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What Kind of Reader Are You? Your Result: Literate Good Citizen   You read to inform or entertain yourself, but you’re not nerdy about it. You’ve read most major classics (in school) and you have a favorite genre or two.
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I can’t get this line out of my head

I heard a poet read on KPFA from the World Social Forum in Kenya which is going on right now. She is a poet named Susan Kiguli. The line is:

I have watched you with the curious interest of an overwhelmed child.

Such a beautiful line.

Another World is Possible. Un Otro Mundo Es Possible.

The new you.

Have you ever wanted to be someone in a fashion magazine? Have you ever wanted to stare at fashion magazines all day long and fantasize about having the magaical things inside? (Even if you are not materialistic normally?) Have you ever wanted to not care about politics or what’s going on in the world and just cater to whatever lures lie behind shopping, pampering yourself, and feeling sleek and the smell of nail polish and hair conditioner?

We all say to ourselves: If I can only get x done, then I will have more time for myself. In the case of us writers, we are of a particularly disturbed bunch; we say, if only I could have time to write my novel, then life would be really great. We persecute ourselves and we cannot let ourselves just vegitate; There is always something we have to create on the back of our minds, nagging us to be written, even when we can’t write, when we don’t feel like writing, or when we are not writing for some reason. Somtimes I’ve wished that I could be someone who doesn’t care about real things. You know, the average Joe Shmuckatello or Jane Doe, who goes to work from morning until evening, comes home, has friends, a social life, and that’s it. No particular dreams of changing the world.

I feel strange for having a desire to write. Why can’t I just be mellow when I have nothing to do, and watch t.v. or something? Why can’t I be a part of the ignorant unwashed masses? Sometimes I don’t want to have to care about what’s going on in the world enough to pay attention and feel horrible about the damage the Bush administration is doing to the people of Iraq, and to the people of this country, to the military, to the constitution, to the legislative branch, to our civil liberties. Caring about these things feels like it does nothing. Though, on the bright side, Senator Lehy really ripped Attourney Genral Gonzales a new one the other day in congress. He called him out on the carpet. If you watched C-Span, and you could see Gonzales’ response to most of these comments, you would be able to tell that he is an incompetent shmuck by the way he smirks when the congress takes him to task. He is definitely the fall guy for the Bush administration’s war on the American Constitution. When I see him talk, I imagine that Attourney General Gonzales has a hand up his ass that makes his lips move and that he likes the gentle tickle, hence the smirk on his face.

This gets me by for a moment. But will there be change? Am I the only person watching C-SPAN seeing this? Or all we all so paralyzed we don’t know what to say when faced with this kind of incompetent beaurocratic double speak coming from the mouth of a public official? Much like the beaurocratic talk that comes out of the empolyees at Bank of America customer service or any company with a call center.

My grandmother doesn’t even know who the current president is. That’s how out of touch with reality she is. I can’t blame her, she’s 96 and has advanced dementia. She’s in deep retirement. She no longer cares about such trifles. She’s getting all saintly as she begins her to detach from worldly cares, slowly, gingerly one toe at a time, not quite ready to give up the daily pleasure of being alive, listening to the birds chirp, playing with the cats, or just being. She is the only person I know who most of the time, can just “be.”

Have you ever noticed that people are always waiting and hoping for a time when they don’t have to work so hard, where they can just “be”? Usually, we call that retirement. But then people who get the situation of being “retired” (I’m thinking of my dad and his brother in this case), and the just hate it, and can’t stand being still and they feel worthless in a way, like all their great work is over. This must feel particularly bad for men who have provided for their families for a number of years.

I wonder what I would be like if I won the lottery and never had to work again, or if flashing forward sixty to seventy years to my deep retirement. I wouldn’t know what to do with myself. Sometimes I think it would be kind of nice–to not have to do anything–to be free. Then I think, are these just strange dreams that the industry of wanting has injected into the soul of every industrialized worker? Have we lost the ability to relax? Have I lost my sense of me when everything is quiet and I am not doing anything? Or, is this just an intrinsic part of human nature, to want to work and make use of one’s time, much like Adam and Eve had their “daily work” in Genesis in the Bible.

While this may be true about human nature and our desire to keep busy, I can’t help but take a Marxist view of work when i look at how hard we all work. What are we working for? To survive? To be able to acquire new things. Is this what’s driving us? Are rich people and poor people and middle class people simultaneously driven and opressed by the desire to be new? To have new things? To feel powerful, important and sleek? Or the lack thereof.

The wanting to be new comes on a conveyor belt out of our minds like freshly minted plastic tiny parts that come manufactured all together on one tray, ready to be punched out and put in a cargo container, shipped by Han Jin lines or Mueler Mersk to the port of Oakland, unloaded by muscular longshoremen, attached to trains and ferretted out every mini-mall in America.

Well, in honor of this desperation for newness, I give you this new background to my blog. Previously a dreamy green with neat organic swirls, we’ve now upgraded to an eclectic, yet urban creative arts feel. Hope you like. Reach out and grab it. It’s the new you. It’s waiting. Don’t hesitate, buy today. Operators are standing by.
It is our pleasure to serve you. New and Improved! Now with nano-technology. Free sample! Free sample!

What do you want to be when you grow up?

I feel like i should have something interesting to say but I don’t.
Does it really matter, in the long run, though? I teach English and this morning I asked my students to answer the following question in writing for five minutes on lined paper: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” It’s something that I am constantly asking myself. Ted says that he doesn’t ask himself that question, but just thinks, shit, I’m grown up, I better start doing something.

When I was five years old, I had this deep interest in civil rights and the civil rights movement. Though there was not a single black kid in my class, I identified as a five-year-old with the African American struggle for civil rights and my favorite months were February and April and the only thing I really remember from kindergarten was our teacher telling us about Rosa Parks not giving up her seat on the bus, and that Martin Luther King said I have a dream. The teacher took my mother aside and told her that I had this obsession with inequality and prejudice and all these opinions about it, in hurried rushed tones. My parents raised me to be a shit-desturber.

When I was five, I wanted to be presdient of the United States when I grew up. This dream lasted through about second grade when we had to make a city out of rocks and my second grade teacher, Mrs. Crayon, said that our rock city couldn’t have a president and discouraged me from making my rock a president rock. I even wrote a letter to the President in my journal about pollution which I think I remember reading to my mom. Instead of making my rock into President rock, I made it into a psychologist. My childhood logic thought it was fat and smooth and resembled my mom in her rock-like form. So, I made it into her. I made myself a little mold of my mother, a psychologist. I remember feeling uncomfortable about making my rock into my mom’s life. But I also remember feeling scared somehow if I didn’t represent my own dreams in my rock-person, that I would not be able to have them anymore.

What do I want to be when I grow up? I don’t know because every day it changes. I think some days, a writer. Other days, a noted political activist and critic, other times a fiercly independent journalist, other times a mavric publisher of Wild Guppy Press, the beacon of arts and culture on the Left Coast, and at other times, a teacher who shapes young minds to challenge the system. Other times, a Bay Area hippy who sips Yerba matte at three in the afternoon at outdoor coffee shops. A radio-anouncer. The head of a company. A political correspondent. A novelist. A poet. A screen-writer. An independent art-film writer/director. A talk-show host personality. A stand-up comic. A grant-writer. A non-profit organization administrator. A wife. A daughter. A mother. A friend. A good person. A human being. An artist. A painter. A photographer. A devotee. A spiritual child. A crazy old lady on pharmecuticals pretending. An intuitive. A healer. A road-side fortune teller. A naturopath. A political representative. A hotel owner. A small-business owner…

I don’t want to ever grow up in my heart. I want to always dream in this life.

I am on vicadin and feeling no pain

Dear world,

Ever since my upstairs neighbor gave me some of her pain killers for back pain brought on by falling down while dusting a very hard-to reach shelf and pulling a muscle, everything has been a lot easier. No longer do I care whether or not Bank of America online banking stole my 99 dollars for opening a secure credit card five years ago and then stole my deposit three dollars at a time queitly, clandestinely until two months ago. No longer do I care what I have to do the next day, nor do I get stressed. Nothing like that can bother me now. But the way the setting sun looks through the tippy-top eucalyptus branches during a golden twilight walk in the panhandle–now that’s interesting.

I just got back from going to the Bank. I’ve been trying to close this savings account that I didn’t know I had. Bank of America charged me 99 dollars when I was just getting out of college and wanted to open up a new credit card. Over two years ago, without telling me they converted this depost to a savings account and proceeded to slowly voraciously drain it like the vampires that they are. But it didn’t show up with my statements and only recently I noticed it was there. When I noticed it, the account had dwindled to 12 bucks because the bank had been charging me a 3 dollar service fee because it was below the 300 dollar minimum they had for savings account.

Every time I tried to call the customer service number in the last few months, I’ve been transfered and had to talk to people who don’t know what they’re talking about. Finally I would hang up. One time I called the customer service rep a fucking asshole when I completely lost it. Today I went–after taking a vicadin–into the bank and asked that they close the account. You know they wouldn’t refund me more than 3 months of the fees? The manager, this pert Latina in a three-peice suit showed me that her computer would not allow her to. I know for a fact that they can refund more of the fees (I’ve had friends who’ve had lower status at BofA who had special codes to override the system, unless they were making that up to make their jobs sound dramatic), but at this point , I figured it was wise to just close the account before they start charging me negative numbers for ever and ever until the end of time. I had already gotten pissed at the customer service hotline before the holidays over this issue and they were very recockulous to me in general. So, I decided it was best to just cut my losses, take the 9 dollar credit they offered me. Then the manager took other clients and told me to go have the teller close my account. The teller couldn’t close it and I had to call the customer service number. I refused. I begged him in my vicadin induced state to just take care of it in person. I said, “Don’t make me call the robotic customer service agents. They are going to put me on hold and they are going to be so rude. You know how they are? Don’t do this to me, man. It’s a friggin-nightmare.” The teller was this young Chinese-American kid with spikey hair seemed like a college student who partied on the weekends. He and the other teller, a young hip red-streaked hair Indian girl, smirked back and forth between themselves while I re-enacted what it would be like if I called the hotline. Eventually we compromised on them letting me use their phone to call the customer service number for me. A little personal-touch, nameless, faceless 1800 corporate style.

I felt like some kind of idiot at first, for having them dial the number, but really, bank of america acts like everyone should have a cell phone. I do have one, but it’s the principle of the thing. If they require me to call a number to close my account, they should call the number with you there. They shouldn’t just hand you a number and tell you to leave. So, the minute the teller left to assist another customer, the person on the phone was rude and said that I had called the wrong number. Then they gave me the right number but wouldn’t transfer me.

I had to go back to the manager who ignored me, so I just opened the door to her little glass box and interrupted her when she was on the phone. (politely, of course). I don’t feel bad for interrupting these people. I will never see them again, and they won’t help you unless you are pushy.

Then I went back to the teller and told him to help me because you had to punch a code to dial out on their phones at Bank of America and I didn’t know what it was and it wasn’t listed on the phone. Then I went to the teller and I told him that he had to call the number for me and that I wasn’t going to go through it all over again. He called and then the other rep. needed all these codes. I realized that if I would have called myself, I probably would’ve had to go back to the bank and do another transaction. But the banks don’t care about you when they tell you to call the customer service numbers. They just want to get rid of you as fast as they can. This guy totally knew that I would have gone through 15 minutes on hold with the customer service office. They acted like i was strange for wanting them to do this for me. But why does the bank act like face-to-face service is such a wrong thing to ask for? I told him, listen if I wasn’t going to be a huge pain in the ass for my direct deposit I would just switch everything over to Washington Mutual anyway, where the people actually help you and don’t expect you to call a customer service number for everything. He laughed and then when i left the store all the tellers smiled at me and waived bye. Either they were snickering to themselves about what a baby I was because I made jokes about how awful it was to call a 1-800 number, and got melo-dramatic about it. Or they maybe a little bit saw the humanity in not being wanting to get lost in the void. I really don’t know.

If I ever get a lot of money in this life, I have to say, I am only going to work with bankers who deal with me face-to-face, at a desk, in an old-style, old country, high context culture way. That’s the kind of person who deserves business, not a nameless faceless global conglomerate. Not a monolithic monster network where nobody has the power to do anything and people tell you, “My computer won’t let me do such and such.” Imagine if when you died you went to heaven and at the gates of heaven St. Peter said, “I’m sorry, but I’m not showing your name in our data-base. Can I have the last four digits of your social security number? Well you’re going to have to go over to our records department and verify your identity with a live-scan. Thank you. Is there anything else I can help you with? Oh, sorry, you don’t have a social? You’re an undocumented immigrant, I mean illegal alien? Well, sorry, you are going to hell then. Thank you. Come Again. Have a nice day. Was there anything else i could help you with?”

Thank goodness for vicadin. It at least makes me laugh through the absurdities of life.

Funny trash my husband found

….a letter we found that was sent to him when he was a property manager after his stupid (much younger) punk ass roomate got caught making fake id’s by the police. Amazing what some parents will do to clean up after their kids. For some reason, reading this, I laughed. Won’t you have a looksie.

Wolfe and Associates
173 Chapel Street
Santa Barbara, CA 93111

Dear Mr. Wolfe:

Re: D_____–tenant in apartment 3, 6645 Del Playa, Isle Vista

We have just been informed that D___ has been asked to leave the apartment by your
company after a recent letter from the Sheriff’s Department.

We are parents of D_____, who recently was arrested while in the apartment. The
police had a search warrant for somebody in the apartment who was selling stolen
merchandize over the Internet. D_____ was not in any way involved with the stolen
goods. In the process of the search, the police uncovered evidence of some activities
that D_____ had discontinued a while back. He was questioned about this and has been
asked to appear at an arraignment on November 7th. No charge has been made at this
time.

Even though D______ foolishly became involved in these activities, he is not a “bad apple”,
but a kind and caring individual who’s been a respectful tenant since August.

He is attending SBCC currently and intends to transfer to UCSB in the fall of 2004. He has
worked at Petco in Studio City, California for two years and saved the money to
move up to Santa Barbara and rent accommodation. He has never been arrested for
anything before.

Since we are concerned that having to move during the school year would be quite
disruptive, we ask that you reconsider and allow him to stay in the apartment.

We hope you can show some understanding in this matter. If you need any more
information, please call us at (###) ###-####.

Sincerely,

__________________
(D’s parents)

reading like a writer and the daily blather of life

Well, usually when I spend an entire day doing lame stuff, I usually feel guilty at the end. Then there’s the feeling of nervousness that sets in, like an impending tidal wave. And then I get kind of manic, self-punishing thoughts, was there more I should have done? How can I be more “on the ball?” Then I beat myself up about it. Usually when I think about writing, this feeling gets bigger. But, I’m turning over a new leaf in how I treat myself after what I do in a day. So, here is what I did today in no particular order.

Woke up late. Allowed myself to sleep in because of getting over a cold.

Then, I showered.

Then ate breakfast from leftovers that were in fridge. Eggs, Hashbrowns and fried zuchinnis. Did dishes. Then I went out to Golden Gate Park and walked around. It was cold. Then I went to Haight Street. Bought a book, and a magazine. Reading Like a Writer, and the latest issue of Mother Jones for Ted. I had heard Reading Like a Writer was good from somebody. (I think it was Leonessa.) Picked it up off the shelf and thought it was 20 bucks, but it got my interest because the writer said that as a writing teacher, her act of trying to teach students how to write via the creative writing workshop was a 20-year act of complete fraud. I got a kick out of this, considering some of my puffed up literary critiques, and especially after the idea that my most loved peice in workshop was a peice I wrote before I knew what an MFA was, when I was at the ripe age of 19. Since then, my prose has gone downhill from there. But hopefully it’s about to be on the upswing again soon. I think I suffer from a lack of confidence of seeing characters and stories through to the end.

So far, the book is good. I see it as much better than what I gleaned while at the library recently and looking at Jane Smiley’s 13 Ways of Looking at A Novel. (By the way, Leonessa, if you are reading this, and if you liked the book,I respect your opinion, but I couldn’t get into it for my own strange reasons.)

I opened up the book to the criticism about the book I had most recently read and this was Dostoyevski’s The Idiot, which I read over the summer and frankly, i found it to be dissapointing. I found Smiley’s little blurb on Dostoyevski’s novel to be dissapointing, not Dostoyevski’s novel. Maybe I’m old school, but I feel sad when contemporary writers try to talk bad about the greats like Dostoyevski. It just seems silly to me. It’s like if Dick Cheney got on the History Channel and started criticizing the battle plans of Alexander the Great. That’s absurd. Hey it could be the latest Republican spin propaganda. That would be a gas, wouldn’t it? If Dick Cheney actually got on the History Channel and started simultaneously critiquing and comparing himself to Alexander the Great? I wouldn’t put it past the current regime to do some random nonsequitor shit like that just to confuse people.

I think I remembered she said that his book was boring or something. I felt like, who the hell is Jane Smiley to say that The Idiot was boring? I don’t think so. This is Dostoyevski we’re talking about not some student in an MFA workshop who writes about something that we “don’t buy.” Then I remembered how lame my 12th grade English teacher was, and how she LOVED Jane Smiley’s A thousand Acres and made us read it. I remembered how much I hated reading about neat little white people on the farm and their sublimated rage and hate for each other, and I remember being pissed that we couldn’t read Truman Capote instead like the other class. I am making a really sloppy criticism here, I realize, because I don’t have her book in front of me, but based on my weird, probably unfounded personal dislike for Jane Smiley’s work, I must blather on.

Then, also, I remember being a college student when Smiley came to speak at the College of Creative Studies after she one the Pulitzer Prize. I remember being twenty and my writing mentor was going to introduce me to Smiley. I remember saying I would go. But I remember that it was my birthday and my friends and I had to get beer for a party later that day or something, and I missed it. (What a brat I was). Kind of like when my friend Mikey and I went to see N. Scott Momaday read and he bored us to tears and we got caught behind this curtain looting the catered h’ors derves cart in front of the whole lecture hall, stuffing our faces with mini-enchiladas, and putting cans of soda in the front pocket of our hoodies. And the caterers thought that the event was over and opened the curtains while he was speaking, and the whole room saw us stuffing ourselves mercilessly with free campus food. Our writing mentor, B was cool about it though. We thought he was false somehow, and that it was okay to go get food early. We had bullshit detectors a mile long, back then. (But they only worked on other people, not on ourselves Funny how that is.) Then I remember my writing mentor being kind of pissed at me for not going. But, I didn’t want to explain to B about how I didn’t like Smiley’s writing, and it had nothing to do with her as a person, but with my 12th grade English school girl perceptions of her. I always felt guilty about not going, just because it must have made B mad.

When I came back today after walking around the streets of San Francisco, I began working on this short story that I have written about four drafts of. I’m now on draft number 5. Draft number 5! I don’t think I have ever made it to this many drafts because I usually feel stupid and give up after like 2 drafts, maybe three.

When I worked at City Lights Press, I once was given the monumental task of making xerox copies of a book which they were going to reprint around the fiftieth anniversary of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. (I jokingly say monumental, because really the only cool thing I got to do when I was working there was read manuscripts, and that lasted about a week. The rest of everything was your run of the mill menial secretarial stuff, and it was pretty much understood while I was there, among the rest of the publicity/publishing staff, that I as a pee-on intern was not to contribute to the perm. employees inside jokes, and if i was to speak when not spoken to, it was to be done sparingly. This was rather disheartening, when you combined it with reading the desperate people’s manuscripts who wanted to be chosen by City Lights, all promising how they could possibly be the beat poets. Little did they know, the orignial beats were all probably at this point, drinking prune juice, or trying to find ways to keep themselves alive, while abused grad. students like yours truly were really reading their work as their cars got ticketed and towed for blocking access to a strip club a minute after four pm on Thursday afternoons. But the grass is always greener. I used to be those people idealizing City Lights.

Anyway, the point I wanted to make before this paragaraph-long digression was: Howl took something like 20 drafts before it was finished. And Ginsberg worked with an editor on it through all of those drafts! THAT IS JUST ONE LITTLE POEM. (Well, it’s an incredibly great poem, and I’d be an idiot if I sat here and criticized it much like Smiley’s blase classification of “The Idiot”)
When I did NPR’s next generation, my radio script took on about seven different manifestations until it was deemed done by the producer. Why did I think writing fiction was any different?

So, I worked on this damn story the rest of the day, taking lots of breaks to procrastinate, and make an experimental form of salmon bisque soup with T, which didn’t work out, but lucky we had left over pizza and salad and sausage to even out the mistake.

Looking at Jade Park’s blog about What Lit Agent X said about writing resolutions, I realize that there are a lot of ways to feed yourself as a writer which I was doing before I started punishing myself with manic thoughts of not being good enough, or not getting enough done. Sometimes it’s good just to dream, to peoplewatch, to sit quiet, to explore, to get involved in coming up with new material.

Having been properly satisfied that I at least worked a little bit today, when I couldn’t think anymore, I fixed the margins in my document and watched Napolean Dynamite on tv, and just vegged out. I love the part when he does the dance at the end. That was my day. Pretty uneventful. At least I wrote a little bit. I’m still not done with the fifth draft. But I think once I figure out how to get from A to B to C in it, I’ll be done. I’ve got my end, I’ve got my beginning, I’ve got my middle. It’s just a few things in between and how toget from one part to the other quickly in words is difficult. Mostly, I have to grow my character up in a few paragraphs so I can connect the beginning of the story to the rest of it. But, I can’t cut the part of her when she’s younger. (I’ve tried). I have to build a bridge between her five-year-old self and her teenage self, and I have to do it in fleshed out scenes that are less than a page It’s going to be difficult but maybe if I sleep on it. I’ve been agonizing over this for more than a few weeks, so if I wake up tomorrow with an idea, it will be a miracle.

Part of writing, I’ve learned is going through the excruciating pain at re-reading what you’ve just written. It’s so incredibly hard to stay within your own story long enough to fix the parts that don’t flow. Does it ever get any easier to look at one’s own work, I wonder?

Will the butterfly ever emerge out of the crysalis? Or will she remain, dewy-winged, in a state of half-way emergence for ever? Now there’s one to ponder for the ages.

warmth and nourishment

I’m going stir crazy. I’ve been inside my house from 3pm yesterday afternoon, trying to get over this cold I have somehow contracted. Now, I am finally feeling somewhat better. But, it’s one o’clock in the morning. Many comedy shows and strange movies involving singing and dancing later, here I am. It’s 43 degrees in San Francisco right now, 34 degrees in Oakland, and I’m happy to be inside my house. The low today in the city was 32 degrees (freezing!) I heard on the news that Santa Clara county declared a state of emergency because of all the cold homeless people who may freeze to death. They’re going around and picking them up off the street and bringing them into makeshift shelters. I wonder if there is somebody doing this in downtown San Francisco? I heard that they are all riding the buses to stay warm. If my grandmother didn’t live below me, I have fantasies of picking up people from the street and letting them crash in the basement with sleeping bags, and in the studio apartment next to her place. Of course, I’m not crazy and I know that I wouldn’t let potentially crazy people off the street into my grandmother’s apartment, or mine, but the urge to open up the garage door and wave people in from the street is there. Of course, not that many homeless venture up to our neck of the woods. But I think this year, people might be getting a little bit more desperate because I did see one person begging two blocks down at the corner bus stop the other day.

About two years ago, I came home and a kid was on my front steps, who looked like he was lost. I say kid, but he was probably about 25. At first I thought he might be friends with the neighbors and I asked him, and he said no. He said, I kind of just needed to sit down for a minute and rest. At the time, I had volunteered to help serve food at Poets In the Schools event at my school. It was the point when I was a first year graduate student when I was getting manipulated into overly serving my school, and signing up for too many things, not realizing that I could say no, or ignore an email. When I got to the event, everything was already taken care of and the people said there was nothing I could do, and just smiled at me. Then, they asked me if I could take home the food. It was huge vats of baked chicken, fish, and spaghetti and salad. I took it home thinking, what am I going to do with all this food? It was more than I could eat in a week.

Then this kid sat on my front door. I asked him if he was hungry. He said yeah. He looked like he was coming down off drugs, or as if he was wandering. I brought him some of the food on a paper plate. I warmed it in the microwave. He ate it and left the plate and the fork. When I came back outside he was gone. Then my boyfriend (now husband) and I got the idea to go out to Haight Ashbury and make little plates wrapped in foil and pass it out to all the hippy kids. Then we drove around the city looking for homeless people and if we found one we would pull up to them and hand them a plate of food and a plastic fork until we ran out of food. I don’t know what made me think of that, but I enjoyed seeing people enjoy the food. I like watching peope enjoy food, I guess.

The other day I made cream of mushroom soup from scratch for the first time. We ate it. It was yummy.
Tomorrow I have to get up early and get back on track with my writing. I am behind, again. I have to get back on track with a lot of things. I want to be done with this damn thing. I feel like with writing, I will never be ready. It’s disheartening when you think that most of the things you’ve written are not “finished” like you are writing into a void, like there is not going to be enough. But nourishment, true nourishment, for me does not come from writing. Maybe it’s not my ultimate path, but a tributary toward it. Maybe my true path is in making sure that others are nourished, that I am nourished. Maybe I don’t care if I haven’t written anything that’s “finished”. Maybe I just write a little each day to nourish myself, and hopefully nourish a reader (if possible, but I’m not keeping my hopes up). So strange, this ambition to be a “writer.” So insignificant, secondary to keeping warm.

back again after a hiatus

Well, I’ve been gone for a while. On Christmas break, and then new years in LA. My hubby and I got ditched by all our LA friends with whom we had made tentative plans, but it ended up being okay because we partied at the last minute under a makeshift ball of tangled Christmas lights that was made to resemble a gimpy version of the ball in New York’s Time Square. We watched our ball go down at 11:55 pm PST on New Years Eve. It slid drunkenly down from its makeshift perch on the balcony of Hennesey’s tavern to the Hermosa Beach Pier, to the screeching of revelers. One thing struck me about being back in LA. Even though a bunch of people were partying in the street, it was all done very seperately. Everyone had their separate little bubble of friends and bubbles didn’t cross. Sort of like how people in the suburbs of LA drive around in their seperate little SUVs, sitting in their little hermetically sealed pods, side by side in grid-lock on the 405. Not to be judgemental about my home city, but is it just me, or is LA so much more isolating than the San Francisco Bay Area? Maybe it’s just modern times in general. People connect with the t.v., they buy things, they go out and party with their groups of friends, they drink, and they are really alone inside their own bubbles, trapped inside the prison between their ears.

One cool thing we did on New Year’s Eve during the day was get over to the Getty museum to see the new icon exhibit from Mt. Sinai. It was incredible. I recommend seeing it. It’s the first time these icons have ever travelled outside of the monastery, I believe, and the first time they have come to the “new world” for sure. They are amazing. My mom told me that when she went to see them, she ate at a nearby restaurant in Century City and the waiter told her that their was a group of monks from Sinai who were staying throughout the tour and would all go to the restaurant and eat together. Then they would go in after the exhibit was closed to the public and guard the icons, praying over them, etc. I haven’t been able to confirm this personally, but the idea that they would do this, to me seems incredible.

For the epiphany weekend (Jan 6), I went with my friend Ioanna to visit a newly built Greek-Orthodox monastery in the middle of the Sonora desert. It was an incredible experience. My mom met us there. I’ve been there three times and each time, the experience is one of intense purification, spirituality and what feels to be a kharmic pull of the essense of the universe to be guiding me along the path. We went to an all-night vigil in the dark from midnight until 6 in the morning. It was incredible. The monks there study in the Athonite tradition, and are mostly young men who were called to the monastery to become monks from various ethnic backgrounds. They all follow in the tradition of the Athonite monk who founded the monastery ten years ago. But they all basically operate in Greek. You walk into the walls and even though you are in the American Southwest, it’s as if you are in rural northern Greece. Everyone speaks Greek. The services are in Greek, their are Greek foods, goods, the ascetic life directly transplanted from Agion Oros, Mt. Athos. You live simply there. With absolutely no mirrors, no tv, no internet, no radio, and despite all that, you just don’t want to leave the monastery grounds for anything in the world.

There is such a charged energy surrounding the place. It feels as if a forcefield of prayer envleops you in a soothing fog. It’s as if you think all of these thoughts at once, your body’s entire essense vibrates. The positivity of the place makes it so that if you need to step outside the monastery to get anything, you can’t. You just don’t want to even go into the parking lot. They even host you up to ten days, and you can basically hang around as long as you don’t take pictures of the monks, and are quiet during the hours of 8pm and 2am, when everybody sleeps to get ready for the vespers which start at 2:30 in the morning.

If you go to the monastery with someone of the opposite sex, no matter what your relationship, don’t expect to see the person much until you leave. It’s separated by sexes, and conservative dress is required. If you’re a young woman, you have to wear the most unflattering clothes, and at first you feel like a freak, and you have to cover your head in a very unflattering way with a non-cute scarf the whole time. It kind of sucks at first, but by the end, it’s freeing not to have anyone look at you. It’s also freeing not to have to pass people and make banal small talk. If people talk to you there, they mean it. By the end of the experience, you are so blissed out, you feel so well-rested, that you go back into the world refreshed and as you emerge into the world, all your previous modern conveniences seem harsh. Television seems garish and grating at first, internet seems pointless. Radio is okay, somehow because somehow it’s non-intrusive and you are just floating by in a state of grace.

When I got back from the monastery I was so blissed out that it felt like I had taken a lot of tranquilizers except without the medicine-y after-effect. I was nice, mellow and chill and strangers at the airport were nice to me. I’ve been trying to work on during this pilgrimage there, my problems with anger. I blow up at so many people for seemingly little reasons. I have road rage constantly, or fight with the people in my day if things aren’t going my way. It’s not really all that much, but it can really build up, and some of the times I get angry when people really do legitimately messed up things to me. But I realized after this trip that anger is a pretty heavy weapon to be always carrying with you. It’s best left at home. But of course after I yelled my first f-off on as this guy was doddling along half-crossing the street in front of my car in a red-light, almost getting himself killed and not noticing, some of the peace wore off a bit. But I think it’s in general a good way to live, without anger. People are annoying in this world. But somehow if I let it go, I’m better off. (Oh, don’t get me wrong, I’m still the fiesty old guppy, here, always challenging misplaced and corrupt authority, but maybe sometimes it’s best just to enjoy the day and being alive.

ABC Meme

Yay! I’ve been tagged. Hooray.

A- Available or single? Nope.

B- Best Friend? Yes. One sleeping in the room next door(Ted), and one living across the bay (Kim)

C- Cake or Pie? Cake Cake Cake! I’m reminded of being 10 and inciting a cake riot with a bunch of screaming birthday party-goers at my 10th b-day party, as my mom and grandma and dad hid in the kitched from us screaming hellions.

D- Drink of Choice? Hmm. Limonatta. Or….if alchoholic…bloody mary (but sometimes it gets me)

E- Essential Item? pens all through the house, in the car, in my purse, in the bathroom, in the kitchen, bedroom, bookbag, etc.

F- Favorite Color? ooh. This one is so tough. I love so many colors. I love vermillion green, and irridescent orange, deep red, rust, maroon, purple, gold, silver, chestnut, turquiose.

G- Gummi Bears or Worms? gummy bears are fun to munch on road trips up the coast between LA and San Francisco but too many can make my mouth numb from all the sugar.

H- Hometown? Redondo Beach, CA

I- Indulgence? books, sleeping in, staying in my p.j.’s as long as humanly possible.

J- January or February? February. So much closer to spring time. And there’s that long weekend in the middle of it.

K- Kids and names? (none…but I’m sure my mother and mother-in-law have come up with a few, while conspiring at recent holiday parties together already)

L- Life is incomplete without? love.

M- Marriage Date? June 10, 2006.

N- Number of Siblings? big fat zero. yes, that’s right. I am a spoiled brat. and proud.

O- Oranges or apples? Oranges. but apply juice over orange juice.

P- Phobias/Fears? water, running out of air.

Q- Favorite Quote? One of them: “The poor seek food. The rich seek an appetite.” ~suprisingly serious fortune cookie

R- Reason to Smile? sitting on the back porch drinking coffee in the “morning”, feeling the sunlight on my back, listening to the birds in the garden.

S- Season? Summer.

T- Tag three people! Hmmm. Whoever is reading this. Yes, this means you, and you, and you. Don’t be shy. You are hereby tagged and dubbed night of the royal court of blogolicious memes.

U-Unknown fact about me. I’m very reclusive at times.

V- Vegetable you hate? Cauliflower. ewwwwww!

W- Worst habit? tardiness. what can you do, eh? swearing, tailgaiting, chewing gum too loud, etc.

X- X-Rays you’ve had? Teeth (horrible! my least favorite thing), the toe next to my pinky toe when I found out I broke it.

Y- Your favorite food? Roast chicken with manestra. Roast lamb with potatoes. bougatsa. (Geez…all so hardy. Well, it’s winter. I picked stick-to-your ribs kind of foods.)

Z- Zodiac? Aries the ram. Head strong and not necessarily good with finishing what i start. Chinese: the Monkey! oo-ooo-ah-ah.