Bread and Bread

Photo by George Kedenburg III on Unsplash I am trying to find a new way of being in the world, but I keep worrying about my lymph nodes. For years, the wisest people—Fr. Greg Boyle, my therapists, my Instagram Explore page (okay, it is not the wisest or a person)—have preached Living In The Moment. Or rather, they have talked about it, but they haven't preached, because I don't like preachers.  Fr. Greg said, This—this here is heaven.  I thought, I will try to live in the moment in the future. The Future seemed like a kind of heaven. If I earned it, through good works and the right kind of disordered eating, I could live there unencumbered. The future would hold promises of More Future. But first I needed to be granted a pass, and that pass would look like normal-range lab results all down the page.  Maybe I've told this story before (I worry that retelling stories is a sign of brain metastasis, but it might also be proof that I need to tell myself the same stories over ...

On Friday night, I scrolled through a feed of burning cop cars, protesters in cloth masks, and cops in riot gear. On Sunday morning, I looked at pictures AK texted me from the park: Dash next to a glassy green pond. Trees stooped to touch their branches to the water. I stayed home to catch up on work, which meant writing this blog post about my org's work in the context of police violence. (Official Organizational Statements declaring solidarity with Black people have become a thing in the past few days, which is part of what makes this time--this violence, this uprising--feel like a tipping point, like the moment homophobia finally became an unacceptable default mode. Of course, homophobia has not gone away and even most of my nicest straight friends are casually heterocentric. So tipping points are not victory, but they are  a victory, a big wave in a sea of incremental change.) (Official Organizational Statements also bump up against my dislike of platitudes and virtue signal...

Dear Cheryl, This story takes place thirty years from now. Can you believe you'll ever be 41? You sort of almost didn't make it to that birthday, but that's another story. In this one, two board members at the organization you work for are Hillary Toomey . They think of you as a well-intentioned flea who is not great at gala event seating. They're not really concerned with you one way or another, but in their wake you feel small and frumpy and rejected. This is how you feel every day in sixth grade. You are too tall and have bangs that don't cooperate. You make jokes that fall flat. You are gay and trying not to be, because gay is just another way of doing everything wrong. The Hillary Toomeys of your future like your coworkers, who are Bonnie in this story. Two different coworkers represent Bonnie--both the conscientious, imaginative Bonnie who will be your lifelong friend, and the sixth-grade Bonnie, who is wooed by the opinions and charms of the mean, popular...

Yesterday my friend Holly took a tour of Dash's preschool; she got a new job recently and needs to make a childcare change. She liked a lot of the same things that I like about the school, namely that teachers encourage play, meet kids where they're at developmentally, and take a constructive approach to discipline. But ultimately (and with more apology than was necessary) she said that it wasn't for them. I had these as a kid. I remember chewing on Cookie Monster's eyeball. Approximately 3% of me was like What?! It's a great school! Another 12% was like Uh-oh, maybe it's not a great school and I've been fooled for three years! But one of the factors on the "meh" side of Holly's pros and cons list was that the school has a fair amount of structured learning, i.e. lining up, sitting in a circle, and doing specific activities at specific times. This might seem ironic, because I think of Holly and her husband Joel's parenting style as ...

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...

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...

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...

1. inconsolable Several people in my feed shared a news clip of Alton Sterling’s son bawling and crying out “Daddy!” I try not to be a look-away type, but I couldn’t bring myself to turn the sound on. The headline and a few seconds of silent video was enough. I kept thinking of last year’s Homeboy Family Picnic, when a little boy temporarily lost his dad, a Homeboy trainee. The boy was maybe seven. He had a chubby face and a buzz cut; a smear of barbecue sauce had defiled his ribbed white tank. He was in tears, calling out “Daddy!” “Who’s your dad?” asked the crew of women who quickly gathered around him. “Raul,” he said.* Raul had to be nearby, playing volleyball or grooving to oldies in the shade. But his son was inconsolable, despite the women’s assurance that we’d find Raul momentarily. He sobbed and sobbed until finally he stopped and threw up on the grass. This year's picnic. Families lost and found. As a kid I’d been quick to panic when separated...

Each day at Homeboy starts with a Thought of the Day--a personal story or short inspirational speech by a staff member or trainee. It's part of the reason I don't bother going to church anymore; I live at church (a church that welcomes atheists, a church where even the priests meditate with gongs and burn sage). (I also know how the church sausage is made, which both dims and enhances the magic, but that's another post.) Naturally Fr. Greg's TotD's get the most accolades, followed closely by TotD's from especially vulnerable and courageous trainees, the taste of both tragedy and transformation fresh in their mouths. But my personal favorite TotD-giver is Jose Osuna, Homeboy's Director of External Affairs. He is a former client, who started as a solar panel program student and worked his way up through the ranks. But he's quick to point out that he was never one of those kids who grew up in Boyle Heights with Fr. Greg as a shadow-dad even during their...