Bread and Bread

Jamie and I spent the morning at a nonprofit training seminar, the highlight of which was running into my old Daily Bruin editor, Edina. When I think back to my Bruin years, I picture myself and my fellow A&E section staffers running around like vulgar little monkeys, doing interpretive dance in our cubicle, immortalizing our own hilarity on our Quote Wall and not returning calls from hardworking arts publicists, because we believed publicists were the devil incarnate, and because we were lazy. Edina was a grownup amidst the chaos, laughing good naturedly at our absurdity, then going about the business of getting the fucking paper out. So when I say she seemed exactly the same 14 (oh my god) years later, it’s a compliment. She was a very mature 20-year-old. Me, not so much. I felt like I needed to be on really good behavior today. I’m proud to say I didn’t pick all my black nail polish off and leave the chips in a little pile on the table or leave the meeting to go buy myself ...

For Valentine’s Day, AK got me tickets to American Idiot (the musical), which combines two things I like very much: Green Day’s American Idiot (the album) and musicals. When we went to Saturday’s matinee, I discovered that it also includes a lot of another thing I love: Rent . A lot. From the general punk aesthetic (understandably) to the choreography to the spare sets adorned with scaffolding and a shopping cart to opening each scene with a date stamp to the curly-haired Puerto Rican-ish love interest who wears short skirts, fingerless gloves and gets addicted to heroin and in one scene angrily throws it across the room. A bit derivative, right? (See photos below for further evidence. American Idiot followed by Rent .) So watching it was a little weird. As various disaffected youth writhed about on stage, I felt sort of like, What’re you so mad about, honey? I wondered if this was what it would be like to see Rent for the first time at age almost-35. I even had one of those awfu...

It was one of those weeks. Yeah, AGAIN. But I had the day off today, and I had a gently used laptop with my former mentee Daniela’s name on it. She mentioned that she was in the market for one, and my amazing friend Craig donated his. So I drove out to Lancaster to deliver it. Not a drive I was looking forward to, but the trip plus Daniela worked their magic. There have been times when I’ve wondered if I find hanging out with Daniela healing because her problems have often been bigger than mine. I’m not at all comfortable with this possibility, but that might be a piece of it. Mostly, though, it’s about who Daniela is: this hilarious kid who’s faced down her demons at times, chased after them at others, but never given up—and who, now, is not really a kid at all. In the past six months, she’s become a mother, gotten her papers, gotten a grownup job with benefits and everything, and become the primary breadwinner in her household of six. That’s a hell of a lot for a 19-year-old to take...

Here’s what happened after my plane touched down Friday night: I came home bleary and self-pitying and woke AK up to get some sympathy. She had a class early the next day and wasn’t feeling very sympathetic. We grouched at each other, and no one but the cats got a good night’s sleep. Then we proceeded to have a very lovely weekend. Saturday night we celebrated her mom’s birthday with a leprechaun cake (you will never meet a Mexican who loves St. Patty’s Day more than Bea Ybarra). Then we went to a drag show* at Mr. T’s Bowl. For you non-Highland Parkers out there, Mr. T’s is a former bowling alley that, according to the sign, has been around since 1966. It’s still a certifiable dive in a time and place where they’re harder and harder to come by. There are notes to the staff written in Sharpie on the plastic switchplates. There’s a fish tank behind the bar that doesn’t look clean or up to code. There are frayed wires sticking out of the wall that are all fun and games until someone has ...

I’m working in New York right now. It’s a meeting-packed trip. But the nice thing about New York is that, even if you don’t have time to see a Broadway show, you still get a show. Some things I’ve seen/heard/eaten in my first 24 hours in the city: A woman dressed from head to toe in orange-rust. Her hair was orange-rust. So was her luggage. A panhandler with a strong Nuyorican accent claiming, “It’s my first trip to America! I have no family here!” He lit up a cigarette on the subway. When someone told him he had to put it out he said, “It’s my first trip to America!” He snuffed out his cigarette, then immediately lit another. Food from a place called The Best In New York Food. I think that “The Best” is intended to describe “New York Food,” but I prefer to think of it as “The Best In New York” “Food.” I just like the idea that an eating establishment would label itself so boastfully (the best!) and so humbly (not even a diner or a deli, just straight-up food). Food...

I’ve always had problems watching movies and TV shows about people at the same life stage I am. I think this would be interesting news to marketers, who seem to think people don’t read/view outside their own demographics, unless vampires are involved. But when I was in middle school, I hated watching The Wonder Years because Kevin had gotten his first kiss and I hadn’t. When I was in high school, I wouldn’t watch My So-Called Life because Angela had gotten her first kiss and I hadn’t. And so on. Therefore, I went into Friends With Kids with trepidation—but it looked sort of funny, and AK doesn’t want to see The Descendants for some reason. In a way, I needn’t have worried. As AK pointed out, it’s not so much a movie about wanting to have kids when all your friends do, or even trying to have kids, as it is a movie about having a kid with your friend and then trying to make room for romance. And it’s a good thing it’s not about people trying to have kids, because of course the...

March has come in like a lion, which is not easy on a sheep-snake like me. Hence the lack of blogging (that, and my continued addiction to Polyvore ; why do I not spend all my free time applying to writing residencies and reading things by smart people?! ). Anyway, here’s what I read in February before I discovered Polyvore. A lot of it was short. Wish You Were Me by Myriam Gurba: This is a strange, great, funny little nugget of a book. Gurba writes about having Tourette's Syndrome (though in no way is this a memoir about a clinical condition), and sometimes the chapbook feels like a performance of Tourette's. In the best way--like, thank you for SAYING that! If you get deep satisfaction from popping zits and think Michelle Rodriguez is only made hotter by an eye patch, this is a book for you. Me, Frida by Amy Novesky; illustrated by David Diaz: Just as the best biopics are strategic snapshots of famous people's lives, Novesky wisely chooses a key moment as her...

My new time suck is not actually new, just new to me. There was a long New Yorker article about it a couple of years ago, and for all its thoroughness, the New Yorker doesn’t really catch things at the very beginning of their ascent. I think they accurately described Polyvore as “paper dolls for grownups.” At the time I thought, Wow, I should make sure to never try that out because it could be a huge time suck. The site lets you create “sets”—fashion or design collages a la magazine spreads but without words as more than an accent or placeholder. (See where our world is headed! Aaaaah!) You can choose from the site’s vast catalog of dresses, outerwear, tops, pants, skirts, accessories, jewelry and visual embellishments, or you can upload your own stuff, but I haven’t bothered with that. Yet. Since Friday I’ve made like a dozen of these things . I wanted to limit myself to two a day, but so far that hasn’t happened. I’ll set some boundaries…tomorrow. In the meantime, it...

Since AK has been in school, our church-going has gotten way less frequent. This became extra clear yesterday when I saw a guy walk into Starbucks and found myself thinking, What is on his forehead? An extra eyeball? Some kind of medical implant? He doesn’t look like the kind of guy who’d be rocking a face tattoo. Don’t stare! Don’t stare! Then I realized it was Ash Wednesday. Today being, what, Freshly Scrubbed Thursday?, I’m a little late to the Lent game, but I’m going to play anyway. Here’s what I’m giving up. 1. Changing the subject to myself. This is an extension of my “listen and lurk” New Year’s resolution, which I’ve been plugging away at with mixed results. Did I ever tell you about the time my favorite college roommate Amber told me I had a habit of interrupting people to tell stories about myself? (I realize I just told you a story about myself, but you clicked something to get here—I’m not interrupting anything except whatever you should be doing instead of fu...

Right now I’m reading (well, listening to) The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie , about a Spokane Indian kid who makes the radical decision to attend high school in a farm town outside the reservation. I’ll try not to give too much away, but there’s a scene where Arnold, the protagonist, finds out about a death in the family—the third in a string of senseless losses. His dad is due to pick him up from school, and when he doesn’t show up on time, Arnold becomes convinced he crashed his truck on the icy roads. He descends into a desperate dialogue with God, pretty much just chanting, Don’t let my daddy die. Arnold comes from the kind of community where it is not rare to have attended 42 funerals by the time one is 14 years old. I’m 34 and I’ve been to six. That includes the funeral of AK’s coworker’s 80-year-old husband, whom I never met. Still, I get it. How loss makes you crazy. Or maybe in my case it’s more accurate to say, brings out the crazy that ...

Wednesday night I read in the Writers’ Row series at The Last Bookstore , an old bank converted to a big used bookstore, with shelves salvaged from a dead Borders and a wall clock that leaps forward every hour but is always wrong (well, except for twice a day, I guess? Its marginal functionality confuses me). You cannot get much more Downtown L.A. In 2012 than that. I was a little nervous because Jean and Linda, coworker and former coworker from New York, were there. They’d been to Really Important Readings at Really Famous Places. Would L.A. represent? Open mics are a little crazy. I probably don’t need to tell you that. But my nervousness reached a whole different level when an unbathed-but-not-exactly-homeless-looking guy took the stage with a hard black plastic case. He spoke into the microphone—something about breathing, about making the choice to breathe every day—but he kept wandering away from the mic and fiddling with the case. His eyes darted around, and he ran his ...

If you read my everyone’s a critic post, you can probably guess how much I loved this post on Bluebird Blvd. , in which Courtenay Bluebird assumes the persona of all those magazines that profess to make us (us = especially women) feel better and usually have the opposite effect . It’s enough to make a girl want to retreat to a cabin in the woods and light a giant fireplace fire with magazines as kindling.* Except then I’d get bored and wish for something to read. Can I make a humble addition to Bluebird’s list from my own monthly mail pile? Hi, I’m REDBOOK . I’m a gift from your really nice sister, whose generosity you totally appreciate . I make you feel weirdly middlebrow—and therefore snobby about feeling not good about feeling middlebrow—whenever you read me. Also, old. And then ageist about feeling not good about feeling old. Sometimes I have refreshing, if mildly simplistic, articles about transgender issues and infertility. But this month is my “Confess...

Factory Girl is one of those movies I added to our Netflix queue a million years ago and felt kind of meh about when it showed up (this is why we recently downgraded our subscription—our moods change too fast for the USPS to keep up). But I also wasn’t ready to totally give up on it, so last night we watched it as AK continued to recover from food poisoning from (probably) Friday night’s veggie pho. The movie is a biopic of Edie Sedgwick and the time she spent in the gaze of Andy Warhol and his camera. Sienna Miller is a great Edie (I say this having almost zero familiarity with the actual Edie, so take my praise with a grain of salt)—all big eyes and deep dimples, somehow both kind and carefree. Guy Pearce’s Andy is a childlike genius whose natural curiosity makes him a star and whose jealousy brings him down. When Andy and Edie slide in and out of each other’s spotlights—showering genuine love but playing stupid games—the movie is a long, glorious, tragic music video. But t...

Here’s a Note To Self that I have to write to myself over and over: Don’t try to do a zillion things in one day. It will make you bitchy. Yesterday I cleaned the house, including the billows of cat hair under the bed (made me miss T-Mec, in all her furry glory); went to My Life is Poetry , a reading of work by LGBT seniors (inspiring!); went to book club (debate-y!); and went dancing in WeHo (Britney-y!). Each thing was fun on its own, but I was pretty much exhausted from 4 p.m. on. When I was trying to wrap up book club so we could meet Nicole and Kimberly and friends in WeHo, I kept hushing side discussions so we could choose the book for next time. Two people kept talking, so I just stared at them until they were quiet. “Sorry, I went all teacher on you,” I laughed. “Yeah, I can totally tell you’re a teacher!” said Sunshine, a new member. “I’m not a teacher,” I snapped. Anyway, here’s what I read in January: Widow Basquiat by Jennifer Clement: An odd and g...

It turns out that Wednesday night is a much more popular time to take Aerial Fitness than Saturday at 8:30 a.m. Saturday class = a half-dozen students and lots of individual attention from Rick and Rob. Rick is built like a gymnast and likes to say things like, “Open your legs, honey. If I had a nickel for every time I said that to a girl, I’d have a nickel.” Rob has a striped mohawk and likes to fall on the ground and pantomime swordfights. Wednesday night = three classes going on simultaneously, a dozen Aerial Fitness students who all just happen to be at least six years younger and 15 pounds hotter than me, and instructions from the distracted teacher such as, “Foot lock—go!” Huh? If the Saturday classes reminded me of my gymnastics years in a good way, Wednesday’s reminded me of them in a…less good way. There was always one rotation I kind of sucked at (then vault, now silks). There was always one teacher who was a little mean (I think I’ve blocked out my mean gymnastics...

I’ve always liked the color and precision of Frida Kahlo’s paintings, and I probably dress as much like her as a white girl can get away with (though in dressing like an indigenous peasant, Frida was arguably an appropriator herself—but at least she had the revolutionary chops to back it up). But I never really felt like I had the right to be as Frida-crazy as, say, my grad school friend who had a tattoo of the MEChA logo and spent a few months in the jungles with the Zapatistas . So I resisted the urge to run out and buy me a Frida tote bag (though when I got one as a party favor, I was really excited). And then I read The Lacuna. Barbara Kingsolver makes Frida come alive as a person betrayed by her body and her loved ones, who responded with passion, humor, stubbornness, ruinous pride or shameless dramatic gestures. I have no idea if this is what Frida was actually like, but I fell in love with Frida the character. Suddenly I saw the blood and body parts in her paint...

The other day I fell into the wonderful black hole that is Regretsy —a blog that makes fun of Etsy ’s wackiest shit. There are crazy ideas, executed beautifully (and, in the case of the Star Trek Enterprise coffee table , photographed against unflattering backgrounds). There are regular ideas, executed terribly . And then there are those magical items that are the holy grail of poor/insane concept and execution, such as the Eva Peron butt plug , featuring a portrait of Santa Evita that is only recognizable as such only because EVA PERON is written in big gold letters at the plug’s base. Regretsy’s approach is mostly celebratory, and if you make Eva Peron butt plugs and sell them on the internet, you’re pretty much asking for it. But…(pun intended?), I found myself thinking, Helen Killer [as Ms. Regretsy calls herself] is totally hilarious, but it’s really hard to make an Enterprise coffee table! The product description even mentioned how the maker had gone through a couple of sheets ...

Yesterday I looked up my Year of the Dragon* horoscope, hoping for something along the lines of “You will get a baby and a book deal, fall even more fabulously in love with your loved one, and for once all of the bulbs in your kitchen light fixture will work at the same time.” Instead it was more like, “Meh.” I’m a snake, which is like a junior dragon. According to this horoscope , Dragon is my Happy Star, but “Dragon travels alone, so Dragon is also the Lonely Star to Snake.” Huh? Why is Dragon such a snob, and why does he want me to be lonely?! Two thousand eleven, though full of love, was also plenty lonely. Two thousand twelve is supposed to be about an embarrassment of riches, dammit. This horoscope (thanks, Cathy Che!) puts a brighter spin on the same info. The first one was sort of like, “Just keep your head down and stay out of trouble,” while this one throws a few exclamation points into the mix. It promises that 2012 will be “an exciting and busy time for you and your partne...

Public service announcement for anyone who’s trying to shut up her biological clock for a minute: Go see We Need to Talk About Kevin . It’s a movie (based on a novel I didn’t read) about a mom trying to raise a little psychopath whose only joy in life is tormenting her. The movie is sliced into short scenes, and it takes a while to figure out what’s going on—all we know is that there’s a Before world, in which Eva (Tilda Swinton) has a husband and two kids and a stylish haircut, and an After, in which she’s alone and haggard in that particular Tilda Swinton, Oscar-worthy way. But it quickly becomes apparent that her Before was mostly a period of suffering in silence, as she endures daily standoffs with a kid who refuses to potty train until he’s eight, when she tosses him across the room in a fit of frustration. Meanwhile her husband (John C. Reilly) just thinks the kid is quirky. The opening scene—never fully explained—shows Eva crowd surfing through some sort of Bacchanalia...

This weekend was a lot of things—MLK Day, Alberto’s birthday, AK’s continued birthday, Amy’s going-away, my biannual pap smear—but it was also…Circus Weekend! Chapter 1: My sister and I take Aerial Fitness at Cirque School L.A. Since my last (and only) trapeze class , they’ve moved into their very own gym in Hollywood. It’s filled with bouncy balls and trampolines and taped-up trapezes and flowy silks hanging from the ceiling. The good thing about going with Cathy is that we have all the same magical childhood associations. So one of us says, “Trampoline” and the other says, “Seriously.” And no more words need be exchanged. I have this plan that I will take all necessary cirque classes (about three months’ worth) to fill my grant requirements; then I’ll quit therapy and use the money I save to become a fucking trapeze goddess. That means I have three months to get my head healthy. The anxiety I had about getting a routine pap smear does not bode well for my mental health. ...