Bread and Bread

This morning Nicole texted me, “I was thinking I should have offered you a Xanax the other night. That always helps me when I spin out like that.” (I have been spinning out. Not because anything really bad is going on, it’s just something I do now and then, like changing my oil, except less constructive. AK has assigned me to read The Happiness Project blog, and I’ve concluded that I am its uptight heroine. Gretchen is so like me that reading her sincere, endlessly hardworking posts can be almost as exhausting as being in my own head. I mean, all the things she tells herself are things I should tell myself too, so I’ll keep reading. But sometimes I want to explore other means of chilling out beyond working very, very hard to chill out. Hence….) Me: “I’m afraid it would begin a lifelong love affair with Xanax.” Nicole: “Nah, it wouldn’t because you’d always feel guilty to take it.” Me: “You know me well.” Here’s poet David Hernandez ’s take on pharmaceuticals ...

I’ve been really distracted lately, so it might please you to know that June will be a much shorter list. Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius by Colin Dickey (yes, that Colin ): People use the phrase "dead and buried" to imply just how very over and complete a thing is. This true tale of famous composers, writers and mystics whose heads were stolen by phrenologists and their contemporaries proves that no person or subject is guaranteed eternal rest. As the poor skulls of Joseph Haydn and Emanuel Swedenborg bounce between various collectors and pseudo-scientists, Dickey paints a portrait of a unique period in history, when Enlightenment reason overlapped with relic-worship, artistic flourishings and eugenics. They were the scariest of times. They were the wackiest of times. But unlike other "thing histories" that claim to explain the entire history of the world through, like, potatoes, Dickey doesn't try too hard to extrapolate. After all,...

Many months later, the exquisite corpse scrapbook I started with my artist friend Sergio is complete. Even after the pages appeared to be full, he kept adding layers: a cityscape in the corner of a partially used page, a collage of coolers and lawn chairs and mysterious holy men. It's everything I love about L.A., art and randomness. Here are a few highlights, as photographed by AK. (The happy writer. Ignore scrubby Sunday afternoon clothes.)

A short play. The only characters are the voices in Cheryl’s head. VOICES IN CHERYL’S HEAD: I have a symptom. It must be a disease , most likely one that will cause infertility now and cancer later. Whatever I do, I shouldn’t Google it. [Googling it] Fuck. [Later that hour] You know, that symptom was really mild and now it’s gone completely. It might have all been in my head, and I think we both know what goes on in here. [Googling some more] But wait—-it says here you can have the disease and not have any symptoms. So I’m not off the hook. Fuck. What other symptom-less diseases might I have...? [Googling]

Every time NPR runs another story about Twitter, AK and I roll our eyes. At best, these stories are about how, say, Iranian students are organizing protests via Twitter. At worst, some old reporter caps his interview with some old rock star by asking, “Do you Tweet?” To which Old Rock Star either says, “Good lord, no” or, with a bit of ironic distance, “Yeah, all the kids are doing it,” and I guess we’re supposed to squeal at the adorable, hilarious mental picture of Old Rock Start pecking away at his 140 characters. As far as I can tell, Twitter exists for the purpose of 1) marketing, 2) coordinating protests in countries under the thumb of oppressive regimes and 3) making reporters who are over fifty feel like they’re with-it. If you’re not a marketer, protester or reporter, you have no reason to be on Twitter. Even if you do have stuff to market (and, sigh, don’t we all ), you’re only going to be hawking your stuff to people who are there to hawk their stuff. It’s like the garage sa...

Some updates: T-Mec is now sans tube-in-face, and we’re all happier for it. My regular vet didn’t even charge me to take it out, even though he wasn’t the one who put it in. I have a long list of kindnesses I need to pay forward. Many of the said kindnesses were committed by AK, including hand holding, grocery shopping, and administration of vodka when I was so crazy with cramps last night that I was just sort of rolling around moaning. Vodka both tastes and functions like medicine. My book club likes poetry . I think that makes them particularly kickass as book clubs go. But because of the aforementioned cramps, I missed some other good poetry: Steven Reigns ’ reading of his new book Inheritance . When I get a chance to read it, I’ll let you know all about it, but if you want to beat me to the punch, go here . I suck at bowling, go kart racing and probably all other indoor sports. AK came in third Saturday at Kimberly’s birthday party, and proudly wore her “Winner” medal (which, actu...

Well, I did end up crying on the drive home from Fresno, this time not because I was seized with the poignancy of life , but because I got a speeding ticket. I'd just spent a sweaty but lovely 45 minutes in the parking lot of a 76 station interviewing blog friend Peter of Plastic Bubble World about his years as a cruise ship dancer, as this is where my so-called circus novel is heading. I pulled back onto the 99 and talked to my sister for a while--using my hands-free device because that's the kind of safe driver I am. But shortly after hanging up, I saw red and blue lights in my rear view mirror, and soon I was in another parking lot (Burger King this time) having a much less pleasant conversation. I wouldn't call the CHP officer baby-faced, but he was someone I could easily picture as a mildly trouble-making middle school student. He told me I was going 82 in a 70 zone. He asked why I was shaking. I said because I'd gotten pulled over (third time ever, first for spee...

The guest speaker at All Saints on Sunday was a man who’d lost both hands and an eye to a letter bomb sent to him when he was protesting apartheid in South Africa many years ago. I had the thought that, wow, it’s bad to send a letter bomb to anyone for any cause, but when your cause is pro -apartheid? Extra bad. The topic of the sermon was forgiveness. The speaker said that, if he met his bomber now, he’s not sure if he would forgive him. Maybe, he said, if he learned that the bomber had spent years working in hospitals. So his point was that forgiveness is complicated, and should come with strings attached. But what I took away from the sermon was the importance of being big and brave in the world. Lately I’ve been feeling like life is good, but because I’m a guilty, superstitious person, this goodness has made me small and afraid. The more I have to lose, the more likely fate is to swoop down and take it all away, right? So church made me want to be big and brav...

“I’ve decided that I’m dressed like this because I filmed my last movie in Mexico and got really inspired,” I said to AK. I was wearing an embroidered Mexican dress belted to look like a mini skirt, lots of folk-art jewelry and big white sunglasses. “I now donate one percent of the proceeds from my perfume sales, after costs of course, to children’s charities in Mexico.” Next to me in the car, AK was dressed in jeans, blazer and baseball cap. She was director Peggy Marshall and I was actress Raquel Tilson , and somehow we’d agreed to do this for Julie and Andrew’s murder mystery party, which had a Hollywood-party-in-Mexico theme. “The invitation said you’re not allowed to make up clues,” AK said. “That’s impossible,” I said. “That would be so boring. Come on, what’s Peggy like?” “She’s obviously gay.” “Maybe Raquel is trying to sleep with her to get cast in her new movie, Gingey ,” I suggested. “Look, if you want to do some role playing later, just say so.” In college, Stephanie’s fri...

A few years ago I got into the habit of buying bras around the time of the L.A. Times Festival of Books. I think maybe Robinsons May had a sale then. There I’d be with a lot of older Persian ladies in the bowels of Westside Pavilion, sifting through racks of large beige bras. Despite what our culture would have you believe about breast size, being a bigger girl is depressing business. And I am sure the Persian ladies would agree. Robinsons May has long since gotten gobbled up by Macy’s, and when I went there today, I couldn’t even find the lingerie section, although Jamie later assured me there was one. So I went to Nordstrom at the other end of the mall, where you can buy all the same stuff but for more money. And so I did. Victoria’s Secret had already disappointed me with its flimsy straps and not-small prices, and my lunch hour was rapidly turning into a lunch hour-and-a-half. Panic got the best of me: I walked out of Nordstrom with four bras. The straps weren’t flim...

AK and I spent 24 hours of our weekend in Palm Springs celebrating Christine’s bachelorette party. We partied the way I suppose bachelorettes in their thirties do: We had lunch at the Parker (a Jonathan Adler spectacle of swank with mirrored shag and $15 oatmeal), Christine worked by the pool at 7 a.m. and Michelle ducked out periodically to spend some quality time with her breast pump. Plus AK was getting over a bad cold, so we found ourselves cozied up in bed at the Quality Inn* watching Saturday Night Live by midnight. But what a night for SNL ! It was the long-awaited Betty White episode , which I think may go down in history as a TV tipping point: The moment when the power of the “I bet I can find one million people who want Betty White to host SNL ” internet trumped the power of publicists and the rest of the TV machine. And more importantly, the moment when a bunch of ladies—many of them over forty and one of them way over forty—took over a male medium and made it tw...

God, my last post was so unbelievably long—like a serial novel but not in serial. And not really a novel, actually. Okay, never mind. But I’ll keep this one short: just a quick reiteration of how much I love college students. Terry and I visited Antioch last night on the last (for now) stop on our unofficial two feminists/two generations tour. It was a little different from the usual read-and-sign gig, and that much more fun for it. We were guests in the psychology department’s LGBT concentration’s lecture series (got all that?). Meaning we were there to talk about feminism, activism and social movements more than our literary inspirations. I was into that because big social ideas are what inspires me to write, and I’d almost always rather talk about ideas than about the writing of ideas. At the same time, I hardly felt qualified to speak as a representative of the younger generation of activists, seeing as how I’m neither young nor an activist, unless you count that form letter abou...

This afternoon I put our ancient office computer out to pasture, which involved wheeling it on a luggage cart through the hallway of our building so I could take it to the dusty gadget-and-repair shop down the street for recycling. Inevitably, this garnered some oohs and ahhs from our building-mates. As in, “Ooh, that sure is an old computer,” followed by an implied, “Ahh, how hilarious that you actually used it for seven years!” The supposed hilarity of old electronics is a pet peeve of mine. My philosophy, which I know makes me sound 85, is if it ain’t broke, don’t upgrade just because the new one is shinier. I also tend to anthropomorphize inanimate objects, so making fun of our slow but sturdy computer also just seems mean. (This runs in my family: My sister just bought an iPod Touch and gave me her first-generation iPod on the condition that I not change its name, which is Nigel.) Saturday night AK and I saw Please Give , a wonderful and thoughtful movie about the pros and cons of...

Things I’m worrying about today: The fact that my cell phone is going to give me a brain tumor. No, really . The fact that I’m too lazy and/or addicted to modern life to return to the way of the landline. The fact that really amazing poets and healthcare workers are getting abducted and tortured by the Philippine military . I mean, it would be bad if the Philippine military were torturing awful poets too. Although it’s sometimes described as such, awful poetry is not actually torturous. But Melissa Roxas writes incredible raw stuff that will haunt you for days, about how torture is not a metaphor for some people, about how she is a black dog in a sea of black dogs, and that is a metaphor. Arizona . Planning my vacations. ‘Cause, you know, not getting the best possible deal on airfare is right up there with racial profiling and torture and brain tumors. The fact that OC has taken to barfing up his special food, substituting one health issue for another. The fact that I forgot to call t...

I just made a bunch of sandwiches to take to the L.A. Times Festival of Books . Unlike some outdoor events, which are all about the food (funnel cake! that corn dripping with mayo that always looks so tasty but way too messy for an OCD girl like myself to even attempt!), LATFOB has apparently contracted with only the most corporate and boring food vendors. So instead of waiting in line forty minutes for a Panda Bowl, AK and I will be eating PB&J on the slightly odd bread I made a few days ago. I substituted almonds for walnuts, currants for raisins and, for oatmeal…Cheerios. Trader Joe’s O’s, technically. Even though the bread machine recipe book is plastered with warnings about substitutions—it’s like they knew I was coming—it all turned out surprisingly well. So, yeah, I’m starting to feel summery and outdoorsy. I’m wanting to pack lunches and wear sundresses paint my toenails (which I also just did, an Orange Crush orange). But I actually logged in to recommend an ind...

Next time I blow $50 at Forever 21 , remind me that there are sites like this out there. In my head, this is how I dress. So if you’ve never met me in person, picture me wearing something like this . Even though in reality I’m wearing a plain gray T-shirt and jeans that I suspect may be too hip hop for my age and personality. I mean, I like the cut and color, but the back pockets have this dark blue embroidery on them—basically the same color as the jeans, but if you look closely, you can see that they’re fakey Chinese symbols which for some reason translates to, like, Baby Phat in my mind. ModCloth is pricier than Forever 21 (I got like six items for my $50), but it’s not outrageous (well, not on the sale page) and they apparently buy from indie designers, which seems less oppressive than your average Banana Republic shopping spree, although technically indie designers are still capable of outsourcing to 12-year-olds in Indonesia. I found the site by clicking on an ad on Go Fug Yours...

I read Colson Whitehead’s John Henry Days a bunch of years ago, but I still remember how he described the main character, a hacky junket journalist, as accustomed to being a passenger on the road of life. (I think VW used this phrase in their “Drivers Wanted” campaign too, but Whitehead did it with more poetic flair.) The notion struck me as uncomfortably familiar. But lately I think I’ve passed my driver’s test—even if I took out a few orange cones along the way—so I feel like I’ve earned some passenger time. This weekend I didn’t teach anyone or moderate anything or coordinate a trip to the airport or even drag anyone along to a social event where I felt responsible for them having a good time. Friday night I showed up during the third hour of a three-hour work event of AK’s. When I arrived at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion—already a disconcerting place with its 1970s Bob Mackie-esque interior—kids were parading down the staircase in lace gowns and painted calavera faces. A ...

A long time ago, B and I rented Ice Age and thought it was cute that the DVD cover said, “Rated PG for mild peril.” Then we proceeded to grip the arms of our futon frame for 81 minutes as adorable Pleistocene creature after adorable Pleistocene creature faced peril that DID NOT SEEM MILD AT ALL. So while my usual M.O. is to fall asleep when I watch movies on weeknights, when AK and I saw How to Train Your Dragon at the $3 Highland Park theater (“Not in 3-D!” announced the sign at the box office), I practically had a heart attack instead. Not only were dozens of adorable mythic creatures in significant peril, but the main one, a Night Fury dragon named Toothless, bore a striking resemblance to our cat Ferdinand. Ferd even has a broken tail just like Toothless, so maybe that’s what’s kept him from flying all these years (though it hasn’t kept him from leaping on the kitchen counter or getting stuck on a roof or two). It was like seeing Ferd in peril. The movie centers on a gawky Viking...

To quote my friend Amy , "' Single Ladies ' is the song that just keeps giving."

I just got back from the AWP conference in Denver—my second trip this week, which makes me worry that I’ll turn into a road-weary comedian who can only make jokes about airline food. And they don’t even have airline food anymore. (See, there’s one.) AWP is creative writing’s big annual conference. I’d only been once before, when it was in Vancouver, but I think my coworker Sara summed it up well: “The first time I went, I was just starting my MFA and I was all bright-eyed, like, Oh my god! So many books! So many writers! And the second time I went, I was kind of in a dark place. I was like, Oh god…so many books…so many writers. ” Everyone you know is there, meaning you don’t have time to see any of them, plus a lot of people you don’t know but should, but are too shy/tired/drunk to talk to. At one point I met a tipsy friend of Colin’s at the Hyatt bar. He told me his first name and extended his hand, and I was like, “Oh, hi. You’re my boss.” This can happen if you teach ...