Bread and Bread

Specifically, the dancewear and costume shop next door to my office has put out its life-size clown mannequin, which it does toward the end of every September. But each year the clown—which stands on a busy street from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day for a month—gets a little shabbier. Its yellow wig has had sooty black tips for awhile now, but today I noticed that one of its cartoony, white-gloved hands has been replaced by what appears to be the hand of a small female mannequin. So what used to be a sentinel of Happy Fun Kiddy Halloween is now an unintentional harbinger of Scary Ghoulish Horror Movie Halloween. If one of the little tap dancer mannequins in the window display turns out to be missing a hand, all the better.

1. i am a crack whore After every Olympics the Manhattan Beach Parks and Recreation gymnastics classes would fill up with wannabe Mary Lou Rettons. I, who had been doing gymnastics since age five, looked upon these fair-weather gymnasts—most of whom would be gone by mid-session—with scorn. I was egged on by my parents, who were big fans of Sticking It Out in all its forms, from classes to bowls of cereal one had poured orange juice on as part of an unfortunate breakfast experiment. I was painfully aware of my Mary Lou-ishness yesterday when I enrolled in the eight-week Covenant I class at All Saints Episcopalian Church , which has been in the news a lot lately, and which was practically bursting at the buttresses during Sunday’s service. But I didn’t sign up because I wanted to be part of the church that was famous for telling Bush to shove it (but less directly and with more love-and-Jesus). I signed up because AK signed up, and I was driving her back from dinner with my aunt and un...

Saturday was the first day of fall, and Sara and I decided to spend it outdoors. This being Los Angeles , there were no trees dropping piles of fire-colored leaves or couples strolling in cable-knit sweaters. But our hike—the Temescal Canyon Loop in the hills above the Pacific Palisades—did take us past one heavily graffitied cactus, a couple of hardcore joggers and the spacious backyards of French- and Spanish-style mansions. Sara sighed wistfully at the latter, much the way she’d sighed wistfully an hour before when we ate at Gladstone’s, a restaurant I thought was crazy-fancy when I was in college (I think because the Daily Bruin ran an article on good Valentine’s Day date restaurants ), but which, upon actually going there, tu rn ed out to be a sort of Buca di Beppo By The Sea. Not necessarily a bad thing—what’s not to love about a giant martini glass full of deep-fried shrimp?—but not the epitome of elegance I’d imag ined. As I studied my Seafood Watch fish guide from...

GUY IN FRONT OF ME , TO GUY BEHIND THE COUNTER : I’ll have a slice of the spinach pizza. The E. coli pizza. ME : I’ll have the same. [TO GUY IN FRONT OF ME ] Did you just say E. coli pizza? GUY : Yeah. ME : I guess I feel like taking risks tonight. GUY : E. coli is the best diet.

I just finished a project for work that involved reading the first three pages of about 500 stories. Even though a lot of those stories were really good, it made me a little crazy in the head. My brain was like, “This is not what reading is supposed to be. When I finally surpassed the not-so-adventurous adventures of Janet and Mark and moved onto real books and decided that, fine, fine, I liked reading, this is not what I signed on for!” Here is what I lea rn ed: 1) Good writing is not hard to find. Great writing is. Right now I’m finding it in Middlesex . My brain was like, “Oh, right, this is how good it can be.” Like going from an at-least-he-doesn’t-hit-me relationship to true love. It’s so layered and delicious and funny and complex. Not just a story but a world. 2) I love finishing projects because it gives me an excuse to begin my life fresh immediately afterward. I’m not sure what that fresh start entails—everything I did today was just like everything I did yeste...

Today at work our 19-year-old intern mentioned that one of her professors advised her never to write about anything outside her own experience. I emphasized, and emphasized again, that that’s a bunch of bullshit. Or, as my co-panelist Tod Goldberg said Sunday at the West Hollywood Book Fair, “The old ‘write what you know’ thing makes for a lot of stories about 21-year-old Cal State Northridge students.” One bit of slightly more valid conventional creative writing wisdom is that the more specific your story is, the more universal its appeal. Paradoxical but true. Here, try it out—which sentence makes you sadder? 1) There was a war and thousands of people died. 2) During World War I, a boy named Franz who really liked movies and had tried smoking once but was bad at it, died when the army took over his home and he and his mother were forced to live on the streets, where they both got, um, cholera. Okay, bad example. Neither sentence is sad because the first is generic and the ...

Both AK and I have lived most of our lives within the same 25-mile radius, so when we get out of town, we’re easily amazed. Last night on the way to my reading at DG Wills in San Diego, we drove down a block of old bungalows. “I sort of feel like we’re in Northern California right now,” I said. “I can see that. Berkeley, maybe,” she said. We turned the corner. “Now I feel like we’re back east somewhere. Maybe it’s the low curbs.” “I think we’re just not very well traveled, baby. We look around and everything’s exotic,” she said. “By the next block we’ll be in Thailand.” That’s part of it, but I’m also realizing that one of our collective hobbies is Assessing The Situation. Psychoanalyzing people and relationships, making cultural comparisons, that sort of thing. I’ve always prided myself on my skills in this area of observation—I’m a writer, and I’d like to think I have something more to show for it than fast typing skills (76 WPM, 94% accuracy, according to the online test I just to...

Every time I see my Uncle Bob, he starts—with almost no provocation or introduction— to recount episodes of various British sitcoms. “Did you see that episode of The Bucket Woman where Hyacinth’s doorbell was broken and—” The show is not really called The Bucket Woman . That’s just Uncle Bob’s nickname for it, and I’m not entirely sure why, because I haven’t ever seen the show. My answer (and the answer of almost everyone present) is, “No, sorry, didn’t catch that one.” For the past ten months, my answer has been, “No, sorry, I don’t have a TV.” And it’s weird how much it feels like an actual apology. Every time I admit that I don’t have a TV, I feel the need to explain that it’s not that I don’t like TV or think I’m better than TV—I’m just so lazy that I haven’t bothered buying a table or shelf to support the various TVs that have been offered to me like wheels of gove rn ment cheese. It’s gotten to the point that a few friends and family members will ask, in exa...

I don’t entirely know, even though I wrote a book of them , and I’m not just saying that to be modest. Even though I’m happy with the way a lot of my stories tu rn ed out, I felt like they were all little leaps off cliffs of varying heights that just ended whenever the ground appeared. But I’m going to do my best to fake expertise this Sunday at the West Hollywood Book Fair , where I’ll join Tod Goldberg, Holiday Reinho rn and Charles Yu to discuss “The Short and the Short of It: Writing the Short Story.” You’ll also find folks like Aimee Bender, Be rn ard Cooper, Luis Rodriguez and Terry Wolverton hanging out at this book fair, along with great local presses and community organizations , so it’s a good event all around. As if a Sunday in the park with churros and frozen lemonade weren’t enough. *** West Hollywood Book Fair Sunday, Sept. 17, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. West Hollywood Park 647 N. San Vicente Blvd. West Hollywood , CA 90069 “The Short and the Shor...

When I got up to read Friday night at the pleasantly packed ICE Gallery in San Diego, it became clear that people in the back would have a hard time hearing me over the fan. Someone turned it off, but then it became clear that it would get really hot really fast. So City Works Press visual artist/impromptu handyman Perry Vasquez got out his power drill and, as I was giving my introduction, unscrewed a board that had been covering the window behind me. Presto—indie air conditioning. When I got back to Hotel Jim and Kelly , the power was out due to construction down the street. As we sat in the candlelit living room, Kelly said, “Oh, and don’t worry about the bees in the walls. They haven’t really stung anyone. It’s just that the honey attracts the rats, so you might here some scurrying during the night. But all the drama pretty much stays inside the walls.”

…ends up on the blog, of cou rse. saturday: when in vegas The last time I was in Las Vegas , B and I hung out with an old friend of hers who lived there. “Ooh, show us what the locals do!” I said, envisioning Bohemian coffee shops and funky dive bars. But that wasn’t really B’s friend’s scene—he worked for a company that distributed monogramable tchotchkes (duffle bags, ashtrays, etc.) to casinos. And so we found ourselves in a local casino. It was just like the rest of Vegas, but with less neon, cheaper games and more Gamblers Anonymous dropouts. It was an interesting night in its own way, but I was glad that AK’s and my Local of Choice for this trip was Mike —who, besides probably being the sincerest and the raunch iest person I know, also happens to edit Vegas’ alt weekly, CityLife , and proceeded to get us into various $20 clubs for free. Right and left. He owned this town. He was a young, brown-eyed Sinatra with a shaved head. sunday: when in paris hilton’s life One night in co...

When I grow up I want to be Lisa Glatt and David He rn andez . Both of them, simultaneously. They had a husband-and-wife reading gig last night at Casa Romantica —a ridiculously romantica villa-type venue in ridiculously beachy-beautiful San Clemente . David read his poetry, which I would call deceptively simple and precise and humorous and not really be doing it justice. I like his poetry because when it is about a garden, it doesn’t get to marigolds until a few stanzas in. It starts with trash bags slumped against a wall “like black pumpkins” and features maggots that look like rice until they start to move, at which point the narrator observes, “Not rice.” Lisa read a short story from her collection, The Apple’s Bruise . I like her writing because she has hard-to-love female protagonists, and it seems like hard-to-love male protagonists are more abundant in this world, and hence I don’t love them so much, just not for the obvious reasons. But I love Lisa’s, or at least I li...

Monday night, after eating tilapia and watching Weeds at Nicole’s, I wasn’t feeling well. But the tilapia with mango salsa was great, and no actual weed was consumed, so I’m left to attribute my sudden illness to Andrea “ that author who dances ” Seigel’s To Feel Stuff , which I finished reading later that night. This is a compliment. To Feel Stuff is about a Brown University sophomore named Elodie Harrington who’s afflicted with ailment after mysterious ailment, to the point where she takes up residence in the school infirmary. There she meets Chess Hunter, a student who’s had his kneecaps bashed in as part of an apparent spree of gang attacks. Until now, Chess has been something of a golden boy, an overachiever from an affluent and attentive family. At the second the crowbar hits his legs, he realizes for the first time that the good life is not inherently his for the having. Plunged into a new world fraught with doubt, he tu rn s to Elodie as a guide. She is—by nature a...

Bonnie was cleaning out her files and found this picture I drew our senior year of high school. I’ve compiled some notes to accompany your appreciation and understanding of this work of art: 1) If you’ve studied my later work (i.e. meeting-doodles), you will note that my style has remained remarkably consistent, but now includes more scribbly ballpoint shading and clothing styles ripped from Rent . 2) The placing of the subjects in this portrait is deceptive. There is no way to tell that the 1994-’95 varsity cheer squad was bitterly divided, with the somewhat nerdier, dance-oriented Cheryl, Bonnie, Kristy and Janell on one side, and the more popular, football-player-oriented Gina, Sara , Hillary and Michelle on the other. I was particularly resentful of Hillary (though I’m sure she’s grown into a kind and lovely adult, damn her), so it’s odd that I drew myself next to her. There are several possible explanations for this. a. The picture was drawn at the beginning of ...

Jenessa was in town last night, which meant theory of the queer, psychoanalytic and postmode rn varieties, and gossip about what all our other high school friends are up to. Happy that Heather had a fun birthday and sad that Amy and her boyfriend broke up, we moved onto feminism—or maybe we were talking about reality TV, I can’t remember—and I complained, “I hate it when women try to call breast implants a feminist act. Like, ‘I did it for me ,’ as if that makes everything okay.” Jenessa stuck out her belly and gave it a Buddha-like rub. “ This is a feminist act.” We agreed that T-shirts bearing this proclamation needed to be printed. They could sell in the back of Bitch , right next to ads for The Keeper . Did I mention we were in line at a bakery when we were having this discussion? I ate a feminist chocolate-dipped apricot shortly thereafter. *** Speaking of queer theory—or rather queer fiction, which is actually really different from and sometimes even antithet...

In one of Sue Grafton ’s alphabet mysteries ( A is for Alibi, B is for Burglar, C is for Corpse …you get the idea), of which I was very fond in high school, girl detective Kinsey Millhone confides that, while she’s no bloodthirsty killer, she’s glad she knows how to shoot a gun—that it’s just one of those skills that’s good to have, like drinking coffee black or driving stick. I don’t like loud noises, and I prefer my caffeinated beverages to end in “-uccino” (frapp-, capp-…you get the idea), but I have always been proud of myself for being able to drive a car with a manual transition. It makes me just a teensy bit butcher. But it’s a skill that had been fading fast, ever since I traded my ’87 Toyota Tercel for an automatic ’97 Honda Civic. I’ve been driving the latter for almost four years now, and have come to think of it as a fairly modest car in LA’s landscape of Hummers and Beamers and Honda Civics With $10,000 of Accessories Grafted Onto Them. Yesterday I was reminded...

The last time I’d played the game was at cheerleading camp the summer before junior year. This time, when I walked into the party, a chick named Blue was saying she’d been a pimp for a while. And that was one of her truths. No one at cheer camp had even lied about anything that outrageous. We were at AK ’s ex’s house for a Gay Girls’ Game Night (and what is more gay-girlish than hanging out with your current’s ex ?). The first few people who went had truths like “I used to identify as transgendered” and lies like “I have 14 tattoos” (she only had six). I wracked my brain for what to say, and realized that most of the quirky truths I could summon were the same quirky truths I could summon in high school. Was I really that boring? Was I really the only girl at the party who’d never worked in the sex industry? I was relieved when someone’s lie was “I race BMX bikes,” and someone else’s truth was “I won a year’s supply of Maybelline cosmetics.” In my head, I rehearsed the follo...

Last night I went to my alma mater, Book Soup —where the bathroom is still smelly, but the children’s section is neater than it was under my domain—to hear a reading by Andrea Seigel , an author I like so much I’ve chosen not to hate her for being 26. (Also, envying someone for being young just feels like a cliché, like something that would make Andrea roll her eyes. Also , I really hope someone hates me for being 29. But when I look at it from that standpoint, I know there’s not all that much that’s enviable about being a young writer because it means that you either A) probably don’t have a lot of life experience to draw from, or B) have a really fucked-up childhood to draw from.) Anyway, I’m pretty sure Andrea’s not drawing on her fucked-up childhood, though she’s open about mining her youthful depression. The form this has taken most recently is To Feel Stuff , a novel about a chronically ill girl who lives in the Brown University infirmary. Apparently waffles and a ghosts ar...

I was interested in reading There Will Never be Another You by Carolyn See for two reasons: 1) I got a free copy, and 2) it sounded from the jacket description like it might accomplish what I’ve been trying to do with my current project, which is take the family saga into the global world . The premise is this: Edith is a recent widow, the kind of narrator people might call “feisty,” which would make her want to smack them. She wants to maintain some dignity. She wants something to do after 7 p.m. Phil is her son, a UCLA Med Center dermatologist with a crappy family life he’s too lazy to do much about. One day Phil is recruited to be part of a semi-secret emergency response team—one that will respond to anthrax poisonings, urban Ebola outbreaks and the like. The directions he receives and the drills he practices are mysterious and seemingly ineffectual. If I came down with Ebola, I wouldn’t want Phil or his equally confused teammates taking care of me. In a side plot, two UCLA student...

Last night I tagged along with AK to a fundraiser for foster youth . The entertainment at the benefit included a jazz singer who modified her inspirational standards to fit the event. As in, “Did you ever know that you’re my hero, and everything I would like to be? I can fly higher than an eagle…and so can these kids with a little help from you kind folks tonight. Who wants to enter a raffle to win a free Kia from Glendale Kia?” When that particular song started, AK’s coworker Jess said, “That’s my favorite song. We need to leave immediately.” Because the P.A. system was so loud that it drowned out all sarcasm and nuance, AK’s other coworker thought she was serious about being a Bette Midler fan and said, “I’ll stay five more minutes, and then we should go.” But I have to admit…I kind of do like “Wind Beneath My Wings.” It’s not subtle, but it’s pretty, and it doesn’t seem fair that it has been voted Official Representative of Cultural Cheese, when there are so many more w...