Bread and Bread

1. nice work if you can get it It's all fun and postcard views till Mt. Vesuvius gets pissed off again. This is the view from my window right now (well, it was when I started this post). You might be thinking: What is someone with an eight-week-old child doing tossing back cappuccinos on the Amalfi Coast of Italy? It was certainly a question I asked myself. As with many things in my literary life, I applied to this workshop called Sirenland on a whim. I heard about it through One Story ( Hannah Tinti is one of the conference co-founders), a literary magazine which recently sent me an encouraging rejection. In my mind, “encouraging rejection from One Story ” = “various famous writers really want me to hang out with them in Italy.” The pictures of Positano, Italy, where it took place, looked pretty. There was a mermaid motif. I get along well with mermaids. Trash can at Le Sirenuse. I felt bad putting trash in it. I found out I was accepted to Sirenland on t...

1. watching yourself watch the leaves Right now—when I’m not reading People Magazine or federal grant proposal requests—I’m reading Devotion, in which Dani Shapiro tries to address her lurking anxiety through a spiritual lens that includes the Orthodox Judaism of her childhood and a variety of Eastern practices that can (or maybe can’t) be boiled down to mindfulness. Read this book if you're the kind of person who's drawn to AA meetings even though you barely drink. I picked up the book because I’ll be taking a workshop with Dani Shapiro soon, and I didn’t feel like reading her more recent memoir, Still Writing, because reading about writing sometimes stresses me out. Devotion really speaks to me, though. Some of Dani’s anxiety is a holdover from a serious illness her son had as an infant, and my own anxiety (well, arguably everyone’s) is equally bound up in birth and death. As grateful as I am for the medical and psychological approaches that have helped me tac...

1. acceptance. speeches. I’ve been thinking about humility, and not just because we’re at the tail end of awards season, a time when people make tearful speeches about how humbled they are. I really liked Common and John Legend’s acceptance speech for the Selma song. They were humble not just in the way that is the opposite of bragging, which is how I’ve thought about humility in the past, but in a way that acknowledges they didn’t get there alone. They are part of a continuing history of struggle. They are part of a community, and they’re holding a statue because others have taken punches or even bullets.** What I’m trying to say is, I think humility is knowing you’re just a character in a story. Humility is arriving at a chapter in that story a different person than you were on page one, and the values you had back then almost feel irrelevant, or at least foreign. What I’m trying to say is, on Oscar night? Here is how I watched. Relax. 2. santa barbara In De...

This morning I woke up with the thought: If not for Martin Luther King, Jr., I wouldn’t be living the great life I’m living. I wouldn’t be able to move through the world easily with my Mexican-American esposa, hoping/planning to adopt a kid, having checked the “any/all ethnicities” box on our adoption preferences. This was followed immediately by the thought: And if not for white privilege, we probably wouldn’t have been able to finance any of it. Welcome to the smoothie of gratitude and guilt that is my brain. It’s okay, I’ve come to find it endearing. We spent the weekend in Oakland*, site of historic and recent civil rights activism. With Pedro and Stephen, we walked the quiet Sunday streets downtown, looking for a place to have a late lunch amid shops with boarded up windows. On the sidewalk, in front of Gold Rush-era storefronts selling artisanal canvas bags or perfectly curated vintage Southwest sweaters, was the repeated stencil: Black lives matter. Downtown O...

Having two full weeks off—twelve days of which were after Christmas—was head-clearing and house-clearing. Every day that I slept in felt luxurious, and I got a jump start on my New Year’s resolutions, which are really one resolution with a few branches: Be more mindful. Because gentleness seems to walk hand in hand with mindfulness, I’m choosing not to get mad at myself for the fact that I’ve already fallen off the mindfulness wagon at least a half dozen times. The point, I think, is that mindfulness is not a wagon . The inside of my head is almost as tidy. The house-clearing part came when AK and I lugged somewhere between ten and twenty bags of stuff from our office to Goodwill/recycling/trash. The office—a.k.a. our storage room (since my real office is Starbucks), a.k.a. the room OC gets shut in when he forgets to use his inside meow—has been hanging over my head for four years. It will hopefully be our baby’s room, but fixing it up preemptively seemed audacious. Not fixing...

Roll out the cat-clawed carpet and put on your fanciest pajamas: It’s time for the annual Cheryl Awards (which I will not call the Cheries, because I only went by Cherie for one year, in third grade, when I was determined to have a nickname—but in fourth grade, Sheri-Lynn Bellflower came to town and quickly established herself as the main Sheri). According to Goodreads, I read twenty-six books this year. Not bad for a year in which I started a new job, but choosing a top ten seems a little much. So, as in years past, I’m choosing the books and movies that, to me, form their own tier. I’m also—new feature!—including a quick “why you should read/see it” blurb. I recently stumbled across the (dormant-ish?) blog of writer Jefferson Beavers and was charmed by his end-of-2013 post , which he titled “10 Good Things That Happened to Me.” It’s such a simple way to express gratitude and give yourself a little love, rather than skipping straight to resolutions. In reading through his ten thin...

1. boyle heights During one of our roughly eighteen trips to Orange County in the past week, Waze rerouted us to side streets to avoid a bottleneck on the 5. The freeway spit us out in Boyle Heights, a neighborhood I’m always excited to discover more of, because it’s Homeboy’s original home and the site of a still unfolding story about immigration, violence, community and “gentefication.” But what greeted us at the bottom of the exit on Christmas Eve was a giant square billboard encouraging us to take out a CareCredit account for a loved one’s funeral. “Welcome to Boyle Heights, time to plan a funeral you can’t afford,” I muttered. The assistant/map reader is right to be skeptical. “Where’s my next turn?” AK said, perhaps a bit bark-ily. (We saw Nightcrawler recently, which is a dark, brilliant and extremely funny movie. The scenes in which Jake Gyllenhaal’s psychopathic, ambulance-chasing “journalist” character lays into his assistant about proper navigation tech...