Bread and Bread

This weekend I felt like I got a small toe back in the literary loop. Saturday I met Sandra Hunter at Buttercelli , a lovely little bakery that anyone not from L.A. would make relentless fun of. There are subsections of baked goods for vegans, paleo people and the gluten-free. I ate something from a menu represented by a lioness mascot. I'm not totally sure what that meant. Vegan and low-sugar, maybe? Like buttah. Not like gluten. (After getting good cancer-test results last week [!], but flying a little too fast and loose around the cheese empanadas at Leslie's short film wrap party on Saturday night, I think I should follow the lead of vegan/low-sugar lionesses. I should probably also talk to my therapist about the patina of control and reward/punishment issues that overlays my generally good-but-imperfect eating habits.) Anyway, Sandra's first novel, Losing Touch , just came out, and I'm liking it a lot so far. It's about a an Indian-English man whose f...

1. swimming with sharks When I was a camp counselor, we had to pass a swim test in order to get a wristband that would allow us in the deep end of the pool. I dog-paddled the length of the pool sloppily and then treaded water for five full minutes. I got my wristband. I was proud of myself for being less tired than the counselor who chain smoked. So Diana Nyad—the woman who swam from Cuba to Florida on her fifth try, at age sixty-four—and I don’t have a ton in common. But I cried when I read this part of Ariel Levy’s New Yorker profile of her: “My journey now is to find some sort of grace in the face of this defeat,” Nyad told an audience a month after her third failed attempt. “Sometimes if cancer has won, if there’s death and we have no choice, then grace and acceptance are necessary. But that ocean is still there. I don’t want to be the crazy woman who does this for years and years and tries and fails and tries and fails, but I can swim from Cuba to Florida and I will swi...

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