Bread and Bread

I’ll let you in on a little secret: Part of the reason I’m a fiction writer is because I’m lazy and impatient. Think about it. If you want to make a film, you have to find financing, assemble a cast and crew, shoot, most likely re-shoot and edit. There’s a reason so many actors knit. It’s because days on the set are slooow. As a solo writer with just a laptop and my imagination, I am light on my feet. I think it and it is. No equipment, no committees. But then I found myself planning a performance with Jamie and Alanna . We wanted it to be multidisciplinary and slightly more cohesive than your average “here’s a bunch of artists all doing their thing” evening. Alanna, who has a way of thinking that I can only describe as diagonal, said, regarding potential themes, “I’ve been fascinated with the idea of live blogging.” Then she laughed her signature laugh, sort of a can-you-believe-this guffaw. Jamie and I liked this live blogging thing. We didn’t 100 percent get it, maybe,...

I wish I could channel Tracy Lynn Kaply at will. Or at least, I wish I’d had a good sharp spoon on me Friday at Bally’s. It’s really the only way to deal with corporate bureaucracy. Here’s the story: My healthcare company will reimburse me for my gym membership if I go 50 times in six months (it’s true—there is a healthcare organization that actually promotes preventative care. Oxford . I recommend ‘em). Through the miracle of cheap-ass-ness, I managed to do this. Now all I needed were three things from Bally’s. 1) A signature from any club employee confirming that this was a facility that “promoted cardiovascular health.” 2) A printout stating my monthly rate. 3) A brochure listing the gym’s amenities. So, like the baker in Into the Wood s who must find five treasures in order to reverse the curse that has left him and his wife childless, I took a deep breath and went into Bally employee Tom’s office. Tom [lifting cell phone away from his ear ever so slightly...

My friend Tommy produced this Dateline NBC segment about the Vietnamese community of New Orleans East, which, led by a priest at Mary Queen of Viet Nam Church , has retu rn ed and rebuilt their neighborhood at astoundingly high rates (90 percent vs. 45 percent for the city as a whole). I watched it and thought, “Wow, I can’t believe I’ve been too lazy to repot my philodendron for almost a year now.” Check it out: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19292199/

It’s 11:32 in Malaysia right now. I know that because I recently discovered sentraal station , which, as far as I can tell, is a compendium of blogs (plus a little online clock) by Malaysians in Malaysia and the diaspora (I love saying, “and in the diaspora”—it’s such a great word). Now that I’ve finally finished A History of Malaysia , I’m all about living in the now. Reading this book has made me realize that, as much as I love history, I could never be a historian, because they’re all about original sources, and I’m all about well-written narratives. I don’t want to be a detective; I want to read a good mystery. But because blogs are original sources that often contain well-written narratives, I can get into them. One day while clicking “next blog,” I stumbled across a Malaysian blog with a historical bent called Kecek-Kecek . It appears to be written by a guy living in the UK who’s a bit homesick for his native Trengannu, about which he relays lots of interesting facts ...

Dear L.A. Times and Paris Hilton, It was interesting to lea rn that Paris will be doing more time than 80 percent of inmates in a similar situation . (And by “interesting,” I mean that I feel thoroughly disgusted with myself that I’m not blogging about Gaza right now.) Yes, apparently being rich and famous occasionally works against you, in the same way that being white occasionally works against you. I think it’s fine to call out these moments of injustice, even to “analyze 2 million jail releases,” as the Times did, or to cry really hard and hug your parents, as Paris did. I just hope that both of you have spent equal time questioning the privilege that led to this smidge of anti-privilege. Paris , I hope you spent just as many nights lying awake in your pimped-out Simple Life trailer wondering, “How did I get my own TV show? How come the richer I get, the less I have to pay for?” Similarly, Times, I hope that somewhere in those 2 million cases, you notice that ...

I just finished reading Noel Alumit ’s second novel, Talking to the Moon , and while the cover does not feature a martini glass, a pair of high-heeled shoes or a bodice in the process of being ripped, I hope you will put it on your beach reading lists, because it’s good. Talking to the Moon tells the story of a “Filipino American ” family (to borrow the phrase that the son’s Taiwanese boyfriend is always baffled by—why, he wonders, are America’s Asians so quick to identify with a country that wreaks havoc on their self esteem?): father Jory, an altar boy tu rn ed pagan healer and mailman; mother Belen, a nurse who will talk to any deity who will listen, most frequently Mary; and their angry son Emerson, who talks to his dead brother on the phone, but can’t say much of anything—especially not “I love you”—to his boyfriend. The book begins when Jory is shot while delivering mail by a racist man fresh from shooting up a Jewish daycare center. This really happened in L.A. a few yea...

1. biffy is like brad pitt to me Screenings of film students’ work in L.A. are not a little talent show for friends and family. People like Gil Cates (known to me and Steph as The Guy Who Would Never Grant The Daily Bruin An Interview, but known to most as The Guy Who Produces The Academy Awards) serve as hosts, and people like Anne Ramsay (known for Mad About You and The L Word ) star. And the quality is really good, or at least it was at Friday’s student showcase at UCLA. But the jewel of the evening as far as I was conce rn ed was Michelle Banta Tessier’s Camp Bean: All Things Woodsey, an animated film about a shy little boy slowly lea rn ing to love his summer camp, which is remarkably like UniCamp , the place I spent three summers singing nonsensical songs, protecting eight-year-olds from menacing field mice and trying to explain to myself and my kids why going days without a shower was actually a good thing. In fact, Michelle looked a lot like Feather, the head co...

A few years ago, when I was in search of geeky gay folks to hang out with, I attended a book group at the LA Gay & Lesbian Center . I announced to the dozen 45- to 60-year-old men in the room that I was just trying out the group and hadn’t read that month’s book, a gay historical fiction novel by a female author. Nevertheless, the group leader kept turning to me and asking for “a woman’s perspective.” I never went back. This Saturday marked Book Group Attempt #2, organized by AK’s college friend Joel, who’s now a seminary student. AK told me to expect a bunch of fresh-faced, young, Christian married couples. I figured that if the queer folks had let me down, maybe common demographics weren’t all they were cracked up to be, and agreed to read Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle and bring a tropical snack. AK and I stopped by Trader Joe’s, where we asked a curly-haired clerk in tight jeans and Ugg boots where the tropical drink mixes were. TJ’s apparently has no such thing, but that didn’t...

It’s happened again: I’ve gotten addicted to caffeine. Which is making me really tired, except for that hour a day when coffee is pulsing through my veins. This morning I switched to decaf. So far I’ve taken three naps today.

On the way back from lunch today, I was thinking about how Farhana is secretly in love with Bashah, but how she can’t help but admire his fiancée, Georgine, partly because she snagged Bashah, but also because she wears sparkly clothes and gossips a lot and seems as confident as a movie star. I’d been feeling estranged from my writing lately, probably because I hadn’t been doing much of it. The time I’d been devoting to my novel consisted of reading tiny little snippets of a somewhat dry history book . In other words, not writing. I don’t know why this is such a big revelation: that not-writing does not feel like writing. I was whining to AK on Saturday about feeling disengaged from writing while being dropped into a world of fantastic writers who were writing fantastic things (which is basically what my trip to New York consisted of). “Why don’t you just try writing—anything—just to see where it goes?” she said. “I sort of thought I was past all that,” I said. “It’s du...

I'm still resting off my trip via a long, lazy weekend, so here are some pictures instead of words. Second only to the Statue of Liberty when it comes to Classic Tourist Shots, I'm sure. AK and Tommy at the Cornelia Street Cafe. Me and AK at the same cafe, full of omelets and mimosas on a rainy Saturday. My friend and co-worker Bill makes us brunch in Hoboken. My baby loves a good skyline. And a semi-eroding train station. My co-workers Chris and Nicole share a tense moment. Okay, not really. Just another day in Washington Square Park (is it just me, or does the person behind the bear look like a weird combination of Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake?). Suddenly I felt under-dressed.

My favorite thing about New York (by which I mean any place where I'm not driving, including the Red and Gold Lines in LA) is that when you have an interaction with someone while en route, it's not necessarily a bad one. If you're driving and you actually communicate with another driver, it's probably via middle finger or exchange of insurance information. Whereas human-scale public transportation produces stories like this one: AK: Guess who got on at the Highland Park Gold Line station and got off at the Chinatown stop? Me: Maggie Gyllenhaal? Your friend Suzie? AK: Nope. A little sparrow. Me: Oh my god, that's so wonderful. I hate driving. All of which is to say that while walking from my hotel to Tommy's place in Chelsea yesterday, I had the best celebrity sighting a writer can have: I saw one of my characters walking down 6th Avenue. Anna Lisa Hill, co-star of the still-unpublished Calla Boulevard and therefore only a star in my mind, is a 50-something, k...

Just a quick note to say that I am in New York and done with 86 of my 87 meetings. Coney Island was rained out and AK almost didn't make it in, but that made it even sweeter when she did. While I met and met and met, she toured the city and brought me back little treasures from her travels, most awesomely And Tango Makes Three , a true, illustrated story of gay penguins and their adopted baby at the Central Park Zoo. I came up for air long enough to join AK at Spring Awakening , a musical about horny German school kids in a repressive turn-of-the-century town that delivered a jolt of live-theater energy I haven't felt since Rent . There was kink and boys kissing and one genuine naked butt, all of which could be objected to by current repressor types, giving the show more edge than it might have had otherwise. But as much as I'm for kink and boys kissing and naked butts, I was most impressed by the songs, the talented cast members (most of whom were younger than the kids I g...

I’ve been to New York a half dozen times, but I’ve never seen the Statue of Liberty. When I’m in NYC, I’m usually working or hanging out with my one New York friend, who, as a local and the sort of person who insists that he only buys designer jeans for the fit, is far too cool for such things. Luckily, I don’t really care about seeing the Statue of Liberty. I don’t have anything against it, it’s just that there’s not enough going for it for me to brave the crowds and the heights. No, the tourist trap I really want to see is Coney Island. In my mind, it’s still 1907 there; full of freaks and mystery, squeaky boardwalks and cotton candy, people in striped swimsuits that go down to their knees. Conveniently, my aforementioned stylish friend Tommy has to report on Coney Island for a news segment as part of his job, and AK and I are going to tag along. That’s on Sunday—between tomorrow (when I leave) and then, I have about 87 meetings. But all I’ll have to do is close my eyes and imagine ...

I’ve been so busy lately that even fun things have become chores, from parties to writing to painting my nails. Not to mention working with the very kind Sally Shore to prepare my stories to be read aloud by actors tomorrow at the New Short Fiction series. She called regularly to see if it was okay to tighten this sentence, skip this paragraph, etc. And each time, after giving her the go-ahead to chop, I thought, Wow, that’s really nice of her to ask. But why is she even asking? It’s her show. Ladies and gentlemen, the opposite of diva is laaazy. And so when Sally informed me that there was a rehearsal Thursday night, I said, “That’s cool. Do I need to be there?” I did—and here’s another thing about being tired and stretched too thin: Although it wears you out, it also makes you more vulnerable to all sorts of magic you haven’t noticed because your head was buried in your day planner. You’re just a thin, distracted wafer, and the magic cracks you in half. I showed up at the library e...

Driving to the Metro station to pick up AK on Tuesday night, I realized that I live on a hill. It doesn’t seem like a hill because most of the streets immediately surrounding mine are pretty flat, except for a steep drop to the west. So maybe I live on a mesa. Anyway, I had this realization because, driving north, I had the most spectacular view of the mountains, which were suddenly much more noticeable because they were on fire. I knew this. I’d heard about the Griffith Park fire (a much bigger one than the little flare-up that temporarily threatened my birthday party in late March) on the radio earlier in the day. But here it was in front of me, not just smoke—though there was plenty—but huge horizontal walls of bright orange flames. Bigger than a house or ten houses or anything else that might catch my eye on a hillside. And, as the sun set, it was apocalyptically beautiful. Is it wrong to find the apocalypse beautiful? Maybe “sublime”—the way Kant (I think) defined it—...

Right now I’m reading A History of Malaysia to satisfy the research phase of my novel. Mostly this involves trying not to fall asleep as I skim chapters about how trade centers like Srivijaya gave way to trade centers like Melaka. I love history, but I’m not so into the ancient stuff. Even though my novel is set entirely in the present, I like to be thorough, except of course when I’m totally ignoring the facts. I’m a little bipolar when it comes to research. Anyway, today’s reading involved the kingdom of Johor colluding with the Dutch to take down…shoot, I already forgot. Some other kingdom. But the point is that they were siding with the colonizers, which made me think about what colonialism must have looked like in its early days. To the average Johorian, this wasn’t a matter of selling out to the white man to defeat your own people and ultimately yourself. Because the people in that other kingdom weren’t your own people, they were just the assholes across the straights....

Conversation after working all weekend at the L.A. Times Festival of Books : Jamie : When I got home last night, I lay down on the couch, and it felt like I literally had thousands of people walking through my body. Cheryl: Yeah—in tiny little cleats. Jamie: I just had to lie there and wait for them to leave my body. But they left all their trash behind. Cheryl: And their self-published poetry books too, right? Jamie: Right. Cheryl: Get some rest. Jamie: You too.