Bread and Bread

1. dr. frankenwhatever, just hand me a cigarette When I was in college, I accompanied some friends to Rocky Horror at the Nuart . They were aging punk rockers, meaning they were twenty and had been going Fugazi shows since they were twelve and were sort of over it all. They still wore twenty-hole Doc Martens, but there was no way they were going to make the effort to dye their hair green and shape it into a mohawk again. Once upon a time, they’d been Rocky Horror cast members. My friend Jenessa’s boyfriend Bill had played Dr. Frankenfurter perhaps for years. Now they watched a few minutes of the movie and spent the rest of the time smoking in the lobby and making snarky (unscripted, unrelated to Rocky ) observations. I suppose they weren’t actually smoking in the lobby. Even in 1998, I’m pretty sure smoking in movie theaters was illegal. But they were all but smoking.  It's just a jump to the left, and a step to the lobby. I was bummed out because I’d never seen...

I'd spend more time like this if our couch were long enough to lay down on. I broke my No Movies About People In My Demographic rule this weekend to watch Hello I Must Be Going , because the trailer assured me that Melanie Lynskey’s character, Amy, would be sufficiently bummed out as to not stress me out. (Can I just say how refreshing it is that a character allegedly born in 1977 is named Amy? Not Lily or Ruby or Madison, or another name given to humans born circa 2007 and movie characters born in 2012. AK and I have a thing about how trans guys tend to rename themselves, like, Brayden, even when they’re thirty years old. If your female name was Jennifer, your male name should probably be Dave or Brian, not Owen. That is, if you’re going for realism. If you just want a name you like and you don’t mind turning around every time the parents at your hipster coffee shop call their two-year-olds, carry on, Brayden/Owen.) Where was I? Hello I Must Be Going and realism, righ...

Ollie takes ownership of the cube. Ahem. Hi. Well, gosh, I feel kind of bashful. When you’re internet-quiet for four months, you feel like the next thing you say should be really important , even if that was never the aim of this blog. But all of a sudden this is turning into that worst-of-all-creative-writing-products, the I Don’t Know What To Write A Poem About poem. Or its blogosphere equivalent, the Sorry I Haven’t Posted blog. I’m not sorry. I’m…rested? I actually have about a thousand things to do this week, so that doesn’t feel like the right word, even if it’s true in the mental sense. I took some time off partly because I felt like my blog was alternately disingenuous or TMI-ish, or maybe both at the same time. This morning I was wondering how to create a voice that is both authentic and not overly revealing. It would have to be some sort of experimental narrative that is always doubling back on itself and calling attention to its own tricks. And that would be no fun...

Who needs perfect teeth when you have a bedazzled face? I started this blog almost exactly seven years ago. I’m sure I have at least seven more years worth of posts in me about movies, books, babies, Taco Bell radio commercials and other pressing matters. But I think it’s time for a hiatus—probably somewhere in the network sitcom range, not the HBO range, length-wise. I’ve been thinking about living my life in public—something I started doing accidentally as a result of being a writer, an all-too-willing Facebook addict and someone who generally can’t shut up. As much as this blog is not a diary (my actual diary sounds like the most boring therapy session in the world), constantly documenting my life in any capacity has created a weird obsession with presentation. It’s like I visit my blog or my Facebook page to find out what I’m like. The places I need to visit are church, my friends’ houses, my therapist’s office. Maybe some poetic mountain or freeway underpass (depending wh...

Let's all go to the lobby! Let's all check our eeeeemail! Last night I read with some fabulous gay men at a reading hosted by Artillery Magazine (“the only art magazine that’s fun to read”), which provided free wine for the hour before we took the mic. I have decided this is a key component of a successful reading. Those folks laaaaughed (in a good way) when I read from my Untitled YA Adoption Scam Novel.* The reading was in the groovy Cactus Lounge at the Standard Hotel in West Hollywood. When my dad arrived—and god bless my dad for unblinkingly attending readings where it’s not uncommon for someone to start his (really great) poem with the word “Semen”—we had this conversation: Me: Did you have any trouble finding the place? Dad: No, no. It’s kind of run-down, though. At first I thought it was abandoned. Me: This is a really nice hotel. I could never afford to stay here. I mean, I don’t know if it’s at the top of the trendy hotel list anymore, but— ...

Is that a magnet in your shirt or are you just happy to see me? My car is such a tease. It’s doing this thing where sometimes it doesn’t start, but it won’t replicate the problem for my mechanic. This morning I tried to explain what Jeff had said to me to my car-expert dad: “It could be that the starter is making the distributor break, or the distributor is making the starter break. But until we figure out which, I can’t replace either.” My dad proceeded to tell me that what I’d described was physically impossible. Things get lost in the Car-to-Jeff’s Chinese-to-English-to-Cheryl-to-Dad translation. But the problem hasn’t cost me any money yet, and walking the mile and a half to and from the shop was strangely uplifting in the lovely Saturday weather. I prefer to save my getting-upset cards for existential matters. And then, oh, do I play them. I made Michelada beer cocktails for book club and they were SO GOOD. I got uppity with anyone who disagreed with my love for Man ...

If you’re like me and make the daily mistake of listening to commercial radio , perhaps you’ve heard the Taco Bell commercial for their new Locos Tacos . Believe it or not, I’m not here to question the edibility of a taco made out of Doritos. We all grew up eating those finger-dying orange chips, so filling them with meat (or “meat”) and other “food” isn’t really a big leap. They probably taste pretty decent, in a 49-cents sort of way. I am a little concerned with the name: We should call them Tacos Locos if we want to stay true to the Spanish language and Mexican culture, which, as we know, Taco Bell is devoted to doing. If we want to acknowledge the inherent and sometimes positive hybridization that happens when two cultures merge (hello, banh mi sandwiches!), we should call them Loco Tacos. In English, the adjective comes first and is never pluralized. Locos Tacos is a fair but awkward linguistic compromise, in my opinion. Make mine without the inside part. Or the outside ...

I'm sure they're very nice people. 1. the gay 1950s Today I read this interview with Sarah Schulman (thanks, Raquel, for posting). Executive summary: AIDS killed radical urban queers and left literal vacancies to be occupied by gentrifiers, namely the children of the middle-class whites who hightailed it to the suburbs in the 1950s. She argues that we’re now living in a “Gay 1950s,” wherein gays—no longer forced into radicalization by oppression—just want to get married, own a home and raise 2.5 children, despite the visible failure of capitalism and the family as institutions. Got all that? I love me some Sarah Schulman. I have ever since I discovered her book about how Jonathan Larson stole her ideas and made them into Rent. (For the record, I don’t think he did. They were both writing about the East Village in the ‘80s, and there was going to be some overlap, you know? However, I don’t think it’s a total coincidence that a literary novel by an activist lesb...

Cowboys, Republicans and prepsters, oh my! Another whirlwind work trip, this time to San Francisco. I was in a better mood, and it didn’t hurt that I got to see a couple of old friends, the kind who are endowed with magical powers in both the healing and philosophical arts. Jamie and I also saw Kay Ryan read, which worked its own kind of magic. She’s a quirky lady: charming and sort of adorable in a way you wouldn’t associate with a middle-aged butch woman, but stopping short of schticky. A lot of her poems rhyme—subtly and impressively—and she would stop in the middle and say something like, “Now, did you catch that rhyme?” or “Can you believe I rhymed ‘why we’ with ‘Hawaii’? Isn’t that just terrible?” or “Do you all know what the word ‘greensward’ means?” (It means “turf that is green with growing grass.” It appeared in a poem about Easter Island and the delicious audacity of artists.) It takes guts to engage with your audience that way. In my mind, I have a silent ...

Sometimes I love traveling on my own for work. I can be as anal as I want to be about lining my toiletries up next to the hotel sink. There’s time to write, get inspired and watch lots of Khloe and Lamar on cable (I kind of like those two kids). Tucson is a particularly great town, with a wide-open, sun-bleached vibe. But my heart wasn’t in it this trip, and I just felt kind of lonely and contemplative, but not in a here’s-a-great-idea-for-my-novel kind of way. One night I ate dinner at my hotel. It wasn’t one of those nice hotels that prides itself on having a top-quality restaurant on the ground floor either. More like a sports bar with so-so fish and water that came in a disposable plastic cup. For a few minutes, that sad little cup seemed to symbolize my entire life. But I more or less dusted myself off, and the great thing about my hotel was that they were having a German Shepherd show there. It was noisy, and when it rained the whole courtyard smelled like wet dog, but i...

Well, Easter happened, so I like to think that spring has begun in earnest and I will now be all the things I didn’t get around to being during the past year. If Jesus can be reborn, why not me? Wait, that’s terrible logic. Jesus does all sorts of things I can’t do, like heal the sick and not include passive aggressive footnotes in his blog. But maybe I will at least manage to get ready for bikini season or something. Here’s what I read in March, which seems like a long time ago now. The Writing Life by Annie Dillard: A lovely extended prose poem on writing in the vein of Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird , though it actually predates the other book. Bird by Bird offers more practical advice, which either makes it more useful or more audacious, depending on your take (mine is mostly the former). At times Dillard's rustic metaphors almost made me cry--see her description of a sphinx moth fighting fate: "It gained height and lost, gained and lost, and always lost more t...

People keep getting pregnant. This is not news. It’s probably also not news that one of Facebook’s main functions is to make members feel like pathetic puddles of nothing-much in a sea of award-winning, best-selling mothers of adorable babies who sleep through the night. Nevertheless, yesterday’s ultrasound picture with its witty, self-deprecating caption did its thing to me. It probably didn’t help that this is Squeakies Death Anniversary Week, and the week I turned 35, meaning that if I was pregnant, I would officially be an “older mother.” (Adopting only slightly hushes one’s biological clock. I would still like to not die when my kids are in college, you know?) But beneath the flurry of outraged texts and emails I sent to people who are tired of getting texts and emails on this particular topic, there was a tiny glimmer of something. I think it was the Option To Not Be Sad And Full Of Hate. It was hard to see, because it was underneath the woodpile of sadness and hate t...

I’ve never understood people who do extreme sports (or other activities that seem to involve a lot of expensive gear) to “conquer their fears.” If I have a fear of sharks, I’ll avoid slitting my wrists and then going for a swim. Fear = conquered. It’s the unavoidable fears that keep me up at night: my uncertain future, various diseases, those creepy commercials that show people dying of lung cancer. If I could defeat my fear of never having children by skydiving, I would skydive. That said…. AK gave me a flying trapeze lesson on the Santa Monica pier for my 35 th birthday. I’ve been taking static trapeze classes , which are hell on the trapezius muscles*, but not so scary, given that the trapeze is about four feet off the ground. Flying trapeze involves climbing a rickety ladder to a platform in the sky, then flinging yourself off of it. I don’t love heights. I took the class because I do love flinging myself in various directions and because I love the circus; AK took the c...

Jamie and I spent the morning at a nonprofit training seminar, the highlight of which was running into my old Daily Bruin editor, Edina. When I think back to my Bruin years, I picture myself and my fellow A&E section staffers running around like vulgar little monkeys, doing interpretive dance in our cubicle, immortalizing our own hilarity on our Quote Wall and not returning calls from hardworking arts publicists, because we believed publicists were the devil incarnate, and because we were lazy. Edina was a grownup amidst the chaos, laughing good naturedly at our absurdity, then going about the business of getting the fucking paper out. So when I say she seemed exactly the same 14 (oh my god) years later, it’s a compliment. She was a very mature 20-year-old. Me, not so much. I felt like I needed to be on really good behavior today. I’m proud to say I didn’t pick all my black nail polish off and leave the chips in a little pile on the table or leave the meeting to go buy myself ...

For Valentine’s Day, AK got me tickets to American Idiot (the musical), which combines two things I like very much: Green Day’s American Idiot (the album) and musicals. When we went to Saturday’s matinee, I discovered that it also includes a lot of another thing I love: Rent . A lot. From the general punk aesthetic (understandably) to the choreography to the spare sets adorned with scaffolding and a shopping cart to opening each scene with a date stamp to the curly-haired Puerto Rican-ish love interest who wears short skirts, fingerless gloves and gets addicted to heroin and in one scene angrily throws it across the room. A bit derivative, right? (See photos below for further evidence. American Idiot followed by Rent .) So watching it was a little weird. As various disaffected youth writhed about on stage, I felt sort of like, What’re you so mad about, honey? I wondered if this was what it would be like to see Rent for the first time at age almost-35. I even had one of those awfu...

It was one of those weeks. Yeah, AGAIN. But I had the day off today, and I had a gently used laptop with my former mentee Daniela’s name on it. She mentioned that she was in the market for one, and my amazing friend Craig donated his. So I drove out to Lancaster to deliver it. Not a drive I was looking forward to, but the trip plus Daniela worked their magic. There have been times when I’ve wondered if I find hanging out with Daniela healing because her problems have often been bigger than mine. I’m not at all comfortable with this possibility, but that might be a piece of it. Mostly, though, it’s about who Daniela is: this hilarious kid who’s faced down her demons at times, chased after them at others, but never given up—and who, now, is not really a kid at all. In the past six months, she’s become a mother, gotten her papers, gotten a grownup job with benefits and everything, and become the primary breadwinner in her household of six. That’s a hell of a lot for a 19-year-old to take...

Here’s what happened after my plane touched down Friday night: I came home bleary and self-pitying and woke AK up to get some sympathy. She had a class early the next day and wasn’t feeling very sympathetic. We grouched at each other, and no one but the cats got a good night’s sleep. Then we proceeded to have a very lovely weekend. Saturday night we celebrated her mom’s birthday with a leprechaun cake (you will never meet a Mexican who loves St. Patty’s Day more than Bea Ybarra). Then we went to a drag show* at Mr. T’s Bowl. For you non-Highland Parkers out there, Mr. T’s is a former bowling alley that, according to the sign, has been around since 1966. It’s still a certifiable dive in a time and place where they’re harder and harder to come by. There are notes to the staff written in Sharpie on the plastic switchplates. There’s a fish tank behind the bar that doesn’t look clean or up to code. There are frayed wires sticking out of the wall that are all fun and games until someone has ...

I’m working in New York right now. It’s a meeting-packed trip. But the nice thing about New York is that, even if you don’t have time to see a Broadway show, you still get a show. Some things I’ve seen/heard/eaten in my first 24 hours in the city: A woman dressed from head to toe in orange-rust. Her hair was orange-rust. So was her luggage. A panhandler with a strong Nuyorican accent claiming, “It’s my first trip to America! I have no family here!” He lit up a cigarette on the subway. When someone told him he had to put it out he said, “It’s my first trip to America!” He snuffed out his cigarette, then immediately lit another. Food from a place called The Best In New York Food. I think that “The Best” is intended to describe “New York Food,” but I prefer to think of it as “The Best In New York” “Food.” I just like the idea that an eating establishment would label itself so boastfully (the best!) and so humbly (not even a diner or a deli, just straight-up food). Food...

I’ve always had problems watching movies and TV shows about people at the same life stage I am. I think this would be interesting news to marketers, who seem to think people don’t read/view outside their own demographics, unless vampires are involved. But when I was in middle school, I hated watching The Wonder Years because Kevin had gotten his first kiss and I hadn’t. When I was in high school, I wouldn’t watch My So-Called Life because Angela had gotten her first kiss and I hadn’t. And so on. Therefore, I went into Friends With Kids with trepidation—but it looked sort of funny, and AK doesn’t want to see The Descendants for some reason. In a way, I needn’t have worried. As AK pointed out, it’s not so much a movie about wanting to have kids when all your friends do, or even trying to have kids, as it is a movie about having a kid with your friend and then trying to make room for romance. And it’s a good thing it’s not about people trying to have kids, because of course the...

March has come in like a lion, which is not easy on a sheep-snake like me. Hence the lack of blogging (that, and my continued addiction to Polyvore ; why do I not spend all my free time applying to writing residencies and reading things by smart people?! ). Anyway, here’s what I read in February before I discovered Polyvore. A lot of it was short. Wish You Were Me by Myriam Gurba: This is a strange, great, funny little nugget of a book. Gurba writes about having Tourette's Syndrome (though in no way is this a memoir about a clinical condition), and sometimes the chapbook feels like a performance of Tourette's. In the best way--like, thank you for SAYING that! If you get deep satisfaction from popping zits and think Michelle Rodriguez is only made hotter by an eye patch, this is a book for you. Me, Frida by Amy Novesky; illustrated by David Diaz: Just as the best biopics are strategic snapshots of famous people's lives, Novesky wisely chooses a key moment as her...