Bread and Bread

A year and a half ago, I invited some friends to guest blog about a day in their lives . I’m always curious about the nitty-gritty of how people make things work. My mantra lately has been Everyone’s life is secretly held together with duct tape. Since today was my first official day as a full-time working mom,* I am currently interested in how I’m going to make things work. Specifically, when will I write? My options seem to be 5:30 am, lunchtime or 8:30 pm. None of these slots is ideal, but today I’m trying out the latter. And I’m easing into it with a Blog As You Are post of my own because that’s all. I. Can. Manage. 6:05 am: Wake up with pan dulce hangover from yesterday’s mini shindig in our backyard. Vow that this time I really, really will take care of my body. Wonder not for the first time if there is a 12-step group for people who eat well seven days out of eight but then really, really fuck shit up on the eighth day. Feed cats. Feed baby. Feed self. 8:10 ...

Well, I gave Kathy’s prompt (“Fresca”) a try, and I almost liked what I wrote. I read up on Fresca soda online and learned that it was sweetened with cyclamates, which were banned in 1969, because studies in rats suggested that a human who consumed 350 cans of Fresca a day might have an increased risk of bladder cancer. Corinthians 1 restaurant knows how to party. I had this idea for a story about someone who’d grown up with a birth defect because her mother had been addicted to Fresca while pregnant. But because a Fresca addiction is so absurd, she tells everyone she’s a thalidomide baby. Then she meets a real thalidomide baby and gets in trouble. I’m still sort of into that idea, but I didn’t like my story enough to post it. The tone has to be just right in a story like that. For a while now I’ve been interested in the idea of genuine tragedy that is the result of an absurd event. Like, what if you lost someone you loved because an actual anvil fell on them? What would...

The audience-participation component of my Ask Me a Question/Give Me a Prompt series hasn’t totally panned out (although it’s not too late, Breadketeers!), so today I borrowed one from Brian Kiteley’s The 4 a.m. Breakthrough. In my case, it’s more like the 5 a.m. Just Write Something. Write a short piece of fiction that depends on a character’s precise perception of or reaction to the color red. We pulled our van up to the white-curbed loading zone, that sacred space, at noon. Gomez was driving and being a dick. He was usually a pretty kick-back guy, but something about Sunset Boulevard and all its valets darting into lanes like deer brought out the worst in him. He’d been shouting at the windshield since La Cienega. “You think you can haul the carpet up all these stairs, Shannon?” We all called each other by our last names, and Shannon was mine, but when Gomez said it, it sounded like a first name. A girl’s name. And that’s fine, I am a girl, but he made it sound like a b...

For the first installment in my Ask Me a Question/Give Me aPrompt series, loyal reader #7, Fresca , asks: Why do you continue to blog in this era of FB, tweets, etc.? (I used to blog a lot, mostly went away for a couple years, came back and am interested in who else has stayed/come back/started blogging. It feels so...old fashioned!) Like somebody famous said (Joan Didion? Or maybe she was the one who said “Take Fountain”), I write to figure out what I think. When AK and I fight, it’s not unusual for me to send her a text or email later in the day to sort out my thoughts. I’m sure she loves it. As a writer of mostly fiction (at least until my memoir-in-progress cropped up), the blog is a nice place to sort through my thoughts on such nonfiction miscellany as Depressing Things In The News, My Various Neuroses, God, Books and Really Bad Reality TV. Not necessarily in that order. Probably in the opposite of that order. Remind me to tell you about Marriage Bootcamp: Br...

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...