Bread and Bread

At this very minute, my innovative writer friend Bronwyn is hosting a "hashtag book festival" about parks. What does this mean? It means that if you go here , you can encounter interesting things to read about parks, and post your own thoughts, writing, pictures and recommendations, all from the comfort of your phone or computer. A genius locale for a book festival in the middle of August. I'm taking this as a call to jot down a few of my own #ParkLit thoughts; I was inspired by a photo Bronwyn posted of Mesa Verde, the national park where she just did a writing residency. I doubt she was housed in an actual cliff dwelling, but that's how I like to picture her: sitting inside an adobe house, laptop on her knees, gazing at the valley below. Great view. Tough commute. My family took one kind of vacation when I was a kid: We visited state and national parks in our 1979 Dodge Four Star motor home. We always left no later than 5:30 am. My sister and I rolled out o...

Yesterday was one of those days that left me wondering How did people ever cross the continent in covered wagons when giving my kid 5 mL of amoxicillin is taking every last ounce of mental and physical energy I have? How did they do it? They smelled bad and a lot of them died, that's how. Then I checked myself: Why do you think crossing dangerous territory with very few provisions is an old-timey thing, Cheryl? Hi, Syrian refugees. And the answer is what it always is: People do what they have to. At this moment, my “have to” isn’t the world’s biggest, or even close to the biggest in my own life, but it’s enough. Dash was sent home from daycare Tuesday afternoon with a low-grade fever. Even though he’s gotten approximately 400 colds since starting there almost a year ago, this was the first one he got sent home for. (I guess he usually gets sick on weekends and vacations, which is total parenting karma, since I was that kid who had perfect attendance during the sch...

1. humans vs. assholes The other day, a writer I’m Facebook friends with posted: “I’m tired of personal essays. I really don’t need to know anything else about any stranger’s breakup, dysfunctional friendships, epiphanies, condescending cultural affiliations, or childhoods. Can the age of the universalizing snowflake transition into something else now?” I basically agree; the thread that followed attached some qualifiers, and I admitted I like reading and writing personal essays when they’re good (well, I like reading them when they’re good; I probably like writing them even when they’re bad). But two things became evident: First, the universalizing snowflakes in question are usually middle class white women, rapidly turning their angst into a bid for internet fame. Guilty as charged, Your Honor. Let me tell you all about my night and how dark and stormy it was. Second, there’s a particular subgenre of the universalizing snowflake personal essay that especially bugs me, a...

After my previous post, I got a Facebook message from a friend (who is staying anonymous because she is private, not because she has body shame). With her permission, I ’m posting our exchange. Body stuff is such a loaded topic, so it makes me happy that we can talk about it sanely, in stark contrast to most of the internet. Cheryl, I just read your post about weight and dieting, and I have a lot to say about this post and would be happy to have a longer 1:1 conversation after you have had some sleep...say in 2-3 years! Briefly let me just say that in not one of the photos you posted were you fat by anyone ’s definition -- anyone ’s but your own. To say that you were the “fattest cheerleader ” is a disservice to you and to all of us who are fat. Further, you ’ ve set up a double dichotomy of skinny = good and fat = bad. For your sake, and most especially for your son ’ s, I would encourage you to spend some time reading in the Health At Any Size (HAES) and All Bodies are Good Bodies...

“I’d come to squander an appalling proportion of my mental time on empty vows to cut down to one meal a day, or on fruitless self-castigation over a second stuffed pepper at lunch. Surely on some unconscious, high-frequency level other people could hear the squeal of this humiliating hamster wheel in my head, a piercing shrill that emitted from every other woman I passed in the aisles of Hy-Vee.” --from Big Brother by Lionel Shriver I never think of really smart, self-actualized women—whether fat, skinny or in-between—as dieting, but Shriver’s novel about consumption and excess in various forms (I think; I’m only on page 28) suggests that maybe she’s not a total stranger to the endeavor. I spent my teens and early twenties bingeing and dieting, plummeting to 107 pounds for a brief period and becoming the fattest cheerleader on the squad for a much longer one. Then I came out, and within a year my eating habits were the best they’d been since childhood. Halloween duri...

There is a Big Lots! around the corner from Dash’s daycare. I’d been meaning to check it out since he started daycare last week; you’d think it was a museum or something, and in a way I approached it as such (hey, you take your thrills were you can). I hadn’t actually been to a Big Lots! before, but I grew up going to Pic ‘N’ Save, its eighties counterpart (Wikipedia tells me that Big Lots! actually bought Pic ‘N’ Save in 2002, although by then it was called MacFrugals). Pic ‘N’ Save occupied most of a down-and-out strip mall in Hermosa Beach. This was back when there were still down-and-out parts of the beach cities. My mom always speculated that the other businesses in the strip mall—an Indian restaurant and a couple of stores that kept heavy curtains drawn at all times—were fronts for something. The price was right. Pic ‘N’ Save was full of cheap crap that regular stores hadn’t been able to sell, but we were a family of bargain hunters. If a brand of kids’ shoes had br...

“The moment of queer pride is a refusal to be shamed by witnessing the other as being ashamed of you,” Maggie Nelson writes in The Argonauts, a book I’m consuming in grateful gulps. Beyond the Absolut Vodka float and bronzed dancing boys in West Hollywood—beyond the bounce house at Dyke Day—this is what Pride is about. I came out slowly and anticlimactically somewhere around 2000; I’d already been following Rent around the Western United States for three years, so I thought I was plenty proud. Proud enough to roll my eyes at the commercialization of it all, proud enough to have sincere conversations about the downside of assimilation. On one level, embracing the rave-hued, raised-fist anthems of Rent was an act of defiance of my conservative (though not homophobic per se) upbringing, but it was also Broadway, and I’d never personally been harassed or shamed. Read this book! I didn’t come out, even to myself, until I was sure it was cool to do so. Not just not-dangerous, bu...

My self-care has taken a dive these past few days, as I was mired in the stress and absurdity of a federal grant while still working part-time. Also the aforementioned medical tests for me and for Dash, all of which had good results (knockonwood), but which sent cortisol pumping through my veins. Exercise started to seem like a distant memory, and soon I was cramming pastries from Elsa’s Bakery into my face the way Dash crams his (much more nutritious) hands into his. And I haven’t been writing anything that doesn’t come with an RFP.* Sweet, sweet pan dulce. I got over the most arduous hump of federal grant (I hope), and today I actually ate five servings of fruits and vegetables, and took a walk. To Starbucks, but still. On the way home from therapy today, I was listening to one of my new favorite podcasts, The Longest Shortest Time , which is pretty much a parenting-themed This American Life. I like it because it focuses on parents as people, which should be a given, but ...

1. boyle heights During one of our roughly eighteen trips to Orange County in the past week, Waze rerouted us to side streets to avoid a bottleneck on the 5. The freeway spit us out in Boyle Heights, a neighborhood I’m always excited to discover more of, because it’s Homeboy’s original home and the site of a still unfolding story about immigration, violence, community and “gentefication.” But what greeted us at the bottom of the exit on Christmas Eve was a giant square billboard encouraging us to take out a CareCredit account for a loved one’s funeral. “Welcome to Boyle Heights, time to plan a funeral you can’t afford,” I muttered. The assistant/map reader is right to be skeptical. “Where’s my next turn?” AK said, perhaps a bit bark-ily. (We saw Nightcrawler recently, which is a dark, brilliant and extremely funny movie. The scenes in which Jake Gyllenhaal’s psychopathic, ambulance-chasing “journalist” character lays into his assistant about proper navigation tech...

The other day I bought the January issue of O, The Oprah Magazine because AK wasn’t feeling well and the cover featured Oprah posing in an emerald green dress next to a lion, and I thought it would make her laugh. It's all about me-ow. It’s fun to make fun of O because Oprah is powerful and ubiquitous and prone to let-them-eat-cake moments; because, like every other women’s magazine, it’s obsessed with self-improvement; and because, well, see lion cover above. But of all the magazines you can impulse-buy at the checkout counter, it’s one of the best. It takes books seriously. It features women of color regularly. And even though Oprah’s always on us to be our best selves, it turns out that the resolution-oriented articles in the January issue are pretty sensible. I have a complicated relationship with self-improvement. I think our (American? female?) obsession breaks us down and gets us to buy shit more often than it lifts us up. On my blog and in my life, I want ...

Like every Angeleno without air conditioning, I’ve been slammed by the heat these past couple of days. But it took me a while to notice. I’m the kind of person who will wear shoes a size too small and wonder why she couldn’t walk five miles. I.e., overly cerebral, self-blaming, not very mindful. By the end of the night last night—despite having a really fun time at Lori’s birthday party—I was kind of a mess. Crabby, over-heated, under-caffeinated, mad at myself for not doing more that day and every day, and especially mad at myself for eating two vegan donuts* and a piece of birthday cake on top of the cupcake my writer friend Sandra bought me earlier in the day. At Lori’s house, I flipped through a lifestyle book about “honest living” by Jessica Alba. It was surprisingly sane and encouraged readers to give themselves one day a week to eat whatever they wanted. But I don’t think that works for people with addictive personalities and a history of eating disorders and cancer that f...