Bread and Bread

Photo by Dave Hoefler on Unsplash I wish I was more connected to my ancestors,  I tell Nicole, after she says she talks to her mom and grandma.  Let's face it: I am a middle-aged white woman. Of course I want this. But I cannot join the folklorico group, and my grandmother has never spoken to me in the form of a luminescent manta ray. I am not Moana.  Nicole and I share cancer-dead mothers, and fear of our own genetic codes. At the coffee shop, a friend of a friend is talking about her engagement. She and her boyfriend went hiking in Santa Cruz. She planned to propose. She designed a pendant for him, a sunflower with an opal at its center and a spiral on the back. For growth and interconnectedness, she says. They were deep in the forest, the dappled sunlight starting to fade. The right moment had not yet  announced itself, and so the young woman seized the one they were in.  Would you— The young man said, Wait!  He put his knee to the forest floor, and pre...

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 ...

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...

1. PGSD I spent the last couple of weeks preparing for 826LA’s big gala. My coworker Shawn—a woman whose superpower is asking people to do hard things in the most graceful, inspiring way, a skill I wish more powerful men would watch and learn—led the charge, but I was second in command. It was all sales and numbers and making multiple donor management databases talk to each other, none of which is my jam. Toward the end, I was working 12-hour days. Also not my jam. My eating habits tanked. My parenting was meh. I relied on AK for a lot and didn’t give much in return. The night of the event, I worked registration in the role of “trouble shooter.” At Homeboy’s gala, if a name wasn’t on the list, I just sent that person down the line to the Lady With The Laptop. Now I was the Lady With The Laptop, which was mildly terrifying. I went in feeling rather proud of my meticulously devised and revised seating chart, and I finished in tears. Being the Lady With The Laptop at a gala e...

Back in the day, whenever a woman ran for office, some dude would fret about what would happen when she got her period (now we’ve found both more nuanced and more blatantly hateful ways to take swings at women running for office). The idea being that there were only two ways of being in this world: cerebral, level-headed Enlightenment machine or crazy, Medusa-haired PMS monster. Me on Thursday. I haven’t gotten my period in almost five years*, but if this week was any indication, my moods are still going strong. I will never be a level-headed Enlightenment machine—as mythical a creature as Medusa anyway—and, because of the way I was raised, I’ll probably never see that as completely fine. Even though it is. I am thinking of the time I told our couples therapist I was hesitant to take anti-depressants because I didn’t want to put chemicals in my body. She said, “There are already chemicals in your body. You get to choose whether you want to flood your body with cortisol or Z...

Working at Homeboy Industries comes with a certain cachet. Most liberal-to-moderate people love the story of the radical priest who rode his bicycle into the middle of gang fights and refused to see gang members as evil incarnate. Today even law enforcement gets the basic axiom that “hurt people hurt people.” In grant applications, I boast about working with the “least likely to succeed.” Tour groups pull up to our headquarters by the busload, partly because people with tattooed faces are still something of a sideshow attraction, but partly because they’re moved by the idea that all these tatted-up gangsters have changed their lives for the better. Sometimes tourists sit for hours in our postage stamp of a garden, listening to stories of pain, confusion, relapse and redemption from literal killers. So it’s hard to remember what things were like back in the day. In 1988, when Homeboy was a tiny jobs program at Dolores Mission Church, gang members were the subject of fear-mongering ...

1. first, let us meditate on how we suck I’m about to blog about yet another podcast. This strikes me as a problem—where are the books and movies in my life?—but arguably the bigger problem is that I think everything is a problem. During my Drama Years, I learned to be more forgiving of myself. I thought it was because I’d finally discovered the Meaning of Life or something, but recently my therapist suggested that I get really anxious about medical stuff because I think it’s the only thing I’m allowed to have Big Feelings about. Like, if it’s not a matter of life and death or a few central relationships, what business do I have caring? Doesn’t stressing about work just make me a banal cog in the capitalist machine? Isn’t my need for peace and a clean house and writing time just a first world problem? So instead I worry that seasonal allergies are cancer. I just did a mandatory transcendental meditation session—long, very Homeboy-specific story—and it felt so great and necess...

1. find out what it means to me A common trope in the queer rights movement is “Children of LGBT people deserve to see their parents treated with dignity.” I’m not a huge fan of invoking “the children” (it’s cheap and it implies that non-parents…don’t need dignity?), but of course I agree. After the Orlando shooting this past weekend, I tried to put myself in the shoes of a queer person’s kid. I tried to imagine what it would feel like, on a visceral level, to see my parents attacked physically, verbally or systemically. When I pictured my actual parents—when I pictured Chris and Valerie Klein—I felt immediately embattled. I wanted to throw myself in front of their tender bodies and souls. Then I tried to imagine how Dash must feel about AK and me. At 16 months, it seems to be: Mommy! Mama! (Actually: Mama! Mama! We haven’t managed to make different names stick yet.) His invocation is a mix of delight and possession, often mixed with the need to tell us something very impo...

1. humans vs. assholes The other day, a writer I’m Facebook friends with posted: “I’m tired of personal essays. I really don’t need to know anything else about any stranger’s breakup, dysfunctional friendships, epiphanies, condescending cultural affiliations, or childhoods. Can the age of the universalizing snowflake transition into something else now?” I basically agree; the thread that followed attached some qualifiers, and I admitted I like reading and writing personal essays when they’re good (well, I like reading them when they’re good; I probably like writing them even when they’re bad). But two things became evident: First, the universalizing snowflakes in question are usually middle class white women, rapidly turning their angst into a bid for internet fame. Guilty as charged, Your Honor. Let me tell you all about my night and how dark and stormy it was. Second, there’s a particular subgenre of the universalizing snowflake personal essay that especially bugs me, a...