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 ...

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. my health and fitness app may have a few things in common with the fictional mean god in my head Good morning, internet. I have been counting the minutes till this morning for about two weeks now. We spent last weekend on a short, lovely trip to the Bay Area for our friend Mikko’s dance party—sort of a fortieth birthday party, sort of a mini summer camp, sort of a party to tell all his friends and family members how much he loved them (a small piece of me was like, Is this the part where Mikko tells us he has an incurable disease? Luckily, there was no such part). Everybody dance now. NOW! Mikko, Chris and AK dance so good they're blurry. We also got to see Pedro and Stephen’s new West Oakland flat. We’re so sad that they’re not in L.A. anymore, but at least they were courteous enough to move to the one city where ninety percent of our non-L.A. friends seem to have congregated. I love me some one-stop shopping. West Oakland walk with Sugar the sweetheart p...

Last night AK and I had pizza and sangria at new friend/Homeboy volunteer Kendra’s house, where we snuggled her new dog and watched My Cat from Hell . Like all makeover shows, it’s not really the cat/dog/kid/house/restaurant who needs to be made over, but the couple trying to wrangle the cat/dog/kid/house/restaurant. And for some reason, the people we seem to trust most to administer the necessary tough love are burly biker dudes with shiny sunglasses (I’ve been watching Restaurant: Impossible at the gym). One part punk, one part military. Or if not them, flamboyant gay men or tough British nannies. Apparently meanness is acceptable from those types. We like it less on naggy (American) women. And we don’t like men who refuse to kick our asses, I guess. I don’t know, this analysis may break down, since the main lesson of My Cat from Hell is Buy Your Cat A Cat Tree. There is a framed picture of a dog in the background. And you wonder why the cat is pissed? My friend Wendy a...

The other day a Facebook friend of mine posted that she was excited for the lunar new year because she needed a do-over on her resolutions. I’m always angling for the same. I’ve been doing okay with my resolutions (although how can it be time to wash my car again ALREADY?), but January left me ragged and exhausted. With my brain attending to two different jobs—and certainly not my writing—I had newfound sympathy for AK, who’s been dividing her time between her paying gig and her therapist hours for almost two years now. I experienced that constant shifting of worlds when I was a working grad student, and it’s a bit of what I was getting at with The Commuters, but back then I had more energy and lived off jalapeño poppers from Jack in the Box.   I think jalapeño poppers might be some kind of official rock bottom in the self-care department. Official handing-off of P&W office keys to new assistant Brandi. Jamie put together a lovely sendoff for me on Wednesday, with ...

Last weekend we went to a holiday party for the clinic where AK is interning, which means almost everything about the party was top secret for reasons relating to the intricate traditions of psychoanalysis. Can I say that I got a nice scarf in the white-elephant gift exchange? I don’t even know. Can I say that the host’s house was super posh, in a way that was one part early California mission, one part Buddhist monastery? The host herself was wearing a non-sheer version of the dress below, and we had a good time. Hands on. Last night we went to a party for Razorcake , the punk rock magazine editor Todd Taylor invited me to contribute to after I met him at my reading with Sean Carswell in June. It had never occurred to me that I could write for such a publication, because one time in seventh grade I wrapped embroidery thread in Rastafarian colors around tiny braids in my hair, was asked what reggae bands I liked and had no answer. I’ve been very careful about being a pose...

Friday, 11/1 1. san francisco, patron saint of animals, merchants and stowaways San Juan felt like arriving back home after our vacation-within-a-vacation. Outside our hostel, Posada San Francisco, we saw the guy from our kayak tour we’d been calling “San Francisco” (for the city in California, not the street in San Juan that our hostel was on). Posada San Francisco on Calle San Francisco. “Are you stalking me or am I stalking you?” He had a lilting Indian accent. We invited him to join us for dinner after we all got a chance to check in and change. This time our room was on the sixth floor, similarly spare but to the point of having no shelves or clothing rods in the closet. As with our previous room, there was a wooden cross above the bed. No bible in the drawer, though, because there are no drawers. One of the nice things about traveling is that you don’t necessarily learn the most textbook things about each other first. We learned that Hakim had gon...

A few years ago I attended a reading by fellows at the Lambda Literary retreat. Whenever they introduced a piece that included family violence, coercive sex or aggressive homophobia, they prefaced it—as one of their workshop teachers had clearly taught them—with “trigger warning.” It struck me as odd, because that’s not really how triggers work. Death and cancer and miscarriage—my trio of connected tragedies—aren’t triggers in the abstract. I would probably find a well written story about any one of them moving and cathartic. No trigger warning necessary. But no one is there to shout “trigger warning!” when Google Maps takes me through Beverly Hills or a chubby, laughing Persian man outside a café reminds me of my fertility doctor. Trigger warning! In high school, only a handful of kids had lost parents, and they always seemed wise and exotic, not to mention unfairly favored by our breast-cancer-survivor English teacher. I remember one of them, a warm, popular girl nam...

It’s because there is a river in L.A. I knew this, of course. I saw Chinatown, and I’ve stood on various overpasses watching water trickle between the famous cement banks. I also know that there’s a lot of talk about revitalizing the river, and that now you can legally kayak parts of it. I even wrote a very short, near-future short story in which the river’s natural flood planes have been restored. No one is allowed to live there for safety reasons, so naturally a bunch of shantytowns spring up there and get wiped out every time it rains. But it didn’t really register that we had a river until I biked a giant piece of it today with AK, Pedro, Alberto and Alberto’s new friend Andrea. Alberto was unemployed for a while, and he used a lot of that time to get in superhuman shape. Sometimes he pushed himself too hard and blew out a joint. Again, my alleged perfectionism fails here—I’ve been exercising frequently, but I’m never the person who does a bunch of cardio before yoga class...

1. kozara I took Nicole out for her birthday Friday night. We spent the first few minutes staring at the menu, trying to figure out what “kozara” was (Japanese tapas, it turned out). “Sorry,” she said. “How are you?” It was the voice she used when she was tired, but trying to hold onto her manners. “I’m good.” “Sorry, I’m just shaking off the week. Work , you know?”  “No worries,” I said. “I’m shaking off the week too. My week was fine, but just, you know, Friday.” If you go to Bar Hayama, order the spicy tuna and crispy rice. DO IT. That week I’d gotten my teeth cleaned and slogged through the building of an online grant management system at work and gone to the hard yoga class and fought with AK about arriving places late. Earlier Friday afternoon, I’d realized I only thought I’d paid my credit card bill last month, and I could no longer say to myself, Yes, but I ’m going through cancer treatment. “Seriously,” Nicole said, and we went back to studyin...