Bread and Bread

Because then, during dinner, when one of you asks, “Did you ever watch The Red Balloon in school?” the other will almost spit out her corn laughing at the memory of this randomest of movies. Then you will muse on its bizarre popularity: a French movie (you both think it was French, though you can’t recall anyone actually speaking in the film) about a little boy chasing a balloon through cobblestone streets. Who said, “Yes, that is the movie that should be shown in lieu of P.E. on all rainy days. That is the movie that should run during free summer programs at the library. That is the movie that, even though it appears to be French, should be shown in ninth grade Spanish classes everywhere.”? The two of you will conclude that it must have been distributed to public institutions for free, much like the prepackaged jicama sticks that were served with every meal at the camp where you were a counselor. Its only other possible draw is the actual balloon itself, which you remember as impossi...

A ghettolovely moment (kind of like ghettofabulous, but quieter): Last night around 10 p.m. a little sparrow perched on the top bar outside the window near our back door. It sat there, well past bird bedtime, feathers fluffed up. “Little nightbird,” we cooed. The window was open, and scents from the cats’ litter box wafted upward. “Maybe it likes gross smells,” we theorized. “Maybe it’s a stinkbird.” Throughout the hot weekend, we’d been lamenting that the bars on our windows prevent us from installing an air conditioner. But our little stinkbird reminded me why, ultimately, I’m a fan of bars. They let you leave your windows open on summer nights, and sometimes sparrows mistake them for tree branches.

I hadn’t seen Bonnie, my best friend during grades four through twelve (with some difficult spots in grades six, seven and eleven—such is the nature of schoolgirl friendships), in almost a year. So naturally, when we met for lunch on Sunday, one of the first things we discussed was Target. Bonnie pointed to her new, antique-looking TV cabinet and matching shelf thing. “Guess where?” The furniture was classy, but still, Target was going to be my first guess. Bonnie and her other best friend, Angie (yes, this other-best-friend situation was the source of some of the aforementioned difficult spots), used to approach Target the way some people approach Disneyland: the attitude is ironic, but the pilgrimages and purchases are frequent. “Target,” Bonnie confirmed. “I just went there before coming here!” I said. “I got some vacuum cleaner bags and some shorts. I’m going to Singapore soon, and I think it’s near the equator. I thought it might be good to have shorts.” “Isn’t that where they—” “...

It occurred to me that, in my last post, I made it sound like the homeless guy gave me $20 for permission to cut my hair, when in fact I gave him $20 for the 'do. I don't know why I feel the need to clarify. Maybe so I sound more like the possibly-gullible person that I am and less like some kind of hair whore.

Last night I went to the Hotel Café to hear Jamie’s friend Shannon McNally play. She’s this young, smooth-skinned girl with a huge, gravely voice and a band full of hippie dudes. Her 47-year-old piano player was wearing a baseball cap with a red-white-and-blue marijuana leaf on it. They rocked the bathroom-sized stage, reminding all the Angeleno hipsters in the audience that country (and country-ish) music doesn’t necessarily mean Billy Ray Cyrus. Or that “Butterfly Kisses” song that’s always played during the dad-and-bride dance at weddings. But before I call Shannon’s music “country” (or country-ish), I want to paraphrase what she said, between lonely howling-at-the-moon songs and bad-ass guitar jams, about genre: Her music has been called folk/country/blues/roots/singer-songwriter/southern. She doesn’t like regionalism, and she doesn’t like being categorized. But instead of saying, “I don’t like labels” (which by now is just as trite as any actual label), she just made up her own g...

My new, free iPod shuffle arrived in the mail the other day. It came in a bright green box, which I just opened a few minutes ago. Inside there’s a disc, some jelly bean-sized earphones and a white plastic rectangle that sort of looks like a hotel key card. It was free because I signed up for a Citibank credit card (a deal I really shouldn’t promote, since, according to Fahrenheit 9/11 , Citibank is evil. I rationalize it by saying that since I don’t carry a balance on my Citibank card, they’re not actually making any money off me. In fact, I’m just causing them a lot of trouble. It’s practically activism). I wish I felt excited about my shuffle, but when I look at the apple-green box, I see A Thing I Need To Take Care Of. Right up there with finding out where those ants in my kitchen are coming from—a thing that is not that hard, but which takes just a little bit more knowledge and energy than I have. Which is not a very grateful attitude. But I’m not an early adopter. The fact that I...

I’m sure entire dissertations have been written about The Sims , so I won’t go into what the game says about our cultural values—say, the fact that your Sims’ career success is directly related to how many friends they know. Instead I’ll just write about how hard it is. First, I took a tour of the household Yoshiko has been lovingly cultivating for two years: Breier and Sylvia, a sexy interracial lesbian couple, are a surgeon and a venture capitalist, respectively. They live in a large house with a robot servant and a flat-screen TV. While we played, Yoshiko bought them an “aqua funhouse,” basically a giant fish tank that you can swim around in. Breier took a few lackadaisical laps while Sylvia stood outside, crossing and uncrossing her arms. Neither of their mood ratings went up. These bougie ladies were hard to please. It was a good thing Yoshiko had recently purchased the Makin’ Magic expansion pack, which allowed Sylvia to learn a snake-charming dance and acquire items like t...

Despite Penny’s assessment of Tacoma, Friday night I headed south to see my friends Daisye and Yoshiko. They are the sort of friends that I would visit even if they moved to Antarctica, but it turns out that Tacoma is a pleasant city with beautiful old houses and a perfect, east coast-style university, where Yoshiko works. Before leaving Seattle, we visited the house in West Seattle where Daisye grew up. We ate veggie taco salad and raspberry-peach pie made from scratch by Daisye’s mom, Minnie, who actually won a state-wide bakeoff back in the day. Yet Minnie is also a lesbian who contemplates hanging signs with random, Situationist-esque slogans from a local bridge. The best of all worlds, really. Onto Tacoma: The only slight drawback to the location of Yoshiko and Daisye’s charming brick apartment building is El Guadalajara, the karaoke bar across the street. None of us will ever hear 4 Non Blondes’ “What’s Up?” in quite the same way again. But there’s a good independent books...

Here is my favorite story from my first-ever visit to Seattle: When The Pioneers (a band of semi-corrupt white guys) arrived at the part of The Sound (my friend Yoshiko tells me only tourists call the big body of water to the west “the ocean”) that is now Seattle, they settled on the only unoccupied flat of land, not thinking that perhaps there was a reason it was unoccupied, and not being familiar with the concept of tides. Some time and many potholes later, they realized their new city/tide flat was basically a giant marsh. I don’t know enough about plumbing to properly explain the problems that resulted when they tried to flush their newly invented toilets, but suffice it to say that they had to put them on six-foot-tall platforms if they didn’t want a sewage geyser every time the tide came in. Semi-conveniently, the city then proceeded to burn to the ground. Great opportunity to re-grade and rebuild, right? City officials thought so, but local business owners (who would have had...

A well reasoned voice to add to the mix: http://www.newsday.com/features/booksmags/ny-bktop4315643jun26,0,5274075.story . My spinning head is now ready to move on to other topics.

Yesterday I went to a panel at Skylight Books called “Beyond Chick-Lit” featuring several writers who, as David Kipen put it on KCRW, “have never written a book with a pink cover”: Meghan Daum, Janet Fitch, Kate Gale, Leslie Schwartz, Susan Straight and one of my favorites, Nina Revoyr . Actually, the paperback version of Susan’s novel Highwire Moon does depict a girl’s semi-bare, toned abs, a weird choice (not Susan’s, I’m sure) considering that the 15-year-old protagonist is pregnant throughout most of the book. Usually I skip any panel related to publishing and marketing. The news is inevitably depressing. As long as you know better than to decorate your manuscript with stickers, a certain amount of ignorance is bliss. I also cringe when people stand up and plug their own writing projects in the guise of questions. I too have delusions of discovery, but I am so clever and subtle that hardly anyone even knows I write. But yesterday’s topic seemed important, and since I’m a few mont...

I’m embarking on draft three of a novel I’ve been working on for quite a while. Conventional wisdom says that I should tighten things up, cut some pages and solidify the main character’s arc. But now I’m contemplating Gertrude Stein’s strategy in The Making of Americans , a 925-page book that I haven’t read (but I’m almost a third of the way through a 16-page New Yorker article about it!). Apparently some of those pages are devoted to a fairly traditional novel. Others are not. Here’s a passage: Bear it in your mind my reader, but truly I never feel it that there ever can be for me any such a creature, no it is this scribbled and dirty and lined paper that is really to be me always my receiver…. This that I write down for you a little each day here on my scraps of paper for you is not just an ordinary kind of novel with a plot and conversatiosn to amuse you, but a record of a decent family’s progress respectably lived by us and our fathers and our mothers, and our grand-fathers, ...

The week had been jagged, full of lost kittens and big questions. I have concluded that, after weeks like this, if you live where we live, it’s good to take the scenic route home. After dinner at Café Metropol , we wove in and out of what I’ll call the Bridge District, white brick arching over lonely and surprisingly clean lots. It was still light out, but hazy in that inland-summer-Friday way. We were the only ones around, so it felt weird to follow orders, to Not Turn On Red. We headed down Alameda, past Washington. A huge tangle of green erupted to our right: plot after little plot of prickly pear cactus, of corn as tall as a stop sign. It was a community garden, technically, but more than that it was farmland. We turned down 41st Street, and it was like a village. In the fading pink light, people cooked meat on corners, and barefoot kids chased each other down the street. We chugged along behind a pickup truck full of flattened cardboard boxes, past two Victorian houses. ...

At last, my two favorite literary worlds merge: http://www.theonion.com/news/index.php?issue=4126&n=1 .

Spammers have the best names. Just this morning, I received Viagra/mortgage/Îáíîâëåíèå offers from Chevalier Bowers, Gustavo Chavez, Durand Chia-Yu, Plums C. Buckley and Violet Esposito. So elegant. So international. I heard once that Beverly Cleary scanned the phonebook when she needed names for her characters, but next time I’m struggling, I’m going to do the 21st century thing and check my junk mail folder.

Sitting by my car when I left for work this morning was a small orange-and-white kitten. My first instinct was to blink and hope that, when I opened my eyes, it would be gone. Jamie and Lee-Roy just found homes for five stray kittens, and a couple of years ago I helped rescue a cocker spaniel that was nicked by an SUV, so I am familiar with the rewards and troubles of animal rescue. I knew what my second instinct would be—capture and snuggle—and I was hoping to avoid it. This little guy/girl looked up at me with its one good eye. The other was swollen and pussy, and there was a long gash running along the side of its body. This kitten was clearly going to have a lot of tough childhood experiences to tell its therapist about someday. The minute I made a move, it took off running—pretty damn fast for a creature with a gash and an oozy eye. First to the tool shed, then past the other parked cars in our parking area, then into the tangle of ivy that runs alongside the driveway. My neighbo...

The summer issue of Blithe House Quarterly ( http://www.blithe.com ) is up online. (I edited the spring edition and am working on fall, but this issue was guest-edited by Ruthann Robson.) Check out the lovely bright yellow background and "Submit: a fantasy" by Sima Rabinowitz ( http://www.blithe.com/bhq9.3/9.3.01.html ), a glimpse into the often tedious and absurd world of literary submissions. If you too have ever had "a lump the size of a self-addressed stamped envelope" in your throat, you shall relate.

Yesterday I wore a T-shirt that I purchased at Goodwill for 50 cents. It’s small and purple, with a faded logo that says, “Polar Expedition: Where kids discover Jesus’ love is cool!” The “t” in “expedition” is white, whereas the other letters are blue, so it looks like—you guessed it—a cross. There is also a small picture of a Wallace-and-Gromit-style penguin wearing a red scarf. Now, I am not a Christian. But while I have all the predictable beefs with organized religion, I also cannot say that Jesus’ love isn’t cool. If you listen to the gospel of Thomas or my friend Alanna, he sounds very cool, in fact. I don’t want to be one of those people who dismisses all Christians as Amy Grant-listening, George W.-loving sheep. So while I bought the shirt with ironic intentions, I wear it hesitantly. I don’t want people to think I’m an Amy Grant-listening, George W.-loving Bible-thumper. But I also don’t want them to think I have anything against Jesus, because I don’t. So if asked, ...

A few years ago, Dan Savage did this great NPR piece slamming gay men who hate sissy guys. Sissy guys are great, Dan said, they kicked ass at Stonewall and offer a nice alternative to Abercrombie & Fitch hegemony. It cemented my opinion of him as someone who Gets It. Now he’s devoted a column to advice for queer teens from queer grownups ( http://www.theonionavclub.com/savagelove/index.php?issue=4125 ). Because I was too much of a slacker to write in myself, here’s my own short list of Things I Know Now That I Wish I Knew Then: If you are a girl who spends most of her time pining for sissy guys, you might not just be a fag hag. You might be a lesbian. That slightly masculine, slightly feminine blurriness that’s so hot in your musical theater-lovin’ R.A. might be just as attractive in a chick. Someday there will be a sitcom called Will & Grace . It will be funny for a couple of years, then it will suffocate in its own schtick for the next four or five seasons. But it wil...

Another heartwarming lion tale (this one has a not-so-happy ending, just to warn you): http://www.awf.org/news/5225 . If you need cheering up afterward, here's a great place for banana pudding: http://www.ejsfamouspuddin.com/ .