Bread and Bread

Some parts of this weekend sucked (thank you, reproductive cycle! You are why our new towel rack is still on the floor, just staring wistfully up at the towel-rack part of the wall). But it got off to a great start when I met with AK’s coworker Hataya’s guy Sergio (got that?) about collaborating on some kind of text/visual art thing. As you may remember, I have a love/hate relationship with collaboration . At CalArts, I participated in this project called “Blind Date,” wherein a bunch of writers were given works by people in the art department and asked to respond creatively, and vice versa. I got to write about a sculpture I remember as silver, loopy and about knee-high. It was cool-looking, but it did not bring forth great emotion in me. So I wrote some trippy, abstract prose poem in response. But even though my meeting at Vroman’s with Sergio was also something of a blind art date, I have to say I was totally smitten. He’d read a couple of my stories and I’d gotten a chance to chec...

According to my McDonald’s place mat**: “Chicken is so rich with potential. It’s ready to be elevated into tender sliced chicken breast. It longs to be premium all-white meat chicken. It wants to be crispy or grilled chicken breast that’s laid across a honey wheat roll or an incredible hand-tossed salad. Chicken doesn’t want to be ordinary, it wants to be juicy, tender, premium chicken. That’s why the best chicken, Tyson chicken, goes to McDonald’s so that you can have a tender moment…with chicken.” *“Chicken” is not to be confused with “ chickens .” “Chicken” is apparently a conceptual yet sentient substance that wants nothing more than to be your mealtime bitch. “Chickens” are birds that, while not known for their intelligence, probably do not have this desire. **Interestingly, the Spanish version said, “Se puede convertir…. Puede ser crujiente….” If my high school Spanish serves me correctly, that means “Chicken can be…” not “Chicken wants …” Is it a translation thing, or is the S...

Apparently Akbar has been hosting a weekly queer-ish comedy night for three years now, but last night was the first AK and I heard about it. I don’t mind being late to the game, though, as long as I’m not too late to see Karen Kilgariff , quite possibly the funniest person alive , who performed last night. She started by reading off the list of people who’d RSVPed “yes” on Facebook. It was a sad but hilarious roll call. Then she did a bit I’d heard her do before, but which still made me laugh so hard that if I’d attended a few days closer to hernia surgery, I could have seriously injured myself. I love funny people. Even though I’ve heard they’re all crying inside, and even though there were a fair amount of anecdotes from, as comedian Erin Foley described it, “my 20s, when I didn’t know if I was gay and did a lot of overeating and overdrinking.” So there’s evidence that maybe they’re not models of well-adjusted-ness. Still, when I hear funny people talk, it makes me want to get ove...

1. train gang I have a complicated relationship with suspense. In movies, that is. In life, I just flat out don’t like it unless I’m on pins and needles waiting to find out just how much I won in the lottery. Except I don’t play the lottery, because [see first half of previous sentence]. With movie suspense, there are pros and cons. Con: “Stressed-out” is not the emotion I go to the movies to feel. And suspense stresses me out. I can handle blood (unless it’s animal blood, in which case I cover my eyes and cry). I can handle sorrow. But if I wanted to feel stressed, I would just, I don’t know, schedule too much stuff to do. Oh, wait…. Pro: A little suspense will keep you awake while watching a DVD in your cozy darkened house after 10 p.m., and that is a task I most definitely need help with. Enter Transsiberian , one of the most stressful/suspenseful movies I’ve seen in a long time. The first half is a believable drama about a couple (Woody Harrelson and Emily Mortimer) taking the trai...

Cut , pasted: Four jobs I have had in my life: 1. bagel slinger 2. gymnastics teacher 3. entertainment journalist or possibly "journalist," as it was the anything-goes dot-com boom 4. arts administrator Four movies I've watched more than once: 1. Waiting for Guffman 2. Sunset Boulevard 3. The Birdcage * 4. Soul Man * *Sometimes you don't re-watch movies because they're good, or even because you love them, okay? Sometimes they're just on channel 9 on Saturday afternoons a LOT, or your roommate owns the DVD. Four places I have lived: 1. West L.A. 2. South L.A. 3. Southwest L.A. 4. Northeast L.A. Four places I have been: 1. Oaxaca, Mexico 2. Kuching , Malaysia 3. Berlin, Germany 4. pretty much everywhere in California that you can go in a motor home Four of your favorite foods: 1. bread pudding 2. flan 3. sushi 4. burritos Four places I would rather be right now: 1. the gym, because my doctor barred me for two weeks and I'm contrary by nature 2. some posh wri...

I'm not sure whether, when you take a week off for surgery, you're allowed to go see a movie if you feel pretty good on the sixth day and think that it might be useful to ease back into the world gradually rather than jumping in the deep end on Thursday. So, if you are my boss, let's just say that I got an illegal screener of Sunshine Cleaning and watched it on DVD from my sickbed. And if you're a member of the MPAA , or whoever polices such things, let's say it wasn't illegal and I'm in fact a member of the Academy. But whomever you are, you should see this movie (unless you're the dad of the girl who was in front of me coming out of the movie theater, who told her in a semi-baffled tone, "I think I liked it...except it was kind of boring"). As I explained to AK, I love movies about people trying to figure out their lives: in this case, Amy Adams is Rose, a former high school cheerleader and present-day single mom trying to turn her housecle...

1. channel changer What’s tiring is not so much the staples in my side or the fact that Team Gato doesn’t really understand the meaning of “not a good time to pounce on my stomach” (as I type, T-Mec is trying to wedge herself in the non-space between my laptop, my pillow and my elbow). What’s tiring—and also kind of interesting—is all this living in my body . The last time I lived so intensely in my body was probably puberty, which I went through early and reluctantly ( Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret was a cruel joke—why would anyone pray to get her period?). After that my relationship with my body pretty much had two channels: Fat and Not Fat. I spent a lot of time and energy trying to switch from one to the latter, but even during the fattest times, there was a reassuring predictability to my struggle. Cookies = Channel 1. Vegetables = Channel 2. So to be reminded that my body is capable of all sorts of wild-card things—that it can put a piece of my intestine where it’s not s...

I'm writing to find out if I really am different on Vicodin . The bottle says, "Use care using machines." I've asked AK to hide the keys to the forklift, but I'm not sure how this applies to internet machines (a.k.a. AK's laptop). I do plan to spell check, so hopefully that counts as using care. In classic Cheryl style, I psyched myself out for a month only to have the actual surgery go totally smoothly. The nurses were nice, the doctors were nice, my dad and AK had a nice chat in the waiting room, sharing a Subway sandwich and debating the pros and cons of I Can't Believe It's Not Butter (AK is of the Michael Pollan eat-real-food school of thought, my dad is totally '80s in his love of low-fat products). One of two nice nurses named Karen promised, "It'll be over before you know it," and I realized that this was literally true. One minute the anesthesiologist was telling me how he was giving me a preliminary drug that was the equi...

The upside of hernia surgery is that it gives me an excuse to be completely irresponsible for a week, which I intend to take full advantage of, beginning Thursday. I shall call on my high school-era procrastination and rerun-watching skills—they’re a little rusty, but the foundation is solid. It’s ridiculously hard for me not to make a to-do list for my involuntary staycation, and yesterday, after one of my New York co-workers kindly offered to write up a document I might have otherwise written, I confessed to my boss, “I could feel my fingers being pried open as I reluctantly let go of it.” “It’s good to let go,” she assured me. “I promise you something wonderful will come and fill your hands.” I hope so. But the first thing may be a remote control, which would be wonderful, actually. (I guess I mean a figurative remote control because our TV has pretty much permanently relocated to the repair shop.) If I’m feeling energetic, maybe I’ll read. If I’m feeling really energetic, maybe I’...

1. hustle ... It had been at least six or seven years since I'd seen Rent , and ten since Stephanie and I had seen it more regularly than we got our oil changed (sometimes two or three times during a run, camping out for rush tickets when we could, blowing our savings on full-price tickets if we had to, once driving to Arizona on a whim). I still had a deep affection for the show, but when I talked about my Rent years to others, I talked about it as if I'd been a hardcore New Kids On The Block fan. Then Rent showed up at the Pantages , and Stephanie wanted to try our luck in the cheap-ticket lotto (they don't let you camp out anymore--it's unclear whether they're afraid of terrorists or it's a liability issue or they just got tired of hosting fan-kid slumber parties). For a little while it was just a thing on my calendar. Then, on the way home from work Friday, I listened to the soundtrack for the first time in ages, traffic melted away, and I realized I real...

I know we’re in a state-of-emergency drought. I wouldn’t be surprised if the plants blanketing NELA’s hillsides are aggressive non-native weeds. But damn, Highland Park is gorgeous after a few days of rain. All the yards on my morning jog that normally have dirt instead of grass (the economical way to practice sustainability) now have grass-like carpets of dewy green sprouts. I don’t know what they are—some salad-ish mixture of grassy stuff and herby stuff and tendril-y stuff. Dirt mounds on construction sites have become frolic-worthy knolls. Our own flower beds, heretofore occupied not by flowers but by stones, succulents and rotten lemons, have gone all Secret Garden on us. Suddenly it’s not hard to imagine a time after humans, when plants push us and all our stupid problems into the ground with their no-nonsense roots. I’ll miss us, but it will be a lovely takeover.

1. if i had a mood ring, it would be going berserk right now I keep prematurely declaring myself done with my winter doldrums. I'll be all, " Yay ! I'm skiing and the weather's nice and I just read a really good book and someone is designing my website!" and then, 24 hours later, I'm all superstitious about hernia surgery again (the song playing in the blood test office's waiting room: possibly bad luck; the show playing on the TV in the chest x-ray office's waiting room: good luck, as it involved a circus). All I can say is: I have a very patient girlfriend. We're taking this relationship class at church right now, and there's a lot of stuff about making time to be silly and not being critical of your partner. AK is a prodigy at being silly and noncritical. She's critical of some things--books and movies and people who aren't friendly--but if you're not one of those things, she's pretty much all love, all the time. Except w...

1. when breast is not best Last night at Nicole’s, we watched an episode of The L Word , which I hadn’t seen in ages. Nicole caught me up the plot, which has the ups and downs of a soap and the wild, jerky pace of a cab darting through traffic. “Okay,” said Nicole, “so Max, the trans guy, was dating this bio gay guy who got him pregnant, then freaked out and left. Now Max’s friends are throwing him a baby shower, and for some reason there’s a Willy Wonka theme.” When I came in, Max’s female friends were all chatting happily about episiotomies as Max looked on with horror. Because, you know, that’s what gay women who don’t have kids usually talk about. They’re LADIES! They love their vaginas! And childbirth! Then Jenny—oh, Jenny—gave Max a breast pump , which he also gazed upon with horror. “I’m not gonna breastfeed,” grunted Max, played by actress Daniela Sea, who seems to think that lowering her voice is a substitute for saying her lines with any expression whatsoever. “I know you ide...

Because I have a cold that is still fogging up my brain, and because I have to meet Nicole for dinner in about ten minutes, all I’m up for today is bullet points (I announce, as if you’d all keel over dead if I didn’t blog this week). Some thoughts, in very unparticular order: Hospitals should not send you letters that say you need an EKG and then, when you call them, say, “Oh, that was just a form letter. You don’t need an EKG” as if you should have known. It is really nice to read a good book after being mired in a, well, not a bad book, but a long, dense book with way too many tangents about drunken clowns in Russia , which is not as fun as it sounds. Giving up abstract things for Lent is not as much fun as giving up disposable cups, which I did two years ago. (Last year I missed Lent altogether—so I guess I gave up Lent for Lent.) The marquis on the progressive church next to my office says, “Enviro…LENT…alism.” If you need a quick pick-me-up, you should watch either this or this...

In LAUSD, when parents take their kids out of school for a week, it’s probably because their car broke down. In snowier parts of the country—and, inexplicably, parts of San Diego—it’s to go skiing. You know how sometimes you hear about a thing for the first time and then you hear about it everywhere for the next few days? That was me and Ski Week, officially known as President’s Week, and oh was it ski week at Mammoth. The mountain was crawling with adorable bundled-up children who were twice the skiers I’ll ever be. Their moms crowded the beginner class AK took. I was envious and a little suspicious of anyone entitled enough to pull their children out of school just because the snow was too perfect to resist. But mostly I was just excited to get started on my own Ski (Half) Week. Christine and Jody were once again Ski Mom and Dad to a gaggle of their friends, organizing the condo rental, telling us whether our boots fit (“If it’s too comfortable, it doesn’t fit,” said Christine, who ...

The other night I dreamed (dreamt? I’ve always been iffy about that one) that I was at a party with a bunch of writers I admired. I looked down and saw that, while I was wearing a skirt I liked—a kind of jagged-edged teal one from American Apparel —I was wearing it with a baggy old T-shirt. I remember thinking hopefully, Maybe it’s sort of raggedy chic and I have a Mary-Kate Olsen thing going on. But nope, it was an old shirt I work out in, which has not seen the color white for a long time. Weird that I didn’t just dream I was naked. Maybe I’m more scared of being thought to have bad taste than of being exposed. Anyway, here are the two things I actually logged in to tell you: 1) See Coraline . It’s so bizarre and lovely, and I would kill to create an otherworldly world the way those filmmakers did, although I’m not nearly patient enough to do so (I would settle for just having Coraline’s cute blue haircut—and I do pretty much have her heroic, big-eyed black cat). It’s also kind of ...

On Saturday AK and I showed up at the ArcLight at random, as we seem to be developing a habit of, and said, “What’ve you got?” What they had was He’s Just Not That Into You . (Do you like how I just made it sound like I was forced to see it as a last resort? Like I saw it only because Waltz With Bashir was sold out? In fact, I was quite into seeing He’s Just Not That Into You .) It’s very much a movie of its genre, which I guess is technically “romantic comedy,” but which in my head is “movie in which all hair is either perfectly curled or ironed to the smoothness of a skating rink, and all the characters more or less work as graphic designers.” This genre is eye candy not of the Scarlett-Johansson ’s-tits variety (although there was that too) but of the shiny-pages-of- Vogue variety. Except the idea of He’s Just Not… was to rip the romantic-comedy goggles right off the faces of its female viewers, right? I didn’t read the book, but I heard co-author Greg Behrendt interviewed enough t...

This is old news among nonprofit arts geeks now, but the senate voted to cut arts funding from the economic stimulus package . Republican senator Tom Coburn presented an amendment that would prevent funds from being used for any “casino or other gambling establishment, aquarium, zoo, golf course, swimming pool, stadium, community park, museum, theater, art center, [or] highway beautification project.” The zoo animals and I are a little offended that our livelihoods are considered as frivolous and useless as casinos and golf courses. We’re not quite sure why auto-manufacturing is considered a real, stimulus-worthy job, but caring for species that those autos are indirectly wiping out and ensuring that American culture is more than just Pimp My Ride are not. If you agree with me and the elephants (whose painting projects are now doubly threatened), go here: http://www.capwiz.com/artsusa/home/ . Incidentally, aren’t we in this mess because Wall Street is one giant gambling establishment?...

[Spoiler alert only if you are Cathy Klein: The following post contains information about your birthday present.] I'd been planning to spend my Saturday morning waiting in line at the Greek Theatre box office for Flight of the Conchords tickets. The good news was that there was only one other person there when I arrived at 9:45. The bad news was that apparently all the people who weren't there knew that the box office was closed for the season. Walking around confused and lightly-rained-on, I kind of felt like I was in an episode of Flight of the Conchords (I love how relentlessly sincere they are, diligently seeing every bad idea through to its ridiculous conclusion; Lee-Roy 's brother Valentine, who's spent a lot of time in New Zealand, swears this is exactly how people are there--once a guy he barely knew showed up at his house in the middle of a thunderstorm to teach him how to play a card game Valentine had casually mentioned wanting to learn over drinks a few w...

Today at work, a small cardboard box from Walmart arrived in the mail. Inside was a SOYJOY bar and a SOYJOY brochure promoting SOYJOY’s “Whole Soy. Real Fruit. Longer-Lasting Energy.” Jamie: There’s something weird about randomly getting food in the mail. Cheryl: I hate it when foods advertise that they’re made with “real” fruit or “real” cheese or whatever. If the best thing you can say about food is that it’s food, it’s probably not that good. Jamie: I wonder if it’s made with non-GMO soy. Cheryl: It doesn’t say it is, so it probably isn’t. What’s GMO? Jamie: Genetically modified. There’s something bad about genetically modified soybeans, but I can’t remember what right now. Cheryl: I wonder if it has any recalled peanuts in it. Jamie: I’m just going to throw it away. Cheryl: No, don’t! I’ll totally eat it.