Bread and Bread

Below is a conversation I had, twice, with a former roommate. Matt: You’re a vegetarian, right? Me [making eggs in the kitchen]: Technically I’m a pescatarian. I eat fish, but not beef or poultry or anything. Matt: Then I guess whether or not you eat eggs depends where you stand on abortion. Like, when does life begin? You’re eating a fetal chicken. Both times, I explained the miracle of life: An egg has to be fertilized before it can turn into a chicken. I wasn’t eating fetal chicken. I was eating the equivalent of a chicken’s period. (Sorry, I hope you’re not eating right now.) Work Cathy and I were discussing how much or little science education we received in elementary school. I remembered building a rock collection in kindergarten and weighing guinea pigs with little metric scales in Mrs. Graham’s sixth grade class. I also remembered how, in tenth grade biology, Mr. K wanted to start the year off with sex ed, even though our textbook wouldn’t get to “family life” until Chapt...

I’m teaching again, which I love, but I already miss recreational reading. Poor Kelly Link—I’m making my way through Pretty Monsters ever so slowly, even though her stories are deliciously weird, like a tweak of Aimee Bender ’s tweak of reality. Anyway, here’s what I read last month, back before 15 new students entered my life: Shanghai Girls by Lisa See: There is a tightly written story of two sisters and their competing histories contained within the many pages of this sweeping historical epic. I took the former for somewhat superficial (Pearl is the smart sister, May is the pretty one, been there, read that) until the final chapters, when it becomes clear that we've been reading Pearl's very subjective take on her family's journey, and that See's characterizations are entirely strategic. See's impressive strengths as a plotter and researcher are hindered a bit by her overly expository language. Even as I geeked out on the many, many factoids she provided about...

I was feeling all Zen after yoga yesterday because during shavasana I conjured up a lovely visualization of leaping from an airplane. Nothing in me wants to do that in real life, but in my head it was like a movie: My parachute was fluttering, but there was no sound except for pretty music, and everyone I loved was waiting for me on the ground. This had to do with ending therapy (till next time) and embarking on new adventures and stuff. I wanted to ride that feeling straight to bed, pausing only for the leftover half of AK’s burrito from Señor Fish and leftover espresso brownies from Christine, but Team Gato was having none of it. Ferdinand was mysteriously MIA, which is not uncommon after dinner, but very rare when he hasn’t eaten. “It is Thursday night,” AK mused. “Do you think he has a gig? Thursday’s a big party night.” We talk a lot about how Ferdinand is a DJ. He’s cool like that, although in real life, loud noises frighten him, so he’d be a very mellow DJ. ...

After Trixie the rainbow pony (or hornless unicorn, as some of us decided she was) took a thrashing during last weekend’s festivities , I sent the head home with Alanna who said, “My creative life is taking a turn for the hilarious.” Now Trixie lives on as the co-star of the video for Fascinoma ’s song “Waste of a Perfectly Good Woman.” This makes me feel much better about basically beating a giant version of my favorite childhood companion to a papery pulp.

The other day at lunch I was reading this interview with JD Samson, formerly of Le Tigre, currently of Men. I haven’t heard any of the music of the latter and I’m only a medium passionate Le Tigre fan, but I found the interview thoroughly refreshing. Her comments reminded me that sometimes people go the indie/grassroots/DIY route for very good philosophical reasons: because you can retain creative control, reach out-of-the-way audiences and have a ton of fun. Because of the glaring lack of opportunities to sell out in my life, sometimes I forget that I don’t actually want to. I mean, I don’t have anything against mainstream success and I don’t think JD Samson does either. But it’s nice to remember that there are reasons you might not have it that have nothing to do with being a loser or a victim. I’m pretty sure The Airborne Toxic Event has plenty of mainstream success by now. Just because their lyrics scream MFA writing program doesn’t mean they don’t have a boatload of fans and a f...

This might turn into the most boring post ever, because I’m just going to use the words “great” and “amazing” over and over again. As in, our families and friends are great, the food was amazing. But it’s a risk I’m willing to take in describing the not-a-wedding party-in-the-park AK and I finally had in order to ensure that what happened in Canada did not stay in Canada. When it comes to weddings and gay weddings in particular, AK and I are much like Ariel Levy . But much poorer. So we wanted to celebrate with our favorite people but we didn’t want to: have a wannabe straight wedding have a cheap-ass wedding have a wedding at all spend as much on the whole day as Ariel Levy spent on her dress alone. Conveniently, Timothy and Heather all but fell from the sky and offered to cater. I mean, they didn’t fall from the sky. I got to know Heather in seventh grade woodshop, and I was so happy when she married Timothy, not because he’s a professional chef (although that didn’...

Scene: a windowless room at West Hollywood City Hall. A map of West Hollywood—-which, interestingly, is shaped like a gun, hence the city’s cop cars sport big rainbow gun logos—-hangs on the wall. Bookish types are gathered around a conference table. City of West Hollywood Employee Lady: Our transgender advisory committee wants to sponsor a panel at this year’s book fair, but we’re not really sure where to start. Me: I could suggest some writers. Flash forward six months. Guess who’s moderating a panel titled “The Many Genres of Gender” at the 9th Annual West Hollywood Book Fair ? Although I’m always a little amused by how volunteering to help automatically turns into volunteering to help a lot , I don’t mean to imply that I’m in any way reluctant to moderate. I think this will be a totally interesting panel with some stellar writers: Ryka Aoki de la Cruz , Morty Diamond , Max Wolf Valerio . But I do feel the need to explain why I’m moderating a panel that centers around an identit...

Sometimes when I hear other writers bemoan rejections, I think, Well, at least you’re submitting stuff. It’s a numbers game and you’re one step closer to winning than I am, sitting here reading Go Fug Yourself or whatever it is I do when I’m not submitting. When I am submitting and I hear writers struggle with particular criticisms (“He wants me to write more like Sloane Crosley , but I don’t even think Sloane Crosley’s that funny”), I think, I would kill for anything besides a form letter. At least they think you’re worth CRAFTING A SINGLE SENTENCE FOR. Yesterday, when I got the most thoughtful, constructive rejection ever from an agent, I thought, If the nicest agent in the world won’t represent me, who will? So basically, I’m never satisfied. This would strike me as very American and worth meditating about if it weren’t still rejection. Only in the literary world do people try to conjure gratitude for rejection. We’re so bombarded with (true) information about how the supply vastly...

1. if tim robbins can’t fix it, no one can Alberto, Emily, AK and I were all set to see Break the Whip at the Actors Gang Saturday night. AK and I had tried to see it during its first run but sold our tickets when our movie club decided to meet that night (that’s how much we love you, movie club). Apparently, though, it’s just not in the cards for us to see that play. The freeways were clear and the parking structure was cheap and easy, which in L.A. means the night is off to an amazing start. We got to the theater early, and because we’d signed up for the reserve section, which was miraculously the same price ($8! Half the price of Dodger Stadium parking! ) as general admission, we lingered outside the Ivy Substation and enjoyed the cool summer night. But as soon as we were done basking in revitalized Culver City goodness, we discovered that, oops, they’d oversold all those reserve rows. Suddenly we and a handful of other theatergoers were at the center of a sto...

Today at lunch I meant to read some more of The Thin Man , which I’m finding funnier and less sexist than Raymond Chandler , but still strangely hard to get through. So more about that next month, when I actually finish it. What I read instead was an L.A. Weekly story about women who are supporting their families by becoming prostitutes. It was basically the journalistic version of the Jennifer Love Hewitt Lifetime Original Movie The Client List , which, yes, I saw. Prurient is my middle name. Not as catchy as Love, so if I ever decide to whore myself, I’ll need to come up with something new. Anyway, here’s what I read in August. Truth and Consequences by Alison Lurie: The two couples at the center of this book can be divided along various lines: sick vs. healthy, caretaker vs. caregetter, artist vs. administrator. Lurie takes a long hard look at all these roles and, with expert character-crafting ability, shows how someone like superstar writer Delia Delaney can be rightly seen as...

Last night Amy fed us cookies and spinach empanada thingies and narrated the Emmys for us. Even though AK and I don’t have cable and usually block our TV with plants, the biggest nominees were conveniently the shows we do watch: Glee, 30 Rock, Modern Family . And I’d seen at least a couple episodes each of Mad Men, Nurse Jackie and The United States of Tara thanks to in-flight entertainment. AK missed them because she was, like, reading or something. Awards shows are all about heckling snarkily, but I have to say Amy takes it to new heights. Case in point, re: the many awards for Temple Grandin : Amy: I just found out from my mom that she went to high school with my Aunt Owie. [The real Temple Grandin stands up in the audience, wearing her signature cowboy shirt and kerchief. Waves.] Wait, that’s Temple Grandin?! She looks terrible! She looks thirty years older than my Aunt Owie. The rest of us: Well, she’s autistic. Amy: Autism doesn’t make you look old . Me: Maybe your Au...

I realized that my last, like, six blog posts have been about death. And the ones before that were about depression and anxiety and fighting with my family. When did I turn into a 15-year-old goth kid? Even though I probably blogged about that stuff in an upbeat way (“You present very cheerfully,” my therapist told me once), it may not be totally evident that now I actually am upbeat. To counteract the death posts, some news from the other side of the circle of life*: Jamie and Lee-Roy’s healthy baby girl was born this morning at 10:25 a.m. That’s all the official news we** have so far, since they want to give their families the scoop on the name and birth details. But I was so excited when I saw Lee-Roy’s post that I actually gasped and put my hand over my mouth like an anime schoolgirl. I like to think that Jamie and Lee-Roy’s little one will be a sorta niece—at least she’ll be the first of my friends’ kids who doesn’t need to be reintroduced to me every time we meet. (We may see T...

Seven years ago tomorrow, my mom passed away. I used to hate the phrase “passed away” because it seemed like a euphemism. (I also refused to refer to her as “dead.” I would say, “My mom died” but not “My mom is dead.” The former suggested she was a person who just happened to have died, the last in a long line of activities. In the latter, death superseded who she was—like referring to “the gays” as opposed to “gay people.”) But then I heard someone—poet Imani Tolliver , maybe?—talk about how, in the African American community, passing on is understood as transitioning to another state, like passing through a toll booth. That seemed accurate, not euphemistic. So now I like it, as much as one can like a phrase that means death. I also like this poem by Eloise Klein Healy . I don’t think anyone has summed up the predictable shock of parental death quite so well. Appropriately, it’s from her book Passing . Living Here Now My father’s dying resembles nothing so much as a small village buil...

This morning I went to the dentist, where the technology was very 2010 and the soundtrack was 1996. Hello, Blues Traveler. Hello, Goo Goo Dolls. I felt like I was milling around the lobby of Rieber Hall my freshman year at UCLA. It was a tough year, but still probably a better mental space to occupy than the current one, where someone was scraping my teeth with a sharp object. On the way into work afterward, I listened to AirTalk with Larry Mantle , the fun, less current-events-oriented second half of the program that I usually don’t get to hear. A theology prof named Velli-Matti Karkkainen ( Shermer proposed that humans like the notion of an afterlife because, like all animals, we’re wired to want to live, but unlike all animals, we know that we’ll eventually lose the battle. So we make up a myth to comfort ourselves. Having made up plenty of myths to comfort myself (“You keep staring at her legs because you want to look like her, not fuck her,” I told my 14-year-old self, except I do...

The summer after my freshman year in college I worked part time at the Wherehouse . My duties consisted largely of alphabetizing now-archaic media, explaining to people that no, we could not just open up another register every time there were more than two people in line because you have to count out the drawer and shit, and occasionally being sent home for wearing a T-shirt beneath my red apron. Because we were supposed to be a classy polo- shirt-and-red-apron-wearing joint. But it was actually a great job because it was so much easier than the hardcore journalism training I was spending the rest of my summer doing. The training was full of unpleasant surprises: What’s a budget meeting? What do you mean you mean the lead dancer at American Ballet Theater isn’t available for an interview two hours before my deadline? At the Wherehouse, all I had to do was alphabetize in a kind of Zen fog accompanied by the soundtracks of that summer: Dave Matthews Band’s Crash and Harry Conni...

1. how do animals experience time? The Team Gato update is that Team Gato is at risk of losing its team leader.* T-Mec has a not-small tumor in her left lymph node and a bunch of small ones starting to bloom nearby. According to the kitty oncologist, it hasn’t spread to her organs yet, which is good. The kitty oncologist also thinks this is reason to do surgery, which would mean amputating her left front leg (which includes one of her Ferd-batting paws), and some follow-up chemo. So I’ve spent a few days trying to separate my contradicting brands of selfishness (I Want My Cat Alive For At Least Another Five Years vs. I Would Like More Than $5 Left In My Savings Account) from what’s best for T-Mec. The three-leg thing is not the issue. T-Mec would rock that look. The constant trips to the vet and the months spent healing from a surgery that might only buy her a matter of months are the issue. I consulted D, one of my New York co-workers, who is practically a pet psychic. She’s the pers...

1. cool kids in camo I’ve fallen in love at first episode with If You Really Knew Me , an MTV reality show which A) is a reality show actually based in reality and therefore free of the weird scripted puns of, say, Parental Control and B) makes teenagers look like the sweetest, most vulnerable creatures ever to walk the earth. The show follows a program called Challenge Day, which is basically high school group therapy aimed at preventing bullying. Over the course of an intense day of activities, the kids let down their guard and share the most difficult parts of their lives—we learn that the homecoming queen has been scarred by her parents’ divorce and the bipolar outcast deserves a ton of admiration for the shit she’s gone through. Half the fun is seeing the subcultures at different high schools. Jocks and nerds may be universal, but “creekers” are particular to West Virginia, where hunting, fishing and wearing camouflage put you on the upper social rungs. (My friend ...

I just took one of those great literary field trips that remind me why leaving the office make you do better work. Jamie, new co-worker Cathy ( Libros Schmibros . As the Spanish/Yiddish name alludes to, it’s in Boyle Heights. (At 2000 E. 1 st St., to be exact, since the website will be under construction until David’s DSL is up and running.) As we arrived one by one, David mildly shamed us for not only driving (it’s right off the Mariachi Plaza Gold Line stop) but taking three separate cars. Yes, we are Angelenos. Then he showed us around: the barred storefront window where two men with very loud tools were carving a door, the vintage Born in East L.A. poster (Kipen was born in Hollywood), the shelf he’s reserving for authors featured at the Guadalajara International Book Fair, which recently spotlighted L.A. literature. While we talked about all the possibilities for the space—readings! workshops! movies!—a woman with two small kids came in to renew her copy of Shit My Dad S...

When I'm not posting photos on Facebook or eating Trader Joe's sun-dried tomato pesto directly from the container or Googling "bed bug stains" (don't worry--the funny marks on my box spring are something else, possibly cat-related...although that's probably not cause not to worry), I obsess over books. Books and writing are probably the only healthy obsessions I have. Here's a review I wrote for Gently Read Literature if you're like, Dammit, those capsule reviews re-posted from Goodreads just aren't long enough. Testimony by Anita Shreve: This novel tracks the lead-up to and fallout from a prep student orgy that gets taped and posted online. Shreve calls upon many (possibly too many) characters to tell the controversial and mysterious story: the school's headmaster, the boys involved, the girl involved, their parents, their roommates, a reporter, a cop, a lunch lady...the list goes on. I was a little unnerved by the girl--Shreve's char...