Bread and Bread

Yesterday my department had a four-hour meeting at WeWork. I arrived in a pissy mood because I'd spent the first three hours of my workday putting together a mailing list and the fourth on a series of freeways. The Culver City building that housed WeWork was across from the Sony Pictures lot, over which a giant fabricated rainbow arced. I imagined a team of producers and diversity-committee types saying, "We have this leftover rainbow from the set of [something Sony produces]. Can we repurpose it for Pride?" The lobby of the WeWork building was decked out with bright lounge chairs, palm trees made of balloons, and an old-timey ice cream cart. It screamed "summer selfie." It also screamed: "Haha, you're not at the beach, you're at work." Photo by Etienne Girardet on Unsplash It's been almost a year since our department was reshuffled and I was moved from a higher-ranking position to one that seemed like a better fit for my act...

1. don’t call me moogle Moogle! began the post in a NELA mom’s group I periodically dip into. Since leaving Parenting for Social Justice and sort of burning out on Facebook groups, I haven’t been super active in any. But a few embers remain, and sometimes the mighty algorithm tosses a match. My husband and I have been trying to find the right neighborhood to move to to raise our son, but we haven’t found a place in our price range that meets our criteria. Her price range was up to a million, which in LA will get you a house that would play a poor person’s house on TV, but still. A million bucks. Her wishlist followed: walkability, lots of trees, safety, “a strong school district with good public schools that will nurture our son’s upbringing,” and my personal favorite: “Our son will grow up with a peer group that is motivated to learn, open minded and driven; the culture also scores low on materialism and sense of entitlement.” Bitch, I grew up in the neighborhood yo...

This is a post about how rundown I am, and how I want it to be otherwise, so get ready to be bored and scroll on by, or to relate wholeheartedly, or maybe a little of both. Many days here in my Very Nice Life, I feel like I'm swimming upstream, just constantly trying to find the motivation to do the next thing. That makes it sound like I'm lying in bed, though. Ha! Almost never. I'm usually doing the previous thing. I am cleaning up mailing lists at work and replying to emails ("Sorry for the slow reply!" they all begin) and cleaning up toy trains and changing peed-on sheets and contemplating the fact that I might smell a little like pee myself. I am trying to help Dash through a difficult phase and trying to work through a difficult phase at work that has lasted longer than any easy phase, even though I Still Believe. I complain the whole way, and then I apologize for complaining, and then I eat things I shouldn't, and too many of them. In some ways, th...

One evening back in the fall, I pushed Dash around Highland Park in his stroller. A carnival had sprung up like a cluster of toadstools in the park next to the library. The lights blurred in the fog and paint peeled from the signs on the rides and exhibitions. It felt like we were in 1992, or 1955, or 1890. The carnival was crowded with families and packs of teenagers and couples with their hands in each other’s back pockets, but I was the only white person I saw the whole time. The sense of witnessing a ghost Highland Park, a fading twin of the mixed, gentrifying neighborhood it is in daylight, was palpable and eerie. Us opens on the Santa Cruz boardwalk in 1986, when a little Black girl named Adelaide wanders into a funhouse called Shaman’s Vision and returns shell-shocked and changed forever. In the present day of the film, it has been renamed Merlin’s Forest, presumably because we don’t appropriate Native American culture anymore. That’s all in the past, right?   ...

The first time I met Molly in person, I was coming off a morning spent roaming the aisles at Target, contemplating the fact that, depending how you sliced the statistics, there was a ten percent chance I would be dead in five years. It was 2013. Then I remembered that coffee existed, and I got some and dried my eyes. I sat down at Swork and waited for Molly to find me, which wasn't hard to do because I was the only bald woman in the place. She told me her story, which is to say her cancer story, which was of course only a piece of her story. She'd reached out to me at Poets & Writers about a Poets & Writers thing, but in the process she'd come across my blog, so she added a P.S. to her email: "If you ever want to talk to someone who went through the same thing at a similar age...." And here we were, talking. About fake boobs and prognoses and the super annoying social worker who'd crossed both our paths. I admitted: "I just feel so old and c...

When I saw The Station Agent , I remember imagining an alternate-universe version of the movie focused on the relationship between Michelle Williams’ and Bobby Cannavale’s characters instead of on Peter Dinklage and Patricia Clarkson. I.e., on the young, traditionally sexy couple instead of the man with dwarfism and the older woman. Of course, that alternate universe is usually this universe, and I felt so happy and grateful to visit a world where the “supporting” characters were central. Realizing that in 2003 Patricia Clarkson was probably like five years older than I am now. I had the same experience last night when AK and I saw Roma at the Egyptian Theatre. If it had been a movie about a middle-class Mexican woman (Marina de Tavira) struggling through a divorce while her indigenous maid (Yalitza Aparicio) deals with an unplanned pregnancy, it might still have been a good story. But writer-director Alfonso Cuarón made the same simple/radical choice that Tom McCarthy made w...

1. the middle will write itself (unfortunately not literally) Some small but important things happened since my last post, and it feels necessary to mark them here, because subtle milestones, like subtle angst, have a way of getting lost in the churn of everyday. I mean, they are the churn of everyday, which is why they’re so easy to not see. I’ve been thinking a lot about units of time. I know what I want in the big picture—love, creativity, and whatever makes those things possible on Maslow’s pyramid. I sort of know what it takes to translate those things into a single good day. Read. Write. Connect with people I care about. Clean some small square of my house and take a walk. (I often don’t do any of these things because work, because life, because phone.) But when I think about the middle range, I tend to panic: What is my five-year career plan? Do I have a five-year career plan? Is it utter hubris to assume I’ll be alive in five years? One solution—and I’m not being fa...

More mornings than not in 2018, I woke up to a string of insults and imperatives--from myself, hurled at myself before I could bring a cup of coffee to my lips. I spent too much money on coffeehouse lattes, so they came with their own shame, curled like foam on top. I got coffee from gas stations and 7-Eleven, augmenting it with things that left a chemical taste in my mouth. There are too many tiny plastic creamer tubs in landfills bearing my fingerprints. I felt tacky and wasteful. On days I made coffee at home, I felt virtuous, even though it tended to be weak and/or instant, and I ran through portable mugs faster than I could wash them. The cliche I live by. Photo by Devin Avery on Unsplash Even the thing that was supposed to jolt me out of my internal invective to be better came with its own list of ways I could do it better. When I was a kid, I wanted to be an Olympic gymnast so badly that watching other girls execute higher, more graceful back flips gave me almost p...

Unfortunately, I am always thinking about self-improvement. To the point that I am starting a pretend nonprofit called IT'S FINE. IT'S FINE's mission is that whatever is going on is fine. Could we use volunteers and donations and a board? I mean, maybe, but mostly we're fine. IT'S FINE was born because panic--the concern that MAYBE EVERYTHING IS WRONG WITH EVERYTHING, AND WE'VE BEEN DOING IT ALL WRONG UP UNTIL NOW, BURN IT DOWN, BURN IT DOWN AND START OVER, BUT THIS TIME BE PERFECT!--usually doesn't make anything better. Photo by  Matt Botsford  on  Unsplash I'm better at getting better when getting better is a whispered goal rather than a shouted one. So this is one thing I've been thinking about. At work and in my personal life. Not as much in my writing life, which is the one place I default to growth orientation and/or act like the mature human I strive to be elsewhere. * Here's another worky analogy for how I want to be in th...