Bread and Bread

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...

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. self-care in red boots Last weekend was busy. The week that followed it was busy. It included a book club meeting at which we discussed the NPR story we’d all heard about how only white-collar people say they’re busy. People who work three minimum-wage jobs just say they’re tired. By the time I left work yesterday, I was both. Which means I was in a weakened state, and it didn’t take long for me to turn my writing evening at Philippe’s into an is-it-scar-tissue-or-cancer Googling session. It’s the absolute worst thing I can do for my mental health, but it’s like I have an addiction that’s long past the point of making me feel good— and pretty much never did. Leave it to a Klein to find an addiction that was never fun in the first place. I need 'em like a hole in my head. I need 'em to heal the hole in my head. It bugs me that my mental health is so precarious, but at least I got my Googling bender out of my system, and I decided to devote the rest of my week...

"The kind of woman willing to wait is not the kind you want to find waiting." Recently I was introduced to this group and this prompt , which provided a nice distraction from the current clunky-ness of my YA novel. When I was in college, it dawned on me that some of my favorite musicals ( Rent, Sunday in the Park with George ) featured male artists and female muses. The women were portrayed as human and whole, but it still bugged me. Last week an artist I like asked me to pose for some photos, something that never happened back when I was neither particularly gorgeous nor all Diane Arbus-y. So I’ve been thinking about what it means to be a non-passive muse (this artist sees the process as collaborative, which I like). I think it relates to the dilemma of being a patient—how to be a recipient, how to receive things you wouldn’t choose, how to be active anyway? How to be the painting that that stares down the viewer with the painter’s help? I’m pretty sure it’s...

1. dr. frankenwhatever, just hand me a cigarette When I was in college, I accompanied some friends to Rocky Horror at the Nuart . They were aging punk rockers, meaning they were twenty and had been going Fugazi shows since they were twelve and were sort of over it all. They still wore twenty-hole Doc Martens, but there was no way they were going to make the effort to dye their hair green and shape it into a mohawk again. Once upon a time, they’d been Rocky Horror cast members. My friend Jenessa’s boyfriend Bill had played Dr. Frankenfurter perhaps for years. Now they watched a few minutes of the movie and spent the rest of the time smoking in the lobby and making snarky (unscripted, unrelated to Rocky ) observations. I suppose they weren’t actually smoking in the lobby. Even in 1998, I’m pretty sure smoking in movie theaters was illegal. But they were all but smoking.  It's just a jump to the left, and a step to the lobby. I was bummed out because I’d never seen...