Bread and Bread

When Kristi Nakamura Johnson and I were college roommates, we shared a love of gay men and musicals. Then she started dating straight guys, and I went on to see Rent fourteen more times. But no matter the different paths our lives take, I'll always adore Kristi, who now lives in Sacramento, because she's one of the sweetest, most open-minded people I know. She also knows how to make a back-up Halloween costume in a pinch. Kristi and her biker girl. 8am - Made C a grilled ham and cheese sandwich for breakfast. Nursed L while drinking coffee, eating a granola bar and checking email and Facebook. 9am - Transformed C and L into Peter Rabbit and Snow White for a Halloween party at the park. 10am - Changed a crying Peter Rabbit into a Train Engineer after his rabbit pants had a potty accident. Had my husband call the pediatrician after noticing Snow White's ear draining while she nursed. The original Peter avoided potty accidents by not wearing pants. 11am ...

Today's Blog As You Are blogger, Kathy Talley-Jones of Pasadena, California, is one of the least feeble people I know. But even human encyclopedias who spend their free time hiking through the desert have moments of doubt. Read on. Kathy (right), much like her pet tortoise, Kip, enjoys the desert. 3:11 a.m. not yet not yet can’t get up yet 3:24 a.m nope 3:47 a.m. must stay in bed until 4 3:59 a.m. oh all right… 4:03 a.m. What have I gotten myself into? A deadline at 9 a.m. for a script on the power grid of the future what do I know about the grid? For once I haven’t procrastinated but I have to edit and format and come up with ideas for infographics and treatments for interactives and ah shit well I’ve done the best I can tried to make the electric grid fascinating and smart appliances intriguing and 8:58 a.m. SEND If it’s not any good, at least it’s on time. 9:00 a.m. No sign of John. Has he died? Without the normal morning cues he’s slept in, “I have 11 minutes t...

Tracy Kaply , today's Blog As You Are blogger, recently moved from Seattle to Joshua Tree. I'm planning to visit her there soon. I'm expecting dumplings and pie.    From what I know of Tracy, this T-shirt says something snarky. Since I have kidney failure and a panoply of other chronic/terminal illnesses trying to kill me, I don't work, and I am naturally a sedentary creature. So today I committed myself to writing down exactly what I was thinking about at each time the alarm went off. Don't worry, I am properly medicated. 8:20 am Woke up. Assessed situation. Pondered methods of killing birds right outside the window. Decided I was too old to be up this early without a damn good reason. Cat agrees, so we go back to sleep.   9:20 am Fine, I am awake. Cat simultaneously wants me to to get out of the queen size bed, because there isn't room for both of us in here, and he wants me to lay very still so he can be on me. I am starting to think ...

The early bird--and you will see Terry is one--gets the first Blog As You Are Project post! Here is how my fabulous mentor spent Monday, October 21, 2013 in Los Angeles. Terry and her exuberant hair. 6 am- I email my mom, who lives in Detroit, every day. After checking other email, I do my meditations. 7 am - Green shake for breakfast, make one for Yvonne too. Then drive like hell to get to South Pasadena. 8 am - Water aerobics at the South Pasadena Y. 9 am - Shower, dress, drive to downtown L.A. Check email at red lights. 10 am - Meet with Michael Garces about EMBERS opera . When will the universe provide an opening for this to be produced? 11 am - Drive home--through arts district, little tokyo, past grand park, through chinatown--wishing I actually had time to stop and wander through my city. At the State Park a circus is being taken down; red and white stripe tent tops swirled like peppermint candies collapsing to the dirt. How the tent went up. Maybe. ...

When I was in fifth grade or thereabouts, my friend Bonnie threw a Come As You Are party. The idea was that she would call her friends at random times over the course of a week or so after sending out invitations. Whatever we were wearing when she called was what we had to wear to the party. I was wearing nothing special—or rather, I was wearing nothing special for 1988, meaning I was probably wearing turquoise culottes—but I had bare feet, so at least there was that. As for Bonnie, her party outfit would be whatever she was wearing when the first guest RSVP’d. She claimed the call came (this was way pre-Evite) when she’d just stepped out of the shower. I had my doubts. I still think she just wanted to prance around her party in a bikini and a towel.  Bonnie (right), me (second from right) and the Barry sisters, as we were in 1994. Soon I’m going to launch what I’m calling The Blog As You Are Project. I asked a handful of friends/writers/artists to choose one day fro...

Dear Charlie Beck, From what I know about you, I like you. Like that one time you were walking through an Occupy encampment with a KPCC reporter, and the reporter asked you if you smelled marijuana, and you said, "Nope. Sure don't." But this letter worries me a little. First, because my car wasn't actually stolen , so I don't think you read Officer Honor's police report very carefully. But seeing as how it was handwritten, maybe you just couldn't decipher it. (Does the LAPD have a computer??) The thief took my radio, iPod and my car's computer, all of which could have happened if I'd had The Club tightly locked on my steering wheel. Although now that you mention it, I think he or she also took The Club that was sitting under the passenger seat, which I kind of imagined myself using as a weapon if I broke down somewhere scary and a creepy person approached my car. The good news is that you guys are probably out solving real crimes. Right?...

I’ve been visiting a hypnotherapist—because I’m not the kind of girl who can be content with just two therapists (couples and regular), and because I want her to convince my subconscious that a long happy life is viable, that imminent doom is not my destiny. She’s been having me write down my dreams, and let me tell you, that shit is one long found poem. Last night I attended Rhapsodomancy ’s ninth anniversary reading at Good Luck Bar and heard work by Cynthia Cruz , Rob Roberge , Louise Mathias and Wendy Ortiz . Soon I was itching to write dark, spare poetry like Cruz’s. Here’s what I came up with, transcribed directly from the previous night’s dream. I genuinely don’t know what it means, which feels like cheating, like I’m one of those coy writers. But, like about eighty percent of my dreams, it seems about guilt on some level, and appropriate for Columbus Day/Indigenous Peoples Day/Genocide Day. A Movie We Didn’t Know We Were In We played in the abandoned rooms benea...

One of the guests at my sister’s UCLA graduation party was her high school marching band director, who was kind of sexist and annoying, but also dedicated and beloved by students who weren’t me. He asked how I was doing, and I told him I’d just finished my thesis at CalArts. “It’s a collection of connected short stories,” I said. “You wrote a whole book? Wow! That must have been hard.” “It was,” I said proudly. “And it’s all true?” “No, it’s fiction.” “Oh. You mean you just made it up?” His disappointment was palpable. A whole thesis full of lies. Writers—not to mention readers of anything thicker than Parade Magazine —usually enjoy this story. Fiction is, of course, an art. You have to create a whole world, not just describe what you see. Remember Parade? Remember All-Grown-Up Miley 1.0? But my sister’s band director might be vindicated to know that one reason I chose fiction is because I’m a lazy researcher. I love learning about other times, place...

A few years ago I attended a reading by fellows at the Lambda Literary retreat. Whenever they introduced a piece that included family violence, coercive sex or aggressive homophobia, they prefaced it—as one of their workshop teachers had clearly taught them—with “trigger warning.” It struck me as odd, because that’s not really how triggers work. Death and cancer and miscarriage—my trio of connected tragedies—aren’t triggers in the abstract. I would probably find a well written story about any one of them moving and cathartic. No trigger warning necessary. But no one is there to shout “trigger warning!” when Google Maps takes me through Beverly Hills or a chubby, laughing Persian man outside a café reminds me of my fertility doctor. Trigger warning! In high school, only a handful of kids had lost parents, and they always seemed wise and exotic, not to mention unfairly favored by our breast-cancer-survivor English teacher. I remember one of them, a warm, popular girl nam...