Bread and Bread

Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash My cousin's husband says his family was robbed by undocumented immigrants when he was a kid, only he doesn't say "undocumented." That's what the cops told his family. To me it sounds like something cops would say if they couldn't solve a crime, but I might be wrong.  He baits me: Wait until they come for you. Do YOU want to spend your time with criminals? Share your bed with gang members?  I tell him I have spent a lot of time with gang members, most of them citizens, and it was just fine. I say MS 13 is an American export. We should apologize to El Salvador. I say I didn't know that wanting someone not to be deported and dehumanized meant I had to marry them.  My cousin's husband dares me to share a bathroom with a trans woman, only he doesn't say "trans woman." I do, that very weekend, in a pizza restaurant in a college town. I wash my hands next to her in the trough sink. I think she is kind of cut...

1. when in doubt I signed up to help with the Homeless Count because I have house guilt . (I’m also working on a story about homelessness in L.A. for Razorcake , because what is more DIY than building your own makeshift shelter?) As we’ve settled into our new place, the streets of Highland Park and Chinatown have filled with motor homes like the one my family camped in when I was a kid. It’s like a post-apocalyptic time capsule. Meanwhile my middle-class friends struggle to pay rent on tiny apartments, and a not-small percentage of staff and clients at Homeboy commute from Palmdale. It’s safe to say L.A.—despite all its blue-state benefits—has a housing crisis. Glamping? After watching two online training videos, I arrive at W.O.R.K.S. , an affordable housing organization in Highland Park. I actually emailed them a while back to volunteer, but I never heard back. Ah, nonprofits. W.O.R.K.S. will be the starting point for counting NELA census tracts. I see my former neighbors, ...

All the sentences I say to AK lately begin with "In Far from the Tree ...." When I was reading the chapter about prodigies, she would say, "Ugh, what about prodigies now ?" I think I've shown great restraint in not diagnosing myself or Dash with the various maladies and challenges covered in the book, but right now I'm feeling a little extra empathy for the schizophrenics in the schizophrenia chapter. Many of them know that the voices they hear aren't real; it just takes a lot of energy--spoons in the language of disability and chronic illness--to shut them out. In the same vein, I know that my anxieties aren't grounded in a ton of reality, but it still takes effort to whittle them down to a manageable size. It's haaaaarrd, and I don't even have an official anxiety disorder, let alone auditory hallucinations.  Here's what's on my plate today: 1) Is it a problem that Dash dropped a lot of height percentile points between his 18-m...

1. battle hymn of the rust belt over-achiever “Our men suffer from a peculiar crisis of masculinity,” writes J.D. Vance in Hillbilly Elegy, his memoir of growing up in a Rust Belt town inhabited by economic migrants from Appalachia, “in which some of the very traits that our culture inculates make it difficult to succeed in a changing world.” I wanted the book to feel more like its cover. I imagine New York agents and editors sending his manuscript around in emails sprinkled with “zeitgeist” and “the white working class” and “fresh, underrepresented voices.” I imagine them filling an unspoken quota that demands more work by conservative writers (Vance claims a conservative identity, although the book is only lightly political). If that sounds like an ungenerous impression, it’s because the book doesn’t quite accomplish what it explicitly sets out to do: represent for an economic and cultural underclass, and offer some loose suggestions about what this group needs, and ...

1. requiem for a dream In college I read a short story in which a boy gets kicked out of school. He’s the child of migrant farm workers, and he has trouble keeping up. He knows his parents will be mad. On the walk home, he keeps thinking, Maybe it didn’t really happen. Texas, 1942. I’ve long forgotten the name of the book or author, unfortunately, but that scene stayed with me because it perfectly captured those moments in your life when you try to rewind time with your brain. When I got out of work on Tuesday, I looked an animated New York Times graphic that depicted a needle wobbling between Hillary and Trump, showing the likelihood of who would get elected based on the count coming in. It showed an 82% chance of a Hillary win. Like so many people, I’d showed up to my local polling place that morning feeling proud and optimistic. People chatted in English and Spanish, greeted their neighbors and sympathized with a toddler who wondered where the “boating” was. ...

Scene: Int. car, night. CHERYL is driving. AK is in the passenger seat; her phone emits a white glow. In the back seat, DASH sleeps. AK: I read an article--where did it go? I can't seem to find it now. Anyway, it said that there's this statistical model that has accurately predicted every election except for 1960, which some people thought was rigged. And it's saying there's a 99 percent chance Trump is going to be elected. I don't know if that's true, but for the first time I feel really scared. CHERYL: Yeah, I just felt a sinking feeling in my stomach when you said that. Is it Nate Silver? AK: No, it's a statistical model. Supposedly Nate Silver has been wrong about a bunch of things lately. CHERYL: I feel like if the model were that accurate we would have heard about it. We'd just predict every election that way. But yeah, I get your point.  How about corn for president? I could get behind corn. AK: Sometimes I think, "So what, it...