Bread and Bread

1. dispatch from debbie downer I’m writing this at Huntington Gardens. A few feet from me, there’s a pond full of Jurassic-looking lily pads and well fed gold-brown fish. Two families of geese are roaming about, getting harassed by families of humans. With lily pads and random children. We wanted to start a "Hey girl..." meme featuring actual goslings. I’m telling you this because I worry I’ve acquired a reputation as a Debbie Downer. On Friday Alberto was talking about taking care of his parents when they get older—when he’s fifty and they’re seventy-five—and I said something along the lines of, Yeah, hope I make it to fifty . As if taking care of one’s elderly parents were a First World Problem akin to one’s yacht needing polishing. I know my odds of making it to fifty are actually very good, but I’m superstitious. I want the universe to know I don’t just take things for granted (even though I take all kinds of things for granted, like clean air and well...

1. relaxing with sex workers AK is taking this class where she’s required to put herself in culturally uncomfortable/unfamiliar situations and write about them. I clearly don’t totally understand it, because every time I suggest something (“Ooh! I know! Take that improv class you’ve been talking about!”), she tells me, No, it’s not like that. But somehow we ended up at a Korean spa at ten p.m. last night because one of the “spheres” she can investigate is race/ethnicity. All I knew about Korean spas was that they’re really naked, and Margaret Cho got kicked out of one for having too many tattoos. Sure enough, there was a sign at the front desk that said: We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone with offensive tattoos or infectious skin conditions.  The pride parade committee was not offended. All signs were pointing to this not being a great place to run around without nipples. I mean, I don’t think my tits look infectious, but the thing about having a nonconfor...

One of Cheryl’s Crazy Dreams or Part of Last Night’s NELAArt Short Film Series ? (With apologies to McSweeney’s Internet Tendency .) Italian students march in lockstep through a lecture hall to turn in their ballots before realizing the election is a fraud. Cats, rats and ferrets wage species warfare on the roof of an apartment building. A young woman hikes through the snow in search of a lost parent. A girl’s mother grooms her to be a prize-winning knitter. A couple tries to hide a runaway German prostitute in their garage during a dinner party. One bookshelf-lined attic stands in for three different apartments. A woman is reunited with her elementary-school crush on a bus trip to Mexico. A man with a handlebar mustache tap dances. Residents of a small Chinese village develop bizarre mutations as a result of pollution. Best friends are subjected to body cavity searches in a South African prison. Like this, but bloodier and with ferrets. Cheryl’s crazy dreams: 2, 4, ...

Kim is my hypochondriac idol because, despite years of panicking that she had ALS and getting checked for cancerous moles every six months, she is now getting a PhD in public health. Way to flip the script! Take that, hypochondria! On good days, I think that being diagnosed with cancer might have done the same for me: The thing that I thought was the end of the world wasn’t. On bad days, I’m still a nervous wreck. Kim and I have gone to a few seminars for breast cancer patients at USC’s medical campus. She gets course credit, and I get a vague sense that I have some control over my life. Much of the last three years of my life has been about relinquishing control—realizing that things haven’t worked out because life is random, not because I failed (not that there’s anything so wrong with failing, and I’ve done some of that too). So it actually takes me by surprise to learn that I can control something beyond what I’m wearing today and what I’m eating for dinner tonight—the ...

And to think, it used to just look like a phallic symbol. This morning I had my first radiation appointment. No actual radiation was involved—they put some waterproof stickers on me and took pictures to make sure they don’t radiate the wrong person or the wrong body part (is this an issue?), and ran me through that big medical donut, the CT scanner. Before my appointment, I finally cracked Radiation Therapy and You, a pamphlet I grabbed at my consultation with Dr. Chen back in January. It has a picture of a lighthouse on the cover, with a beam of white light aimed at the horizon. This picture is both serene and disturbingly accurate. Here’s what’s inside. (I’m paraphrasing.) Hi! You’re reading this because you have cancer. Just wanted to remind you. In this guide, you’ll find many facts that will help you through your treatment. Q: What is radiation therapy? A: Radiation therapy is a cancer treatment that uses radiation to do therapy. Against cancer. Q: Wh...

It’s been two weeks since I made the bold decision to kinda sorta* be a vegan for, you know, a little while. Last night I dreamed I was in some unnamed war-torn country in which bands of guerrillas charged down the street, setting stores on fire and yelling, “Revolutionaries go to that side of the road, conservatives to that side!” Whichever side you picked, you got shot. In the dream, I was looking for a good gelato place. So, I guess you could say there’s a lot I would do for dairy. I miss lattes and Greek yogurt. And without fish, soy, eggs or milk, it can be hard to get enough protein. I’ve been eating a lot of beans and nuts. If you are imagining a pot of red lentils soaking on my kitchen counter, great, keep imagining that. I’m imagining it too. They’re organic and I got them at my local famer’s market! I brought my own container, so no plastic was involved! Just don’t imagine me at Leo’s Mexican Food ordering a bean and cheese burrito, hold the cheese, while my gr...

1. just imagine the horizontal plane as facebook Margot, my church therapist (not to be confused with my regular therapist, couples therapist, physical therapist or radiation therapist), was talking about the horizontal plane and the vertical plane. The former is the everyday stuff, the latter is the sublime. They intersect and form a cross, she said, unless cross imagery makes you uncomfortable. People at All Saints are always apologizing for sounding too Christian. Fabulous jewelry doesn't make me uncomfortable. The good thing about Shitty Life Events, she said, is that they break you open and allow you to access the vertical plane, where God and Jesus and Buddha and the best book you ever read live. I mean, she said, the horizontal plane is still valid and important. Some people live their whole lives there. (And when I studied Margot’s amazing preppy angora cardigan, I believed that she had an investment in the horizontal plane.) But they’re missing out. ...

"The kind of woman willing to wait is not the kind you want to find waiting." Recently I was introduced to this group and this prompt , which provided a nice distraction from the current clunky-ness of my YA novel. When I was in college, it dawned on me that some of my favorite musicals ( Rent, Sunday in the Park with George ) featured male artists and female muses. The women were portrayed as human and whole, but it still bugged me. Last week an artist I like asked me to pose for some photos, something that never happened back when I was neither particularly gorgeous nor all Diane Arbus-y. So I’ve been thinking about what it means to be a non-passive muse (this artist sees the process as collaborative, which I like). I think it relates to the dilemma of being a patient—how to be a recipient, how to receive things you wouldn’t choose, how to be active anyway? How to be the painting that that stares down the viewer with the painter’s help? I’m pretty sure it’s...

1. the end of the middle of treatment In a couple of hours, I’ll have my sixth and last (hopefullyforeverknockonwood) chemo session. Before I started, I told people I was thinking of chemo as my four-month vacation from worrying about getting cancer, and it’s pretty much been that. I’ve used that time to work and read and write and do some fun things; also to bitch about people who’ve let me down and stir up small dramas with my family and friends. Because hey, cancer treatment still blows, just not in an anxiety-producing way. I also told people who seemed convinced I’d be more sick than I’ve actually been (knockonwood), “Maybe you’re right. Maybe by the end I’ll be so sick of being sick that I’ll trade it in for good physical health and the return of crippling anxiety.” I’m almost there—it would be nice not to have my feeble exercise routine undermined every three weeks. It would be nice to have hair. And, thanks to Effexor, I’m not totally an anxious mess. I’m just a gi...

Take that, all you uber-healthy wheelchair racer types. A few nights ago, because I still can’t go to sleep without images and voices flashing on a screen, I started watching Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan . I remembered the documentary coming out when I was in college, and it had stuck with me—maybe because in elementary school I’d watched Alex: The Life of a Child a bunch of times. It was a TV movie about a girl who died of cystic fibrosis, the disease Bob Flanagan had, and as a kid I thought, Cool! Bob Flanagan was prodded with needles and choked with mucous from the time he was a few months old. He knew about pain. He knew about not being in control of his body. And so his brain did what funny human brains do, and decided to take control by liking pain. (You can’t fire me, I quit.) He became a masochist, and as the documentary reveals in his interactions with his mistress wife, the bottom is always really the one in control. He became a performance artist, ...

Go toward the fluorescent light. Yesterday I went to Terry Wolverton’s annual Poetry Month workshop (more of a craft talk, actually) and reading at Skylight Books . I feel like I’ve been absent from the literary landscape for a while, and when I think about going to events, I think about seeing a lot of people I know a little bit, and explaining (or not) why I’m bald. Mingling takes energy for me even with hair, even if I have some new publication credit in my pocket. But Skylight and Terry’s crew feel like home, so it was a nice way to get my feet wet. I became a fan of some new poets (Ashaki M. Jackson—and Andrew Wessels, whom I work with three days a week but hadn’t read before), and by the end of the panel, I was jotting notes toward some kind of poem of my own. It’s below, and rough. I had a nice weekend, but it was threaded with thoughts of death, the way even some of my nicest weekends are. I watched an episode of Mad Men , in which a woman diagnosed with terminal c...

1. a child’s garden of viruses I grew up hearing stories of sickly children who’d grown up to be famous writers. Unable to leave the house due to vague and romantic illnesses, they read and reread classic literature, hardbound books strewn about them on fluffy Victorian linens. Perhaps they would pause to gaze out at the lonely moors now and then. I also liked the sick kids in books. I never wanted to be rambunctious Laura Ingalls or frolicking Heidi or sassy Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden . I wanted to be blind, well-behaved Mary Ingalls, or Clara in her antique wheelchair, or pale weak Colin. It’s easy to see why I romanticized illness and disability—these kids got to be mysterious and special, while being forgiven any shortcomings. I actually was like the talkative, mildly troublemaking protagonists—the Lauras and Heidis—who tried adults’ patience with their busy imaginations, and therefore I was totally uninterested in them. They were always picnicking with bread a...