Bread and Bread

1. my health and fitness app may have a few things in common with the fictional mean god in my head Good morning, internet. I have been counting the minutes till this morning for about two weeks now. We spent last weekend on a short, lovely trip to the Bay Area for our friend Mikko’s dance party—sort of a fortieth birthday party, sort of a mini summer camp, sort of a party to tell all his friends and family members how much he loved them (a small piece of me was like, Is this the part where Mikko tells us he has an incurable disease? Luckily, there was no such part). Everybody dance now. NOW! Mikko, Chris and AK dance so good they're blurry. We also got to see Pedro and Stephen’s new West Oakland flat. We’re so sad that they’re not in L.A. anymore, but at least they were courteous enough to move to the one city where ninety percent of our non-L.A. friends seem to have congregated. I love me some one-stop shopping. West Oakland walk with Sugar the sweetheart p...

Lovely cover, lovely book. Sandra Hunter ’s Losing Touch is a quiet book that unfolds as life does—in lonely moments and poignant ones; matters of life and death are written in cups of tea, mechanical beds and long distance phone calls. Nevertheless, Hunter’s first novel began as something of a thriller for me, because something is wrong with protagonist Arjun Kulkani’s leg, and he has good reason to believe it could be a type of motor neuron disease, his family’s genetic curse (British doctors initially dismiss the immigrant’s self-diagnosis, because they believe a disease that’s common in India must be the result of some third-world problem that could not manifest in England). As a hypochondriac whose fears have, on occasion, proven right, I was filled with dread on Arjun’s behalf. Each chapter is named for a symptom: “Reduced Deep Tendon Reflexes” or “Weakness of the Facial and Tongue Muscles.” Like any slow, degenerative illness, the cruelty of Arjun’s disease is that, in...

We’re back at the airport in Nadi, Fiji, where the guys in aloha shirts playing calypso guitar are giving me flashbacks to last week’s blues. It’s hot, crowded and dirty—there are random chip canisters and plastic plates scattered about, and the lighting and the signage have the aura of cheapness, yet nothing here is actually cheap. I just paid six Fiji dollars (however much that is) for my third-choice flavor of melted ice cream. So yeah, we’re ready to be home, although after my Huka Falls meltdown, I did manage to pull it together again. AK was sweet to me, told me the turbulent blue and white water was like our feelings—she was jokey but touched by her own metaphor and the bigness of nature all around us. AK in the backseat with her Dramamine, Cheryl with her schnoz, Emily at the wheel. We drove back to Auckland through the cow-speckled countryside. AK slept in the backseat and Emily and I talked about the comforts of history. “It’s all stories,” she said. “That’s ...

The saddest selfie ever! It’s our last full day in NZ. Right now we’re at Huka Falls, a highway-wide river whose white and pale-blue rapids generate fifteen percent of NZ’s power. And I’m the idiot who’s on a park bench journaling and crying because of all the baby stuff, and lack thereof, we have to go back to tomorrow. AK and I talked about it in the hotel a little bit this morning—poor Emily. We talked about AK’s dislike of Zoey and Jim’s tactics and my feeling that my calling in life is to weather heartbreak, and the absurd romanticism of that idea. The shitty thing about open adoption, and the reason I will never be poly-amorous, is that it’s not enough for two people to be on solid ground, to love each other and to have worked through our shit. Three or four people have to be there at the same time. And it pisses me off, endlessly, that what’s good enough for other people isn’t good enough when I do it.

1. spaaaahhh After we all finished our travel journaling Thursday night at the Irish pub, we kept talking, and Rachel came up again. I asked Emily how, exactly, that year had shaped her. She was living in Moscow, Idaho, and teaching in Pullman, Washington, a place she hated, and Rachel’s death simply but vividly underscored the fact that life is too short to waste. She didn’t want to fuck around, but she was also kind of trapped. A coworker who had also lost a good friend told her: “This kind of experience gives you a clarity not everyone has access to. But it fades—the challenge is to keep it close to you and let it inform your life.” So Emily bided her time and went to therapy and the gym, and made herself the kind of person who would be ready to take full advantage of better things when they come along. I want to let the whole baby/cancer experience inform my life the same way. I don’t have the luxury of dreaming my life will be perfect and waiting until then to enjoy my...

1. rock, mud, logs and europeans Here is my mini-mini version of Wild (probably—I still haven’t read it. But I want/plan to!). A grueling two-day hike is like every life journey: If you could see what you were getting into, you probably wouldn’t sign up for it, but in the end you’re glad you did it. We rented a car (left side of the road—I was happy to be a backseat passenger) and drove through the sheep and cattle pastures of the NZ countryside. NZ is a big dairy exporter, and these cows look much happier than the ones you see on the side of the 5 freeway in smelly Hanford, California. These cows gambol . Happy as cows in spring. From the little town of Thames, we turned off into the parkland of the Coromandel Peninsula and began our backpacking journey through the ferny forest. It seemed one part NorCal, one part tropical rainforest. We went up, up, up, taking turns wearing Emily’s too-big backpack, whose straps dug into my collarbone. Doing something physical an...

1. emily 2.0 Today was our chill-in-Auckland, get-used-to-the-time-difference day. Emily loves it here and is sick of Pullman, Washington, where she lives and teaches. Immediately we could see the happiness roll off of her—not annoying giddiness, but true, hard-won happiness. I think she’s sort of declared Auckland her safe space, where only good things happen, like I have with our house (this started when I used to get home from work and it was too late in the day for doctors to call with bad news), except a bigger, cooler version. Emily is a good role model for this week. She dresses like an older, updated version of Daria, in jewel tones, perfectly fitted down jackets and arty T-shirts. Her apartment is spare but charming. A kiwi made from salvaged fabric perches on the back of her couch. A small tag on his gray foot says his name is Sean Finnegan. Sean's brethren in a shop window. After AK and Emily’s friend Rachel died, Emily found herself a therapist who helpe...

The days leading up to our New Zealand trip were kind of a triathlon of adulthood: I spent the last Friday in May getting four grants and reports ready to submit, packing for an international red-eye flight and texting with the expectant mother of twins. Twin bunnies! The latter, whom I will call Zoey, emailed us late Wednesday night. In the adoption world, twins almost always = scam. If Zoey was running a scam, though, it fell into the really convincing, non-financial genre. I talked to her Thursday night, and it was like talking to an old friend: She was funny, straight-forward and down-to-earth. She was baffled by the behavior of her roomie at the hospital where she was on bed rest, who’d fractured her pelvis while jet-skiing at twenty weeks. “Who jet skis when they’re twenty weeks pregnant?” Zoey said. I agreed. I didn’t add that there are lots of birthmoms who do hard drugs while pregnant (although there are many more who don’t). Zoey was refreshingly responsible,...

1. adventures in public transportation I got on the Purple Line at the Normandie Station. Linda and I had just spent an hour and a half drinking soju and nibbling on an immense potato pancake at a Koreatown bar called Toe Bang. (The other place we were considering was called School Food Blooming Roll. You gotta love K-Town.)  Toe Bang: best potato pancake east of Fairfax. The Purple Line was always quiet and relatively empty at this time of night. Those sharing my car included a guy muttering to himself and smoking a cigarette, and a very tall, very thin man with a pencil mustache, slouch boots, and a feminine V-neck sweater. He (she?) seemed like a proud character from a novel about the marginal lives of aging disco queens. For some reason, the Purple Line wasn’t running all the way to Union Station, and it took me lot of minutes and some backtracking to realize this. When I transferred at the MacArthur Park Station, a white-haired man shuffled up to me and mumble...

Happy Cinco de Mayo, everyone. Today Angie at Homeboy Bakery was decked out in red, white and green, and almost announced the day’s pan dulce options in Spanish. At the last minute, she switched to English because she felt bad for all the non-Mexicans and non-Spanish-speaking Mexicans who wouldn’t understand her. I’ll be celebrating in my preferred crowd-averse way by having an Olvera Street margarita tomorrow. At least that’s the plan. An authentic Mexican who does not speak Spanish (that I know of). For now, here’s my bimonthly book roundup. I’m about two thirds of the way through Mermaid in Chelsea Creek by Michelle Tea, which is a great book—very sweet and magical—but I wasn’t in the mood to read it tonight because I saw her Facebook post about being pregnant. She’s written unflinchingly about the highs and lows of trying to get knocked up, and it’s taken her a long time, and she is an incredibly nice and generous person, and I am absolutely rooting for her and her baby-to...

1. take a walk My new thing is walking home. I’ve done it three times now, first because the Gold Line was broken, later because it seemed more efficient than driving to the gym. On Tuesday I took a new route up Griffin Avenue, which runs through Lincoln Heights, Montecito Heights , and the southeast side of Highland Park. The day was too hot, but the light was perfect, that pinkish gold that filmmakers love. The houses in Lincoln Heights wore their decades in layers. Shingles, stucco, rickety bedrooms built over carports. The makeovers got nicer and more up-to-code as I moved north. Walking a long street is always a series of ethnographic studies, as you make your way through waves of immigration and gentrification. House on haunted hill. I discovered that the grassy no-man’s-parkland near the Arroyo is where old TV’s go to die. The whole walk, I felt like I was witnessing the last of something. Maybe because history was so compressed all around me, maybe because re-urb...