Bread and Bread

Some photos from yesterday’s rally and march to renew the charter of Academia Semillas del Pueblo .

Great news, T-Mec watchers: The tumor was benign. A big, black, bumpy, two-inch, perfectly harmless tumor. The bad news, as far as Mec-Mec herself was conce rn ed, was that she had to wear a little sweater to protect her stitches. It was actually more of a wife-beater—ribbed and sleeveless—and she looked like a bad-ass, in a cuddly sort of way. I took a bunch of pictures, which quickly became historical artifacts. Girl figured out how to get her sweater off about 20 minutes after getting home from the vet last week. Yesterday mo rn ing I took her in for a check-up, and told Dr. Marks (subbing for Dr. Wong , who’s out of town this week) that T-Mec has been wriggling out of her sweater. “You could try to find a tighter T-shirt for her,” he said, looking me over. “You’re pretty big, but maybe if one of your girlfriends has one of those itty-bitty baby tees….” I’m still not sure if he was calling me fat or telling me I had big tits, but either way, I can see why he works with animals rath...

Okay, I’m back from Crazyville, more or less, thanks to ramen with Steph and Nina (right), some mellow quality time with AK, a lot of phone calls to my very patient dad and sister, and a really sweet get-well card from Sara ’s cats, Chaucer and Schro. It was especially nice of them considering that they’ve never even met T-Mec in person—but they used to all live in the same building in Northern South L.A., so I’m sure they’ve had their eyes on many of the same pigeons and free-range pit bulls. Now I have new cause for bittersweetness: On Tuesday I let my writing group know that April 25 would be my last day with them. I’m at a stage in my novel where I need to do a bunch of research, and being in a regular writing group brings pressure to turn in pages rather than study the rainforest conservation movement in Eastern Malaysia. That’s right, I’m quitting my writing group because it was causing me to write too much. Also, I’ve been in it for almost three years, longer than most MFA prog...

1. sometimes the balance came out wrong Turns out I am not fluent in vet-speak. “The full mammary line” actually only means one side—in this case the three left boobies, which would make her lopsided if she weren’t an A-cup anyway. And, it turns out, “the X-rays are clear, but her tumor was big and nasty and bumpy” means there’s a fairly good (meaning very bad) chance that it has spread in some small way and could recur, which wouldn’t give her all that long. After Friday’s cautiously optimistic blog post (during which I was secretly feeling very optimistic), I came crashing down and stayed there for 16 excruciating hours. I was feeling strange and stir-crazy, and since T-Mec was scheduled to be at the hospital overnight, I decided to meet AK in Hollywood for a movie. She indulged my need for the lightest of light fare and let me drag her to (she even suggested it) Reno 911! Miami , which I’m pretty sure was pretty funny. (On Thursday, the first of what’s shaping up to be the monasti...

For those of you kindly tuned into the T-Mec saga , I just got an update from the vet, the super nice, energetic, seemingly 17-year-old Dr. Wong: Mec’s X-rays came back clear (though it’s possible she could still have tiny bits of undetectable cancer floating around in there, but hey, so could any of us). She’s still having surgery to remove the lump we knew about as well as what Dr. Wong calls “the full mammary line.” I.e., all six boobies. Luckily, when you’re covered in fur, you don’t need to worry about how you look in a bikini. Thanks for all your nice comments, Bread and Bread peeps. T-Mec couldn’t have more cyber-support if she had a Catster page.

I’ve developed a strange new hobby of filling out consumer satisfaction surveys. It started with a questionnaire about an Excel class I took at the Center for Nonprofit Management . They’re nice folks down there at the Center, so I filled it out. And I won a digital camera as a result. Now, even though most surveys don’t enter you to win anything, I can’t stop. Earlier this week I let the Miyako Hotel in San Francisco know that I that the cleanliness of their bathrooms exceeded my expectations. I even typed a nice note into the optional “comments” box. Today I informed Expedia.com that the staff at Payless Car Rental was slightly below average in friendliness. Part of it is the fake power: Expedia is listening to me ! Part of it is empathy. Someone on the other end of the DSL line is compiling the results of these surveys, and I feel like it helps to balance their conclusions if not all the respondents are crazy, retired or venting about the worst customer service experience of thei...

One year ago Monday , I was driving to Akbar, decked out in a red thrift store skirt, black T-shirt that said “Denise Rossi’s Dance Ten Presents Into the New Millennium” and a scarf with owls on it. It was my idea of a cute blind date outfit, though later I would find out that my date’s first impression was, She’s wearing a skirt. Weird. But I guess it wasn’t all bad, because there was a second date, during which I choked on empanada toppings and lost my car in downtown LA. “God, I hope it didn’t get towed,” I worried. “No, you just forgot where you parked it,” she assured me. “Don’t worry, I do stuff like this all the time.” Our attempts to celebrate one awesome year of looking for our respective cars after many fun days and nights on the town were somewhat thwarted by AK’s sudden and nasty cold and my discovery that my cat Temecula probably has breast cancer. Yeah…I’m not taking it well. She’s scheduled for X-rays and surgery on Friday, and if the vet discovers it hasn’t metastasize...

Friday I showed up late to Noel ’s reading at Vroman’s . While you can count on many authors to read for a good (or not so good) 45 minutes, it was just my luck that Noel kept things short and sweet—so I only got to hear a few minutes of his seemingly really interesting new novel, Talking to the Moon . Noel is a sometime actor, so he read well, too. Sigh. At least I was there for the inspiring Q&A and tasty samosas. I can’t wait to read Talking to the Moon , but I have about 250 more pages of Han Ong’s The Disinherited . It’s an ambitious and well written book, but it’s slow-going because A) the sentences are a lot more complex than those usually found in contemporary novels and B) it’s uber-cynical. The narrator is the disillusioned son of a Filipino sugar mogul who (contrary to the title’s suggestion) finds himself with a huge chunk of dirty money to get rid of. He’s equally disgusted with the virtual caste system and unthinking Catholicism of his home country as with the greed ...

Yesterday after work, I pulled into the Chevron station near my office. When I got out of my car, the woman at the pump in front of me said, “Excuse me, do you know how to make it so the gas just keeps pumping and you don’t have to hold the nozzle the whole time?” She was in her mid-40s, nicely but not fancily dressed. She had no accent that could be traced to a country where no one drives. So it seemed unlikely that she was either too rich or too poor to have ever pumped gas. I said, “Maybe something’s wrong with it. I can try wrestling with it if you want.” I hooked the nozzle into the tank, pushed down and clipped the lever back. It worked like it always does. The woman thanked me and I felt like a hero. “My husband usually does this for me,” she explained apologetically. When I told AK the story, she said, “Hi, Oprah .” Although that was my natural reaction too, I’d recently read a chapter of my friend Cara’s novel, in which the 18-year-old narrator, on her own ...

Every now and then, someone makes me want to write a poem. Most recently, it was Tess Gallagher and Eloise Klein Healy , who read and talked poetry Monday night at the Geffen Playhouse . It hasn’t happened yet (the writing of the poem); in fact, even the writing of this blog entry is barely happening. Yep, it’s one of those weeks where I forgot to book any real downtime for myself. Chronic over-bookers are annoying because: 1) They tend to act like it’s not their fault. Like God instructed them to work a serious job and take a writing class and go to two readings and one movie and one mysterious sales pitch about something that their friend swears is not like Amway all in the same week. 2) They then proceed to play the I’m-sooo-busy card in discussions with others, which implies that others are not busy, which of course they are. They’re just quiet about it, and they manage their time better. Think about it: Do you know anyone between the ages of 12 and 80 who’s not busy?...

Have you noticed that a lot of blogs aren’t so much chronicles of the blogger’s life or opinions, but more depositories for their favorite YouTube videos? I’m not saying that I’m above this, just that I’m a little late to the game. Until recently, I’ve been a passive YouTube watcher, watching only what people send to me or, well, post on their blogs. But last night I crossed a line. After coming home solo from my sister’s birthday party (AK and I both wanted quality time with our cats—not to fill any lesbian stereotypes or anything), I had some post-party energy that took the form of watching old episodes of Punky Brewster on YouTube. It’s amazing how much new technology is used for nostalgic purposes. First I watched an episode from the third season (by which Punky had stopped wearing the same thing everyday and started teasing her bangs) called “ Metamorphosis .” While Cherry is despondent that she’s “a pirate’s treasure, a sunken chest” (big canned laughs—I guess the studio audienc...

1. rhymes with bitch One great thing about driving down highway 99 in a rental car (and there are not a lot of great things) is that you can listen to the CD of the Wicked soundtrack that your sister burned for you over and over. That’s how I spent Thursday and Friday of last week, and by last night, I was fully prepared for opening night at the Pantages (Cathy’s awesome Christmas present to me). I knew that Stephen Schwartz ’s score was as catchy as his earlier musical Godspell and that the lyrics were even better (no offense to Matthew). He is a master of breaking words in half and sewing them together to make unpredictable rhymes. For example: And helping you with your ascent al- lows me to feel so parental Or: Uh, Nessa, I’ve got something to confess, a reason why I asked you here tonight. Add to that a story ripe with political allegory and literary allusions and I’m in heaven. The musical opens with all of Munchkin Land ding-donging about the witch’s death, then flashes back t...

I just purchased a $15 purple thermos at Starbucks. In the past, I’ve looked at the overpriced coffee accessories on the shelves and wondered, Who actually buys that crap? Now I know the answer. Ed’s sermon on Sunday was about lent. As a newbie to this church thing , I’ve never given up anything for lent before, but it’s the type of project that appeals to me. I always have a long list of self-improvement-related tasks waiting in the wings, ready to be called into action at the slightest provocation: a new year, a birthday, a Monday. Lent offers a new opportunity to reach for an unattainable goal—only this time I’m answering to God, so I better not fuck up, right? I thought about sacrifices I might make—ideally something that would improve not just myself, but the world too. All Saints is all about that. Ed sort of sighed and said, “It’s not really about giving up chocolate or cheap white wine.” Then he said something about embracing your enemies rather than slandering them. Damn. My...

This is me. This is me reading at UC Riverside earlier today. This is the flyer that was posted on campus to promote the reading. I’ve Googled my name enough times to know that this Cheryl Klein is a children’s book editor. I’ve always wanted to email her and say, “So, we’re both named Cheryl Klein and we both do stuff with books. Crazy, huh? Want to hook me up with a publishing deal or something?” This may be my in.

Isn’t it frustrating when someone you could look to in your shallowest, least empathetic moments—someone you could count on to be so vapid and sluggish and selfish that you felt completely comfortable judging her and sooo the opposite of those things— goes and dies ? Then you’re like, Oh shit, she was a real person. As much as I’m all for laughing at spoiled people, maybe sad things happen when those spoiled people are also kind of dumb and have family issues . I sort of feel like I contributed to the demand side of a really ugly economy. In other news, Britney and that guy who looked like K-Fed but wasn’t K-Fed have broken up.

Why? Because she is magic: http://www.avclub.com/content/node/58250

1. site-specific moviegoing Because AK and I like to stay on the cutting edge, we just saw Borat . (I’ll agree that it’s funny, and that that Sacha Baron Cohen kid is a smarty, but I’m not sure it was the big exposé of America that people have said it was—I just came away thinking, Yeah, America has some nice folks and some assholes. ) It was only playing at a second-run theater on Hollywood Boulevard . The good news is that tickets were only $7. But these days, seven dollars apparently gets you a seat in the world’s longest, skinniest theater, where, when you shift to try to dislodge the metal spring from your butt, the whole row of seats moves back a foot. The ticket taker was a tall, lurching man with a birthmark covering much of his face. It was hard to understand him because the speaker in the plastic wall of the booth was broken. When we walked in, a smaller man scampered down the stairs to ask if we wanted him to open up the darkened snack booth. We didn’t. The t...

If you’re a regular but reluctant KROQ listener like myself, you know that Kevin and Bean have nothing good to say about the 909 (or gay folks or uppity people of color or women who have the audacity not to be hot, but that’s another blog post). The 909 (a.k.a. the Inland Empire, a.k.a. Inlandia , a.k.a. Riverside and San Be rn ardino Counties ) has an unfortunate reputation for being home to meth labs and dirt and not much else. For 30 years now, the good folks in the creative writing department of UC Riverside have been making the 909 an increasingly important cultural region with a fabulous little event called Writers Week . This year’s lineup includes Califo rn ia Poet Laureate Al Young , performance artist Tim Miller (one of the NEA Four !) and, um, up-and-coming LA writer Cheryl Klein , among others. I hope you’ll make the trek on the 10 East (but if you can’t, or if you, like my dad, are all about Cheryl and not so much about the NEA Four, I’ll be reading in LA...

Okay, I’m at that point in my flu when I’m too well to sleep, but still too sick to do anything productive, and reading has given me a headache. So I decided to do what women on TV and in chick lit novels do when they’re feeling crappy: I took a bath. I even lit a candle. But unlike on TV and in chick lit novels, I didn’t fill the tub with bubble bath so that no non-PG parts showed. There were a few specks of cat litter in the tub, kicked up from the litter box nearby, which, if I sat in the front half of the tub, I could smell. Also, I discovered that because my bathroom is just barely the width of a regular-sized tub, there was no little ledge on which to comfortably rest my head. This was all news to me because I’d never taken a bath at my apartment in the just-over-a-year I’ve lived here. Arguably, I don’t relax enough. But my rebuttal to that argument would be, yes, I do, but when I relax, I relax so much that drawing a bath (don’t you love that phrase?) is too much work. I lay i...

That’s how I felt when I woke up at 4 a.m. this morning, and how I continued to feel until about five minutes ago. I’ve recently upgraded to bleh, with no additional melodramatic letters. My first thought was, Am I strong enough to pick up the phone to call in sick to work? My second was, Since I’m not going to work, maybe I can do some yoga, work on chapter one of my novel and redesign my MySpace page . My body was doing a fine job of being sick, but my brain was in denial. Between naps, I did finish Lisa Glatt ’s A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That , a sharply written book that took me a few steps closer to understanding girls who sleep with lots of guys. But mostly I wished I had a TV so I could raise the remote and feebly click between Jenny Jones and General Hospital and behave like a proper sick person. I tried to determine the origin of my illness. There were three culprits: 1) The fish burrito I ate yesterday at Señor Fish , where AK and I wrote and sketched and discussed the ...