sankofa

you can't fire me, i...

2011-08-18T22:42:00.002-07:00

stop, start, stop, start, stop.

a new car every morning. remember never to sit in the front seat. sometimes it's like waking up from a dream in which you were drowning, the way the air rushes back into your lungs and your brain reminds you of its will to live. of its fear of coming in contact with the rear-end of the car in front of you. brake, shift, brake, shift, brake. coming (too) close to the guardrail. you sit still and read your book and hope for the best.

little brother says thirty-one is really thirty, it means you're really in your thirties and there's nothing you can do about it. maybe celebrate your 29th ad infinitum but 29 wasn't such a great year. four. four was good. being little and snuggling on the couch with dad during nap time. comfortable for you. not so for him. everything looming overhead. everything new and impossible. shadows and birds cawing and the pavement hard under your feet as you ran home. you said, "let's pretend," and you could really do it. pretend. make the world new, every morning.

all headstones should say: eris quod sum.

don't tell the same story over and over again. it's gauche.

he asks, what do people mean when they say "of course?"
you say, it's like, "you're welcome," or, "no problem," like when you say "thanks for the ride" and they say, "of course." but you start to second guess yourself, because you're not really sure what it means, maybe it's a shortened version of "...a matter of course," which you think translates to, "it is a given," but there's too much to explain so he shrugs his shoulders and you shrug your shoulders even though the entire exchange takes place over the phone.

say something. say anything. but turn off that boombox, people are trying to sleep and for god sakes, get out of the rain.

the lazy blogger

2011-03-13T19:12:00.002-07:00

please visit me here at tumblr for the time being.

xo,
nana k.

eulogy

2010-12-17T23:55:00.004-08:00

in less than twenty-four hours, i will lose you all over again.

on friday you called and said you were going to the hospital; in the months before something was shrinking in your voice, a sinister hand closing your throat, strangling your voice to a pained whine. that night i was sick. i was popping tylenol to keep the shakes away, to ward off the fever. i forced myself to eat some curly fries. outside the burger joint, a girl wearing ugg boots said something insipid and awful to her male companion. there was nothing to do but laugh. there were christmas lights. a sequence of dark rooms with dark walls. outside i finally got you on the phone. i balanced a drink on my knee while you told me your hands and ankles were swollen and maybe you had a fever, too, the kind that rages in your body, tylenol or not.

i remember those times when you felt faint and small beads of sweat would appear on your forehead and nose, just small pinpricks wavering in fluorescent light. in the grocery store, when you sat on the bench near the doors while i bagged our purchases.

and i can see you steering the car to the hospital, wavering on a dimly lit road, parking crookedly against the curb and shuffling into the emergency room.

you didn't mind the winter but you were a summertime type of gal. the sort who owned one pair of sneakers over the years i was blessed to know you and those you wore inconsistently, sloppily, flattening the backs so you could slip your feet into them. most of the time, you'd wear a pair of sandals, guarding your feet from the wet and cold with socks.

maybe you don't know, but when someone passes away in a hospital, the nurses put all the deceased's belongings into a bag. out of this bag i removed a sweater, an undershirt, a pair of pants and the thin belt that kept them on your waist, a pair of sandals, and those crummy hospital socks with grips on their bottoms, those raised white slip guards that never last long in the wash, breaking apart into undecipherable hieroglyphics. each article smelled like you. a particular odor i still cannot define. soft, and subtle, and warm.

and one time we were in the car, going somewhere, late again after a harrowing exit from the house; i said, "why can't we ever get anywhere on time?" and you said, "murphy's law." and i finally understood what that meant.

you had been there with me many times. an emergency room. a hospital bed. me vomiting in a trashcan and you calling me "poor darling," or else saying "i told you so," in more than four words.

the month before i lost you i ended up in the hospital for a stupid reason, but i couldn't get in touch with you except for to tell you i was on my way to the emergency room. so you had my brother locate me by process of elimination, calling all the hospitals near my apartment until you found me. i called you again when they finally released me, after sitting alone in a sterile room without knowing what was wrong and crying. and feeling like an idiot for crying. and you told me to stop on the way home and get some 7up and then tuck myself into bed. you knew me so well.

when they put you in the ground, i was in a hospital bed, looking at my heart moving in blurry gray waves on a small screen. the technician told me i had a beautiful heart.

i remember because i am scared to forget. when i lost that $100 bill in the store. when i stole something from my school's booksale and you pulled the disappointed card. when we went to see some african drummers and you got on stage and danced, you were unfettered in a way that i will never be. when you pulled yourself together and did what you had to do, regardless of consequence. when you refused to give up on those who'd wronged you. forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.

or maybe the psalm 23, yea though i walk through the valley of the shadow of death. i will fear no evil. for thou art with me. the words leaving your mouth with such conviction while i stood next to you in the pew, fidgety in body, restless in mind.

they admitted you. you felt at peace. enough to sing. i said to my friends, "she's singing." i sipped my drink. i figured it meant you were feeling better. that everything would be all right.

i keep working to become the woman you want me to be. in my own way. in my own time. i battled with my femininity while you were always so sure of yours. red lips and high heels, showing off your assets. making dinner with one hand, a master's degree in the other. i didn't think you were wrong. i just thought i could never be the way you were. squared in shoulders. sharp of tongue. for a long time you tried to push me into a mold and i won't apologize for fighting you. those were lessons we both had to learn.

and you remember the last night we "talked," when i spoke and you made a forced choking noise and i said you should go to sleep. that i'd call you in the morning. i was so sure i would talk to you in the morning. everything would be fine. everything was always fine. i keep wondering if you were dying, then. if in that moment you were trying to tell me; if i misunderstood the lilt in your choke as one of acknowledgment instead of something else. the day before, you tried to tell me, "if i should die," and i cut you off. because you weren't going to die. i didn't want you to talk what way.

i want you to know that i worry no one will ever love me as much as you did.
and that i say goodbye to you every day; maybe if i say the word for the rest of my life it will make up for the one goodbye i never got to utter.
and that i am so proud to have called you my mother.
but at the same time i hope my life is nothing like your life.
sometimes i have to cry because i think of all the ways i wronged you.
and i hope you know that i am sorry, infinitely.

i will count the seconds, minutes, hours, days, years. i will hold them close. i know you exist in each one.

saturday night's all right, all right, all right

2010-11-20T17:48:00.002-08:00

and by the way, i do not like thunderstorms. most dogs are smart enough to cower and whine when thunder strikes. so why do most people find them so entertaining? whenever the thunder rumbles i stop whatever i'm doing and put my fists against my mouth, because that's what i do when i'm afraid.

i've been wearing a lot of denim lately. it's just a thing, i guess. a series of fashionable consequences and foolish financial choices have brought me decently-fitting jeans and a denim dress from a swedish or otherwise nordic clothing company. the dress makes me look pregnant. in that sartorial way. it comes with a faux leather belt. when i look at the whole thing objectively i see a sack made out of light-weight denim & a piece of twine coated with rubber or something to hold the thing together. i still love it, though.

someone said: oh, i like your outfits so much and i said back, well, it's only to keep myself entertained. which it is. i see women everywhere dressed in that certain 9-5 uniform and i feel bad for them, clipping along in their louboutin's or otherwise cheap knock-offs. all that says is you spent $700 on shoes that you can't really walk in. how boring.

but then again i spent a bit more than i should have on a denim sack dress.

the other day i picked 7 chewed pieces of gum out of my purse. i save the wrappers so i can dispose of the chewed-up pieces after they lose their flavor; often there's not a garbage can nearby, so i stick it in my bag.

i remember when i just used to spit the gum out wherever i was.

one time, i spit it out of my uncle's car, but the gum got stuck to the side and we were moving pretty fast down the freeway, so i couldn't pick it off. some years later, a black streak was still there, on the right rear passenger side door, what gum looks like after it dies.

and a few years later i saw a girl dispose of a sauce pack from wendy's right in the middle of the street; just threw the thing as she crossed from one corner to the other when there was a garbage can a few feet away. i almost ran her down with my car. i wanted to tell her the world is not infinite. that someone will not always be around to clean up your mess. that she ought to have more respect for her local environment. but i kept driving.

i carry everything to the trash. or carry everything around until i can get to a trash can. sometimes my pockets and purse are full of rubbish.

tomorrow is when i will fully realize why i dislike this time of year so much (happy birthday, mom).

and, tomorrow, i will find some other way to occupy my time so that i don't think about it.

i'm getting tired of the word "it." i use it to much. it is annoying. it is the mark of a lazy writer.

but i keep going, nevertheless.

time passed

2010-10-31T23:17:00.005-07:00

someone reminded me that i needed to update this blog.

i thought about it for a week or two. and then, true to form, i didn't do anything to change the situation.

today i bought (well, put a deposit on) 2 pieces of furniture & i have no idea where they'll fit in my apartment and the woman selling them said that she'd rather have someone who loved the pieces as much as she did take them. it was one of those "act now or regret it" moments. like when you zero in on what you want and a few moments later that thing is in your hand, except with me i zero in on stuff and not so much on purpose.

so there was this old man trying to talk the furniture-lady down on the cost of what i think was butcher block & boy she was giving him what-for. i guess he lowballed her, and kept insisting. he was extremely old, gesturing with his cane and all and part of me wondered why he needed to buy anything else. at his age, haven't you got everything already?

i watch a ted talk about keeping your most important goals secret in order to really achieve them. so now i will not be telling anyone anything.

which is fine because i think i give a little too much; blame it on my staunch devotion to honesty and genuine discourse.

but all people mask the truth a little bit.

for all the work i've been doing on myself i still have irrational fears. i'm not the only one, am i? i'm supposed to breathe through the attack and take time to write down my worries--an act that is proven to reduce anxiety for most people who suffer it. my headshrinker says most people can't be bothered. therefore: i win the fucked-up peoples award for tenacity.

you know when you hurt yourself, or experience some kind of physical pain, and you think you'll remember it for the rest of your life, how badly you felt, how deep the wound or broken the bone--but for all that yapping, the pain still becomes a vague memory and when you recall it you're not sure if what you're feeling is the actual pain, or your brain's closest approximation of the pain you told yourself you'd never forget? that's how i feel now. only the problem is psychic, not physical.

there are people outside yelling and groaning and cats fight each other (or fuck?) and i have this notion that i'm going to get mugged, soon.

which is one way to keep yourself from leaving the house.

except you have to counter-think, and say, "well, it's just stuff, after all."

and also that whatever you put into the universe will likely come back to you. so i'm trying to think safe thoughts.

and also that i'd like to strangle anyone who finds it necessary to steal.

well, most people, anyway.

suddenly i miss the suburbs. my dad told me it got to be so windy the other day that the "for sale" sign in front of his house blew away, and i want that to mean something, but all i can think is that our parents are leaving us with the most broken of legacies. still, how often do you get to laugh about a big wooden sign getting hurled off by the zephyr's wrath?

i understand more and more that i think & comprehend in pictures and less so in words. maybe i should make movies?

i think of wasted opportunities.
and one-way conversations.
and the person who made me feel that way.
and that the internet is getting to be awfully boring.
and the two big white dogs i saw outside of the bookstore this afternoon, which were way better than imposing statues of lions in mid-roar or whatever else.
and charles bukowski sitting in his car crying like a baby.
and the days
run away
like
wild horses over
the
hills.

(suffix)-ion

2010-08-07T08:30:00.001-07:00

turns verbs into nouns.

i'm holding a bottle in my left hand. i waited for this bottle for nearly an hour after a twenty-minute doctor's appointment, during which i learned my weight and again had to guess my height and had to fill in a form that asked me in varying of ways if i feel sad all the time, if i experienced loss of interest "some of the days," "a few of the days," "almost every day," or "all of the days." and i wanted to ask which days, and what all the numbers associated with my answers meant and why my doctor didn't bother to add them up; i guess my answers revealed something we both already knew.

at the pharmacy i was told my prescription is a controlled substance and required a fax from my doctor, even though his office was down one flight of stairs and really, couldn't i just have carried whatever paper they were going to fax up to the fucking pharmacy? the girl at the counter said maybe 20 minutes and i sat reading, watching the big screen for my name, but the screen just repeated the same names over and over again and more people got in line and took seats in the waiting area and i started to feel agitated and itchy. i am reading a book. i'm a few pages into this very popular book and i can't understand why everyone thinks it's so great. so i started to feel bad about that. and an old man shuffled towards me, sat heavily in seat next to mine. he smelled like ben gay. in the seats across from mine two old women talked about john legend and how adorable he is; one of them was the fussy type, corralled all her potions and pills in plastic baggies. she kept reapplying her lipstick, a constant, swooping motion perfected by too many years of practice but it didn't help anything because her face was still droopy and wrinkled and the lipstick was the wrong color, anyway, and suddenly i felt very afraid of old age.

45 minutes passed. i approached the counter and said i'd been waiting for an hour and the girl at the counter (a different one, this time) typed on her keyboard and clicked the mouse and shouted to her coworkers about a "hold" on my prescription and why it was taking so long; first she was going to call my doctor but before she could the hold magically disappeared. so i got my prescription and more or less threw my bank card at counter girl, my face like a piece of iron sheeting, and she said "sorry for the wait," and i tried to smile, but i couldn't.

these are small peach tablets. i am to take one pill daily for a week, and then increase to two per day. i have three refills left. one label informs me that this drug may cause drowsiness or dizziness and alcohol may intensify those feelings. another label tells me to avoid alcohol all together. nowhere on the label does it say that i might gain a lot of weight. or that my already suffering libido may suffer even more. on the info sheet included with the prescription i am told that this drug might cause headaches and dry mouth and sweating and all kinds of other unfortunate side effects; really, i thought the purpose of this endeavor was to encourage me to leave the house, not give me more reasons to stay in it.

so of course i wonder how something so small could cause so much bodily sturm und drang and i'm having all these second thoughts like, what kind of (reasonably) healthy person with no prior issues with addiction can't go out for a drink with friends, or even let a guy buy a round on a date? (assuming i ever go on one again) and, how am i supposed to feel better if my positive feelings are tied to my body image and if my body image changes for the worse, am i really going to get better? i don't think of the positives. how maybe all of that won't matter. i don't consider that side effects are individual quantities and i might not experience any at all. somehow, the fear of going up a pant size trumps my general well being. really, what's wrong with me?

what's wrong with me is that i fear being alone. i'm already alone, and now certifiably off-balance, and all those side effects increase the potential of my being alone and just one small seed of potential is all i need to grow a strangling vine of malcontent. small enough as one of these pills i'm supposed to take before i go to sleep this evening. i sleep a lot anymore. i can't control it. i get on the couch and i don't care enough to do the dishes or make dinner or chop things or sweep things; curling up in a ball and exercising the muscles in my thumb by flipping channels is really all i have energy for. if i wasn't already employed i'd have little reason to get out of bed. if i wasn't so vain and truly cared less what people, strangers, really, thought of me i'd make an art of donning pajamas as day wear. once in the fairly recent past i was getting ready to meet a friend, a completely platonic hang-out, and it took me about 2 hours to decide what to wear; i was insane over it--pants, or skirt? perhaps a dress? which shoes? those are too pointy. these make a squeaking noise when i walk. maybe this situation is to casual for a dress? this outfit makes me look tomboyish. this one makes me look like a fifteen-year-old. maybe if i put this sweater over top? it didn't matter what i did. my whole body felt prickly, my thoughts were racing, i felt that odd sense of detachment--how i used to experience PMS in those early pubescent days; i would go absolutely psychotic but part of me, a part of my mind cordoned off by a curtain, knew i was acting in an outrageous, untenable way but i couldn't stop. by the time i got dressed and got myself into the car i was exhausted and didn't want to be around anyone. least of all myself.

my doctor looks a little like one of those guys that had it too easy, and perhaps things got difficult for a while, and then they got easy again. with no disrespect to medical health professionals, i sometimes get the feeling that they'd rather not be in that room, discussing your deepest and darkest and most embarrassing. because my idea of a great afternoon is spending it in a waiting room, picking up on the stress of other people, all the individual frailties infecting my own. i especially like the intake nurse who couldn't be bothered to take my height--i wanted to say, i come here at least once a month, don't you have it on record? i liked filling out the form in a sterile examination room and admitting that most of the days i feel sad, and most of the days i have trouble getting out of bed, and most of the days i have problems focusing and feel fidgety. and i truly enjoyed waiting at the pharmacy for 100 of these "film-coated peach tablets" that may or may not do unwanted things to my unfortunate self.

8/6/2010: went to bed after 1 1omg dose of celexa. was hard to sleep--woke up multiple times. experiencing loss of coordination; have "rubbery limbs" and slight headache.

random notes

2010-08-06T11:28:00.004-07:00

-i wish the street creeps would come up with a new euphemism, "chocolate" isn't cutting it anymore. next time i get catcalled, or stopped, or harassed, if the guy says, "hey, fresh loam around the roots of a newly planted tree," i might marry him.

-revelation: at some point, i'll reach an age of maturity & will no longer be able to bear children. given as much, why should i have to wear the spanx and get the botox and fret when a man doesn't respond to my womanly wiles (as if i have them)? the mens are the ones who can continue to reproduce well into old age. shouldn't they be trying to win young females over? someone, explain the reason for this. (for the record. i don't to either. the spanx or the botox. though i'm in deep consideration regarding the spanx).

-she always said, "things done by halves are never done right" and now i can't do anything by halves anymore and every task takes a ridiculous amount of time.

-you say love, i say guilt, let's call the whole thing off.

-everything happens during the day. this place is loud. buzz saws and garbage trucks and those kids next door with the loudest dog that ever was and car alarms and vacuums and some neighbor hammering nails into the wall, or something. and yet, i always forget and think it would be lovely to spend a day at home.

-well, look at that lovely fu manchu. and j. cusak looks like the smelly kid you forced to sit in the backseat.

-in retrospect, i've always felt this way. with everything in my line of sight a little dim at the corners, a little too hard to bear, a little too much to motivate. like my brain is layered as the heavens and earth and hell and i'm always in one or the other but never the middle.

-i make a list. it's a sad list. an exploration of a slow descent.

-the sun comes out around 11:30. remember for future reference.

-she says, the thing about him is that you look at him and you think, oh, what a nice looking boy. and then you look into his eyes and you realize, no actually, that's a man. and i say, yes, definitely. he would destroy you and you'd love every minute of it. face of boy. eyes of man. win-win situation.

-the problem with my irregular streaks of genius is that i never execute them.

-and i can always talk myself out of taking the bus. even when it rains.

-space makes me feel small. it makes me miss the future i'll never get to see.

-suddenly, i enjoy writing things that can be read backwards or forewords, little literary palindromes--though irregular. not the words themselves but the story they create.

-and by the way i'm done with writing advice. do it or don't. the end.

-on the one hand, it's only $60. on the other hand, it's $60.

-sometimes i walk into a church and i forget how much i miss being inside one. but churches are different when they are almost empty, except for us, a couple curious souls critiquing the architecture and one old man in a pew, his head bent in prayer and maybe, if you look closely you can see a few tears. maybe at the scenes running along the walls, the stations of the cross on bronze plates, lest we ever forget what it is to suffer.

no, wait.

2010-07-11T00:39:00.004-07:00

i can't get that stupid lady gaga song out of my head.

which one? all of them. but mostly "telephone." i finally watched the video thinking a direct approach was best, but that choice proved to be foolish. it only made the earworm burrow deeper. and now my eyelids are etched with visions of pop starlet du jour and her naughty bits wrapped in crime scene tape and beyonce's black lipstick and by the way why were they eating a snack cake? or maybe it was a sandwich from a vending machine.

i have a lot of questions about that video.

you say: she's probably a virgin.

i say: could be, but maybe she just really likes sex. but then again, people who haven't had sex tend to glorify it. pray at its altar. dildos and k-y jelly and a photo of john holmes or whatever.

all i want is for her to put some clothes on. one day i'll write something important. i'll call it, "the hypersexualization of the american female." i will use lady gaga as my first case study. i will ask her: are you owning your sexuality by flashing your giblets and wearing shoes even the most stylish aliens wouldn't touch? or, is all this your half-baked idea of sexy? what happened to suggestion? a wink. a bare shoulder on an otherwise clothed body?

i am a.) a prude, or b.) an old lady

but my female role models, when i had them, never got so naked.

what happened to art? everything is plastic and quick cuts and the same lines repeated over and over and over again until you want to die because death is silence, unless there is a hell, in which case you should know that satan is on a real lady gaga kick.

my ipod is stuck on jimi hendrix. on shuffle, every other song is purplefireareyouexperiencedhaze.

i don't mind. but i have no idea how it happened. i jimi-ed myself out sometime during the 10th grade.

i read somewhere that jimi was always trying to assert his ethnicity. to remind himself and everyone else that he was a black man who happened to be a little piece in the white man's game. people more comfortable with their racial identity chided him for it. because who cares, really? motherfucker played the guitar with his teeth. i mean, i think that was him, at least. i'm acquainted with far too many guitar gods.

i always wondered why they'd show lenny kravitz videos on BET, but not the chili peppers. same difference, right?

...stop calling, stop calling, i don't want to talk anymore...

god. it's horrible.

there's no harm in it, right? i once babysat this goth girl who slipped into a will smith phase, she would wiggle her fingers in time to "gettin' jiggy with it" and make this face that was cute and frightening at the same time. the next year, she said to me, "can you believe i liked will smith?" like she'd gone insane. in the court of music she could plead temporary insanity--the defense would fly. that shit was catchy. at least the guy has morals.

05:13 pacific standard time

2010-07-01T21:59:00.005-07:00

i don't know why i still dream about you. we were in a hospital. not to convalesce. we were just there, in the building. white walls, polished floors still blinding in shadowy memory. then a friend came to visit and suddenly we have people in common. the friend is strange. someone i feel i don't know well. she has a pockmarked face and stringy hair. there is something brutish about her, like she spends her free time punching walls. i get in the car, in the backseat because that is where i sit and you get in the front. you look different, sparsely bearded and pudgy, now, like everyone else. towheaded. average. i try to hold my tongue but silence has never been one of my strengths. eventually, it all comes out. a tumble of dream words from a wounded woman's mouth. you are cruel. your mouth is cruel, twisted and pinched. you scoff, you say it's the same old story, the same lies i told your brother (who i never met), the same lies i tell everyone else. the car stops and your new girl gets in and suddenly you are all moony eyed kissy-faced; with glee in your voice you tell everyone how you're going to buy all these things at the mall, new shoes and new kicks from banana republic--then you correct yourself. shoes, kicks. they're the same thing. you can't bear to be wrong. i do not look at you, at the back of your head, your hair sticking up in the unkempt mess that was always so adorable. your girlfriend is small, a slip of a thing, matchstick wrists, slender thighs. i am a giant next to her, a dark thing no one wants to touch. i want to tell you: you can't buy men's shoes at banana republic, but i don't. the brute in the driver's seat begins to talk, her voice like grains of sand underfoot, she tells us the sense of smell is the weakest sense, but women have more sensitive olfactory glands than men. i want to ask, is it because the sense is so weak that it always leads us down the wrong path? the car darts and maneuvers, moving too fast on a city street, at night, everything fluorescent yellow and black and navy blue outside the windows. another friend seems to apparate next to me and i tell her how you heartbroke me, i say it loud enough for you to hear; in the dream, i sob, i say you broke my already burdened heart, because people die, and men leave, and i can never get the timing right.

and the scene changes. i'm watching an episode of grey's anatomy. meredith weeps over the father she never had. in the episode, all the characters are dreaming, daydreaming, they separate themselves from their bodies, the separation represented by some digital magic, their spirits are sucked out and waver, watercolored shadows hovering over their own bodies. behind them, reality makes itself known, ghostly patterns, melodramatic scenes to the tune of a gently plucked acoustic guitar.

F = (16)(16)-6

2010-06-28T21:44:00.009-07:00

i remember that shirt. i bought it from value city, or tj-maxx, some discount store or another where it was hanging on a rack, forgotten, pressed between dusty items in a forlorn place, languishing halfway between the manufacturer and donation (or, off-loading) to a third-world country. 90% cotton, 5% spandex. $7.99, sales-tax free. i still remember the way the fabric stretched, how i thought it hung just in the right way, and i waited to wear it for precisely that occasion, a party, maybe a birthday. maybe more like, "my parents are out of town, let's fuck shit up," but probably a birthday, because i wasn't a fuck shit up kind of gal.

i thought the shirt hung the way i wanted it to, clingy in the back with give in the front. the jeans i openly stole from my father's closet. he didn't care. he laughed, said he didn't really wear them, anyway, but why on earth would i want to wear his pants? underneath the shirt, a clearly ill-fitting bra; underneath the pants, a red plaid pair of flannel boxers, also purchased at value city, likely from a two-pack . i think the other pair were green. must have been chirstmastime cast-offs.

i like how i'm holding my left hand in that gimpy fist, with my arm curved, reminiscent of a stroke victim's unmovable limb. i remind myself of kevin spacey's character in the usual suspects, using the indignity of a disability as subterfuge. in that movie, he was a criminal mastermind, at the end he shook off his infirmities and walked away with an evil, cunning heart. i was just a fifteen year old girl, embarrassed by her watch, so much so that i can't even remember what was on its face. i stopped wearing that watch and for a while, i took to carrying an old fashioned pocket watch, a big gold pendulum with mysterious etchings on its case, roman numerals on its face. our uniform skirts didn't have pockets, though, so i'd clip it to the top of my tights and tuck and roll the watch in the band of my skirt so the chain would dangle in the appropriate way. then that watch broke, and i forgot about time.

those shoes are either chuck taylors, or a pair of one-stars, maroon suede. skater shoes to ride the skateboard i didn't have. i wore the chucks so much; eventually they were held together by safety pins, and my feet; eventually, my mom threw them out. i don't know what happened to the one-stars. i remember changing into them for work one day, and after that they sort of disappeared. truly, i'm an unfaithful shoe-holic.

it was a party so i put makeup on, lipstick probably out of the .99 cent bin at walgreens and this was possibly during my blue mascara phase. looks like i went overboard with the pressed powder, covering up blemishes i did not have with an un-matching shade because there weren't tones for people like me. so i used whatever i could find, poorly applied. my mother always said i shouldn't use makeup, and never taught me how. she said: don't shave (except your armpits) and don't use tampons (until you have sex). i did all of those things. it was just what normal girls did. i don't begrudge her for keeping these things from me. she was only trying to save me some trouble, to preserve the youth teenagers are universally in a hurry to get rid of.

i used to practice shaving by spreading body lotion on my legs and squeegeeing it off with the edge of a nail file.

as of this date, i haven't shaved my legs in 2 months. howdy, boys.

in the photo, i was probably wearing socks with those shoes. a short time later, i gave up on them. the socks. fucking socks.

speaking of undergarments, my mom used to buy all my bras for me but sometimes i'd get a little rebellious and used the little money i had to buy my own, the lacy, dangerous kinds my smaller-chested friends got to wear and, though i now see that it looks like i've got a harlequin mask strapped around my chest, and a plywood board underneath my shirt, i thought i looked pretty foxy.

kind of.

i still had fat bits bulging out everywhere and i could never get the boxers to peek out above my jeans the way i wanted to, being blessed with ass i was constantly trying to cover up.

i showed this photo to someone earlier today and that person remarked on the beads dangling from my braids. upon further remembering, those weren't beads. they were tiny rubber bands. like the kind you might find in the mouth of a twelve-year-old, connecting her top braces to the bottoms. i never had to wear braces, but those rubber bands came in handy. i remember getting my hair done, how the rubber bands pinched the root of each braid and my mother clicked her tongue when she came to pick me up.

sometimes, i hated my hair so much that i'd sleep with it in a ponytail because i didn't want to be ugly while i dreamt; i used to sleep with my bra on, because couldn't stand how my breasts fell into my armpits when i lay down, how they put an uncomfortable few inches of distance between me and the mattress should i turn on my stomach. i felt my underwear kept all my parts bound, and safe, out of my way as they needed to be.

i didn't spend much time in the shower. there was something so awful about being naked.

flipping through the photos, i had a mission: locate senior portrait, you know, the one where they pose you in some hackneyed way, airbrush you beyond recognition and your parents buy 50 of them to send to relatives and no matter what, you hate the end result, until about ten years later, the point at which misery becomes hilarity because you can't trouble with the bad feelings anymore.

the last 3 pages in that particular photo album are full with senior portraits from friends, because what else can anyone do with 35 wallet-sized prints but give them away? so there's about 3/4 of my senior class of 1998, wistful eyes looking into the future with expectation, posed with roses and velvet wraps displaying bare shoulders and by the way, didn't anyone think it was a little weird that we had to pull our bra straps down and show off a little skin for some ham-fisted photographer? it was a catholic school, after all.

people say i don't look the same as i do now in that portrait. my hair is different and there's a little less chub under my chin but i don't think i've changed all that much. or maybe that's what it means to age. an external process that happens faster than our brains, our self-perceptions, can keep up with.

my senior photo is a lot different than this photo. in this photo, i look at balled fists and ill-fitting clothes and dour, why are you taking my picture expression and i see someone who was so hopelessly scared of herself, of the parts and curves that made her female, weighed down by bacon-and-mayonnaise sandwiches and capri suns. this person was, albeit clumsily, trying to reject what she felt were the stifling notions of femininity, the rigidity of it, the standard impossible to attain. and yet, this person would get on the scale three or more times a day, decide she could stand to skip dinner, fill her belly up with water until the hunger got to be too much to bear. until the tin of spam in the pantry cried for attention and the frying pan waiting to be used.

there's only so much to chalk up to style, or fads. i can use the times to defend myself. things were mean. everyone was tired of the 80's, the plastic and leather, the songs about nothing, j.r. got shot, everyone shrugged and moved on. those times weren't about being pretty. they were about steeling yourself against the world because there was so little beauty in it. but, at some point, i have to realize i was hiding behind my hair and my awkwardness and my angst. i remember how it felt, like if i took a hard step i'd break through the floor, how i felt sloppy and greasy and generally malcontented. i never wanted to be anyone else, really. i knew i was a girl, and that was OK most of the time. i never wanted to be a white person, or one of any other race. i liked my name. i just wanted to be a better version of myself. in a way, i am still the girl in this photo, always ungainly on the inside, never quite sure of herself, trying to sort out what comes next, like feeling your way out of a dark, unfamiliar room.

so i look at those photos, everything ill-fitting and saggy or too tight, too wide in the leg, too loose in the chest, too manly in cut, too short in the skirt, and i can't imagine why anyone would look back on those adolescent days with any idyllic thoughts. after you start at such a base level, there's only one place left to go.

judge and jury

2010-06-19T21:53:00.002-07:00

so i bought a new pair of shoes.
pinkish, like a caucasian baby's bottom.

try to make the faces you made in baby photos, you look like a parody of yourself.

i do this in the privacy of my own closet. but my cheeks just aren't that big anymore and i can't make those cute little fists with my hands.

have to have a new dress to "go" with the shoes (because shoes don't match, they "go," like purses "go" and bragh. that has a go.). this is something you learned recently.

learn too late the wonders of a baking sheet.

consider the possibility of agoraphobia. how you waited off to the side until you were sure your neighbor had made it in the door and up the stairs before you even thought about putting your key in the lock.

and on your birthday (not mine) half of the moon threatened to fall on the earth, framed between two buildings and the horizon and the sky and all you (i) could think about was cookie monster's seranade, "if moon was cookie..."

smokers can be "chippers" so shoppers can be too, right?

get riled up over the game, even while lying in bed, and having missed most of it. make up for the day's early excitement with a nap, make up for a nap with a trip "out," buy shoes. buy fries. stimulate the economy, one empty purchase at a time.

you have to wonder why anyone would get their eyebrows threaded in such a public place.

consider the vulgarity of a woman's body. it makes you shiver, a little.

and you were making good progress until you got caught up on trying to find a way to describe the sound of mandarin, spoken.

there were things you forgot to ask but hope to, next time.

remember the weather is never your friend, it's not anyone's friend, and it doesn't care how long it took you to do your hair.

and in the past week, three unrelated people have told you to smile. you start to wonder what's wrong with your face. the last one said, "those are nice sunglasses, they'd be nicer with a smile." so you smile, but not because you are flattered.

machinations

2010-06-13T23:14:00.004-07:00

things done and not:

-spend the hottest day of the year mostly indoors, while your apartment warms like a slow oven, baking you in your shell; in the evening, find reasons to go outside and press bare feet to dirty concrete to cool them off.

-across the way, the neighbors are watching csi: miami. horatio caine removes and replaces his sunglasses, tilting his head at that unsettling angle. if only life were so simple. slight depression at the realization that the show is recognizable even from several yards away, through window.

-precisely between 8-10 am, allow DSL technician to tromp around, installing a new modem. he tells you he has six jobs to do today and asks, rather politely, if he can sit down to fill in his paperwork. unasked, he staples the cable cord flush to the floor, to avoid tripping accidents. the cord has been that way for two years. sometimes, people can be so nice, it's heartbreaking.

-read the tipping point. wish to be a "connector." understand that to be a connector, it is necessary to leave the house, and, when out of the house, to interact with strangers.

-find fault with the way you laugh.

-wonder what happens to what must be thousand of american orphans, having been passed over by their counterparts in the motherland. have heated conversation with yourself; are you being ridiculous, so jaded and hateful that the noble act of adoption becomes a fault, or, as you convince yourself, completely right when you decide ethnic babies are like fashion accessories dangled from the wrists of wealthy mommies. wonder what happens to an individual raised by his opposites, with no exposure to his culture, his upbringing the result of luck, and fortune. literal fortune.

-if i spent less time on my own, would i quit talking to myself? i don't remember being any different. of anyone, i am most combative with myself.

-as per usual, too many exposed breasts on true blood this evening, not enough exposed ass.

-but enough exposed ass to help you remember what you like about it.

-taco night is a good night.

-friends have revelations. you have steep climbs. recently, a doctor told you to avoid high altitudes because it can aggravate sickle-cell anemia. it makes sense. climbing mt. everest was never an ambition, anyway. two weeks later, receive letter from doctor informing her clients of her decision to leave the hospital. there's nothing sad about it.

-since when is straight up licking someone's neck during a makeout session an erotic thing to do?

-or, for that matter,giving someone a dental exam with your tongue. figure it out, people. kissing is fundamental. the more you know. etc.

-keep friends in your heart. mourn their losses.

-it has been decided that headbands and soccer shirts and orange shoes are a good look, and should be sported by all.

-it comes to you two days later: the word is "verdant."

-experience slight anxiety since hairstylist will be on vacation for two weeks and your roots are coming in curly.

-are stomach transplants a reality yet?

-remember: the only way to be truly anonymous is to go somewhere your kind is not.

becoming, pt. 2

2010-06-08T20:14:00.004-07:00

read part 1 here.

There was a boy. His name was Steven or Shaun or Seamus. Selby remembers resting her head between his folded legs, the sweet smell of his crotch, and the way he stroked her hair, stretching out her curls with a gleeful “boing!” like the boys in grade school used to do. He had a girlish giggle and a crooked smile. On her twenty-eighth birthday, she’d gone out with friends and drank herself ageless, accepted the joint when it was passed, drifted in and out of bars until they closed, allowed her friends to drag her to a house party, through crowds of people milling around in the hot night, she thought she had never seen so many people, roving like animals released from the zoo. The party thinned until she and the boy were left, groping each other with mindless hands. In bed, the boy’s skin was damp against hers. She cupped a hand over the flab at the base of his abdomen. He caressed her ears, her elbows, desperately gripped her naked hips, then turned out the light. Waking late in the morning, Selby watched the boy scuffle around his bedroom, his body suddenly not so flawed as it had been in the night; his lean silhouette cut the air, weapon-like. He blew his nose with the corner of a wrinkled t-shirt and dressed, ignoring Selby’s guilty “good mornings.” Through the door, she heard him talking to a roommate, “where’s the girl from last night,” the roommate asked. “I don’t know,” the boy said, “she was gone when I woke up.” “Are you sure,” his roommate said, “her stuff is still here.” The boy said he didn’t know. It didn’t matter anyway, he hadn’t planned on seeing her again and he couldn’t stand around talking about it, he wasn’t going to waste this day like all the others. The two roommates decided to go for breakfast, remarking on their messy apartment, how suffocated the place made them feel. “The weirdest thing happened,” the boy said as he and his roommate went down the stairs, “I knew she’d left, but I could feel her in bed next to me.”

Picking her way through post-party clutter, Selby found her belongings, her keys hanging over the edge of a red plastic cup, her feet protesting her shoes. Thinking about what the boy had said, she pinched herself. Sitting half-dressed on an unfamiliar couch, she felt numb but the pinch stung all the same. Outside, obscene sunlight collected itself in reflections on the hoods of cars, dappled the surfaces of greasy puddles of water; Selby stepped out into the street, crossed it, the boy’s odor lingering in all her subtle creases and folds. Nothing had changed. Her birthdays were like that. She was nine, then she was ten. She was twenty, then twenty-one, twenty-five, then twenty-six. There was no gravitas in age, only decay. Her grandmother had warned her on the evening of her twenty-eighth, as Selby got ready for her night out. “Just wait,” the old lady said, “it passes. You’ll get old and heavy, like me.” The morning after, Selby walked to her car with shoulders heavy under the weight of carnal acts. Her thighs were sticky with sweat and sex. The inside of her mouth dry, her tongue a salted slug. She drove herself home, to the squat house she shared with her grandmother, at the end of an urban block preserved in time, green lawns and white awnings fiercely tended at the will of several old ladies, who refused to let the dark corners of the world shadow the prim stairs leading to their front doors.

this is a work of fiction, composed by and belonging entirely to me. please don't steal it.

becoming, pt. 1

2010-06-07T22:08:00.006-07:00

i thought it might be interesting to serialize a work-in-progress. here goes. it might be a long ride.

Becoming

She was twenty-eight when they stopped seeing her. The men. She’s been counting the days since. Two months after her birthday, Selby planted herself in front of a businessman with abandon, her last shreds of it, thinking maybe he would pass through her and she would feel how every spirit must feel, smoke and mist constrained in the shape of a physical being. He would walk through her center, and she would dissipate. She would know. Instead, he bumped into her shoulder with a cough and a throttled “sorry,” apologizing to the perceived empty space on that long stretch where no obstacle should have been, where nothing was on his approach, or on his retreat and he kept walking with an exaggerated quickness, the way people do when they want to pretend nothing happened. After a few backwards glances, the businessman returned his eyes to the sidewalk. Hers had never left, it remained there under her feet, worn and stained red brick laid with a precision no one cared about. A dried disc of bird shit here. A bent cigarette butt resting in a groove between bricks. A nebulous glob of fresh spit there, just inches from her toe, and the man behind her, hunched over in an expensive coat, rushing away.

this is a work of fiction, composed by and belonging entirely to me. please don't steal it.

and the fog is like an angry ghost

2010-06-06T23:34:00.003-07:00

--& i try to draw ampersands freehand.

--& i can't sleep.

--& i sneezed so hard my throat closed, for a second, but long enough to scare me.

--& my feet are hot, again, just around the toes, like in those commercials for athlete's foot medication.

--& i remember the time my mom told me an aunt had a gangrenous toe; all i could think about was that toe, one i had never seen, going black like a rotten fruit.

--& i thought his red shirt really set off his eyes.

--& i tried to stop thinking it because he belonged to someone else.

--& i keep waking up with tension headaches.

--& she was wearing a hat, half a lemon with its guts scooped out; a yellow coat and bare legs.

--& i thought: is this what agoraphobia feels like?

--& we discuss the apocalypse, only half in jest, because it can't be that far off.

--& they played tag, and i was base.

--& i didn't say: i could never kiss a guy with so many lumps on his upper lip.

--& i miss the times i never cried about anything, happy or sad.

--& i sat on the hood of my car at night, in an empty parking lot, swatting at bugs and scribbling in my journal, understanding the moment meant something even though i couldn't define that something.

--& by the way i've never as much as tweezed my eyebrows.

--& the edwardians were boring and so was america during the victorian period.

--& i drove around for ten minutes, trying to avoid the hills, because i had nightmares about them when i was younger; i'd approach a sharp crest going downhill and it would go all the way down, vertical, into a black gaping gap.

--& by the way, a little anxiety is OK; who actually enjoys careening down a steep grade at high speed?

--& one time, he took us over a jump in his jeep. the jump was basically a forced hop over a curb, but he was skinny as a rail and had that trashy haircut, shaved but for a long flop of hair in a ponytail on top. he smelled nice.

--& most things i say are jokes at my own expense.

--& i can't help but to worry.

--& it makes sense; i'm extraordinarily unprepared in event of a zombie attack.

--& if i couldn't beat them, i would join them. because zombies don't know any better, they have one track minds. i miss not knowing any better.

artistic process

2010-05-29T23:33:00.004-07:00

eventually, there are no more distractions.

there's nothing on television; you know there's nothing on television because the season has ended and everything is reruns, and reality TV shows, like, tough love: couples, where the men cry and the women's breasts are so padded, like swollen fruit about to burst. you've seen it all before, all the episodes of it's me or the dog, the poor man's dog whisperer, and you paused, briefly, on a lifetime movie featuring elizabeth barkley, in a tour-de-force performance, portraying a high school teacher accused of seducing her young student.

so the TV went off, and you read for a while, muddled your way through a drug-addled muddle, then turned to a culinary memoir, the author of which ostensibly led an idyllic life, her mother's inability to cook the only real trauma, thus far, in a narrative peppered with all the usual cliches and more adverbs than you care for, though you do appreciate the recipes.

reading about food made you remember how you hadn't eaten much, and you felt dizzy, so you took a nap. first you dreamed someone was at your door; you could hear a door knocker creaking on the lift, thudding against cheap wood on release, over and over again, with no response when you asked who was there and could see no one through the peephole. when you opened the door, the hall was empty. you remembered, you don't have a door knocker. you dreamed you had your hair done but your pothead of a stylist screwed it up so badly that you could hardly stand it, you'd go back to the salon, right that minute, and make her fix it. you rose off the couch and used the bathroom, collected your keys, and your purse, and wrapped a scarf over your head to cover up the soon-to-be-corrected damage. you played the scene out in your head, how you would stand up to her, you wouldn't let her bully you into another style you didn't like; you started for the door, gripping your car keys in a clenched fist. you jumped and realized you were still on the couch, sweating with the prospect of confrontation. immediately, you touched your head, checking your hair as if the particles of dust filtering through your apartment care what you look like.

feeling restless, you went outside. once there, you were assaulted by the blazing pale legs of wafish girls in cut-off shorts and scruffy boys in burnt-out t-shirts milling around on the grass or taking up too much sidewalk space. so you went back inside.

you looked at shoes on the internet. red peep-toes. then blue peep-toes. you are trying to wear less black. you are trying to be more like the kind of girl who gives deep thought to the color of her nailpolish. so far, the effort is more struggle than it is worth.

somehow, you discovered the kid from kick-ass is british and has that strange talent almost all british people seem to possess, of raising his eyebrow in a naughty way so you watch videos of him refusing to put on an american accent and learn he is engaged to a woman almost 23 years his senior, which makes you think there's hope for you, yet.

then you watch videos of mcbadass from grey's anatomy (ok, and rome. and trainspotting.) happily displaying his talent for accents.

then you watched craig ferguson and ewan macgregor dance around like leprechauns.

you did the dishes.

you tried on some clothes, putting outfits together that will never see the light of day because, really, you just don't dress up.

you discovered two moldy lemons on a shelf in the kitchen and marveled at their extreme ruination, half of one entirely green and white and lumpy, like the surface of a lost planet. and yet, pears you bought nearly two weeks ago are seemingly healthy as ever.

you turned the radio on. garrison keillor was singing. you turned it off.

you remembered that on thursday, you spent the first half of the day crying at your desk with a paper towel from the bathroom pressed against your eyes so hard you saw more than stars, you saw kalidescope patterns shifting in ardent circles; each time you removed the towel, you teared up again; thinking about tearing up made you tear up so you turned the TV on, again, only to turn it off.

outside, the car alarms have quieted and the lights in the apartments across the alley are off. you have some pages, not blank, but imperfect, a semblance of a story, a collection of words that, like the many outfits you try on in the safety of your closet, will likely never see the light of day but you keep at it, keep making yourself mad with the torture of creation because you've done everything else, and have nothing left.

notes from the road: part II. the ballad of rocky raccoon

2010-04-22T21:25:00.003-07:00

bible dip, courtesy the gideons: "and the angel answered and said to me, 'these are four spirits of heaven, who go out from their station before the lord of all the earth'" zechariah 6:5

foreboding. four horsemen. four four four. approximately the number of times someone said, today, "that's my grandma's name," or, "hey, is my grandmother here?!" or, "wow, i like that name." nod. smile. laugh, even. resist the urge to say, "never heard that before." apparently, the denizens of this place cannot count originality as a strength.

there were peas in my dinner. i hate peas. i picked them out, timidly, at first, then recklessly, dissecting my meal, discarding the peas to the edge of my plate. there's always something, it seems. at dinner, we talk of horror movies and ghost stories and pass a haunted house on the way home; the taxi driver says, "people love that place; they take pictures through the windows and strange figures appear in the images." and johnny depp gets sucked into a bed. and there are four iterations of "saw," and i am in this hotel room, alone, on a high floor, and on the tv, someone just put a tarantula in his mouth.

the back of the bible is sticky, like a child laid it in a puddle of spilt juice. everything went wrong when we arrived, when i arrived, to an empty, carpetless booth, like a prison cell in the middle of an opulent mansion. boxes everywhere, seeming to multiply as did my confusion; finally it was determined: someone forgot to place our order. so i order new stuff. carpet. padding for under the carpet. three, no two tables, a stool, of course a stool, and a wastebasket. an easel. oh, a sign. all this for 9x10' of space. unload books from, arrange them, dis-arrange them, put them back in boxes, ship them off. talk to people to talk them into doing things. realize the best way out of a sticky situation dressed up as a teaching moment is not to speak at all. wait out the rain with papa on the phone.

try not to be scared of the shower.

dream of vegetables and your own bed.

wonder if the bible opened to the apocalypse because of your own fear, or as a warning.

sleep. sleep. sleep.

notes from the road: part I

2010-04-20T22:28:00.006-07:00

it wasn't until the plane was about to land that it occurred to me: i am in a place i've never been to before. i felt a brief excitement, like i could take this place and eat it up, all of it as it expanded underneath me, wide and flat, the sun hitting everything at just the right angles.

there's rain in the forecast. of course. i took a walk just before the clouds came in and the wind got angry, chased everyone inside, off the beach, away from outdoor patios and the persistent queries, can you spare any change, can you spare any change, can you spare any change. i heard once that in the midwestern states, the homeless spend cold nights on their feet, moving constantly, searching for unclaimed space on a grate to warm their toes. not so, here. everything is slow, here, even the street creep took his time eating a piece of pizza tossed to him from who knows where, his gaze long and searching as he looked me over.

you leave a place thinking it will be the same when you get back; foolish thoughts, change is inevietable. i looked hard before i left, at my apartment, clean and preserved before all the dust has time to settle. at the neighborhood waking up slowly on a cruel and rainy day; the kids climbing the stairs at the elementary school, hoods pulled up over their heads, members of a secret yet colorful cult. a sign says, "ohmega salvage," and i wanted to say, "that's spelled wrong." the taxi driver comments on the rain in broken english, apologizing for it all the while (the rain or his lack of competency with the english language, i couldn't tell--neither mattered to me) and tells me he can only accept visa credit cards, but that doesn't make sense. he drops me off at the airport and i gave him the plastic i have, not a visa.

try to maintain normalcy while in a new place, because it's not for pleasure, it's to unload boxes and shake hands and make small talk. eye the basket of goodies over the television in my hotel room with longing. resist the urge to "break the tab to open," as it says on the cabinet concealing the mini-bar, not because you want a drink, but because you just want to see what's in there. close the curtains on the city below, on this day, look forward to the next.

ketchup randomness

2010-03-30T22:10:00.004-07:00

it must suck to be james franco right now.

every artist knows the fear of completion. the fear of success--you get what you want and sometimes even praise is difficult to hear, because the praise isn't right. you don't want to hear, "it's good," you want to hear, "ah, this is the next great american novel." as if. what's worse is when no one says anything, when they nod and smile and say, "well, it looked like you had a great time up there!" which is code for, "dude, your band sucks." but it's got to be especially awful when bloggers have compiled lists of groaners, i mean, similes, from your freshly published short story.

if you haven't bothered to read the story, or read the tidbits of "just before the black" that accompany the story's many scourges on various blogs, let me summarize:

young-ish, flippant guy often considers death. crashes car. gets high. asks the sort of questions i imagine boys ask each other in lieu of having those scary emotional conversations. young-ish, flippant guy gets high and wishes he were some other ethnicity or sexual orientation because it's oh-so-boring to be him, just plain old him, white, we can assume, wondering what it means to be alive and how strange it is to be alive, how all we have is breath and time (that last part's a gimmie, franco. you shoulda used that shit instead).

yawn. i mean, beneath the outrageous similes and the slightly annoying way the narrator thinks and speaks, this is basically and MFA over-workshopped story that does have its merits (because it contains all the things a good story should contain, and is quirky) and, if not written by james franco, would likely have appeared in a little journal edited by an already overworked someone who likes writing so much that she agonizes over it for free.

so yeah, i am a little bitter. not because i think i could write james franco under the table (if that were the case, i'd actually have been published; ultimately, who am i to talk, really?), rather, the homogeneous climate of the larger literary community is absolutely disgusting me. "just before the black" is one of those slightly despondent fauxhemia n buddy films in prose form. it's the dancing plastic bag scene in american beauty. we have seen and read and heard these stories so many times over; when will we get tired of them? the seedy underbelly isn't so much of an underbelly anymore. the underbelly is made of the stories that don't get told--or, they do, but no one ever gets to read them.

from my perspective, writing and publishing have always been privileged interests. to engage in these things, you must be willing to be broke, and you must be willing to suffer, because they are thankless pursuits until some years pass and you realize you've actually managed to make something of yourself. of course, when you don't have to worry about being broke, the thanklessness is a little easier to bear. i hate to be the angry black woman in this situation, but consider: i once had a professor respond, when asked how he'd managed to become so successful--how he found the time when certainly he had to support himself, he said his parents were willing to support his career and then, later, a girlfriend helped him out, too. consider: most publishing internships are unpaid affairs, so the persons who take them on are those who can afford, as oxymoronic as it sounds, to be unpaid. most of those people are the same type of people and i hope by now you'll know the type of people i'm thinking of. and most of those people have the same tastes and are looking for the same thing as they sort through all the unsolicited manuscripts, so your story, or your book, a refreshing, well-versed piece, is clearly not as exciting as someone else's work, who might now be compared to james franco. and james franco can write away because, in between acting and "studying" (people in art school do not study, don't kid yourself), and so easily getting into yale to get his ph.d., he doesn't have to hustle to stay alive.

lovely.

i should qualify all this and say, as a fan of literature in general, none of this is easy to generalize. i recently read didion's "play it as it lays" and thought, "wow, a book about a white lady on drugs;" by the same token, i adore kate braverman's "tall tales from the mekong delta," which is roughly about the same topic but so well formed that i could weep if the whole story didn't have a layer of slime over it, which only enhances the story's overall effect. still, i'm ready for something else. i'm ready for the mainstream to stop being the mainstream, and let something else get an edge in. let's get tired of something else the way we are tired of cookie-cutter literature and reality television. let's read some different stories. i want to know about other things. i want to be punched in the face with a tumble of words so revelatory and extreme and orgasmic that i can't bear to read days afterward. instead, i guess i'll take, "he breathes his smoke out of the black gaping gap."

illustration via. it's how i feel when i think about "the industry."

inertia.

2010-03-28T22:50:00.004-07:00

i tried to write the next installment in the lab rat series. part iv: the wrath of...oh hell, i can't even be clever. it began with a poke. it ended with a poke. i took picture of myself in the examination room. i don't feel any differently. my pee still smells funny. the end.

someone once wrote, in a story, "...had made him feel like an automaton." i had to ask, "what is an automaton?"

a fancy word for robot.

i feel like an automaton. track change insert comment backspace delete confusing awkward phrasing here "then" not "than" you're/your fatal error fatal error fatal error.

i recently had the pleasure of meeting mary gaitskill, who is incredible, and moves with this regal slowness; she has tiny person syndrome, i think; you wonder: how can so much awesome come out of someone so small? anyway, she asked me if i was a writer and i mumbled some evasive answer, knowing full well i was making excuses not for her, but for myself--also, there was an incredibly annoying lady from south africa, who'd identified herself as a writer (right, who isn't, anymore?), and was asking all these obnoxious questions. what are you supposed to do after that? "hi, famous writer, i am also a writer, and here is my incredibly ridiculous question...."?

i told mary gaitskill i appreciated what she had said about stories taking a long time to gestate. she was asked, (some one always asks this question at a reading) how long it takes her to write. it could be a week. it could be a month. some tales come faster than others. i feel like all my tales are somehow reluctant to show themselves. mary gaitskill sat poised in a folding chair, she was like a filament of diamond, unbreakable though a strong gust of wind might still blow her away. she has a nose piercing. it was amazing. she looked at me quite plainly and said it can take time, that the story so often starts here (she motioned to her stomach), and can take ages to move here (she motioned to her head), and all i wanted to do was fold her up and hang her in my house and maybe attach a pull-cord to her back so she could dispense pearls like that whenever i was having a moment, like this one, folded up on the couch in ratty pajamas and some crap on the tv and slightly frightened of insomnia and so completely devoid of creativity i could scream for the lack.

words and letters start to bleed together.

ideas look funny when put into words.

i saw an old homeless man today, sitting on a park bench. this is nothing new. he was the color of a forgotten raisin. his face was a hardscrabble landscape of accident and disappointment. he'd tied his dreadlocks up but still, they dangled around his shoulders, matted black and gray patches, in the way dreads do. one leg was thrown neatly over the other, in a sort of prim, almost feminine manner; a weathered hand sheltered his knee. he was just staring. maybe staring at me staring at him. i forget, sometimes, that there a moments like that to be had.

massive attack, "inertia creeps;" mezzanine, 1998

the late bloomer's handbook, pt. 1: definitions

2010-03-10T15:28:00.007-08:00

so, my mother always called me a "late bloomer" and i didn't know what that meant; she said it with affection, mostly, so i never took it the wrong way (except for an adolescent outburst here and there--can't be helped). she could've meant that i was (and am) terribly shy and clung to her skirt even when i was big enough to reach her shoulders. she could've meant that i was short, like, dwarf short, and there was brief concern that puberty would not be kind to me. she could've meant that, generally, i ran around picking things up and putting them down and getting bored with one thing to try out another: there were girl scouts and flute lessons and piano lessons and then i was gonna be a hardcore bicyclist and then i was going to play tennis and then i just didn't care anymore. finding something i liked to do took far to much energy. i couldn't be bothered. it was much easier to watch the x-files and eat grilled cheese sandwiches and marvel at my thighs as they expanded outwards to touch each other.

i don't know why, but i started thinking seriously about what it means to be a late bloomer.

no wait, i do know why. it's because i'm about to be 30 and am having a really bumpy approach, despite all the 30+ year olds i know who survived. it's because i'm about to be 30 and i don't have a single thing i thought i'd have by 30. like, a long-term career. and a partner. and a house. these are all cliche things, but they have become our accepted measurements for success. it gets to be such that the absence of those items in one's life identifies that person as half-baked. at this point, i have none of those things, and probably won't have any of those things, except i've been trying to tell myself there's no time limit to achieve.

but i realize i can't be the only person who feels this way, or has spent the first 25 + years of life bouncing around, waiting to latch onto something. there are more people living at home these days, not only since our economic bust, but also because of parents who got started late and aren't quite ready to have their kids leave the nest (for serious. i heard it on npr). while it's become more and more acceptable to be aimless, being so is not very comforting.

i really think it would be fascinating to explore this issue, so, 5-or-so odd people who read my blog: what do you think? did you always know who you were/are, what you wanted to do, and where you wanted to be? are you still searching? think of in large terms: career, sexuality, stability, etc. does being a late bloomer mean someone who develops late physically, or does it encompass those who discover talents late in life? answer in the comments.

this is all going somewhere. i hope. i promise.

things to read here and here.

comic via (for the record, i have bubble solution in my office. i have a go with them sometimes. blowing bubbles helps me think. also, bubbles are purty).

young(ish), black, and single

2010-02-23T19:06:00.005-08:00

yesterday, in the midst of some pre-menstrual depression, i happened upon this post, at okcupid. you have to be a member to read it, so if you're not like me (you haven't taken to trolling the internet for new love interests), i'll sum it up for you: black women get no replies to messages. everyone writes to white men, yet they almost never write back. to anyone. asian and hispanic women really like white men. white females would rather partner up with white males.

a couple weekends ago, i read john mayer's infamous playboy interview, in which he says he has a "david duke dick," and yet the heart of some i-love-everybody happy happy person blah whatever (that "person" would be benetton. right. with their shitty, overpriced clothing). the interviewer pushed john mayer to rattle off some black females he finds attractive, such as robin givens, halle berry, "hilary" from the fresh prince of bel air. kerry washington. all lovely ladies. all supposed, yet completely unattainable, molds for what a black woman in america should look like, the same way all hispanic ladies should look like shakira and white women should look like whatever supermodel or TV actress is hot right now, and we can all blame her for the awful blonde dye jobs we see everyone running around with.

a lot of people who read that were offended, by the above, but also at john mayer's claim that he has a "hood pass," and black people love him. i'll wager this love he feels from the black community can be attributed to the fact that most "minority" cultures genuinely do what a lot of the men i date claim to: see beyond a person's race. there's good people, and there's not good people. the difference is, we don't have to say, "well, he's a whiteboy, but...," "she's straight, but..." "he has six fingers on his right hand, but..."

listen, i'm not going to dare say john mayer is racist (you can read the fun at racialicious for that); i don't think he is, i think he's young and stupid and probably needs to see a therapist. however, there was a good point made at racialicious, which has, sadly, added another nail to my "world is against me" coffin:

The bitch of it is Mayer’s comment is–yet again–another pop-culture “confirmation” that Black women are undateable, which translates to utterly undesireable and unfuckable...His disingenuous rejoinder of stating the Black women in Hollywood he wanted to get with–and then broke out with some wack-ass stereotypes of Black and White women and our dating styles just underscores his racially essentialized hot-mess-with-flies ideas about Black women.

so, let's back up. here's a tidbit from the okcupid blog post:

Whether it’s due to talkativeness, loneliness, or a sense of plain decency, black women are by far the most likely to respond to a first contact attempt. In many cases, their response rate is one and a half times the average, and, overall, black women reply about a quarter more often that other women.

it's not because we're talkative, or lonely, but we are decent, and probably more open to the idea of widening our dating pool, especially since society says it doesn't want us to.

and, further:

Men don’t write black women back. Or rather, they write them back far less often than they should. Black women reply the most, yet get by far the fewest replies. Essentially every race—including other blacks—singles them out for the cold shoulder.

what? have there been so many parodies, so many sheneneh's, monique's, maxine shaw's, whitley's, real housewives of atlanta, and on, and on, to make the black female in america appear to be so brash and difficult to handle, so much so that no one writes us back? not even black men? if this were a cartoon, and i was speaking, my lips would be flapping and i'd be soaking you with spittle.

unfortunately, this isn't new news. there have been infinite words written on the lonely plight of the black woman. we have been fetishized and tossed to the side, still, i rarely meet women who are so strong, and capable, as women of color--across the board. make her gay: it gets worse. imagine if she were elderly, and disabled, too? she might as well shoot herself, right?

just so you don't think the okcupid post was the baseless musing of some okcupid staffer, there were charts and graphs created from data pulled from the site. i don't know how to read those shits, so i'll believe it. there also followed a caveat that most okcupid users tend to be younger, slightly more educated, and theoretically open-minded, so yeah, that match.com commercial you see with the interracial couples canoodling and what not? probably not true. it's like a picture of a big mac. so lovely until you get the real thing, made by some despondent teenager working at McD's, dreaming of something better.

really, this all started with facebook. a friend's brother posted something about 40% of professional black women being single. i don't know where he got that statistic from, but can you imagine if 40% of professional white women were single? there'd be an influx of mail-order husbands from russia. i'm not even sure how that percentage is possible. since when does being smart and working and having goals make a person undesirable? how did i become a furtive fetish, an aberration in a normal coupling pattern? sometimes, i can see it on men's faces, the realization: if i took you home to my mother, she would kill me.

all this information keeps rendering down inside me to a hard nugget, residue of whatever elements make up solitude.

now, i'm not going to hang my hopes on the stoned rambles of some soft-core rock musician (sorry, john mayer, everything you do sounds like milk, like paul simon, but less cool), and a very strange internet dating website that i'm on because it doesn't cost me anything except endless clicks to refresh the browser and disappointed sighs when i see that "D1BONE" has sent me a message riddled with misspellings and bad grammar; but the thing is, i am. black and female and educated and professional and probably hard to deal with, and definitely stubborn, and most absolutely opinionated, especially when i have no idea what i'm talking about...but i'm also kind of geeky. no, i'm insanely geeky. i was on a date recently and sharing information regarding training a cat to use the toilet. i don't even have a fucking cat. i'm really cute. i'm mopey, and goofy, and probably all the other dwarves, too. i don't like holding hands with someone i don't know because that act to me is more meaningful than kissing, even. when something goes my way, i do a little dance. i am so fucking adorable, a guy would want to throw up in his mouth. you know, if he ever wrote me back.

oh, and ps, john mayer: can i have a cracker pass? white people LOVE me.

image of mildred and richard loving via

in short

2010-02-17T08:50:00.000-08:00

sometime during the haze of this long weekend, i heard guy raz's soothing voice say something about a three-minute story. i perked up, because any time i hear things like that, i think, "ah, maybe i'll write something," and then i never do, for whatever reason. one time, i tried to recount my first sexual experience in 2,000 words, with an edge of hilarity, yet impressive depth, as indirectly dictated by some submission guidelines & previous entries to the project. how can one relate an experience so huge with so little words? needless to say, that failed submission is secreted away in a forgotten spot on my computer. as it should be.

today i got a challenge from a friend. more of an urging. more of a directive disguised as a suggestion. a literary kick in the pants. was i going to submit to that 3-minute fiction contest?

i always like to try for a challenge, at least. but something that can be read in three minutes is only about 500-600 words, per the website. that's just getting started. that's the broken water before the baby. that's insane. it's got to be obvious by now that i can't write anything in just a few words. meanwhile, if someone asked me to write a ten-page essay, i'd flick my wrist and snort, "no problem!"

what i find most fascinating is this tidbit:

Interestingly, says Raz, few of the finalists were professional writers – or even aspiring professional writers. "It really challenges your assumptions about who a writer is," he says.

that is interesting, marjorie kehe. don't it make you wish you'd skipped journalism school? i do. except exchange "journalism" for "creative writing."

guy raz seems to think a 3-minute story isn't insurmountable. i think he should mosey over to narrativemagazine.com and have a look at their six-word stories. i blame the internet and the irrevocable damage it's causing our collective attention span. soon, all books will be one word long, viewable only on an e-book reader, and surrounded by american apparel adverts.

and yet, barring any personal injury, loss of money, or great damage to my self-respect, i never say no to a dare.

i first typed "dare" as "date." of late, that is true, too.

confessions of a lab rat, part III: chlorine

2010-02-10T15:41:00.005-08:00

just tuning in? check out parts I & II

i suppose people who swim regularly know that it's impossible to do so without swallowing a little water. i had a vague idea but when i tried to kick, stroke, and turn my head to breathe all at the same time, i ended up with a mouthful of YMCA pool water. it was hard for a germaphobe like me to get over, but i managed. i really want to learn how to swim, so i'll keep at it. anyway, a few days after that, i looked down and noticed my right knee had somehow rotated inwards, towards the other leg; i've always been slightly bow-legged but this was frightening in its obviousness. the turning was accompanied by a sharp pain if i stepped the wrong way or looked at it funny. then i noticed the swelling.

normal people would go to the doctor, at this point. since my body is anything but, and this knee crap happened before, over 10 years ago, i iced and elevated and laid off the wedge-heeled shoes for a few days.

that was all fine, until my hip started to ache.

having sickle cell, i'm used to that; it's a bit like a destroyed clock gag: parts, one by one, coming apart in a comical fashion. but i got to thinking, i'm taking this drug, right? why isn't it working? suddenly, i'm obsessed with knowing whether or not i'm on the placebo. i don't think i'll be able to find out until the study is complete, even after my participation is finished. the study ends sometime in 2011. sigh.

anyway, this visit was relatively routine (um, except for the part about me going out drinking the night before. oops), which i suppose happens in the life of a lab rat--some days are are especially dull. i answered some questions (i get some great joy out of answering the anxiety/depression survey--it always makes me realize that i am neither anxious nor depressed), and they took all those things medical professionals take from you: weight, blood pressure, temperature, the sound of your heart, the sound of your breath filling & escaping your lungs. once again, my veins ducked for cover as the needle approached and the n.p. apologized profusely and i just took it because those veins will really never cooperate. the past two visits, they've had someone from the lab in the examination room with me, to scoop up some of the samples, because they need to be tested right away. somewhere, someone is measuring my CRP level.

i hope i have less CRP than last time. because it would be CRPy if not.

sorry. sorry. i had to do it.

so i got my parking voucher, and my stipend, but my pills weren't ready so the n.p. (who is quite chatty), kept me company. i quite like her. she talks like her words are marbles and she can hardly control them as they roll away; she's always doubling-back on herself, qualifying, explaining. she's very into holistic medicine--we got to talking and she mentioned that she's seen some horrible sickle cell cases, but there are some patients who have what is traditionally the type of sickle cell disease that is most difficult to treat (type SS), who are healthier than normal. in most of those cases, she's realized those patients have cultivated good general health habits: a good, well balanced diet and are as active as they can be. these habits usually start in childhood. it's just another indicator that what we eat and what we do affects our health, even if we're in poor health to start with. she told me they are doing another study regarding the effects of creatine on sickle cell patients, and that person is doing remarkably well. It used to be that they offered warm baths to patients with sickle cell and other inflammatory diseases, but that practice was stopped because there weren't any quantitative results. now, i'm not one to decry the medical profession because i'm pretty sure my various doctors are the only reason i'm alive, but i do think there is room for alternative treatments and certainly more room to educate people so they can learn to live with what they have, with little expense.

still waiting for the pills, the n.p., asked me, as she always does, if i felt any different and i said no, in fact i was having some pain and swelling issues. she suggested an epsom salt bath (everyone does--let it be known: i do not like baths), or a soak in a hot tub; i told her i had recently been in a hot tub, at the Y. after i was in the pool. so, did you know that chlorine can cause inflammation in the joints? what kind of bullshit is that? the n.p. told me if i was going to swim, i should really have a bath afterward.

eh. sometimes i let it go because there's just no way to win.

also: i still don't have my pills. they weren't ready after my appointment, so i was told they'd be overnighted to me. that didn't happen. we are now playing a cat and mouse game with FedEx. it would've been faster to send them by carrier pigeon.

next month: i also see the hematologist. she really likes to take a lot of blood. no joke. is anyone going to be around to give me a ride?

just kids

2010-02-06T13:43:00.002-08:00

whenever i used the bathroom as a kid, i used to do this funny thing.

well, i did a lot of questionable things in the bathroom when i was a kid, but we all do, right?

i feel like i might have mentioned this before in a stupid facebook quiz or something. or maybe even here. i can't remember. but anyway, i would sit on the pot and, if it was going to be a while (and sometimes it would sit there just because. it was a nice break), i would pretend the entire bathroom was my living space, and i would plot it out carefully because everything i needed had to fit inside it. i didn't think about logistics; for example, doubling-up the tub as as bed wouldn't make much sense for an night-bather like myself. but there were bonuses--the bathroom had two sinks. i could wash my dishes in one & use the other for all those grooming needs. there was a tall shelf in there; i figured two of the shelves in it could hold my clothes, one could be a pantry, the others just for general storage. on the wall opposite the toilet i could have something of a kitchen set-up, a hotplate or something. the bathroom was impressively utilitarian. i wanted to live in there, to have my space.

the larger point is that while i engaged in this exercise, i could see the floor plan with a clarity i seem to have lost somewhere down the line. it's sad that, when we're young, we have the most vivid imaginations, but poor grasp of language. can you imagine if all kids could write novels? eventually, the bathroom becomes what it is: you use the can and brush your teeth and shave your legs (or your face, if you're a dude, or a hirsute female [apologies, if so]) and have minor hissy fits while cleaning the tub. i used to see patterns in the tile--faces, the vague outline of an animal; now, all i see are grungy early-century tiles that will not get clean even with infinite passes of a mop.

i miss using my brain in that way for no reason. i miss carrying my journal around everywhere and writing awful poetry, recording tortured musings in garish ink and slanted cursive. i miss trying to construct a robot out of batteries and various wires foraged from the garage (true story).

so last night i actually sat and watched the tavis smiley show (FYI, i do not recommend this); he happened to be interviewing one of my role models, patti smith. patti has a new book out, just kids, about her relationship with robert mapplethorpe, and other things. the vestiges of my youthful obsessive tendencies are sort of slipping away, but i might actually read this one because every excerpt i've read blows my mind, e.g., my love of prayer was gradually rivaled by my love for the book. well played, patti. well played.

towards the end of the interview, patti made an excellent point. artists are necessary in any society, and artists do a lot of work, most of them for a scant amount of recognition. it's also possible to say that artists don't do "real" work, and spend a lot of time sitting around pondering the work they are about to do, or should do, or have done and oh, what will everyone say about it?; meanwhile, someone is outside hauling the trash and fixing the electricity and generally making things go. to that end, patti makes an effort to perform some act of creativity every day, write a paragraph, take a picture, an act that at least reminds her she is doing something with her creativity, because that's what she was given to use in the world. at least, that's how i understood it.

forgive me the cliche, but, words to live by.

and here's tavis [un]smiley (thanks for that one, sds!), interviewing patti smith. le sigh.

i rememory you

2010-01-24T14:12:00.003-08:00

here's a cliche: my mind is like a sieve. i read somewhere that hiccups can be related to dementia. horror stories on the internet about loved ones hiccuping away while their minds erode. i get the hiccups a lot, something about my diaphragm. it's jumpy. maybe a little too sensitive. so i hiccup a lot, at inconvenient moments, and i can't remember anything, have resorted post-its cryptic reminders and maybe later they'll be tattoos. "your name is. you come from here. you live there. you are not lost."

i knew a guy once who said the only way to get rid of his hiccups was to smoke a cigarette. i thought that had more to do with the rhythmic breathing involved in smoking. inhale exhale diaphragm settle. his dad had alzheimer's. but at the time, i couldn't make the connection. i think about being forgetful, how a friend asked me to do something, once, and i said yes, and then i completely forgot and she was MAD, all capitals, raving, "if you didn't want to do it, you should've just said so," and i did want to do it, but i forgot. it was college. there were finals, and i was angry at myself, told myself i wouldn't forget anything ever, hence the post-its, and standing in the middle of my apartment, wondering, "what was i doing?" i break off in the middle of things to do something else, i write this sentence, i remember i neglected to write down an appointment on tuesday, i come back to this sentence. i forget my place. i am tired of forgetting.

"i forgot" was always a way to get out of things. "why didn't you move your bike, like i told you?" "i forgot?" "you forgot?" it was stupid, really. even coupled with a cute shrug, an "oh well," and either parent's face twisted, like, "what the fuck is wrong with you?" it's worse, now. there's more riding on memory. on myself. on forgetting when i say, "yes, i'll do that," and remembering the thing a week later, the forgotten research project, or item of mail to send, or conversation in the copy room. i hate forgetting. people say it's normal. somehow, i see it as a weakness.

sometimes, things come back randomly. like, being in new orleans, in thick heat, walking around with pasty white dust on my fingers, confectioner's sugar, and skeletons everywhere, and old things hiding, harmlessly in the shadows. here are my feet half-buried in sand. here is a neighborhood in london, in which i am lost, and home seems very far away. here is the impossible glare of the salt flats. here is my niece, winking at me like i taught her. i am in none of those places. am in my pajamas, on a couch with the radio talking at me and craving for sushi in my mouth; i do not ask for these memories, but here they are.

i am writing this because i know you'll read this. because we've had the same conversation several times; you ask me how to change, i tell you, it's always the same reason, always the same clear liquid, a little ice, a little tonic, chipping away at your gray matter. so you always forget. you tell me you have the hiccups. i don't have any more air to give you.

google fail (subtitled: paratrooping)

2010-01-16T12:33:00.006-08:00

this is a thing we all do. type someone's name into a search box and see what comes up. currently, in the search box in my firefox toolbar says "daul kim." i wanted to read her blog, but it's by invitation only.

the last few searches are for:
matthew gray gubler (be still my geek-loving heart)
define: arras
toni morrison (knowing that her first novel wasn't completed until she was 39 gives me hope. take that, zadie smith).
catch-22 (which, originally, was a few different catches before it was "catch-22")
aldo shoes uselton ( i wear a size 9, if you're curious)
joseph patrick smith (actually, it's something else, but for the sake of whatever shred of privacy i have, courtesy this blog, names have been changed to protect those who took my innocence. ha.).

you wonder: who's that last guy?

i do, too. i like to pretend i can accurately predict the trajectory of his life after the time we split, after a friend saw him in a parking lot somewhere and reported back that he was selling used cars and had grown a little bit of a paunch. too much yuengling. he could never resist.

it's not fair to say he's old, now. some of my best friends are the age he would be. he's probably married; his wife is blond and thin and she speaks with a slight breathy lilt because those are really only the type of women who get married to guys like him. they have kids. they live in new england, in a big house, and none of those things were meant for me because we were odder than odd. badly matched. i wonder if his hairline is receding.

i get to thinking about him whenever i feel like things need to change. whenever i want to pack up everything i own and haul off for london, where my life will unfurl in a plot like love, actually, bridget jones' diary, notting hill, and about a boy all rolled and mashed into one big ball of the queen's english and cobblestone streets. except for the scene in which he bakes me a birthday cake and tells me to make a wish. must through a little sixteen candles in there, too. i'll finally learn correct currency conversion and prior experience has taught me never to play beer pong with 1 pound coins. though, i'm past that, right? beer pong is for frat boys and crazy american girls living in basement flats with little money and even less regard for their health.

anyway.

apparently the way to disappear completely, barring death, barring the possibility that he re-enlisted (did he ever de-enlist?) and went off to the desert to fight the "terror" and got IED'd or friendly fired or whatever horrible thing or sequence things that happen out there, is to have the most generic name in the history of WASPy names, and exist in new england, of all places, where everyone has WASPy names and faces and sharp incisors that were sometimes imprinted into the skin of my shoulder.

and i wonder: how can you miss someone you haven't known for ten years?

ps: the common hugh grant theme in the films mentioned above is completely coincidental. it's not my fault he's britain's favorite fuck-up. i'm on team jude myself.

confessions of a lab rat, part II: on starvation and slippery veins

2010-01-09T23:28:00.008-08:00

if you're just tuning in, please see part one of this ridiculous series here.

did i mention i'm not a patient person? my mom got on me a lot for this, "have patience," she'd always say when i freaked out that something was taking too long, or not happening the way i wanted it to, which was often. she was likely of the mind that my impatience will one day do me in. she was probably right.

all that to say: this experiment is getting tedious. four big pills a day, with sadly little evident effect...i find this disheartening. i was really expecting my body to devolve to it's teenaged level of fitness...but then again, i was quite schlubby as a teenager, so maybe i shouldn't wish for that (though my back hurt much less in those days). for about an hour after each dose, my pee still smells like i drank runoff from a garbage dump. this is the internet, folks. the tmi line was crossed long ago. my life giver (who requested that i promptly send him all the details of the study because you can push thirty [and even pass it] but they never quit worrying), believes this odor comes from sulfates in the medicine breaking down during digestion. he thinks this means i am more than likely not on the placebo. i tend to believe him, that guy has a ph.d. in biochemistry. also, during this most recent visit the nurse asked me if i felt younger, and she giggled; it didn't occur to me until later that she probably gave everything away. medical research study FAIL.

i got the call to make the second appointment on monday, and, owing to my extremely busy life (temporary fluke, i swear), i suggested wednesday, at 2pm, because i'm a working girl and working girl have meetings to attend and people to coddle via email. the research assistant said, "are you sure? remember you have to fast for 8 hours..." and i said, "yeah sure whatever that's fine," channeling my inner-executive, or some other insane person who puts their responsibilities before their own comfort. "ok," she said, "no food after 8 a.m.," and in my head i thought, "no problem, i'll just get up early and have a small bite, it'll be fine."

it was not fine. i got up early and spent, as per usual, an infinite amount of time fussing with my hair which is crazy because i don't have much of it to go around anymore. then i was about to be late. then i ran out the door. then, at approximately 8:30, my stomach started to rattle around like an aimless pinball.

you enter a zen-like state after a while. a harmonious place in which the rational part of your brain attempts to soothe your stomach with the whispers of reality, "it's ok, you'll eat soon. just a few more hours. hey, answer another email. you'll be fine." meanwhile, the reptilian part makes you instinctively reach for anything edible; in this case, a questionable package of dried mangoes that tasted funny and make your teeth hurt which is why you didn't finish them but there they are, and beggars cannot be choosers in times of great despair. as your hand reaches for the dusty package wedged partially behind the computer, you remember: no food until 2pm. this happens repeatedly.

in case you are wondering, if the two of us were stuck on a deserted island, i would most definitely eat you. i can't eat fish. i can't eat coconuts. and i turn into a hosebeast when i haven't had anything to eat. just know: i'd be truly remorseful when i tell rescuers that you drowned and were probably eaten by piranha.

at 1:15 i drove to children's hospital with the sort of delirium i have only experienced while in the throes of pain: there was only my destination, and the car; everything else was a wooshing, angry black mass on the periphery. it's fascinating how our animal nature becomes so evident in a situation like that. there is you. and there is the food. and there is what you need to do to get the food. all of the latter is in-between nonsense that has to unfortunately be dealt with before you get to the food.

1. park car. exit car. weave through extremely noisy and bright lobby of children's hospital to research clinic. try not to notice that lobby smells like someone just brought all their insides out through both ends.
2. clamber into examination room with the grace of a tenacious fly, swatted more than once, but still hanging on.
3. nod and smile through research assistant's recount of the cruise she took over christmas. make concerted effort not to launch into diatribe on the cruise ship industry.
4. answer questions, to the effect of: did you forget any doses (only one, i'm a champ)? did you lose any pills (no)? are you taking any new medications other than those you reported last time (no)? do you feel any differently (i feel like eating the fingers on my left hand. i don't use them for much any way)?
5. answer more questions, on paper. have i had any of the following long list of health problems in the month since my last visit? these include: every horrible disgusting symptom, so much so that you'd want to check "no," because who would really want to admit they had bloody stools?
6. answer more questions. do you see how optimistic i am at this point?
7. small talk with nurse. nurse does not remember you from last time. you are secretly offended. you feel foolish for this. nurse checks your vitals. the blood pressure machine takes a shit. you want to kill it.
8. nurse ties you up with a pink tourniquet. you offer your arm. she sticks you. she misses. she sticks you again and digs the needle around. she misses. she does it again. she says, "i don't remember it being this tough last time." you are too nice to reminder that it was, indeed. she tries a fourth time, saying to herself, "come on, you can do this!" she says to the vein, "stay put, you little bugger!" you say, "this happens all the time." it does. the nurse gives up and tries the other arm.
9. early success with the left arm, but as the nurse relaxes and gets to talking again, you watch as the tube runs dry and a small bubble of skin fills with blood. there is a general ruckus in the examination room. "just a little hematoma!" the nurse says, when all has calmed down. she is very remorseful. you are a beast. pain is nothing. the nurse returns to the other arm.
10. after 7 vials of blood, you are given a parking voucher, some lunch money (you perk up, briefly, at this) and 70 more giant, pee-altering pills.
11. back in the car, you manage to drive to the top of the parking structure before going back down to the exit. you are seeing stars. you have large bandages on both arms. your stomach has declared war.
12. manage not to murder everyone in line at bakesale betty. it's 2pm, shouldn't all those assholes have eaten lunch earlier?
13. realize that sandwiches from above restaurant are too unwieldy to consume while operating a vehicle. suddenly, you live very far away from the place you currently are.
14. throw self into apartment. remove shoes and coat, which crumples in a sad pile on the floor. eat on the couch while snarling like a hyena over scavenged meat.
15. remember you intended to use lunch money to get quarters for laundry. don't remember ever feeling so gratified by a meal. remove bandages from arms. fall asleep on couch.

sadly, in my food-depraved state i neglected to take many photos. children's hospital really is an oddly magical place. and, besides, had i gotten around to snapping pictures, there would've been a few of my awesome hematoma. and you didn't want to see it. i keep reminding myself that all of this is hopefully for the benefit of many, and i'm learning many interesting things and that i will never, ever, do the master cleanse. you can keep your lemon juice and maple syrup and cayenne pepper, thanks.

vocalization

2010-01-05T10:09:00.004-08:00

you do know that writers didn't have to read publicly, once upon a time? can you imagine emily dickinson in a coffee shop, doing a reading? i doubt you'd hear her over the grinder. no. in my mind it was all rather idyllic. you sit and work and produce material and no one bothers you for face time. that's a beautiful thing.

and then suddenly writers, the job of writing, got so popular and wanted a piece of the attention pie that such things as book tours and reading series were developed and people would sometimes pay, and all the time stand around to watch some crazy person or another read their work. i'm thinking of a particularly uncomfortable scene in an episode of mad men. that scene reminds me of this awful reading i endured recently; the author (one of a few on a panel, i might add), read from her disorganized, incomplete memoirish novel piece of crap thingy in a scratchy, disquieting voice for at least half an hour, apologizing little for her narcissism. i won't lie: i wanted to punch her. i can't even be nice about it.

then, can you imagine, it was generally realized that literature readings are incredibly boring and most of the people who attend them are struggling with their attention spans, wishing they could be somewhere else, or perhaps that they'd eaten dinner before the reading, or counting clock hands in their slow rotations. so it became somewhat important that a writer did more than write well, they had to become performers. perhaps someone is uncannily good looking. or they have a lot of odd tics and twitches that are more endearing than off-putting. or, as was once asked of me the day before my big senior reading (undergrad), they can embody their characters enough to do their voices, or mannerisms. all this because it has come to pass that visibility is an important tool than selling a book. more important, perhaps, than what's actually inside the book. unbelievable!

i don't do voices, btw.

so what, writers are actors, too? i did not sign up for this! i fear people; i'm one negative interaction shy of agoraphobia. i want to sit in a quiet room and type away and then imagine someone else reading my work in another quiet room, with no knowledge of me, save for my author photo, which will be extraordinarily cute.

all that said, i am reading here, on thursday, and you should come. because i'm told i have a nice voice, and i promise i won't go on for more than 15 minutes. which i think is the amount of time it takes for someone to lose interest in anything. contact me for details.

pic via

diplomate!

2010-01-04T09:20:00.000-08:00

the next time you're in france, and happen to come across a car commercial, i am convinced the song below will be playing. can't you just picture it? that crunchy but not off-putting riff; the possibly hardcore message--i've no idea, i remember about 5 words of french after 2 years of grueling study--and the lead singer is familiar to frenchies since he had a big hit in the early 90's, with this. he was four. who allows their child to record a club song? anyway, much to my chagrin, that song has been stuck somewhere in my head since i first heard it played briefly on an episode of the real world. london cast. with lars. oh boy i thought lars was so cute.

in the commercial, the voice-over would tell you, in a sexy way, all the amazing features of the car and it's company and how much you need one so you can listen to this song on the stereo at full blast while you cruise down the grand-route.

i think this is the cleanest, tightest pop song i've come across in a while and part of me doesn't want to like it but i can't stop! i think it's because i can in no way decipher what are probably very trite and obvious lyrics. i enjoy music sung in a language i don't understand. the vocals truly become what they are: just another instrument to augment the whole song.

jordy and the dixies, "diplomate!"; vingt'age, 2008

oh yea: happy new year

and miles to go before i

2009-12-30T11:55:00.000-08:00

so i have this love-hate relationship with poetry. ok, maybe it's more of a hate-hate. i used to write poetry (i guess every angsty artsty high school kid can say the same). i chewed through almost all of charle's bukowski's poetry in probably less than a year and loved it, still do, and then i don't know what happened. college? i got stupider? (or, is that "more stupid?") i've no idea. it's terrible, really. if you had me listen to a song, i might say i love it; if i were to read the lyrics to the same song, i'd say something snide about modern poetry.

my mother was the classicist. all robert louis stevenson and blake with his tyger tyger and chaucer and old works of literature that made me sneeze when i opened them. it retrospect it was amazing, really, how she could recite poems she learned in grade school by memory. substantial stuff. not the vitriolic words of a drunken bastard written late at night, on a typewriter, maybe, or a scrap of paper that i can call to mind with little provocation. the illusion is that you are simply reading this poem...

but some things stick with you.

i don't know why i love this poem so much. i keep coming back to it. i have the utmost respect for robert frost, i think for undermining the trend of his time and being obvious when it was popular to be obscure, for giving the vernacular a voice. and also, this time of year i start to feel heavy, like tree branches bending under the weight of snow. there's just something so perfect in its simplicity and the story contained in four stanzas.

"stopping by woods on a snowy evening"

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound’s the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

poem via

photo via

scrooged

2009-12-24T19:20:00.001-08:00

did i mention how much i fucking hate christmas?

bah-fucking-humbug.

xx,
nana k.

and run

2009-12-21T09:57:00.000-08:00

i love when cover songs are better than the original. sure, the original has its merits too, i guess. but this shit is awesome.

johnny cash, "rusty cage;" unchained, 1996 (orig. soundgarden; badmotorfinger, 1991)

wolf at the dining room table

2009-12-19T13:20:00.001-08:00

this all began with my misunderstanding of the word, "kink."

so, i was chatting with this guy, recently. we were exchanging pleasantries; --where are you from, where do you work, what's your sign, do you have herpes...the usual, you know, and, after the pleasantries, but before i felt i could actually say i knew this person or felt comfortable enough to disclose my deepest darkest-s, he asks me, "what's the craziest, wildest, kinkiest thing you've ever done?" i hate this question. i really do. i hate it because i don't have an answer for it; i mean, does getting into it with a guy who used a plywood board as a mattress count as crazy or wild or kinky? because all it did was make me feel like i'd slept on a fucking plywood board. i don't have an answer for that question because i find life, itself, to be crazy and wild and kinky and i have little need to chase things to enhance that quality of existence. but, even if i did have an answer for it, i wouldn't tell him, because i just "met" this guy and that's not really any of his business.

so i tell him, "i hate that question, and i don't have an answer for it."
and he says, "ok, well, do you like to get your bottom spanked?"

i have this thing that i do. i watch television more than i ought. i watch more television now than i used to when i was a teenager, when i did things like read more than 5 pages of a book in one sitting or go out to movies instead of wishing i made better netflix choices (note: i heard a story on good old NPR, to this same effect. apparently, the older we get, the more we indulge in the tube). i watch so much television, that i'm starting to repeat myself. or is the TV repeating itself? there's this movie. it's a terrible movie, featuring jack nicholson and james "my husband" spader and michelle pfeiffer and david hyde pierce, for god knows why, and a lot of other white people who appropriately work at a publishing company, lazing around and doing things of little consequence and wearing such awful drab clothes as if to blend in with the soft focus and washed out landscape. anyway, this movie is called "wolf." i have seen this movie about 5 times, now, because it seems to be the film TBS throws on when they think no one is looking, except for people like myself who don't get off from torture, but don't take the necessasry steps to avoid it. what can i say? i saw james "my husband" spader's name in the opening credits and i just had to watch because no one does hateful white boy like he used to. the plot of this movie is insignificant. there are some laughable special effects and michelle pfieffer takes a few steps closer to being even less endearing. there's adultery. there's intrigue. there's transmogrification. there's one scene, after james spader is discovered to have usurped jack nicholson's big boy job at the publishing company, in which jack gets in real close, his face a miasma of rage and punishment, and says, almost growls, "i'm gonna get you, stewart." stewart being the name of james spader's character. "i'm gonna get you, stewart," he says, and lifts his eyebrow and bares his teeth and you can almost feel his breath in your face, and you don't even want to think about what it smells like. i love this scene. i love this scene because james spader does one of his "don't hurt me, i'm innocent" expressions, the kind that ripple over his face so briefly and makes your knees feel funny, and that stupid one-liner passing through jack nicholson's curled lips, "i'm gonna get you, stewart."

some people have positivity mantras. i have a line from a terrible movie birthed during the nascent nineties. this is what the universe says to me while it laughs at my expense. this is what i believe the universe says to me, anyway, like the other day i was cooking and i spilled hot soup all over the counter top and as the soup dribbled down the cabinets and onto the floor, a jack nicholson said, "i'm gonna get you, stewart." someone dented my car and left the bumper hanging by threads, barely a day after i changed my insurance and increased my deductible. "i'm gonna get you, stewart." i got dumped for a little asian girl. or little white girl. or little black girl with a rounder butt than mine. "i'm gonna get you, stewart." i screw up at work. "i'm gonna get you, stewart." i'm being softly stalked by a neighbor, who is the exact opposite of an attractive man with hair gently falling in his face and shy eyes. "i'm gonna get you, stewart." i don't believe in any of that cosmic b.s., the change your mind, change your luck stuff, think positive, do what you love and the money will follow. you have ups. you have downs. our lives move in undulating waves, and i am having a down. i am having a long down and somewhere, on some global TBS affiliate, jack nicholson is gritting his teeth and saying, "i'm gonna get you, stewart."

so i'm twenty-nine and i can quite literally hear my ovaries shriveling and drying up, it sounds like the pages of an old book crumbling between your fingers, almost like a defeated hiss, and i start to think: i guess i should do something about that. i mean, i guess staring at a guy while he passes by me on the street isn't enough to convey my possible affection. i might actually have to talk to one. i opted to do so via the safety of my computer. defying my own principles, i join an online dating site, and i answer all the questions, and fill in all the about myself crap that makes me fall asleep just to type, trying to keep my answers light and yet directly convey my personality and my wants; and then i'm left to read that information about other people, and try to decipher something about their true nature. i'm sorry, but shouldn't we be past judging if someone is a good enough fit for us by their musical tastes? yes, is important, and sure, if someone exclusively listens to throat singing, he and i will have problems, and yet i think my senior prom date was really into pearl jam, too. last i heard, he was in jail. oh, you do yoga? that's very healthy of you. i do, too, as does 87.5% of the coastal population in california. it must be love. but, i have to let it be what it is. i am using the internet as a dating tool. i wink at a few people. rate them with stars and fairy dust and whatever. i end up sending a few messages back and forth with this guy, and then we happen to catch each other online. what else to do but chat?

so he asks me if i like to get my bottom spanked. i mean i should've known it was coming. i should have known, because he's on the internet trolling for women and not 5 minutes earlier he was telling me about possibly going to a strip club, on a tuesday night, and the girls love him because he pays attention to them and he's not just about trying to fondle them or put dollar bills in their thong-strings. he send me some photos. he looks like shel silverstein. if shel was less affable and less debonair. he asks me when i went on a date last, or when my last relationship was, and i dislike those questions, too, because they are invariably followed by "oh, i can't believe that, you're so pretty, you must have to fight them off with a stick." because that's supposed to flatter me? it just makes me feel more lame. thanks. i try to be an open person. you're a red-blooded dude and you visit a strip club. OK. on a tuesday night...ok?....now you're asking me how i feel about relinquishing control in a sexual situation and i am hearing that voice again. "i'm gonna get you, stewart." the questions keep coming. am i princess? do i gain pleasure from being servile? i have left my computer now, and i am cleaning up the after-dinner mess in my kitchen, and using the bathroom and when i come back he is apologizing for taking things too far, and all i can hear is, "i'm gonna get you, stewart." i ask him why he's posing all these questions and he says, "because i'm a dom," like it's not anything, like a box you check after you fill out your age/race/sex on a job application and i think, people who choose to define themselves as a "dom" to someone they hardly know don't have any control when it comes to the rest of their lives, and so have to make up for the lack in bed; i thought about that guy with his weird skin and beard and cowboy hat pressing down on me and saying nasty things and i felt almost nauseous, almost like a wrestler with his head caught in the wrong place. so i tell him that i appreciate his preferences but that he and i probably don't have much else to talk about. he says he doesn't think so. he says that most "vanilla" girls he meets have some dirty impulse just waiting to come out of them, and part of me starts to understand that he wants to be the key to unleash that thing, the one to make me wear a gimp mask and scream "thank you" with every crack of the whip.

and suddenly, he's asking me where my parents live and i tell him, i say, "one is deceased," and he doesn't say anything after that. somewhere there's a snide chuckle, and a howl, and a hiss, "i'm gonna get you, stewart."

monday night on wednesday morning

2009-12-16T11:43:00.000-08:00

i've read a lot of stories lately. a lot. a thunderous amount, by my normal standards. some of them are intriguing. others, not so much, but even those writer's efforts are admired because they're doing what i have yet to do: allow other people to read my work, and believe it in enough to do so.

it's interesting. part of my job (the one that pays me. meagerly.) is to vet book proposals and often those get nixed after the first paragraph. but the stories are different. for some reason, i have to know what happens at the end, even if the thing has been tedious and terrible throughout. stories can sneak up on you. i feel they deserve a little more time.

but you know, only a little.

in any case, this is just a post to:

1. remind you that monday night's reading period is officially closed. try again next time!
2. thanks for all the support and submissions and blessings to you if you bought a copy. we heart you!
3. remind you that copies are still available, here. or through me. a $3 xmas gift? holy cow. the only thing that's cheaper, and comparable, is a kiss, and i don't know about you, but i fear the herp so i don't just go around kissing anyone.

happy holidays!

how do you do the things you do, sir/ racing from the rising tide to my father's door

2009-12-14T09:10:00.000-08:00

hey, you, are you sitting at your desk, whiling the minutes between meetings away by tooling around the interent? more importantly, are you finding a lack of sexiness in your life? here's something to spice things up for you:

black rebel motorcycle club, "666 conducer;" baby 81, 2007

if, by the end of that song, you don't feel like taking a long shower to wash away all the grit, and then coming back to watch it again because you feel too clean...well, there won't be any real consequences, but i'll have to be forced to re-evaluate your cool factor.

and, if that overloaded you a little, here's a gentle cool-down. it even has harmonica. everyone loves a harmonica. and the cute grungy guy who plays it. oh, to be that harmonica.

black rebel motorcycle club, "fault line;" howl, 2005

confessions of a lab rat. part I: baseline

2009-12-09T09:49:00.003-08:00

they took a lot of blood. just as the nurse practitioner was about to poke me, i warned her about my veins and their tendency to dodge the needle. she responded with a knowing giggle but it still took her a minute or so to lock the vein down and get the needle in. some of the vials were covered with tinfoil; she said this was because certain vitamins react to light and this can change their concentration in the blood. covering up the sample makes for purer results.

some background:

in case you didn't know, i'm kind of genetically useless. mostly, my problem is this, but i also have myriad food allergies, trigger-less hives that rumble under my skin and make themselves known if i go without antihistamine for too long, frequent enough migraines and a touchy stomach. as far as my issues with sickle cell go, i'm healthier than most. you get used to having things hurt and having only a vague idea why and, if you're me, you let it go too far 'cause you're a badass and pain is just a state of mind and then you end up in the hospital with something awful. more than once. oops.

it's fascinating, really. what i have is a misguided gene on one short strand of code, which i share with 1 in 5,000 persons of my color and heritage (in the united states), because of malaria, and mosquitoes, and not being egyptian. it seems to have so much to do with the butterfly effect and at times so unfair; it's not like i can say i have cancer, you know. you say you have cancer and everyone gets all wide-eyed and pouty-lipped. say you have something else; walk up to a person and tell them you have something like tay-sachs disease. they'll furrow their brow and say, "oh, what's that again?" some people get to be tall and evenly proportioned. i get a wierdo genetic disease and eyeballs the color of the underside of a banana skin. that's from this. i'm ready for my close-up, mr. de mille.

so when i moved out here, i got hooked up with the adult sickle cell clinic at children's hospital oakland. some aspects of sickle cell will disappear (for lack of a better term) with age, but then you acquire a new set of problems. it's extraordinarily difficult to find a doctor who specializes in sickle cell (though i have seen and continue to see a few very knowledgeable hematologist/oncologists), so having that clinic nearby when i'm experiencing that special kind of ouchy is nice.

the set-up:

i got a call from them a while ago, asking me if i would be interested in participating in a study. this is actually the 2nd time they've called me for this reason. i don't exactly remember what the study was about the last time they called, but the description of that particular drug freaked me out enough to want no part of it. you can't walk in there, say you'd like to participate and ask for the placebo, right? so i bowed out. in any case, the research assistant, speaking softly on my answering machine as though trying not to disturb the air in my empty apartment, mentioned something about antioxidants and a 6-month study. i know what antioxidants are. they're in food. i like food, food is safe. i called back the next day and after some back and forth over scheduling and reading of literature, i made an appointment.

reading material:

the literature i was sent was quite informative. here are some facts you can use to impress your friends at parties: persons with sickle cell disease have, in general, more inflammation throughout their bodies than you normal types. inflammation increases during times of crisis, or severe painful episodes that give people with scd an excuse to stay home and drool on their pillows and cry. inflammation can be measured in the blood by checking the level of a protein called "CRP," which i read as "crap," and will continue to do so, because it makes me laugh. it's not wholly clear on what "inflammation" is, but i understand that to mean "swelling" and swelling in general is no good, especially internally (people with scd experience on average more joint aches and pains). via other studies, antioxidants have been found to help reduce swelling in persons with other conditions, such as obesity, and others i was told about but can't remember. the goal here is to determine whether the drug will have the same reductive effect in patients with sickle cell. this is a drug that is available over-the-counter, it's called juvenon, and is marketed as an anti-aging supplement. assuming i'm not on the placebo, i'm excited about having shinier hair, younger looking skin and a sharper memory. oh, and not being so inflamed.

baseline visit:

there's something special about children's hospital. everything is so colorful and miniature. even the beds in the emergency room are half-sized. there are fishtanks and cartoons on the television to diminish the gravitas; underneath all of that is the knowledge that something frightening is happening to someone's child; i can't stand the thought of sick children because they so rarely know what's going on. i never did. i have an awful memory of waking up alone in a hospital room during a particularly bad crisis. however small you are, the experience makes you even smaller, a speck of cosmic dust, or grain of sand, or whichever metaphor suits you. but this time i was fine and was, hopefully, doing something good. the research assistant met me at the door and ushered me into an examination room. the paper on the exam table was covered with illustrations from the cat in the hat. she asked me a few questions and made me fill out some questionnaires--in the last four weeks, had i experienced any common medical issues over the last year, had i felt depressed, could i be pregnant, when was my last crisis, etc. i had to sign a lot of things. after a while, you stop reading and hope your soul doesn't end up a piece of paper in the devil's filing cabinet. she took my height and weight. she took my weight three times. by the third time i thought, if it changes at all from what it was 5 seconds ago, i'm going out for a new pair of jeans. then i had to pee in a cup. did i mention how humiliating i find peeing in a cup? they give you the cup, show you to the bathroom and you have to contort yourself so all the liquid goes into that little plastic container, without it spilling over, or making a mess on the floor; my humiliation is doubled because, as a result of scd, my pee is not a normal color. that's all i'll say about that. and then, i had to carry the container out of the bathroom so i tried to hide it with the sleeve of my coat and walked really fast back into the examination room. i handed it off to the research assistant. "oh," she said, "it's so warm!"

i spent a long time with the nurse practitioner. she was one of those berkeley types with stylishly ramshackle clothing and an i-love-everyone air about her; a slightly judgemental revelation on my part: i thought for sure she was going to tell me about her partner and whatnot; instead, she has a husband and kids. i have lived here for too long. she was very nice, and willing to answer all my questions--where will the testing happen; why are some of the vials wrapped in tinfoil, does it matter than i take certain other drugs from time-to-time (folic acid and generic zyrtec and, these days, a whole lot of tums). she even offered to have the primary doctor on the study stop by during one of my visits to talk about it in further detail. after about 5 test tubes were filled, i lost count. now i'm thinking about my blood being spun and shook and separated and peered at through a microscope as they try to discern my starting point.

at the end of the visit, i was given an absurd amount of pills (i shouldn't worry about finishing them between now and my next visit--apparently no one does, the amount of pills is determined by the participant's height and weight...oy), told to take two pills twice a day, and be aware of anything i notice. i'd read somewhere that i was supposed to keep a daily journal while participating in the study; instead, the research assistant said she'll call me once a week to check in. which is great, because my journaling would've turned into some existential bullshit that had little to do with the study and everything to do with my own neuroses. in a strange turn of events, i was paid for a doctor's visit, in the form of a parking voucher (hooray!) and a $10 food stipend; i will get these after each of my visits. one visit a month for 6 months, a decent amount of money at the end. i wonder if i can quit my job and do this type of thing for a living? no, wait, don't meth-heads do that? never mind.

so far, i feel about the same, but i've noticed that my pee has the pungent post-asparagus odor. more than you ever wanted to know about my pee, eh?

scd illustration via

my heart is like the ocean/it gets in the way

2009-12-07T09:46:00.000-08:00

in high school, we used to talk about poetry that had an "inside voice" vs. an "outside voice," (or else "public" and/or "private" voice) the former a label tacked onto poems with obscure lines and verses, it's meaning buried under literary confusion; eliot's the wasteland comes to mind. the latter is maybe something like frost's stopping by woods on a snowy evening (which is quite possibly my favorite poem). now i realize it's the kind of distinction people who don't understand poetry make.

so i was talking with some people a while ago, and i'm not even sure how this came up, but i said, 'have you ever noticed how tori amos' lyrics don't make any sense?" it's not true of all her songs, certainly, but in most cases the words are so coded and the music is so artful that you find yourself singing along, "rabbit, where'd you put they keys, girl?" without caring how crazy that sounds, like it came first from the mouth of a bag lady pushing her cart uphill.

my tori amos fandom was waning, until a college roommate unintentionally renewed my interest with this particular tune (even though she had it on constant repeat and i wanted to murder her for a while). i prefer the studio version, with the full instrumentation and backup vox, etc., but this is still pretty awesome. and, if you're into it, you can watch tori wiggle and pout her lips.

tori amos, "take to the sky;" winter single, 1992

maintenance

2009-12-04T15:10:00.003-08:00

hi. there have been minor grumblings about an inability to comment.

i just checked my blog settings. all i can say is: my bad. i had it set to "openID" for commenters. i think this was keeping me safe from spammers.

anyway, feel free to comment away, and please do, 'cause it makes this blog look loved. if you spam me, i will eat you for dinner. believe it.

also, if you search for "repair sign" on google images, you get a lot of stuff about shoe repair. which is OK with me. though i never had a pair of shoes repaired until last year, and one of those pairs still fell apart.

photo via

out of habit

2009-12-01T21:49:00.003-08:00

this happens to me regularly. i'm in my car and a friend is in my car and my iPod is plugged in playing some song i can't let go of. ultimately, the friend says, "oh wow, i used to listen to this all the time!" and i wonder: used to? it's a comment spoken with little meaning, just a small realization on a friend's part; i'm listening to "even flow" for the 5 millionth time (literally), and the friend hasn't bothered with "even flow" since 1993, when it was likely last appropriate to be concerned with that song at all.

but i still feel sort of strange. i love music. i'm a nerd. i can identify when it's paul singing, or john, and i don't understand people who can't. i know that the drum track for "when the levee breaks" was recorded in a stairwell to heighten that far-away, undulating rhythm. i used to transcribe song lyrics from memory during class, instead of taking notes. when i catch on something i really like, it sticks, and i listen to it over and over again until i can't remember what i wore the day before, but i can recite verbatim all of the lyrics to ani difranco's "out of habit" (which is not a big deal, it's a short tune. but still).

however, i've aged into one of those horrible crotchety music geeks who shakes her fists at the kids these days, and their misguided ears. i'm a long way past sincerely judging people for their musical tastes, but i did laugh when i saw the line for the david archuleta show the other day at the warfield. david archuleta? really? he's enough to make you stand in line on the worst block in san francisco, with your mom standing a few yards away, trying to stay out of your cool space? ok, whatevs. but all the fist shaking and general crabby attitude about it has left me in sort of a musical void. besides NPR, i don't listen to the radio anymore, and, thanks to MTV and it's unabashed war against the music video & exaltation of the reality show, i have absolutely no idea what's going on. i rarely spend money on music, and depend on the charity of others to knock me out of my primarily mid-90's orbit. (an aside: no, this does not only include grunge/indie rock music. get off my back already!). it's easy to use the "all music these days is crap" excuse, but that's not necessarily true, we all know this. you just have to know where to look and who to talk to. the problem is that i never pursue those avenues. i just put "stop making sense" on and wonder why anyone would bother to listen to anything else.

so how do we discover music when we're old and can't keep up? i used to get all into a band's space and find out what they were listening to, that's how i came to love such bands as the who and the talking heads and the pixies and ben harper and later the buzzocks and kings of leon, etc., ad infinitum. my dad got me into certain sounds, the beatles, eric clapton, prince, and the dire straits, for like 5 minutes. MTV and 92.3 KDWB did the rest. now, i get a gift from the music fairy every so often, and have that blessed being to thank for black rebel motorcycle club and the von bondies and yes, the ramones, who i didn't like when i should have, until someone pointed out to me that the ramones boiled down to do-wop with some guitar. dig it. i'm also a retroactive listener; sometimes it takes seeing a band or musician perform in a different element to pique my interest--i had this experience a few years ago, after seeing trent reznor acoustic at the bridge school benefit. which led to a period of nine inch nails insanity. that might be my favorite thing, realizing there's no time limit, there's nothing you should stop listening to at a certain time, nothing you can't go back and pick up. but, when you say "i used to listen to this all the time," what have you replaced "this" with? what are you listening to? because i love hearing "daughter" and remembering how pissed my dad got when i would sing the chorus really loud whenever we fought; i love listening to tricky's "christiansands," and remembering my first boyfriend, and how he wanted me to give him that CD before he went on a trip, and i couldn't bear to part with it. i love listening to "let it be" and remembering my mom and i singing along in the car, and when it was over she made me switch the classic rock station off because she couldn't take the noise. how is anyone supposed to let go of those things? is it so shameful to hang on?

no, really, what are you listening to? i just bought this. awesome.

picture via

listen to me, oh no

2009-11-23T09:19:00.000-08:00

this has happened to you before, right? you click a link or watch a video expecting to last a minute before scoffing and closing the window. or maybe, on the one day of the week you decide you'll give the radio a shot, you listen to a song and at the end, the DJ comes on and announces that you've spent the past few minutes listening to "generic song of the hour" by train. ah, train is such a great band, the DJ says, there are so many good train songs to choose from. the problem then isn't that the DJ clearly has questionable taste in music, rather, you thought the train song was a tune by the black crowes (of whom you have dearly fond memories & utmost respect), and you find yourself weeping a little and wondering what happened to your ears.

or, you know, not.

so i clicked on a link and watched a video and the first time through i thought, well, that's all right, thinking i could go without it until i woke up in the middle of the night with this song in my head. that's not my name. that's not my name. that's not my....suddenly i want to wear short dresses and feathers in my hair and make a movie of myself jumping on a trampoline and kicking blithely at balloons. actually, it's kind of a brilliant song, if you listen closely. whether or not i have the ting tings to thank for that, or whomever does their production, is hard to say.

the ting tings: "that's not my name;" we started nothing, 2008

mathematics

2009-11-21T12:30:00.004-08:00

1980 - 1948= 32. equals, older than i am now. equals, the first birth of two. a plan executed according to the schematic, a baby turning midway between north and south, an impossible number of miles from home. still, an accidental penultimate.

1984 - 1948= 36. equals, a gift from god. equals, the second of two and final, the first would draw eyeglasses and mustaches over pictures of the second, not knowing that photos are hard to replace. the second small, an accident, welcomed, more familiar than the first.

2006 - 1948= 58. equals, an even number. add to get an unlucky odd. multiply to get a fat round, some say a pinnacle. some say the height of one's demise. divide, a number of little consequence, the loneliest number, with a sticky remainder refusing to budge.

2009 - 1948= 61. equals, three years gone. equals, hard ground and, decomposition within, and, last rights, and the weight of time blistering forward, the only true juggernaut in a world of sifting grays and blurred lines. the only final thing. the only thing we all have to contend with.

2006 - 1980= 26. equals, if you make it another year, you might make it the rest of the way. equals, an unknown voice qualifying a barely known quantity, oh, you are so young to suffer such a loss. add, a year of life hardly remembered because there would be so many more to come, subtract to find the same, divide, arrive at a magic number. a man and a woman had a little baby. multiply, find a dozen. half a day, times two.

2009 - 1980= 29. a strange thing to say, twenty-nine, words sharp, a guillotine blade wavering. how many nights; how long before i realize the heaving and gasping and tears happened in the landscape of a dream, before i understand my mind in sleep goes where i will not let it while awake; in the morning, the mirror reveals more crust in the corner of my eyes than normal.

november 21, 2006, i called to say happy birthday. her voice was high and clotted with sick. oh, my dear, she said, thank you.

foiled attempts

2009-11-20T20:17:00.004-08:00

i was going to post about this article i read. i read the article because my boss gave it to me to read, because we were thinking of signing this guy up at mission control...the article really pissed me off, and i had a lot to say about it; then today my boss says, by the way, that guy accepted our offer. now i can't mention the guy's name, or anything about him, really, in effort to keep my employment.

so, that's not going to work out.

and then the other day i heard this fascinating piece on npr about the immediacy in our current existence; the reporter-girl had a boyfriend who would answer his phone at 2 a.m. you know what happens at 2 a.m.? mostly sex, or bad things. and the boyfriend is also a reporter, or somesuch, and is very plugged in and a news addict, and everyone was generally upset by the blackberry that was never more than an inch out of reach, the whole situation was most highly disagreeable. like americans particularly do in the face of change, they planned to rally against this invasion of the instant. which means this person, or group of people, as i understood it, was (or, were) going to set the clock back to 1985--no cell phones, or computers (not the household variety, anyway), or even CDs or, gasp, digital television. they would write letters and make long distance phone calls to each other over landlines. mon dieu! there was something charming about all of it, really, because i feel the same way much of the time; i was thinking the other day: how are children taught handwriting these days? my own handwriting is atrocious, but it wasn't for lack of trying. are pens going to go the way of flint arrowheads? somewhere on the far edge of town, a ball-point pen factory will become a historical site, all roped off and clean for the visiting masses, "look, jimmy, that's where they used to put the ink in the pens. remember how i told you about those?"

all of this to say, i fucking can't find the story on npr's website. i have searched for two days. my interest was piqued because i really want to start writing letters again, and slow down in earnest; i like being plugged in, what i don't like is feeling that i need to be. did anyone else hear that story? can you at least remember what program it was part of? 'twas around 6:30 pm on tuesday.

given that i'm out of ideas, and that it's cold and wet outside, i am going to watch criminal minds and try to use the force to cook my dinner.

play me out, mos.

short, gray and old

2009-11-18T09:28:00.000-08:00

some weeks ago, i was thinking about henry rollins. i don't know why, exactly. i wouldn't call myself a fan of his--i was never into black flag, or even the rollins band; i mean, i found "liar" intriguing by but for the same reason as everyone else--this (seemingly) huger than huge guy yelling into the camera using words i knew, yet in a style i couldn't really connect with. the neural path i followed to get to henry was probably something like this: i'm single --> i'm tired of being single --> i wonder if i'll be single forever --> if i were not single, who would i be with -->henry rollins is pretty cute, what about that guy? then i fell asleep.

a while after that a friend mentioned that henry rollins was doing a stint on the show sons of anarchy, which i don't watch, but i was interested enough to pursue the possibility. on a listless saturday afternoon, i spiraled into an awful youtube black hole of henry rollins. you know those days, when you get stuck on something and you can't control yourself, so you end up wasting 2 hours, you even read the godawful comments posted after some of the videos. i watched henry talk and talk and talk, because that's what he does. at the end, everything was still the same, but i hated the internet a little bit more.

this isn't really about henry rollins, though. it seems wrong to have an opinion about someone who has endless opinions coming out of his mouth-hole. my youtube black hole led me to a google vortex, in which i read about henry's tattoos "very old and very cool, just like me," he says. can't argue with that) and henry's appearances on various random television shows, and then, finally, there was this:

“I hate writing. I just wish I could stop but I can’t...The better you get at it, the harder it is, because it’s less time that you bullshit yourself. I’ve met a handful of writers and they’re pretty miserable people. Because they know that the beast is sitting in the room saying, ‘come on. You know you’ve been playing around with your friends long enough. Back to class.’"

and then i was kind of like, holy shit wtf omg. people think writers are miserable because it's their job--a choice, really, which is worse--to simultaneously recognize all the ills in the world and all the beauty in the world and somehow mush those things together, seamlessly, so people will ask: how did you do that? that doesn't make a writer miserable. writers are miserable because we cannot stop what we do, even when we want to. when we're sitting in front of the computer with 5,000 words that were months in the coming, the cutting and pasting, the agonizing, the reordering, the napping-instead-of-writing and feeling like a shithead about it even though no one else is keeping track. it's like being pissed because you want to stop breathing but you can't, your body won't let you. how foolish. you get a taste of fresh air, the kind you get only after a rain--someone read your piece, and they liked it, and they're going to put it somewhere where other people can see it, and you don't think: now i can rest. you think: now, i have to do something else.

p.s.: watch the video linked to on the first "talk." it's pretty funny.

like a picture of a sunny day

2009-11-16T19:10:00.003-08:00

oh, hello blog. and hello three people who read my blog. i kind of missed this. sitting here when i should be doing all sorts of things; instead, i feel some unfounded pressure to finish this post, and the next one, and the next one. until all i do is blog for free.

i did finish a story though. goal, completed. and the newest edition of monday night is finished, and you should get one, or at least stop by the website and read it: www.mondaynightlit.com

the story: needs work. i'll get there. what else can be done? here's something that's been kicking around in my ears, lately:

"modern girl," sleater-kinney; the woods, 2005

notes from an ungrateful fan (or, in which i try to intellectualize my dislike of pearl jam's newest album)

2009-09-25T12:00:00.001-07:00

few people like to put themselves in boxes. now, maybe more than ever, definitions are useless; it seems like we're almost trying to outdo each other with the number of personality conditions we acquire. ok. i'm a laissez-faire kinda gal. just don't try to wrap me up in your polyamorous spree. but i like definitions. i like knowing i'm female even though us fems got the raw deal. i like knowing i'm african-american (which is different than black-american), i like that men piss me off and confuse me to no end but i love the way they smell, and i fucking love pearl jam. i might start filling that in as the "other" option on forms and surveys. name: nana k. birthdate: septemeber. sex: female. race: pearl jam fan.

i was eleven when i first heard "jeremy." i won't presume to say i recall the first time i ever heard it, though i think it involves the backseat of my mother's old car on a long stretch of empty road and being interested in something outside myself for first time in a long time, so much so that i stared at the radio wishing i could hear it again. those first aggressive, ominous notes shook my spinal cord, like the first line of a novel that promises to suck out your soul, yeah, you fucking call me ishmael, bitch.

i'm twenty-nine now. besides the core aspects about myself, a lot of my external existence has changed, i.e., those things i chose to take on. this morning, i realized that it'll be a long time before i willingly purchase and wear another pair of pants--this from a girl who would kick and scream at the slightest glimpse of the frills and lace of a sunday dress. i thought i would be married by now. i'm not. i thought i'd have more money. i don't. i thought i'd have to call my mother and beg her to come out of retirement from wherever she was vacationing to help me take care of my kids. won't happen. i live in california. i'm still wondering how that happened. but, in the midst of all that, i have remained a pearl jam fan. that's ten studio albums, myriad side projects, an assload of bootlegs, both the official kind and otherwise, a tattoo, some DVDs (the official kind and otherwise) a few thousand dollars on the fan club, show tickets, plane tickets, gas, hotel rooms, and, oh, there was this. i was as obsessed as your favorite fanboy or girl and the evidence to prove it is littered throughout my life. but i don't wear flannel anymore. when i paint my fingernails black, it's more as a joke than anything else. i sometimes hate my parent, but for different reasons than my angst-riddled teenaged self did. i'm ashamed to admit this, but much of the three-chord, despondent rock-n-roll i used to listen to annoys me when it catches me off guard. which doesn't mean i don't continue to love that music, it just doesn't color my life as much as it used to. my ears have grown as i have. and that's ok.

somewhere after no code, i started to wonder if pearl jam would ever disappoint me. would something like that even be humanly possible? at that point, even i was surprised; friends, whose interest had taken a nosedive after vs., would ask how i could still like pearl jam and i had no concrete answer. i would sputter out a response about the band still being good and ohmygod you should see them live. but the short answer was this: they put out incredible music. i loved what i heard. what other reason is there? my love was serious, as immediate as the at first sight bullshit they sell you in operas and romantic comedies. i would hear singles on the radio and the inside of my heart would vibrate. when yield finally came out, that time period probably being the peak of my insane fandom, i cried when i heard in hiding (see prev. post) for the first time. i remember that moment clearly. i was guiding my little nissan up the winding road that lead to our housing development in delaware; the distinct odor of the piles of manure crowding around the mushroom houses infiltrated the air vents. i leaned forward to turn the stereo up. then i sat in my driveway and wished, as often happened, that i could hear it again.

that was the year i ditched my college orientation to see pearl jam in philadelphia. this year, i had to talk myself into spending the $200+ to buy a plane ticket to see them in the same city, allegedly for four shows, though i only have tickets for two. i pre-ordered the new album, certainly, about 4 days before it was released. i wasn't even expecting it to arrive this week--in the past, i would've rearranged my schedule so i could go to the record store first thing in the morning and i'd rip off the plastic on the way to my car, rabidly hungry for ear candy. i found the new album wedged into my mailbox on monday and currently my favorite part about it are the baby photos in the back (hey, does anyone know who's who?).

having had almost twenty (gah!) years to think about it, what i appreciated about pearl jam was, and, ok, is, how they teetered on the edge of popularity. frat boys love them and so do little black girls from the suburbs. they're angry and yet uplifting, poetic both in lyric and music, intimidating and attractive. they experimented, but did it well, and i wanted that challenge--how the music sort of stared me in the face like an eager lover and said, "this is totally different than last time. are you ready?" and i was. i always was. people would tell me they listened to an album one time, and then put it right back on the shelf next to the others, never to pick it up again. i'd be horrified. people would say, "this song sucks," and i want to pop them in the mouth. recently, while i was griping about pearl jam's latest effort & how every song i heard made me all the more dubious, a friend said, " i like anything the band does. even when they're bad, it's like a chanukah gift from grandma - it comes from the heart." that's how i felt about everything before this album. er...the one before last. and maybe the one before that one? no, actually, i quite like riot act. and i even like binaural, and i like the strange and wonderful art piece that is no code, and i especially love yield because i can listen to it straight through without thinking, "oh, this one is so much better live--i can't listen to it." what i've realized, though, is that most pearl jam fans don't like these albums in their entirety. it seems that most pearl jam fans want ten. they want the upswing of "betterman" and the do-do-do-do-do-do-dooooo of "black." they want the raw speed of "go," and the misery shrouded in an uplifting melody that is "elderly woman behind the counter in a small town." and i want all those things too, but i also want the way the bass sounds like a horn in "all those yesterdays," and i want the strangeness of "help help," and the stop-start of "big wave."

i had to ask a friend if my ears were broken, since i'm completely unable to hear what other folks are hearing, since it seems everyone else in the world is rabid for this album. i had to ask if, maybe because i know 4 guitar chords that i can't really put together, i was missing something due to lack of musical prowess and understanding. i had to ask myself: am i too cynical to handle an un-cynical pearl jam album? there's something about backspacer that's too easy. it's too fun, it's too straightforward. the lyrics are too rhyme-y, the general mood of the songs is too catchy. my banana pudding isn't fucking banana-y enough, damnit. this type of album something i expect from a band that's already established itself as fun and obvious, not pearl jam, who probably killed off 1/3 of their fanbase with vitalogy. which isn't to say i'm going to throw it out with my next trash dump. i appreciate this album, it's as skillful and brilliant as ever but i don't want to hear it a million times over, and make everyone i know do the same. and i miss that feeling.

i think the going opinion is that the band has been weird and been punky and been hardcore and this is a return to basics, good old rock-n-roll. even the band is of the opinion that this 10th effort is remarkable in all aspects. i say, to hell with basics. if i want basics i'll put on this album and clean my house and then turn it off and never think of it again until my bathtub starts to get dingy.

even now i'm asking myself why i've spent so much time and so many words on these ponderings. so consider this: besides my immediate family, pearl jam as a band, have been in my life longer than most of my good friends, than most of the men i've been involved with, most of the jobs i've had. at my best and worst, there was pearl jam. highest and lowest, past and present, all those opposing forces. you get the drift. to actively dislike something they've done is a big deal. for me, anyway. i'm getting tired of hoping that the next one will be better. or maybe pearl jam is tired of me.

nothing better to do on a monday night

2009-09-23T19:38:00.004-07:00

peeking out from behind the blog curtain to announce issue 8 of monday night. in this issue:

Conor Allen
Ching-In Chen
Jenny Drai
Samantha Giles
Vivien Jones
Pete Knight
David W. Landrum
justin mcelfresh
David M. Morini
Mark Stevens
Rebecca Stonehill
Sharon Zetter

you can read everything online; you old fashioned-types can order a print copy here.

i was flattered to be asked to work on monday night with rob, sharon, and jess, and i'm looking forward to the start of the reading period. for now. until i get crushed by the electronic weight of submissions. because i don't spend enough time pushing the no button at my regular job.

but you should send something in, anyway.

here's what my life is like these days (music starts around 25 seconds in):

gone fishin'

2009-09-21T10:10:00.004-07:00

here are ten things i plan to do instead of blogging. all of them are true:

1. complete at least one of the many short stories i have started and can never seem to finish
2. home improvements
3. watch mad men (i didn't want it to happen. but it did. i am so easily influenced)
4. reading submissions for monday night! if you're a writer, or perhaps you feel like one on any given day, please submit.
4.5: convincing more local bookstores to carry monday night. and, if you do not live in CA, and there's a local bookstore you frequent that sells literary journals, please let me know.
5. yoga-ing to work off the weight i've acquired post-joe camel. ugh.
6. f*cking finish the wind-up bird chronicle (i dunno why but that book is making my life difficult)
7. turn tricks to earn money for a plane ticket, so i can see pearl jam in oct.
8. take classes so i can become a computer superstar
9. read all the books in my house. i am serious. i buy them and they sit around. i'm a fucking bibliophilic hoarder. no more book purchases until i have read them all, or made an attempt. (however, if they are acquired for free, lent, or given as gifts, i'll take them. always a loophole).
10. please see #1.

it's temporary, like the sign says. blogging is way too much of a distraction for me not to come back.

besos (and thanks for reading),
nana k.

the west is the future (or: the time i turned 29)

2009-09-16T23:04:00.000-07:00

i'm sure that's what the donner party believed. i made the mistake of looking them, and the pass named for them, up before driving out to utah. i told myself this was because i had some apprehension about driving over the mountains. i really just wanted to read about abject desperation and wonder what it must have been like to finally resort to cannibalism. bear in mind, it wasn't only the people trapped in the pass who took to eating their fallen compatriots. the forlorn hope, 15 of the would-be settlers who were sent to find help when it became apparent the party couldn't go any further, also had a few gruesome meals.

we drove overnight, so, it was too dark to see much of anything and, except for a brief glimpse of the pass, i was asleep for most of it. the memory is already foggy; i have only the feeling of escalation and shadowy outlines of mountains on either side to remember the moment. the above was among the first things i saw when i got to nevada. they don't waste any time. i was expecting something different. an intimidatingly narrow pathway, the kind of thing presses your chest until your last breath escapes in a deflated whimper. there'd be craggy outcroppings and animal carcasses and in the dim light i'd be positive i saw a human skull, cast to the side after being picked clean.

instead, we drove through the pass like it was nothing, and stopped at a rest stop for a stretch. there wasn't much of anything there. different parts of the world are different in the dark. at rest stops, everything is ominous and sinister. there are moments, after i've been sitting for a while, i realize i haven't heard a single sound and my ears kind of adjust to the assumed silence, by turning themselves off, like i slipped on a pair of earmuffs.

i don't take many roadtrips. i'd forgotten about views like this. even though the road stretches ahead, taunting you with its forever-ness, there's a sunrise. i'd forgotten about the full moon at night in an unpolluted sky and how it's like an incandescent plug holding in the air of the world.

it's always good to have company, to save you from going insane. we listened to a sookie stackhouse novel...which unfortunately had adverse effects. we crossed into utah with it, and the contrast between the badly-written occult fantasy and the holy beehvies made us wriggle in our seats. but that also could've been because we'd been sitting for 9 hours.

about 3 hours after that, we all got reacquainted with sophie. oh and we were also in park city, utah. i was in utah. i felt only a little out of place. mostly when we were in public. i realized we were at 7,000 feet when my joints started to hurt and couldn't get a breath. i guess that's the thing about the mountains. you have to earn your keep there. you have to adjust.

the power went out on my birthday, so i turned 29 in the dark. it seemed fair, and we were undeterred. we played cards and ate blue cheese burgers. i didn't feel any different. but i don't think i was supposed to.

the next day, we climbed the unitas mountains, and i started thinking: utah's not so bad.

it has its moments. the mountains were stunning. i wondered what that must of sounded like: two solid, thick plates cramming themselves together. the earth's prehistoric, jagged wisdom teeth jutting out of her gums. i thought about and how long ago that happened. and what's supposed to happen next.

afterwards, we had some good old aggressive fun. i was sore for days. some of us were bruised. being competitive is hard work.

there's a lot to be said about the salt flats, but my creativity is on strike for the moment. i haven't been to a place where there are absolutely zero signs of life. i guess it's a good picture of the world, post-armageddon.

then we had to go home. hello, california.

i'm afraid i can't help it

2009-09-14T08:59:00.002-07:00

so my father gets off a plane in 1969. he arrives at the minneapolis-st. paul international airport, from ghana, via several other places. he is jet lagged and disoriented and excited; he's wearing, in his words, a "yucky" suit that he just wants to get rid of. he speaks the language, and knows where he's going, but is unsure how to get there, so he stops a policeman and attempts to ask him, "how can i get to the university of minnesota?" for each two steps my father took towards the cop, the cop took two steps back. the way my father tells it, he had his return ticket in his pocket and decided if he was going to be treated so badly, he would just turn around and go home.

hyperbolic father begets hyperbolic daughter.

in the end, a man and his son had been watching the scene unfold and, after my father had given up on the airport's finest (or, been given up on), the man approached my father and gave him a ride directly to the U of M campus. my father isn't a terribly intimidating person. not physically, anyway. he's small and thin. he wears dorky glasses and at that time, he hadn't grown out the afro and mustache he'd sport throughout the 70's and most of the 80's. he tends to keep to himself; i'm sure it took a lot for him to even approach the cop and, beyond that, allow a strange white man and his family to drive him to his destination. but in desperate times, even the most wicked seem like our best friends.

i got to thinking about all this after recent events. this past july 4th, i waxedomething-or-another (wouldn't call it "poetic") about america and how great it is (and there are perks, certainly--my clitoris wasn't mutilated when i started menstruating and i wasn't married off when i was eleven years old), but i'm now feeling dismay in the most purest sense. while i marvel at the man we have in office, most often for no reason than he's of color and even i didn't think such a thing possible, i never expected the amount of hate that's being spewed from the mouths of the (un)right(eous). at least not to this violent degree. shouldn't civility, too, be one of the perks of living in one of the most powerful nations in the world? all that's happened in these past few months is the racist, spiteful masses now seem to have a platform with which to express themselves. they doctor their true feelings up with the propaganda of the paranoid--our president is a socialist who'll kill your granny before her number is up and did you know he pals around with a domestic terrorist? all they're saying is: he's a dirty black man, and he doesn't represent me. in college, we talked a lot about white guilt. now, we have to talk about white oppression. which is bullshit. the nyt says it best: "what do you get when you combine the worst economic downturn since the Depression with the first black president? A surge of white racial resentment, loosely disguised as a populist revolt."

david bowie: "i'm afraid of americans;" earthling, 1997

a lazy post

2009-09-04T08:46:00.000-07:00

it's friday. i'm hot and lazy and about to drive for 12 hours. so instead of my own bullshit, here's a random smattering of links that have struck (stricken? strook?) my fancy (or gotten me really riled up) lately:

this post at racialicious. thea lim discusses the paucity of diversity in MFA writing courses. i'll say what i said on fb: if you are a teacher, and you aren't committed to diversity, you shouldn't teach. i don't care if the only person of color in your class is the one who spent too much time at the beach. good writing is good writing, regardless of color.

t*fanie's portrait of the artist on a cross-country road trip. the post is a month old, but i think these shots are beautimus, and i keep going back to look at them.

last week's true blood recap at io9. for the penultimate episode of the season, it wasn't the best (though, as is mentioned, there was some quality eric-time.), but bad can beget so much good. (definite spoilers there, by the by).

some thoughts on the end of the editor-author relationship @ editorial ass. as a pubco peon, i can only sympathize--our job is to churn out product and once a book is completed, we have to move on to the next. as a writer, this only serves to further the point that you are your own best advocate. don't depend on your publisher to escort you through that nether-region between the end of your first book and the beginning of the next--those days are over. your editor probably still loves you, but your editor also has to sign and publish 4 other books before the quarter ends.

savethewords.org. modernicide? jussulent? somandric? they all need some tlc. you can adopt a word as long as you pledge to use it. look at that plethora of abandoned words. i wonder if this is how angelina jolie feels when she visits an orphanage in an exotic foreign country--tiny, pleading voices and all.

splitting at the seams

2009-08-31T09:10:00.000-07:00

this year, at the outside lands festival in san francisco:

* we melted on one day, froze the next
*fergie, apparently, did some weird shit with squirelly dave matthews and his band of merry men; people freaked out and left (er, i hope they did)
*eddie vedder and the pearl jams loved on yield (my favorite!) and ended with a bang
*the porta-potties were gross, as per usual
*atmosphere loved all us ugly people (but he didn't do the "minnesota" song. boo.)
*the national won everything
*modest mouse sucked, again. i'm done. no more modest mouse live.
*m.i.a. (careful i think her website tries to brainwash you) played all your favorite songs AND had twin albino dancers in blue suits. because she's not awesome enough

some other things happened, too: there was a strange tent where a gang of scantily clad teenagers had gathered to drink an unspecified electric blue beverage and honed their d.j.-ing skills, while rockin' out to such oldies as ruby soho and take on me (that's your cue to feel old). their tongues were stained the color of windex and everything throbbed in way that made me feel i'd smoked every ounce of kush each dirty hippie had smuggled in under his armpit . i had to get out. only to be confronted with a bunch of clowns who'd joined together to form some kind of marching band. fucking san francisco, right?

i don't usually do festivals, because i'm bad at making decisions and festivals are the ultimate test in choosing your battles (plus they're expensive, plus you end up dirty and smelly at the end of each day, plus the unwashed listless masses never know how to behave in public), but i was gifted a ticket and pearl jam was headlining. out of all the acts featured, i saw a scant few, but perhaps it's better to approach such events with blinders on? i'm definitely not sad i missed the DMB, a little sorry i missed zee avi, and i wish i would've seen band of horses. but they were on at roughly the same time as m.i.a. so here's this instead:

band of horses, "no one's gonna love you;" cease to begin, 2007

an old dalliance of mine sent this song to me long long ago in the dreary past of 2008. there's plenty of music that i can't bear, or couldn't listen to for a long time because of some guy or another who ruined it for me in some way (the same dalliance made it impossible for me to listen to pearl jam's cover of "i am a patriot" from the uniondale 2003 show, that fucker). i remain mostly unfamiliar with band of horses, but i truly do adore this song. but not more than i adore m.i.a. maybe i'll catch them when they come around next.

oh, and by the way, i drank whatever the kids in the tent were drinking, so if in a week my pupils dilate and i seem to be under alien control, just let me go. remember me for how i was.

part III: hairsimilation

2009-08-28T08:24:00.000-07:00

all day yesterday i was mulling over how to round out "hair week." i was making my daily graze through gawker.com, and came across this article, from the nyt. how fortuitous. i love these nyt style pieces because i can picture some older-ish white lady reading it and wondering why any lovely black lady would want to straighten out her naturally curly locks. "now isn't that fascinating," she says, as she sets a mug of coffee down on her desk and clicks away to another window. her movements are practiced and staid. she runs her hand idly through her own straight hair.

it might seem ridiculous to politicize hair, but in this society, we're very much taught that it is important to conform, and we're fed all kinds of nonsense and half-truths in order to achieve that conformity. allow me some simplified definitions: being healthy means being thin, being happy means being wealthy and the lifestyle that wealth provides, being beautiful means being white, or at least having the features & hair to match. if you don't believe me:

....anyone who thought such preconceptions were outdated would have been reminded otherwise by some negative reactions to the president’s 11-year-old daughter, Malia Obama, who wore her hair in twists while in Rome this summer. Commenters on the conservative blog Free Republic attacked her as unfit to represent America for stepping out unstraightened.

well, that's lovely. when i was malia's age, i was in a play in grade school, and in-between visits to the braider's chair. so i had this amoeba-like afro that i hated, and my schoolmates adored. my friends all had lovely hair--blond & straight, shirley-temple curly, stylish short bobs...and i looked like buckwheat. by some cruel system of justice it decided that, for this play, we would let my hair fly free and i had all these fake miniature purple roses stuck in the front and to the sides, so i looked like buckwheat ran through a hedgerow in candyland. it was awesome. i'm sure i cried backstage at least once. in college, during the 5 minutes i had a twa ("teenie-weenie afro," if you didn't read the article) of my very own, people asked to touch it all the time, and stuck pencils in it, and generally marveled at the stuff that simply grew out of my head. magic. so you're either exoticized, or ostracized, it's a fair toss of the coin, right?

in the end, as it is said, it is just hair, and any black woman...any woman, at all, should do what she pleases and not feel that she's making a political statement or trying to fit in or forgo her culture. or is it just hair? when i was bitching about my hair on facebook, a friend (who i know will read this so let me say, friend, i'm not trying to aggravate anything, just making a point) said what most people say when you complain about your hair: "the thing about hair is that it grows back." definitely true. but for some of us, the "growing back" is only part of the issue. for a long while, persons of my color were denied our natural appearance, whether literally under someone's thumb, or, as were my parents, under their ruling influence. and race aside, hair can often does define who a person is. it's one of the few things about ourselves that we can control, so it makes sense to have an attachment. mention you got a haircut & everyone wants to see photos. i know i'm not the only person who has shed tears after a bad day at the salon. i even learned recently that patrick stewart started balding when he was nineteen (!!), and he wore a combover until someone forcibly cut it off. he was bald and proud for then on, but would still bring wigs to his auditions and used his follicular versatility as a selling point.

the film "good hair" is referenced in the article, but my stylist also told me about it. this is chris rock's version of every movie michael moore ever made, but better and funnier; i can't wait until it comes out. the clip is comforting, and hilarious, but also a little disheartening. for example, we learn that pepa's (from salt-n-pepa) hair was burned off after a bad perm and that's where the asymetrical look came from....which, as i consider it now, is a good way of turning a negative into a fashion statement. it's also evident (though we all knew it already) that many african-american actresses & performers have weaves because that type of style makes them more marketable and, allegedly, more attractive. all we do is change, and hide; i understand the ability to change is part of our humanity, but so often we (selectively) forget where we started from, and start to deny it.

today, i thought my hair is very much like hedwig's angry inch: it's what i've got to work with.

part II: follicular homicide

2009-08-26T10:35:00.001-07:00

so i'm nine or ten or maybe younger and my older sister comes home with these long, slender braids. each braid ended in a magnificent corkscrew. the next weekend, i was sitting in a barber's chair, spinning around and around. the anticipation spread electric tendrils through my chest. as i kicked my legs and drummed my fingers on the cracking vinyl, i was approached by a mean, heavyset woman whose glasses slipped down her nose, like they were trying to get away from her even if it meant suicide; a film of greasy sweat gave her face a reflective quality. she grasped my head with rough hands and tugged at my hair. i winced. "oh, you tender-headed," she said. "this is gonna hurt. better get ready." she worked with a grim expression on her face, releasing the occasional huff or snort at some unseen annoyance. she would push and pull my head in whichever direction was most comfortable for her, regardless of my own comfort--never mind that i felt my throat was going to collapse on itself. "hold your head still," she'd say when i strayed. then she'd shove my head so that my ear touched my shoulder. which was fine. except i had to keep it like that for fifteen minutes while she tugged and tugged and tugged.

eight hours later, my guts & every ounce of blood had migrated into left & right ass cheeks; my legs were numb, my face had taken on the same greasy shine. on my head were sleek, tightly braided strands but they were loose at the ends, resembled sparse and jagged tips of old paintbrushes. where were the corkscrews? how had my sister endured this madness? i turned to watch my oppressor making furtive movements involving a plastic bowl and some water. my head felt heavy. the synthetic hair itched against my neck. i heard the whirr of the microwave and then it's mechanical beep, and i felt the heat behind me. the smock, which i'd grown fond of, bristled by extension. "now i'm gonna put your ends in this water. it's very hot. if you move, i'll beat you," my hairdresser said. i was old enough to know when a grown up was saying things in last-ditch effort to intimidate, and when they were serious. her voice had an edge on it, like a bread knife, or a crudely made prison shiv. i kept still while she wrapped the loose ends of each braid around soft curlers, then she dipped the braids into the bowl of water. i could feel the steam tickling and threatening my scalp.

prior to, i had an unruly, tightly curled mess that i didn't like anyone to touch. even i didn't like to touch it. at the end of each week my mother would force me to sit between her legs and would take an unbreakable plastic comb to my hair (i have, or i should say, my hair has, broken cheap plastic combs. snapped the teeth right off the base). she separated it into sections, then bound each section with black thread. i would scream and cry and try to catch the snot before it slid out of my nose. this made me cry harder. the next day, our neighbors would stop by and ask if perhaps i'd had an earache the night before, or been impaled with a sharp object? when my mother was finished, and my head and neck ached, i toyed with the clumps of hair she had combed out. each short strand locked in several places with another. it took a great effort to separate them. that was my hair, an angry tangle that bound together, as if to protect itself from a larger evil, as if to say, you may lynch me, but you'll never comb my hair.

if not the thread, then the hot comb; if not the hot comb, then i looked like a pygmy running loose in a human zoo. people in the grocery store would turn up their noses and wonder who let their pet off the leash.

by getting my hair braided, there was, finally, a way for me to escape the pulling and combing and piles of tear-stained tissues. if i could endure those eight to twelve hours of pain every few months, it would be worth it. beyond that, getting my hair braied was an inverted way for me to eschew my heritage. i could cheat the grand design. i wouldn't have to put a t-shirt over my head and flip 100% cotton shirt sleeves as a stand-in for blond layered locks. if i wanted to, i could put my hair in a ponytail. in a bun. in pigtails. after those eight tortuous hours, even my throbbing scalp and the headache that crept across my forehead couldn't stop my elation (assuming the final result was to my liking). my eyes were full of wonder and hope and promise and all that dumb kid shit. i hopped out of the chair without a thank you to the mean lady and shook my braids and corkscrews all the way home. this is how monsters are created, how addicts become the way they are. one good ending leads to infinite expectations of perfections. maybe you chase the next high, i chase the next hairstyle. for a while it was corkscrew braids. then cornrows. and then thick braids that hung down to my butt; i would sit expectantly in the hairdresser's chair and order them not to cut the braids. if most people spend 1/4 of their life in traffic, i've spent twice as much time in vinyl chairs, with two or sometimes three women tressing my hair into braids that got smaller and smaller over time. smaller and longer, making me look not like me, but a better facsimile. i couldn't bear the thought of myself with short hair. i couldn't bear the thought of myself with my hair. when the bulk of the hair on your head is not yours but that of some unidentified woman in an unspecified asian country, you definitely have a problem. if i'd saved the money i've spent getting my hair done in the past 15 years, i'd at least have an apartment with a bedroom, if not two. with the exception of a few brief months when i was seventeen and twenty, my hair has never not been braided or otherwise obscured.

so on saturday i'm sitting in a chair in front of a mirror with various bottles and tubes spread out on the shelf in front of me; a very san francisco hair stylist is working me over. "believe me," he said, "nobody wants to look the way they're supposed to look. if they did, i wouldn't have a job."

did you see the drummer's hair?

2009-08-23T09:43:00.000-07:00

i'm dubbing this week "hair week." part I: pavement. the little 90's band i never got into but wish i would have. i lost them in the cacophony of pearl jam and nirvana and soundgarden and &c..., &c..., and when i say "lost," i mean i literally could not hear them. they were too soft, too subtle for dense little me. but i'm much more endeared to them now.

and every time, every single time i do anything with my hair, this song runs laps in my head. i think the song is actually about the fickle nature of fame, and the music industry, and how image is so often (and unfortunately) more important than quality ...but what the hell do i know in 3 minutes and as many vague verses? i just hum along with the hook.

pavement: "cut your hair"; crooked rain, crooked rain, 1994

also, the wikipedia entry for this song/video is unintentionally humorous. some strange things happen to each band member. indeed.

give thanks

2009-08-21T09:09:00.000-07:00

i started to make a list of things i'm good at doing.

it was very short.

pretty much, i'm good at words, though i've dabbled in nearly everything. i'm a fan of dabbling--how else are you supposed to find out where you excel? in addition to being good at words, i'm an incredible dilettante. ballet lessons (too uncoordinated) and piano (the 2nd part of fur elise put me off) and flute (got dizzy every time i practiced) and guitar (still working on it) and plays (serious stage fright) and photography (well, everyone's a photographer these days) and art classes (i quit after sister francis told me i sucked) and chemistry sets (no explosions) and that one time i was in the 4H club for 5 seconds, because i lived in minnesota, and brief participation in 4H was mandatory. i like cows but i don't need to be around their poop, thanks.

but i'll try almost anything almost once.

i like words. i like language. i like story. most of the time, i like sitting on my couch until my butt goes numb, trying to sort out the right way to say something. i recently had to read through and edit a math book, of all things, and it was awesome. this is also awesome. it actually makes me feel all tingly inside.

the only thing i intended for this blog was to create writing that other people would have to read. and it's become known to me that people actually come by to visit my random little corner of internets. thanks, guys! i know i don't offer much of anything except words, but words are all i got.

mmere dane (time changes)

2009-08-19T08:51:00.001-07:00

the other day i was rooting through my purse and i smelled something oddly comforting: the commingled odors of chewing gum, two half-empty tubes of hand lotion, and cheap leather. this is what all of my mother's purses smelled like. sometimes, you'd stick your hand in there and come out not with what you were looking for, instead, a light patina of shimmery flakes clung to your fingers, sloughed off from hand cream and concealer compacts and pieces of gum flecked with "flavor crystals." i stuck my hand in her purses a lot, looking for treats, or a pen, and later, the odd $10 or $20 bill i didn't think she would miss. i think now, if anyone removed anything from my own purse, i know precisely what it was, and who might have taken it; but my mother never really said anything when i stole from her, even though we both knew what was going on. she was so forceful about everything else. maybe she thought being stolen from was a consequence of having children.

for a long time i was scared that i would forget certain things about her--her soft palms or the way she smelled (for a long time, i wouldn't wash or wear any of the clothes she left behind for fear that she'd somehow disappear from them); i thought i might forget the way she tried to deliver sly winks even though she didn't know how to wink, so it appeared her face was having a seizure; maybe the distinct non-sound of her footfalls as she moved around the house would fade away, lost somewhere between cerebellum and amydgala. i thought i might forget the sound of her voice, that malleable thing, sometimes guttural and angry, sometimes an unnerving whine, especially when she sang. i think about the last time i heard her make any sounds, when i called the hospital late the night before she died, and she couldn't speak, though she tried. she was either choking, or crying. i couldn't tell. but she was lucid, then, if only for a little while longer. i know because i heard her hang up the phone, the space between us fuzzed and popped as she unsteadily sought the base in the dim hospital room. it was as if she was agreeing with me, faithful that yes, i would speak to her the next day, and it was OK to hang up.

funny how i can think about all that in a second. it occurred to me that i should clean out my purse, that i am becoming like my mother a little more each day and i don't mind so much, except for the part about dying alone in a suburban hospital. she kept receipts and empty bottles of various substances and broken sunglasses and scraps of paper with intangibles written on them, things that only made sense in a brief moment; each month, my mother sorted through her purse, cleaning out the accumulation of life. of course it wouldn't last. of course, two weeks later, a drug store circular would be crumpled next to a key of unknown purpose; bits of broken eyeshadow would tumble around in the bottom, turn the undersides of your fingernails smoky mauve.

sometimes, i smell cut grass and i don't think about a lovely spring day, i think about my bare skin prickling and itching against what most people consider to be innocuous plant life, and the insides of my nose slime-ing over in protest.

sometimes, i smell the very particular odor of my father's cologne and remember how i always knew when he was coming around a corner.

sometimes, i hold my breath, and try not to smell anything, hoping that maybe i'll forget.

i'm ready 'cause it's my day

2009-08-17T09:04:00.000-07:00

yay, BART is operational (but c'mon, you're still a little sad about it--there goes your excuse to work from home this week)!

here's some le tigre. couldn't find a legitimate video. so, you know, just listen & dance around a little.

le tigre, "my my metrocard;" le tigre, 1999

reaching a point

2009-08-14T09:55:00.000-07:00

i got a bug in my ass and started a new blog: http://literarygangster.blogspot.com/

the idea was (maybe still is) to condense and comment on any writing/craft/publishing related news and gossip i stumble upon, with a special focus on small, independent literary journals--'cause i'm about to start working on one and won't it be fun to see me fuck it up all over the place? i can either transform this blog into that, or continue with the new blog to create legitimate digital identity, as my dear friend mb talks about here.

however, if you're in publishing, or a writer, or just a writerly fan person, you probably already know all the blogs to follow. my personal favorites are here, here, and here; but then there's also this one, and this other one, and this guy. one of those people signs my timesheets and it ain't the intern. so i couldn't overtly reference my job (which is too bad, 'cause it would be hilarious). the problem i have with these is primarily (small detour: look, if you are a prolific blogger about a specific topic, PLEASE incorporate a search box onto your website/blog. just, please. ok?) that they are either too specific, not specific enough, or not only focused on writing/reading/publishing, they're more like pop culture endeavors. and of course they tend to exclude the contingent of people who publish online and in journals sans ISBNs. but maybe i'm wrong about all this?

and them i'm 2 parts busy, 3 parts distracted by my own interests, goals, and life, and 1 part lazy.

of course, i could continue to put the hodgepodge of stuff i usually put on this blog, which is probably what'll happen, 'cause starting and maintaining a new blog and reaching out to people to create a network is a lot of work. these days, it's much better to focus your blogging efforts, but i've never been focused. ever. no lie.

aren't these "what am i doing with myself" posts the awesome? you love it. you know you do. opinions on the other blog are welcome.

*image via, when i searched for "literary gangster"

this one goes to eleven

2009-08-13T11:54:00.001-07:00

in high school, we learned that a woman's thighs had to touch. this was the way we'd been created by the LORD; the extra meat on our thighs would serve for added support when our stomachs swelled with the fruit of our loins. in fact, our entire bodies were constructed so that we might carry and birth children until our plumbing rusted up. that may have been, but we felt a collective discomfort when our thighs touched the way they do when it's hot out and you're wearing a short skirt, the way the skin kisses itself and makes you shudder, and screw up your face. so we drank gallons of water to keep from eating and wore baggy pants, and tights; we made lists (mentally or in the margins of notebook pages) of what we ate, how much, how long ago, and what else we could eat that day. in high school, we realized adulthood might be simple (it's not), but femininity would never be.

the other day at the doctor's office i knew i should have turned my head away when the display on the scale stopped flickering and revealed a number that sent me straight back to high school in poundage and psyche. i shouldn't be so upset about it, i have made positive changes in regards to my health and weight gain is the unfortunate consequence-- but when my jeans refuse to come up past the middle of my ass, i can't help but feel dismayed.

this is (mostly) why i haven't been blogging. i think highly personal blogs are OK, though not for me and i've recently been too wrapped up in myself to put anything that's remotely polished on here. on tuesday, i went to the doctor only to find her office had moved & it was unclear as to where, so i had to call kaiser while i was in kaiser; i think a black hole formed, somewhere, as a result. it was a standard visit. weight and temperature and blood pressure; frustratingly long wait in a windowless, sterile room, the paper on the examination table crinkled angrily underneath me any time i shifted my position. i saw the doctor for approximately 7 minutes, she examined me for 3 of them, and i spent the rest of the time expressing congrats on her pregnancy and silently coveting her wedding ring. my doctor is not much older than i am, and i revert to puberty whenever i see her. she sent me to the lab. in the lab, they shouted at everyone and poked me twice because the first stick was no good. i'm used to it, ignored the angry tuts the lab tech directed at me, expressing disdain at my roly-poly veins. the walls in the lab were painted scrub green, which is the after-color of blood, which is supposed to be soothing; instead, it felt like the inside of an asylum. an ant crawled over and in and out of a pile of cotton balls, the same pile the lab tech had taken from and used to rub alcohol over the insides of my elbows. the ant's movement's were frenzied, i imagine it felt the way we might if we were phased out of this existence and into a different one, a place devoid of color and shape. i got home and found a self addressed stamped rejection letter in the mailbox, giving me all the motivation i needed to sit on the couch and poke at my fat rolls.

am i boring you yet? i'm boring myself. but i'm at least doing something. i'll be better in the future, promise.

start a war

2009-08-03T09:20:00.000-07:00

recently, a very wise person i know said: "the price we pay for junuary in the city [san francisco] is febuly." and, in case you're thinking it, the quote* so often attributed to mark twain was likely not uttered (or penned) by him. i suppose that's another interesting party fact for you, like, "hey, did you know abraham lincoln actually had a high-pitched voice?"

the weather here is getting to us all. a hermetic seal of clouds and gray and fog and the persistent threat of rain, but it's only ever a threat, a slight mist on the way to work in the morning. everywhere else, people are still scantily clad and tanned and doing things like going to the beach, or the pool, or sitting in the park with sweat running in rivulets down their collarbones, a slippery beer bottle in one hand, a cigarette leaving hot dust between index and middle fingers in the other. here, the weathermen lament "below average" temperatures and we wear our coats and grumble about the wind. in january, we will call you and let you know that we are, in fact, wearing flip-flops and miniskirts.

this is good music for somber weather:

the national, "start a war;" boxer, 2007

*"the coldest winter i ever spent was summer in san francisco." hyuck-yuck.

out now and available everywhere

2009-07-30T16:00:00.001-07:00

a few mornings ago, i was making my way to the casual carpool line up. (if you need to know what that is, visit here). i was lucky, there was a high-driver, low-rider (ha) ratio--meaning i wouldn't have to wait 15 minutes only to get in the backseat of someone's old beater, complete with a rickety, stained car seat and little dribbles of some sticky substance or another (possibly dried soda) all over the wrinkled leather. inevitably, the driver is listening to something inappropriate on the radio, like the shouty gay guys, and there are an alarming (and stifling) number of air fresheners hanging from and/or stuck to various parts of the vehicle. at that point, i've been waiting for 15 minutes and all i want to do is get away from the guy at the bus stop across from the carpool pickup, who doesn't do anything but stand at the bus stop, drink a can of coke and very obviously ogle anyone with a set of breasts who walks by. if she (or--f*ck it--me) happens to be wearing a short skirt, his x-ray vision burns a hole into her outer garments and a car rolls up just before her undergarments are melted away. this guy never, never gets on any of the buses at that stop. he just stands there and paces and smokes cigarettes and stares. what the deuce?

i got carried away, so i'll start over: a few mornings ago, as i was approaching the carpool pick up i spotted two elderly women wearing cardboard signs and handing out flyers; i tried to think of an adequate refusal: if god truly loved me, he'd give me a better paying job, or, i don't know how to write so i can't sign that, or, don't you know jesus weeps every time you kill a tree in order to distribute another useless flyer? but i got up close and they looked pretty harmless, cheerful, in fact, as they handed out advertisements for a new book about the casual carpooling experience:

there's a toni morrison quote that is often mishandled: "If there's a book you really want to read but it hasn't been written yet, you must write it." good advice, assuming writing is something you can do (apologies, but i'm not of the opinion that everyone can write. everyone cannot write. i know some developmental editors who make a killing as a result). not too knock too hard on ms. semones' skills, but i started to flag somewhere around "seasonally, in the breathy fog..." and by the time i got to "i rode with them. i saw them." i smacked my forehead because that's what i do when i see words used in that way. and that's about all i can say, given that i don't have the whole book to read.

but the reason i posted this wasn't really to bust an unknown author's chops. i'm really fascinated by self-publishing, especially these days since it's easier than ever to do with various web tool s, and obtaining an ISBN is a piece of cake. many poets i know have created chapbooks, and while i'm no expert, i do know the chapbook tradition is long-standing and i imagine these days, it's difficult to get a publishing house to take on a book-length work of poetry. but for the two other major genres, people (rightfully so) get fed up with the hoops we in the publishing industry make authors jump through, so they, like this person, publish and sell the books out of the trunk of their car. that type of story is getting to be as cliched as your grandpa who walked 5 miles to school, barefoot, in the snow, but it persists because it is kind of inspiring. grandpa finishes school gets a job and buys a car; self-published author doggedly promotes book and eventually gets picked up by a large publishing house, with a nice advance and cut 'o the royalties. it's not really a bad system, except for the self-publishing middle man bit. as your humble EA, i apologize in advance for not catching the awesomeness in your proposal and making you have to use the trunk of your car as a mobile display case. (in seriousness: if you do self publish, and are successful at it, you'll be coveted by any publisher because these days, marketability is as-if-not-more than important to the quality of your work. if you have viable proof that your book will sell, a publisher will be thusly inclined to pay attention).

good luck, vicky!

blackvertising

2009-07-28T09:23:00.001-07:00

i was cruising through the ever-growing roundup of blogs that i follow, and spotted this post @ racialicious. if you're unfamiliar with racialicious, they do their best work in deconstructing matters of race in modern and pop culture. sometimes the posts are interesting; other times, as i'll discuss shortly, i find myself wholly confused as to how to feel. being the uncle tom that i am, should i carry the flag and condemn the persons who put the assumed evil in question out into the world....or, do what i usually do, and brush it off, or make a quite statement about it?

the blog in question explores a particular advert for 542542.com (you text them a question, they answer--it's an old model, maybe this incarnation will fly); two black women are in a salon; one is getting a weave. they inquire as to where the weaving hair comes from and then in a few quick cuts some questionably racist things happen. the whole thing ends with a statement said in a stereotypical manner about yak hair.

(firstly, everyone knows that good weaving hair is human hair [er, so it says on the package], and that usually comes from china...or various asian and/or south eastern asian countries. more on that another time. however, it's not unbelievable for lower quality hair to come from yaks, or even be synthetic. just wanted to get that out of the way).

i'll be honest and say that i think they go overboard at times at racialicious, i.e., with this dissection of a little debate on twitter*. i tend to think most people are unintentionally racist, most of the time, a misguided comment is handled with a general correction, or just simply to ignore it. i'm certainly not politically correct all the time, and i don't expect everyone to be. but i have a different level of sensitivity than others. racialicious sez:

This creates an odd hierarchy of Others; at the top of the tier we have the 542542 agents, the sophisticated white folks that the viewer is supposed to identify with (of course, the man is ultimately more trustworthy than the woman), followed by the black women who are laughable, but still familiar, and at the bottom we have the Eastern Europeans, who are essentially dehumanised. (And notice how this pits people who should have solidarity with each other - black Americans and non-white folks in other parts of the world - against each other.)

ok, i can agree as to the heirarchy in the ad; why the spokepersons have to be two quirky white people, as always, escapes me (can we do something different, advertisers, please?), and the women are typecast black american females, and then we zoom off to a middle-eastern village where the white people are rather offensively, even if subtly, disgusted by what they see. which in itself bizarre because they didn't seem at all nonplussed to see a woman getting hair sewn on her head, or at the question. perhaps we're desensitized to only part of the issue--thanks to tyra banks and her model show, we've seen several girls getting weaves and you can barely get through a post about lindsay lohan on perezhilton.com w/o a mention of her ratty extensions. so we know it happens, but not where it comes from--and how worse we are for finding out.

brief interjection: when i was a teenager, and wearing those impossibly long braids i'd have to purchase a large amount of packs of synthetic hair. i was a bit embarrassed about this, but on one eve of a hair appointment i could absolutely not get rid of my best friend so i had to take her with me to the beauty supply. without going into detail, the whole experience was mortifying so you'll excuse me if i'm reticent about my hair. but that was ten years ago. since then, the mysteries of hair weaves and extensions have been revealed.

i think what racialicious is getting at is asking why these two women were shown in this situation, and not another one (and why the reaction at the end of the spot, needs be so trite). why weren't they, oh, in an art museum in front of a van gogh painting, wondering if that madman actually did cut off his ear? as has been stated, the commercial perpetuates the stereotype that all black women do is get their hair and nails done and hock cleaning products. putting us in those situations would be fine, if we were seen in others. we see white people portrayed as hicks and other ne'er do wells, but we also see them--en masse-- as doctors and lawyers and presidents. black people and individuals of other ethnic backgrounds often have nothing in popular culture with which to counteract stereotypes.

all that said, the ad itself is just dumb, and i didn't consider any of the above when i first saw it. so, while i don't totally agree w/ racicalicious, i thank them for making me think. via that post, i came to this, which is of interest because i have been in chicago-lake liquors many a time. oh, how often i have walked through those dingy aisles buying god knows what for god knows why! i think i even spent 45 minutes in there, once, mulling over a wine purchase. since the twin cities don't often come up in the media (bridge collapses and centuries-long senatorial races aside), i have to be interested on principle alone.

i won't go into detail about the blog post, but what i was too scaredy-cat to say in the comments was to ask: where do those stereotypes come from? everyone else is saying, yes, those ads are racist; they aren't funny, they're "hideous," even....but no one as suggested that there are dozens upon dozens of rap songs that use that sort of urban lingo for 5 minutes on end, as are there television characters...characters in films...comedians.... so how offended can we be? i'll be the gremlin who suggests that, probably to much furor should anyone of import see this, many stereotypes are based upon some nuggets of truth. if it was determined that the developers of the advertisement were not, in fact, "some hipsters in a Twin Cities ad agency are sitting around right now, fist bumping and congratulating themselves on a job well done. 'We rock, yo!'" but a group of black ad execs? would that make it ok? that particular subsect of culture has been brought fully into the mainstream, and is it fair to say no one else can use it? (please no guff about the n-word. we all know that's a different matter). because if that's the case, i'll be needing to unload a lot of caucasian affectations i've picked up along the way. i'll also add that i found print ads, which are also shown on the blog, more offensive than the commercials. in the commercials, everyone looks misguided and it's easy to laugh at them....in that uncomfortable way. if we as persons of color want people to stop mimicking us in a certain way, we need to make it difficult for them to do so. putting individuals like this on television does not help our overall image.

*really, if i made some comment about fat people and how they're so jolly and fun to hug, unlike skinny hipster people, i'd be banned from the internets.and that's probably all kirstie alley needed to hear.

something new

2009-07-27T09:00:00.000-07:00

yesterday, as i plodded towards the end of another slow, wasted weekend, i tried to write, but instead looked at modcloth.com for all the mod clothes i can't have, and listened to the radio (npr, of course), where i heard this interview.

which lead me to this:

afterwards, i felt like every photo that's ever been on cuteoverload.com joined together to form this voltron-like being, except, you know...cute. and with a nice, gentle voice, & style reminiscent of feist. and who doesn't love feist? i'm probably the last person to join this party, and i hope i'm fashionably late, as opposed to disatrously late--already drunk and showing up when the keg is kicked and the last folks are leaving, while i'm standing on the sidewalk shouting, "doesn't anyone remember laughter?"

'cause that happens to me all the time, dudes. happy monday.

interlude: classic girl

2009-07-23T11:45:00.008-07:00

when i was young and impressionable, it was cool to wear your dad's clothes. i should rephrase: when i was young and impressionable and old enough to care, i went to catholic school, so really it was cool to wear any clothes that were not a white polo shirt and gray plaid skirt. anyway, this was an era of rebellion from the avant-garde eighties, where everything was big, and tight; boxy and short and nothing made sense. and then everyone went blind from staring at each other's neon leggings and hypercolor shirts so they all did coke to feel better about it. (am i the only one who realizes 80's fashion was just an extension of the 70's, just a little less flouncy?).

thank god i missed all that. instead, i got muted and drab, sloppy, ragged flannel and cotton and denim and combat boots and yes, god yes, chuck taylors. i got jeans with 32"+ leg openings. army jackets. occasionally, there was a tight-fitting babydoll top (or, if you were me, t-shirts bought from the boys' section @ value city) or slinky tanktops; babydoll dresses (worn over pants!), and, because most of my fashion idols were men, i of course i raided my father's closets looking for anything i could pass off as cool. which was pretty much anything i wanted it to be.

my, my. i'm twenty-eight and feeling nostalgic for my teenage years. i blame the weather.

in any case, coming off of that period there was a strange fashion limbo; i'll call it college. i have absolutely no idea what happened in the fashion world between 1998-2002. i did plenty of shopping, but i can't really remember anything interesting. there was some fever about j-crew jeans, and diesel jeans, and of course the ubiquitous thrift stores, but my interest in those styles were likely due to the people i was hanging around with at the time, and had little to do with my own personal style (apparently, during this phase i was still young and impressionable). the desire to fit in is universal, and i've stopped punishing myself for it. i think it takes a while to get acquainted with one's body, and, beyond that, to accept it and then comes the wholly unreasonable task of finding out what sort of clothing works for you. i have watched plenty of episodes of antm, project runway, tim gunn's guide to style, what not to wear and, yes, i've recently even stooped so low as to watching that bootleg excuse for programming--fashion show because i needed a fix--and i still have no idea as to what really works on my body. i'll briefly depart from here to say i'm rather in denial about the body i have and wish i could trade up (shit, or even down--some proportions that made sense would be nice), but i've already expressed that sentiment here.

because of my general ignorance, and the fact that 1/3 of my fashion ethos comes from laziness (1/3 is comfort, the other 1/3 is 'cause i'm cheap and broke), i entered the post-college work world looking like this, or this. every once in a while i'd try a skirt or something ill-fitting and ridiculous--these memories make me cringe a little. fortunately, i work in publishing, so nobody really gave a shit. however, since most women dress to please themselves and/or each other (and/or show one another up), as opposed to impressing men, i'm still hung up on those mistakes. i come from a family where image was everything--being overweight was an unforgivable offense and cause for reproachment. wearing flip-flops beyond the front yard: nope. sporting denim in pleasant company (i.e. church): forget it. after deboarding a plane after a red-eye flight for which i was dressed appropriately in sweats and a headwrap, my mother almost disowned me at the baggage claim. she said, "you can't dress like that when you travel. you never know who you'll run into," or, how about the time my mother and younger brother wailed on me for wearing an unfortunate pair of shoes to a formal dance? the verdict: "you look nice, but those shoes are awful. tsk-tsk." fashion was always a point of contention between her and i, but that's also for another post. all that said, the halfway mark between my upbringing and my desire to look nice created a solid t-shirt and jeans girl. i rebelled with denim and cotton.

enter american apparel. i don't remember the first time i stumbled upon dov charney's vertically integrated wares; the memory is shrouded in a soft-focused bliss of plain t-shirts that fit my body and expressed my personal style--simple, clean lines, nice colors. i'm sure the first time i walked into the aa store the doors opened as the heavenly gates surely would for me when the time came; i didn't stop to wonder why st. peter was unwashed, messy-haired and sporting a lip ring, and a stretched-out shirt. the obsession was instant. so for years, i have ignored detractors who dislike aa because they were boring or overpriced, or because of the truly atrocious (and at times deplorable) advertising campaigns PR department churns out in the name of "honesty." (charney has been quoted as staying that his company advertises the way they do because young people appreciate "honesty"). it's true, i value honesty. and while i understand provocation in advertising, i don't really like to see private parts 500 ft across on a billboard.

i also don't like it when a company who, for a while, applauded themselves for using "real people" for models--individuals who worked at aa's home offices in los angeles, women and men of all shapes and sizes and levels of hairness--has now seem to fallen victim to the skinny bitch curse. and i don't mean only via the ad campaigns. it's understood that most clothing designers, even if they do make clothing for curvier women, will use thinner models in advertising. (reference shoshanna lonstein gruss' clothing line--she purports to make clothes for women like her...and me....who have larger bustlines but smaller waists. do you see anyone with big boobs on that website? this is also a pet-peeve of mine. a woman of that age and that size would never wear that outfit. who are they trying to fool?). i'll forgive american apparel for the tactics they employ because they have to keep up, as every business does. however, i've been a little shocked at the clothing aa has been producing lately. as in the photo above, or this dress, or this bodysuit (potentially NSFW). who is wearing these pieces? the comments for the two-sided $40 leggings say, for the most part, how foxy they are and discuss what sizes would be best. seriously? those are atrocious. wear them sheer-side to the back, you'd expose your rear end when the wind blows. wear them sheer-side to the front--isn't that cause for arrest? how 'bout the comments for the bodysuit?: "Yummyummyummy!" oy vey.

in cruising through the aa website, i begin to feel the way i imagine people who viewed "2 girls 1 cup" felt, something i base on all the reaction videos that followed on the heels of that wretched whatever-it-was. the experience begins blandly enough and then by the end you want those 5 minutes of your life back; you're crying bloody tears of regret and wishing for eternal sunshine of the spotless mind sort of treatment. suddenly, i have to wait until closing time to view the aa website at work, lest anyone think i'm using my work computer for unsavory purposes. what has happened to my plain, comfortable, unrealistically priced (though i eat the cost b/c they are good to their workers and it's important to me to support those sorts of businesses), and only sometimes well-made clothes? besides all of that, i'm dismayed at the--yes, i know it's a cliched sentiment--message these articles of clothing send and the way they are advertised send. aa is a trendy organization, which means the majority of their support comes from young women. and i, prude that i am, believe that young women should learn first how to leave something to the imagination. at 17, i thought the attention i received from men--whether i was wearing a tight pair of pants, or even my school uniform-- was some mark of my worth. that i had to titillate in order to be appreciated and as a result i shrank into myself and tried to hide everything, including the good parts. and it's ok to be sexy. low-cut? ok! sheer? why not! but any woman has to know what she's doing by dressing in that way, why she does so, and how to translate the attentions and affections their style brings. i'm of the mind that a teenage girl has hasn't fully grasped that language. hell, even i haven't.

it would be foolish to suggest that aa is somehow responsible for the degradation of our youth--i'm really not. i'll be the first to opine that youth need to be degraded a little--that's how we grow up. i might never wear those two-sided leggings, but i do admire the balls it took to design them and put them out on the market. where i find fault is the break between aa's general principles of fairness and social responsibility, and their marketing of hyper-sexuality. furthermore: how is anyone with anything more than a b-cup and a little meat on her hips supposed to wear this? what happened to designing for everyone? why must i dig to find the awesome t-shirts, and versatile skirts? why aren't the unisex v-necks and hoodies cool anymore? to add insult to injury, they seem to have discontinued the absolutely useless footless knee-"socks," which i loved. what's a prudish plain-jane to do? all i want are for the shlubby aa models to come back and grace us with all their roly-poly splendor. they've even replaced the hairy, slightly guilty looking male models with pretty boys sporting unrealistically toned abs perfect facial hair. what's american about that?

in seriousness, and in fairness, i've always found fault with this type of styling and advertising (abercrombie and fitch, calvin klein, various perfume adverts) across the board, because they do leave out a large swath of the wannabe-trendy population and perpetuates the notion that attractiveness--sexiness-- means exposing everything. that's not what sexy means. besides being a highly subjective thing, sexy is also about one's comfort with his or herself, and the ability to translate said comfort into confidence. no girl should have to wear a see-through mini-dress to feel sexy, and yet i get the feeling many believe they have to. and american apparel, as any other clothier, has to grow its business, either by sparking trends or following close on the heels of the new and the different. having gotten bored with the regularity of my clothes i've added some other elements; i, too, have changed, and grown. i guess the honeymoon can never last forever. but it would be so nice if it could.

aloha & mahalo

2009-07-21T20:46:00.005-07:00

i took about 300 photos last week. this one is my favorite. i envy that kid, and his toy trucks or whatever he was playing with, in seeming obliviousness to the tourist traffic creeping by on the street, just yards away. his backyard is a beach and two fecund mango trees shade the entrance to his home. when we passed by, his father was picking mangoes with a fruit picker and a grim look on his face, like he was mowing a lawn. scattered on the pavement in front of the house were squashed mangoes, stringy exposed flesh, bleeding juice and pectin all over the road. a stern sign (there were several stern warning signs displaying various messages) said, "do not pick the mangoes." i noticed that the locals are careful to delineate what is theirs, and what they are willing to share.

for the duration of our stay we were very aware that we were 1. on an island. 2. said island was in the middle of the pacific ocean and 3. we were driving in a car, on an island, in the middle of the pacific ocean (that wiggled and jiggled and tickled inside her....). those moments of realization felt strange, like bubbles bursting in the brain stem; i would close my eyes and feel the car rumbling around me. pull back to visualize the car making tight turns on the road up & around haleakala. once more, and the car is the size of the boy's miniature playthings, the island is a speck on the globe, the globe is a speck amongst many specks. i gave up trying to control those cinematic wanderings. this happened to me wherever we went. on the mainland, it's easy to be on a road, and see nothing but the road, and the place it will take you, because the road is attached to something else, unlike a hawaiian road, which is a tenuous, moody thing.

before i went on this trip, i realized that everyone who i spoke to about it never said anything about having a bad time in hawai'i, not like they do when you say you're going anyplace else. people said things like, "it's expensive, but...," or, "it's hot, but...;" in the space following the "but," i was to understand that it doesn't matter that a box of cereal is $7, or that you can't really get around without a car (unless you're daring enough to hitchhike, which plenty of people were), you just have to go, and when you arrive the sugar cane undulating in the breeze lulls you out of any misgivings. it's such an odd place. cinder cones and strip malls. curious birds and unidentifiable foliage. tourists and locals vying for space. camouflaged crabs and walking sticks and bold fish swimming around your feet, like you aren't anything more than an interesting bit of coral. maybe we've only fooled ourselves into believing that they are entertaining us.

trip stats:

approx. number of miles: 7,470
# of airports: 3
# number of flights: 4
# of geckos riding along on our rental car: 1
# of peacock sightings: 1
# of baby papaya sightings: sadly, zero
# of jellyfish: none that i could see
# of times a crab caught its dinner right in front of my eyes: 2
# of one-lane bridges on the way to and from hana: 54, according to the website.
# of shave ices consumed: 4, i think.
# of antagonistic (and ignored) signs: 2 (er, i paid attention to the jellyfish warnings. jellyfish and i are not friends).
# of grains of sands in my bathing suit bottoms: gross, you don't want to know about that
# of conversations overheard between a japanese tourist and one from spain: 1. the latter kept asking why she couldn't smoke on the beach. i had hard time holding my tongue.
# of man-kini sightings: 1 (and you all know it was hilarious)
# of times i wished time would forget about me, and leave me where i was: 8. maybe 10. maybe right this minute.

photos (as many as flickr would let me upload) are here.

like an ocean in disguise

2009-07-20T10:29:00.003-07:00

whenever i fly (something i'm increasingly apprehensive about doing), i think about how impermanent the world is. i suppose seeing things from that elevated perspective makes me realize all we live on are slabs of rock that came together in a certain way, and will shift and change over time. how volatile everything is. i happened upon this song on my ipod yesterday (the album version, anyway), and i don't know where in the world eddie vedder was when he wrote it, but i can guess.

pearl jam: "can't keep;" riot act, 2002

love list: 7.10.09

2009-07-10T09:30:00.000-07:00

when i graduated from high school, my mom promised me a trip to hawaii or jamaica or the bahamas as a congratulatory gift. she said the same when i graduated from college, and when i was really in the cut after college, tucking my grandmother into bed and eating tater tots for dinner, because i couldn't let go of the previous four years. she was always so hopeful; "oh, one day we'll take that trip."

during the time i was blessed to know her, my mother never took a vacation. when she traveled, it was usually for work, or because someone was getting married, or someone died, and we all know neither of those are really pleasurable experiences, depending on your level of involvement. after my mother passed, we found a copy of a letter she'd written to her boss; in true fashion, she channeled her post-colonial education and completely excoriated this person with some choice 10-cent words. she said (note: did not ask) she would be taking a much needed leave. she used her "leave" to take care of my grandmother, and never returned to that job. nor did she visit jamaica, or the bahamas, or hawaii. i'm just making up for missed opportunities, for consuming responsibility and perpetual broke-ness .

this week:

1. i
2. am
3. going
4. on
5. vacation.

bye!

and forever after

2009-07-07T09:23:00.002-07:00

i did the dishes and found a dead moth on the dishtowel under the drying rack. the moth had been plaguing me for the past few days and there it was, keeled over on its side like a wayward twig, wings folded and tiny legs stiff, bent into absurd angles. i picked it up gingerly, expecting it to turn to dust between my pinky and thumb but it didn't. so i threw it down the drain. i'd been wanting for it to die but couldn't kill it; a long time ago, my mother told me that butterflies are the souls of dead folk and somehow this extends to moths, though she never mentioned anything about moths. they are winged and antennae-ed so i can't kill them. i don't mind sharing my space with harmless insects, but this moth was persistent, always found a way to get in my face or hover around my head and i could've just snuffed it out between my palms; instead, i shooed it off, or ran away, shouted obscenities at it. not long ago i had a discussion with someone about the benefits of and drawbacks to living alone. silence is golden but what happens if you get sick, or slip in the shower? i turned the disposal on and listened to the blades slash bits of lettuce and moth, infinitesimal pieces of head, thorax, abdomen tumbling in gurgling water.

in an episode of star trek: tng, dr. crusher asks the computer, "what is the nature of the universe," believing the computer will be unable to provide an answer, but the computer responds, the universe is a spherical object 250* meters in diameter. her universe is shrinking. people are disappearing; whenever she blinks an eye, another person phases out of existence. you can see where i'm going with this.

i'm really taken with these photos, from dina goldstein's "fallen princesses" series. there are days when the only thing that keeps me from ruin is the understanding that external beauty cannot last forever, and that perfection is a myth. so what happens after the story ends, after the credits roll and two cartoons have walked off into a crisply illustrated sunset? is it even fair to take these fairy tales and paste them into the modern world, create a fantastical and gruesome pastiche of the mythical and the real? is it social commentary, or slightly offensive? is the photographer ruining it for the rest of us, for those who believe happily ever after is an appropriate ending?

suddenly, i'm feeling reticent, likely because i'm no art critic; i tend to lump everything--especially visual art-- into two categories: appealing and unappealing, with little more dissection beyond that. i find these images to be heartbreaking and humorous and provocative, even if they are flawed. they make me realize, truly, that nothing ever goes away, it just gets recycled.

*i can't remember exactly how large the universe was in that episode. in fact, i have no idea how large (or small) 250 meters comes to. but it sounds appropriate, right?

i'll be forever blue

2009-07-06T09:12:00.002-07:00

at pearl jam concerts, meatheads rejoice whenever the band plays "betterman." well, not the meatheads, rather, their girlfriends. orange-skinned, crunchy-haired eyebrows plucked to frighteningly severe angles girlfriends, with their goods hanging out and cups of beer clasped, dangerous and loose in their spindly hands. as the song crescendos and peaks, eddie vedder belts, "can't find a betterman," and these girls jump up and down; they squeal and point excitedly to their muscled boyfriends, "i can't find a betterman," they let everyone in section 201 know.

given that the song is quite clearly about an abusive relationship, the confusion is understood (though not forgiven) since an up tempo can obscure any song's meaning. but one would expect that if you can recite the words to a song, the lyric "she loves him, she don't want to leave this way," or even, "she lies and says she's in love with him" would raise some flags. not so. the song ends, the meat-girls strangle their thick-necked boyfriends into sloppy kisses.

well, i'm nothing if not a hypocrite. even me, surly curmudgeon that i am, finds 3 minutes of bliss in this song. how is this possible? it's really all about a soon-to-be jilted lover--and yet, every time i hear it, i know in my heart that i want this song played at my wedding, set to a slide show of the happy couple.

i should probably go back to therapy to explore why i associate unhappy things with happy occasions. while i ponder the possibility, there's this. enjoy the sheer eighties-ness of this video ("i hear you calling;"--cue shot of ringing telephone) and i will give you $10 if it doesn't lift your mood. don't make me work so hard.

Erasure - A Little Respect
Uploaded by hushhush112 - See the latest featured music videos.

erasure: "a little respect; the innocents, 1988

america. opportunity; land of.

2009-07-04T12:30:00.002-07:00

this post might come back to haunt me, should ever run for office, or become involved with someone who does. but i won't, because i believe most politicians are corrupt, even if they begin with the best of intentions. i like being secure and will never wrap that in the guise of social responsibility. capitalism is one thing. altruism is another. how often the lines cross.

america and i have a strange, strained relationship. outwardly, i was raised in a very "american" way: mcdonald's and tract housing and pledges of allegiance. inside the four walls of our home--and wherever we went as a family unit, it was more like this. if you want five people of varying, non-white races to get along (especially if their parents or grandparents were f.o.b), ask them about getting whooped. but it's not just that. every now and again, i still catch myself shaking my head in bewilderment, "americans," i'll say, especially when confronted with an oversized plate piled with food, or stroll through the aisles at a department store--so much crap, and where does it all go? even from inside it, i can't wrap my head around what it means to be american, or define american culture, except to say that we have a need to be the best at everything; have the biggest stuff and most important people. maybe every country and culture is like that, and i wouldn't know, because i live in a america, a place that blots out all others. literally.

that said, if not for america, and opportunity, then there would likely be no me. in what other place could two immigrants (or any person or people of limited means) create a stable, secure lifestyle from nothing? my parents complained vocally about the failings of american culture; when asked why, if this place was so flawed, they came here--if home is so great, why leave? that word always came back: opportunity. opportunity allows a person with an accent thicker than an idiot's skull to obtain advance degrees and earn money enough to purchase a house, something i can't even do, me being as american as you know what. opportunity allows a person whose closet is stuffed with the traditional garb of her homeland to send her children to private schools and summer camps and on field trips. opportunity is something you give, something you sacrifice for. a country says, you do not have, we can give. a parent says, i did not have, therefore you must. but the former seems to be fading.

today, we're supposed to celebrate our independence from the brits and the birth our our nation. between bites of hot dogs and firework bursts we should consider what it means to be american, and how privileged we are, and had circumstances been different, we could be declaring allegiance to an elderly lady who loves her handbag(s). i'm going to see public enemies. i think it's appropriate.

love list: 7.3.09

2009-07-03T09:05:00.001-07:00

over the past weekend, i got a haircut that i decidedly do not love, but i will focus on the positive. my dear friend shaley has been counting down the days until our upcoming trip to hawaii. today makes it 7. i must admit i've already checked out. it's difficult to focus when in a number of days my feet will be covered in sand and i can go a full week without setting my alarm.

this week we have shoes on sale (my favorite thing), the adventures of a publishing psuedo-staffer, and another graphic "novel." and two more things i'll add later. whatevs.

1. this blog. god bless, you, INTERN. i hope someone pays you to do something soon, because you and your green sequined flightsuit and bear-costume wearing boyfriend and superb rejection-letter writing skills are brilliant:

What really goes on in editorial meetings is a lot like what goes on when a bunch of girlfriends go out shopping for clothes. Many acquisitions can be boiled down to one fundamental question: Does This Make My Boobs Look Good?
Never underestimate the importance of the appearance of a certain publisher's proverbial Boobs. It doesn't matter how good your manuscript looks on the hanger. If it doesn't fit the publisher—or fit in with the publisher's overall style—it won't fly. INTERN can't count the number of times the only question that comes up at an editorial meeting is "I like this, but is it for us?" ("Oh, it looks good on you, sweetie." "Are you sure? Doesn't it make me look fat?" etc.)

i've often wanted to discuss my job in this same manner, because i truly am fascinated by the...quirks of publishing industry, but there's no need when such a blog exists (or this one)--i'm just another EA with tired eyes, paper cuts on my tongue and delusions of publishing grandeur.

2. these shoes:

i got out of work early yesterday (you don't know this about publishing? we don't really understand this "work" thing and leave it as often as possible), and i thought: oh, i'll just cruise through macys. it started off a little shaky, when i made the mistake of walking through the beauty dept. all the counter dudes and dudettes were lined up there, the tools of their trade cradled in their hands--perfume samples, eyebrow tweezers. i tried to look unapproachable but i was harassed into trying some lipgloss at the urban decay makeup counter. i said: i don't wear makeup very often. shopdude: me either! his face was caked in powder, lips glistening in the fluorescent lights. i didn't laugh.
i almost never go to macys because i can't really afford anything there, but i felt compelled, and wandered up to the juniors shoe dept, where there was a massive clearance sale happening. the flats were $12, the wedges $17. i win. oh, and so you don't think i'm totally crazy, i returned these. for some reason, they made me unhappy and now i know why. i really shouldn't be buying anything; apparently impending vacation and crushing student loan debt will not squash my love of footwear.
(blowfish shoes, "segment," orig. $49; report shoes, "sedaris," orig. $78)

3. this book. comics inspired by missed connection ads on craigslist or found in newspapers, lent to me by the lovely d. on the heels of my watchmen experience, i'm much better at reading this type of work and i've found myself alternately chortling and frowning at the various pieces. i used to scour the missed connections section on craigslist with a pitiful fervor. it proved to be too heartbreaking an experience, go i gave up. as julia wertz says in the foreword, "being a short, average-looking girl, i knew it was an exercise in futility."

4. this dish:

to sound completely immodest, my cooking skills are coming along. i really enjoyed this meal and it's quite eas y. i love how colorful it is. i added some chicken (i always add chicken when i feel dishes lack protein). i would advise adding the chicken after you stir in the cheese. lesson learned.

5. on one of my (theoretically) daily walks around lake merritt, passed a homeless woman (i am 90% certain she was homeless) feeding crumbs to the ducks and other waterfowl that live in and around the lake. i did a double-take, because i forget sometimes--more often than i'd like-- that people are generous, even those who have so little to give. i passed her by holding by bag of consumer indulgences and remembered that i would not be where i am, in part, without the benevolence of others.

the persistence of.

2009-06-30T22:31:00.002-07:00

i wanted to write something about memory. something about the information we gather and moments we remember, and how arbitrary they are, for example:

- 9411 Briar Circle, So., the address of one of my childhood homes
- 234-2424, call the news journal classified ads
- the lyrics to "jenny says" by cowboy mouth
- almost every line from the princess bride
-my big toe pinched between a crab's claw
-the way my stomach twisted up during that awful scene in the little mermaid, you know, when ursula the sea witch totally fills the screen and there's this awful, ominous, music playing and she's cackling and i almost lost all the popcorn i'd eaten on my sister's lap. that was the first and last time i saw that movie
-my father's face, contorted, after i dropped a plate on the kitchen floor and he called me "klutz!" and i knew it was true
-me, at age something or other, locking myself out of my bedroom because i had locked the pretend king and his useless, squealing queen inside to punish them; in one hand, i held an imaginary sword, and with the other, i pulled knob and slammed the door so that it shook in its frame and i exclaimed, "the king and queen shall be locked--!"
-the black and white and yellow reflection of a daffy duck cartoon in a window in our house in texas; it was night-time, and the carpet was unkind against my bare skin, legs crossed the way i learned in school and everything else is brown and quiet. this is my first memory. i feel cheated.
-the moment i looked down at the floor and realized i was farther away from it than i remembered
-driving past the saddest house in the world, in south minneapolis, minnesota
-a blue sky framed by two rocky cliffs and the gray asphalt stretching between them as i drove through wisconsin
-a woman, jogging through a baseball field on mercer island, then running away from a stray dog. even then, i laughed, because the dog had gone after her, and not me
-pink napkin filled with a smashed, half-chewed bit of banana, refolded and put back in the drawer; i remember seeing it, though the culprit will not admit to the deed.
- american cheese going soft in my hands and my mother's feet going past the basement window, because working women sometimes have to make unfortunate choices
-my grandmother falling on the sidewalk; we forgot, for a moment, that you can't make old ladies run for the bus
-my mother and i singing along to "let it be" on the radio, then she made me switch it off when the song ended. it was the only music we ever agreed on.
-the sense of foreboding i experienced the last time i was in the e.r.; at the time, i knew in my heart if i fell asleep, i would die, and each time i felt my breathing slow and my jaw go slack i would shake myself awake
-the time what's-his-name in 5th grade declared his affection for me on top of a mountain of snow and i shrugged him off but i realize now that it's likely no one will make such a grand showing of affection for me ever again
-the way opening your eyes while kissing someone is like looking through the bottom of a thick glass
-an old sepia toned photograph i dreamed about once, depicting lady i didn't know, but i added her doughy, expressionless face to my mental photo album
-wriggling through a small window to get into the house, because my sister and i were locked out; the basement was dark, and cool, everything was purple and black shadows. i ran up the stairs and unlocked the front door. when our parents got home, they were not impressed with our ingenuity; rather, they scolded us for being foolish. i said, "but i live here and you forgot to leave the key," they said, "that doesn't matter"
-holding the paratrooper's hand, gathering sweat between our palms; we would release and wipe our hands on our knees and rejoin, because we had to

i want to remember everything, like hyperthymesics. i want to remember what my mother said to me that one time we were in the car and she was telling me about the spirit, and the body, and it was obvious she was quoting something she had just read. it seemed important, but my brain let go of it. i only remember what i had for breakfast three days ago because i eat the same thing for breakfast every day, and it usually involves peanut butter. i want to remember the precise number of moles the paratrooper had on his back, though i can clearly remember what his naked flesh felt like and the way i tried to read his moles like braille. i want to remember where i put my concert ticket stubs, saved for ten years, possibly more, and lost in the clutter of my life, in the smallest place i've ever lived. hyperthymesics say the disorder can be tortuous, one woman says, "it's just there," all her memories like heavy-laden orange apple pear trees with perpetually ripe fruit in reach for picking. being tortured by memory wouldn't be so bad.

except for all the bad.

i remember

2009-06-29T09:00:00.000-07:00

i suppose it'd be expected that i post a michael jackson video this monday, perhaps my favorite one, and riff on why it's my favorite and the small effect mj had on my life (because he had one on everyone's life in the past 25 years, whether you like it or not)...but that's too easy and i'll be honest, when i thought about what to post for today, i didn't pluck any mj from the storm in my head. he had a great yet troubled life, and i hope what follows for him is peace.

so here's something 180 degrees different. an epic love song (my favorite kind), courtesy damien rice & lisa hannigan. i remember. do you?

damien rice, "i remember;" O, 2002

love list: 6.26.09

2009-06-26T08:24:00.001-07:00

it's been a rough week, personally and in the world at large. hard to find anything to love, but that's the point of this exercise, really.

1. this person. because he is a genius.
2. my job. i must repeat this over and over again: i love my job. i love that i have a job, and that it keeps me on my toes, and that one day i'll get somewhere within said job.
3. l.'s list of loves. much better than i can do at this time, on this day.
4. this particular photo of my niece, because it embodies how i've felt this entire week:

5. our house in minnesota, tendrils of cigarette smoke curling around corners, stifling us all but we pretended not to notice and my father exhaling, sitting on the couch, whether you wanted him there or not. n. and i ordered pizza, probably a meat lovers, from pizza hut, and listened to the "thriller" album. the title track scared me and i hated it. i hated the zombie faces and yellow eyes and the way the wicked laughter at the end mocked me as i tried to sleep at night. but n. insisted, and my father turned the stereo up loud.

put one hand up, can you repeat that

2009-06-22T09:01:00.001-07:00

for some reason, i've had this song stuck in my head for the better part of a week. i have no idea why. i have an unhealthy affection for it, even though the sentiment doesn't apply to me in the least, at present (and really never has). am i the only person who remembers this group?:

702, "where my girls at;" 702, 1999

i checked 702 out on wikipedia. theirs is a pretty typical rise and fall. they were discovered at random by sinbad...oops, i mean this guy in las vegas, and were popular in the mid-late 90's/early 00's. "where my girls at?" came out in 1999 when girl groups where the thing; i was in college and would walk around campus singing it to myself. again: i have no idea why. imagine a slightly chubbier, certainly more unkempt version of myself shuffling her goodwill shoes and electric blue braids around a generic liberal arts college campus, humming this tune. i couldn't help it. you have to admit that, despite the obvious rhyme scheme and kind of oxymoronic message (it's like a rallying cry, but then also a warning...? i dunno, whatever), and how it is just so formulaic, it's super catchy. consider this little earworm my gift to you as you start the week. happy monday.

love list: 6.19.09

2009-06-19T08:53:00.001-07:00

i allow far too much negativity into my life. if you're reading this, and you know me, i'd urge you to stop nodding your head so vigorously, lest you do some physical damage. to try and offset my general gloominess, i am introducing a new blog feature: the love list, which will be in a similar vein to 5 things, over at rearranged design--in that i'll post it one day a week (friday), and maybe there'll be photos (for those of you unfamiliar with the 5 things, it involves getting rid of 5 items every week). items on the list will be anything or anyone i choose, so long as it tickled my fancy this week. also, i like making lists.

i encourage you to leave your own, in the comments....mostly so that i don't feel like a schmuck.

6.19.09:

1. this gadget case, from lolabags (marimekko gadget case, $15).
2. this graphic novel. ok friendlies--why did you not tell me to read this sooner, and especially before the movie came out? it's like harry potter for misanthropic, defeatist grown-ups.
3. smartthrobs, such as this guy, or this guy, and this one, but especially him, him, and more him.
4. the way the gentleman who lives in apartment across the the way from my apartment was cleaning his windows. he was so dedicated; he had what i think are called pocket windows (the type that open out); he cleaned the glass, the frames, the sills. i watched him for a long time. it was all very impressive. i respect those who respect their living spaces.
5. pictures of peonies, in decline, from suz b. at diaphanous. there's something amazing and otherworldly about them.

q: what did the hipster say when he walked into the hipster bar?

2009-06-18T09:15:00.000-07:00

a: "let's get out of here... this place is full of fucking hipsters" rimshot!

amy r., one of my favoritest people, is trying to start a war between oakland hipsters and san francisco hipsters, specifically mission hipsters, and we all know about them.

i feel that this video (courtesy of killing my lobster) will tell you all you need to know about the great divide between young oakland and san francisco residents (what, you thought it was just the bay and a bridge?), especially the way every SF-dweller shrieks and hides at the sheer mention of oakland. seriously. i was dating this guy, and it took me me about a month to get him to get on BART to come to the east bay to visit. so i picked him up from the station and he's freaked out about being a white dude in the middle of downtown oakland. he was standing on the curb making these timid steps, the way a dog does when it wants to cross a street but isn't sure. sacre bleu! all the scary persons of color lurking in the oakland shadows, waiting to pick on those with fair skin and dumb expressions on their faces.

whatevs. i'm not bitter. also i find a lot of fault w/ that video, but that's for another post. probably one about how i have a hard time suspending my disbelief.

anyway, since amy r. began her campaign, i maintain that oakland hipsters could give the bay bridge a much needed shine with the SF variety, but this isn't really about that. in the storm of fb comments generated by linking this video, it was postulated that hipsters are evil. i'm not going to bother to try to even define what a hipster is, though you can read stephen elliot's take on it here. even though i gripe at them because it's as en mode to gripe at hipsters as much as it is to be one , it would appear that 1. i am one, according to the aforementioned article (and i called myself a gen x-er. tsk!) and 2. hipsters aren't evil. they're just the most current version of grunge, of hippie, of beatnik, of punk, of zoot suit, of dadaist, every subversive, off-centered sub-sect of culture that every decade is so blessed to have. we must all suffer the growing pains of a generation . finally, 3. we all need something, someone younger than us to insult when we realize we've grown up, that our parents have cut us off and can't in good faith get away with pretending like we're the only people who matter, that we believe we won't die and can definitely not wear stirrup tights.

i really want to gather a group of hipsters and tail them for ten years, at which point i'd do a compare/contrast/where are they now piece. perhaps they will have evolved by that time? gone straight-n-narrow with the 2.5 kids and a condo in pacific heights, relegated all photos of themselves in their skinny jeaned glory to albums that gather dust on a top shelf. but more than that, i just want to be able to wear stirrup tights and mesh bodysuits.

....but not really, though.

hipster joke courtesy j. frahm.

transference

2009-06-17T09:47:00.000-07:00

so i started writing this story. it's not anything, really, and, like most of the stories i write it probably won't end up anywhere, which makes me think i ought to give up the ghost and leave the whole thing to others with more talent and temerity than i. i am also re-reading half asleep in frog pajamas, because a book with a title like that deserves to be read at least twice; i was so young when i read it, hungry for words strung together in ways i could hardly conceive of and lives larger than mine would ever be. it still has that effect, except i'm learned now, supposedly, and can see all of tom robbins' tricks. i can say, this passage does little to forward the motion of the plot and this particular paragraph makes heavy use of adjectives (just about all the paragraphs do that) and i can wonder how effective the book would've been if he'd used first person or third person as opposed to second person, which, at times, is a bit like getting gently hit on the head with an empty beer bottle. a green one, specifically.

i can't recall when i read that book last. i only remember parts of it--the rich boys, the stuffing of grape-or-banana-or-tobacco leaves (whatever they are, i'll find out soon enough) into a rectum and a morbidly obese psychic. how does he do it? i can take all the pieces apart and i still can't figure out what powers the thing.

but anyway, i'm writing this story and in the story, someone gives another person a note, but before all of that (though after i read half asleep), there was this boy in college, and i really liked this boy; i used to write him notes and stick them to the door of his dorm room, little non sequiturs in silver ink on black paper. flirting for the socially awkward, before the immediacy of the text message. he kept all of them, lined them all up in chronological order on his cloudy mirror and i would feel flattered each time i went to visit him; he kept them even when he had a girlfriend, and i was crestfallen. at the time, i didn't know where i got the idea to use the silver ink or the black paper; i think i found them at the college bookstore and i had to have them, though i never used them for anything else, they were just for the aesthetic value. i thought those tools, and the manner in which i used them, would make me somehow attractive, make me seem more intelligent than i was, an enigma worth solving and getting to know.

on page #72 of my copy of half asleep in frog pajamas, q-jo huffington, everyone's favorite flabby psychic, leaves gwen, the baby voiced filipina heroine, a note, penned on black rice paper, in silver ink. a cute quirk that builds her character. q-jo would do something like that. except i'd forgotten all about her when i wrote "we are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of the dreams" in loopy handwriting and stuck it to my paramour's door and scampered off like a chipmunk in heat. two days ago, i wrote something about someone receiving a note, written on black paper, in silver ink, and stuck to a door-- which was clearly based on personal experience (interesting tidbit on that here), and written before i read page #72 of half asleep in frog pajamas for the second time in my life. a portion i don't remember reading in the first place.

i find this worrisome, for several reasons, primarily, the prospect that i'm not a very original writer frightens me, though i am learning that we all tell each other the same basic stories, just in different ways. beyond that, i wonder how much of say, slaughter-house five has shown up in my work--i've read that at least 6 times. or any # of the books in the wizard of oz series. i used to spend summers with my godparents in cincinnati, and i read all 7 of the chronicles of narnia during each of those summers. one of the best things you can do is re-read, an idea i fervently believe. so is my work an amalgam of those works i've read multiple times? is that...good, is that what they call influence? or should i channel my creative energy elsewhere, and keep my appreciation for literature as that of a reader, only?

rhetorical, rhetorical everywhere and nary an answer to speak of. i changed my story. i'd rather emulate than duplicate.

15 steps, then a sheer drop

2009-06-15T09:14:00.001-07:00

my friend @ the science company once told me about the time he met thom yorke. he did a really disturbing impression of thom yorke, and i think the story ends with my friend climbing to the top of the venue and listening to the show there. i dunno, it was a long time ago and i'm surely making the details more fantastic than they were, or else confusing them with other stories the emotional scientist told me. since thom yorke seems more socially awkward and strange than i, i have no desire to meet him, but i have had a long relationship with his band's music. it's been renewed with the release of in rainbows, which i find to be an adequate mixture of the sounds i fell in love with them for (pablo honey, the bends), and the albums in between, which i decidedly did not love, for a long time.

Watch more cool animation and creative cartoons at Aniboom
radiohead: "15 step;" in rainbows, 2008

i'm on the fence about the video. it won radiohead's/aniboom's animated music video contest in 2008 (actually it was a 4-way tie) and i can see why it appealed to radiohead's senses--it's as frenetic and nonsensical as most of their post-bends-era videos; personally, i prefer music videos that are a little more stylish and have more of a direct connection to the song. not necessarily a literal translation, but something a bit smoother (clearly i am not equipped with film critic lingo). there also seems to be a lot of cliche anime tricks, however, i'm not a big anime fan so i could be wrong... though i'm pretty sure a transformer makes an appearance. it was nice to stumble upon this contest; for most of my youth, music videos were my bread and butter; i'm sad to find such a paucity of them since the decline of mtv.

i would also like to take the opportunity to applaud radiohead for keeping up with the current shifts in the music business, remaining accessible to their fans post-record contract and finding new and innovative ways to keep us interested. and that's not because i'm bitter about this band. not in the least.

if you should want to binge on radiohead vids, check here.

lift & separate

2009-06-10T10:10:00.000-07:00

the other day, i caught an episode of "true life," mtv's last reputable program. it's an interesting documentary-style show; each episode introduces us to (usually) three young people of various races, locations, and socioeconomic backgrounds who are dealing with the same issue. the topics are equally as diverse--as frivolous as "i'm in a summer share," to a recent episode that i find especially moving: "i'm coming to america" (though "i'm a single parent" comes in a close second). it's unfortunate that, since "the real world" has fallen the way of many other reality television shows, mtv can't create more interesting, socially responsible programming mixed in with all the requisite junk. the episode that prompted this post, though, was "i hate my large breasts." mtv's cameras followed around three well endowed young women who well, the title is self-explanatory.

i was eleven and mostly ignorant about my body, and the way it worked. the inkling that the body i had would not be the one i ended up with was like a newly birthed star in the deepest part of my mind, small and nearly invisible yet generating enough heat to make its presence known. in the meantime, i was tomboyish and bony; i liked getting dirty, took secret pleasure in each newly acquired wound. i went by my best friend's house one afternoon, and she showed off her training bra with an undefinable pride, though she had nothing to train at the time and the bra itself wasn't much more than three pieces of fabric held together by some elastic--essentially a bikini top made of flower-patterned cotton. she wanted me to be somehow amazed, or envious, because she was going to develop soon and i was still a stick figure with a little life breathed into her. i genuinely remember the feeling of not caring, the precise opposite of amazement. i suggested we go ride bikes.

two years later, i began to suffer the inscrutable pain that binds all women together. for at least 6 months, the skin over my breastbone hurt so badly, it felt bruised, as though healing from a rough beating. i couldn't lay on my stomach. wearing a shirt that so much as touched my skin was akin to torture. if i dared to do such a foolish thing as run, i had to cross both arms tightly over my chest; many of my classmates who were experiencing the same changes took soccer balls to their upper bodies and after each hit they doubled over, the way the boys would after a squarely placed shot to the crotch. but what were we supposed to do? revert to the victorian era, rest on divans and avoid contact sports? this was the supposed cornerstone of our femininity? a hostile takeover, a full year of abject discomfort as our breasts stretched and pushed through our skin? i liken it to the way teeth grow, by relentlessly cutting away at the gum until they can push through. when it was over, i looked down and felt impossibly heavy. i wondered what i had done to deserve such an overwhelming mammary expansion. i didn't care about filling out swimsuits, or thrusting my boobs in men's faces; when i thought about sex, i didn't think of having my chest fondled. in no way did i want what i got, and those always seem to be the things we can't change.

i'm much more of a sexual animal now, but my breasts and i continue to have a mostly hate-hate relationship. for many years, i wanted to get rid of them all together--a sentiment expressed by one of the women featured in the documentary--breast reduction surgery seemed the only plausible solution, the one way i'd ever feel comfortable with my body and look proportionate. that idea went out the door when i was laughed out of my doctor's office; i was sixteen, and had become obsessed with the possibility of a breast reduction. i scoured phone books and invented reasons to make the surgery a medical necessity--i had severe back pain (never mind the 30 lb + back pack), i was seriously depressed (otherwise known as "puberty"). in a somber tone, i informed my doctor of my wishes; she tittered (oh yes, pun intended) and asked me "what do you need that for?" when i got home, i shut myself in my room and cried. whenever i went bra shopping with my mom, i plodded miserably behind her while she selected the wholly unattractive brassieres that are made for those who require "full coverage." forget sexy little demi-bras, my bras were (are?) bomb shelters. forget cute bathing suits and halter tops. forget womanhood. wear baggy clothes and try to disappear yourself, hide from roving eyes and groping hands. hide from purely sexual intentions and overzealous nibbling teeth. your intellect doesn't matter, your skills don't matter, all anyone wants is your T&A and naughty bits. suddenly, all this attention is showered onto you, regardless of yourself--i could be a shitty person, a serial killer, a baby snatcher--doesn't matter, my tits are huge.

there are many discussions that can be had about this--how we define beauty, how much control a woman has over the way people react to her body, how much license those people have to react. i wonder if the man who saw fit to inform me that i had chillbumps (goosebumps) on my chest was just being helpful (read: obvious, i remember it was cold that day), or making it painfully known to both of us that he would definitely not remember face after i shooed him away. i often wonder if it is possible for a man to feel as objectified and awful as women do when they're doing nothing more than trying to simply get through life. men, especially, seem to forget that most women aren't surgically enhanced. we aren't trying to call attention to ourselves, but we must also acknowledge our femininity in the way we see fit--never mind that most women don't dress for men. we dress for each other, or to feel good about ourselves. wearing sweats and shapeless clothing does not make me personally feel good about myself.

You can read more about the women featured on the episode in question here. for me, the clip (potentially NSFW, depending on how strict your work environment is about these things) is especially wrenching; it's evident how uncomfortable she is with herself, and also why she had a good reason to be so unsure. by the end of the episode, each of the women featured seems to come to a healthy conclusion about her breast size--one finds peace in therapy, another begins a rigorous work-out regime and loses an inch around her bust nearly every week. the third, the most unhappy of the lot (she convinced her husband to move to a cheaper apartment so that they could save for her aforementioned breast reduction surgery--oddly, she's the smallest and most proportionate of the three) discovers that a good bra and tailored clothing can do wonders.

i'm still at odds with the issue. perhaps most women are. there are days, weeks, even, when i love my body and content to work with what i have. more often than not, i get frustrated that i drew the short-zaftig-lumpy stick from the creator's mischievous fists. you rarely see a nude starlet with her breasts falling into her armpits. clothing designers still can't imagine a that small waist and larger bust line occur naturally, and aren't phenomenons or oddities. unless you're one of those ladies who can hold a pencil under her boob. even i can't do that.

and for the record, if someone gave me $15,000 and two weeks sick leave, i'd strut back into the office with c-cups. believe it.

and makes for stormy weather

2009-06-08T09:27:00.000-07:00

it's odd how cliches and proverbs work themselves into our lexicon. there are conversations during which i realize the entire discourse has been a volley of overused phrases, or the suggestion of such. oftentimes, it occurs to me much later what these adages actually mean; my mother was most fond of things done by halves are never done right, which was usually offered as she followed me around the kitchen floor while i swept, or threw all the laundry, regardless of color or fabric, into the washing machine at the same time because i couldn't bear to do it the long way. she said it so much that i can't do anything without thinking things done by...so, should i start something, i have to finish it, or accept the fact that the feeling of incompleteness will torture me. but we all know that these simple truisms stick with us for precisely that reason.

i have to be honest and say i'm not a big placebo fan. i appreciate them for what they are, but after i got without you i'm nothing, and never made it past the first track, i left them alone. it's impossible to like everything. however, i do like this song. it's taken on a new meaning of for me in the past week (this song, and, oddly enough, the album cover are eerily reflective of recent events, in a manner of speaking) and it's a good tune to listen to when you need to focus on whatever you're doing--for me, that's usually walking to the steady beat and spacing out to the nonsensical lyrics.

placebo, "pure morning;" without you i'm nothing, 1998

curious incidents

2009-06-05T11:00:00.002-07:00

so i was all set to do a book review, but why bother when michiko is still doing her (controversial) thing? and then i thought, perhaps i can interpolate some personal anecdote about why this book affected me so much? but all my personal anecdotes would reveal me to be just a bit dim, if particular. or quirky, as i prefer to be called. so i thought, well, i'm good at research, and i like facts, and i've just finished working on a book on this very topic....but it proved entirely too complicated a task and i'm effectively brain dead this week.

there are certain things that everyone should like:

1. perfectly unfurled roses
2. radiohead's "(nice dream)"
3. the way it feels when your lover grasps your head in just the right way
4. the beatles
5. this book (as if you didn't see that one coming)

and of course the list is subject to change.

i tend to keep to myself and use books, especially when riding public transportation, as shields as well as to pass the time. sometimes i'll see someone eyeing the book i'm reading i'll and turn the cover so that they can read the title and author w/o having to ask me. and i'm convinced that stephen elliot once asked me what i was reading on BART from SF to the east bay, but he didn't remember when i asked him and i have no further evidence. while i was reading this book, a woman accosted me and started asking me questions about how she loved it and what did i think and i initially shrugged her off with an "i'm not so far into it yet but i like it...."; we got off at the same stop and ended up standing in the station, talking about this book, the way the plot sucker-punches you and you feel happily defeated. something amazing happens when such a slim volume contains something so large.

i don't have this book anymore. i gave it to the last shmuck i dated, which was saying a lot, on my part, like the infinite hours i spent makig mixtapes for crushes in my youth. so why is anyone surprised that he didn't appreciate it? so much so that he didn't even want to give it back.

you can pick it up here. or from your local bookseller. be cool and buy local or directly from the publisher.

[end] friendship

2009-06-02T22:55:00.001-07:00

i had a best friend in high school. she, like most people that populate my life, was my polar opposite. she was a pixie, as sprightly and innocent as those beings are, with hair that never misbehaved and big green eyes that always got her out of trouble. she also had a string of boyfriends, relationships that would inevitably end and i would, also inevitably, have to console her each time she called me crying about so-and-so the lacrosse player who'd flung her
ball-heart out of his net. i never had similar issues; i had an alcoholic father and a perpetual crisis of faith. when you're fifteen, these are not good topics for discussion.

i'm not trying to make myself out to be the good guy. i certainly wasn't. somewhere around junior year we began to split, she was a faithful optimist and i subscribed to the rules of pessimism, though i preferred to call it "realism." i started to spend more time with the girls who expressed themselves with thick black eyeliner and green glitter lipstick; the girls who lifted their uniform skirts higher than the regulated 3 inches above the knee, the girls who smoked and knew that one older guy who would buy them booze. i never did any of those things, not really, but i felt more at home with that crowd. so i stopped going to watch my best friend's soccer matches, and stopped going to the mall with her on friday nights. still, it was a slow break, we peeled away from each other until the very end, when i went away to college and when i got back for the summer she called me, demanding to know why i wasn't talking to her anymore; she started crying, and i think i said something awful, like, "i'm sorry, i'm just not feeling it anymore." she tried to convince me that she wasn't the way i thought she was, a squeaky clean girl-jock high-achiever, and i probably knew she wasn't, but that's what i chose to believe at the time. i haven't heard from her since or made an effort to get in touch. i still feel like an asshole.

i keep wondering what binds us together. my spiritual side says fate, my rational side says circumstance; the almost cliched list of common interests, similar upbringing, proximity. i wonder why we give some people a lot of room, and put others on short leashes. i wonder how and when we know to call it quits, and why it's so painful to do so, even if that friend needed to be cut loose.

a sequence of recent events has made me realize what a damaging thing i did to my former best friend. instead of being honest i was false, smiling and laughing with her while i silently criticized her j-crew outfits and perfect teeth and perky nature (beyond that, i was jealous--except for her teeth. mine are already pretty nice), tolerating her until i saw an appropriate exit. i can give myself a pass because i was young and didn't understand those feelings at the time, but being able to define my behavior now only serves to make me feel worse. i don't like entertaining the idea that i might have hurt someone.

she used to say that she could see the two of us growing old together, and living next door to each other, shaking our canes at the neighborhood kids. each year, life teaches me that long-range planning is a pointless pursuit; that placing your future to such an extent on something as tenuous as a relationship will only serve to double your heartbreak when it doesn't work out. i started to get scared, it wasn't a feeling i could articulate at the time; i didn't know how to say, but i'm leaving this place. this is not where i want to grow old, this isn't where i want to die, without cruelly crushing her vision of the future. i started to realize that she and i had cultivated a relationship similar to the ones she'd had throughout high school, we just hadn't given ourselves to each other in that physical way, one of the few definitions that delineates a platonic relationship from a romantic one. and, because we could take pleasure in each other independent of carnal activity, as you can with most of your friends, the wound was even deeper.

there's no way to avoid it, or several its depending on how many people you allow into your life. you can only hope the scar will be a small one, that every time you look at it or your fingers pass idly over the raised skin, you'll be reminded of the thing you did wrong, or the wrong that was done to you. and you keep going, because we're social animals, and most of us can't function on our own.

(for all of youse outside the bay area--the street sign is real).