Bread and Bread

This weekend I felt like I got a small toe back in the literary loop. Saturday I met Sandra Hunter at Buttercelli , a lovely little bakery that anyone not from L.A. would make relentless fun of. There are subsections of baked goods for vegans, paleo people and the gluten-free. I ate something from a menu represented by a lioness mascot. I'm not totally sure what that meant. Vegan and low-sugar, maybe? Like buttah. Not like gluten. (After getting good cancer-test results last week [!], but flying a little too fast and loose around the cheese empanadas at Leslie's short film wrap party on Saturday night, I think I should follow the lead of vegan/low-sugar lionesses. I should probably also talk to my therapist about the patina of control and reward/punishment issues that overlays my generally good-but-imperfect eating habits.) Anyway, Sandra's first novel, Losing Touch , just came out, and I'm liking it a lot so far. It's about a an Indian-English man whose f...

1. sea glass and glendora I’m just now getting around to posting the entry I wrote about last weekend, which tells you what my week was like. Let’s just say I spent most of it working on a federal grant, and by the end of the day yesterday, I was having Republican-ish thoughts about government bureaucracies. (If you work for the Department of Labor and are reading this, that was just a little joke! I totally voted for Obama! ) But it’s Good Friday, and I’m determined to have a good Friday. I worked a half day, went to Shoshana’s yoga class—my favorite—this morning, bought some berries at the Eagle Rock farmers market and did a little bit of writing, even though I neglected my YA novel yet again. I’m feeling refreshed-adjacent, and I have the berries to prove it. So, anyway, last weekend: AK and I had planned to go to Catalina with Pedro and Stephen on Sunday, but when we found out it was $35 each way, not round trip, we all cheaped out and ended up in San Pedro instead. W...

1. self-care in red boots Last weekend was busy. The week that followed it was busy. It included a book club meeting at which we discussed the NPR story we’d all heard about how only white-collar people say they’re busy. People who work three minimum-wage jobs just say they’re tired. By the time I left work yesterday, I was both. Which means I was in a weakened state, and it didn’t take long for me to turn my writing evening at Philippe’s into an is-it-scar-tissue-or-cancer Googling session. It’s the absolute worst thing I can do for my mental health, but it’s like I have an addiction that’s long past the point of making me feel good— and pretty much never did. Leave it to a Klein to find an addiction that was never fun in the first place. I need 'em like a hole in my head. I need 'em to heal the hole in my head. It bugs me that my mental health is so precarious, but at least I got my Googling bender out of my system, and I decided to devote the rest of my week...

Last night AK and I had pizza and sangria at new friend/Homeboy volunteer Kendra’s house, where we snuggled her new dog and watched My Cat from Hell . Like all makeover shows, it’s not really the cat/dog/kid/house/restaurant who needs to be made over, but the couple trying to wrangle the cat/dog/kid/house/restaurant. And for some reason, the people we seem to trust most to administer the necessary tough love are burly biker dudes with shiny sunglasses (I’ve been watching Restaurant: Impossible at the gym). One part punk, one part military. Or if not them, flamboyant gay men or tough British nannies. Apparently meanness is acceptable from those types. We like it less on naggy (American) women. And we don’t like men who refuse to kick our asses, I guess. I don’t know, this analysis may break down, since the main lesson of My Cat from Hell is Buy Your Cat A Cat Tree. There is a framed picture of a dog in the background. And you wonder why the cat is pissed? My friend Wendy a...

I’ve been working like a motherfucker lately. Or perhaps like a no-one-fucker because when you work a lot, there’s less time for fucking. When things were slow and same-old-same-old sometimes at P&W, I occasionally envied people with “real” jobs—I had a kind of Mad Men image of striding into an office, rolling up my shirtsleeves and clacking away at a keyboard as part of some larger mission. Work is so American and noble. Let's get to work here at this beautifully designed modern coffee table. Work is such a human-sized, fortunate, un-existential problem to have. It’s not an exclusively first-world problem, but at its best it can be kind of adorable. And now that work is so very much in front of me, the problem of too much work feels bourgeois and un-artistic and banal and a silly thing to stress about because I have my health (at least I think, knockonwood), and I’m mildly embarrassed and ashamed that I’m letting work stress get to me. But how could anything you d...

I’ve been thinking about space lately. I’m finally living the Eastside dream I’ve had since I started making pilgrimages to Silver Lake in college . I start the day with a train ride that takes me across trestles and over a cement river. I eat lunch in the middle of 1938’s idea of China—neon-outlined pagodas and bamboo lettering. And then I go home to Highland Park’s rolling hills and gold-pink light. I took a long walk on Saturday and found an old glass-works studio I’d never known about. Old New Chinatown. Sometimes, even now that it’s (nearly) all familiar, L.A. still takes my breath away. Other times I wonder if the magical space I longed for in my twenties is made magical only by my longing. It’s like having a crush on someone and then marrying them. Your love dives deeper than you ever knew possible, but the exotic twinkle fades. A little while ago, a writer I know, who recently moved to L.A., asked her Facebook friends what their favorite coffee shops to write in w...

I just realized that my last four Facebook posts were about the rain. I’m a predictable SoCal native—like my cat OC (also a native), I am surprised and a little unnerved when water starts falling out of the sky. I’m one of those freaked-out drivers you hate. I stay home and ruin the economy, although I did clean the house. Eventually. When you put up barriers, you miss out on the love, Grumpy Cat. First I went back to bed and read Sharp Objects — another creepy-good Gillian Flynn novel—until noon, and felt guilty about it, naturally, because people with more important lives don’t do this, right? I might have a mild case of SAD, or I might be mildly under-caffeinated. I griped at AK for having an overbooked day. I thought about how I would be more confident if I lost six pounds. It’s March 1, which is a great day to be ambitious about such things, except today feels like gloom, not rebirth. I listened to This American Life, an old one from 2002, where they spent the da...

1. homie down There was a girl in my high school Spanish class, Jayne Milton, who was always running out of class in tears, often about some boy. I found it kind of braggy, like she was trying to show everyone how exciting her life was. I was always the Quiet Girl with nothing going on. Until I became the Jayne Milton of P&W’s California office and discovered that being the Drama Girl is no picnic either. Apologies to Jayne Milton and to Jamie. I wanted to work at Homeboy partly because it’s a place where even the hardest and quietest people cry, and it’s okay. But I was also hoping that I could take a long hiatus from Jayne Milton theatrics. Then I got Sizzle ’s email, subject line “news.” Tracy passed away. Her brother called me today to tell me her parents found her in her bed this morning. This Tracy . Photo by Robert, known on Tracy's blog as The Hotness. And even though she blogged on this blog about having terminal diseases, I thought they were t...

I spent a piece of Sunday afternoon at L.A. Zine Fest, primarily at the urging of Brodie and his friends, a cadre of friendly ladies with punk hair and vintage clothing. It occupied a big garage/warehouse-type space at the Helms Bakery Building, and it was a little overwhelming. I’m not well versed in the zine world, and I wanted to read everything with a funny title or a cute cartoon on the cover or an interesting binding or a friendly person selling it. Which is to say, pretty much everything. That would have made it easy to get a kind of quick, general shot of inspiration and leave having purchased nothing. But I reminded myself that staying part of the literary community means diving deep and being at least a little bit extroverted. So I made my rounds and ended up with a handful of awesome-seeming zines. Aurora Lady's zine from Fair Dig Press . I heard her read Wednesday night, and she was funny and vulnerable and great. Because I like to draw, I am so tempted to...

1. swimming with sharks When I was a camp counselor, we had to pass a swim test in order to get a wristband that would allow us in the deep end of the pool. I dog-paddled the length of the pool sloppily and then treaded water for five full minutes. I got my wristband. I was proud of myself for being less tired than the counselor who chain smoked. So Diana Nyad—the woman who swam from Cuba to Florida on her fifth try, at age sixty-four—and I don’t have a ton in common. But I cried when I read this part of Ariel Levy’s New Yorker profile of her: “My journey now is to find some sort of grace in the face of this defeat,” Nyad told an audience a month after her third failed attempt. “Sometimes if cancer has won, if there’s death and we have no choice, then grace and acceptance are necessary. But that ocean is still there. I don’t want to be the crazy woman who does this for years and years and tries and fails and tries and fails, but I can swim from Cuba to Florida and I will swi...

I’m sitting at Swork right now, trying to start Draft 3 of my YA novel. The good news is that my agent liked Draft 2 and gave me some good notes, and Swork has almond milk. The bad news is I feel like I’ve forgotten how to write. Maybe the new job is filling my brain with Grant Voice, or maybe I’ve just been in nonfiction mode for too long. To get some of the right kind of voice in my head, I Googled Andrea Seigel, whose blog and novel The Kid Table are wry and well observed. I think I’m aiming for a voice adjacent to hers. I hoped she had a short story or something online to get me started. Once I saw her and her cute BF in South Pasadena while I was on my way to a particularly grueling couples therapy session. That was a bad idea. Because what I found instead was this interview , in which she discusses her anxiety about growing old alone and childless while engaged and pregnant. She says: Our discussion about the baby, was “Maybe we should stop using protection. ...

The other day a Facebook friend of mine posted that she was excited for the lunar new year because she needed a do-over on her resolutions. I’m always angling for the same. I’ve been doing okay with my resolutions (although how can it be time to wash my car again ALREADY?), but January left me ragged and exhausted. With my brain attending to two different jobs—and certainly not my writing—I had newfound sympathy for AK, who’s been dividing her time between her paying gig and her therapist hours for almost two years now. I experienced that constant shifting of worlds when I was a working grad student, and it’s a bit of what I was getting at with The Commuters, but back then I had more energy and lived off jalapeño poppers from Jack in the Box.   I think jalapeño poppers might be some kind of official rock bottom in the self-care department. Official handing-off of P&W office keys to new assistant Brandi. Jamie put together a lovely sendoff for me on Wednesday, with ...

This weekend marked my last P&W event—after a week of “lasts” that included my last trip to the Westwood Petco for kitty litter—and I felt acutely how much I’ll miss being in a room full of friendly writers who instantly get me. I know I’ll be in other rooms full of writers, but not in quite the same way. Then one of them told me she could never take a job as a grant writer, because it would be too tedious for her creative mind. She also complained to our intern about the smallness of P&W’s grants. Apparently, she would like more money but is above asking for it. So at the end of the day, I was thinking about how I’d miss eleven out of twelve people in that room. We spent half the day on writing prompts, one of which was “If you were granted three wishes, what would they be?” The writer who brought it led us in a guided visualization exercise, in which we encountered a genie at a garage sale. Here’s what I came up with. You can't wish for more wishes, but you can wi...