Bread and Bread

On the way back from lunch today, I was thinking about how Farhana is secretly in love with Bashah, but how she can’t help but admire his fiancée, Georgine, partly because she snagged Bashah, but also because she wears sparkly clothes and gossips a lot and seems as confident as a movie star. I’d been feeling estranged from my writing lately, probably because I hadn’t been doing much of it. The time I’d been devoting to my novel consisted of reading tiny little snippets of a somewhat dry history book . In other words, not writing. I don’t know why this is such a big revelation: that not-writing does not feel like writing. I was whining to AK on Saturday about feeling disengaged from writing while being dropped into a world of fantastic writers who were writing fantastic things (which is basically what my trip to New York consisted of). “Why don’t you just try writing—anything—just to see where it goes?” she said. “I sort of thought I was past all that,” I said. “It’s du...

I'm still resting off my trip via a long, lazy weekend, so here are some pictures instead of words. Second only to the Statue of Liberty when it comes to Classic Tourist Shots, I'm sure. AK and Tommy at the Cornelia Street Cafe. Me and AK at the same cafe, full of omelets and mimosas on a rainy Saturday. My friend and co-worker Bill makes us brunch in Hoboken. My baby loves a good skyline. And a semi-eroding train station. My co-workers Chris and Nicole share a tense moment. Okay, not really. Just another day in Washington Square Park (is it just me, or does the person behind the bear look like a weird combination of Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake?). Suddenly I felt under-dressed.

My favorite thing about New York (by which I mean any place where I'm not driving, including the Red and Gold Lines in LA) is that when you have an interaction with someone while en route, it's not necessarily a bad one. If you're driving and you actually communicate with another driver, it's probably via middle finger or exchange of insurance information. Whereas human-scale public transportation produces stories like this one: AK: Guess who got on at the Highland Park Gold Line station and got off at the Chinatown stop? Me: Maggie Gyllenhaal? Your friend Suzie? AK: Nope. A little sparrow. Me: Oh my god, that's so wonderful. I hate driving. All of which is to say that while walking from my hotel to Tommy's place in Chelsea yesterday, I had the best celebrity sighting a writer can have: I saw one of my characters walking down 6th Avenue. Anna Lisa Hill, co-star of the still-unpublished Calla Boulevard and therefore only a star in my mind, is a 50-something, k...

Just a quick note to say that I am in New York and done with 86 of my 87 meetings. Coney Island was rained out and AK almost didn't make it in, but that made it even sweeter when she did. While I met and met and met, she toured the city and brought me back little treasures from her travels, most awesomely And Tango Makes Three , a true, illustrated story of gay penguins and their adopted baby at the Central Park Zoo. I came up for air long enough to join AK at Spring Awakening , a musical about horny German school kids in a repressive turn-of-the-century town that delivered a jolt of live-theater energy I haven't felt since Rent . There was kink and boys kissing and one genuine naked butt, all of which could be objected to by current repressor types, giving the show more edge than it might have had otherwise. But as much as I'm for kink and boys kissing and naked butts, I was most impressed by the songs, the talented cast members (most of whom were younger than the kids I g...

I’ve been to New York a half dozen times, but I’ve never seen the Statue of Liberty. When I’m in NYC, I’m usually working or hanging out with my one New York friend, who, as a local and the sort of person who insists that he only buys designer jeans for the fit, is far too cool for such things. Luckily, I don’t really care about seeing the Statue of Liberty. I don’t have anything against it, it’s just that there’s not enough going for it for me to brave the crowds and the heights. No, the tourist trap I really want to see is Coney Island. In my mind, it’s still 1907 there; full of freaks and mystery, squeaky boardwalks and cotton candy, people in striped swimsuits that go down to their knees. Conveniently, my aforementioned stylish friend Tommy has to report on Coney Island for a news segment as part of his job, and AK and I are going to tag along. That’s on Sunday—between tomorrow (when I leave) and then, I have about 87 meetings. But all I’ll have to do is close my eyes and imagine ...

I’ve been so busy lately that even fun things have become chores, from parties to writing to painting my nails. Not to mention working with the very kind Sally Shore to prepare my stories to be read aloud by actors tomorrow at the New Short Fiction series. She called regularly to see if it was okay to tighten this sentence, skip this paragraph, etc. And each time, after giving her the go-ahead to chop, I thought, Wow, that’s really nice of her to ask. But why is she even asking? It’s her show. Ladies and gentlemen, the opposite of diva is laaazy. And so when Sally informed me that there was a rehearsal Thursday night, I said, “That’s cool. Do I need to be there?” I did—and here’s another thing about being tired and stretched too thin: Although it wears you out, it also makes you more vulnerable to all sorts of magic you haven’t noticed because your head was buried in your day planner. You’re just a thin, distracted wafer, and the magic cracks you in half. I showed up at the library e...

Driving to the Metro station to pick up AK on Tuesday night, I realized that I live on a hill. It doesn’t seem like a hill because most of the streets immediately surrounding mine are pretty flat, except for a steep drop to the west. So maybe I live on a mesa. Anyway, I had this realization because, driving north, I had the most spectacular view of the mountains, which were suddenly much more noticeable because they were on fire. I knew this. I’d heard about the Griffith Park fire (a much bigger one than the little flare-up that temporarily threatened my birthday party in late March) on the radio earlier in the day. But here it was in front of me, not just smoke—though there was plenty—but huge horizontal walls of bright orange flames. Bigger than a house or ten houses or anything else that might catch my eye on a hillside. And, as the sun set, it was apocalyptically beautiful. Is it wrong to find the apocalypse beautiful? Maybe “sublime”—the way Kant (I think) defined it—...

Right now I’m reading A History of Malaysia to satisfy the research phase of my novel. Mostly this involves trying not to fall asleep as I skim chapters about how trade centers like Srivijaya gave way to trade centers like Melaka. I love history, but I’m not so into the ancient stuff. Even though my novel is set entirely in the present, I like to be thorough, except of course when I’m totally ignoring the facts. I’m a little bipolar when it comes to research. Anyway, today’s reading involved the kingdom of Johor colluding with the Dutch to take down…shoot, I already forgot. Some other kingdom. But the point is that they were siding with the colonizers, which made me think about what colonialism must have looked like in its early days. To the average Johorian, this wasn’t a matter of selling out to the white man to defeat your own people and ultimately yourself. Because the people in that other kingdom weren’t your own people, they were just the assholes across the straights....

Conversation after working all weekend at the L.A. Times Festival of Books : Jamie : When I got home last night, I lay down on the couch, and it felt like I literally had thousands of people walking through my body. Cheryl: Yeah—in tiny little cleats. Jamie: I just had to lie there and wait for them to leave my body. But they left all their trash behind. Cheryl: And their self-published poetry books too, right? Jamie: Right. Cheryl: Get some rest. Jamie: You too.

Last night we were supposed to go to the Dodgers/Giants game, but it was sold out unless we wanted to pay $35 or more. We did not, so AK and I found a not-too-shabby plan B in the form of a reading by Felicia Luna Lemus , Raquel Gutierrez and Claudia Rodriguez at IMIX in Eagle Rock. Claudia is my friend from CalArts, and she and Raquel both read beautifully descriptive, funny prose about genderqueer youngsters. Felicia also went to CalArts, although we didn’t have any classes together, so I never got to know her. But I definitely knew of her—as the superstar who went out and nabbed Sandra Cisneros’ agent right after graduation, published her first book with FSG and wore gorgeous, bright-colored vintage dresses while doing it. Am I jealous? A little. A lot. I used to be really ashamed of my envious tendencies—maybe because of the Why can’t you just be nice ? look my ex would give me whenever I wrestled with someone else’s success. These days I stop short of embracing this particular...

One thing that sucks about not being famous, besides not being handed gift bags full of iPods and designer sunglasses everywhere you go, is that no one’s knocking down your door to interview you. So you have to go knock on a few doors yourself—I knocked on Claire ’s, and she emailed me the questions below: 1. If you had the opportunity to write a nonfiction book, what would its topic be and how would you prepare to write it? Form-wise, something along the lines of Adrian Nicole Leblanc’s Random Family or Susan Orlean’s The Bullfighter Checks Her Make-up —something that would require me to spend a lot of time with a group of interesting people and write about them in a vivid, narrative, predictably fiction-esque manner. I was a journalist for about five minutes, you know. Topic-wise, I think it would be about the circus. 2. Do you have any tattoos? If so, where and what? If not, what would you get and where? I have one tattoo: a vine wrapping around my left wrist. There are light bulbs...

Okay, so I’m in a somewhat lower income bracket and I wouldn’t describe myself as agnostic, but otherwise, this Onion article (“ This American Life Completes Documentation Of Liberal, Upper-Middle-Class Existence ”) skewers me pretty successfully, right down to the Honda Civic and the lack of anger. How do I know for sure (besides the fact that I love This American Life )? Because I found myself protesting a bit too much while reading it: Hey, TAL covers a lot of working class and lower class lives—what about that story where the really articulate homeless guy talked about sleeping outside ? What about all those quirky but undeniably blue-collar jobs David Sedaris worked before he made it big? If you need me, I’ll be at Starbucks thinking about how my non-disposable mug might, in some small and pathetic-but-sweetly-poignant way, counteract the effects of global warming.

1. Taking the Red Line downtown. I drove halfway to TC Boyle ’s reading at the Mark Taper Forum, a benefit for Red Hen Press , parked in Koreatown, and took the train the rest of the way. I know that people do this everyday in other cities, that the experience is tiring and tedious and full of smelly people. But in LA it feels positively luxurious. As I opened my book and read approximately three and a half pages over the course of five stops, I kept thinking, I am so urban and sophisticated! And I am reading ! I’m a sophisticated, urban multi-tasker ! 2. My orchid blossoming. AK gave me Kid (as I named the orchid) a few months ago, and I thought I’d killed it by not giving it plant food per the little plastic instruction card. But it didn’t look totally dead, just sort of stick-like but still green, so I kept watering it anyway. I felt crappy because, around this same time, the succulent she’d given me earlier had tu rn ed a troubling shade of purple that seemed to suggest su...

I’m past the age where, when that phrase sums up my weekend, it refers to vodka. (And even when I was at that age, dessert was my real vice of choice.) No, this weekend it referred to KCRW ’s awesome but somewhat interminable Sounds Eclectic concert at the Gibson Amphitheatre. The Jurassic Parking structure (don’t you wish you lived in LA?) spit us out onto CityWalk , where huge neon signs and the sent of kettle co rn somehow add up to nightlife. We groped our way through the crowd until we saw a couple in their late 20s, both with shaggy haircuts, she wearing high heels and skinny jeans, he wearing…well, some other type of good-looking jeans. I’m bad at noticing boys. “They’re clearly going the same place we are,” AK said. “Let’s just follow them until we get to all the other well-dressed aging hipsters.” When we united with the aforementioned group, we heard a woman say to her friend, “This is such a KCRW crowd.” “Oh my god,” I whispered to AK, “we’re even all having...

A long time ago I saw a cartoon of a man walking down the street. A few feet behind him was a piano that had just crashed to the ground from some great height. The man’s thought bubble said, “Wow, another close call.” The caption said, Thursday the 12 th . Was it any wonder that I came home yesterday to find a giant tree toppled next to my apartment building, but not on top of anyone or anything but the sidewalk? This Friday the 13 th , Ca rn ival of the Mundane presents Tales of Close Calls and All-Out Bad Luck. (But if you scroll down far enough, there’s always happy stuff too. None of us has blogged our suicide note yet, knock on cyber-wood.) Nevertheless: Claire of Taller Than Average Tales is so unlucky that not only is sangria drawn, moth-to-flame-style, to her light-colored pants, but even her friends can’t get a break . Nelumbo of Mommy Plays Bass discovers that the only thing more fun than a breast exam is going into labor while getting a breast exam . ...

That line was spoken by Darlene in the episode of Roseanne —circa 1993—where the family gets a VCR. It goes through my head every time I acquire a new gadget, usually four to seven years after most people in developed countries do. My dad, on the other hand, is an early adopter, albeit a somewhat contradictory one. We were one of the first families in our neighborhood to acquire a VCR and video camera, but 15 years later, when other people were walking around with hand-held camcorders the size of a coffee mug, my dad was still carrying around our giant camera and the entire VCR, which, in the old old days, you had to strap to your hip pack-mule-style if you wanted to shoot a little footage of your daughter performing a gymnastic routine to the opening medley from Cats at the school talent show. In a polo shirt hand-puffy-painted with a giant cat face. Needless to say, my dad has been a proud iPod owner for several years now, while I continued to squeeze everything I could out ...

He was a she back then, or as she as he ever was, androgynous in a gray hooded raincoat and baggy black jeans. This is a sentence from chapter five, draft two of the novel I’m currently working on. Who knows if it will live to see draft three—the sentence, that is. The itself novel better survive. Here’s another sentence, from chapter 10: Becca unzipped the biggest section of her backpack and removed what appeared to be a messily rolled-up beach towel. But then I smelled it. If you want to hear more sentences like this, come see me and my writing group-mates read May 1 at Skylight Books. It will be the debut of my new project and the finale of my time with the Writers at Work gang . If you are into writing sentences of your own and do so regularly on some type of blog-type device, please consider participating in the aforementioned Ca rn ival of the Mundane . I haven’t gotten many submissions yet—what, are you worried you’re not mundane enough? I’m talking to you Sara ...

Jamie and I had had a long day of Talking About The Arts, or, more specifically, listening to other people Talk About The Arts. Funding, outreach, funding for outreach. This stuff is our life, and it’s really important, but since this particular meeting was at the Getty , by hour three we were itching to experience the arts. So we did. After being greeted by Tim Hawkinson ’s giant Uberorgan (giant being an understatement—it’s probably the only musical instrument that could fill the entire atrium of the Getty), we were anxious for more of his organic-meets-mechanical work. The accompanying exhibit, “Zoopsia” (which means “visual hallucination of animals”) was dwarfish by comparison—just four works—but not disappointing. What I love about Hawkinson, whom I first encountered at LACMA a few years ago, is how he combines concept and craft. A Puritan work ethic shoots through my artistic soul: I can’t help but set aside big splashes of color and idea in favor of thousands of painstaking b...

I just took an abs class at Bally’s. By accident. I went in for yoga, but in classic Bally’s style, a guy walked in and announced, “Joelle couldn’t make it tonight, so I’m subbing. But I don’t know yoga, so we’re gonna do some abs and cardio.” I didn’t suck as much as I thought I would, which made me wonder, So where are my six-pack abs? Why is my middle more the consistency of flan? I am still wondering this as I sit here eating leftover tres leches cake from Saturday’s party. Exciting discovery: Like lasagna and soup, it gets better after a couple of days in the fridge. Moist and sour-creamy. If you are the sort of person who enjoys philosophical musings on the likes of cake, Carnival of the Mundane —a roundup of blog posts about everyday life—was made for you. An early and enthusiastic participant, I have to admit I’ve been slacking lately. But I’m due to host again this month, so if you have a particularly fabulous post about your unfabulous life, please send a link, along with yo...

This is where I had my birthday party on Saturday. Let me explain. AK and I discovered the Old Zoo Picnic Area of Griffith Park when we went hiking over the holidays. Built by the WPA, these old habitats and enclosures served as the LA Zoo until the mid-‘60s, when the animals moved on up to (comparatively) deluxe quarters a couple of miles northeast. Now you can picnic in and around the Old Zoo. Since wandering through decaying ruins and eating outdoors are two of my favorite activities, there was really no other place I could have my party, even though a small co rn er of the park caught on fire on Friday and the Old Zoo is almost impossibly hard to find. My friend Amy circled Griffith Park for almost an hour. Finally she gave up and text messaged, “Happy Birthday. Sorry I’m retarded.” (Sorry, Amy—it’s not you, it’s the zoo.) Each habitat seemed to have drawn a different subculture to picnic there—kid’s family birthday, stoner couple with dog, teenage punks who called ...