Bread and Bread

My self-care has taken a dive these past few days, as I was mired in the stress and absurdity of a federal grant while still working part-time. Also the aforementioned medical tests for me and for Dash, all of which had good results (knockonwood), but which sent cortisol pumping through my veins. Exercise started to seem like a distant memory, and soon I was cramming pastries from Elsa’s Bakery into my face the way Dash crams his (much more nutritious) hands into his. And I haven’t been writing anything that doesn’t come with an RFP.* Sweet, sweet pan dulce. I got over the most arduous hump of federal grant (I hope), and today I actually ate five servings of fruits and vegetables, and took a walk. To Starbucks, but still. On the way home from therapy today, I was listening to one of my new favorite podcasts, The Longest Shortest Time , which is pretty much a parenting-themed This American Life. I like it because it focuses on parents as people, which should be a given, but ...

Here is what happens in my favorite episode of Maron : Marc (a stand-up comic in life and on the show) goes on the road and checks into a La Quinta Inn. When the WiFi in his room doesn’t work, the clerk at the front desk (a deadpan Tig Notaro) tells him that sometimes the connection goes out between 8 pm and 12 am. And also between 12 am and 8 pm. But there’s a coffee shop down the street if he wants to watch his porn there. I've had good times and bad times at the La Quinta Inn in Fresno. Marc isn’t trolling for porn. He’s Googling “mouth cancer” because he has just discovered a large, suspicious black sore in his mouth. His imagination is already spinning out, and seeing internet images of malignant mouths doesn’t help things. He ruminates about death with his podcast guests. He sees a doctor who shrugs and says “I dunno. But black isn’t good.” By the time he takes the stage that night, he’s half come to terms with dying. In a nod to Tig Notaro’s actual “I have cancer” p...

1. fever isn’t such a new thing When I had my one-on-one consultation with Dani at Sirenland , I debated out loud whether it made sense to end my memoir with a celebratory chapter about Dash’s birth. “It’s a book about learning to live with uncertainty, and I don’t want to wrap it up too neatly. I think there should still be some uncertainty.” She answered more as a parent than as a writer. “Oh, there’s still plenty of uncertainty.” After B and I broke up, I tried to nail my world down, even as I let it open up. I asked my landlord for bars on my windows, even though I lived on the second floor. He told me to give it a few months. It was like he knew. Then I met AK and fell in love. The little storytelling voice inside me said, This is your happy ending. Two bad things happened to you: Your mom died and B broke up with you. But now you finally get to live happily ever after. I was twenty-eight. Pop off in case of fire. I wouldn’t have expressed it so sm...

1. nice work if you can get it It's all fun and postcard views till Mt. Vesuvius gets pissed off again. This is the view from my window right now (well, it was when I started this post). You might be thinking: What is someone with an eight-week-old child doing tossing back cappuccinos on the Amalfi Coast of Italy? It was certainly a question I asked myself. As with many things in my literary life, I applied to this workshop called Sirenland on a whim. I heard about it through One Story ( Hannah Tinti is one of the conference co-founders), a literary magazine which recently sent me an encouraging rejection. In my mind, “encouraging rejection from One Story ” = “various famous writers really want me to hang out with them in Italy.” The pictures of Positano, Italy, where it took place, looked pretty. There was a mermaid motif. I get along well with mermaids. Trash can at Le Sirenuse. I felt bad putting trash in it. I found out I was accepted to Sirenland on t...

1. watching yourself watch the leaves Right now—when I’m not reading People Magazine or federal grant proposal requests—I’m reading Devotion, in which Dani Shapiro tries to address her lurking anxiety through a spiritual lens that includes the Orthodox Judaism of her childhood and a variety of Eastern practices that can (or maybe can’t) be boiled down to mindfulness. Read this book if you're the kind of person who's drawn to AA meetings even though you barely drink. I picked up the book because I’ll be taking a workshop with Dani Shapiro soon, and I didn’t feel like reading her more recent memoir, Still Writing, because reading about writing sometimes stresses me out. Devotion really speaks to me, though. Some of Dani’s anxiety is a holdover from a serious illness her son had as an infant, and my own anxiety (well, arguably everyone’s) is equally bound up in birth and death. As grateful as I am for the medical and psychological approaches that have helped me tac...

1. acceptance. speeches. I’ve been thinking about humility, and not just because we’re at the tail end of awards season, a time when people make tearful speeches about how humbled they are. I really liked Common and John Legend’s acceptance speech for the Selma song. They were humble not just in the way that is the opposite of bragging, which is how I’ve thought about humility in the past, but in a way that acknowledges they didn’t get there alone. They are part of a continuing history of struggle. They are part of a community, and they’re holding a statue because others have taken punches or even bullets.** What I’m trying to say is, I think humility is knowing you’re just a character in a story. Humility is arriving at a chapter in that story a different person than you were on page one, and the values you had back then almost feel irrelevant, or at least foreign. What I’m trying to say is, on Oscar night? Here is how I watched. Relax. 2. santa barbara In De...

This morning I woke up with the thought: If not for Martin Luther King, Jr., I wouldn’t be living the great life I’m living. I wouldn’t be able to move through the world easily with my Mexican-American esposa, hoping/planning to adopt a kid, having checked the “any/all ethnicities” box on our adoption preferences. This was followed immediately by the thought: And if not for white privilege, we probably wouldn’t have been able to finance any of it. Welcome to the smoothie of gratitude and guilt that is my brain. It’s okay, I’ve come to find it endearing. We spent the weekend in Oakland*, site of historic and recent civil rights activism. With Pedro and Stephen, we walked the quiet Sunday streets downtown, looking for a place to have a late lunch amid shops with boarded up windows. On the sidewalk, in front of Gold Rush-era storefronts selling artisanal canvas bags or perfectly curated vintage Southwest sweaters, was the repeated stencil: Black lives matter. Downtown O...