Bread and Bread

1. the turns our lives have taken My last post was so melancholy. I mean, that was the space I was in, but sometimes I think I only know how to write in Sad Voice anymore, even when I’m happy. I’m like the most emo 39-year-old you’ll ever meet. But I’m healthy—those quarterly appointments are a new lease on life, no matter how much I try not to let my world revolve around them. And I just got back from vacation.* So it seems like a good time to try my hand at writing about a good time. That's Amy on the left. This is 2008, which in my mind was two years ago. It was a pretty simple trip—a few days with friends in a rented house on the Central Coast—but we’d been planning it a long time. Amy and AK go way back to a women’s group at the Gay & Lesbian Center, and Amy and I go back almost as far. I remember the night we stayed up late eating cheese and talking at her friends’ gorgeous Craftsman house where she stayed in raw early days after her breakup with Kim, her...

1. you always hurt the ones you love Friday night my dad called to say hi, and I mentioned something in passing about fearing a recurrence of cancer. Although I’m prone to medical anxiety, I think it’s safe to say that every person who’s had cancer and who thinks about the future wonders if that future will include cancer. But my dad took this as his cue to launch into a pseudo-scientific list of reasons why I would live to be 112. It’s what he needs to tell himself—and I get it, because a lot of the time it’s what I need to tell myself too, and sometimes it’s what I need him to tell me—but I wish he would admit it’s part of assuaging his own worry. Instead, he says things like, “I’m concerned you don’t have a realistic picture of your prognosis.” We had a calm, if lengthy, conversation about managing anxiety; at one point I said, “I know you hate emotions,” and he was like, “I do! I do hate emotions!” And then I hung up and felt too tired to clean the house or pack for our tr...