Bread and Bread

This is a video Jamie ’s friends shot at the gObama! fundraiser party AK and I went to last month. During my three seconds of fame beginning at minute 3:04, I’m referring (in my mind) to The Second World , that book by Parag Khanna I raved about a while back. But more on that later, when Bread and Bread publishes its official voter guide (get ready to learn where I stand on bond measure 1A, everyone!).

“What do you wear when you want to look like you don’t really care about looking good but could if you wanted to?” I asked AK. Veronica had invited us to the last night of Fashion Week , where she would be modeling in the Kucoon show. I love fashion, but it’s hard to tell because I devote almost no time or money to it. I’m like a person who thinks she likes to read because she enjoys Oprah’s book club segments. I read a lot of fashion magazines—so at least I could point to a page that said slouchy jeans were back when AK became insecure about her pants. I ended up wearing jeans that were neither trendily slouchy nor trendily skinny (Target, $20); a dark orange wife-beater (Nordstrom clearance rack, like $12); a blazer that my friend Daisye had sewn patches on (random thrift store in Tacoma, $10); and silver Jessica Simpson pumps (DSW, $18). With the exception of Daisye’s handiwork, all were fairly embarrassing items, but once we got to the downtown warehouse where the shows were taki...

I think we’ve all been burned by Starbucks’ more creative offerings. The Gingerbread Latte tastes about as much like gingerbread as grape candy tastes like grapes. And the Skinny Mocha tastes like soap. Even the Eggnog Latte, while tasty, is mostly just a latte with extra cream and sugar. But I am of the “more is more” school of food, so there’s no weird new flavor I can resist trying, and half the time I like the over-flavored crap that people with respectable palettes hate (see eggnog latte). So of course I had to try the Salted Caramel Hot Chocolate. Reader, it was amazing. Like a liquid chocolate-covered pretzel, which is one of my favorite chocolate-covered foods. You have to try it. But whatever you do, don’t make the mistake of looking it up online, in which case you’ll accidentally stumble across its calorie content and discover why it’s so damn good.

When I was at a book festival in Houston last fall, Junot Díaz read from The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao . It was a passage about a young girl being roped into her mother’s self-breast exam; her embarrassingly enormous breasts were now home to a brooding tumor. A whole class of middle-school kids got up and walked out, led by their teachers. Was it the breasts? Was it the fact that the breasts and the passage were laced with dark and messy feelings? (Although I also kind of remember Junot Díaz swearing a bit in his introduction, which I found refreshing after a day of relentless wholesomeness.) After reading the novel, I wonder if Junot would say this is how the first world deals with life’s ickier issues, collectively uttering, “The horror, the horror.” Oscar Wao is sort of a response to that. The story of a young Dominican-American man—a full-scale D&D nerd and seemingly perpetual virgin—who has inherited the fukú, the curse placed on his motherland and his family by the ev...

Sunday started with brunch at the New Otani Kaimana Beach hotel, where a lot of the wedding party was staying. We didn’t get too see much of Jamie and Lee-Roy (just enough to grab a picture with them before they departed on their honeymoon), but we hung out some more with Jesi, Tina and I Ching, who are all really interesting and inspiring in different ways. After brunch we ended up hiking—and by hiking I mean climbing—Koko Head with AK’s college friend Tai-An, her husband Mano and their friends Terry and Marie. As we were driving, I saw a steep domed hill with a stripe of brown running straight up the side of it. In the back of my head I thought, “What if that’s our trail? Ha, ha…no, that’s clearly just a fire break or something.” Around this time we also learned that Mano, Marie and Terry had all been in the Navy. Terry was an ex-firefighter and Tai-An, according to Mano, used to play volleyball “eight days a week, 25 hours a day.” And of course that thing that was too impossibly ste...

In Oahu now. We walked across the street from our hotel, the Queen Kapiolani, to the Honolulu Zoo. While we were looking for the entrance, we saw a guy open a side gate to let some people in and he waved us in too. Suddenly we were in the zoo. For free. We looked at each other and shrugged: Slowly some kind of thoughtful volcano goddess was making up for our expensive cab ride. We spent a couple of relaxing hours looking at endangered nene geese, tropical gardens, Sumatra tigers and elderly lions. We listened to a Galapagos tortoise roar like a dinosaur as it humped another tortoise…for quite a long time. Turtles don’t have a rep as the studs of the animal kingdom, but they should. Then we ate vanilla/lime and strawberry/banana shave ice and watched kids on the playground, little zoo animals themselves. Jamie and Lee-Roy’s wedding was beautiful: next to a pink house formerly owned by Dolly Parton, just feet from the water. It was very Jamie-and-Lee-Roy: elegant and simple and natural,...

We’re at Manini Beach Park, trying to rest off some of yesterday’s fun-but-exhausting-for-the-last-two-hours activities. There are lava rocks and coral and one free-range donkey whom I befriended and petted on her soft gray-brown forehead. There are all kinds of crazy animals here: geckos, a zebra (I’m thinking not native—a haole zebra in a pasture off Highway 11) and a feral pig that we almost hit last night. It was shaggy like a golden retriever and did not know that to get away from a car, you should probably not jog along in front of it. The Manago is an old hotel with clean but plain rooms and gorgeous gardens. How we should all be, I told AK: materially simple and naturally abundant. More and more, I’m realizing how Hawaii is almost like another country: Things aren’t all America-shiny, and it has its own dialect and races. Okay, news break: A woman and two kids just walked up, and the kids asked, “Is this your donkey?” Then a little cat ran by, and they said it was theirs. It tu...

So it turns out that Hawaii is a great vacation spot. Who knew? Okay, a few people knew. But the last few days have been one lush, green, sea-turtle-y revelation after another for me. Excerpts from my travel journal and lots of pictures of me in front of lush, green, sea-turtle-y things shall follow. 10/9/08: poi and pouting I just woke up in Captain Cook on the Big Island of Hawaii at the Manago Hotel. It’s cool and breezy, and outside our balcony window it’s green as far as you can see. There are palm trees, something I’m going to pretend is a mango tree and a talkative chicken. Pretty idyllic, huh? But the way AK and I were feeling yesterday, you would have thought we were here to do forced labor. We had down time between flights to Oahu and the Big Island, so we took a cab to Ono’s, a local spot Jamie recommended. And given how much time we ended up spending at HNL, it was good that we got out and took in some non-airport air…and butterfish in something green and leafy, and poi, wh...

The first time AK visited Honolulu, someone told her she could pass for a native Hawaiian. Then she opened her mouth. “Oh,” the local said, “except you talk way, way too fast.” I spent my lunch hour at Starbucks across from two guys selling Herbalife or some sort of pyramid scheme on their cell phones. They both had Madonna mics and a lot of product in their hair. “Hi, this is Sean Michael,” one of them said over and over. “So, you’re in the Valley? And what do you do, what’s your background? Are you looking to get started with something pretty quickly?” After he hung up, he would turn to his friend and say, “See, I show them how valuable my time is. Like that guy just now, I told him I’d have to call him back later. They need to know how busy I am.” Why is busy-ness—not just busy-ness but too-busy-for-you-ness—a trait people try to achieve? Yeah, you don’t want to be a total couch potato, but do you really think people will be impressed that you have no time for them because you’re t...

I’ve come to realize that a little bit of what I want out of all authority figures in my life is for them to act like my mom. Which is terrible: Imagine the worst employee/writer/underling/volunteer you can. Pretend you’re the authority figure complaining to your friend about said needy underling. You’d probably say something like, “Good lord, does she think I’m her mom?” People say things like this all the time: “Please clean up the conference room. The office manager is not your mom.” “You’re going to need to be better about deadlines. I’m not your mom.” It’s not that I want anyone to clean up my messes, literal or figurative, but I do want the leaders in my life to be nurturing and organized, two qualities that defined my particular mom. I realized how strong this desire was when it was fulfilled this weekend by the folks at City Works Press , publishers of the beautiful and comprehensive new anthology Hunger and Thirst .* I’ve got a short story in there, so I read along with a hand...

I was slow to get on the Palin-bashing bandwagon, maybe because I was too disconnected to realize how many people were on the Palin-liking bandwagon--so the hate just seemed hateful rather than like a necessary counterattack. Tonight's debate didn't make me feel any more or less disturbed by her, but I did spend some time thinking about how she's more of a mascot than a candidate. She's sort of wearing a big foam head in the shape of folksiness and mom-ness, and I was going to say that no party would ever trot out a male candidate like that, except George W. is mostly a big foam cowboy head. I don't have a lot more to say about this. I'm not even bitter that America loves Disneyland and all its foam characters because I think they'll love Obama more. And no one can afford to go to Disneyland these days anyway.

1. saint paul kept his pants on (or did he? I don’t really know the bible) I was listening to NPR the other day and Joe Eszterhas ( Basic Instinct, Showgirls ) was telling the interviewer about how he got throat cancer and had to give up drinking and smoking, which, he said, “were so intimately linked to writing for me. I’d sip coffee laced with bourbon while I wrote.” So he was miserable and desperate and then he found Jesus and now he can write again, and is working on a screenplay about Saint Paul instead of about girls who show their boobs, I guess. There but for the grace of overprotective parents and D.A.R.E. (seriously, that shit freaked me out) go I. Because I have a fairly addictive personality, and my writing routine seems to be intimately linked with my caffeine intake. In trying to avoid consuming overworked teacher/nightshift worker/first-year medical resident amounts of coffee, I’ve found myself sitting down with decaf a few times recently, and the result has been extrem...

My reading tastes are both expansive and narrow—expansive in that I like more books than I dislike, and I need a blend of high and low culture to keep me feeling connected to the world at large. A little Remembrance of Things Past (which I started a few days ago out of some masochistic desire to read a 1,018-page book—and that’s just volume I), a little Us Weekly . Maybe a lot of Us Weekly . But I’m narrow-minded in that if you drop me in a bookstore, I’ll end up in the fiction section like water sliding toward a drain. And within that section, you’ll find me reading novels, probably American, probably realistic and literary in tone, probably written after 1980. So while Aimee Bender ’s Willful Creatures isn’t an earth-shaking, drain-moving departure (she’s a contemporary American fiction writer—she even lives in L.A.), I was still surprised how much I liked it: It’s short stories , and so frequently I find short stories to be mean little teases, like the first date that either fails...

[Setting: front porch of a Highland Park duplex. An iron gate hangs open. A woman in her 50s with a long tangled ponytail and less than the average amount of teeth approaches, hustling two cats along in front of her. She is NEIGHBOR.] NEIGHBOR [pushing cats through gate, closing gate] : Are these your cats? ME: Yes. Um, thanks for bringing them home, but actually they’re allowed outside . NEIGHBOR: Oh, well, you gotta watch out. There’s coyotes around here, you know. ME: I know—that’s why we only let them out during the day, when we’re home. NEIGHBOR: Okay. Watch out for the coyotes , alright? ME: Alright. Thanks for looking out for my cats. This would not be such a crazy conversation if I hadn’t had it with the aforementioned neighbor at least three or four times. Or if she was an overprotective cat mom herself—but she has cats who freely roam the streets all day. Which makes me wonder: Is she concerned with our cats’ safety, or does she want her cats to have the run of the block like...

1. not the john hughes movie It’s a good day for it to be the first day of fall. Because fall makes me sad in a happy way, or maybe the other way around. This weekend was that. Saturday I had breakfast with the group of ladies my mom called Breakfast Club. They met—what, biweekly? monthly? time is so weird when you’re a kid—for more than 20 years. The first time my sister and I stayed home by ourselves was when our mom went to Breakfast Club. We locked the doors and watched as much TV as we wanted (which was a lot), and when she came home, she came home with a blueberry muffin for us. After that we didn’t mind staying home by ourselves. Also, she always came home with good gossip about the other ladies’ kids, who were all within a couple of years of our ages. We weren’t that close to most of them when we were in school, but even years later we knew when one of them decided to go to law school or study abroad—which were the kinds of things that they would do because they were all nice k...

Since joining Facebook , I've gotten a little lazy about posting book reviews on Bread and Bread . I know, I know, you've been crying yourself to sleep every night. Obama better get elected, and Cheryl better post a book review tomorrow or things will just not be okay, you hiccup into your pillow. Even though I suspect you guys prefer posts with pictures or ones containing stories about the many embarrassments of my youth, hear me out: I do it because books--at least the ones that are not about diets or do not feature Oprah's seal of approval or face on the cover--need every shout-out they can get, and my ego needs to feel powerful in the role of critic. Facebook has all sorts of booky applications, so lately I've been posting short little reviews of stuff there--there in the social networking wasteland, where you give everything one to five stars and no one knows or cares if you gave something three and a half stars because it was brilliant and new but deeply flawed, ...

Sometimes I hear about suicides and a part of me thinks, So in the end, you really just couldn’t get over yourself? I can imagine feeling despondent or dulled-out. I’ve felt like that, although I know I have to be careful not to confuse chronic and acute. I can imagine feeling quite convinced that life had nothing very good to offer me. But that doesn’t mean that I have nothing to offer life. When I picture that rock-bottom feeling, I remind myself of my plan: Assuming I’m still in decent physical health, I will get myself a minimum wage job consisting of motions one can go through even when profoundly depressed. Then, on evenings and weekends, I will go to a homeless shelter and ladle soup, another simple action one can perform while depressed. That way I won’t sentence my family and friends to a lifetime of wondering if they failed me, and I’ll also be confident that I’m still pushing back on the world in a positive if small way. I don’t think that earthly life is infinitely p...

The other day, AK and I had one of our favorite kinds of conversations, where we answer the sort of theoretical questions you might find in the Ungame and make lists of our favorite things. The topic this particular day was: What issue are you most conservative about, and where are you a big lefty? (We’re both solid Obama supporters and everything, but bristle at any kind of knee-jerkiness, so I think we pride ourselves on having one or two unpredictable views.) AK decided she leaned conservative on budget stuff and uber-liberal on transportation issues. I concluded that my basic distrust of the average voter’s ability to make good decisions was kind of conservative (“Well,” said AK, “that either makes you a fascist or a communist”). I have leftist ideas that will never in a million years get implemented when it comes to: marriage (all of it should be abolished in favor of domestic partnerships that can be entered into by any number of people whether or not they’re romantically invol...

When AK and I saw Rilo Kiley play at the Grove in Orange County a few months ago, their opening act was, somewhat randomly, Dolly Parton. It seemed she’d followed them home from a gig in Vegas. “Wait, okay, I feel a little stupid for asking, but that’s not really Dolly Parton, right?” I whispered to AK. No, it wasn’t. But the real live Dolly did show up at the Ahmanson last night to introduce the new musical version of 9 to 5 , for which she wrote the music and lyrics. “They’re still working some of the kinks out, so if they’ve gotta stop the show for a minute, be nice,” she said. I wanted to curl up in her voice and nap like a kitten. “I’ll just put on a show or something,” she laughed. “So that is the real Dolly, right?” I whispered. Yes! And the show—which was lots of fun if not exactly groundbreaking—did hit a technical glitch shortly before intermission, and even though Dolly appeared to have been kidding when she said she’d put on a show, she led sing-along versions of “9 to 5” ...

I’ve never hated coming home from vacation, partly because I like being able to choose what to wear from my whole closet instead of from just the contents of my suitcase. (Shallow, but it works.) Still, Oaxaca was so lovely—my senses were turned on high because my brain wasn’t busy planning what to eat for dinner or finding time to do my art-class homework or wondering why last month’s MasterCard bill was so high. Although I think a certain amount of minutia and struggle can be healthy, I’m trying to find ways of keeping the Spirit of Vacation alive, beyond wearing my new necklaces made of bright-colored beans. Because the Spirit of Vacation is also the Spirit of Inspiration, one I’m always trying to tap. Here are my tips for you, or not for you, because these things are highly individual by nature. Nevertheless, I possibly highly encourage you to: See Vicky Cristina Barcelona . It takes place in a world in which people bicycle through cobblestone streets on their way to pick blackber...