Bread and Bread

Huntington Hospital looked like a hotel, a huge peach building spanning a block, with a turnaround island and two towers connected by a footbridge over the entrance. I don’t remember if there was a fountain, but it definitely seemed like there was a fountain. An easel held a sign outlining maternity ward visiting hours. A big promotional poster showed a new dad cuddling a dark-haired baby. Someday, I thought, maybe, maybe we would be here—or at another hospital—to visit our baby and his/her birthmother . But on Thursday, the day of my ovary-nixing surgery, it was just cruel. I sat quietly with AK in the pre-op room. A blonde, middle-aged nurse named Becky asked me to pee in a cup: the standard-issue pregnancy test they give to every woman of child-bearing age prior to any surgery. It was time for my big performance. “Is there something I can sign instead?” I asked. “I think so, but I’ll have to ask your doctors. They might refuse to do the surgery.” “I mean, ...

1. nudity of abundance Sunday afternoon, AK and I went to a potluck for all the participants in Bodies Mapping Time , the photo project I’d posed for a few months back. J Michael Walker , the artist/photographer, had snagged a room at the Flintridge Foundation, a tree-flanked compound in Pasadena. The room was institutional, with desks arranged in a square donut and a projection screen. I plopped my couscous down among the lentils and zucchini and scones that other people had brought. J Michael had roasted tomatillos from his garden and made a hot, smoky, delicious salsa. As far as I could tell, he was a Latina woman trapped in a white man’s body. But moving through the world in a white man’s body shapes you. That’s the nature of the body, and the people who witness it. It wasn’t my nature to trust men who were too quick to idealize women as goddesses. But the shoot had been fun, cozy, intimate but simple. So I trusted J Michael’s sincerity.  Flashback to the ba...

Meghan O’Rourke has an essay in this week’s New Yorker about her experience with an autoimmune disorder called Hashimoto’s. I only diagnosed myself with it for a second while reading the article, which is progress for me. I’m lucky that I’ve never had a mysterious constellation of symptoms that takes years to diagnose, and I’ve never had serious pain related to illness. My own sicky situation isn’t even technically chronic, although it is in a de facto way.* Hashimoto's makes your thyroid all wonky. And talkative? Nevertheless, the article resonated, and I felt grateful for yet another role model—a sicky-smarty who has managed to navigate illness, even to let it change her, without letting it define her. My favorite quotes: “In your loneliness, your preoccupation with an enduring new reality, you want to be understood in a way you can’t be. ‘Pain is always new to the sufferer, but loses its originality for those around him,’ the nineteenth-century French writer A...

It’s because there is a river in L.A. I knew this, of course. I saw Chinatown, and I’ve stood on various overpasses watching water trickle between the famous cement banks. I also know that there’s a lot of talk about revitalizing the river, and that now you can legally kayak parts of it. I even wrote a very short, near-future short story in which the river’s natural flood planes have been restored. No one is allowed to live there for safety reasons, so naturally a bunch of shantytowns spring up there and get wiped out every time it rains. But it didn’t really register that we had a river until I biked a giant piece of it today with AK, Pedro, Alberto and Alberto’s new friend Andrea. Alberto was unemployed for a while, and he used a lot of that time to get in superhuman shape. Sometimes he pushed himself too hard and blew out a joint. Again, my alleged perfectionism fails here—I’ve been exercising frequently, but I’m never the person who does a bunch of cardio before yoga class...

1. no one is watching Amy was in town last weekend, and it was so nice, so easy to pick up where we left off, in the way of old friends. At one point, AK said something about my anxiety. The other day, she’d mentioned how poorly I had handled the uncertainty of apartment-hunting five years ago, and I’d balked. Did she really think I was still that person? Yes and no, she said. Now, I said, “I’m really much less anxious now. I reserve my anxiety for like two things.” Amy called me out: “Are you less anxious, or do you just distribute your anxiety differently?” Some people talk about the fearlessness cancer creates in its near-victims. It’s true that I am acutely aware of all the things that won’t kill me, and am accordingly blasé, maybe even too much so: losing my job, writing a story no one likes, offending someone, disappointing someone, not making the bed in the morning. But the fine print in this fearlessness contract—at least for me—states that in lieu of worry...

1. kozara I took Nicole out for her birthday Friday night. We spent the first few minutes staring at the menu, trying to figure out what “kozara” was (Japanese tapas, it turned out). “Sorry,” she said. “How are you?” It was the voice she used when she was tired, but trying to hold onto her manners. “I’m good.” “Sorry, I’m just shaking off the week. Work , you know?”  “No worries,” I said. “I’m shaking off the week too. My week was fine, but just, you know, Friday.” If you go to Bar Hayama, order the spicy tuna and crispy rice. DO IT. That week I’d gotten my teeth cleaned and slogged through the building of an online grant management system at work and gone to the hard yoga class and fought with AK about arriving places late. Earlier Friday afternoon, I’d realized I only thought I’d paid my credit card bill last month, and I could no longer say to myself, Yes, but I ’m going through cancer treatment. “Seriously,” Nicole said, and we went back to studyin...

1. chonnie When Bonnie and I were in fourth grade, we were bussed to GATE (“Gifted and Talented Education”) every Wednesday at a nearby school the district wasn’t using. My main memory of GATE is that there was a microwave there, so you could bring Cup O’ Noodles, which was very exciting. So yes, I went to a special school to learn how to microwave soup. NoodleBot: what a truly gifted kid would have made for lunch. But for some reason having to do with the intricate politics of girlhood, Bonnie and I decided to convince our non-gifted-and-talented friend Stephanie (who I think is a marine biologist now) that GATE was an amazing place where the corners of our friendship triangle grew closer. We did this by inventing a super cool girl named Chonnie (as in Cheryl + Bonnie) and talking about her all the time. I don’t remember what made Chonnie so great, but knowing my fourth-grade standards of coolness, she probably had a pet dolphin, and she may have met Pee-Wee Herman. 2. cathy ...

Kind of like Shutter Island, but funnier. Quality over quantity, these past coupla months. Madhouse Fog by Sean Carswell: What made The Matrix amazing wasn't the revelation that the world we know might be fake, but the idea that we can use that knowledge to manipulate hyperreality. The Matrix sequels kind of forgot about that and got hung up on saving sweaty, dingy Zion. But Sean Carswell's appropriately dubbed "metaphysical thriller" seizes the fun part and runs with it. Madhouse Fog is narrated with tight language and humble humor by a punk rocker-turned-grant writer who takes a job in a mental institution and stumbles upon research into the "collective unconscious," a space that opens up all sorts of good and evil possibilities for philanthropy, advertising, personal healing and wacky interactions with Einstein and African griots. Although the plot can be a little hard to follow, I was always happy to be along for the ride, thanks to th...