultures merge (hello, banh mi sandwiches!), we should call them Loco Tacos. In English, the adjective comes first and is never pluralized. Locos Tacos is a fair but awkward linguistic compromise, in my opinion. Make mine without the inside part. Or the outside ...

I'm sure they're very nice people. 1. the gay 1950s Today I read this interview with Sarah Schulman (thanks, Raquel, for posting). Executive summary: AIDS killed radical urban queers and left literal vacancies to be occupied by gentrifiers, namely the children of the middle-class whites who hightailed it to the suburbs in the 1950s. She argues that we’re now living in a “Gay 1950s,” wherein gays—no longer forced into radicalization by oppression—just want to get married, own a home and raise 2.5 children, despite the visible failure of capitalism and the family as institutions. Got all that? I love me some Sarah Schulman. I have ever since I discovered her book about how Jonathan Larson stole her ideas and made them into Rent. (For the record, I don’t think he did. They were both writing about the East Village in the ‘80s, and there was going to be some overlap, you know? However, I don’t think it’s a total coincidence that a literary novel by an activist lesb...

Cowboys, Republicans and prepsters, oh my! Another whirlwind work trip, this time to San Francisco. I was in a better mood, and it didn’t hurt that I got to see a couple of old friends, the kind who are endowed with magical powers in both the healing and philosophical arts. Jamie and I also saw Kay Ryan read, which worked its own kind of magic. She’s a quirky lady: charming and sort of adorable in a way you wouldn’t associate with a middle-aged butch woman, but stopping short of schticky. A lot of her poems rhyme—subtly and impressively—and she would stop in the middle and say something like, “Now, did you catch that rhyme?” or “Can you believe I rhymed ‘why we’ with ‘Hawaii’? Isn’t that just terrible?” or “Do you all know what the word ‘greensward’ means?” (It means “turf that is green with growing grass.” It appeared in a poem about Easter Island and the delicious audacity of artists.) It takes guts to engage with your audience that way. In my mind, I have a silent ...

Sometimes I love traveling on my own for work. I can be as anal as I want to be about lining my toiletries up next to the hotel sink. There’s time to write, get inspired and watch lots of Khloe and Lamar on cable (I kind of like those two kids). Tucson is a particularly great town, with a wide-open, sun-bleached vibe. But my heart wasn’t in it this trip, and I just felt kind of lonely and contemplative, but not in a here’s-a-great-idea-for-my-novel kind of way. One night I ate dinner at my hotel. It wasn’t one of those nice hotels that prides itself on having a top-quality restaurant on the ground floor either. More like a sports bar with so-so fish and water that came in a disposable plastic cup. For a few minutes, that sad little cup seemed to symbolize my entire life. But I more or less dusted myself off, and the great thing about my hotel was that they were having a German Shepherd show there. It was noisy, and when it rained the whole courtyard smelled like wet dog, but i...

Well, Easter happened, so I like to think that spring has begun in earnest and I will now be all the things I didn’t get around to being during the past year. If Jesus can be reborn, why not me? Wait, that’s terrible logic. Jesus does all sorts of things I can’t do, like heal the sick and not include passive aggressive footnotes in his blog. But maybe I will at least manage to get ready for bikini season or something. Here’s what I read in March, which seems like a long time ago now. The Writing Life by Annie Dillard: A lovely extended prose poem on writing in the vein of Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird , though it actually predates the other book. Bird by Bird offers more practical advice, which either makes it more useful or more audacious, depending on your take (mine is mostly the former). At times Dillard's rustic metaphors almost made me cry--see her description of a sphinx moth fighting fate: "It gained height and lost, gained and lost, and always lost more t...

People keep getting pregnant. This is not news. It’s probably also not news that one of Facebook’s main functions is to make members feel like pathetic puddles of nothing-much in a sea of award-winning, best-selling mothers of adorable babies who sleep through the night. Nevertheless, yesterday’s ultrasound picture with its witty, self-deprecating caption did its thing to me. It probably didn’t help that this is Squeakies Death Anniversary Week, and the week I turned 35, meaning that if I was pregnant, I would officially be an “older mother.” (Adopting only slightly hushes one’s biological clock. I would still like to not die when my kids are in college, you know?) But beneath the flurry of outraged texts and emails I sent to people who are tired of getting texts and emails on this particular topic, there was a tiny glimmer of something. I think it was the Option To Not Be Sad And Full Of Hate. It was hard to see, because it was underneath the woodpile of sadness and hate t...

I’ve never understood people who do extreme sports (or other activities that seem to involve a lot of expensive gear) to “conquer their fears.” If I have a fear of sharks, I’ll avoid slitting my wrists and then going for a swim. Fear = conquered. It’s the unavoidable fears that keep me up at night: my uncertain future, various diseases, those creepy commercials that show people dying of lung cancer. If I could defeat my fear of never having children by skydiving, I would skydive. That said…. AK gave me a flying trapeze lesson on the Santa Monica pier for my 35 th birthday. I’ve been taking static trapeze classes , which are hell on the trapezius muscles*, but not so scary, given that the trapeze is about four feet off the ground. Flying trapeze involves climbing a rickety ladder to a platform in the sky, then flinging yourself off of it. I don’t love heights. I took the class because I do love flinging myself in various directions and because I love the circus; AK took the c...