Bread and Bread

The weekend started at the Aquarium of the Pacific , where AK, her sister Lori and I elbowed small children out of the way so we could feed the lorikeets . The bait was taken. But despite their dependence on $3 cups of nectar from tourists, the birds maintained a certain formidable dignity. As did the sisters Ybarra . I'm sort of fascinated with museum signage, like how the Body Worlds exhibit took such pains to explain that the dead guy in a top hat was science not (god forbid) art. So I especially liked the "journal excerpts" posted in the lorikeet forest, in which an unnamed 19 th century explorer washed up on Australian shores and quickly went native with the local lorikeets , which he and his cook, Finnegan, miraculously knew all sorts of facts about. AK and I got a couple of the lorikeets he sketched to sit on our arms. I was going to say that I wish I could have an entire wall of jellyfish in my house because they are like nature's beautiful, moving wallpap...

There was a time when I posted long, muse-y book reviews on this blog, and while they never garnered as many comments as my bitchy recaps of The L Word , I, for one, liked them. I’ve gotten lazy lately, and just posted short little thumbs-up/thumbs-down blurbs lifted from my Goodreads/Facebook reviews . While there’s arguably something to be said for brevity, especially on the internet, some books are just so damn good they deserve three whole paragraphs. (And perhaps a dissertation or two, but that’s not the business I’m in.) So here are three paragraphs about Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham: 1. This is the kind of book I like: While Michael Cunningham is such a linguistic genius that he can and has made baking a cake seem like the most beautiful and meaningful experience in the world, in this book he takes crazy-ass risks and writes about ghosts and aliens. More specifically, he tells three stories with recurring motifs and characters set in three different, difficult time perio...

I am freshly back from Sacramento, where I did some worky things and gave what I think was sort of a lackluster reading at Luna’s Café . Luckily I wasn’t the only one on the bill, so other people kept things lively. It was a warm-up for Reading Season, the time when my book comes out and I bombard you constantly with emails and blog posts about where to see me next. For the record, I’m usually a pretty solid reader, so don’t let the aforementioned lackluster-ness scare you away. I’m warmed up now. More importantly, Sacramento is home to my very good friend Kristi, whom I hadn’t seen in two years. We met freshman year in this ridiculous UCLA class called The Scientific Method and the Search for Life in the Universe, which turned out to be a fancy name for Geology. We bonded over the bummer of that revelation, plus the fact that our class was full of weirdos like the body builder who opened a smelly can of tuna halfway through class every day, plus the fact that we wanted to take ballet...

I just don't buy that they're evil, no matter what action movies tell me. (Thanks to Suzanne for posting this.)

On Saturday, AK, Bonnie, Jamie and I hiked Hoegee's Loop in the Angeles National Forest just north of Arcadia. Except, because we're not good at reading signs, it was more like Hoegee's Zigzag. But look how intrepid we are in our cool REI gear. (Seriously, we were like a walking REI ad: The guy at REI told me this is how your shoes are supposed to fit.... I love my new REI water bottle!... I love my new REI pants!... The guy at REI gave me his phone number. At first I thought it was some kind of hiking hotline. Then I realized he was hitting on me, and there is no hiking hotline. ) "I love how misty the hills look," I said. "I think that's smog," someone else said. The "waterfalls" also kind of reminded us we weren't too far out of the city. But I'm a proud urban hiker, so whatever. AK was official keeper of the guidebook. The trail was dotted with cute little cabins that looked like a WPA project. The next day at my grandma's M...

The biggest highlight of last night’s reading by Brian Castro at the South Pasadena Library was, of course, Brian Castro. He read a lyrical, dreamy (yet kind of action-packed) excerpt from his “fictional autobiography” Shanghai Dancing against a backdrop of old photos, some from his family’s days in China, some he found out in the world. It was lovely, evoking an old black-and-white movie somehow. My CalArts buddy Colin Dickey interviewed him afterwards, and I decided that Castro might be one of the most dignified and thoughtful writers I’ve met. When talking about the not-so-easy process of getting his work published in the U.S. (despite winning gobs of awards in his native Australia), he said, “I’m quite comfortable and proud to say that I’m a writer who belongs with a small literary press.” I was like, Hey, yeah, me too! I very much wanted to be in the good company of Brian Castro. Nevertheless, the second biggest highlight of the evening was the drunk and/or schizophrenic gentl...

I spent a small piece of my afternoon texting with my 16-year-old mentee about math homework. Her: I have a ? wats a hypotenuse. Me [Googling “hypotenuse” because, before I realize we’re talking about math homework, all I can think is, A misspelling of hypotension? ]: Just looked it up: the longest side of a right triangle. i haven’t done geometry in a LONG time! Her: Um do u knw how to find it if 1 side is equal 9 & da other 1 to 12? Me: Pythagorean theorem? i’ll ask my math teacher sister and get back to u! The world’s most roundabout math tutoring session then ensued, with me texting my sister and then texting my mentee. Someone really needs to work on getting “+” and “=” signs onto the text menu. I understand that the square root sign probably has a limited audience. (Shut up, all you people with iPhones. I know you probably have a “+” and an “=” already. You probably have a fucking math homework application.) Is it lame that I felt kind of cutting-edge? I was all, Look at me! ...

What a lovely weekend. Relaxation ruled with an iron fist, though it took us a while to submit to it. We got to see Lee-Roy and his beautiful sketches in I Am That Girl , which screened as part of the L.A. Asian Pacific Film Festival . It’s nice to see truly independent (as in financed by the director’s friends and family, not Miramax) movies get some screen time. This one had some bumps but also great characters and a compelling story. On Saturday we saw what you can do with an extra $100 million or so, which is: make steel claws grow out Hugh Jackman’s hands. It was a fairly well-spent $100 million, I’ve got to say, as long you don’t get hung up on details like, Wait, why are Wolverine and his brother feuding? And why are Liev Schreiber’s long pointy fingernails a super power? I have funky-looking thumbs—can that be a super power too? I’m writing about mutants myself right now, and it was instructive to think about the rules stories create for themselves when they break the rules o...

It’s been a week of literary posts, and this is one more. But I guess you’d be watching a vlog if you didn’t like reading on some level, right? Sometimes I have a complicated relationship with literary stuff—talking to other writers, reading about other writers and going to events can feel like work. I mean, of course it’s work, but sometimes it starts to feel like a job . Which it also is. That’s the deep dark secret of doing what you love (or something adjacent to what you love) for a living (or something adjacent to a living): It makes work fun, but it also turns fun into work. But the beauty of fiction is that even if I start out thinking, I really should read this book because it’s for my book club/someone I know wrote it/someone I know published it , I inevitably lose myself in the story a few pages in, and reading becomes the wonderful escapist exercise that got me into this business in the first place. Can you tell I’m ready for the weekend? But here are the books I’ve been es...

I’ve spent a lot of time the past couple of days doing mad edits to Lilac Mines before it heads off to the printer. It’s been a flashback to my undergrad days, when I often asked myself the question, Can I read a whole book in one day? Only then it was usually a result of having spent the previous day watching reruns of 90210 . It’s been stressful, the way I hear book publishing can be (from AK, who reads Poets & Writers Magazine more thoroughly than I do), but I think I’ll be pleased with the result. Right now I’m trying to detox from the nitty-gritty part (yay for yoga!) and get excited for what comes after the nitty-gritty, which is the fun part: readings. Where I get to see all of you ! Here’s the first one, which I’m pleased to announce on the eve of Buy Indie Day : Where: The Promising Series at Skylight Books, 1818 N. Vermont, L.A. CA 90027 When: Friday, June 5, 7:30 p.m. Who: Cheryl Klein, Raquel Gutierrez , Orlando Ashley and Scott Turner Schofield; hosted by the fabul...

For the past six years, I’ve spent the last weekend of April sweating (or avoiding rain) inside a plastic tent at the L.A. Times Festival of Books . This year my organization didn’t have a booth, meaning that I was free to roam, which was cool but also like waking up from one of those dreams where you have to take algebra again and didn’t know you were enrolled until the day of the final. I kept having to remind myself, No, I’m not working. I’m not due back at the booth to take over Jamie’s shift. I did spend some time hanging out at the Manic D / Gorsky Press / Poetry Flash booth, home of brightly colored table cloths and some good indie reading. (I’m biased , but I’m also telling the truth.) Panels are always a bit of a gamble—I’ve seen so many on publishing and L.A. lit that no matter how good the panelists are, I usually end up wanting to claw my eyes out. So I try to steer clear of those now. But I saw a lovely fiction panel with Susan Straight , David Benioff (who taught us how ...

In case you thought my thumbs-down for 17 Again proved I was a big snob, let me take this opportunity to say: I heart Fast & Furious . Everything about it: Michelle Rodriguez (though there’s too little of her), Vin Diesel, the way the cars are both pristine and feral, the ridiculous dialogue, the ridiculous but well-paced plot, the ridiculously gratuitous three-girl make-out scenes that are part of every underground street racer party scene, and did I mention the ridiculous hotness of Michelle Rodriguez? (Seriously, she’s practically the only celebrity out there for girls whose tastes veer tomboyish and non-blonde. She’s shouldering that burden on very nice shoulders, but it would be great if she could have a little company.) My favorite aspect of the ridiculous plot is that a drug lord would A) hire street racers to zip drugs across the border—because there’s nothing more inconspicuous than four pimped-out hot rods driving in formation at 120 miles an hour; and B) stage a race th...

As of today, my six-week post- surgery ban on strength training is up! And the ban on lifting things like boxes of magazines and buckets of cat litter, both of which I apparently have lots of occasions to lift. And I heard saunas were off limits too, although I don’t really know why and don’t use them very often anyway. But it’s good to know I can. I actually haven’t done any of these things (except go in a sauna in February ; go figure) for three months because the rules for a pre-op hernia are pretty much the same as for post-op. And this is just a theory, but I think my totally un-diversified workout routine has been partially responsible for the recent grumpiness of my lower back. So, in my mind, I’m about to embark on a healthy diet of yoga, weights, core training (whatever that actually involves, unless it’s Pilates, which I kind of hate), dancing and running. And why not throw in a little rock climbing? Ooh, and parkour ! In reality, I’m actually going to miss making AK lug th...

There are some movies you want to see because you know they’ll be good, and there are some movies you see for the air conditioning. Like 17 Again . No, that’s partly a lie. Although AK and I did see it at the cheap-o Highland 3 during the still-scorching late afternoon yesterday, I also kind of wanted to see it because 1) most movies about teenagers have fun clothes , 2) maybe my 16-year-old mentee would see it and then I’d be, like, speaking her language (although last I checked, the movie at the top of her to-see list was Obsessed ), and 3) I have a high tolerance for dumb comedies, in a way that I do not for dumb action movies. Because of its dumb-comedy designation and its 13-year-old target demo, I tried to be patient during the scene where Mike (Matthew Perry reincarnated, sort of, in Zac Efron ’s body) gets beaten ad nauseum with a variety of toy swords by his geek best friend who doesn’t recognize him. After all, I’d signed up for this. The movie is a revival of the ‘80s body-s...

More stuff ripped from the Facebook headlines/notes application: 1. Did you date someone from your school? I went on one double-date-like thing with Bonnie, Jason and this friend of Jason’s who clearly had some mental irregularities. He called me for a few months afterward to tell me the news that was coming through his police scanner. I didn’t go on another date until college. 2. Did you marry someone from your high school? No, since I am not into police scanners. 3. Did you carpool to school? I walked or hitched a ride with Bonnie in her mom’s VW Bug, which would sometimes stall when we tried to drive over the huge roots in our school’s crappy parking lot. 4. What kind of car did you have? None. I wished I had an easily-stalling VW Bug. 5. What kind of car do you have now? Ninety-seven Honda Civic. Movin’ on uh-uuup. 6. It’s Friday night in the present: I’m probably dashing off to whatever my social-butterfly girlfriend has planned for us, complaining mildly that we’re too busy. 7. I...

Just like how that set of stairs in Washington, DC will forever be known as The Exorcist Stairs , wine-tasting in the Santa Ynez Valley has, since 2004, been known as The Sideways Tour. I've seen ads for actual bus tours built on this theme, a la the Sex and the City tours of Manhattan. But we had something better than a bus: We had Meehan , who'd scoped out the area a couple of times since moving to SB in August. Ever since her friend's dad got ill from picking pesticide-drenched grapes, she's been an advocate of organic wines, so our first stop was a small but beautiful winery called Demetria , which practices not only organic but also " biodynamic " farming. Lee, the head winemaker, was happy to fill us in on the principles of biodynamics , which involve reviving damaged soil and planting according to the phases of the moon. It seemed like one part sustainable farming, one part Scientology. But as Meehan said, "The main thing is approaching the pr...

Claire’s comment on my previous post reminded me that it’s time for my annual Cadbury Crème Egg Experience, in which I am lured in by its fascinating/creepy faux-yolk center, then reminded that it tastes like a big gob of nasty frosting. I will proceed to finish the egg anyway, because nasty frosting is still frosting, and I like to finish what I start (thanks to This Afternoon in Drama for alerting me to this pathology). I will repeat this exercise with Peeps , which look like how a cloud would taste if you’d just dropped acid. Except in real life clouds probably taste like water and/or pollution, and Peeps taste like stale goo. Just as I sometimes put off eating healthy things that are delicious (mangoes, strawberries, pineapple) because some part of my brain has declared it a chore, I also get excited about disgusting things that are bad for me because my brain thinks it’s going to have a sinful good time. That part of my brain seems to be stuck in its early 20s, the years of st...

Instead of New Year’s resolutions, Jenny over at Run Jen Run always comes up with themes or role models for the year. This year she’s channeling Patti Smith . Since I’m still working on fulfilling my 2009 resolutions (sorry, dusty bike, I’ll let you out of the garage soon), I decided it was best not to be too action-oriented regarding my 32nd year. This may not be the catchiest theme, but I think I’m going with Slow Food Life. Here’s what I’ve learned from the slow food movement (of which I’m not actually a part, having just consumed a bagel with Trader Joe’s hummus and 7-Eleven coffee), which I think can be extrapolated to the rest of my life: Fast and productive are not necessarily better. Organic is good. Doing it yourself is good. Quality is more important than quantity. Your neighborhood and your loved ones are wonderful resources. Sometimes recipes go wrong and you have to throw out a bunch of tomatoes and start over. I’ll stop before I get too self-helpy. This weekend AK and I...

Nothing like dancing on a bar top to keep you young. Unless, of course, you're super drunk and even the gentle Christmas lights strung throughout the bar can't hide your crow's feet and you yell out, "Oh my god, you guys, I'm so crazy!" and what everyone hears is, "Oh my god, you guys, I'm trying desperately to hang onto my obviously fading youth!" I didn't yell on Friday night, but I did--for the first and possibly last time ever--climb on top a bar and, well, actually I hula-hooped. Apparently it's what they do at Birds if you stay past 10:30 p.m. Who knew? We had a great time watching the absurdly comedic, semi-improvised Glass Beef Musical at UCB (and sneaking peeks at Natalie Portman, who was in the audience), then we headed next door for a few Citron martinis and the next thing I knew, Alberto was pushing me toward the bar. I would be lying if I said he had to push hard. Soon it was clear that it was all part of Alberto's pla...