Bread and Bread

Back in the day, whenever a woman ran for office, some dude would fret about what would happen when she got her period (now we’ve found both more nuanced and more blatantly hateful ways to take swings at women running for office). The idea being that there were only two ways of being in this world: cerebral, level-headed Enlightenment machine or crazy, Medusa-haired PMS monster. Me on Thursday. I haven’t gotten my period in almost five years*, but if this week was any indication, my moods are still going strong. I will never be a level-headed Enlightenment machine—as mythical a creature as Medusa anyway—and, because of the way I was raised, I’ll probably never see that as completely fine. Even though it is. I am thinking of the time I told our couples therapist I was hesitant to take anti-depressants because I didn’t want to put chemicals in my body. She said, “There are already chemicals in your body. You get to choose whether you want to flood your body with cortisol or Z...

1. The girl who learned to shoplift from her mother builds websites for old family photos: Here is the alcoholic grandfather and the aunt with pancreatic cancer and that Christmas everyone posed with faces as serious as the 19 th century. Digitization as affirmation— her story will not be stolen. 2. The archivist’s friend was stabbed leaving a piano concert at 23. Her blood slick black in the dim parking lot. The man moved on to guns and the archivist nursed a fear of flickering street lamps. 3. The child who fled his empty house for the thrum of the street stabs a man in prison but sends his daughter to college and watches her fall from an airplane, holds his breath until her parachute opens. She flies toward him, a nylon flower billowing behind her. 4. The ex-gang member considered his past a fading tattoo until old enemies came for his son. The boy’s headstone shows him stone-faced; the cursive promise...

Here’s a problem that, like much of what I write about on this blog, exists mostly in my head. But that’s why I have a blog, so here goes: What if I should not be writing a memoir? Flashback to November 2012. Coming off the Great Mind-Destroying Miscarriage of 2011, I was diagnosed with cancer, and my third thought (after Am I going to die? and Will I die before I get to be a mom? ) was: Fuck it, I’m writing a memoir. I know that a memoir needs to be more than just the story of several shitty things happening in a row, and soon enough, I found a theme for my series of unfortunate events. My memoir, in its current half-draft form, is about how my mom’s death led me to worry I didn’t deserve parent-child love, and how I eventually convinced myself otherwise. It’s also about what a bitch imagination is—how storytelling can be the hypochondria that nearly kills you, or the hopeful meta-memoir that saves you. How’s that for an elevator pitch? When I write it out like that, I...

1. people vs. principles I’ve been thinking a lot about ideological vs. relational ways of moving through the world. Bear with me. I was raised to put the former on a pedestal, and in my unpublished novel (one of them...), the protagonist takes a stand against foreign adoption and risks her relationship with her partner. I still think it’s a good novel, but I’m no longer interested in critiquing foreign adoption in any kind of definitive way, and I now give hard side-eye to people who stand on principle at the expense of their loved ones. For many years, AK’s mom—a Catholic-raised Mexican-American woman who currently attends an evangelical Christian church—wasn’t really down with AK being gay. Because the bible and all that. But in practice, she always accepted AK and, later, me. I came to understand that while her ideological world is homophobic, she’s relational by nature. Ideology may close borders or open them; relationality (spell check tells me this isn’t a word) usually ...

In keeping with last year’s pseudo-resolution to focus on my strengths rather than my deficits, I’m making a list of…well, “accomplishments” isn’t the right word, because I’m always trying to be more process-oriented and to just be period (while also trying desperately to accomplish all of the things). Most of the items on the list below are just milestones in ongoing challenges. Of all the generic inspirational quotes I might want to paint on a chalkboard in a curly font for 2018, Progress Not Perfection would be the winner. #ThingsToDoodleInYourBulletJournal With that caveat, here are my favorite things—about myself and in the arts—of 2017. Six things I’m proud of: 1. Joining 826LA/knowing when it was time to grow: I was happy at Homeboy Industries. Or so I told myself. I’d gotten the hang of grant writing and I liked my coworkers. So what if there was a low hum of sexism and an organizational culture that didn’t cater to quiet worker bees like myself? I’d built a ...

Everything Cheryl does, she’s totally joking and completely serious.             --AK 2,628,000 minutes 2.6 million moments so dear 2,628,000 minutes How do you measure, measure five years? In new jobs , in boob jobs , in blog posts, in cups of coffee In coffee, more coffee, in coffee, and tea In 2,628,000 minutes How do you measure five extra years? How about love? How about love? How about love? Measure in love Seasons of love 2,628,000 minutes 2.6 million plans gone awry 2,628,000 minutes How do you measure public places I’ve cried ? In grants that I wrote, and novels on the side   Facebook rabbit holes are no source of pride It’s time to kiss Dashaboo Though he’s sticky with jam Let’s celebrate, remember five years Of making people deal with who I am Remember the love Remember the love Remember the love Measure in love Rent rent rent rent reeeee...

Putting Dash to bed has been an ordeal lately, an up-to-two-hour affair involving multiple requests for milk (yes, after he's brushed his teeth; I judge me too!) and kisses from whichever mom isn't in the room. He wants "one more book." He wants to sleep on the floor. No, wait, he wants to sleep on the bed. No, the floor. He wants "that pillow." No " my pillow," which might look like that pillow, but is in fact inexplicably different. He wants "Dinosaur Boom Boom," a game I used to play when he was a baby, which has recently enjoyed a revival. He lays down and I hold his legs and chant "Boom boom, boom boom, dinosaur walking, dinosaur walking. Swish swish, swish swish, dinosaur dancing, dinosaur dancing." Etc. Recently he added a part where he kind of kicks me in the face. Good times. He has successfully sleep-trained me. He is, as you may have gleaned based on the behaviors described above, 2.75 years old. My emotions s...

Yesterday I cleaned the house while AK took Dash to Orange County for some tia time, and I binge-listened to the L.A. Times’ Dirty John podcast. I’m one of those true crime podcast junkies: I was into both seasons of Serial, I squeal and laugh along with the sloppy-funny hosts of My Favorite Murder every week, and I loved falling deep into the Southern gothic tragedy of S-Town . Orange (County) is the new noir. (Photo credit: Christina House, L.A. Times.) At first Dirty John seemed like a well reported but relatively unremarkable imitation of other true-crime cultural phenomena, right down to the Making a Murderer - esque soundtrack. The title character is not an affable possible innocent a la Serial’s Adnan, nor a tortured genius like S-Town’s John B. McLemore. Dirty John is a fairly typical conman with some power and anger issues, who has perhaps seen too many mob movies. It’s not that I don’t think literal psychopaths are interesting (if my not-completely-scientific stud...

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 ...