Bread and Bread

Last night AK and I binge-watched the first three episodes of Friends from College , a Netflix comedy starring Keegan-Michael Key, Fred Savage, and Annie Parisse as, well, friends from college whose lives get re-intertwined when they all end up in New York. Keegan-Michael Key is Ethan, a literary novelist in search of commercial success. Fred Savage is his agent. Annie Parisse is the woman he’s been casually hooking up with on out-of-town visits for twenty years, despite being married to another college friend, Lisa (Cobie Smulders). The show is clever and real, despite some loopy plotlines (replacing a dead bunny, writing while high, etc.). I enjoyed many literal lols, like when the group tries to figure out whether Marianne’s (Jae Suh Park) experimental, cross-gender production of Streetcar has started or not. Having a creative crisis in a very spacious apartment. I also paused the show a handful of times to nervously ask AK things like “Do you think I’ll ever publish anothe...

Working at Homeboy Industries comes with a certain cachet. Most liberal-to-moderate people love the story of the radical priest who rode his bicycle into the middle of gang fights and refused to see gang members as evil incarnate. Today even law enforcement gets the basic axiom that “hurt people hurt people.” In grant applications, I boast about working with the “least likely to succeed.” Tour groups pull up to our headquarters by the busload, partly because people with tattooed faces are still something of a sideshow attraction, but partly because they’re moved by the idea that all these tatted-up gangsters have changed their lives for the better. Sometimes tourists sit for hours in our postage stamp of a garden, listening to stories of pain, confusion, relapse and redemption from literal killers. So it’s hard to remember what things were like back in the day. In 1988, when Homeboy was a tiny jobs program at Dolores Mission Church, gang members were the subject of fear-mongering ...

Wind River is an intense, beautifully made movie about a hunter and an FBI agent investigating the death of a young woman on a Native American reservation in snow-strangled Wyoming. The landscape is a character in itself, often a villainous one. When 18-year-old Natalie Hansen (Kelsey Asbille) is found barefoot in the snow, six miles from anywhere, raped and bleeding, the medical examiner can’t list homicide as the cause of death because technically the cold killed her. This creates a jurisdictional nightmare, because Agent Jane Banner (Elizabeth Olsen) can’t call in FBI assistance unless it’s officially a murder. But there are only six cops (led by Graham Greene, who plays the part with world-weary humor) on the whole reservation, so without backup, the investigation is fucked. Getting the weather report. The snow holds tracks and covers them. Blizzards shut down roads and obscure views. Long shots of snowmobile caravans making their way across a white snow-desert conjure ima...

Every few months, a shoebox appears on the reception desk at Homeboy. It’s covered in paper printed with grainy photos. Sharpie or ballpoint pen explains who died: someone’s mother or brother or homie. A few times it has been a trainee, although never one I knew personally. Once it was a baby. Rarely is it anyone over fifty. There’s a slit in the top of the box for folded bills. At this year’s mandatory open-enrollment meeting, our insurance brokers talked about HMOs vs. PPOs, inpatient vs. outpatient, FSAs and co-pays and preventative care and cancer. Everyone watched with glazed eyes. When the brokers got to the life insurance section and mentioned funerals, the room buzzed. Everyone knew exactly how much a funeral cost. I didn’t know Roxy well, but I didn’t have to ask “Which one was she, again? Did she work in the bakery?” The first thing I noticed about Roxy was that she was beautiful—like undeniably, Disney-princess beautiful, with big dark eyes, dimples and long strai...

I’m a believer in the close read—in getting to know a book, play or film so intimately that you can consider the meaning of every detail—but I’m not much of a practitioner. It’s true what librarians’ bumper stickers say: So many books, so little time. But if you want to study every nuance of a thing, I highly recommend hanging out with a toddler. The catch is that the thing in question will probably be the Minions movie or a picture book about construction vehicles (ask me about the difference between a front-end loader and an excavator). Boat! It’s a little embarrassing how excited I was when Moana appeared on Netflix one day recently. Finally, a movie we could both get into watching 17,000 times! I hadn’t seen it, but I listen to the soundtrack a lot, and I sneaked in a couple of songs between “The Wheels on the Bus” and “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” on the Tidal playlist I created for Dash. Toddler criteria for liking something seems to be “Do I already like it?” When the...

Confession: I joined Weight Watchers. Why is this a confession and not just a statement of what-I-did yesterday? A bunch of reasons: Canned fruit platter anyone? Feminism: As I’ve said before, good feminists are supposed to love their bodies and, if they want to get in better shape, train for triathlons or something. They’re not supposed to give money and energy to the Weight Loss Industrial Complex. Despite feeling a bit doughy these days, I do actually love my body. I don’t always like it, but I love it. Once you hit a certain age and/or have survived a disease or two, you have genuine gratitude for every day without organ failure. But I’m not so great at treating my body like I love it. Eating M&Ms (which, let’s be honest, are the Charles Shaw of chocolate) by the truckload is not love. It's a salad bowl and a melting pot! It’s so middle-brow: Weight Watchers sounds like something a forty-year-old mom should do, not a vibrant young person like…oh wait. A...

1. first, let us meditate on how we suck I’m about to blog about yet another podcast. This strikes me as a problem—where are the books and movies in my life?—but arguably the bigger problem is that I think everything is a problem. During my Drama Years, I learned to be more forgiving of myself. I thought it was because I’d finally discovered the Meaning of Life or something, but recently my therapist suggested that I get really anxious about medical stuff because I think it’s the only thing I’m allowed to have Big Feelings about. Like, if it’s not a matter of life and death or a few central relationships, what business do I have caring? Doesn’t stressing about work just make me a banal cog in the capitalist machine? Isn’t my need for peace and a clean house and writing time just a first world problem? So instead I worry that seasonal allergies are cancer. I just did a mandatory transcendental meditation session—long, very Homeboy-specific story—and it felt so great and necess...

1. genius vs. more geniusy genius A couple of years ago I went all the way to Italy to learn that you can’t write a memoir by pasting together a bunch of journal entries. Even if they were pretty well written journal entries, if you do say so yourself, and even if you were kind of trying to write them from an imaginary point in the future as an exercise in convincing yourself you had a future…they are still not a memoir. Dani Shapiro kindly suggested that my journal entries might not be as useful as I wanted them to be, but her advice took another two years to sink in. It took two years to walk that much farther away from the events I was writing about (infertility-miscarriage-cancer, that old tune) so I could see them more clearly. Actually it's been forty. Recently my friend Dan and I started a writing group. It’s had a couple of hiccups getting off the ground. One member was pregnant and got intense migraines that kept her from looking at screens. Another got ...

Like all my favorite novels, the podcast Shit Town is about a lot of things: the tension between home and the larger world; the many sides to every story; what it m eans to care for another person; the curse of genius; depression; time; clocks. Like all my favorite novels, it's a mystery whose answers are both bigger and heartbreakingly smaller than the questions initially posed. It is a work of art, and you should listen if you haven't already. But today I'm blogging about Chapter VI: " Since everyone around here thinks I’m a queer anyway." Our protagonist, John B. McLemore, embodies many paradoxes (worldly hick, tender asshole), but he especially straddles a generational and regional divide between Out Gay/Bi Man and Shadow-Dwelling Pervert. I listened to Chapter VI with a growing recognition that was one part empathy, one part dread.  Uncle Bob was a redhead too. My Uncle Bob wasn't a suicidal mad genius. He didn't have gold buried on his prop...

From my travel journal: Thursday, our first in Mexico City, we kept it mellow and walked around Polanco, which all the guidebooks say is the "Beverly Hills of Mexico City." It's true that I saw a BMW motorcycle and lots of professional dog walkers, but Polanco has more urban flare than BH. We spent a lot of time at Lincoln Park; there's a statue of Lincoln here that says "a gift from the people of the United States to the people of Mexico." Nearby a store had hung a #fucktrump banner. Better than a wall. We stayed up talking to the friends we're staying with, Laura and her wife, Molly. I've known Laura since I was a little kid; our moms were good friends, and hers passed away recently, from Alzheimer's. Laura said that navigating her mom's illness would have been twice as hard without her sister Lindsay, and that's part of why they wanted a second kid (Cora is four, Evan is 20 months). It's sobering, but it did push me more in...