Bread and Bread

confession: i read magazines because i’m an aspirational masochist

2012-02-13T19:28:00.000-08:00

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 “Confessions Issue”! Juicy, no?

Well…no. Chelsea Handler dresses up as an angel on the cover, but when you flip to the inside…what’s that? A second cover, featuring Chelsea in a cheap-looking teal shift dress with devil horns! The interview is all about how, even though she’s made millions marketing herself as a boozy slut, she’s actually a hardworking businesswoman and homebody who loves her dogs. Who doesn’t love a hardworking liar? No doubt you’re feeling better about yourself already.

My health and personal finance articles are also branded as confessions. Headlines like “Confession: I haven’t seen the inside of a gym in years” are followed by shaming smackdowns about how you’ll die if you don’t exercise. Then I find a little loophole: It’s okay if you just run ten miles in a park instead of inside a gym! As if your real worry was that your rigorous exercise routine didn’t actually take place at a gym, not that it didn’t. actually. take place.

The moral of this issue, and even the confession-I’m-a-stripper-to-earn-extra-cash-for-my-family article, is that it’s okay to be quirky or even to have approximately two minor flaws, so long as you’re a good girl who never veers far from your continual forward march of self-improvement.

Did you hear me? March!!

*At first I wrote “kindle.” That tells you how far removed I am from an actual cabin in the woods, and how I feel about the Kindle. Nah, not really, but I think I’m still a year or two away from actually buying one.

the burden of depth: on factory girl and some guys i sort of dated in college

2012-02-06T20:58:00.000-08:00

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 then there’s Hayden Christensen as Billy Quinn, an insufferable prettyboy Bob Dylan stand-in. It was hard to figure out what was Christensen’s fault and what was the script’s and/or director’s fault. But I got the feeling the movie wanted us to see Quinn as the deep, socially-conscious, true-love boyfriend Edie might have had, if not for her glamor-girl downfalls (of which Andy is one). But Christensen’s Quinn comes across like every guy I dated or almost dated in college: obsessed with his own angst and depth, unwilling to admit he just wants to fuck a pretty (or, in my case, average-with-nice-teeth) girl for the same reasons everyone else does, and quick to put the burden of depth on the girl.

I remember how Andy—a sophomore history major, not that Andy—would admonish me when he felt like our late-night dorm conversations got too pedestrian. And how Brian didn’t commit to liking me until I wrote him an enraged letter calling him on his philosophical bullshit. Then he decided I was worthy of his intellect. As a youngster, I did a lot of smiling and laughing nervously, and I always seemed to meet the kind of guys who were drawn to that but also disdainful of it. Apparently it was up to me to prove I wasn’t a ditz. When I inevitably lost interest in the task, they usually accused me of being a lesbian. So I guess they weren’t completely clueless (although I’m still annoyed when girls think the only thing standing between them and mothering Neil Patrick Harris’ twin gaybies is his sexual orientation).

Anyway, I’m glad those days are over. I wish Edie Sedgwick had lived long enough to laugh at them in her rear view mirror too.

book/clubbing, bitchiness and what i read in january

2012-02-05T09:54:00.000-08:00

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 great little book that makes me want to write in short, simple sentences. It's part memoir--with apparent transcriptions from Suzanne, Basquiat's longtime girlfriend, that grow in length and frequency as she grows as a character--and part prose poetry. The story of Suzanne and Jean-Michel's love affair is one we've seen before: troubled genius meets troubled, ambivalent muse. It's nice to hear from the latter in her own voice (and that of her friend, author Jennifer Clement, who appears as a character only late in the book), in such lovely, nonjudgmental prose. Suzanne, like Jean-Michel, knows all the intricacies and vulnerabilities of her own skeleton. In this way, the book is an X-ray: just a glimpse, but one that looks deep.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot: The stories of Henrietta Lacks, a poor African American woman who died of cervical cancer at age thirty, and the cells from her tumor—-which were kept alive and continue to be used in countless medical studies—-intertwine like DNA. Rebecca Skloot is a hell of a storyteller and, if you’re a hypochondriac like me, this book is as compelling as a horror novel. The medical establishment treated patients, especially poor people of color, abominably—-and my use of the past tense is probably unwarranted, despite some significant changes in policy since Henrietta’s death in the 1950s.

Nevertheless, Skloot acknowledges that much of the research was done in good faith, and it’s hard to argue with the results (AIDS medication, the HPV vaccine, etc.). So I get tangled in a mental time machine: X shouldn’t have happened, but if it hadn’t, Y would never have been born, so does that mean X was a good thing? Sort of?

But I think Henrietta’s daughter Deborah left the strongest impression on me, and clearly on Skloot too. Like her mother, Deborah is poor and uneducated, and she bears the psychological scars of a difficult life. Her paranoia that someone might kill her to use her body in medical tests is both crazy, completely understandable and, for me, relatable—-there but for some therapy and a few undergrad science classes go I. But she takes it upon herself to learn about her mother and her sister, who died in a “Hospital for the Negro Insane” (every bit as horrible as it sounds), and to find a sliver of peace. I’ll consider both Deborah and Skloot heroes for a long time.

The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver: This is one of those epics that's about everything (art, love, food, the Red Scare, cultural relations between the U.S. and Mexico, etc.), so it's hard to know where to start. Most of all, I think, it's about the way stories can both betray us and save us, and how personal stories become history. Harrison, the main character, is a mild-mannered sometime cook and typist for Frida Kahlo and Lev Trotsky. Against the odds, he becomes a celebrated author in the U.S. in the 1940s, only to have his life and his love for America shattered by the Communist witch hunts of the late '40s and '50s.

Despite being 1) a book about a writer, 2) a semi-epistolary novel and 3) one of those books in which an ordinary person is always colliding with famous people--all pet peeves of mine--I loved it. Mostly of the beautiful language and because Barbara Kingsolver puts in the legwork. She lays out the details of Harrison's early life so meticulously that when the authorities twist them around, we're as baffled and outraged as he is. I particularly liked Kingsolver's characterization of Frida as a funny, blunt, outraged woman--it reminded me that her work goes much deeper than something that looks cool and colorful on a tote bag. I also liked Violet Brown in the Nick Carraway position (that is, if the Great Gatsby was so humble he rarely used the word "I"). She's a sort of radical librarian ahead of her time.

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath: I feel like I was supposed to have read this when I was 19 and angry, but I think I relate more to Esther's craziness now--the feeling that what seems so simple for others is utterly confusing and overwhelming (especially frustrating for any erstwhile overachiever). The storytelling is a little heavy-handed at times, but I loved the language. I came away inspired to write, and grateful to live in the days of SSRIs and non-suicide options for lesbians.

unfitness, aerial and otherwise

2012-02-02T21:41:00.000-08:00

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 teachers; but the mean-ish circus teacher was just grouchy, I think, because she had a knee injury from stilts).

Lately I’ve felt like a teenager in so many ways. I’m learning new things, which is good, but I also feel like I’m constantly getting it wrong, and every little thing sends me flying off the handle, which is…less good. When I was in my twenties, people always seemed to be talking about how, in your thirties, you’d have it all figured out. You’d just be so comfortable in your skin. There was a subtle implication that you would also own a home, have a fulfilling career, be in love with someone who always understood you and possibly have a really cute baby or two. It’s the myth of upward mobility in all senses of the phrase; it’s what they sell to middle-class twenty-somethings.

When I was in high school, people talked about how, in college, there was no such thing as the popular crowd. In college, you’d find your niche and be so comfortable in your own skin. Surely it was just a matter of writing for the school newspaper, right? That’s the myth they sell to nerdy teenagers.

(I know I should question the myths, and the class implications, and my own conflation of accomplishment and self-worth. I’ll add it to my Should List and get to it right after I wash the outside of the house [that I do not own].)

Eventually, I loved college. But first there was a year of secretly gorging myself on my roommate’s potato chips, dating my other roommate’s ex and incurring her wrath, and writing long sad letters to my parents (who lived five miles away). I did join the newspaper staff, but when I went to the Bruin’s end-of-the-year party, the only girl I really knew there vomited all over the table and passed out immediately. The only words spoken to me by the hilarious editor I really admired were: “So, like, what do you do for fun?” There was genuine bafflement in his voice, and I wondered too. Fun? I hadn’t really had any the whole year.

All I wanted to do at the end of the day yesterday was be good at something. I wanted to sneak into a beginning writing class and pretend to be a prodigy, not someone who’s been working her ass off for at least a dozen years. I wanted to call my sister in hopes that she’d had a bad day, so I could comfort her and she could tell me what a good sister I was. In the car on the way home from Aerial Fitness, I actually started singing the theme song from Cheers to myself, and I might have cried a little bit. It doesn’t get much classier than that.

What teenagers have to get them through the transition times is good skin (even the ones with terrible acne have beautiful skin; this is something you only notice when you turn thirty). What I have, I guess, is…maturity? And faith in the process of growth…? I guess? But I swear to god, if AK had a secret stash of potato chips, I would have eaten them all last night.

fruit and doves and blood and body parts

2012-01-30T22:11:00.000-08:00

I’ve always liked the color and precision of Frida Kahlo’s paintings, and I probably dress as much like her as a white girl can get away with (though in dressing like an indigenous peasant, Frida was arguably an appropriator herself—but at least she had the revolutionary chops to back it up). But I never really felt like I had the right to be as Frida-crazy as, say, my grad school friend who had a tattoo of the MEChA logo and spent a few months in the jungles with the Zapatistas. So I resisted the urge to run out and buy me a Frida tote bag (though when I got one as a party favor, I was really excited).

And then I read The Lacuna.

Barbara Kingsolver makes Frida come alive as a person betrayed by her body and her loved ones, who responded with passion, humor, stubbornness, ruinous pride or shameless dramatic gestures. I have no idea if this is what Frida was actually like, but I fell in love with Frida the character.

Suddenly I saw the blood and body parts in her paintings not as goth accessories to offset all the fruit and doves, but as, well, blood and body parts.

She had several miscarriages, and predictably, this was where I connected. Yesterday I got to see some of her paintings at LACMA’s In Wonderland exhibit of American and Mexican female surrealists (specific, no?). I stood in front of Sun and Life, in which a three-eyed sun glows in front of vulva-like pods, one of which contains a grotesque fetus, and I cried. I always thought crying at paintings was something only a really pretentious person would do, or rather pretend to do, because no one would ever actually do that, right?

But I could write a list poem called “Public Places I’ve Cried.” I feel like I should be more embarrassed than I am about it. There are a thousand things I care way too much about, and apparently this is just not one of them.

I also encountered other surrealists whose work I quickly developed crushes on: Gertrude Abercrombie, who looks like she’s about to strangle herself with her own black demon hands in Self-portrait of My Sister, and Remedios Varo, whose Celestial Pablum says a thing or two about the dark truths of art-making. (Also, she has an awesome name and there’s a great photo of her with a cat that I totally can’t find online.)

I love how all of them are like, “Oh, so there’s something about my life and soul you find unsavory? Tough cookies, mister. You’re going to look at it.” Except they don’t really use the phrase “tough cookies.”

everyone’s a critic (in which i pat myself on the back a little bit)

2012-01-26T20:29:00.000-08:00

The other day I fell into the wonderful black hole that is Regretsy—a blog that makes fun of Etsy’s wackiest shit. There are crazy ideas, executed beautifully (and, in the case of the Star Trek Enterprise coffee table, photographed against unflattering backgrounds). There are regular ideas, executed terribly. And then there are those magical items that are the holy grail of poor/insane concept and execution, such as the Eva Peron butt plug, featuring a portrait of Santa Evita that is only recognizable as such only because EVA PERON is written in big gold letters at the plug’s base.

Regretsy’s approach is mostly celebratory, and if you make Eva Peron butt plugs and sell them on the internet, you’re pretty much asking for it. But…(pun intended?), I found myself thinking, Helen Killer [as Ms. Regretsy calls herself] is totally hilarious, but it’s really hard to make an Enterprise coffee table! The product description even mentioned how the maker had gone through a couple of sheets of glass before making the perfect tabletop. (She did file this particular item under “Things I Love,” so I don’t think she and the artist were necessarily in disagreement.)

The relationship between artist and critic or, more broadly, doer and critic, is a complicated one. Back in my Zap2it days, I wrote a semi-scathing review of If These Walls Could Talk 2, a TV movie about lesbians living in the same house over the course of multiple generations.* Scathing was my specialty. I’d learned in Free Speech 101 that it was my constitution-given right to write about how crappy TV movies were. I titled my review of Jennifer Love Hewitt’s Aubrey Hepburn biopic “Jennifer Love Blew It.” Ha!

The filmmaker who’d made These Walls sent me an equally scathing email accusing me of homophobia and saying, “Do you know how hard it is to make a movie? Have you ever made one?”

Hate mail! The ultimate way to flatter a journalist (or, in my case, a “journalist”)! I laughed about it—if only she knew I was a baby dyke currently taking my first queer lit class!—and wrote back, “I’ve never made a movie. I’ve also never been president, but I still vote.”

I stand by that, and by the much-maligned role of the critic. I believe that progress requires introspection, and that an unexamined culture is not worth inhabiting. But I’m older now, and although I still haven’t made a movie, I’ve written two books and I do a lot of blogging (some in critic mode, some in creator mode). I think I have a better idea of how hard it is to make an Enterprise coffee table.

As an artist, my skin is pretty thick. Okay, medium thick. But as a doer—specifically, as a wannabe parent who sometimes writes and responds to articles about adoption—my skin is the thickness of a newborn hamster’s.

I know that no one lies awake at night making lists of reasons I shouldn’t become a parent. But I am discovering that lots of people have Thoughts About Adoption. Not all of them are warm and fuzzy. In fact, I wrote a three page post in response to some lady’s response to my response to a Huffington Post article by a woman who’d been adopted. The solipsism of that little knot of communication is almost unfathomable, and so that post will never see the light of your computer screen. Even though it was all sociological and stuff, and kind of smart!

What I will say is more or less what that filmmaker wrote to me: At least I’m putting myself out there—not just online, but in life. Over the past year and a half, I’ve taken a lot of risks: gotten myself knocked up, gotten through the grief when it didn’t work out, filled out a thousand reams of adoption paperwork. AK and I have put in serious hours trying to figure out ourselves and our relationship.

It’s so easy to be self-critical and to find confirmations of my own worst insecurities out there in the world. So what if I seem a little desperate and crazy to myself? So what if I’m the equivalent of an Osama bin Laden commemorative oyster shell? (Okay, maybe that’s a bad example.)

And now we’ve offered ourselves up to the world: This is us. Do you want us to be the mothers of your kid? It’s harder to do this than it is to have Strong Opinions about what parents should and should not do. It takes serious balls, or, as Dan Savage would say, ovaries. I’m glad mine are good for something after all.

*I realize that this bears some striking—though not copyright infringing!—similarities to the plot of Lilac Mines. Irony noted.

dragons, snakes and unicorns (ay yi yi)

2012-01-24T19:32:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I looked up my Year of the Dragon* horoscope, hoping for something along the lines of “You will get a baby and a book deal, fall even more fabulously in love with your loved one, and for once all of the bulbs in your kitchen light fixture will work at the same time.”

Instead it was more like, “Meh.”

I’m a snake, which is like a junior dragon. According to this horoscope, Dragon is my Happy Star, but “Dragon travels alone, so Dragon is also the Lonely Star to Snake.” Huh? Why is Dragon such a snob, and why does he want me to be lonely?! Two thousand eleven, though full of love, was also plenty lonely. Two thousand twelve is supposed to be about an embarrassment of riches, dammit.

This horoscope (thanks, Cathy Che!) puts a brighter spin on the same info. The first one was sort of like, “Just keep your head down and stay out of trouble,” while this one throws a few exclamation points into the mix. It promises that 2012 will be “an exciting and busy time for you and your partner.” That either means BABY!, or that AK will have a lot of homework.

Both horoscopes agree that I should exercise a lot. I’m cool with that. I took my second aerial fitness class on Saturday and was slightly less sore afterward. I love that trapeze tricks have names like “mermaid,” “mermaid angel” and “unicorn.” It’s a sport that speaks straight to my seven-year-old heart.

Despite the ambiguous nature of my horoscope, and feelings of residual blueness when the rest of the world seems to be charging full speed ahead, I’m determined to make the Year of the Dragon a year of mermaids and unicorns. Once I found a book or a webpage or something that said my “secret sign” was sheep. I haven’t found it since, but it was as much of a revelation as learning that Cancer is my rising sign. Sheep are supposed to see a “flurry of activity” around their careers, and take up snorkeling.

Okay, snorkeling it is. Because it could not possibly just be a bunch of bullshit.

*Water dragon illustration by the incomparable Lee-Roy Lahey.

the sea of smashed things

2012-01-21T17:21:00.000-08:00

Public service announcement for anyone who’s trying to shut up her biological clock for a minute: Go see We Need to Talk About Kevin. It’s a movie (based on a novel I didn’t read) about a mom trying to raise a little psychopath whose only joy in life is tormenting her. The movie is sliced into short scenes, and it takes a while to figure out what’s going on—all we know is that there’s a Before world, in which Eva (Tilda Swinton) has a husband and two kids and a stylish haircut, and an After, in which she’s alone and haggard in that particular Tilda Swinton, Oscar-worthy way.

But it quickly becomes apparent that her Before was mostly a period of suffering in silence, as she endures daily standoffs with a kid who refuses to potty train until he’s eight, when she tosses him across the room in a fit of frustration. Meanwhile her husband (John C. Reilly) just thinks the kid is quirky.

The opening scene—never fully explained—shows Eva crowd surfing through some sort of Bacchanalian festival, nearly drowning in what looks like a sea of smashed raspberries. Nearly all the scenes drip with blood-like messiness—the red paint thrown at her house by pitchfork-type townsfolk, the splatters from Kevin’s paint gun, a sandwich oozing jam. On one level it’s straight-up foreshadowing of the actual blood that Kevin will summon, a la the opening credits of Dexter. On another it’s straight-up Freudian: Kevin, trapped in the anal-propulsive stage, shits (sometimes literally) all over everything Eva values.

It’s clear that Eva, who at one point makes an offhand comment about how fat people shouldn’t blame their genes, blames herself for Kevin’s strangeness and anger. Not in a traditional handwringing way, but in her stoic insistence on letting the aftermath of Kevin’s crimes ruin her life. In this way she is like him: relentlessly stubborn. He’s the one who destroys, she’s the one who cleans up. Their version of love is a kind of codependent harmony.

The movie’s title is ironic: Eva and her husband never really do talk about Kevin in a serious way. A doctor rules out autism, Kevin hides the worst of his creepiness from his dad, and that’s that. The family seems to be well off, so I wondered why they didn’t hire some sort of behavioral specialist to come by for, oh, like nine hours a day. But I also wondered if, to Eva, that would have meant sharing Kevin and giving up.

There’s no genuine cautionary tale here, just what I imagine is a brutal truth: When you’re a parent, you go where your kids take you. Here’s hoping AK and I get off easy and just have to learn to like soccer or something.

circus weekend

2012-01-16T19:06:00.000-08:00

This weekend was a lot of things—MLK Day, Alberto’s birthday, AK’s continued birthday, Amy’s going-away, my biannual pap smear—but it was also…Circus Weekend!

Chapter 1: My sister and I take Aerial Fitness at Cirque School L.A. Since my last (and only) trapeze class, they’ve moved into their very own gym in Hollywood. It’s filled with bouncy balls and trampolines and taped-up trapezes and flowy silks hanging from the ceiling. The good thing about going with Cathy is that we have all the same magical childhood associations. So one of us says, “Trampoline” and the other says, “Seriously.” And no more words need be exchanged.

I have this plan that I will take all necessary cirque classes (about three months’ worth) to fill my grant requirements; then I’ll quit therapy and use the money I save to become a fucking trapeze goddess. That means I have three months to get my head healthy. The anxiety I had about getting a routine pap smear does not bode well for my mental health.

Chapter 2: Cathy and I can barely move our arms on Sunday—just washing my back in the shower kills me—but we make it to the Kodak Theatre, where Cirque du Soleil is staging Iris, its homage to classic Hollywood. Anyone who’s worried that one medium (film) will eclipse another (theater), need only look to Iris to see the possibilities of us all-just-getting-along. Live filmed bits flicker elegantly alongside stage performers who interact with them directly.

Iris has pretty much the same vague premise as all Cirque shows—everyman gets whisked away to mysterious dream world—but since this is what it means to go to the movies, it makes more sense here. Also, since the early days of Hollywood coincided with the end of the circus’ golden age, all the ‘20s costumes give you the feeling of peeking into two histories at once. My favorite number is a Busby Berkley-inspired piece in which a string of starlets and dashing young men follow each other in and out of a row of dressing rooms, interacting with filmed backdrops and disappearing behind doors. It is choreography as magic trick.

Hardcore circus fans also lament that Cirque du Soleil hides much of the apparatus behind its polished sets, and that the visible scaffolding of the circus is integral to its beauty. That’s why I love a showstopper that pays homage to the backstage circus of 1930s, Cecil B. DeMille-style epics. Contortionists dressed as aliens climb a ladder while Roman soldiers stampede and some sort of gaffer-type person twirls from a rope. These are worlds that speak to each other easily; each indulges in the harmonic chaos of Putting On A Show. And no vertical space is wasted, so even the cheap seats are spectacular.

Cathy and I clap plenty loud and raise our hands as high as our aching shoulder blades will let us.

my heart belongs to sodapop

2012-01-11T19:01:00.001-08:00

This might be the only old-time photo that my cousin Maria and my childhood friend Bonnie have not put on Facebook, because neither of them had the privilege of starring in the Mira Costa High School production of The Outsiders in 1991. Neither did I—star, that is. I was an extra. I spent hours at rehearsals every week only to do things like walk across the stage pushing a stretcher during the hospital scene. Ah, the endless abundance of time that is youth.

When I found this photo at my dad’s house (actual size: 11” x 13”), I said to my dad and sister, “How much do you want to bet I wrote something like ‘I heart Denito “Sodapop” Kelly’ on the back?”

I flipped it over. I’d been stealthier than that: I’d labeled everyone and who each person played, but I’d written the “O” in Denito as a heart. Sexy.

Denito is the one cuddling up to the girl that’s not me in the second to last row. He’s wearing a lot of blush in this picture. My sister pointed out that this may have been part of the attraction for me. AK pointed out that, despite our attempts at period costume, we all look pretty ‘90s (see: my hair and slouch socks). However, my dress was as authentic as they come: I found it in the green room of our high school theater, which had not been cleaned out since the 1960s. There were probably all kinds of things there that could get big bucks on eBay now.

The little guy in the black shirt is Danny Strong, who played Ponyboy and actually went on to become a real actor. He was a regular on Buffy for a while. The bigger guy next to him, also in black, played Dallas. “He’s the cutest, in my opinion,” AK said.

“It might be because he’s like thirty,” I said. “He could be on Glee.”

I vaguely remembered Mrs. Verhoef (with the bow on her head and the glare on her face) calling in a ringer—some actor friend of hers—for the part.

Wendy Molyneux (far left) went on to semi-fame as a TV writer and author of Everything is Wrong With You: The Modern Woman’s Guide to Finding Self-Confidence Through Self-Loathing, which is as brilliant as it sounds. Her Facebook posts are always really funny.

I’m not sure where the cherub with the trumpet is these days, but my guess is the Mira Costa High School green room. Maybe I left a scrunchy there too, and it will be discovered by some kids performing a period piece about the ‘90s.

temecula klein, 2001-2012

2012-01-07T13:52:00.000-08:00

Dear T-Mec,

When the rescue organization folks delivered you and OC to B’s and my apartment ten years ago, the first thing you did when they opened the door to the cat carrier was walk over to the brand new litter box and take a polite little pee. You’d been in the car for an hour and a half, and now you were in a strange new place that smelled like paint, but you knew what needed to be done.

Last night you left my life just as neatly and tidily: We’d already placed a call to Vet on Wheels, thinking it might be time, but you decided to do it on your terms and save us $300. After a cuddly evening at home, we woke up to the sound of you coughing or…something. The phrase “death rattle” came to mind, and the night felt eerie. But we were there, next to you, until you were no longer there next to us.

We petted you and talked to you and AK went for her bible to find a passage she remembered from Titanic (such is AK’s range of references). We let the boys in the room for a goodbye sniff, because it seemed good to give them closure rather let them think you’d been kidnapped or quietly disappeared by some sinister regime. This morning we wrapped your body in a towel and took it to the not-on-wheels vet. Having you—even though it was no longer you—on my lap in the car one last time reminded me what I’d be missing: your weight and softness, the double-edged sword that is having a body and living on earth.

I feel relieved and grateful. I want you to know that you didn’t have to make it so easy on us—you were worth any sort of trouble you wanted to put us through. The rescue org named you Angel, which we thought was a little schmaltzy. You clawed enough furniture in your lifetime to prove you had a devilish streak, and you swatted Ferd enough times to make it clear you wouldn’t put up with bullshit.

But you are an angel not in a top-of-the-tree way, but in a magnificent Angels in America way. You’re an angel with street smarts. You were with me through the worst year of my life, and although I don’t believe anyone gets to choose when they go, if you had a little bit of a say in it, I believe you waited until I was okay. Whenever those random getting-to-know-you questionnaires ask who my heroes are, I say you, and I mean it. If I could be half as calm, fearless and full of love as you were, I would be in great shape.

I love you, Mec-Mec, and I’m so grateful that all of us got to know you—OC (who’s known you the longest, who cuddled with you even when you smelled kinda funky there at the end), Ferd, AK, me, B, our families, your many generous cat-sitters, Jennifer next door and her little girls, and all the neighbors who probably considered you their cat and probably fed you regularly, which would explain a lot.

Wherever you are now, I hope there is, as AK said, “lots of tuna, but amazing celestial tuna that we’d never even recognize.”

Rest in peace, Temecula. You are loved.

Cheryl

let's go to the beach, or: what i read in december

2012-01-06T19:30:00.000-08:00

This morning I looked at the Excel file where I track my literary submissions, and let me tell you, there’s nothing like a highly organized document to let you know in no uncertain terms exactly how unproductive you’ve been. Six submissions in the entire year of 2011! Since my unofficial 2012 motto is “Be less lazy and crazy” (my official motto is “What would Tina Fey do?”), I am particularly proud of myself for meeting the postmark deadline for this summer’s RADAR Lab, in which a bunch of queer people shack up in Mexico for two weeks and write together. That’s practically a novel itself. It will be called Vamos a la Playa, Jotos.

Anyway, here’s what I read in December, back when I was still being a little lazy (and working my way through The Lacuna, which I’m still not done with).

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? by Mindy Kaling: Mindy Kaling name-checks Tina Fey and Chelsea Handler's books in a self-deprecating way. For the record, Kaling's is much funnier and sweeter than Handler's, but not the work of deceptively simple genius that is Fey's. (But no worries, she's got a few years to catch up.) It's a little slight--as you might imagine a memoir by a 32-year-old who adores her parents would be--but I laughed out loud a lot, in a "that's so TRUE!" way. Here's Kaling on making it in New York: "I had placed a lot of faith in Woody Allen's belief that 80 percent of success is just showing up.... Sure, I can just SHOW UP. Here I am, New York! Give me a job! It turns out the other 20 percent is kind of the difficult, nebulous part." That's so true.

The Beekeeper’s Apprentice by Laurie R. King: This book opens with one of my pet peeves: feminism reduced to a spunky, super-genius heroine who is miraculously ahead of her time (WWI-era England) in every way. This particular spunky heroine befriends Sherlock Holmes and learns his methods, enabling the second part of the book, a series of classic Holmes-style puzzle mysteries. I'm not that into mysteries that are more about steampunk forensics than character motivation, but at least the puzzles were fun. Then there's a random, awkward side trip to Palestine. Then the spunky heroine dukes it out with her arch enemy, who turns out to be (spoiler alert) a woman. They're like the queen bees the title alludes to. Except they don't remotely alter the females-as-enemies dynamic the narrator claims to hate. In all, this is a wildly uneven if kind of engaging book.

the cheryl show, now with more costars and fewer commercials

2012-01-01T17:43:00.000-08:00

Zelda Kennedy is one of my favorite people at All Saints because her sermons frequently quote plays and musicals, and because she hugs parishioners like she means it. This morning she quoted a line from The Velveteen Rabbit, which made me cry when I was six and believed my stuffed animals had souls (I still kind of do) and again today. Something along the lines of: “If you become real, you will get worn down and used up, but you will never be ugly to anyone who understands what it means to be real.”

Someone could probably put together one of those photo comparisons a la Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War for me in 2011. Which is not to say that my recent howls of thwarted entitlement* are the same as the Civil War, just that, well, it’s been real, and I think I have some fine lines to show for it.

I’ve had a very nice week-plus off. Last night AK and I rang in the new year with Pedro, Stephen, Maria and Calvin at Onyx, after a potluck dinner at the boys’ place around the corner. We cooked our own food. We had reservations at the lounge, so we didn’t have to do a bunch of standing. Calvin broke three noisemakers. AK took a couple of brief catnaps in our booth and, every time she woke up, immediately started dancing. On the walk back, a man said to Stephen, “I would pay you a sum of dollars for your hat” (velveteen plastic and not terribly real; he gave it to the guy for free). It was all kind of perfect.

And now I’m done with 2011. Very, very done.

Here are my resolutions for 2012 (besides the givens, which require me to become a perfect human in every realm from personal finance to properly appreciating sunsets):

1. Sweat. Recently I realized that, if I were sixty and had high blood pressure, my physician would congratulate me for my regular, reasonably paced three-times-a-week workouts. But I’m 34 with a healthy heart (knock on the wood I pretty much keep by my side at all times). There’s no reason I can’t amp it up a notch. There was a reason, which was that I felt like my body was delicate and unpredictable and I didn’t want to ask for trouble. But that was 2011. In 2012, I’m going to run up the hill, do an extra set of crunches, take the hard yoga class and stick around for all of Zumba.

2. Listen and lurk. I know that in the not-too-distant future, all of us will have fruit-fly attention spans and all art will be interactive, and it won’t really be worse, just different. But I was born way back in the 1970s, and I want to cultivate my erstwhile attention span. Lately I’ve sat in bed with my laptop and raced to the comments section to put in my two cents and read magazines for the pictures way too much. I feel like it’s making me dull and antsy at the same time. It’s not just about reading either—sometimes my self-talk becomes such a running commentary that I forget AK’s life story is unfolding right beside me the whole time. I’m not some dudely dude who wouldn’t know an emotional cue if it sat down next to him and started talking about football, but I could do better. This is not the Cheryl Show Starring Cheryl. In 2012, I will read literary journals, short stories in The New Yorker, books that give me background info for what my students are working on, profiles of writers that make me turn into a puddle of motivating envy. I will read between the lines. I will make space for conversation. I will resist the urge to comment unless I really have something to say.

So it’s ironic that I came to Starbucks to read an anthology I’m supposed to blurb and do a little writing, and I ended up blogging, the ultimate Cheryl Show Starring Cheryl. But I have to state my intention before I can enact it, right? Oh…I guess I actually don’t.

3. Write to an inmate. Although I’m sure there are many willing pen pals in the criminal justice system, the ones I want to correspond with are participants in PEN’s prison writing program, which first crossed my radar a few months ago. Twenty-twelve is the time to actually do it. I figure that when the apocalypse hits and prison gangs start running the post-apocalyptic dystopia, it couldn’t hurt to have a couple of the more poetic ones on my side.

*This is a phrase I recently read in a New Yorker article, describing Carrie Brownstein’s characters in Portlandia. I realized, troublingly, that 2011 was basically one long howl of thwarted entitlement for me.

top 11 of 2011

2011-12-27T22:39:00.000-08:00

The more parents of young children I know, the more I hear some version of the following sentiment: Oh, I used to try to keep up with what was cool, but now I spend my days listening to [annoying kids’ album of the moment] and wiping up puke.

AK and I have all but pinky sworn that we won’t do this. It’s not that we don’t expect—even hope—that the puke-to-museum-going ratio in our lives will change once we convince someone to give us a kid. But for us, the arts aren’t about having something cool to talk about at parties. (Lately I would feel a thousand times cooler if I could talk about wiping up puke.) Books and movies aren’t some kind of shorthand for how edgy we are or aren’t. They’re as life-sustaining as friendship and work.

Coolness is about what’s new, something I gave up on long ago, as evidenced by my list of favorite books this year, one of which was published in 1905. But culture is forever.

So with that overly sincere intro, I present my annual, completely-irrelevant-to-anyone-but-me list of the best stuff I read and saw. The common theme seems to be trauma and its aftermath, or Shit Happens And We All Muddle Through And Sometimes Laugh Or Make Art.

Books

1. Room by Emma Donoghue

2. The False Friend by Myla Goldberg

3. More Than it Hurts You by Darin Strauss

4. By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham

5. Bossypants by Tina Fey

6. The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

Honorable mention: A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow, Pinko by Jen Benka, Stealing Angel by Terry Wolverton

Movies

1. Take Shelter

2. Young Adult

3. The Future

4. The Poetry of Resilience

5. Martha Marcy May Marlene

Honorable mention: Hanna, Bridesmaids, Melancholia, Urbanized, Beginners, Unstoppable, The King’s Speech (occupying the regular spot of Movie From Last Year That I Didn’t See Until Late January But Really Loved And Now I’m Not Sure Where To Put It)

the devastating effects of happiness narratives, or: this movie knows me

2011-12-27T10:23:00.000-08:00

Movies about misunderstood artist-types finally breaking away from small-town hell and following their dreams are outnumbered only by movies about career-obsessed shrews who rediscover the simple charms of their hometowns.

Together, the genres seem to encourage the following narrative: In order to live a perfect life, you should grow up in a small town, hate it, escape, build your fortune in the big city (where you are most likely an editor for a glossy magazine), feel something is missing, return to your hometown for reasons beyond your control (funeral, etc.) and run into your old boyfriend. From there, the options are 1) settle down with him and make babies like a good girl (but one who already has an amazing résumé under her belt), or 2) see how good he is with his surprisingly cool new girlfriend, leave him to his new life and settle down with the hot, quirky, intellectual funeral director you just happen to have been flirting with throughout, and make babies like a good girl.

The Surprisingly Cool New Girlfriend is a new-ish type in movieland, different from the Manic Pixie Dream Girl but not unrelated to her. She’s been invented to help us understand that women should not have adversarial relationships—just one of many things women should not do if they want to live the aforementioned perfect life.

Leave it to Diablo Cody to subvert a genre that was only just solidifying. In Young Adult, Charlize Theron follows the above narrative up to the last fork in the road, at which point she comes to understand the stupidity of the various narratives we cling to. (This is subtly underscored by the clips of Keeping Up with the Kardashians and other reality shows she watches throughout—TV shows in which messy real lives are edited to make neat stories.)

But let me be clear: The way Theron’s YA-writer character, Mavis, becomes enlightened to the pitfalls of narrative are anything but redemptive. She’s a little too obsessed with high school and her ex, but when she moves on, it’s not for something better. It’s not really even moving on. It involves a humiliating scene a la Bridesmaids that explains part of her obsession, which I won’t give away here. Suffice it to say that when we left the theater, I told AK, “This movie knows me.” She said, “I think it knows all of us.”

The movie is a lovely, holiday-time Fuck You to the Surprisingly Cool New Girlfriend, our own bitch selves whose big-city glamour jobs actually sort of suck, and the notion that anyone’s life doesn’t.

There are lots of great little moments that made me laugh, like when Mavis is lying on the bed and her Pekinese runs across her chest, making her utter a helpless oof. Also great: Patton Oswald subverting the Cheerful Gay Best Friend role as a classmate who was permanently disabled after being beaten by a bunch of hater jocks. He is not cheerful, and, in fact, he isn’t even gay, making him not a noble hate-crime victim but, he says, “just a fat nerd who got his ass kicked.” His rival is Mavis’ cousin, whom he calls the World’s Happiest Cripple—a super-fit guy in a wheelchair who plays a mean game of pool and is celebrating his sixth anniversary with a presumably amazing girl. Yeah, fuck that guy too.

inspiration, issues

2011-12-21T19:47:00.000-08:00

Some things that are inspiring me today:

My friend Devoya, who just opened what might be the most affordably priced Etsy shop ever, at least in the non-Regretsy genre. If you like small, cute-but-not-precious things—like little boxes with hidden treasures inside—and have a passion for the likes of Marvin Gaye and Erykah Badu, this is the shop for you. I have to admit that I need to do some Googling before I can appreciate all the references in her collages, but the best kind of art is the kind that makes you learn.

My student, Chopper, who is a candidate for The Most Interesting Man in the World (other possibilities: Sara, Jamie’s dad, AK’s friend Adrienne [I realize a couple of them aren’t men]). I met him in person for the first time last night because he was in town for the holidays, and I got to hear his amazingly unbraggy stories about building a house with his bare hands on 35 acres of land in rural Virginia, following the Grateful Dead for years, touring with his own band and developing his own karate technique. Writing a novel is just the latest chapter in his life. In a world (well, a very small but vocal world) of 25-year-old MFA prodigies, it’s nice to meet someone who has shit to write about; someone who knows that we live a bunch of lives in our lifetimes.

The Inspiration Issue of P&W. Okay, I haven’t actually cracked it yet. Even though (or maybe because) I work for the organization, I sometimes feel strangely intimidated by the magazine, like it’s full of 25-year-old MFA prodigies reminding me of all that I’m not. Inevitably, I put off reading it, and then I read it, and the prodigies mostly remind me of what I could be, and I get envious in the best way. I’ve been fluey and unproductive this week, so it might be the exact kick in the pants I need to do something other than watch TV via Hulu (see below).

Project Accessory, which is Project Runway with handbags and earrings. One of the challenges was to make accessories out of shit from Coney Island. Another was to incorporate a dead insect into a red carpet ensemble. You can try telling me it’s a trashy reality show, but there is something truly transcendent about watching a guy pour resin over a beetle and make up a story about extinction.

cookie bars and other holiday magic

2011-12-18T13:07:00.000-08:00

I’m pretty sure our living room is the same size as the closet Mariah Carey has just for her shoes, so we have to have friends over in shifts. Yesterday we had eight people over (well, more like seven and a half, since Kohana is small and only ate Cheerios and grapes), and it felt like a rager.

Sweet potato pie with premade crust aside, my holiday baking attempts have been notoriously disastrous, so when Sizzle posted her favorite recipes, I asked her for the most foolproof one. Magic Cookie Bars, she assured me, barely even involve stirring. Since I’d already used our only 9” x 13” pan for the lasagna, I lacked the bakeware the cookie bars called for. I was tempted to throw it all in two 8” x 8” pans, but I was like, This is the kind of thinking that results in hard/overly crumbly/strangely onion-flavored cookies.

So I did math!

I fenced off a little piece of one of the 8” x 8” pans with foil so the overall square footage would be the same as a 9” x 13” pan. Mr. Ninnis my tenth grade geometry teacher would be so proud! I owe him a cookie bar (which turned out great, by the way, in really intensely sweet way).

Things got festive. Jennifer reprised the actual Christmas tree skirt that she wore to her office’s Ugly Christmas Sweater party.*

She’s also doing a special project that I can totally see becoming a blog that becomes a book that gets sold at Urban Outfitters: Her mom sent her an amazing green-and-white mongoose-print dress that she supposedly wore when she was a baby, saying that her dream was to see a grandkid in it. Jennifer doesn’t want kids (I know! I can’t tell you how refreshing, as a baby-hungry person who doesn’t have one, I find the company of people who don’t want ‘em, don’t got ‘em). So she’s taking a series of photos of kids she meets in the dress. Luckily Kohana was game.

But maybe that was just because she was drunk.**

Other things that happened: People wore cute clothes.

I wore silver lamé, cuteness being in the eye of the semi-blinded beholder on that one. But I felt festive.

Joel made a volcano cake in the microwave, which is apparently possible (and, for the record, tastes amazing). Joel is a cook after my own heart—he threw in half a banana, an Easter chocolate bar that said “He is risen” on it and two Tootsie rolls just for the hell of it. Here are Joel and Alberto carefully flipping the cake out of its bowl.

People sat around and talked. I always like it when people hang out long enough to get past the middle-class-adult conversational basics of work and travel and house-buying and baby-making and, like, gardening tomatoes. Sometimes it’s hard to know so many overachievers. So when it got late and we found ourselves speculating about how, exactly, one consumes meth, I really started to feel like we’d thrown a good dinner party. Even if we were so nerdy that none of us actually knew and we had to look it up on Wikipedia.

*So, I guess this is a thing now. eBay, my new best frenemy, has a ton of sweaters listed under billings like “FESTIVE FROCK FOO FOO LIGHT-UP TACKY UGLY CHRISTMAS SWEATER.” I will not pay $65.99 for irony.

**Note to the adoption police: just kidding there! Not only were all adults and one-year-olds sober, we also made sure Kohana stayed away from glass ornaments and electrical sockets and other things that make a party fun.

writers' row, off the row

2011-12-15T19:37:00.000-08:00

If you’re on my “L.A. lit list” Gmail contacts list, you know that I was supposed to do a reading last night and it got cancelled. (If you’re not and want to be, let me know.) As a consolation prize, Jessica, the hostess of Writers’ Row threw a little party/open reading at a friend’s loft at the Brewery. It was also a birthday party for her other reading series, SoapBox Poets. In fact, I was a little confused about the role each series played and how the two intersected, and I felt like one of those guest speakers who gets in front of the mic and is basically like, “Where am I? How did I get here?” I usually think those people are snobs who didn’t do their homework.

(Once, a guy considered to be very funny by many people emceed my organization’s benefit dinner. His whole schtick was that this was the most coveted gig in town, because ha ha, of course it wasn’t. It was pretty funny the first time, but grew progressively less so throughout the evening. When he hosted again the next year, he had the exact same schtick. I felt like, Okay, at this point it’s more about your own laziness and inability to get a better gig than our hilarious unfamousness.)

I’m getting off track because really, last night was just a fun little party at the loft of a photographer who puts wax over her photos and makes them look all cool and painterly. I usually read prose, but because the whole thing felt kind of off the record, I read a poem. A new and angry one. I hoped no one noticed that I was shaking when I read it, but I think at least AK did. India Radfar, the poet I was supposed to feature with read prose. A woman read a beautiful poem called “Dear Iceberg.”

At one point, AK nudged me and pointed to the window. Two paws were against the glass. It was a highlight. Then the cat ran off. But we did get to meet the photographer’s two Rex cats, who were strange and wonderful. (Go to nicolefournier.com and click on “encaustic portraiture” in Nicole’s portfolio if you want to see an amazing Rex glamour shot.)

There were small cupcakes and a big chalkboard full of poetry. It was a nice night.

this will happen again (or, brooding as prose poem-type thing)

2011-12-13T09:18:00.000-08:00

You think you’re over it, and it’s a normal day, and you congratulate yourself for reentering this land. You don’t believe in normal, but you’re back to a place where you can contemplate semantics, and that means something. You watch a baby bat drink formula from the tip of an eye shadow brush. Your to-do list says Christmas cards.

Tonight there will be no choreography of preparation and acceptance, of reprimanding yourself for not being a Nice Person while taking care not to pressure yourself to be a Nice Person. You’re just here for some cake. And then it hits you. When they say like a freight train, what they mean is: It’s not the train’s fault. It never saw you. Or, if it did, it couldn’t stop in time. Stopping wasn’t its job. But then the train moves on and you’re peeling yourself off the tracks, a flattened cartoon, thinking I’m so sick of this until the next train comes along.

get behind me, libra moon

2011-12-09T15:15:00.001-08:00

For years I read descriptions of Aries traits and didn’t really relate despite my April 3 birthday. I’m stubborn, independent and (sometimes) energetic, yes, but I’m not a leader who has trouble taking orders, I don’t really have a temper and I don’t have problems with follow-through. If anything, I’m compulsive in my follow-through.

To which people always said, Yeah, but what’s your rising sign? Because the explanation could not possibly be that astrology was a bunch of bullshit.

So when Thomas McBee, in his IBC post about dressing for your sign, included a link to a site that would do your chart, I had it do mine.

This explains so much! (Because astrology cannot possibly be a bunch of bullshit.) My rising sign is Cancer, which sounds a little ominous, but I do like crabs as food, pets and pretty much anything but an STD. My crabbiness explains why I’m fiercely loyal to my family, a sentimental fool and overly sensitive to criticism. Basically, I dish it like an Aries but take it like a Cancer. I’m a good time.

My moon sign—also important, apparently—is Libra. This makes me artistic, but the site warns: “You are not a self-starter. Be careful of a tendency to be overly self-indulgent (i.e., lazy).” I felt strangely vindicated. All my life I’ve told people I’m lazy and they kind of haven’t believed me because, I guess, my laziness is tempered by my rammish determination. Meaning, sometimes I force myself to drink lattes and make up stories.

If any of you out there know about this kind of stuff, maybe you can tell me if, like, my Libra moon is at a particularly influential place in the sky right now, if that’s even how it works. Because damn, I’ve been lazy lately. I spend 15 minutes of every writing hour searching “statement necklace” on eBay and 15 minutes of every yoga class talking to my sister on the phone in the car. I’m only fifty pages into our book for book club, which meets Sunday. And I keep trying to count pumpkin pie and apple turnovers among my recommended five-a-day fruits and vegetables.

This is a slow time of year at work, and I have a theory that humans are like goldfish when it comes to time. If the only thing on your to-do list is going to the post office, it will take you all day. (Okay, bad example since it’s the holidays and post offices are closing right and left. It easily could take all day.) If you have to pick up your kids, walk your dog, sweep your backyard, finish a novel, make dinner, see your friend’s play and write ten thank-you notes, you probably will. So right now my body has clicked into some kind of slow-ass rhythm where it balks at the notion that it might take me less than an hour to write an email.

Another theory I have is that I spent a year working very hard for something I didn’t get, and on some level I’m like, Fuck it, I’ll just be a couch potato. But I think the Libra factor is the most likely explanation, don’t you?

I know that December isn’t really known as a time for getting one’s shit together—that’s more of a January thing—but I just made an informal list of things I plan to get done (sorry, AK) during my time off, and things I plan not to do, which mostly involve fucking around online and shopping, and combinations thereof. I’ll let you know how it goes.

confessions of a jury duty reject, plus what i read in november

2011-12-07T18:47:00.000-08:00

So I got booted from jury duty. Is it weird that I feel bummed about it? Especially since it was a child molestation trial, and did I really want to spend my day listening to thirteen-year-olds testify about creepy, thoroughly traumatizing incidents?

The judge asked, as they always do, if there’s anything that might bias you one way or another in this particular case. First, let me say that the number of people who said they didn’t know anyone affected by child abuse was ridiculously high. Do these people not talk to their friends? Aren’t the statistics like one in three?

So I mentioned a young woman I know, whose abuse was more recent and seemingly life-shitifying than that of my friends who’ve figured out how to be strong, functional adults in spite of someone’s best efforts to prevent it. I figured that, if I got dismissed, it would be by the defense. Because clearly I had a beef with child molesters, right? And I did—part of me thought, I want to put this guy in jail! The other part of me strongly believes child molesters are not sub-human; they have a right to fair treatment. Also, maybe this guy was innocent.

See how balanced I am? I would have been a great juror.

But then the prosecution dismissed me! The really focused, down-to-earth attorney with cool tights, whom I’d already decided I liked. I was like, What about me says to you that I’m on the side of child abusers?! And it tapped into all my the-universe-thinks-I’m-not-equipped-to-parent issues. But it’s all good, I went to therapy today. Hopefully the poor kids who have to testify about their trauma to a room full of strangers have a good therapist too. We all deserve one.

Here’s what I read last month:

Mamas and Papas, edited by Kelly Mayhew and Alys Masek: Most anthologies strive for inclusivity, but never have such editorial decisions made me cry just reading the table of contents. In this collection, people who've lost babies are parents too; parenthood is hard-won and not always won at all; papas are not just bumbling sidekicks; and even when everything goes right, the dirty little secret behind the joy is its fragility. As Maureen A. Sherbondy sums it up in "Things That Get Lost," a poem about a brief grocery store separation, "Even after I heard his cry,/ that tone-specific inflection, mama,/ pieces of me were so far gone,/ I could not get them back." There is no shortage of humor, as in Sam Apple's blend of myth-debunking journalism and personal essay, and lyrical beauty, as in Dorianne Laux's wintery poem "Augusta." Together they create the world of this anthology, which is, refreshingly, not a world of new plastic products and squealy baby showers but one I actually recognize--of humans, some of them small, some of them big and searching.

Spook by Mary Roach: As opposed to a serious discussion of science and the supernatural, this book is in the Sarah Vowell tradition of "Hey, want to hear something crazy?" histories. But as the latter, it's lots of fun (and more focused than Vowell). History has provided no shortage of crazy; I was particularly entranced with the chapters about women who produced "ectoplasm" from their ladyparts during seances. There's something to be written there about harnessing female power for purposes other than sex or motherhood. Roach hasn't written it here, nor has she done a lot to dismantle the binary of science VERSUS the afterlife. For example, the fact that various believers who've promised to make contact post mortem have failed at the task doesn't say to me that there's no afterlife; what if our capabilities and priorities just change radically? (I mean, how could they not?) As a philosopher, Roach didn't impress me, but as a storyteller, I enjoyed her very much.

Stone Arabia by Dana Spiotta: I think most non-famous artists have asked themselves whether their work will make noise in a forest if no one is around to hear/read/view it. The sparsely populated forest in the book is inhabited by Denise and Nik, a brother and sister who grew up as semi-feral rock 'n' roll kids in L.A. Nik is a talented and prolific songwriter, but he only shares his work with a few people and in his "Chronicles," a meticulous documentation of a parallel universe in which he is the (not infallible) king of rock.

But despite the novel's Jonathan Lethem-worthy pomo pop culture savvy, Stone Arabia is first and foremost a book about memory--Denise's narration is intercut with Nik's Chronicles and her daughter's blog, among other sources. And memory is always about the inevitability of loss. Loss comes into play in more immediate and suspenseful forms as well, which made this book a page-turner. I liked its kindness and I empathized with Denise's neuroses (which include a tendency to over-empathize) and her conclusion that people can't be anyone but themselves. But something about the ending left me feeling drifty. I feel like it bears a reread, but until then I'll hold off on that fifth star.

Calling Mr. Lonely Hearts by Laura Benedict: This book may be the final straw in my habit of browsing the sparse shelves of my library's books-on-CD section for novels to listen to during my commute (next time I'll place something on hold that comes with good credentials). The subject matter--black magic, sinful priests, possession--is sensational, but the book is surprisingly boring. The prose lacks the shimmer of mystery that much less explicitly supernatural books deliver.

Mr. Lonely Hearts is the story of three Catholic schoolgirls who ruin a priest's life by accusing him (not totally without warrant) of sexually assaulting them. He seeks revenge, and we get to watch their adult lives destruct. I'm always drawn to stories about how girlhood friendships evolve into adulthood, and this one seemed ripe for metaphorical examinations of morality, culpability, envy and revenge. But while Benedict tries to make the characters three-dimensional by giving them all negative and positive traits, they all feel flat, and there's no real protagonist. Above all, I think this novel is just kind of tone deaf. It doesn't help that the male characters have names like Thad, Jock and Varick (hi, daytime soap/porn!). Or that Benedict traffics in one of my new least favorite stereotypes: the brittle, unhinged infertile woman (her pregnant foil is earthy and innocent). Or that the actress who narrated the CD did inconsistent accents and pronounced "santeria" to rhyme with "cafeteria."

call of jury duty: a non-live live blogcast

2011-12-05T22:34:00.000-08:00

Right now I’m sitting in the Clara J. Something Criminal Justice Center downtown. I feel about jury duty the way I felt about wearing our drill team uniforms to school in tenth grade. I know you’re supposed to hate it and complain, but secretly I think it’s kind of cool. It’s a change of scene, a day off work and a great chance to people-watch. Examples: woman wearing houndstooth pants and matching houndstooth shoes…and…well, actually, most of the people around me look pretty normal. That means nothing, of course, but they could conceivably be a jury of my peers.

Now a guy is guiding us through the juror questionnaire: “Where it says ‘number of people in your household,’ Ima ask you to go ahead and write how many people are in your household.”

I almost never have the urge to Tweet, but now that I’m trapped in a room without internet access, I do. So I think I’ll periodically log into this notebook (not a notebook computer, an actual paper notebook) and type it up later.

8:12 a.m. JUROR: “What if you’re a student and have a final today?”

JURY INSTRUCTOR GUY: “You need to postpone, dude. Your finals are important.”

8:23 a.m. Just learned they only do criminal cases here. The judge who’s speaking says, “Criminal cases are much more interesting, and shorter. You won’t end up on some long asbestos case.” Last time I was on jury duty, I got assigned to the case of a guy named Bruce Bible who was accused of running a crack house. They ended up settling before opening arguments, but I agree with the judge when she says, “People get into it, as we used to say in the seventies.” (???)

8:30 a.m. Jury instructor guy is back. He just referred to “the section where you write down if, you know, you’re deceased or something.”

8:41 a.m. They have W and Vanity Fair in the jury room. The chances of me finishing our book club book just went way down.

8:56 a.m. Raiders, Lakers and Dodgers jerseys aren’t allowed in court. This morning on the Red Line a guy was wearing an L.A. Rams jacket. I wonder where the court stands on vintage Rams wear.

9:22 a.m. Sometimes when I encounter expensive things that are not quite my taste, I play a game in my head called “But If Someone Gave It To Me For Free, Would I Keep It?” Just so you know, I would keep Prada’s coral-rose and crystal bracelets.

10:36 a.m. A woman is showing her friend an 8” x 10” photo of a horse wearing a large, feminine straw hat. I have so many questions! 1) How do they already know each other? Can you schedule jury duty with your friends? 2) The obvious question.

11:09 a.m. I just read an article about Justin Bieber. Anything to stay awake. For the record, I don’t think lesbians who look like him are all that cute.

11:45 a.m. Fifteen minutes till lunch. The vending machines in the jury room are plastered with signs advertising the courthouse cafeterias on the fifth and thirteenth floors. They’re like, “Look, we know you’re not really into Famous Amos cookies.” I already ate the mealy apple I brought with me. Blech. It better have been full of fiber and vitamins.

11:53 a.m. Things people are reading: a biography of Cleopatra, a book open to a chapter called “Starting a New Life,” Makeup Artist Magazine, newspapers, tablets, phones.

11:55 a.m. Despite the highly advertised fifth and thirteenth floor cafeterias, I’m going out. There are so many good places to eat downtown. Maybe I’ll have one giant Big Man cupcake.

1:07 p.m. Eating yaki saba bento from Marukai, which, okay, is like a Japanese cafeteria. But so yummy. I didn’t know what all the names of the bento combos meant, so I read the ingredients. They included equally mysterious items like “wiener” and “croquette.”

1:19 p.m. Jury duty spawns ad hoc, half-assed solidarity. We’re all in this together! Or at least you probably won’t steal my bag while I’m in the bathroom. That might just be because we’re all non-felons, though.

1:30 p.m. Security guy working the metal detector, while scanning the metal studs on my jeans: “Women these days! They can’t just be simple. Why they gotta be all complicated?”

1:42 p.m. The cop seated next to me is talking about a Bill O’Reilly book: “There’s no political slant in this one. It’s pretty much just historical facts.” I am not feeling solidarity. Neither is the guy next to the cop, a man in his sixties with a dapper messenger bag. When the cop says, “He makes a lot of sense,” the messenger bag guy says, “Well…not always. But who does?”

And then I was called into a case. The judge told us to quit our whining re: civic duty and proceeded to read an obituary of a soldier who’d died in Afghanistan. I have to admit it was effective. And from there the day took a bit of a sober turn, as he read the charges against the defendant and I remembered that not everyone was in court to read W.

live etsy

2011-12-03T23:22:00.000-08:00

Recently I’ve developed a strange obsession with eBay (no one ever accused me of being an early adopter). It has a little bit to do with my love of clothes, a little bit to do with my tendency toward compulsion (and hey, searching online for Seychelles wedges is much less self-destructive than playing symptom roulette on WebMD)…and plenty to do with the excitement of winning.

So what if the baby gods and the literary agent gods have rejected me? With eight dollars and a bit of good timing, the Madewell utility zip pants gods will smile upon me.

Because I’m a cheapo, my new hobby hasn’t cost me much in the way of money, but I’m pretty sure I would have read an extra novel last month if I hadn’t been busy stalking these amazing Fenton/Fallon for J. Crew jaws earrings.

As any recovering alcoholic/current competitive bodybuilder knows, the best way to squelch an obsession is with another obsession. And Unique L.A.—which Amy accurately described as “live Etsy”—is a good antidote. Instead of dirt cheap brand names, it offers one-of-a-kind goods for prices ranging from reasonable to, well, what brand names go for at retail.

I got a handful of holiday gifts about which I’ll keep mum, plus a few irresistible things for me. They’ll help me get hooked on truly interesting pieces that are ethically made, I told myself. That’s how I justified a lace-print batwing shirt; a necklace woven from metal and orange string; and a felted flower headband that makes me feel a like a felted Frida Kahlo when I put it on.

What those in sustainable crafter circles don’t really talk about is that there’s a lot of very cool, highly useless stuff at places like Unique L.A. The cheese plate made out of a melted Grey Goose bottle, ceramic “barnacle vases,” beautiful cut-paper maps of Silver Lake. I mean, I guess you could put cheese on them or flowers in them or use them to get around Silver Lake? I lusted after them all, but quickly realized that I don’t have nearly enough tabletop or wall space in my life for them.

A 117^th necklace for my necklace collection, though? Totally necessary.

oc goes soho

2011-12-01T10:30:00.000-08:00

Back in the day (sorry, Stephen—I know how you feel about that phrase) my organization shared a lovely brick building in SoHo with a fellow literary nonprofit called Poets House and the corporate headquarters of Marc Jacobs. Although my coworkers are generally snazzy dressers, it was always clear in the lobby who worked for which company.

My org was a holdover from the days when SoHo was home to actual artists, not just high-end galleries. Sometime in the mid-2000s, rent crept up so high that Poets House had to leave.* Shortly thereafter, my coworkers overheard a couple of Marc Jacobs employees talking in the elevator: “One poet company down, one to go.”

Within a year, my org was out of there as predicted (to very nice but unnerving digs near Ground Zero), and Marc Jacobs took over the whole building.

So it was more than a little ironic when they opened up a bookstore on Bleeker Street, called Bookmarc. Now there’s one in L.A. too; AK’s friend from school works there. She’s a former model who now has the two best jobs in the world, working at a bookstore and GETTING PAID TO WEAR MARC JACOBS CLOTHING. Not necessarily in that order.

But if Bookmarc really wants to establish its arty bookstore cred, it will need a bookstore cat. OC is auditioning for the job.

*They had the last laugh, though. This is their new location.

booze, needles and santa claus

2011-11-30T17:30:00.000-08:00

1. ivf (i’m [a] veteran [of this] fuckingprocess)

If only meeting birthmothers was as easy as meeting fellow adoptive parents.* For every subculture, there is a blogging sub-subculture, and last night I met up with a local segment of the adoption blogger sub-subculture, plus Heather of Production, Not Reproduction, who was in town for the BlogHer conference.

None of the rest of us are quite so committed to our blogging, but we were happy to commit to drinks at Magnolia. Can I just say how nice it is to be with a group of five women where I don’t have to assume, anytime someone orders a nonalcoholic beverage, that she’s pregnant? And then proceed to try to coax myself back from depressed resignation?

It was nice—and weird—to be able to talk in a sort of shorthand. “At first, I was so freaked out by the needles,” Victoria said of her IVF adventures. “It took me four hours just to do my first Lupron shot!” Hahaha! Because everyone knows that Lupron needles are skinny, and it’s the Menopur, Bravelle, and estriadol validrate needles that are really a bitch.

Right?

Heather did not know. She is the rare adoptive mom who is 36 years old with a six- and a three-year-old. In our mid-thirties, AK and I feel like we’re on the young end of most of our adoption meetings, so Heather and her husband must have felt like babies when they were going through the process. She projected the innocence (whether real or imagined by me) of people who manage to have kids just because they want to. I mean, by definition she had to work harder for it than the glass-o’-wine-and-sex crew, but she didn’t have that shroud of been-through-hell that I felt like the rest of us carried to varying degrees.

Joanne, the only other not-yet mom in the group, hadn’t tried IVF, but, as she said, she’d had enough fertility tests that she knew “I didn’t want them rooting around in there anymore.” She said it all in a lovely London accent. How is it that a British accent makes everything sound understated and manageable? I know Joanne wanted kids as badly as the rest of us, but she sounded so very keep-calm-and-carry-on about it.

2. the big things and the little things

Kristin of Parenthood Path, who organized the meet-up, immediately won my heart by complimenting our adoption profile (“Not that I’m exactly your target audience,” she pointed out) and confirmed my instant like by asking thoughtful questions and making sure everyone was included in the conversation. Eventually she said, “Okay, I’ve got a glass and a half of wine in me, so I’m going to talk about race now.”

We talked about transracial adoption; adopting older kids (Sue was surprised with an eight-month-old, and Joanne is considering a child as old as five years); the IVF reality show pilot Victoria shot (how could that not get picked up? What could be more TLC-ready than a show about highly hormonal women spending gobs of money?); and, eventually, about Santa photos and advent calendars. I suppose this is where all of it leads—to the actual parenting part. Thank god, right?

“All Santas are not created equal,” Victoria warned. “The first year, we got one with a real beard, but last year we got the drunken pedophile Santa.”

Kristin, whose son is two, shrugged and said, “Maybe we’ll do a Santa photo when he’s five.”

That sounded about right to me. One thing at a time. Till then, I’ll keep chiming into parenting conversations with anecdotes about my cats.

*A note about the image in this post: I would never actually wear this shirt any more than I would wear the “There are two peas in my pod!” shirt or the “Pregnant, not plump!” shirt advertised in Pregnancy Magazine. The only statement I want to make with my clothes is “I am a snappy dresser” and such shirts accomplish the opposite. Also, they are assholey. I did, however, tell Keely once that I was contemplating a T-shirt that said, “Not pregnant, I just like dessert!” At the time she was pregnant, so she said she would print one up that said “Pregnant AND I like dessert.”

why i would be happy to raise amy poehler’s children but not kiefer sutherland’s

2011-11-28T18:40:00.000-08:00

It was a lovely, lazy weekend. Yesterday AK and I hiked up the west side of the big hill that is Debs Park and discovered a lake at the top. Well, maybe a pond. A very green pond. There were a couple of people fishing in it, which seemed a little risky, though probably less so than fishing off the Santa Monica pier.

We heard a guy tell his kids, “Come look at the turtles!” and we both ran toward him because, hello, turtles!

When we saw him, we concluded he seemed a tad too urban to know much about pond fauna. We did not see any turtles, although we spotted a bunny in the brush. All this five minutes from our house. We looked out over Highland Park’s old bungalows and marveled at how wide Avenue 50 looked, and how faraway Downtown seemed. So that’s why it takes me so long to get to get to work.

Last night we saw Melancholia, a beautiful Vogue shoot of a movie about how people of different worldviews respond to opposing situations. Kirsten Dunst’s depressive character has a meltdown trying to be happy at her wedding, but when (spoiler-ish alert) the apocalypse comes, she’s in her element. Her brother-in-law (Kiefer Sutherland) is a happy pragmatist who doesn’t worry until given cause, and then he just checks out. I sort of hate him and want to be him. But who I actually am is Dunst’s anxious sister (Charlotte Gainsbourg), who can’t quite convince herself that things will be okay, or that the world is worth giving up on entirely. Hence her (my) constant turmoil.

In between the hike and the movie, I read my student’s thesis while AK watched this video of Amy Poehler at the Time 100 gala. She’s such an amazing, quiet radical that I almost fell off the couch. Here is a female star (of my favorite TV show, not coincidentally) ADMITTING SHE HAS NANNIES. She doesn’t just allude to “having help” in the vague, guilty way that most female star moms do. She THANKS THEM BY NAME. Because they are humans who are important enough to have names, and because SHE ISN’T ASHAMED to be a mom with a job other than being a mom. It takes a village, ladies, not just to raise kids but to create a culture that supports female comics. Kudos to Amy Poehler and Jackie Johnson and Dawa Chodon* for making it happen.

*I can’t tell you how many articles I read that said she “thanked her nannies by name” but didn’t actually mention their names. Way to go, internet.

how to make cheryl's semi-famous sweet potato pie

2011-11-22T23:34:00.000-08:00

1. Buy overpriced ingredients at Whole Foods because it is the closest grocery store to your therapist's office.

2. Read about some MTV exec's wardrobe in Elle while sweet potatoes boil. Wonder why Isabel Marant makes sneaker wedges in which the wedge is hidden, so that the wearer looks like a strangely tall, awkward person who can't walk in sneakers.

3. Discover that your mixer is missing one if its little whisk attachment thingies.

4. Discover, triumphantly, that it is possible to mix ingredients with only one whisk attachment thingy. Imagine that this is how that one-armed drummer in Def Leppard must feel.

5. Pour batter into ready-made organic whole wheat pie crusts (thank you, Whole Foods!).

6. Spill batter down inside of oven door.

7. Learn that you really can't clean an oven while it's on. Wonder if Sylvia Plath wasn't so much despairing as trying to tidy up her kitchen.

8. Pour batter remaining in bowl directly into your mouth.

9. Have a happy Thanksgiving.

before you hit the mall, occupy literature!

2011-11-21T16:13:00.000-08:00

Beyond bringing blankets and soup to protesters camped out at your local city hall, what’s the best way to support the 99 percent this holiday season? How about buying books published by small presses and sold at independent bookstores for 100 percent of the people on your gift list? Small presses give voice to writers and viewpoints overlooked by the mainstream. Indie bookstores let you be a literary locavore. And subscriptions to literary magazines are gifts that keep giving all year long. Consider the lists below your holiday literary activism starter kit. Happy browsing!

Southern California-based Presses:
•Ammo Books: one-of-a-kind titles featuring amazing design, thoughtful writing, and exquisite printing
•Angel City Press: nostalgic yet cool illustrated books
•Arktoi Books: poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction that give lesbian writers access to “the conversation”
•Beyond Baroque: books by local, emerging, overlooked, and previously out-of-print poets
•Cahuenga Press: poetry that honors creative freedom and cooperation
•Cloverfield Press: books as visually beautiful as they are intellectually and emotionally stimulating
•Dzanc Books: literary fiction that falls outside the mainstream
•Green Integer: essays, manifestos, speeches, epistles, narratives, and more
•Les Figues Press: aesthetic conversations between readers, writers, and artists, with an avant-garde emphasis
•Otis Books/Seismicity: contemporary fiction, poetry, essays, creative non-fiction and translation
•Perceval Press: art, critical writing, and poetry
•P S Books: micro-press that publishes conceptually motivated series on a project by project basis
•Red Hen Press: works of literary excellence that have been overlooked by mainstream presses
•San Diego City Works Press: local, ethnic, political, and border writing
•Santa Monica Press: offbeat looks at pop culture, lively how-to books, film history, travel, and humor
•Tebot Bach: strengthening community and broadening the audience for poetry
•Tsehai Publishers: literary fiction and serious nonfiction, with an emphasis on first-time authors and writers from under-served communities
•What Books Press: books by L.A.-based writers whose work spans the full scope of the past quarter century

Independent Bookstores:
Book Soup, West Hollywood
Beyond Baroque, Venice
Chevalier’s Books, Larchmont Village
Diesel, Brentwood and Malibu
Eso Won Books, Leimert Park
Family, Fairfax District
Flintridge Bookstore and Coffeehouse, La Cañada
Hennessey + Ingalls, Santa Monica and Hollywood
The Last Bookstore, Downtown
Libros Schmibros, Boyle Heights
Portrait of a Bookstore, Studio City
Skylight Books, Los Feliz
Small World Books, Venice
Stories, Echo Park
Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural & Bookstore, Sylmar
Village Bookshop, Glendora
Vroman’s Bookstore, Pasadena

Please forward this widely to those interested in books and writing. Happy holidays from the Future of Publishing Think Tank*!

*The Future of Publishing Think Tank is an ad hoc group of writers and representatives of independent publishers and bookstores, nonprofit literary organizations, and community radio. Our task: to consider the changes occurring in publishing, distribution, and marketing of literary work and to envision new ways for writers to engage readers and build audiences for their work. Visit us at www.foptt.com to see the results of our reader survey and find more bookstores and literary activities in your area.

take the cannoli

2011-11-20T16:18:00.001-08:00

1. like a bucket list, but tastier and less depressing

When Jonathan Gold’s “99 Essential L.A. Restaurants” guide came out last week, I immediately tallied up how many I’d been to. Eleven: Border Grill, Bottega Louie, Casa Bianca, Euro Pane, Good Girl Dinette, Guelaguetza, Huarache Azteca, the Hungry Cat, Musso & Frank, the Oinkster and Waterloo & City.

Not bad for a cheapo and non-foodie. (I love good food, but I can also thoroughly enjoy a vending machine donut or five.) It doesn’t hurt that Jonathan Gold’s tastes veer toward cheap ethnic holes-in-the-wall. Waterloo & City, where we went for Nicole’s sister’s birthday, has plates of charcuterie that look like a painter’s palette. But Huarache Azteca has plastic forks and random vendors who wander through the eating area selling bootleg DVDs.

The other 88 restaurants make for a nice to-do list. But it’s harder than it looks. When we first read the list, we just started reminiscing about Guelaguetza, where we held “planning meetings” for our Oaxaca trip. So that’s where we ended up last Saturday, with Lori and Brett. The mole, as Jonathan Gold promised, was “as black as Dick Cheney’s heart” (but much more full of love).

Last night we went with Christine and Jody to Maximiliano, which apparently hasn’t reached “essential” status—it just opened—but got a shout-out in Gold’s write-up of the Oinkster, which has the same unpretentious chef. Maximiliano is definitely fancier—with its mosaic tile oven and walls painted to look like abstracted bean sprouts or rice noodles (or maybe spaghetti would make more sense). But it’s not too fancy: Its tag line is “Kinda old-school Italian” and you can get a big-enough-to-share pizza for $12.

Christine has this amazing ability to make demands with a big grin on her face. So they don’t do flights of beers? Well, could they? Shouldn’t there be more cream in the apple brown betty? But somehow everybody wins. The waiter/bartenders (we ate at the bar—apparently it’s good to have a reservation, which makes me uneasy about the future of Highland Park) seemed to enjoy their day a little more, and Christine got what she wanted.

We all did: eggplant pizza with big dollops of burrata and a bubbly crust; roasted fennel, which is the rare dish that tastes completely indulgent while making you feel vaguely like you just brushed your teeth; and a warm salad with squid and blood oranges.

2. why i’m not a chef or a drug addict

Every now and then I think about my eighth grade home ec teacher instructing us to add mandarin oranges to a salad. I was like, Gross! Fruit in a salad other than a fruit salad?! Now it seems like the weirder the shit you throw together, the more delicious it is. Roasted Brussels sprouts and bleu cheese on a raisin bagel? Bring it on!

I realize it’s probably not quite that easy. It’s more about types of flavors working well together than whether the ingredients are traditionally found in the same dish. To be a chef, you have to know chemistry and stuff. Still, doesn’t my Brussels sprouts bleu-cheese bagel sound kind of good? Kind of?

Okay, maybe stick to what Max (actually, I don’t think there’s a Maximiliano; there is an Andre Guerrero) has on the menu. Dessert was the aforementioned too-dry apple brown betty. But I pointed out to Christine that I’d never had apple brown betty before. Maybe it was supposed to taste like diet cobbler.

The cannolis made up for it, though. Jody, who grew up on Long Island and has tasted his share of great Italian food, declared these the real thing, though he thought they were a little heavy on the nutmeg.

“Are you sure that’s nutmeg?” I asked. I was distracted by the dusting of crushed pistachios and the sweet spoonful of heaven that is mascarpone* with chocolate chips.

“Definitely nutmeg,” Jody said. “We used to try to trip on it in college.”

“Really? I had no idea you could do that. Do you, like, snort it?”

“We just mixed it with a bunch of water and drank it. It didn’t work very well.”

I think I will continue taking my nutmeg in the form of my true drug of choice, cannoli.

*Spell check informs me that it’s not spelled “marscapone,” like the planet and the gangster. Spell check and I also struggled with cannoli and burrata, which tells you how often either of us writes about food and/or goes to Italy.

it’s really just damn lonely sometimes: the adoption bloggers interview project

2011-11-17T08:15:00.000-08:00

As part of my ongoing exercise in magical thinking (in which blogging a lot about adoption = getting a kid sooner), I signed up for Production, Not Reproduction’s Adoption Bloggers Interview Project. Apparently being only an occasional adoption blogger didn’t disqualify me. The idea was that adoptive or prospective adoptive parents would exchange some Q’s and A’s and post the answers on their respective blogs.

When Heather of PNR paired me with Jenni of Sincerely, Jenni, my first thought was, Is this, like, some kind of odd-couple stunt? I’m a queer, childless, marginally fertile, urban liberal planning to adopt an infant through an agency. Jenni is straight, has bio kids and step kids, lives in a tiny town in Iowa, links to a blog called Getting Down with Jesus, and is so fertile that she got pregnant accidentally at 19 and placed her son for adoption (more on that later). AND she’s planning to adopt an older child through the foster care system.

But after emailing with her and reading her heartfelt and good-humored blog, I started wishing our kids could have interstate play dates. I imagine that this is good practice for matching with a birthmother. Maybe you don’t have a ton in common on paper, but shared experience brings you together.

Here’s what Jenni had to say about home studies, racial issues and reindeer food:

1. Your family is planning to adopt an older child through the foster care system. Why did you choose this route?

My husband had a vasectomy in 2001 after our youngest daughter was born, because we had decided we were done having children. About five or six years ago, it came up in random conversation that we might consider having another child, but neither of us felt like we wanted another BABY. We felt like we were past the baby phase of our lives, as our children all are very busy with sports and other activities. Over the last several years we talked about it more and more and finally decided our children were old enough that adoption of a younger school-ager was a real option for us. We decided we would look into adopting from the foster care system. There are so many children in our state needing a family, and we want more than anything to add another child to ours!

2. I just read your post about the supermom myth--did you ever feel like the home study was some kind of interrogation to find out whether you and your husband could be super parents (or is that just my own paranoia)?

We just finally found out our first homestudy appointment is going to be Monday the 21st (YIKES!!!), and to say I am nervous would be a gross understatement. I have been seeing my home in a whole new light lately. The paperwork we have needed to fill out has been so probing and so intense that if everyone needed to complete this stuff before being allowed to have children, there would be a LOT of people in this world without kids, that’s for sure! I think as potential adoptive parents, we all try to present our best selves, because we are all competing for the same children. It’s sad to think about, but its true. My husband and I are competing with other couples in the foster/adoption process in the hopes that we are matched with particular children. It’s stressful to think “What can I be doing differently to make my house/life/kids/job/past finances look better in order to make this outcome turn out the way we want it to?” As potential adoptive parents, we are so NOT in control of the situation, and I think that’s the hardest part of it all. It’s a waiting game, and a lot of hoops to jump through and it’s really just damn lonely sometimes.

3. You’ve discussed how the child you adopt may be of a different race than you and/or have special needs. Unconditional love is the first and most important ingredient in making a family, but what outside resources will you look to for help?

We are so fortunate to have a wonderful family and a great group of friends that are so open and willing to support whatever child we welcome into our family. We have discussed with all of them the fact that we are not ruling out any children at this point, other than we are looking for a specific age range (4-7) and sex (boy). Our children have such wonderful hearts and are so open-minded and ready to welcome a new brother to the family, whatever the ‘package’ he might be wrapped in. We are also lucky to have a great school district with a fantastic special education program (if needed). As far as race, that is the one issue that is a bit of a concern for me. We live in a small community and it is mostly white. There are a few African-Americans, and they are children (most of them have been adopted by Caucasian parents). As far as I know, there are not any Hispanic or Latino members of our community. We would make sure that we make every effort to seek out cultural opportunities in communities around us (Our state’s capital is within a few minutes from us, where the minority demographic is quite different).

So I guess what I am trying to say is… while our family is very open to accepting any race the child happens to be, we will probably have to stop outside our small community to expose him to his own culture more often.

4. In addition to the two biological children you’re raising, you also have two stepchildren, right? How do you think being a stepmom has prepared you to be an adoptive mom?

I have two stepchildren, ages 16 and 14. When I first met their father, they were 4 and 2 years old. My husband is also a stepfather to my 16-year old daughter. She was 3 years old when he and I met. I think the most important thing it has done to prepare us for adoption is that it has taught us how to bond with and parent children that are not our own. Being a step-parent is not an easy job. Shared parenting with a birth-parent that is not all that excited to have you around is pretty similar to being a foster parent, when you think about it. The kids sometimes compare me to their “real mom” and it can get frustrating. Sometimes I have to get used to ranking lower on the totem pole, but really—it has made us a stronger family because of it. We have learned to be so much more accepting of different types of families.

5. You also placed a child for adoption when you were 19 (so you've been pretty much every kind of mom--birth, bio, step and now adoptive--there must be some kind of prize for that!). How does your own experience shape your attitude toward the birth family of the child you’ll adopt?

A lot of people think of kids being removed from their home and put into foster care and they automatically assume the parents are horrible people. They assume abuse, neglect, drugs, alcohol… the worst. In many cases, this is true—unfortunately. What I’ve come to learn, both through placing my own child for adoption and also through taking classes to become an adoptive parent, is that we all make mistakes in our lives. Some people are just not ready to parent. Some people just have fallen down, and have a hard getting back up. Many times the children need a place to go temporarily while the parents pick themselves back up and get the help they need. Then there the times that the children need a permanent home because the parents decide they can’t parent the children or the courts make the decision for them. In my case, I made my own decision that I was not ready to parent. I was too young, the father wasn’t in the picture, and I knew there were couples out there that couldn’t have children that could care for my child so much better than I could.

Now, all these years later, having met my son, I know I made the right choice. I am so grateful that his parents have let me be a part of his life. We have a wonderful relationship. I still grieve missing out on 18 years of his life, but I know he wouldn’t have turned out the way he did had I chosen to keep him. Now, WHERE’S MY AWARD????

6. You have a full time job outside the home. What tips do you have for other working parents (or future working parents)?

Consistency is key. My kids are very active in sports and activities and I have tried so many different tools and gadgets over the years to keep our family organized. For me, nothing works better than a regular old planner and pencil. Everything gets written down. I use one planner for everything – work and home. Everything that my husband and kids do go in there—practices, church, school events. Everything. And its all in pencil, because things change all the time. I also keep a big calendar on the fridge. Everything also gets added to that.

My other biggest tip is this: Don’t try to be a supermom and do it all. You are only setting yourself up for failure. I find it is so much more important to spend quality time with my kids than making sure my kitchen floor gets mopped on a weekly basis or that I am a part of every committee at my kids’ school. (On that note, why the heck am I on so many committees at my kids’ school? Sheesh.) It has taken me some time, and I have learned through trial and error, the fine art of MODERATION. I can do a little of everything, but I now know when to draw the line when I am over-scheduling myself or my kids.

I am also very fortunate to work for a company that is VERY family-friendly. They are so accommodating to employees that have children and offer flexible scheduling, and are always willing to work with me if I need to leave early or come in late. I don’t know how I would manage if it wasn’t for that.

7. I don’t know too much about the process of adopting an older child through foster care. Is there a chance that he could be returned to his bio family without your consent? If so, how do you think you’ll handle that?

There are two ways to adopt through the foster care system. One is foster-to-adopt, where you take a foster children with the intent of eventually adopting one (or more) of them eventually. These children do not have a TPR (Termination of Parental Rights) in place already. Your home might be the first foster home they come to after being removed from their birth parents. It can be a lengthy process, and sometimes even though you think the child is targeted for adoption, they might end up being returned to their birth parents—or another family member of theirs steps and wants to take them.

The other way to adopt from the foster system is just a straight adoption, which is what we are hoping to do. There are listings of children already in foster care—whether in group homes, or living with foster families. They already have their TPR in place, and they cannot be returned to their birth families.

8. Are there any circumstances that would make you choose to end a foster placement? If so, what?

Right now, we are not planning to do foster care. We may consider it after our older children leave for college and we have some extra room in our house. But, I think the only reasons we would consider ending a placement would be if the child was physically harming one of our children or one of us. Since we have the option of saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to a placement before taking a child, I would hope we would get as much information as possible before bringing the child into our home in the first place.

9. Does your family have any wacky habits or rituals that you think will make the kid you adopt just scratch his head?

One of our weird rituals at Christmas time is to make reindeer food instead of setting out milk and cookies for Santa. I always told my kids that so many people leave milk and cookies but forget about the reindeer, and you know they probably get hungry flying all over the world! So we always made reindeer food! We’d mix up reindeer food (a.k.a. oatmeal) and add in the special “magic spices” (a.k.a. gold and silver glitter) and shake it up really good. Then we would sprinkle it out in the snow. The reindeer can see the magic spices from up in the sky and so they could not only find our house easier, but they would also get some yummy reindeer food as well!

A wacky habit in our house is more to do with our dog, Bella, more than anything. Our yellow lab, is absolutely devoted to me. I have no idea why. She follows me everywhere. She sleeps in our bed every night (under the covers, of course!) and has conditioned herself to wake up and hop out of bed when she hears the “beep-beep” of me shutting my alarm clock off. She also knows when I shut the TV off at night and it makes a “beep-beep-beep” shutting down sound, she runs upstairs and knows its time for bed. My husband and kids are amazed when I show them these little tricks, because I am the only one she will do them for.

10. As someone who’s been on both sides of the adoption experience, what do you think birthparents and adoptive parents should know about each other?

I think the most important thing to remember is that no matter what, everyone is in this for the child. That’s who matters most. Our main goal is to do what’s best for that little boy or girl.

USA! USA! USssigh….

2011-11-14T09:24:00.000-08:00

I’m at Starbucks right now, ostensibly doing some freewriting in preparation for a possible future novel, which is a huge indulgence because the circus novel isn’t anywhere near done. But a few drafts in, I get itchy to start something new, and I’m not nearly practical or short-winded enough to just work on a short story.

I’m also drinking a salted caramel hot chocolate, another huge indulgence (360 calories; thanks, stupid new law requiring Starbucks to inform me of this).

But I was distracted from my indulgences by these wristbands that Starbucks is selling. They look like little loops of bungee cord sealed with a metal square. I have to admit they’re more attractive than the LIVESTRONG-style bands. The red and blue bungee bands promote “Americans Helping Americans Create Jobs.” If you buy the $5 wristband, some money will go to a domestic micro-loan program.

My first thought when I saw this was Oh my god, we’ve become our own third world charity case.

I’ve done my fair share of holiday shopping at The Hunger Site, and I would definitely prefer to give someone a fair trade Taureg* ebony and coin silver cuff bracelet from Mali than sweatshop-made Muppet-fur boots from Claire’s Boutique. Nevertheless, I’m always a little skeptical about shopping for any cause. Is making ebony and coin silver cuff bracelets for Americans as helpful as, say, making food or clothing for fellow Malians? Does buying a bracelet lull us into a false sense of good deed-doing and prevent us from writing our congresspersons or donating cash to an organization that would make a bigger impact?

I genuinely don’t know the answers to these questions. I just know that such transactions smack of paternalism in a way I can’t quite put my finger on. Maybe just because they let us pretend we didn’t create our own crappy post-colonial world in the first place.

According to some statistics I’ve heard,** the U.S. is officially a second-world country now, meaning that while we have stuff like the internet and Chipotle, we also have a giant chasm between rich and poor. So now we’re treating ourselves in the same well meaning but half-assed and unsustainable way that we treat Mali or Haiti or Guatemala.

Because let me tell you, every mug, thermos, and eco-friendly reusable Starbucks lunch bag they’re selling here is stamped Made in China. Call me crazy, but I have this idea for how we could create jobs in the U.S.

*The site says Taureg is a “term used to identify numerous groups of nomadic peoples in the Sahara Desert.” Is that why Volkswagen named their SUV “Touareg”? Because driving around in an all-terrain vehicle is kind of like being a nomadic person of the desert?

**The Second World by Parag Khanna. Also, my yoga teacher.

unbirthday

2011-11-10T18:03:00.000-08:00

As anyone who’s been surprised by a tiny thirty-week baby or gotten induced for a second time knows, due dates don’t mean much. Still. Tomorrow would have been mine. 11/11/11—which I only found out because I used one of those online due date calculators, not because my poker-faced doctor ever encouraged me to look so far ahead. (And he was right, but still, fuck that.)

Except that it wouldn’t have been my due date, because I was carrying twins, who never hang out in utero for the full forty weeks. Sometimes it boggles my mind that I was pregnant, and with twins. Even just typing it feels like a lie, or at the very least some kind of dubious legend passed down from a long time ago. But my body knows. My body always knew. And when I fell apart so spectacularly, I think it was partly the result of my mind pushing one idea—You can’t possibly be this sad about babies who were never babies, so there must be something else terribly wrong with you—and my body pushing another: You were sheltering two little people and then they just left and now you’re all alone.

Now both my mind and body are wondering about the parallel universe in which I’d be the sleep-deprived, grouchy, terrified, self-doubting blissfully happy mother of two one-month-old-ish boys.* AK would have been sleep-deprived, grouchy, messy, socially starved and blissfully happy.

I’ve been helplessly, absurdly, gut-wrenchingly envious of pregnant women over the past six months (well, really, the whole year, from when we first started trying). I’ve been more envious of pregnant women than women with babies, which is weird because I never saw pregnancy as more than a means to an end. But that’s my mind talking. My eyeballs saw baby bumps and transmitted wishful telegrams to my heart and uterus.

I mean, I don’t know. I don’t know how the mind and body work, or how they’re connected. I’ve learned that the body does in fact carry knowledge, but I’ve also learned that that particular truth is a slippery slope into thinking that your mind caused a baby to die or a tumor to grow or whatever, and I’ve racked up some serious therapy bills trying to learn that the universe’s math is not nearly so neat and tidy (or so mean).

Still. I wonder, as my parallel universe self proceeds from pregnancy to motherhood, if I’ll stop reserving my most intense envy for pregnant women and start directing it at parents of infants. And then toddlers. And then…but hopefully, by the time we would have had a toddler, we’ll actually have an infant. (If not sooner. If not tomorrow. The fun of adoption is that it could, in theory, happen any minute. This is also the craziness of it.) And by that point, I’ll be so in love with our actual baby that I’ll be glad to live in this universe and not that other one.

There’s also a world in which I never got pregnant at all, and one in which I’m still with B, and maybe one in which I lived out my ninth grade dream of marrying the guy who played Sodapop in our high school production of The Outsiders. But the Squeakies were in this universe for a minute, which is why I’m glad to be here now, in one of the worlds in which I got to love them.

*Did I ever tell you they were boys? We know this only because they did an autopsy, or whatever you call an examination of a body that was never a body. They were “genetically normal males” with a pesky neural tube defect. I am glad and not glad to know all of this, like so many of the things I know.

this friday, let's do something different

2011-11-06T12:05:00.000-08:00

Yoga and movies are getting a little old. Instead, let's go to a dive bar on the industrial outskirts of Santa Ana, near the John Wayne Airport. A place where guys dress like this:

We'll meet up with Lori, Brett, Maria, Calvin, Pedro and Stephen, plus Stephen's sister and her crew, who told us about this night.

So that's a Huey Lewis and the News cover band onstage? I don't actually know any of their music, but if you say so. I do remember shelving their CD that summer I worked at the Wherehouse. Remember the Wherehouse?

Let's pretend like we're being followed by paparazzi.

I guess the next band, Lady Zep, is the only thing it could be: an all-girl Led Zeppelin tribute band. What do you think their day jobs are? I mean, assuming this isn't a full-time gig yet.

You're right, the lead singer is definitely an admin assistant. The kind who sounds very authoritative on the phone but takes a lot of smoke breaks. Except, she doesn't really sound like she smokes. She sounds pretty good, actually.

And how about her? She looks like she likes animals. "Do you have your Petco card with you today?" Yeah, I can picture it.

The drummer is a dispatcher for a trucking company. She will not take any shit. Not any.

Have we really been here two hours? I can't believe Stephen's sister and her crew have been in the dive-bar equivalent of the mosh pit this whole time. I admire them, seriously. Endurance is a very important trait, like, if you're in the CIA and being waterboarded or something.

Oh wait, the headliners are finally here! Metalachi: They do mariachi covers of heavy metal songs. Get it?

From far away, they look like a mariachi band.

Up close they look like Kiss, or pirates, or vikings. Or all of the above.

They sound kind of great. I mean, they're jokier than Mariachi El Bronx, which is my new favorite rock/mariachi hybrid, but they can play the hell out of their instruments.

The between-song banter is starting to annoy me, though. Why did they invite that girl onstage and spend like ten minutes mixing her some wacky drink and then pretend to hump her? There wasn't really a punch line. I feel like I'm in a weird dream.

They all talk in these fakey Mexican accents, except for the guy who sounds inexplicably Bostonian/New Zealand-ish. I mean, I know they're Mexican and all, and it's supposed to be okay to do stereotypical impressions of a thing if you are that thing. But it doesn't feel quite that well thought out.

Oh, and now they're joking about some slutty girl. I hope she's fictional. One of them just said, "Ay, I heard that girl's a dude" and someone else yelled, "Nasty!" Ha ha! Girls who aren't pretty are lame! Girls who were born dudes could never be pretty! The concept of a girl with a penis strangely intrigues and therefore angers me!

Okay, we're outta here. We ordered some sodas to stay awake, but they were the flattest sodas ever. And I like flat soda. The fish and chips we had earlier was pretty good, but seriously, what kind of bar cannot make a Coke? Next Friday, let's go to yoga.

what i read in october

2011-11-03T19:51:00.000-07:00

Not much, as it turns out. I blame shortened library hours. But I did reread Pinko by Jen Benka and wrote a longer review for Gently Read Literature (cyber-flip to page 11). I almost never reread books because there are so many I haven’t read even one time, but whenever I do, I’m reminded of what a worthwhile activity it is. New meanings emerge, structures become apparent, the text works its rhythms into your soul. I feel like real writers reread.

If I were a real writer, I would probably be reading the classics below for the third time. But I also believe that real writers don’t waste time apologizing for their imperfect reading habits. The important thing is the voraciousness.

A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean: I started this book on a trip to Montana (perfect, right?). Maclean sums up the spiritual effect of the landscape beautifully: "For all of us, mountains turn into images after a short time and the images turn true. Gold-tossed waves change into the purple backs of monsters, and so forth. Always something out of the moving deep, and nearly always oceanic. Never a lake, never a sky."

He talks about hiking--during his years in the Forest Service--to various rhythms, and clearly he has a musician's ear. Or maybe a preacher's, like his father. The language is one part cowboy wit, one part biblical. The content is a similar blend of adventure tale and philosophy, set in the rugged terrain of men and lovingly calling its bluff, which makes me see him as an odd sort of precursor to Dave Eggers. I also really enjoyed reading a somewhat contemporary older man's remembrances of his youth--I feel like that's the closest look I'll ever get at 1919, and it feels like a privilege.

The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton: This earlier novel of Edith Wharton's lacks the polish and maturity of The Age of Innocence; sometimes I felt like I was reading a trashy gossip rag. But I mostly mean that in a good way. The story of Lily Bart, a fun-loving upper class bachelorette who is inconveniently lacking cash, exposes the cruelty of class and gender discrimination as well as many tragic personal flaws (namely Lily's ability to adapt to any situation, which makes her unable to commit to any one kind of life). At an earlier point in my own life, I think I would have been more put off by Lily's snobbery and greed. Now it's hard not to relate to this woman who wants too much (though not more than many of her peers have), is punished for it, accidentally (spoiler alert) commits suicide while trying to manage her anxiety, and dies clutching an invisible baby. There but for the grace of Zoloft....

happy halloween! here’s a peanut butter cup and my life story

2011-11-01T21:41:00.000-07:00

I love our neighbor Jennifer. When I complained to her the other day that we never get any trick-or-treaters, she promised to come by with her daughter. I take all commitments very seriously, so I went into work early, left early and sat in traffic thinking, There are children who need me!

I got home and threw our light-up Snoopy “Happy Halloween” thing in the window just in time to see Jennifer and Lucia coming up the sidewalk (or, more likely, they came over when they saw our light was on). Lucia was a baby carrot, although she’d gotten fussy when Jennifer tried to put her green frondy hat on, so basically she was wearing a big orange bib.

“It’s okay,” I assured her. “Some carrots don’t have tops.” But I don’t think Lucia, who is two, was all that self-conscious about it.

“Kitty,” she said.

“Do you think we could see your cats?” Jennifer asked.

I invited them in, the cats having been sequestered for the night to protect them from possible tricksters. Seriously, my aunt had this adorable black kitten named Spider who was killed in a truly horror movie-worthy way one Halloween. No way am I letting ours (who look like a witch’s cat, an increasingly round pumpkin and, well, a cat with cancer, respectively) out into the wilds of Highland Park on Halloween night.

T-Mec did her happy three-legged bunny hop over to Jennifer and Lucia, whom I think she’s missed as she’s become more housebound. Lucia petted her very, very gently.

I don’t know Jennifer very well—I actually just found out Lucia’s name like a week ago—but she’s one of those people I want to instantly spill my life story to. She just has such a warm vibe. It must be hard to be one of those people, always getting sidelined by people’s life stories. I wanted to tell her that I love her kids (even when they’re screaming, as one was the other day, “Daddy, I will never love your again!”) and the fact that she worries about being “that lady” when calling the police about the abandoned house around the corner. I wanted to tell her that C.C. and I are working on having kids of our own and that even though hers might be, like, ten when that finally happens, I want them to have play dates.

“Alright,” she said to Lucia. “Let’s go home and you can eat your candy.”

Lucia explained her priorities: “I want kitty.”

“You can come by anytime,” I said, and I meant it.

“I want kitty,” Lucia said.

We also got a baby monkey and a princess and a superhero. Toward the end of the night the teenage kids from up the street came by.

“Where’s your cat Fernando?” they asked. “And what’s the other one’s name? Missouri?”

We figured it made sense that Ferdinand would kick it with the older kids. For the rest of the night we called Ferd and Temecula Fernando and Missouri. We didn’t want OC to feel left out of the nickname biz, so we decided that City is to State as County is to Continent. We called him Australia and Western Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa, and he and I both pretended that we weren’t too shy to make friends with the neighbors.

i like big dinosaur butts and i cannot lie

2011-10-30T10:27:00.000-07:00

I had a dream that I was putting together an Amelia Earhart costume for Halloween, which would have been awesome, but last night was also PEN’s kickoff reading for Night in the City, a month-long celebration of L.A. literary and film noir. So instead, AK donned a fedora and I Googled pin curls.

I think I looked more 1940s with the placeholder scarf than with the curls, but AK pointed out that the look I was going for was femme fatale, not war bride.

Sort of Veronica Lake-ish?

Here’s Veronica Lake making a public service announcement to all the Rosie the Riveters out there, telling them not to wear their hair like hers.

We hit the reading at the Last Bookstore and although the lit crawl that was to follow sort of disintegrated, we met up with Pedro, Stephen, Christine and Jody (below, as cheerleader) at Spring Street Bar. It turned out to be the perfect vantage point for watching costumed revelers. Some club nearby was having a big thing, and the stream of “sexy [fill in the blank]” got thicker and thicker.

Our favorites, though, were the two beautiful and sexy (not “sexy”) girls in calavera makeup at the other end of our table, and a wacky girl whom we guessed was a…devil cat with a big butt? She was wearing furry green horns and a matching tail, and had stuffed balloons in the back of her velour pants.

She showed us a small sign that said “Bronty the VegeSCAREian.” “See, I’m a brontosaurus!” she said, and proceeded to do her impression of one, which involved roaring and pawing at the air.

There was also a lion carrying strings of marshmallows and a rifle. I had a vague but visceral flashback to third grade, when Mr. Rosenbaum read us Lafcadio, the Lion Who Shot Back. Christine tested it out: “Lafcadio!”

The lion cheered. His friend said, “Wow, I was just saying, 'Does anyone know who the fuck you are?'” I like to think we made the lion's night.

Other than that, you know that whole don’t-be-racist costume campaign? I am in agreement, but I also had the thought, Yeah, but who really dresses up as an Indian or a terrorist? Plenty of people, as it turns out, and a lot of them were in line for the club thing.

We moved on to JP’s annual amazing Gothtober party, where the costumes were brilliant and bizarre, sometimes nearly naked and occasionally sexual but usually not “sexy.” This was a crowd who viewed their bodies in terms of performance potential.

Earlier in the night, when we’d seen a Dr. Frankenfurter with a pretty impressive upper body, I’d thought of this girl I’d gone to grad school with who had these crazy ripped biceps. At JP’s, that same girl (who may or may not be identifying as a girl these days) was playing Dr. Frakenfurter in several elaborate vignettes in the middle of the dance floor/living room.

Flipping gender (and other goofy constructs) on its head and then back again and then turning it sideways is exactly what Halloween should be about. That and candy, of course.

use only as directed

2011-10-26T18:39:00.000-07:00

The good news is that my pupils are almost back to the same size. The bad news is that it took me a $30 co-pay and a lot of freaking out to learn that you really shouldn’t douse one of your contacts in the kind of eye drops that say “Remove contact lenses before using.”

I guess I sort of thought all clear-colored, eye-related solutions were the same? And I’d forgotten about that one time I ran out of contact solution and soaked my contacts in eye drops all night, which made my eyes into giant fireballs, but I guess they were fireballs of the same size?

Anyway, this morning I put my contacts in, went to Zumba at the gym, impressed myself with how well I could shake my ass, was not impressed by the actual shakiness of my ass, took a shower and—when I looked in the mirror to put eye shadow on—saw that my left pupil looked like Puss in Boots when he goes all big-eyed:

…and my right pupil was more like Puss in Boots as seductive hero.

Except he wouldn’t be seductive or adorable if he was all lopsided and crazy-eyed. I literally had crazy-eye!

I panicked, as per usual, and called my dad (he’s an optical engineer—maybe he knew about these things? He didn’t, but he told me not to panic, as per usual). Then I made an appointment at the optometrist’s office below mine, which seemed more convenient and friendly than the ER. At this point I was thinking maybe the eye drops were at fault, but my brain was also shouting, You might have a brain tumor! I might have a me-tumor!

Dr. Gording shined some lights in my eyes, said he didn’t see any signs of inflammation and concluded the drops were to blame. “You’re a little young for a stroke,” he said, sort of as a joke, but my brain was like, Aubrey Plaza! Aubrey Plaza!

On Marc Maron’s comedian-interview podcast WTF—which AK got me addicted to, to the point where I kind of want to stake out his house because he talks about our exact couple-block radius of Highland Park all the time—Aubrey Plaza of Parks and Rec fame talked about how she had a stroke when she was twenty!

But I haven’t lost speech or movement, just another little shred of sanity, so I guess I’m good. Dammit, I do all the things you’re supposed to do. I floss. I buckle up. I paint my nails in a well ventilated area. You’d think that a moment of rebellion might do me good. Next time I’m going to abuse a drug, I guess I’ll go find some ecstasy or something, and then at least I’ll have some fun in exchange for my crazy-eye.*

*Note to the adoption agency social workers and/or potential birthparents who I’m pretending/hoping are now part of my reading audience: I’m kidding. I don’t do drugs. But also, I don’t judge people who do, and a baby born with a smidge of weed in his or her system would probably just be really mellow, right?

sane crazy people

2011-10-24T19:30:00.000-07:00

My final post for Ironing Board Collective went up today. It’s almost embarrassing how much brain space guest-blogging took up, and how sad I am that I will now have to devote my brain to other things. Or maybe you’ll just see more style-related, photo-filled posts here at Bread and Bread. Just a little warning. Anyway, my post is about high school fashion designers. They’re pretty great.

I am hoping that this moving-on thing will be good for my wallet and the overcrowded closet AK and I share. Seriously, I can’t keep buying clothes. I have shit I need to save for. 1) Car. 2) Baby. Not necessarily in that order.

Speaking of pathologies, this weekend AK and I saw Take Shelter, which is maybe the best movie I’ve seen this year (although The Future is up there) and definitely the best movie I’ve seen about mental illness. Curtis works on a construction crew, loves his wife and daughter (who is deaf and awaiting cochlear implant surgery, insurance willing), and is starting to have intense nightmares and midday hallucinations about an apocalyptic storm.

In other movies, one of the following would happen:
1) He would go from sane to batshit roughly overnight, and the movie would be about his saintly, long-suffering family.
2) He wouldn’t be crazy after all—an apocalyptic storm would come, and he’d be a hero.
3) He would be crazy, but he’d also be spectacularly good at math. Or able to talk to dead people. Or at least a tortured artist.

I won’t tell you exactly what happens in Take Shelter, but it’s none of the above. It’s a movie about a very sane person dealing with the fact that he’s crazy, if that makes sense. Although I’ve never (knock on wood) had hallucinations, my recent brush with a handful of anxiety disorders would lead me to believe that the movie is very realistic: There’s one part of you that’s grounded in the world everyone else lives in, and you know that you’re simply freaking out for understandable experiential and biological reasons. There’s another part of you that is absolutely convinced that the slightly darkish area on your back is not a spot your sunscreen missed at Emily’s pool party but a melanoma that will be reabsorbed into your body and grow to the size of a malignant football, like that lady you read about in that magazine. And the second part of you says to the first, Yeah, but sometimes even paranoid people are being followed.

When Curtis has a dream about his dog attacking him, he doesn’t go after the dog with an axe (because that would be crazy). He builds the dog a pen in the yard. Later he finds the dog a good home with his brother. Curtis is a highly responsible crazy person, which makes him more likable and the movie more terrifying—because he does everything right and it doesn’t stop the crazy.

A couple of critics on KPCC complained about the last scene of the movie, but AK and I agreed it was a beautiful piece of poetry in an otherwise uber-down-to-earth movie. You can read the scene as a metaphor for how his family will be dragged into the waking nightmare of mental illness, or for how they will lift him from it. Either way, none of them are alone.

project baby: here's where you come in

2011-10-22T09:33:00.000-07:00

I’ve always hated the concept of networking. I picture a bunch of dudes in suits with shiny teeth and ulterior motives exchanging business cards—in other words, that scene in American Psycho. That’s not what you want if you work at a nice little nonprofit (which is why we in the 501(c)3 field call it “community building”). And that’s definitely not what you want if you’re trying to adopt a baby.

Nevertheless, our open adoption agency frequently reminds us that ten percent of matches between adoptive parents and birth parents are made via personal networking (as opposed to the agency sending out our profile). So we’ve done what any loving parents-to-be would do, and created a Facebook page.

All you’ve got to do is:

1) Log in to Facebook, go here and click “like.”

2) Share the link with your friends.

Maybe you (or one of your friends) is a high school teacher who has a student who recently peed on a stick and did not get the result she was hoping for (I can totally relate, although in a flip-flopped way). Maybe you’re a doctor with a patient who wants to find a stable and loving home for that blur on the ultrasound monitor. Maybe you, person on the internet who might be reading this, are pregnant yourself. If so, let us introduce ourselves.

We are two friendly women in our thirties, white and Latina, who want to adopt openly. Open adoption means the birthmother gets to decide who will raise her child, and she gets to stay in touch with the child as he or she grows up. The birthmother never has to wonder how her baby is doing, her kid never has to wonder about his or her roots, and the adoptive parents get to be honest with their kid right from the start.

A pretty good deal for everyone, don’t you think?

I’m so grateful to all of you who’ve helped us through the emotional roller coaster that is Project Baby. This is the happy part, where there’s actually something concrete you can do to help (see above). And unlike when you “like” a Save The Whales page or something, this could actually accomplish something. And if you link us to a birthparent, we promise not to ask you to babysit too often.

save some dates: private dicks and fem(inists) fatales

2011-10-21T19:30:00.000-07:00

Pretty much all literary events that don’t happen during National Poetry Month in April happen in October. And those that don’t happen in October get squeezed into November. It’s shaping up to be a busy (and fun) month for me and my fellow writers.

First, Jamie and I will both be participating in the month-long Night and the City: L.A. Noir in Poetry, Fiction and Film festival. You may remember that I was lukewarm on The Big Sleep, but I do love me some dark alleys, dirty secrets and stylish fedoras. Will I dress in costume when I read a bit of Chandler’s work and a bit of my own with the fabulous Pam Ward on Nov. 6? You’ll just have to come and find out.

What: Noir Genius: Weldon Kees and Jorge Luis Borges
When: Tuesday, Nov. 1, 7 p.m.
Who: Jamie FitzGerald, Dana Gioia, Lou Mathews, Robert Mezey, Mariano Zaro
Where: Libros Schmibros, 2000 E. 1st St., Los Angeles, CA 90033

What: Big Noir Open Reading—with Features
When: Sunday, Nov. 6, 3-5 p.m.
Who: Cheryl Klein, Pam Ward, Mike Sonksen
Where: Gemini Manor*, 1341 N. Mariposa Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90027

Flash forward about three decades. L.A. still has plenty of dark alleys and dirty secrets, but the fedoras have been replaced by corduroy bellbottoms, and women are roaring in amazing, imaginative ways that still haven’t gotten proper credit. Seriously, why are the Black Panthers and the ACT-UP crew held up as icons of empowered coolness while first-wave feminists are seen as whiny women in Birkenstocks?**

Maybe we’ll address this on Nov. 14, when I’ll moderate a panel of some of my favorite foremothers as part of Pacific Standard Time. I am seriously so humbled and excited to be part of such a big exhibit/citywide party celebrating two of my favorite things: art and L.A.

What: Telling Stories, The New Short Fiction Series presents the Woman's Building Writers Workshop
When: Sunday, Nov. 14, 6:30-7:30 p.m.
Who: Bia Lowe, Deena Metzger, Terry Wolverton; their stories will be performed by Jesse Holcomb, Barbara Keegan and Sally Shore; after-panel moderated by Cheryl Klein
Where: Annenberg Beach House***, 415 Pacific Coast Highway, Santa Monica, CA 90402

*I hear this is some crazy old ramshackle mansion that was a big party house in the eighties. That alone is enough to get me there.
**I am not saying this to imply a hierarchy among movements. I believe all equal rights movements are created equal.
***Another seriously fantastic location!

treat yourself!

2011-10-20T18:19:00.000-07:00

AK and I have very different relationships to illness. I have a high pain threshold but worry that every new ache or bump or freckle is a sign of a life-threatening illness. AK is not a worrier, period, but when she’s hurting, you’re gonna know about it. She would, preferably, like a battalion of friends to gather round with chicken soup anytime she coughs.

This morning I had a follow-up to my 2009 boob ultrasound, which I’d been worrying about off and on for weeks. In a heroic attempt to let me get some sleep in my precarious mental state, AK threw our noisy cats out of the room at 6 a.m. On the way back to bed, she slammed her toe into the cat tree and broke it.

So, as you can imagine, we were both at our best.

The good news is that my boobs are cancer-free (so when some guy leaned out of his car and yelled, “Nice titties!” on my way home, I had to agree). A trip to urgent care confirmed that AK’s pinky has a spiral-shaped fracture (that is her actual x-ray on the left), but other than a limp, she’s good.

So there we were with a free afternoon and light hearts.* Enter Parks and Recreation again: We’d just watched an episode in which Donna and Tom celebrate “Treat Yourself” day. They dine out and go to the mall and try on outrageous clothing. When one of them asks, “Should I get this?” the answer is always “Treat yourself!”

AK had to go back to work (not a treat!), but we did make time for lunch (build-our-own-burgers at Jake’s in Pasadena), and then I treated myself to a little Treat Yourself! at J. Crew and Forever 21. Nothing I bought was over $20, but it is possible to go broke in $20 increments. I’m hoping this habit of mine will settle down once I stop fashion blogging. But not today. Today I’m playing fuckabout (as Kaply calls it) with nothing on my to-do list; it’s crazy how long it’s been since I had a day like this. Today I’m treating myself.

*Well, as light as a heart can be when it knows how ridiculous and unfair and random the world is. Every time I go into the strangely spa-like breast center, I think about how not everyone will leave there with good news. Not everyone even gets to go there if they don’t have insurance. And I think, Why shouldn’t I be the one who gets bad news? even as I desperately hope that I won’t be.

parks and non-wrecks

2011-10-19T09:21:00.001-07:00

I had a very important epiphany yesterday, about why I love Parks and Recreation so much. I was reading this Ironing Board Collective post about New Girl, a show in which three normal guys suffer the hijinks of a zany girl who, if she existed in real life would be 1) totally dysfunctional and/or 2) really hurt by the crap they say to her.

This is the premise of a lot of TV shows and movies, although usually it’s a guy being immature and a boring, normal woman enduring him. So, um, score one for feminism? And of course there are the shows where all the characters relentlessly sling insults at each other: Two and a Half Men, 2 Broke Girls. Occasionally the insults are irresistibly witty, but mostly…I can resist.

So here’s why Parks and Recreation is great: The characters aren’t always nice to each other, but they care what their peers think, and when there’s conflict, they react the way actual humans would. Recently* Ann spent most of an episode trying to get Ron and April—the show’s resident antisocial employees, who still aren’t cruel; they just want to be left alone—to make small talk. She finally succeeded when she told them a grisly story from the hospital where she works.

The main characters are slightly wackier than most you’d meet in real life, but they’re mature(ish) and competent. Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler) is a wonky feminist who loves her job and the historic murals at City Hall. Ben (Adam Scott) is a geeky accountant, but he doesn’t wear his pants up to his armpits or have trouble making conversation. Chris Traeger (Rob Lowe), with his manic positivity and love of health food, is pretty much a carbon copy of my chiropractor.

No one has to be the long-suffering straight man because no one has to be the hate-able manchild. Everyone is a little of both, just like in real life. So watch it.

*Maybe not recently. AK and I watch P&R on Hulu, where recent and three-year-old episodes live in timeless harmony.

march and mirth

2011-10-16T09:36:00.001-07:00

1. a caffeinated review of the ides of march

AK and I drove through drive-thru Starbucks on the way home tonight to get hot chocolate because it’s a night that calls for coziness. But they accidentally made mine a mocha, so here I am, all wired up with nothing to blog about. But since when did that ever stop anyone from blogging?

The thing we were on our way home from was The Ides of March, a movie so dark it was hard to believe it was actually in color. Afterward, I kept telling AK that I didn’t want to work in politics, until she was like, “Okay, I get it.” As if she’d been pestering me to run for city council or something.

Ides is a really smart movie about people resorting to dirty, dirty means to justify noble ends; it also feels like George Clooney’s answer to the people who keep actually pestering him to run for office.

That answer is: Sure, I can look good saying idealistic things, but I’m going to imprint you with this image of me as a sleazeball with poor judgment so that you’ll shut up already. Remember? I like to have fun. I have a house on Lake Como and fuck models. Why would I want to live in a world where those things are a liability?

Evan Rachel Wood is good as an intern with apparent daddy issues. Marisa Tomei is a little bit ridiculous as an anything-for-a-scoop reporter. Partly it’s how she’s costumed: in these thick-rimmed glasses and men’s shirts and strategically tousled hair. She looks like someone doing an impression of a reporter. I think an actual reporter would wear, like, a nice sweater and sensible heels.

2. houses of mirth

Apparently it is Craftsman Weekend, which may be a holiday unique to Pasadena, California. This morning my dad and I took the Arroyo Terrace Walking Tour of the Greene & Greene homes near the Gamble House. Beautiful stuff—dark shingles, Japanese-inspired horizontal lines, hand-carved everything. I think my favorite detail was a wall made of clinker bricks (the wonky bricks at the bottom of the kiln) that looked like it was growing out of a row of arroyo boulders.

Even though a lot of these houses would go for about five million dollars today, the people who live in them drive Subarus and Leafs (Leaves?). An elderly man who lived in one remodeled Greene & Greene home (remodeled to make it smaller) saw the tour and invited us to wander around his yard. It reminded me that not everyone in the one percent is a stay-off-my-lawn snob.

Tomorrow is book club, where we’ll talk about The House of Mirth. Edith Wharton does an amazing job of breaking down the numerous subspecies of the upper classes. There are the wealthy society people, the secretly poor society people, the nouveau riche climbers and poor “gentlewomen” who rely on charity yet have servants. I’m really confused by the latter.

But, anyway, Pasadena’s old moneyed seem like they fall into that category of people who don’t need to be flashy because they’re so secure in their positions. I feel like they have season tickets to things and buy books. I don’t believe in art that’s only for the upper crust, but I’m also grateful for anyone who thinks art is worth something. If I were rich (isn’t it great how everyone has a contingency plan for what they’ll do when they strike gold?), that’s how I’d use my money. Also, I would buy a pony. But it would be a rescue pony.

Okay, I think the caffeine is wearing off; I’m too tired to hit “publish,” so this will probably go up in the morning. Thanks for hanging with me in the wee hours.

i am the 32 percent?

2011-10-12T19:09:00.000-07:00

In writing and in life, I’m mostly about specificity. But I’m inclined to forgive the Occupy [fill in the blank] protesters for their so-called lack of specific demands. Partly because AK (who is usually very pragmatic when it comes to politics) is smitten by them and I’m easily influenced. Partly because, when you want the world to change fundamentally, like at its core, it’s hard to boil such a paradigm shift down to a checklist. Partly because there are specific demands: Hold banks accountable for ruining the economy. Tax the rich.

Over the weekend, I watched a lovely, ragtag group of protesters make their way down C Street in San Diego, a military town with a wonderful literary/activist niche of which my City Works editors are kick-ass leaders. As I contemplated missing my train to join their ranks (I didn’t; shocking, I know), I wondered whether I could rightfully call myself part of the 99 percent. I mean, there’s a 99 percent chance I am. But one of the great things about this alleged class war is that it includes people from multiple classes. Take these ladies:

I have a history of being hyperaware of my own privilege, and of making everything about me. So instead of taking to the streets, I made a mental list:

Evidence I’m in the 99 percent:

I went to public schools up until grad school, and I have a five-digit student loan to show for that.
My family rarely went out to eat, went to the movies, flew anywhere or stayed in hotels.
I drive a 14-year-old car.
I’ve gotten four pedicures in my life.
I buy most of my clothes in thrift stores and sale racks.
My last three apartments had bars on the windows.
I’ve worked since I was 14 years old.

Evidence I’m in the 1 percent:

Those public schools were in an affluent suburb, and my parents paid for my undergrad degree.
My family owned a VCR and camcorder before anyone else we knew and we took several vacations each year.
Even though we never had a new car, we had five old ones.
When the investments that made us poor in the ‘90s finally paid off, my dad set aside some money for my sister and I, to be used at a later date. It is, technically, um, a trust fund.
I’ve never been involuntarily unemployed for more than a few weeks at a time.

So I guess that lands me in, what, the 32 percent? Or maybe just this group:

chasing waterfalls, and what i read in september

2011-10-07T21:26:00.000-07:00

Right now I’m in San Diego for work, staying the Crowne Plaza Hanalei. It has a Hawaiian theme, in case you couldn’t guess. There are waterfalls and tiki statues in the hallways, and canoes hanging from the roof of the valet area. My room is nonsmoking but you would not know from the smell.

I don’t mind, though, because it reminds me of the approximately four times I stayed in a hotel room as a kid. Mostly my family went camping, which my dad, at least, found vastly preferable to expensive, smoky hotel rooms. Meaning, naturally, that my sister and I loved the forbidden fruit that was hotel life.

Once in a while he was forced to attend a conference in San Diego, and his organization put him up at a budget hotel. We came along so that we could all go camping afterward. The hotel had waterfalls and koi ponds, smoky rooms and a pool that I did my best to spend every waking moment in.

I don’t know if I’m staying in that hotel now, although the era of the architecture seems about right. Either way, I’m pretending it’s the very one and that tomorrow, while my dad is working, my mom will take us to the mall across the street and buy us a My Little Pony.

What will actually happen tomorrow is that Jamie and Lee-Roy and I will go to the San Diego City College International Book Fair and see Jesi and Lenise and other local literary folks. Lenise and I had amazing mustardy Brussels sprouts and sweet potato pizza tonight at a place called Local Habit. We caught up on our respective crappy years and the not-so-crappy stuff going on in the present. Almost as good as a pony.

Oh, and while we’re vaguely on the topic of literary things, here’s what I read in September, since I know you were wondering where my monthly list was:

Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination by Helen Fielding: Hmm, I wrote a review of this, but it looks like Goodreads didn’t save it. I’m too tired to rewrite it now; the book was just okay.

I Remember Nothing by Nora Epron: Nora Ephron's humor stems from acknowledging brutal truths: People die; the only thing failure really teaches you is that failure is possible. Instead of making for a depressing read, this makes her writing as comforting as one of the decadent desserts she's known for (but which her sister will no longer let her bring to Christmas dinner). This collection of essays, which also covers lighter topics like email and meatloaf, is a fast, funny read. And, like all the best comedy and literature, it reminds you that you're not alone.

Death of a Circus by Chandra Prasad: I'm a sucker for circus novels, and the cover of this one (yes, I judged) was pretty irresistible. The novel itself is a bit rocky--a slow beginning whose purpose I'm still unsure of, and a general aimlessness throughout--but there are some undeniably good ingredients in here, from a shape-shifting animal trainer to an ambitious wire walker. I think the writer had some interesting thoughts about the racial dynamics of the time (the early 20th century) and the political microcosm of the circus, but they never quite coalesced for me.

Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut: Partway through this book I said to my AK, "I'm not sure how I feel about this collection of Kurt Vonnegut short stories." She said, "I get it. The strength of his writing is his heart, and that doesn't always come through in short stories." I said, "I was thinking more of his misogyny and weird libertarian politics." She said, "Oh."

Now that I've finished the book, I agree with her--stories like "Adam," in which a Holocaust survivor marvels at the birth of his son, and "More Stately Mansions," about a poor woman's decorator daydreams, are thoroughly kind to their characters, sometimes to the point of not fully developing them. (Which doesn't mean I don't take issue with the rape fantasy that is the title story.) At his best, Vonnegut is generous, clever and appropriately skeptical of all political systems. At his worst, he's politically problematic (to me, at least), simplistic and a not-very-scientific sci fi writer (in "EPICAC," a man responds to a robot's request to "define poetry" with no apparent irony; the robot proceeds to spew brilliant sonnets). The stories add up to a book that feels a bit dated, but in an interesting way.

everything i need to know i learned from lululemon

2011-10-05T19:30:00.000-07:00

You know Lululemon, right? You don’t? This means you’re not into the kind of yoga that requires a $128 hoodie to practice. Lululemon is a company that “creates components for people to live longer, healthier and more fun lives. If we can produce products to keep people active and stress-free, we believe the world will become a better place.”

Or so it says on my reusable Lululemon shopping bag, which is currently holding my lunch and which, I suppose, could be considered a “component.” It’s a stylish mishmash of red and white text, with a silhouette of a girl in dancer’s pose. Let’s see how it suggests staying active and stress-free, shall we?

Don’t trust that an old age pension will be sufficient.

The world’s non-hoodie-based media sources would agree with this one. Luckily I’ve invested all my savings in this $78 Weightless Running Skirt. I just know its value is gonna skyrocket like a tract home in the Inland Empire.

Visualize your eventual demise. It can have an amazing effect on how you live for the moment.

I actually spent about four months this year doing just that. It involved a lot of crying and Googling diseases I might have. If that’s living in the moment, I’ll take Zoloft, thank you.

Write down your short and long term GOALS four times a year. Two personal, two business and two health goals for the next 1, 5 and 10 years. Goal setting triggers your subconscious computer.

Wait, I thought I was supposed to live in the moment.

The world is changing at such a rapid rate that waiting to implement changes will leave you 2 steps behind. DO IT NOW, DO IT NOW, DO IT NOW!

Aaaaaah! No offense, Lu, but this is not making me feel very stress-free.

Stress is related to 99% of all illness.

Shit. I’m totally fucked, in that case. Wait, you’re kind of implying that stress causes illness, but I smell a dangerous fallacy. What did they call this in AP econ? Ergo hoc, post proctor hoc? Something like that? I would believe that 99% of illnesses cause stress, which is a different equation entirely.

I wonder what conditions are in the 1% that don’t. I had a friend who went skiing and got a bad sunburn, and her doctor told her that the sun damage to her eyes would turn them blue in a year. I guess that wouldn’t be too stressful.

Nature wants us to be mediocre because we have a greater chance to survive and reproduce. Mediocrity is as close to the bottom as it is to the top, and will give you a lousy life.

Oh. And here I was thinking that Nature was good. Stop trying to fuck up my life, Nature. But, ha! I just set two personal, two business and two health goals. Take that, Nature! I’m gonna be an X-Man before you know it.

Observe a plant before and after watering and relate these benefits to your body and brain.

Okay, here goes…. I dunno, it looks kind of mediocre. Just sitting there, not making any money or doing any yoga.

Friends are more important than money.

Which is why it’s okay to spend $52 on something called a Silver Bullet Sleeveless Tech tank top.

Your outlook on life is a direct reflection of how much you like yourself.

Which is basically saying “Your outlook on life = your outlook on life.” Calling the Department of Redundancy Department! (Sorry to get all English major on you, Lu. You make way better Vinyasa Scarves than I ever could.)

The pursuit of happiness is the source of all unhappiness.

So you’re saying I shouldn’t have set those goals? Or I shouldn’t have set goals that would lead to happiness? Like, maybe my goal should have been to encounter a swarm of angry bees this fiscal year?

Personally, I think the 405 is the source of some unhappiness.

Dance, sing, floss and travel.

Done and done. Except dancing and singing make me kinda happy, and when I flossed, I was not living in the moment. If today were my last day on earth, I would not have spent it flossing.

Breathe deeply and appreciate the moment. Living in the moment could be the meaning of life.

Got it. No more flossing for me. It’s all $78 Astro Wunder Under Crop pants from here on out. Namaste.

fur and hair

2011-10-03T09:04:00.000-07:00

When I stayed at the classic-movie-themed Chelsea Pines Inn a couple of years ago, the hallways were lined with posters from the 1960s advertising Blackglama, which was, I gathered, a fur company. They all featured black and white photos of divas like Marlene Dietrich, Lena Horne and Raquel Welch beneath the headline What becomes a legend most? Answer: Blackglama!

If you clothed yourself in a dead animal, it seemed, you went from “slightly past your prime” to “legend.” I’m all for the awesomeness of older ladies, but I’d like to think that true legendary status could come across via wool or tweed. Even leather, which, at least, is a byproduct. (West Hollywood, where I spent a sunny, fur-free day at the book fair this weekend, just outlawed fur. Good work, WeHo!)

But this month’s Vogue is unapologetically full of fur, and Janet Jackson is the new face of Blackglama. Who knew it was still around? I have to admit she looks great, and this jacket is more Rhythm Nation than uptown lady who lunches. But come on! Did all those buckets of red paint mean nothing? Was being anti-cruelty just another trend that came and went?

In less controversial, but perhaps more fun, fashion news, my post about my secret love of frizzy hair is up over at Ironing Board Collective. Meanwhile, we’ve started calling Ferdinand “Blackglama.” He is a legend, and it becomes him.

coming late to the bake sale debate, and other lazy activism

2011-09-30T19:06:00.000-07:00

1. ward, my old frenemy

Ward Connerly was on the radio this morning, speaking against Senate Bill 185, which would allow public universities in California to consider race as a factor in admissions once again. Recently, Connerly has made headlines via cupcake-based performance art (who knew he and Karen Finely had so much in common?), a story I only caught the tail end of. Mostly, I remember that name from my own UC days.

He was the villain in UCLA’s hottest controversy, which was affirmative action. I started college as a moderate conservative who thought affirmative action was unfair because the only (apparent) beneficiaries I knew had the same upper middleclass upbringing I did. A few years and many consciousness-raising classes disguised as “American lit” courses later, I was attending my first protest ever: a tent city set up in the courtyard between Royce Hall and Powell Library to protest Connerly’s pet proposition, 209.

The night was sparkly. The tents looked like a fairyland in the lamplight of the courtyard. I said a shy hello to some Daily Bruin folks I knew. Then, as far as I can remember, I just stood around for a while.

It was the start of a sporadic and unimpressive track record as an activist. I can count three protests I’ve been to since then, and two of those were against Prop. 8. For some reason I feel like it doesn’t quite count if the issue affects me directly, though of course political movements are most effective when led by people full of righteous anger.

I was curious what I’d think of Connerly now. A cynical part of me wonders if my collegiate activism—which mostly took the form of seeing Rent a lot and having long arguments with my dad, in which I tried to explain to him why he was The Man and not in a good way—was just an attempt to be cool. My peers in Manhattan Beach had opposed affirmative action, so I did too; when I got new peers, I went along with them.

2. remind me to tell you about the essay i wrote comparing “a dream deferred” to drill team tryouts

To my relief, Ward Connerly still pissed me off, especially when he told his own story of going to community college and a Cal State because he couldn’t afford a UC, even though he had the grades. The implication was, If I can pull myself up by my bootstraps, so can you.

There are some kids who would excel under almost any circumstances, and maybe Connerly was one of them, and there are some who would fail no matter what. But I know deep in my soul that I’m in the 95 percent in the middle, who could go either way. There but for the grace of circumstance go us. Or there but for the lack of the grace of circumstance go us in some crappier direction.

Connerly was also quick to say that poor Vietnamese kids do great in school, so poor black and Latino parents must be to blame for the fact that their kids often don’t. I do think that all struggles have to be fought on many fronts and, sure, parenting is one of them. But to reduce centuries of oppression and some very important differences between cultures to basically not trying hard enough is an asshole move.

Nevertheless, I don’t think Connerly is a complete idiot. In general I think economic status is a better measure of adversity than race, and that when we address economic disadvantage in America, we help the people of color who need the most help. But just as wealthy kids of color have an advantage over poor kids of color, so do poor white kids have an advantage over poor kids of color. For lack of a better term, poor white kids can pass.

Also, let’s not forget that this isn’t just about choosing the lucky few who will be granted entrance to the Land of Success. This is about creating a better society. Hordes of uneducated, disenfranchised young people don’t benefit anyone. How do you think suicide bombers are made?

Of course, as Connerly was quick to point out, there are a zillion factors that can cause a young person to struggle. Maybe you lost a parent, or moved around a lot, or have a learning disability, or are the only Jewish kid at your school, or are really, horribly unattractive. That, as any AP English teacher will be quick to remind you, is what the personal essay is for.

It’s the one piece of the college application that does not reduce you to a number, though it certainly has its own weird demands—for example, the notion that you should be telling a story of triumph over adversity in the first place. But the closer life gets to an essay test—even if that means just adding more check boxes—the better. And if life could maybe not be a test at all, that would be even more amazing. Actually, that would be called CalArts.

cities beautiful

2011-09-25T23:16:00.000-07:00

I’ve taken up a lot of server space in the blogosphere lately, so I’ll keep this short. (Also, I should go to bed.) But I just saw a great movie and you should see it too. Urbanized is a documentary that explores just what the hell we’re supposed to do with the fact that something like 75 percent of the world’s population will live in a city within the next few years. Mumbai has 36 million people, the majority of whom live in slums where there is one toilet per 900 people.*

I like most documentaries because if they’re even halfway decently made, I learn something. But a lot of them either illuminate a terrible problem (and are therefore depressing) or are uplifting but only because they focus on one tiny triumph of the human spirit. It was really refreshing to see a movie about a problem no less serious than the exhaustion of our planet, that actually highlighted solutions.

In Bogotá, a former mayor put bike lanes in the center of the streets and implemented a “subway on wheels” bus system that was more flexible and much easier to build than an underground rail system. In a South African township, a nonprofit has installed lighting and staffed “lookout points” that have reduced crime by forty percent. In Detroit, urban farmers have reclaimed vacant lots.

What the solutions have in common is that they’re so different—they’re tailor-made to their communities and based on actual human behavior, not on the bird’s-eye perspective of some “visionary.”

I saw the movie with AK, Christine, Jody, Pedro and Stephen. Christine has a master’s in urban planning and was critical of a lot of aspects of the film, especially the fact that it sort of overlooked the need for economic development. I’m sure she’s right, and the filmmaker, who was there for a Q&A, was the first to admit that the movie is the tip of a very large iceberg, as are the partial solutions it highlights. Still, it was nice to see a movie about the future of the world that made me feel good about the future of the world.

*I'm probably remembering all these numbers wrong. But the point is, they're big.

9/24/11: drive and driving

2011-09-24T22:55:00.000-07:00

We poked around downtown Whitefish, which is very Cute-with-a-capital-C, for a while, but everything was closing for the day and I didn’t need a $300 purple fringed jacket anyway (do I need a $20 purple fringed jacket? Possibly).

So we went to the movie theater on the Not Cute southern end of town, in a mostly vacant mall that hadn’t seen a facelift since the ‘80s. We saw Drive and it was strange to see L.A. all lit up and infinite on screen as we sat there with one other couple in a tiny town in Montana.

Drive was almost a good movie. I’m usually one to favor mood over plot, but we got the feeling that some scenes explaining huge coincidences in the story may have gotten cut to make room for long close-ups of Ryan Gosling’s slowly clenching fist.

Also, Carey Mulligan’s character—a Denny’s waitress with a young son and a thing for bad boys—didn’t quite make sense. I think Carey Mulligan is hugely talented, and I loved An Education and Never Let Me Go, but she seemed more innocent and regal than the role required. A better casting choice would have been Christina Hendricks, who played a petty criminal and did a lot with the couple of lines she had. But of course it’s not really a movie about the women anyway. Although it does a pretty good job with its who’s a villain?/who’s a hero? theme. And Carey Mulligan has a really cute apartment.

Where were we?

Right, Montana.

This morning we drove back, down the west side of Flathead Lake this time. At the airport AK had to get escorted back through security to put a bottle of lotion and a jar of huckleberry jam in her checked bag. When she returned, she said, “God, everyone’s so nice. Can you imagine how that would have gone in L.A.?”

We decided Montana’s official motto should be: Montana: We’re so nice we make Canadians seem douchey.

9/23/11: red rock and whitefish

2011-09-24T22:49:00.000-07:00

This morning we hiked to Red Rock Falls, where we saw a moose (tall!) and some grizzlies (through a telescope!).

This afternoon we checked into the Grou se Mountain Lodge in Whitefish, which has turned out to be posher than we realized. I spent some time in the Swiftcurrent giftshop yesterday reading this coffee table book about the great old lodges of the National Parks—they have their own architectural style, which his sort of rustic-lux. The Grouse Mountain Lodge is in that tradition.

Everything in Whitefish seems to be, actually. There are lots of real estate offices. And the group of Canadian guys who checked in ahead of us, with their golf bags and spiky hair and Jersey Shore pecs on the verge of giving way to beer bellies, made me speculate that there was a douche bag convention in town.

At AK’s urging, I’m reading A River Runs Through It. The narrator’s brother is this smart but super country bar-brawler guy. I hope the convention runs into him out on the town tonight.

9/22/11: take a hike

2011-09-24T22:39:00.000-07:00

The great thing about wearing yourself out is that relaxing feels so incredible afterward. Right now AK is sitting next to me in the lobby of the inn (we’re staying in a cabin nearby), drinking a Coke and reading Vanity Fair and looking like the happiest girl in the world.

Before that, we hiked 11 miles roundtrip to Grinell Glacier. When I was younger—even when I visited Malaysia—I remember thinking that Africa and continents with rainforests had really scored in the nature department. The flora and fauna of North America were just sort of…beige.

But I would like to humbly rescind that assessment. Some things we saw on our hike:

Another bear, which triggered my flight-or-photo mechanism. I was dubious about continuing on the trail, but we staked out a space between two other couples and decided there was safety in numbers. The couple in front, whom we nicknamed Northface, had cameras with telephoto lenses and seemed like they were trying to lose us. The other couple, recent University of Washington grads, was friendlier. We developed a sort of call-and-response thing with them to ward off bears. I defaulted to cheerleader mode and yelled “Woo!” every minute or so.

A herd of big-horned sheep, as vivid and majestic as the ones I’ve seen in Natural History Museum dioramas. Maybe more so, since they weren’t stuffed and dead-eyed. They were placidly nibbling grass, and when they leaped across the trail or scampered up the mountain, you could see the power in their haunches. They have buns of steel.

Three lakes, one as brilliantly turquoise as any Hawaiian beach. But probably a little colder.

A glacier. I know they’re very important environmentally, but to be honest, it pretty much looked like snow.

9/21/11: city mouse, country mouse

2011-09-24T22:25:00.000-07:00

1. rush hour with bears

Last night we ate dinner at a place called the Silk Road—and in case you’re wondering where Missoula keeps its fusion restaurants and funk stores, it’s on The Hip Strip. It’s actually called that.

The Silk Road’s schtick is international tapas. It’s a pretty new restaurant and when we walked in, the host/possible manager or owner asked where we were from and proceeded to explain how tapas worked, then sort of half apologized, like, Oh, you’re from L.A., you must be cosmopolitan. (Other people just said, “Is there any time of day that isn’t rush hour?”)

But the trying-so-hard vibe was friendly and the food would hold up to or surpass any place in L.A. For $26 plus tip, we had fried goat cheese ravioli, seared shrimp with grilled peaches, an amazing pile of savory French-ish mushrooms and a dessert appropriately named “The Bombe”—chocolate-covered sea salt-flavored ice cream cake.

Then we walked along the river and watched the multigenerational skaters at the skate park, which looked like a lunar landscape at night. I might have had second thoughts about that walk if I’d known that bears lingered nearby: On the way back to our motel, I shouted at AK to stop the car.

“It’s a baby bear!”

A black bear with a loping gait crossed in front of our headlights before disappearing into a patch of landscaping outside the neighboring hotel, the C’mon Inn. (It’s actually called that.)

I’ve been camping in bear country dozens of times and received all kinds of conflicting advice about what to do if I encounter one, but this was the first time I actually saw one. What we did: kept driving until we got to our hotel, where we proceeded to talk a lot about how cute he was.

2. we’ll be comin’ round the mountain about two hours late

This morning after a run by the river, we hit the road and headed up to Glacier National Park. And except for a lunch at a cute café run by nuns, all we did was drive. It should have taken us about four and a half hours, but instead it took almost six and a half. The main road through the very big park was closed, so we basically had to sail around Cape Horn instead of cutting through Panama.

It was a pretty drive—hills of evergreen forests broken up by wide yellow plains. We got to see a little bit of the Blackfeet reservation and listen to most of Nora Epron’s I Remember Nothing on CD. But when these amazing vistas opened in front of us—huge craggy mountains that cast shadows across blue-gray lakes—we were too exhausted to appreciate it.

What I did appreciate—what made me want to fall down and kiss the ground—was the sight of the Swiftcurrent Motor Inn, with cars and humans clustered around it, a garlicky smell coming from the Italian restaurant and dumb tchotchkes for sale. I am a city girl at heart.

9/20/11: keep missoula beered

2011-09-24T21:57:00.000-07:00

1. zootown is my kinda town

We landed in Missoula yesterday afternoon, and even though it took us an hour to locate our bags in the tiny airport, we could quickly tell this was a great town. The lone, harried employee at the Delta counter was as patient as a kindergarten teacher. Then again, not one of the dozens of people whose flights had been messed up due to some sort of snafu was making a stink. And when we asked the rental car place whether I could be added free as a driver, because AK and I are Canadian-married, he didn’t miss a beat before saying yes.

Yesterday was our bumming-around-Missoula day. We hit a thrift store, explored downtown with its charming old cottages and winding river, and finished the day at the Iron Horse Brew Pub, a place with a menu after my own too-many-flavors heart: salsa-flavored sour cream! Honey pesto scallops! A cocktail called the chai-tini! Everyone gathered around the TV to watch the Charlie Sheen roast, where we were all blinded by Seth MacFarlane’s creepy white teeth.

Today has been more of an adventure day. We started off with a “river float.” AK wanted to try whitewater rafting, and if this were an essay in a women’s magazine, the story would be, “I was feeling shaken and fragile after a difficult year. Taking up whitewater rafting made me feel strong again.” But instead I just said no, and she booked us a non-whitewater raft ride.

We shoved off in four inflatable teal rafts—we being AK and I, our five guides and thirty mostly European tour guides testing things out to see if they wanted to bring their countrymen to Western Montana. In our boat were an Englishman, a guy from Arizona who liked to tell stories about eating road kill and scorpions, and two German women who said of the raft full of singing French guides, “It’s been like a French musical all week.”

The trip was staffed by what I’m realizing is a common type here: the REI hipster who may have left a hometown like mine (where he may have been president of the Ecology Club) for a place like Humboldt State or U of Montana. He talks with a bit of a brah and can geek out in a conversation about ski jackets. I mostly like this type.

The river itself: smooth, shallow, surrounded by hills, some of them drenched in gold-pink light that rivals L.A.’s, some casting shadows and nearly freezing our toes off.

2. young men and fire

In the afternoon, we went to the Smokejumpers Center, which is a base and training site for guys who parachute into forest fires. That’s right. They are firefighters who jump out of planes.

I don’t usually go for beefcake-y guys, or men in uniform, or men for that matter, but sensitive, green-eyed guys with super elite training who kind of look like Daniel Craig and give you a free bottle opener from the gift shop? Sign me up.

He showed us the hundred-pound pound suits they wear, with gear in one pocket and miscellaneous personal items in the other. One guy’s had a big bottle of Sriracha sauce in it. When we learned that their food rations consisted largely of Spam, it made sense.

Daniel Craig also told us all kinds of amazing facts about the history of smokejumping, which started in 1939:

During World War II, the Japanese had a plan to divert U.S. war resources by parachuting into the U.S. and starting forest fires. They were actually successful a few times, even killing a farming couple in Oregon, but they started too late in the year for the fires to get very big. (If only they’d had global warming, with its year-round fire season, on their side.)

A lot of smokejumpers did go to Europe or Asia during WWII. Their spots on the home front were filled by an all African-American division and by conscientious objectors who nevertheless wanted to help their country through a tough time.

They still use a WWII plane, the DC-3, for many of their jumps.

They can also suggest great post-tour activities, like visiting the Big Sky Brewery, which offers free samples of Moose Drool Brown Ale and Slow Elk Oatmeal Stout.

glaciers and smokejumpers and bears, oh my

2011-09-24T21:55:00.000-07:00

We just got back from Montana. The short version? We loved it. The long version? Read my travel journal in the next few posts.

sadly howling wolves

2011-09-18T23:29:00.000-07:00

It was a regular, busy weekend in a lot of ways. AK and I babysat Kohana, which consisted mostly of keeping one ear on the baby monitor while we watched old episodes of Roseanne on TV. I went to a sort of Tupperware-party-for-clothes thing at my sister’s house. And we packed for our trip to Montana next week.

But in the middle of all of that was Rachel’s memorial. The main one was in Denver, where she and Jeff and their kids moved about a year and a half ago, but they had roughly a thousand friends in L.A., so Jeff said goodbye twice. Or, more likely, he said goodbye quietly on his own and then endured as the rest of us attempted to wade through this absurd event. I imagine it’s like being drafted as the male lead in a really nightmarish play, this huge audience analyzing your performance.

I don’t know, maybe it’s not like that at all.

At first it just felt like a big barbecue, with really amazing tacos at the home of some people from Jeff and Rachel’s church. They lived in this fantastic, rambling old house in the foothills that used to be the carriage house of a Greene and Greene mansion. It would have been a great place for a wedding.

One of the many uncomfortable things about death is that people mourn the particular version of the deceased that they knew, and they all mourn in their own way. So if some people wanted to “give glory to God” a lot at a time when I wanted to give glory to Rachel, I had to find a way to be okay with that. Rachel knew and loved most people there much better than she knew me.

People shared funny and heartfelt memories about Rachel’s leadership skills and determination to cook eggplant for a house full of eggplant haters. It would have been kind of random for me to share anything, but if I had, this is what I would have said:

During the months when Rachel was feeling like shit and pretty much looking death in the face everyday, she took the time to email me when she heard about my miscarriage. She wrote: “I remember my miscarriage was so painful and the recovery not as quick as I hoped, and that is just the physical side. I hope you know that you are so likely to be just fine and have a great little baby (babies!). It is tough to keep going. I hope you are able to take your time on this one. Much love to you both in this process.” She was a person who cared deeply about other people in a pragmatic, funny, nonchalant way, and it seemed entirely wrong that we were all plodding through the motions of mourning as if her being gone was okay.

Because of her email, and because she was diagnosed the same week we lost the Squeakies, the two events will always be entwined for me, I think. Call it The Summer Of Awfulness. And so, even though I’ve been feeling much better overall (and I couldn’t stop thinking about how Jeff’s awfulness still has many chapters to come), I sobbed through and after the service last night in ways that transcended all reason. At one point every pore of my face was swollen with snot and saltwater. I felt like a bit of a drama queen.

Tonight Rachel and AK’s friend Suzie made pizza for a small group of us, including Jeff and the two small daughters he’s unfairly charged with raising on his own now. Mostly they drew pictures and played on Suzie’s husband’s iPad and pretended to be wounded animals at the animal hospital. I know they’ll be fine, but I also know they’ll be scarred forever, like the bears with injured paws or the sadly owoowoowooing wolves they played.

a whole bill o’ wrongs

2011-09-13T19:18:00.000-07:00

1. pettin’ in the park

The other day, Peter of Plastic Bubble World shared this blog post from a self-proclaimed “scientist turned homemaker and joyful convert to Catholicism.” Here’s the executive summary: She’s seen a little same-sex PDA at her community pool and local park, and she’s terrified, because how will she protect her children’s innocence now? What is she supposed to tell her daughter when she befriends a child with two “mommies.” (Her quotation marks probably irk me more than anything. If you care for a child, you are a parent. Period.)

Oh, and she’s also not down with the fact that her tax dollars fund “contraception, abortion, and IVF” and that an undocumented immigrant killed a child while driving drunk. I know a South Park fan who got a DUI, so I’m thinking South Park fans might be a danger to society too.

Also, I would like the number of whatever government department or free clinic funds IVF, because maybe I can file some paperwork and get reimbursed.*

Sorry. I did have a point here, and it’s not that this woman is crazy. She and her supportive commenters** actually seem disturbingly well educated, except for the obvious ways in which they’re not. My point is about the “right to protect my children’s innocence” part.

The religious right has a history of playing—and twisting—the persecuted minority card. The pro-Prop. 8ers talk a lot about the “people’s right” to amend the state constitution, i.e. some people’s right to oppress other people.

Catholic Mom closes her post by saying, “But that just adds to everything else I'm being asked to tolerate. Seriously, is this freedom?”

“Freedom” does not mean getting to do everything you want to do. The notion that it does is very privileged and very American. I get it, though, because hey, I’m privileged and American and I also want to do the things I want to do. I want to be a mommy, or a “mommy,” as much as I’ve ever wanted anything. I sort of think it’s my right. Except it isn’t. It’s just a wonderful thing that might or might not happen.

So, Catholic Mom, you don’t have a right to protect your children’s innocence at the expense of other people’s actual, listed-in-the-Constitution rights.

2. all cats go to heaven, and some go too soon

Temecula is the most outgoing of our three cats. She quickly won the hearts of our next-door neighbor Jennifer and her three-year-old daughter Claudia. I love puttering around the yard and hearing Claudia exclaim, delightedly, “Mecula!”

The other day, Jennifer emailed AK and I: “Yesterday when we were getting out of the car I noticed that a very loving, very sweet Temecula had one very large paw that seemed to cause her to limp. We were really concerned, especially my littlest daughter. Is it anything serious? Hope she's okay.”

We explained that T-Mec has cancer, and I thought, Wow, now Jennifer has to explain illness and death to her daughters. They’re not even in kindergarten.

Of course, she could just say that T-Mec is trying to popularize a new dance craze, just as Catholic Mom can tell her kids that their new friend’s mommies are holding hands because they’re playing a two-person game of Red Rover.

But eventually, all children lose their innocence. Yes, if it happens too soon it can be traumatizing. But merely learning about the existence of certain worldly truths doesn’t fall into that category. Gay people are real. Death is real. (I’m sure Catholic Mom would be glad I’m putting them in the same category.) Someday, if I’m lucky, I’ll have to teach my children that people like Catholic Mom are real. I’m not looking forward to it, but I know my job isn’t to preserve my children’s innocence—it’s to give them the strength to face the world as it is, not as I wish it was.

*For the record, I don’t think the government should fund IVF. I was unsure about funding my own IVF. I think the government should offer lots of resources and incentives to help people adopt with minimal hoop-jumping.

**Since the post went viral, a number of people have left pro-gay-rights comments as well. So when I read this comment—

“Homosexuals spent centuries hiding in the closet. It wasn’t until the 1970s that the American Psychiatric Associating and the American Medical Associating decided homosexuality wasn’t a mental disorder. Now that the vast majority of our doctors, educators, and scientists all agree that homosexuality is ‘normal’ and ‘natural,’ they’re asking for equal marriage RIGHTS on top of it?! Give a homo an inch and he wants a mile! Isn’t it good enough that they’re not considered mentally disturbed deviants anymore??”

--I assumed it was from a queer employing irony, the folk art of our people. But nope, as I scrolled down it became clear that this commenter was absolutely sincere.

you’d think bloggers would just wear pajamas

2011-09-12T19:15:00.000-07:00

When I started guest-blogging for Ironing Board Collective, I warned AK that I essentially had a new crush, and everything would remind me of a post I read on the site or one I was thinking about writing. Lord knows it’s given me an excuse to buy a bunch of new and new-old clothes, when in reality I just need the one shirt I’m wearing in my profile pic.

All of which is to say: Bear with me. And, if you’re interested in fashion or such fashion-adjacent topics as Little House on the Prairie, the photography of Jacob Riis, kindergarten fashion faux pas, and naughty French maid outfits (<--that was not my kindergarten fashion faux pas, for the record), then head on over. My most recent post is sort of an elaboration on my reaction to MOCA’s street art exhibit, but with the 1890s standing in for the 1980s. Check it out and, if you’re moved to do so, leave a comment.

this night is a bust

2011-09-10T15:22:00.000-07:00

“I heard the cops are trying to give lots of cell phone tickets before the 19^th,” Nicole warned me at lunch.

It could have been something she read on a news site or the seed of an urban legend; either way, I stayed off my phone on the long drive to Burbank, where the plan was to meet Sara at the mall (like middle school!) for a little shopping followed by a mojito (not like middle school, unless your middle school was much more advanced than mine).

Sara had forgotten her cell phone that morning, so we came up with a very specific meet-up plan over email: Macy’s entrance to the mall, first floor, 7:30. If traffic slowed me down, she’d just shop in the general vicinity. I was just a few minutes late, but Sara was nowhere to be seen. I hung around house wares, craning my neck at all blondish heads.

Various sales people asked if I needed help, and it occurred to me that I looked like a terrorist nervously casing the place. I’d just heard an NPR report about all the people stopped at the Mall of America for “suspicious behavior,” which included things like taking notes (while black) and accidentally leaving a cell phone in the food court (while Pakistani).

My white self went un-harassed, but I never did find Sara. After texting later, we realized that we’d probably just missed each other by a few feet. Also, since different floors open to the street, there may have been some confusion about what the “first floor” was.

At least Old Navy was selling things for dirt cheap. I bought a sacky sweatshirt dress which I just learned is technically exercise gear, but I think it will look good belted, with heels. And hey, it was less than the price of a mojito. Then I headed home, and was promptly pulled over.

Last weekend someone rammed my back bumper and taillight while my car was parked on the street, so I was expecting a fix-it ticket. But the bald, blue-eyed young officer who pulled me over informed me that the month part of my registration tags was faded.

“I’m not even really sure what you’d do about that,” he said as he looked over my license. “When you renew your registration, they just send you the year sticker, so…. But, anyway, you might want to try to take care of that.”

I did not ask the obvious question, which was, If you’re a cop and you don’t know what I should do about it, how am I supposed to know? I mean, I guess I could go wait in line at the DMV, but…no.

He asked me where I was coming from and where I was going and let me go. A few months ago, AK was pulled over in the northwest part of South L.A. while she was parked and asked why she’d pulled the hood of her sweater down as soon as the cops came by.

“I didn’t, actually” she said.

“And you’re wearing sunglasses,” he said.

“Because the sun is bright.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I go to school at Antioch, and I pulled over so I could eat a snack.” She held up her baggie of almonds.

Later she told me, “I always get really defensive, like, Could I be more innocent?! I’m a grad student eating a healthy snack!”

He asked to see her student ID and then let her go. She went home, confused and outraged. What if she’d been a bum eating a cheeseburger? What the police want is a story that makes sense to them. Stories that don’t add up are a good way to tease out crimes, but it’s also legal to be weird. What if I’d driven to Burbank just so I could sit in traffic on the 405? What is my narrative debt to society?

Let me say here that I don’t hate cops. My favorite uncle was a cop for years and now works as a psychologist with the police department. I think cops have a ridiculously hard job, and they’re prone to making mistakes that any human would make while doing a ridiculously hard job. When I’ve seen hit-and-runs, I haven’t hesitated to call them.

I wrote an angry letter to the LAPD when my mentee told me that they were overturning the food carts of street vendors like her mom. (Yeah, didn’t hear back.) But I also did not exactly take her side when she got a ticket for drinking on the street. (“I’m gonna fight it,” she said, “’cause I was just holding that beer.”) Still, sometimes I feel a strong sense of why don’t you go investigate some real crimes?!

I’m sure most police officers are thinking about their fallen comrades of September 11, 2001 this weekend. Listening to a firefighter who barely made it out of the second tower speak on the radio, I was as full of love as any straight woman gazing at a fireman beefcake calendar.

These are dirty jobs, and I’m glad I don’t have to do them. I don’t blame people for being a little jumpy this weekend. Sure, if you see something, say something, but I don’t think my faded registration tag counts as “something.” Although you could say the deal I got on that sweatshirt dress was criminal.

art, work

2011-09-05T17:00:00.000-07:00

Happy Labor Day, y’all. I’ve had a four-day weekend, thanks to a wonderful East Coast invention called “summer Fridays,” and while it’s been refreshingly slow-paced, it has not been without labor. That’s the world we live in—there’s the job you do (if you’re lucky) for cash and benefits, and the various jobs you do for fun and Facebook “likes.” Or Wuffie, the currency of the reputation economy in Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. (For more on that and other August reads, see below.)

AK has two papers due next week, so I popped open my laptop and worked next to her at my various pseudo jobs and personal projects. I felt a little bit like Maggie Simpson steering her toy wheel next to Marge in the opening credits of The Simpsons.

How I labored:

Finished a revision of Chapter 14 of the circus novel. The next one is mostly new material, so it should be more fun and a lot harder.

Tinkered with the website I designed to convince birthmothers that AK and I are responsible yet fun-loving, on top of things yet relaxed, financially stable yet down to earth, busy with work and fabulous hobbies yet able to make lots of time for a kid, and dying to be parents yet totally not impatient. Hopefully the font upgrade I shelled out $30 for communicates all of those things.

Posted my first guest-blog for my favorite fashion blog, Ironing Board Collective (which I have been calling the Ironing Board Collective up until now, like your grandma talking about “the Facebook”). If you love fashion and are often as baffled by it as I am, head on over and read about my outlet-shopping adventure in Palm Springs. And leave a comment, because it’s my secret hope that they’ll ask me back for occasional guest-blogging stints even after my two allotted months (every Monday!) are up. I want my editors to think of me as “that girl people read and love” as opposed to “that girl who’s a little unclear about what constitutes and A-line skirt.”

***

And now, in a relative non-sequitur, here’s my monthly reading recap:

The Last Days of Dogtown by Anita Diamant: I'm already getting this book mixed up with the last historical fiction novel I read (Tracy Chevalier's Burning Bright, which took place forty-ish years earlier and in London), which doesn't bode well. I love the idea of this book: A hardscrabble township that's mostly home to widows, whores and the occasional runaway slave becomes a ghost town before our eyes. But Diamant doesn’t seem to have much to say about that concept. Characters just go about their daily lives, working, moving, falling in love, dying. I liked the book more once I began reading it as a series of connected short stories, but it's still hard to rally a lot of enthusiasm.

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow: It's hard to believe that when Doctorow wrote this novel way back in 2003, the iPhone didn't even exist. Yet he envisioned a future in which there's an app for everything. The internet is so small and user-friendly that it actually lives inside people, and if you inconveniently die, your backup will just be inserted into a clone. This raises some interesting questions about self-hood, but it's a good thing, mostly. I'm not a big sci fi reader, but it seems like many contemporary futuristic novels are dystopian. It was incredibly refreshing to read one that was optimistic (though still far from utopian and more believable for it), not to mention clever, funny and sprinkled with lingo and syntax that sound like English 3.0. Down and Out suffers from many first-novel flaws, such as a lack of character development, needlessly confusing plot points and bits of repetition that an editor should have caught. But I'll always take interesting-and-flawed over predictable-and-perfect. (Which is more or less what the protagonist concludes when he claims a technological middle ground at the end.)

By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham: This is a quieter book than Specimen Days or The Hours, but no less deep. It's about a middle-aged art dealer who's strangely drawn to his young, beautiful, drug-addict brother-in-law, territory that could annoying in the hands of a less skillful writer. But leave it to Cunningham to turn an idea--in this case, the relationship between beauty and destruction--over and over to reveal each glimmering facet, each worn curve, in new light.

At first it appears that Peter Harris will meet his downfall in his noble pursuit of great art and great human art. Everything and everyone else, including his angry, plain teenage daughter and his aging wife, who has her own career struggles, is just a sad imitation or a commercial gimmick. Pity the little people, and if Peter is one of them for not being an artist himself, at least he's smart enough to position himself adjacent to greatness.

But ultimately By Nightfall is a quiet celebration of the greatness of little people and the littleness of great people. Cunningham's eye is on every cab driver (and he dedicated the book to his agent and editor, those unsung cogs that make art happen). I've heard Cunningham speak about how every piece of art is an imperfect act of translation from the ball of passion and fire in the artist's mind into mere words, and also how everyone is the main character in his or her own novel. This novel honors both those statements by revealing both Peter's aesthetic/spiritual hunger and the fact that this hunger is neither unique nor entirely necessary--there is greatness in the mundane, which is never as mundane as it seems.

By Nightfall is written in what I'd call the Very Very Close Third, sometimes tumbling into second or first person as we fall deeper into Peter's thoughts. This reflects his tragic self-absorption (though he's always nice, always reasonable, always self-aware, making his tragic flaws even more cathartic). It also reflects the evolution of Cunningham's prose style. He's always had X-ray vision into the layers of human consciousness, but now that clairvoyance feels more intimate and clipped--not quite spare (I love him for what I consider his maximalism), but definitely without frills. The result is critical essay that reads like a galloping, page-turning ride through one man's mind.

the help: in which i attempt to quote karl marx and alison bechdel

2011-09-03T21:55:00.000-07:00

I was feeling skeptical about The Help for reasons articulated nicely by Raardvarks. It appeared to fall in a genre I call Slavery Is Bad—historical movies that let us feel good about taking the right side of an issue that was highly controversial in its time, which is kind of like betting on a race that’s already been run.

Not to mention the whole Black People Becoming Liberated Only With The Aid Of White People/White People Finding Themselves With The Aid Of Magical Negroes issue.

But while I was content to spend most of my undergraduate years being outraged by things I didn’t know anything about, I decided it might be interesting to actually see The Help before hating on it.

We went this afternoon with AK’s parents. AK’s mom spent many years working in a middle school cafeteria, and although working at a school in your own community is really different from working as a domestic in the Deep South, AK thought she might relate to this story of working class women of color standing up for themselves. But when we asked her what she thought of the movie, she said she liked it and “If I ever have a maid, I’ll be really nice to her.”

Which might say a thing or two about the point of view of the movie, which is ultimately budding white journalist Skeeter’s (though it’s somewhat disguised as maid Aibileen’s). The Help is a Slavery Is Bad Movie in which a white girl uses the stories of black women to further her career; in which black women don’t consider speaking out until she comes along. The villain, a snotty little racist played by Bryce Dallas Howard, is so absurdly villainous that any viewer who doesn’t kick puppies can congratulate herself on having a heart of gold.

But The Help is also a really well made, superbly acted movie about the risks people took behind the scenes of the Civil Rights Movement. The black women take the biggest risks by far, but Skeeter faces genuine consequences too. Refreshingly, the movie passes the Bechdel Test with flying colors, underscoring the power of gossip and other trivialized feminine behavior. And while it’s profoundly messed up to think that oppressed people need to be saved by those in power, the truth is that all social movements have benefitted from activists in all kinds of roles: the righteous oppressed, the sympathetic powerful, those who work within the system, the radicals who fight it. Didn’t Marx say something about the workers of the world needing wealthy allies?

Of course, the problem is that we hear a lot more stories about wealthy allies than the angry oppressed. AK said she read an interview with Kathryn Stockett, the author of the novel The Help, in which she seemed a little baffled by the success of the book and unconvinced that it was any kind of model treatise on racial justice. Usually I think it’s a cop-out not to own the politics of your own work. But I also get it—you tell the only story you can tell, and while you want it to mean something, it can’t mean everything.

So the real question isn’t so much why are we hearing Skeeter’s story, but why aren’t we hearing stories from real Aibileens? At the end of the movie, Aibileen tells us via voice over that her son always said there would be a writer in the family, and now she supposes it’s her. Except, at this point, writing has garnered Skeeter a publishing job in New York, and Aibileen is still living in poverty in Mississippi. So I guess that answers the question.

pet peeve #521

2011-09-01T18:44:00.000-07:00

First a disclaimer: I believe language is an evolving beast. “Queer” doesn’t mean the same thing now as it did in 1955, and it didn’t mean the same thing then as it did in 1855. I don’t think that Kids Today are going to destroy the planet with their texting or their sexting or their rap talk.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t have a few grammatical pet peeves.

Life seems to have imitated art in the years since Mad TV’s Clyde and Judith spewed elaborate similes and then defeated the whole point of metaphor by punctuating it with “Literally!” There are two ways that the rampant abuse of “literally” pisses me off.

1. The classic Clyde-and-Judith-style misuse, when what you really mean is “figuratively” (which is literally the opposite of “literally”!). Plum Sykes, the Vogue writer I look to anytime I’m not sure what to wear to Gwyneth Paltrow’s birthday party, opened her recent article about Tom Ford’s new cosmetics line by saying that he’s the one guy most women would “literally die to receive a makeup lesson from.”

If that’s true, Tom should launch a line of mortuary makeup, because shortly after their lessons, those women will be buried. I suppose we should all be so lucky as to die doing something we love, but personally all I would give for a makeup lesson with Tom Ford is, literally, like twenty bucks. And that depends whether there’s a free gift with purchase.

2. The not-technically-incorrect but equally unnecessary use of “literally” to mean “very.” As in, “I literally ate six Arina and Cracked Pepper Crackers with Fennel and Pomegranate Salad at Gwyneth’s b-day party. Then she was literally like, ‘Thanks so much for coming to my party. Excuse me, now I’m going to go speak Spanish and sing.’”

I think it’s my inner poet who, unlike my inner fashionista, believes less is more. Why say “I literally ate six crackers” when it means the exact same thing to say “I ate six crackers”? It’s so much tidier.

Okay, my rant is done. I am also highly disturbed by Kotex’s U line of feminine hygiene products, which claims that the best way to express your personal boho style* is by printing something you’re going to bleed all over with swirly paisley stuff. But I’ll save that one for another day.

*All the real bohemians are wearing the Keeper anyway.**

**I am not a real bohemian.

day = made

2011-08-29T18:51:00.000-07:00

From: Pedro
To: Cheryl
Subject: PREPARE YOURSELF
9:36 a.m.

...TO HAVE YOUR DAY MADE! Pop Culture Icons as My Little Pony Dolls

From: Cheryl
To: Pedro
Subject: Re: PREPARE YOURSELF
1:49 p.m.

OMG. This is getting blogged about. I recognize Apple Jack beneath that Frida monobrow, which is appropriate, because I always suspected Apple Jack was a lesbian.

poetry and palm springs

2011-08-23T14:12:00.000-07:00

On Friday Jamie and I saw this amazing documentary called Poetry of Resilience, which profiles a handful of writers who’ve escaped horrific political situations (the Hiroshima bombing, the crackdown after the Iranian Revolution, the Cultural Revolution in China, and holocausts European and Rwandan). All are scarred in ways that cannot be healed—a part of each of them has died, says poet Li-Young Lee. But all write heart-stopping poetry that gets at the essence of things in a way that’s undeniably alive.

Watching it (and the other films that were shown as part of Laemmle’s DocuWeeks shorts package; there are only a couple of days left to catch it!), I felt ready to stop being so all-about-me and start engaging with the world again. Maybe even in a helpful way. I recently heard about PEN’s prison mentoring program, and I’m thinking that might be a good place to start. When you’re corresponding via snail mail, you don’t have to worry that you’ll be hanging out in your car on Normandie for an hour because your mentee got arrested and couldn’t call to cancel. Your mentee will already have been arrested.

But before signing up to save the world, I enjoyed a big all-about-me binge. Cathy and I took a short but long-discussed sister trip to Palm Springs, where we laid by the pool, laid around the spa, ate some Thai food and watched Hoarding in our hotel room while practicing yoga moves (hers were fancy, mine less so). We also hit the Cabazon outlets, which I loved a little too much. I may be writing more about that soon, since I’ll be guest-blogging for the Ironing Board Collective in September and October. I am so excited. I am now off to give myself a crash course in fashionista-ism.

commuting has never been cuter

2011-08-18T14:44:00.001-07:00

Don't ask me which Google black hole led to this discovery (my therapist and I are just glad I'm not Googling diseases today), but did you know that Sanrio's posse of characters includes a bullet train named Shinkansen? Yep, right there alongside the bunnies and bats and frogs and, um, marshmallow-lemur-puppies. This is why Japan will solve the whole climate change thing decades before we do. I for one will happily submit to my adorable new overlords.

our great countrys

2011-08-17T18:48:00.000-07:00

Found, taped inside an empty L.A. Weekly newspaper box in Westwood:

in the future, cats will talk

2011-08-15T19:30:00.000-07:00

I have seen the future. Or so says the tiny button that Miranda July’s people handed out at Saturday’s showing of The Future. I’m one of the many people who sort of want to hate Miranda July—because does anyone really need to be a filmmaker and a fiction writer and a performance artist and a visual artist? Also, there’s the quirk factor, which one can only take in small doses.

But the truth is, some people do need to be all those things. There are specialists and there are generalists, and Miranda July is lucky enough to be the latter without sucking at any of her métiers (well, actually I’ve never seen her performance and visual art. Let’s pretend they suck). As for the quirk—which takes the form of a magical T-shirt and a talking cat in The Future—it’s not something I’m in the mood for every minute, but she never cheats by trying to make it stand in for depth.

The Future is about a couple in their mid-thirties who’ve rescued a cat named Paw-Paw. But Paw-Paw (who subsequently broke my heart) has an injured…paw, and has to stay at the shelter for an extra month. Overwhelmed by the impending responsibility, Sophie and Jason decide they have thirty days to get their shit together: find their true passions, make a difference, live as if life is not just a rehearsal. So Jason quits his IT job and starts going door to door selling trees, except he ends up buying random stuff from the Pennysaver instead. Sophie quits her job teaching dance and sets out to choreograph and upload “30 Dances in 30 Days” to YouTube. Except she’s totally paralyzed and ends up making her own random and even destructive connections.

Meanwhile, Paw-Paw waits for his people to take him home.

The particulars of Sophie and Jason make them not quite real, but if you substitute “write a novel” for “selling trees,” and “have a kid” for “adopt a cat,” and “two or, sigh, maybe more years” for “thirty days,” suddenly it’s not so absurd. Or maybe it is, but it’s an absurdity that, ahem, I relate to.

It’s a movie about the paradox of waiting. We as humans and felines can’t wait for the future, and so we miss out on the present, which is yesterday’s future. We snuff it out with worry and paralysis. And because anxiety about the future clouds the present, it makes us dislike the present and pine for (and worry about) the future even more.

Other movies and books have more or less said this, but what I like about The Future is that it also acknowledges that hope is an integral part of waiting and therefore not so bad. As Paw-Paw says (I’m paraphrasing), “I’d be happy to wait forever if I always knew they were coming tomorrow.” A certainty that the future has not yet begun is an unconscious way of knowing that time is endless—which is what enables us to enjoy the present. Or so went my thinking when, as a teenager and young adult, I consumed massive quantities of junk food every night. I would have hated the idea that my life was junk food and TV, but I was confident that my real life—the one in which I did my homework right after school and ate carrots and had a busy social calendar—would start tomorrow. It was a lie I had to tell myself so it could eventually (sort of) come true.

I’m kind of perennially burnt out on Q&A’s, but Miranda July won me over. She didn’t play one of those “Oh it just came to me in a dream/I’m so kooky and charmed” artists. She owned up to her own intentionality. The way she talked about her process made me realize that her approach is, I think, to follow the whimsical thoughts we all have to their illogical conclusions. We all read the Pennysaver to procrastinate and wonder, Who places these ads? But then we tell ourselves to go do the dishes. Miranda July interviews the ad-placers and puts them in her movie.

So ultimately, like a lot of artists I love, she is unapologetically herself. Which makes me want to be more like her, which makes me inherently unlike her.

a post about death, or: happy friday, everyone

2011-08-12T15:53:00.000-07:00

I feel like I’m slowly emerging from my psycho funk (I’m pretty sure that’s the official DSM term for it) only to discover the world outside my fire-damaged brain is also on fire. Republicans are trying their hardest to make Obama cry. They’re taking things away from people who barely had anything to start with and convincing some of those people (I’m talking to you, Joe and Jane Tea Party) that taxes—on their nonexistent incomes—have been keeping them down. That, and the queers, feminists and immigrants, of course. America is a few years away from being a second world country. England, despite its free education and socialized health care, is still full of Angry Young Men.

T-Mec is dying. It took longer than anyone predicted, another notch in the mystery that is medical science. She still has good days. She still likes to eat and purr and insinuate herself into the nearest lap. But her leg is swollen, her lumps are big and oozy and she often looks tired and glassy-eyed. It’s not time yet, but it will be soon.

Rachel, AK’s good friend and my more recent but very much admired friend, is dying. She was diagnosed with stomach cancer just days after we lost the Squeakies, and it’s been a long-short four months. It’s not time yet, but it will be in days. Her husband Jeff’s updates (which have only recently supplanted Rachel’s own) are heartbreaking. The kind of stuff that makes you cry at your desk, feel the bright terrible clarity of love and loss, feel more awake and connected than you did when you sat down, then realize the price of that little zap of connectedness.

My aunt is sick; probably something she’ll bounce back from very soon, but it’s taken frustrating twists and turns, and the unknown-ness hovers like a raincloud.

It’s hard to come back to the world of carrying about others when there are so many reminders that they could be whisked away from you. Or you could be whisked away from them. One image that has comforted me a little bit in the past few months is that of my mom, in Heaven—total fluffy cloud land, with unlimited Oreos and lots of good books—holding one Squeaky in each hand. Two little balls of light, the grandkids she never knew but knows now, the kids I’ll never know.

Rachel had a miscarriage before her oldest daughter was born, and it occurred to me today that she’ll know that baby now. That’s something, right? And of course I don’t know what the afterlife is. It’s probably something much more amorphous than my fluffy cloud land with its anthropomorphic spirits. But like I’ve said before, the picturing it and the wanting it is the thing itself. Love. God. Whatev.

And T-Mec, whose name was Angel when B and I first adopted her (but who’s a little too fond of swatting OC and ripping armchairs to shreds to earn that title on Earth), will make some introductions up there. I have a lot of people (including cat-people) on the other side now. Someday I hope it makes me less afraid of going there.

climate change

2011-08-08T22:36:00.001-07:00

My cousin Maria, keeper of Taylor family memorabilia, posted this letter on Facebook; I hope she doesn’t mind my stealing it. Our grandmother—Mommer, as we called her—wrote it to our grandfather about a year before they got married. As a 23-year-old career gal (animating Oswald the Rabbit and, later, Woody Woodpecker for Universal Pictures), she was bucking the norm for her generation.

My sister is carrying on Mommer’s (and our mom’s) artistic legacy. She just painted a mural of children’s book characters on the wall of her friend Jenny’s son’s bedroom. See photo. Jenny’s kids insisted that she wear the pirate hat. Can you blame them?

I apparently inherited Mommer’s love of L.A., slightly florid prose and stealing office stationery.

no more running away from the circus

2011-08-04T20:30:00.000-07:00

Since returning from the cruise, I’ve been meaning to start working on my circus novel again. I no longer have the “but first I need to do some research” excuse, or the “but I have debilitating anxiety*” excuse, or the “but I’m working on this art project” excuse, or the “but I’m working on this short story” excuse. I don’t even have the “but at least I went to the gym” excuse.

Last night I planned to go to the gym, but AK—who’d also been planning to work out—had a really long day, so I convinced myself that she needed me to crash out in solidarity with her. And to pick up pan dulce on the way home. And to watch TV while eating roughly half a bag of the sweet potato tortilla chips that Trader Joe’s was pushing earlier this week. AK is grossed out by Weird Cheryl Food like sweet potato tortilla chips and chile mango popsicles and mochi everything, so I’m not sure how this particular gesture showed solidarity, but it’s all about creating a mood of relaxation, right?

Today I’m back on various wagons. The not-eating-chips-like-tomorrow-is-the-apocalypse wagon and the writing wagon, muse willing. This morning I went to Starbucks and it felt like a homecoming. I got a latte and a multigrain bagel and opened Michael Cunningham’s new novel. So far it doesn’t seem as daring and wonderfully weird as Specimen Days—it’s about a middle-aged art couple with ennui, a plot that would send me running if it were handled by almost anyone other than Michael Cunningham. He could write the phonebook and make it inspiring and clairvoyant.

(Actually, this isn’t totally true. Despite his linguistic genius, he has a tendency to give his characters boring names.)

But reading Michael Cunningham is like drinking a double espresso. A great fast track to creativity. Who knows how long it will last—like the angsty characters in By Nightfall, I know how fragile any sense of wellbeing is—but I’ll take it while I can.

*Still there, just not so noisy. Thank you, Zoloft.

what i read in july

2011-08-04T19:58:00.000-07:00

Last month felt like a big reading comeback. Books are great! (Even though I have resumed neither the sound nor the fury.)

Stealing Angel by Terry Wolverton: Even most indie bookstores don't have a shelf for "spiritual thrillers," but if they did, Wolverton's newest novel would no doubt be facing forward with one of those "staff recommends" cards beneath it (at least if I was on staff). I devoured this book--about a woman who kidnaps the daughter she's raised with her ex, the girl's bio mom, to protect her from abuse--in two and a half days. As Maggie and Angel travel through Mexico, Maggie struggles to square her actions with her spiritual practice, something Eastern and yoga-like that the locals find cultish. The question seems to be: How do you maintain agency in your life without being a control freak? It's something I've been thinking about a lot lately, and even though I'm still not sure about some of the novel's apparent conclusions (for example, that it's better to be calm than emotive), I was moved and riveted by Maggie's journey.

The Anxiety of Everyday Objects by Aurelie Sheehan: This is a novel about a 29-year-old, single, middle-class woman trying to navigate romance, career and creativity in the big city. But while that might be a formula for chick lit, with all its derogatory associations, Sheehan's novel has a subtle Aimee Bender-esque undercurrent of surreality. There's the protagonist's mysterious blind coworker, snippets of newspaper articles about magical bees and other oddities, and just a general sense that this world is adjacent to our own but *not* our own. Sheehan also has a flair for small, poetically human moments which make a good case for 29-year-old, single, middle-class women having more than visions of wedding dresses dancing in their heads.

City of Thieves by David Benioff: Ten out of ten people in my book club liked this novel: Structurally it's an action movie, right down to improbable scenes of our scrappy hero wrestling a gun from Nazi hands. But the scrappy hero himself, a young Russian Jew named Lev, acknowledges this, and Benioff's thoughtful, literary writing never glorifies war. Torture, cannibalism and acts of cowardice are all presented matter-of-factly, and Lev and his friends get through it because they have no other choice. Although Vika, Lev's girl-soldier love interest, says that winning for Mother Russia is the only thing that matters, Lev points out that they are Russia and therefore worth saving. An individualistic and American worldview, but also a tender and life-affirming one. I kept thinking about the serious post-traumatic stress all of these characters must have experienced later in life. Sometimes I think anyone who lives through a war and doesn't spend the rest of his life screaming on a street corner is a hero. And maybe those who do are too.

Limitations by Scott Turow: Scott Turow always gets billed as one of those "literary" genre writers, which somehow seems insulting to everyone involved, as if plotting and pretty writing are mutually exclusive skills, as if readers shouldn't hunger for both. Anyway, yes, this is a legal procedural about a judge trying a rape case and avoiding a threatening stalker. It's also a character study of a middle-aged man reflecting on his privileges and past misdeeds. It's fairly effective as both, painting the legal system and humans themselves as the limited entities the title implies. But (perhaps a mark against hybridity?) the book was neither a total page turner nor an intricate examination of humanity. Eventually the stalker spills his (or her) guts in traditional TV-villain style, and I found myself simultaneously thinking that I wanted to know more about this character and also that (s)he was unveiled too quickly.

8/1/11: grand finale

2011-08-01T15:47:00.000-07:00

Highlights from last night’s dance show, Shout!:

Some of the dancers are Broadway/Laker Girl/So You Think You Can Dance-finalist good. Some are more on the level of the high school kids I took jazz classes from in eighth grade. But I idolized those kids, so saying you dance like Stella Choe is not an insult.

They opened with an oldies medley: “Born to be Wild,” “Yakety Yak,” “Rock ‘N Roll is Here to Stay.” But again the show took a Red State turn, with cowboy hats and a Jesus-praising gospel number with purple choir robes covering the swimsuits from the Beach Blanket Bingo number.

There were a couple of songs from Hair—I liked seeing a nod to actual musical theater. Were they taking us through the decades? From poodle skirts to Mad Men-style beachwear to psychedelic? With detours through early ‘90s country, calypso and yet another America tribute?

Final note: The Macarena is alive and well and living on the Carnival Paradise.