bananarchist

the theme of my life

2011-11-28T11:24:00.000-08:00

From E.B. White's essay "A Report in Spring":

The stalks of rhubarb show red, the asparagus has broken through. Peas and potatoes are in, but it is not much use putting seeds in the ground the way things are. The bittern spent a day at the pond, creeping slowly around the shores like a little round-shouldered peddler. A setting of goose eggs has arrived by parcel post from Vermont, my goose having been taken by the fox last fall. I carried the package into the barn and sat down to unpack the eggs. They came out of a box in perfect condition, each one wrapped in a page torn from the New England Homestead. Clustered around me on the floor, they looked as though I had been hard at it. There is no one to sit on them but me, and I had to return to New York, so I ordered a trio of Muscovies from a man in New Hampshire, in the hope of persuading a Muscovy duck to give me a Toulouse gosling. (The theme of my life is complexity-through-joy.) In reply to my order, the duck-farm man wrote saying there would be a slight delay in the shipment of Muscovies, as he was "in the midst of a forest-fire scare." I did not know from this whether he was too scared to drive to the post office with a duck or too worried to fit a duck into a crate.

This is the author who also said, "All that I ever hope to say in books is that I love the world. I guess you can find it in there, if you dig around."

waltz for m

2011-11-16T14:36:00.000-08:00

The month has treated me well. I have time. There are few negative consequences when I stay up until dawn on a Tuesday recording a song as a way of telling somebody something I can't seem to say.

Waltz for M

We go on like a marching band
I think I would rather a waltz
Your sunset competes with the second hand
And earthquakes are everyone's fault

Why should we waste our time, talking this way, drawing lines in the sand?
I'd rather chase you home, on 19th at one, reaching for your hand

Must we do the electric slide?
I think I would rather a waltz
No one remembers the chorus line
And colliding is everyone's fault

Why should we waste our time, talking this way, drawing lines in the sand?
I'd rather watch you trace stars in the sky, movements I understand

The campus police want to start a fight
I think I would rather a waltz
Drinking with you on an autumn night
Our rupture is everyone's fault

beijing to san francisco

2011-10-18T18:49:00.000-07:00

Coming home today. Sad to leave a dear friend in Beijing, excited for home. Don't we travel to get a little homesick?

Yesterday on our way home from the morning trip to the market, for peppers, bitter melon and a pomelo, WF had us follow a detour to a patch of dirt next to a worn apartment building. Not something you'd ever seek, unless you were the type. She directed me to a low bush with two white flowers, and told me to put my nose in it. I inhaled and, just for a moment, lost myself.

How was it? she asked. I said, Very nice. My vocabulary for expressing pleasure is very limited.

She said, You say everything is very nice. Doesn't it smell like your first love?

I'm going to bottle the memory of that flower and that exchange and bring it home to share with you.

a conversation in chinese

2011-10-18T00:05:00.000-07:00

Between a semi-literate American learning to appreciate what she has (B), and an intelligent, curious Chinese yearning to experience what she doesn't (W):

W: I heard there is a law preventing people from camping on Wall Street, so the protesters have built cardboard houses to get around this law.

B: I don't know. That seems normal. The government can't stop that because of the freedom to give orations -

W: Speech. Freedom of speech.

B: - because of freedom of speech. It's very important to Americans. I've protested. Lots of people have. But police have other laws they can use to make it hard, like the camping law.

W: It's funny that even when protesting people follow the law so carefully. No camping, so the protesters don't camp. Freedom of speech, so the police must allow it. I'm impressed. In China, there are laws governing some aspects of life, but nobody follows them, and then there are no laws to govern what should be governed. You're not supposed to park on the street but everyone does anyway, and blocks traffic. You're supposed to be able to petition the government if you have a problem, but the government beats you up and throws you in the woods if you actually petition.

B: That seems [fumbling in dictionary] unpredictable.

W: There's a Confucian saying: 无所措手足. "Nowhere to put your hands or feet." He thought that if the laws weren't clear to people, or if the laws were not predictable, people would not know where to put their hands or feet. They don't know how to behave.

B: But the Chinese government is so powerful. Ferocious. If they wanted to stop people from parking their cars in the middle of the street, they could.

W: The Chinese government's number one goal is to maintain stability. Which means there are plenty of police to control what you're saying about the government, but none for enforcing parking.

B: I'm afraid to send emails to you about this because I don't know who is reading. Maybe we can create another language. So they can't read.

W: Chinese bloggers already do that. You know if you put on your blog "Communist Party," that blog will be taken down. So people write "GCD" [the pinyin acronym for Communist Party]. It's one way to get around it.

B: Do you think they monitor blogs?

W: Sure.

B: Yours?

W: Maybe.

B: There must be other people who aren't happy with this circumstance.

W: Of course.

B: So there's hope. You don't think it's possible to stay and change Chinese society?

W: Most people care about their finances, making money, not so much about human rights or changing society. China has been like this for thousands of years. I used to think it was possible to change but now I just want to immigrate.

B: Most people everywhere just care about making money. And what about the thing that happened in Tiananmen Square, with the students, in 1989? Did you learn about it?

W: Every year around June 4, security is tightened in Tiananmen Square. And I've read a few things about it on the Internet. And I've heard things. But it wasn't something we learned in school.

B: You don't know the famous photograph? The person, he was a student, in front of the thing that the army has, it's like a car, but it's huge and it rolls -

W: Tank?

B: Tank. You can't see the student's face. He's in front of four or five tanks. The tanks are lined up. The first tank goes right, the man goes left. Tank goes left, he goes right. He doesn't let them pass. They don't run him over because the international media was there. They were there because there was a conference with the government the same week. Everyone in the world was watching. You haven't seen the photo?

W: No.

B: The man represents freedom. To a lot of people.

W: It's the power of one person to stand up against an oppressive government. But I heard - didn't the tanks roll in anyway and kill a bunch of people?

B: Yes. Later that week.

W: What happened to the man?

B: The government didn't find him. There were lots of students behind him. He went into the group of students. I think they changed his clothes. They didn't find him.

W: America sounds like a very fair place.

B: I don't know if that's true. It has problems. Different problems from China. You can protest. And you can write what you want to write. And I suppose you know what the laws are and most people follow them.

W: I watched that movie "Twelve [Incomprehensible]."

B: Huh?

W: You know, people get in a room and talk about law.

B: What?

W: They help the judge come to a decision.

B: You watched "Twelve Angry Men"? Black and white movie, from the 1950s??

W: Yes. I was so moved. Americans really seem to care about how their decision affects another person's life.

B: It's an ideal. It's not reality. If it's real, if a juror doesn't like your face, they decide against you. Nothing stops that. People are people everywhere. There is prejudice in America. Are there juries in China?

W: No.

B: Would you like to serve on a jury?

W: I would love to.

update

2011-10-17T09:29:00.000-07:00

I promise I have been thinking the deepest of thoughts regarding philosophy literature art society film and culture, but let me just tell you about diarrhea which, with the assistance of some mysterious Chinese meds picked up at a pharmacy where I all I said was "你好，我拉肚子了" ("Hello, I have diarrhea") and then got a pack of pills with a diagram of a large intestine pushed at me, turned into three nights and a day of constipation, which let's count was ten meals plus lots of idle snacking mostly consisting of colon-plugging processed white flour-based Uighur products since that seemed most innocuous except one meal of noodles cooked only with half a pound of extremely hot peppers (portending pain on exit), of which I was blissfully unaware until the morning of day four, when blinding cramps colonized me and I had to abandon all my luggage in the train waiting room telling the woman next to me "Look at it!" not knowing if "watch" means "keep watch" in Chinese as it does in English, and sprint to first the women's room downstairs (closed) then the men's room (open but crowded with men waiting for the stalls, doors flung open, watched men shitting and crouching and smoking, felt out of place as 16 year old boy/31 year old woman, had to leave) then the women's room upstairs and suddenly empty four days of offerings to the fecal finger of fate. Do you know what that looks like? Atlantis. Layers of cities, almost distinct but mingled at the edges, each layer in a more advanced stage of decrepitude. Hot peppers an apparent specialty of one of the civilizations. A pale archaeologist might step through in knee-high waders and say: Was it plague that disappeared the primitive people? Or, they crafted prized copper urns yet buried their dead in formless mounds. Or, art and learning flourished in the halls of the great library, until the flood. It was the formation of sedimentary rock, God forbid an animal mislodge and become fossilized in a globe of not quite amber for posterity to unearth, examine, wrinkle a sensitive nostril at. I felt faint. Tears in the eyes. For a moment almost said fuck it and just sat in the squat. Grasped bottom edge of door instead. Panting. All better. Twenty minutes later boarded a train for a 35-hour ride to Beijing.

hipsters in xinjiang

2011-10-15T12:35:00.000-07:00

Two hipsters on my train to Urumqi. Really jarring to see floppy greasy hairstyles, dirty torn t-shirts, those cloth surfer shoes worn without socks, and to smell the failure to wash. Except for the tattoos and the skin color they could have been the peasants on the train - that's what earth-working poor people in developing countries wear, not just healthy wealthy young people from America who want to look laissez-faire. Which I thought amusing. Who cares how you want to express your soul in America. But why maintain your vanities in a country that reads hipster as peasant? For each other?

One of the army men I chatted with this afternoon noted that there were two American young men in his cabin. He was appalled at how dirty they were. "Their toes were blackened with dirt," he said. Then he called them 邋遢, which I had to look up. Oxford's Chinese-English dictionary says: "slovenly."

I appreciated the opportunity to learn new vocabulary.

majority minority

2011-10-15T12:26:00.000-07:00

I've been lucky to connect with new strangers almost every day I've been in China. Today on the train five army men mistook me for a sixteen year-old boy (so they later told me, when I confessed ovaries) and made me drink beer and eat sunflower seeds and talk politics and society for four hours. Yesterday on the train a man saw me reading an English book in the dining car and we talked politics and society for two hours. Day before that etc. etc.

People here talk to me like I'm one of them. By people here I mean Han Chinese people, the majority, the ethnicity one thinks about when one thinks "Chinese." And it's not a social position I've felt before. The majority. I'm not sure I like how it feels. Because I've been talking to Han Chinese people, who have been so generous and open-hearted and curious and warm to me - offers of food, assistance, companionship, advice; friendliness, helpfulness; questions and attentive listening; responses to all of my questions about Chinese politics and society etc. etc. -

But then in hour two of the conversations I start asking about Xinjiang. And Uighurs, the Muslim ethnic minority concentrated in Xinjiang. The full name of which is the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. And the anti-Han riots, the suicide bombings, the beheadings, the push for a Uighur state. Or, on the other side, the discrimination, the assimilation, the military presence, the de facto perhaps also de jure segregation.

Both the army man and the dining car man, when I asked, dropped their voices to whispers and looked around them. We were traveling by train through Xinjiang, and many passengers were Uighur. Then the dining car man said, "They're a little stupid." The army man said, "They're undeveloped, incompetent people." A woman earlier in the week had said, "They'll never be like us. They don't eat pork. They don't speak the language. They have to leave work to pray five times a day. How can we be expected to hire somebody like that?"

I don't want to make the people I spoke to seem like villains, because the picture is much more complicated than that. How fearful or hateful would you be if people of your demographic were being killed in your city for being people of your demographic? The Western press doesn't know which is the worse boogeyman, the Islamic terrorist or the Chinese government, so reporting about Uighur separatism doesn't have quite the same sanctimoniousness that reporting about Tibet has. And the dining car man saw multiculturalism as the driver of development. He pointed out that Shanghai you can see American, European, African, Middle Eastern, Russian faces everywhere, and that China needed more of the same. He quoted Confucius: "三人行必有我师." In literal translation, "If three of us are walking together, at least one among you can be my teacher." Meaning be humble, and accept that other people have things to teach you. But this is the man who also proposed that the only solutions to the Uighur problem are (1) let the Uighurs secede, which China will never do because of the natural resources in Xinjiang, or (2) assimilate the Uighurs completely so their culture disappears?

What I want to note is my discomfort with the us in the sentence "They'll never be like us." I'm rediscovering on this trip what I love about China and Chinese culture - including the traditional, education-hungering, hierarchy-respecting aspects and the reduced expectation of privacy, which make possible the familiarity strangers assume when probing me - but paradoxically I do not like that it is so clearly defined. Three thousand years of tradition can sure ossify a society's understanding of how a member should look, behave and believe. And I don't want to be part of a majority culture that demands a minority assimilate or go away, and until they do feels entitled to treat them as second class. The in-group, conspiratorial tone feels too much like the conversations I imagine white people have in bars and living rooms in America when there are no people of color around: "If they're going to come here, why can't they learn our language [and stop eating chicken feet] . . ."

I recognize the historical inaccuracies interlarding my thoughts here. Is it fair to say Chinese culture is a monolith? My surname more or less means "barbarians at the gate," because once it swept in from the northwest, pillaging on horseback, but now it is China's president and it shakes hands with Barack Obama. I don't understand historical patterns of migration and cultural diversity in China well enough to say the first part of that last paragraph. The second part stands, though. I'm just not interested in being us to anybody's them.

passages from between the acts

2011-10-13T20:36:00.000-07:00

The story of Between the Acts is very simple – it observes 24 hours in the lives of a few people in the English countryside. The patrician, Bart Oliver, his widowed sister Lucy Swinton, his son Giles Oliver and Giles’ wife Isabella’s are hosting at their home in Pointz Hall a pageant for the village. It is June 1939 and the eve of World War II. Melba Cuddy-Keane, the critic who wrote the introduction, says the novel “turns on a fundamental incongruity, questioning the relation between everyday life in an English village and momentous events occurring simultaneously on the world’s stage. What does it mean, the novel asks, to hold a village festival when the country is on the brink of war?”

To be honest, this book was very difficult for me to understand. Maybe because the details of the plot are meant to be confusing, and secondary to the multiplicity of voices that Virginia Woolf so skillfully moves between. The book is itself a pageant, and the subject of this pageant is the pageant playing out at Pointz Hall. I felt a lot of sympathy for Isabella in this scene where she can’t comprehend what is happening on stage:

There was such a medley of things going on, what with the beldame’s deafness, the bawling of the youths, and the confusion of the plot that she could make nothing of it.

Did the plot matter? She shifted and looked over her right shoulder. The plot was only there to beget emotion. There were only two emotions: love, and hate. There was no need to puzzle out the plot. Perhaps Miss La Trobe meant that when she cut this knot in the center?

Don’t bother about the plot. The plot’s nothing.

But what was happening? The Prince had come.

The note to this portion of the text observes that Woolf wrote, in letters, “[a work of literature] is not form which you see, but emotion which you feel.” The critic adds, “The documentation of detail, in building up impressions, leads the reader to emotional understanding.” Which is to say Between the Acts is an impressionist work, the individual phrases may seem like meaningless blobs of paint but taken as a whole they give you a cathedral.

Still, so many things to admire in the writing, in the individual phrases. Watch how she moves from a poetic, obscurantist, omniscient voice to the point of view of a boy, here pulling up a flower and then being startled by Bart Oliver’s Afghan hound and the Bart himself, holding up a newspaper to make a beak:

The little boy had lagged and was grouting in the grass. Then the baby, Caro, thrust her fist out over the coverlet and the furry bear was jerked overboard. Amy had to stoop. George grubbed. The flower blazed between the angles of the roots. Membrane after membrane was torn. It blazed a soft yellow, a lambent light under a film of velvet; it filled the caverns behind the eyes with light. All that inner darkness became a hall, leaf smelling, earth smelling, of yellow light. And the tree was beyond the flower; the grass, the flower and the tree were entire. Down on his knees grubbing he held the flower complete. Then there was a roar and a hot breath and a stream of coarse grey hair rushed between him and the flower. Up he leapt, toppling in his fright, and saw coming towards him a terrible peaked eyeless monster moving on legs, brandishing arms.

The boy bawls, and then Woolf moves seamlessly, within the page, to Bart’s thoughts on the boy: “Old Oliver raised himself, his veins swollen, his cheeks flushed; he was angry. His little game with the paper hadn’t worked. The boy was a cry-baby. He nodded and sauntered on, smoothing out the crumpled paper and muttering, as he tried to find his line in the column, “A cry-baby—a cry-baby.”

Consider the opening description of the library in Pointz Hall:

A foolish, flattering lady, pausing on the threshold of what she once called “the heart of the house,” the threshold of the library, had once said: “Next to the kitchen, the library’s always the nicest room in the house.” Then she added, stepping across the threshold, “Books are the mirrors of the soul.”

In this case a tarnished, a spotted soul. For as the train took over three hours to reach this remote village in the very heart of England, no one ventured so long a journey without staving off possible mind-hunger, without buying a book on a bookstall. Thus the mirror that reflected the soul sublime, reflected also the soul bored. Nobody could pretend, as they looked at the shuffle of shilling shockers that week-enders had dropped, that the looking-glass always reflected the anguish of a Queen or the heroism of King Harry.

I hope someday to have the confidence to write with this omniscient, judgmental voice. What backbone. This passage opens a new section. No indication of who the “foolish, flattering lady” who made the statements about libraries is. Then Isabella enters the room and there’s still no clue as to who first remarked on the library but Isabella is complicated by her association with the statements:

“The library’s always the nicest room in the house,” she quoted, and ran her eyes along the books. “The mirror of the soul” books were. The Faerie Queen and Kinglake’s Crimea; Keats and the Kruetzer Sonata. There they were, reflecting. What? What remedy was there for her at her age—the age of the century, thirty-nine—in books? Book-shy she was, like the rest of her generation; and gun-shy, too. Yet as a person with a raging tooth runs her eye in a chemist shop over green bottles with gilt scrolls on them lest one of them may contain a cure, she considered: Keats and Shelley; Yeats and Donne. Or perhaps not a poem; a life. The life of Garibaldi. The life of Lord Palmerston. Or perhaps not a person’s life; a country’s. The Antiquities of Durham; The Proceedings of the Archeological Society of Nottingham. Or not a life at all, but science—Eddington, Darwin, James.

None of them stopped the toothache.

And here’s another quick dip into the voice of another character, this time Giles Oliver getting irritated with the idea of entertaining strangers with a pageant at this point in European history:

Giles nicked his chair into position with a jerk. Thus only could he show his irritation, his rage with old fogies who sat and looked at views over coffee and cream when the whole of Europe—over there—was bristling like . . . . He had no command of metaphor. Only the ineffective word “hedgehog” illustrated his vision of Europe, bristling with guns, poised with planes.

I am so much happier when I read creative writing.

taste of hoof

2011-10-13T20:31:00.000-07:00

Janelle knocked on my door at 5pm to invite me to a quick bite with Michelle, Tai the Uighur man, and Patty, also a Uighur man. Tai wanted us to try a special Uighur dish. We walked around the corner of the hotel to a place that served what I had identified earlier as sheep lard heaped up with coiled sausages. Turns out it is not lard but lung, distended with a water and flour mix and then boiled or steamed in large cakes that only look like lard, white and soft and smooth. These cakes are cut into bite-sized pieces and submerged in a sheep-based broth and served with cuts of the sausage, which is the large intestine packed with rice and spices and very little meat. The sausage and the lung were innocuous enough – so much flour and rice that they didn’t taste like an animal product, just poor people’s protein-free nourishment – and they took on the unremarkable salty cilantro flavor of the broth. I nodded and mmmed and generally tried to seem like a gracious guest. Of course Tai would want us to like the special cuisine of his culture. But most disgusting was the sheep hoof I sampled. I was thinking that because I like chicken feet at dim sum I would find something redeeming about the sheep hoof too. But no. It was brought to us on a little dish covered in a plastic bag (to obviate the need for washing dishes, I think), the hoof and the first two joints above it, totaling about six inches of lower leg. It had been boiled until the bones disconnected and the skin and tendons sloughed off. There was no meat, just a few ounces of skin and connective tissue, so nothing for your teeth to take purchase on. The texture was first slimy and then gummy, so that everything stuck to your teeth. There were patches of black hair on parts of the hoof. I didn’t touch the hoof nail, didn’t feel the need to nibble on another beast’s keratin. It tasted so strongly of sheep meat, gamey and head-filling, except much more like armpit or crotch or something hot, sweaty, and inappropriate, perhaps because it was the closest part of the animal to the mud and shit and piss on the ground, or maybe just because the texture coated your teeth and mouth and throat and so the smell lingered after the swallow. I took a bite and decided I could take no more. I’m not usually squeamish, but I didn’t see why I should finish something that I felt so strongly negative about. I apologized profusely for my inability to finish and tried to make up for it by eating as much lung as I could take.

renming xi lu, kashgar

2011-10-13T06:32:00.000-07:00

I have fallen in love with this young Uighur woman who is assiduously mopping the second floor of this restaurant. Her hair is tucked into a flopping blue toque and her brows are knotted in concentration. So few people have come into this space in the two hours I’ve been sitting here, yet she draws her mop over the tiles, around the stools, under the benches. She can’t be paid more than pennies an hour. An American R&B song on the speakers is playing my heart: “Can I get closer? Can I get closer?”

I’m sitting at the window on the second floor of an antiseptic fast food restaurant in Kashgar, typing on my laptop, headphones plugged in, looking out over the roundabout where Renming West Road, Youmulakexia Road, and Kezigeduwei Road meet. It’s dusk, meaning 8 p.m. in the far west of China. Pleasant, warm, low pollution, Thursday, October, 2011.

The roundabout itself is a baseball field-sized manicured lawn with a topiary panel in red and yellow flowers in the shape of China, with adjacent panels spelling out surely a patriotic slogan in commemoration of Chinese Independence Day. The surrounding buildings are six to ten stories, office buildings, shopping malls, hotels. The building one across from me has faded into a lusterless blue but has a grandiose cupola up top and a 20’ by 20’ LED screen playing flashy, silent advertisements.

A line of lime-and-white cabs had clogged up the road for a spell, but now the road is clear for grannies on mopeds, workers steering moto-tricycles with one hand and holding up cell phones with the other, a woman with her feet up on the stepthrough to avoid the spinning pedals on her electric bike, minibuses, SUVs, sedans, and pedestrians to go in all directions on the X-Y plain. Every second is fifteen narrowly-avoided traffic calamities. There is an underground walkway lined with shoe and bag vendors, but just as many people opt to walk deliberately, carefully, across the crowded street.

On the wide sidewalk, lined with parked cars and mopeds, are policemen on bicycles with flashing blue and red lights, a young man of not more than 25 indifferently rocking swaddling in his arms, a dromedary of a schoolboy hauling his humpbag and twirling his identity card on a lanyard, six soldiers in camouflage walking in formation carrying riot shields and batons, a young woman in a black shirt with a white shawl buttoned at the neck hooking two fingers through a shopping bag and tossing it over her right shoulder. A shaggy young man in green sneakers smoking a cigarette while thumbing his phone. A six year old telling a four year old to hurry with a push. Two men, carrying identical blenders. Bottle Blondie with a teal sweater. Black Volkswagen reversing skillfully into a parking spot. Man crumpling a cigarette box and dropping it to the sidewalk. Old people, young people, in between people with that splay-footed, pot-bellied, proud way of walking. Mother in high heels holding baby who holds a plastic bag full of dates. Middle-aged woman walking slowly between cars, tracing a circle, and then standing with hip cocked, weight on one foot, hands clasped behind her back. Most people move much faster.

Two youngish women are wearing uniforms: blue collared button ups, black jackets, black pants. I’m focusing on the taller, larger one, who wears her hair down to mid-back and walks with a heavy gait. I’m wondering if with shorn hair she would be read as a man for the indelicate movements of her body and the breadth of her back. I’m wondering if she reads novels in bed, late at night, hugging a pillow. I’m wondering if they’re going to catch the number 10 bus going east. I’m wondering how many times people watching life on a busy street have watched me and then wondered how many times other people watching life on a busy street have watched them.

karakoram highway

2011-10-12T07:26:00.000-07:00

You’re in Kashgar, and you might as well tour the Karakoram highway, the passage to Pakistan. Nine hours there and back to Karakul Lake in a minibus. From the barrenness of Kashgar up to a boulder field with a gray opaque river running through it, past rust-colored, steep, furrowed mountains, to a huge gray plateau at 9,000 feet elevation covered in a layer of clay and water and surrounded by mountains made of white sand, then up to a black mirror lake at 10,000' with views of snow blowing off the peaks of the 21,000' Kunlun mountains behind it. Is the promise of the brochures. Put on a scarf.

Two hundred kilometers out of Kashgar to the lake. A stop in Upal to collect naan, tea and pomegranates. Coming up the road you first see the red foothills – iron. Copper too, says the driver. And the mining tunnels and the machinery, not much but enough to have presence. Behind the hills a mirage of snow peaks, like a fata morgana. The other passengers scrutinize the sky and say I don’t see it, but there it is, up there, floating above the rust hills. Everybody yearns to get closer. But first, a checkpoint, a soldier firing a rifle toward the hills, papers fluttered in the air, papers stamped, a face and an American passport scrutinized. The bureaucracy maintains the lines that say where China ends and Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Afghanstan, and India begin. Disembark, walk across a line, get back in the minibus, drive away.

The road winds. Brushes past overhanging rock walls. Ends suddenly, continues on gravel reroute. Five hundred workers died building it. They get a stone pillar marked with some words at the side of a road that is still at parts unpaved. The minibus pitches and yaws. It sweats up the hills. Everybody falls asleep or turns green. In the place of traffic cones, boulders are rolled into the street and painted with red and white stripes. An eighteen wheeler has plunged off the edge of a road. The crushed cab and cargo load is still there, a cautionary tale. The government or the driver’s family or whoever should be responsible does not have the wherewithal or the ambition to remove the wreck.

The minibus goes past boulders the size of refrigerators, trucks, houses. The houses are stacked up rocks mortared with pulverized rocks and water. Every few miles there are two such houses, and a goat, or a donkey, or a dozen sheep. The guide says more people live to be 100 in the mountains than they do anywhere else, but the long life is simple and lonesome. In the distance, the array of sixty red-roofed buildings? A settlement built for the mountain people. No word on whether it is occupied.

The other occupants – older, Chinese, friendly, protective – say: how old are you? Thirty-one? I would have guessed sixteen or seventeen. That’s a doll’s face. You look so young. America? I thought Chinese. That's a Chinese face, dollface. What do Americans think of China? What do Americans think of the depreciation of the U.S. dollar vis-à-vis the renmingbi? De-pre-ci-ation. You know, economic development? Development. Don’t you speak Chinese? What does it feel like to come from America to a country where every face is yellow? What kind of a bank does your mother work in? Does California have good beef noodle soup? Then why is there a fast food chain called "California Beef Noodle Soup" in China? Say “Michael Jackson” in English. What do you think of American education? Is it true that American children don’t have study habits? How could you not know what the Donghua cave paintings are? Can you see stars from the airplane if you fly at night? The men’s room is that direction. No - you’re a woman? I thought you were a man! Or, I couldn’t tell, and we guessed but – hmm! Really, I couldn’t tell!

Everybody smiles, it’s like you have four more parents, the curiosity and chatter never feels oppressive or probing, only familiar, and they invite you to dinner after the tour. They lean across your legs without asking to take photos. It's all very familiar.

The driver puts on the most inane and heteronormative music ever recorded that repeats for the next six hours of driving. Song #1, male lead: “Being a man is tiring / so tiring / everybody knows / woman is a rose / taking care of her tires me out / this is my punishment / my punishment.” Song #2, alternating male and female voices: “Pretty girl marry me, if you married somebody else I would so devastated / I’m a pretty girl, I’m going to be married / Pretty girl, marry me,” und so weider, ad infinitum, until the audience froths and reaches for the airsickness bag. Then the man who leaned over your legs leans over again and asks, “Hey, is that a male voice or a female voice?” It’s a high clear soprano, so you say, “A woman?” He says, “No! That’s a man! He’s very popular now.” That high flute of a falsetto makes you rethink every nasty thing you just spent the last hour thinking.

On the road, there are only mountains, boulders, rivers, pools of still water, and low, crushed grass. No trees. No explanations or only incomprehensible Chinese language explanations, so you are only left to imagine life on this section of connecting trade route to the Silk Road. The dirty ancients grubbing a passage over high, treacherous terrain. Bored, frostbitten prostitutes at the caravanserai fondling the unwashed parts of traders. How much measured in Hotan jade a strong central Asian steed traded for. Bandits descending from a furrow in the mountain to slaughter a merchant, steal a cargo of spices, break the axels. The watchful eyes of the mountain people, their lifetimes on horseback, in yurts, gnawing sheep. Mystics barefoot in caves. Talking monkeys. Flying carpets. No guide or curator or book cures these imaginations, so they just run on and on, like bandits descending from the mountain furrow, like central Asian steeds, like mining trucks undeterred by the red and white striped boulders on the road, for a moment flying free.

At the lake, you ride a horse in front of a Kyrgyz boy who slaps it into a gallop. You squeal and clutch at the saddle. The horse runs to the lake and dips suddenly, and you hear thhhup thhhup thhhup as it sucks up water. Karakul means “black,” but the wide, flat surface is today a robin’s egg blue that reflects a blurry striated double of the unfathomable peaks beyond it. You’re not there long and the structure of the adventure feels schlocky but the view is magic, and the imagination will last forever.

the things i carry

2011-10-12T07:06:00.000-07:00

My money is distributed among my possessions. 500 RMB tucked into a flap in my journal, another 1500 RMB and a passport and an ATM card in the pouch I tuck into my waistband, pocket change and a California driver’s license and a Chinese ATM card that doesn’t work in the wallet I keep buttoned in the back of my chinos. This way something gets nabbed and I’m not stranded.

This is a travel habit I developed a long time ago. When I traveled in Nepal – for seven weeks, on assignment to rewrite the Kathmandu and eastern Nepal sections of a budget travel guide – I kept 200 rupees between the insole and sole of my left boot.

The monarchy had just collapsed. A few hours before I arrived, the prince massacred his family. With an assault rifle. Or a pistol. Because he was crazy, drunk, or in love with a woman. Any which way, the banks were closed at the airport. Most of the airport was closed. I tried to pay for my bus ride to Thamel with an American dime. There were noon curfews for the next three days. A guesthouse accepted my residency and fed me on the promise of future payment. When I finally got my hands on Nepali money, I stuffed some into my shoe.

The last ten days I was there, I rode buses an average of thirteen hours a day, moving between towns in a hurry to get the last of my itinerary researched: Ilam, Shivagunj, Biratnagar. Usually it was four or five hours on a bus in the morning, two hours investigating sleeping and eating and transport options at the first stop (“How much for a single room? A double? A dorm? What time do you open? Close? How much for dahl bhat? How many buses leave per day for Dakshinkali? How long does it take? How much? Danyabad, namaste.”), then another few hours on a bus to the next stop, where I’d eat and find a hotel for the night.

Sometimes I called my parents and savored every second we talked. Sometimes my editor called, sometimes to say, We lost a researcher, Peru, overnight bus, cliff, launched through the window. Reception was sometimes awful but what came through was enough to get the picture.

The longest bus ride was 19 hours. My strategy was to remain dehydrated and almost motionless on the bus so that I would not need to pee, and then chug a few liters of water at night, when I knew I had consistent access to a bathroom. For the most part it worked, except it failed on the longest ride, and I found myself frantic during a five minute pit stop, unable to locate a bathroom, desperately needing to pee. I ran around a corner and pulled down my pants in the weeds beside a building, sprayed my boots, and then ran back to the street to see my bus pulling away. I sprinted after it screaming. It stopped after a block.

So I kept money in my boot. Just enough to get a hotel room for a night and a bus ticket back to a place I could get help. I never had to use it, but it was reassuring to know it was there.

By then I had dumped most of my possessions except a slim shoulder bag in which I kept my necessities: (1) the 100 pages of copy I was to research and rewrite to send back to my editor and the scissors and gluesticks I used to prepare my edits (such were the primitive ways of 2001), (2) photocopied pages of the Rough Guide and Lonely Planet for cross-reference, (3) my journal, (4) a pair of underwear rolled into a knot, (5) a toothbrush rolled into a bandana, (6) bug spray, (7) a golf pencil with four feet of duct tape wound around it, (8) a yard of 3mm rope, (9) hand sanitizer, (10) an umbrella, (11) a long-sleeved shirt, (12) a plastic water bottle crushed to the size of the water level within, (13) a cassette player, and bootleg tapes of the Rolling Stones, Everything But the Girl, and Massive Attack, and (14) a novel – probably Virginia Woolf also, as it was in Nepal that I learned to love reading her writing when traveling.

Other necessities I kept closer to my body. I wore extra-large convertible pants that happened to be on 90% discount at an outdoor outfitter store (the hem dragged under my heels; the waistband pleated when I drew my belt tight); a sports bra, and a bright yellow t-shirt with cat’s paw prints and English words across the chest. My right front pocket was for tissues, right rear was for a gaffer tape wallet containing only cash, left rear was for a small spiral bound notebook and mini pen which I used to sketch, record stray thoughts and document the items I spent money on each day. It was about $6 a day on food, travel and accommodations, slightly more if I bought batteries or novels – Nepal is a very poor country. I kept a debit card and cash and my passport in a waistband pouch. I also in the pouch was a slip of paper on which I had written my parents’ phone numbers, my passport number, and my own name. In addition to the shoulder bag, I had a handbag in which I kept an extra t-shirt, extra pairs of underwear and socks, flip-flops, three extra novels, and my Larium pills. I kept the second bag mostly to have something to leave on bus seats when I needed to designate a spot, since it was filled with worthless things and I would not be devastated if it were to be stolen or left behind.

I could pack light because I was not in the habit then of showering or changing my clothes. I washed myself fewer than ten times in the 51 days I was in Nepal, and was perfectly unable to understand why dirt and dead skin rolled up in little tapered lines when I drew a finger across my neck. Some of the people who knew me in those days still think I have this attitude toward personal hygiene, but it feels like a very long time ago.

headache, diarrhea, impatience, kashgar

2011-10-11T05:55:00.000-07:00

Arrived Kashi 11:48am. Spent 45 minutes roaming to and fro at the train station, trying to get to post office 100 yards away had to walk quarter mile around toll booth and back and then again to return to train station. Because there were police every ten yards forming a cordon. Is that normal? It felt scary, like the last moments of a regime or something. But what I do I know about what that feels like. Had to wait in line for train tickets back to Urumqi. Angry Uighur police officers said, “You didn’t hear what I said? Wait in line!” then pushed me. I was scared that something was going to go violent and I wouldn’t have control of it. Very glad to pick up my train ticket, get in a cab, and go to town. Didn’t understand lone boy furiously digging up sandpile. Severely dilapidated buildings with severely dilapidated pool tables out front. Found hotel. Room smelled like feet and/or diapers. Book day trip to Karakul Lake. I wonder if I’m going to get very sick tomorrow, with this headache tonight and the 0' to 10,000' back to 0' change in altitude tomorrow and the diarrhea. I'm leaving destinations in my toilet bowl. This morning: the Korean peninsula. Wonder if this is God's way of pointing me to the next adventure - like Carmen Sandiego! A clue via travelers' diarrhea about the next place once should go to get travelers' diarrhea. T.'s story about getting an icy IV in Xinjiang comes to mind. Thought about women, drunk yahoos, yobs. The police state. Police and PLA presence is a lot more demonstrative here. PLA walking around with assault rifles. When have assault rifles in the hands of a police force ever had effect? DC cops carried assault rifles into the Metro after 9/11. Why? So that they could kill off whoever the suicide bomber didn’t kill in a hail of bullets intended for the perp? Bought a bagel then ate a burger and an egg tart in a fast food joint and watched a father play with a child. Adults engage a lot more with kids here. Generally. And kids wear pants with a slot up the crotch so their naked asses are revealed, so they can piss and shit right on the street instead of having diapers. Which made me realize that the onesies I bought Wu Fei are the dumbest thing to bring ever. Wandered around old Uighur town. Into music store. I am going to buy an instrument before I leave, I know this, the pretty longnecked one with a snakeskin drumhead. Found my way back to bing guan. Paid for tour tomorrow. Wandered out again. Walked slowly. Past kids getting out of school. So much to think about. Traffic patterns – opporutnitistic, just go whenever there is a hole for you to pass through. Career through might be better word. Death within inches everywhere. Made me think about that fool of a journalist and his description of Indian traffic as “human ballet,” as if there was a dog ballet or donkey ballet or any other ballet that is not human. Why do I find the memory of that man so contemptible? His toothsome privilege, perhaps? His self-promotion? Then to Renming Gongyuan (old people doing drumming calisthenics), Dong Hu (pretty, empty, dusty pollution, old workers yelling at each other while trying to hang up big red lanterns along the promenade). Walked to bazaar. So much crap everywhere. Maze-like. Rows of stores. Negotiated for and bought backpack to look more like Chinese school boy. Walked back through old town. Felt like Nepal. Dust. Broken down everything. Men sitting in front of their crappy broken store fronts working over anvils, ding ding ding, making hinges and axe heads and tools. Kids playing in dust and trash heaps. Man with pickaxe picking down a brick wall. Bricks and scrap everywhere. This is why 20,000 people die when there are temblors. The houses are thousand year old messes of shit held together by fix-its and scrap lumber. Motos and cars zipping by, grazing me. Honk honk honk honk. Most of the time, I don’t get a second glance. Thank God. But sometimes I did get the face-chest-face glance. So much of my energy I realized is looking at other people to see how they will look at me. Piles of lumber, of wool. Behind the man with the lathe, a thousand cylindrical dowels waiting to be shaped into bedposts. Wool being fed into a machine to turn it into – thread? Four sheep skinned, hung by their legs, butcher hacking off pieces. Wasps flocking around candy/sugar seller. Carpets. Rows and rows of carpets. Plastic sacks of walnuts, almonds, peanuts, saffron, hot chilis, spices, dried persimmons, raisins, beans – everything. I’m afraid to buy anything lest I mistake a prayer rug for a table runner. Two dozen people squatting in the street next to vendors eating steaming bowls of something. Tried not to step on a man going down in underground pedestrian walkway. Food: a stack of lard and on top of that a coil of sausage. You point and he hacks off a piece. Lots of shao kao kebabs. Warm dead fish hanging over the edge of a plate, hacked off by the piece to be fried in front of you. Candied cakes of almonds and sesame seeds and walnuts topped with raisins. Appetizing-looking golden baked buns that I bought two of that turned out to be filled mostly with sheep fat. Disgusting after two bites, I fished out the lard with a finger and tried to eat the bun which was tasty, but still my mouth was waxed with mutton lard afterward and I felt queasy. I sucked yogurt through a straw also. Dinner was suoman again in a Uighur restaurant, but it came not as pulled noodles but more like fan-shaped pasta. Suoman is tomatoes, bell peppers, onions, some chopped green, peppers, pepper. Sort of pasta like actually, but the flavor is a bit saltier and spicier. I think mine had beef but then I came across a piece I chewed for a full minute before realizing it must have fallen off the rubber tree. I swallowed it. So many sights to behold and thoughts to process. Uighurs mostly. Not a lot of Chinese. Uighur men ogling a bosomy foolish Chinese girl with dyed blondish hair who rode on a camel next to the mosque and had photos of herself taken. Most women covered up – scarf halfway over hair – some with kerchiefs draped over their heads, some with more formal scarf with eye slit. Seems pointless when there are hussies wearing short skirts too, both Uighur and otherwise. Lots of kids eating popsicles. Why don’t kids wear helmets if China’s so fussy about only having one kid and everyone puts all their hopes on that one kid? Or maybe Uighurs are permitted to have as many as they want. Just had to stop typing for half hour to sit on the toilet and have diarrhea. Uhoh tomorrow’s not going to be a good day. Knew I should have stopped at CVS on the way to SFO and gotten anti-diarrheals. I can’t remember other images from today I wanted to remember. Weird shit. I felt like I was in Indiana Jones. I felt like I was finally where I wanted to be as an 8 year old captivated by adventure stories. Now I need a quest. I need something to happen. Poof.

urumqi to kashgar by train

2011-10-11T05:44:00.000-07:00

The first five hundred kilometers of the journey from Urumqi to Kashgar took ten hours.

So said the man who shared my cabin on the train. He had the berth opposite mine, the mirror image of my wide padded bench, upholstered in a pink patterned fabric, with a coat hanger and a luggage rack fit for a child’s schoolbag at one end and a table at the other, near the window, that swung up on a hinge and bore an unhemmed tablecloth and a Thermos for our shared use. Small speakers were embedded in the corners of the cabin. These played a continuous stream of music, entertainment, announcements. I didn’t realize there was a way to opt out until I saw, in the thirteenth hour of the trip, the man opposite me turn a dial over his head that trebled the volume of an entertainment show in which every phrase the host uttered was followed by a cartoonish sound effect, the boinga-boinga of wolf eyes bulging, a slide whistle dropping a register, the ka-ching of a till closing a sale. We were also provided with pillows and blankets, and switches to control the overhead light and the ceiling fan.

The man said the landscape we traveled through did not permit travel at faster than 50 kilometers an hour because of the winding climb through the mountains between Turpan and Hejing. The train took us first in the wrong direction, east to Turpan, across the barren landscape I had crisscrossed earlier in the week, gray gravel stretching in every direction to the horizon. The sun must kill everything, for there was nothing on the ground except that gray gravel, and electrical poles running parallel to the train tracks a few hundred meters away, and occasionally a windfarm or an oil derrick and the trucks and gravel paths that serviced them. No tuft of green or side of flesh; energy harvested from the land could fuel life in a big city, far away, but could do nothing for life here. For long stretches there was not even topography to break up the monotony. Just gravel, gravel, gravel…

After Turpan, this moonscape went on another few hours. I alternated between reading the Virginia
Woolf novel I could barely understand, at a pace to match our unhurried passage through the mountains, also out of necessity rather than leisure, because I found the multiplicity of voices around the pageant at Pointz Hall so difficult to follow, especially over the stream of Chinese and Uighur babble from the cabin speakers; listening to electronic music; and sleeping. On occasion I would look out the window and find that nothing had changed. Once there was a gravel berm running alongside the tracks. Another time we passed hundreds of giant white whirligigs – I couldn’t fix an exact number because they faded into three-fingered apparitions as they approached the dusty horizon and then disappeared altogether. I stood in the throughway at the end of my car and did calisthenics – squats, lunges – while we passed them. Yet another time there was a fence that carried on for miles, but large sections of it lay flat against the ground. The Xinjiang sun is too passionate, too sideways, too wan, too something, maybe because its diffusion through the hot dust blown in the air or because of the decision of the Communist state to give the 4,000 mile breadth of China only one time zone, unremarkable for the big cities clustered in the east but one that gives the far western border a mid-autumn dawn at 8:30 a.m. and sunset at 9 p.m. The quality of light made me feel especially alienated; or heightened somehow; or I am just a traveler, and everything looks irregular to my eyes, even the plain vents on the ceiling and the plain booths in the dining car, and I can be trusted only to absorb sensations with my mouth slightly open but not to comprehend.

Around this time, I attracted the attention of the man opposite me by writing in my journal. I saw him looking. Then he leaned across his berth and scrutinized the words in my spiral-bound book. “What language is that?” he asked. “English,” I said. He looked at my face, puzzled. We had already gone through the niceties in Chinese: where are you going, what are you doing, what time does the train arrive, what kind of work do you do on the railroad, I’m a tourist, I’d like to learn about the relations between Uighurs and Han Chinese people in Kashgar, where is Aksu, how does one get to Karakul Lake, would you like to share my golden raisins? Hadn’t I had this conversation a dozen times since arriving in Urumqi? I said I was American.

It gives me pleasure to no end to be mistaken for a Chinese citizen. It’s what makes travel in China so unique for me. All this time I have fixated on passing as a man, I have forgotten to write about passing as Chinese. I blend in, and blending in lets me eavesdrop and participate in activities with locals and walk down the street unmolested by other people’s curiosity – luxuries an international traveler in China doesn’t always have. I look the part: my stature and broad shoulders aren’t as anomalous here as they are in the south or in Taiwan, where people are smaller, or perhaps I am just registered as an invisible teen boy. My unusual clothes are not that far out of the range of reason. I also sound the part: I am fluent enough, at least in the first ten minutes of conversations one has with strangers, and China is linguistically diverse enough that my accent is just understood as a Zhejiang flavor. It is until conversation goes deeper and my mind draws blanks that I have to confess my citizenship. Please explain, sir, what you mean by something something law in America, because my speech bears a blush of intelligence but my language comprehension is actually like Swiss cheese – no, like Swiss cheese which has been first melon-balled then jackhammered and then chopped to pieces and half the pieces thrown to the camels in the Xinjiang desert – and then after a comedy of circumlocution the open-mouthed party understands that the man opposite her is asking about employment law in America.

I had to show my passport to get into an Internet café a few days ago, which caused this conversation between me and the man and woman attending the cash register:

Woman: She’s American.
Man: You look Chinese.
Me: I’m a Chinese person born in America.
Man: What? When did you move there?
Me: I was born there. I’m a Chinese person born in America.
Man: So you have a green card?
Me: No. I’m a citizen. You’re holding my passport. I’m a Chinese person. I was born in America.
Woman: So you’re – half Chinese?
Me: No, my family is from Zhejiang. I’m all Chinese. But I’m American. Look at the passport.
Woman: Yeah, because you look all Chinese.
Man: When did you move back here?
Me: I never lived here so there’s nothing to move back to. I’m traveling. I’m Chinese. I’m American.

I had also called the woman “xiao jie” when trying to get her attention. She was ignoring me for the chat window open on her computer. I understand xiao jie to be a polite way to address a young woman, like “miss,” or “ma’am.” She looked up in shock. Later I learned that xiao jie means “prostitute” in Xinjiang.

Another conversation, with a woman selling me postage-prepaid postcards:

Me: Can these be sent to America?
Woman: I don’t know. Who do you know in America?
Me: I’m American.
Woman: Wah! You seem Chinese.
Me: I am Chinese. I’m an American-born Chinese. My old home is Zhejiang.
Woman: What’s America like?
Me: A lot like China.
Woman: Which is better, your country or China?
Me: Well, I’m Chinese, so China is my country too, isn’t it?

She beamed. I beamed. Then I paid probably three times what those postcards were worth and we went on our merry ways.

Handling other people’s cognitive dissonance is still fun and not yet tedious. People are so curious about America. Maybe it’s rare to probe an American traveler who looks and speaks Chinese and is willing and able to engage in long conversations about the difference between America and China. Once I opened the door with the man opposite me on the train, he had so many questions: What do Americans think of China? Do Americans drink hot water, like Chinese people, or do they prefer cold water? Is it true there are laws governing every aspect of life in America? How much does a car cost? A Toyota Yaris? A Jeep? How much is a bottle of water? A meal? How much does an average household need to earn to live comfortably? Isn’t law a difficult and prestigious profession? How old are you? Are you married? Do Americans like peanuts? Are there deserts in America? Can you see sights like these? We would sit in silence for hours – me preoccupied with Virginia Woolf, him listening to the radio program – and then he would reopen the conversation with a question starting “In America . . .”

Questions others have asked me: What is it like to study abroad in America? Do Americans consider having the number of children they want a human right? Do all Americans treat each other fairly? Are all taxi drivers in America black? In America, if a rich person runs over a poor person with their car, can they get away with it? Because in China they can.

And I ask in return: What do Chinese people think about America? What is the relationship between Uighurs and Han Chinese in Xinjiang? Is it safe? Have the bombings kept Chinese tourists away? Do people speak putonghua in Kashgar? What do you think about not being able to get on certain websites? Do you trust the news? Do you trust your government? Do you read blogs? How do you say “bleak and infertile land” in Chinese? Is it lonely to live in the countryside? Are those camels being raised for eating or riding? What does camel meat taste like? What kind of work do you do? At what age do you retire? Does the government provide libraries, hospitals, and free primary schooling? How is your life going to change once your wife gives birth to you child? Are you afraid of the change? How does one get a bus to Karakul Lake? And would you like to share my golden raisins?

He did. The man opposite me gave me yogurt and I gave him golden raisins and roasted peanuts. The later left a circumference of husks fluttering around the trash bin.

Before we reached Hejing, that landscape started to rise. Life, too – a ten-foot wide river wound near the tracks for miles, and alongside there were stands of birch and elm trees, very small settlements, land that had been furrowed, the occasional boy on a motorcycle – but the view was still mostly monochromatic, as the land was brown-yellow and the leaves on the trees had turned yellow for the season. The homesteads ran right up to the base of black granite mountains that rose hundreds of feet steeply, all rock, no growth, mountain after mountain overlapping into a range. We went through tunnels that plunged us into darkness for five minutes at a time; I knew because I would set Between the Acts down and do timed plank exercises in the dark, on my padded plank, while waiting for my reading light to return. Just before Kurla, it began to snow.

My preoccupations were few but they felt rich. I read my book and underlined passages I thought skillful. I wrote in my journal. I turned from side to side when lying in one position too long felt hot. I listened to electronic music, because I needed ambient noise to drown out the cackling hosts of the radio programs, or because it was easy to fall asleep to the repetitiveness of the music, or because it reminded me of a very late night I spent with an architect very far away. Ooonce ooonce ooonce goes the music: then I doze. I looked out the window. I did squats in the throughway, totaling four hundred over the course of the day. I wandered up and down the cars and noted where people were playing cards, where men stood to smoke, where the Uighur boys entertained themselves making faces at me and clomping around in their mother’s high heels. What if there had been hard sleeper tickets left instead of only soft sleepers? I imagined how I would cope penned in six bunks to a six by six foot space, with another person’s legs dangling in my face the entire night.

Then there was the bathroom. I had had a delicious but ultimately regretful honeydew melon the night before my trip. My bowels liquefied instantly – not exaggerating, the moment I swallowed my first bite, noises like muffled fireworks started to sound from my abdomen. So I spent some time on the train in the closet squat toilet. I had a regimen: button wallet into back right pocket to prevent disastrous loss of important documentation and ATM cards to the hole that emptied directly on the tracks; stuff tissues into front pocket, soap into back left pocket; change from slippers into hiking boots for courage and protection; trundle to end of car; wait in line; close and lock door behind me; square stance over squat, pull down pants; clutch sides of closet; attempt not to piss into my pants or onto my shoes; attempt not to touch shit-encrusted scrub brush hanging inches from my face; empty bowel explosion; attempt not to press my own fingers against my own dirty asshole while using palimpsestic facial tissues to wipe debris from bowel explosion; exit closet; wash hands in the washroom; return to cabin, remove hiking boots, and eat Uighur bread and peanuts with my hands. Looking forward to killing the parasites that are surely eating my insides with toxic Western medicine as soon as I return. Strangely, despite all of the wet surfaces, the squat toilet smelled very strongly of artificial oranges.

The man opposite me left at six this morning at Akesu. I never learned his name. A dour woman came to take his place. I have not offered her golden raisins.

Then we were in another sort of desert – not gray gravel anymore, but tan sand dotted with bunches of scrub. Long, low, flat, all sand to the horizon.

At 8, I ate a meal of rice porridge, mixed pickled greens and peanuts, and a hardboiled egg in the dining car. The man who handed me my meal through a slot in the kitchen wall did not look Chinese – he had the pale skin, dark hair, and big, coarse features of a central Asian race. He peered at me through the slot and said, “Take your meal, champ.” Today I’m wearing a sports bra, and I’m glad the squat toilets are unisex because I wouldn’t know which to choose. I would say breakfast was disappointing, but I never had expectations that it would be anything but watery slop with cold amuse bouches. I only went because I was brainwashed by the morning broadcast, a minute-long loop extolling the health benefits of eating breakfast (preventing headaches, feeling energetic, tasting delicious rice porridge pickled vegs eggs) that reminded me of the busybody public service exhortations that feel so typically Chinese, like my cab driver in Urumqi telling me that travel alone was boring and pointless and I would killed by a bus and nobody would know, so why didn’t I find a friend or a partner to travel with?

We are now at the penultimate station. The ticket taker came by with the news. There are structures and cornfields. We must be nearing Kashgar.

tian chi (heaven lake) by tour bus

2011-10-11T05:19:00.000-07:00

In the morning, I woke in darkness at 7:30 a.m. and did core exercises lackadaisically on the bed while reading the introduction to Between the Acts. I’m glad I took the time to read the criticism first, for context, because I am scared of being too stupid to understand Virginia Woolf’s later works. At 8:50, I went to wait for the bus tour to Tian Chi. On the way to the bus I ate a half dozen pork baozi and two hardboiled eggs and their shells (peeling problems) and bought a half pound of mac nuts for munching on the road. The mac nuts helped me befriend the woman sitting next to me, a retiree from Jiangsu visiting her son for the week. She was my companion for the rest of the day. We chatted about blah blah blah – tourism in Xinjiang, the prices of things, how rude Uighurs are to Han people in Kashgar, all the things Chinese people on tour can talk about. None of her comments betrayed any particular assumption about my gender, though she must have heard the tour guide call out my Chinese name. It’s an outdated, unmistakably feminine name. Perhaps an equivalent name in English would be Victoria, or Betty Lou, or Esmerelda. Then she referred to me later as a xian sheng. Mister. Very confusing. [Mosquitoes are biting every inch of my face - Internet cafes aghhhhhhhh what I won't do to serenade you by blog]

On the hour and a half drive there, our tour guide stood at the front of the bus, facing the passengers, and spoke into the microphone a mile a minute. I would barely have understood her even if she had spoken slowly, but with their speed her words were unable to make more than a gentle water lily's impression in the dark pond of my brain. I caught a couple of declarations – about the color of Uighur mens’ hats, and how traveling in Xinjiang for Han Chinese people was as good as traveling overseas, because one could see blue eyed and light haired people within one’s own borders. At a rest stop, the tour guide began collecting money from passengers for some huodong or another, and I learned that my Chinese understanding had failed to locate the key points in the tour guide’s speech. I handed over my money not knowing what it was for.

It was a day of partial understanding. The confusion deepened after we entered the Tian Chi park, which, like many national parks in America, was enormous and required a vehicle to see in full. The land turned from Xinjiang bleak into a mountain range with steep slopes covered in golden dust and stands of pines, with vertical granite outcroppings every quarter mile or so. Behind these slopes were mountains that must have inspired mystics, 16,000 foot peaks with snow blowing off at the top. Again the strange quality of Xinjiang sunlight made this landscape feel coiled with potential. We got up to six thousand feet or so. Our bus driver honked to scatter mountain goats that had wandered onto the street.

All this time our tour guide prattled on. So familiar – the busload of obedient tourists nodding along to the words of a knowledgeable Chinese guide. Sometimes I think these guides contemptible, snake-oil salesmen – so much of the industry depends on the tour guide pushing customers to buy shit from the vendors they force us to patronize – but often the contempt will soften into gratitude and eventually feelings of affection and then desperate hunger for parental validation. I couldn’t have figured out the logistics to visit Tian Chi on my own, and I worried most of the day that my tour would leave me behind and strand me in the alpine hinterland, so our guide started to represent salvation for me. The tour made me wonder how I could communicate this experience, understand as I do, not totally as an outsider but not as an insider either, with affectionate contempt. It’s very Chinese. Do I want my children to have this experience, even though I was so bored with the form as a child myself, simply because I want to transmit this aspect of my culture?

Our first stop was billed as a geography and cultural center. The tour guide led us into a windowless classroom that was empty except for forty seats, a mural-sized photo of Tian Chi, four or five glass jars of herbs, roots, and mushrooms, and a big chart depicting all of the energy flow spots on the hand, with little illustrated organs superimposed showing which parts of the hand corresponded with the liver, spine, heart, etc. A broad woman in a white lab coat entered and spoke slowly about the importance of Chinese medicine and the herbs found on the mountain. She said that today, and today only, they were offering free consultations with a Chinese doctor: there are only four spots left; who would like to take them? Four people from my tour immediately leapt to the door. The woman in the white lab coat peered through the curtain blocking the door, and said, Now there are four more spots! Who would like those? Another four leapt up. I waited until everybody had leapt up and left for their consultations before snapping a discreet photograph of the hand-energy chart, and then wandered around the next hall, where there were dozens of bored sales people ready to offer plants as medicine to whatever fool was willing to buy. I left. Outside, I attempted to bargain for drinking game dice (the faces said things like “Drink two glasses!” in Chinese) with a hawker, but he refused to budge and I refused to buy.

The next stop was a yurt. Kazakh. Dancers. Tried on traditional clothes. Ate some of their extremely stale food. The dancers seemed to hate us. The tour guide told us to go pee in the woods. She said wait by the apple seller. Nobody was buying apples.

Then we went to the temple and climbed the 300 steps to eternal health. I thought the man who led us through the temple was so serious and knowledgeable. He spoke like my imagination of a Shaolin monk trainee. He told us how to respect the space and what the bagua meant. He gave us silk scarves to wear while in the temple. We learned how to bow. Right thumb clasped in left hand. Saw the white tiger, blue dragon statues; human forms with the animal form embedded in the forehead. I was very curious. People bowing three times holding up bedroll-sized incense sticks. I wanted to hold the weight. I wanted to ring the refrigerator-sized bell. But then he led us to more snake oil! First a room where today, and today only! (again! Today is the greatest day I've ever known!) there was some sort of a man in Tang Song Ming or some very old dynasty monk getup who asked us our birth years, said some words about our horoscopes that I didn’t comprehend, sprinkled our palms with water with a brush made of drooping leaves, whipped a horsetail flog over our heads (it touched my hair) and then directed us to stalls with wise men. We were to bring a question in our hearts to these wise men. I thought very seriously about it and my question was a variation of the question I asked A.'s tarot cards; today’s question was “Will I become the person I know I am capable of being?” The answer is obviously yes, don't need a yahoo in a monk suit to tell me this. We were instructed not to say hello, goodbye, or thank you, only to utter some mystical words that I only caught a few phonemes of. It all felt so convincingly ritualistic I wasn’t aware even then that they were running a scam. My wise man asked my birth date, month, and year, and wrote these three numbers on a piece of paper, then wrote “300 600 900” underneath. As instructed, I said “Wooloomooloo!” instead of hello. He kept saying things to me I didn’t understand at all in a very, very serious tone of voice, as he was telling my fortune, and then asking me, at the end of each very serious incomprehensible phrase, “Do you understand?” And I’d say: “Yes.” Then, “Wooloomooloo!” After four such exchanges I started to think the situation so ridiculous – him saying very life-changing things and me not comprehending a word but nodding yes, yes I understand, wooloomooloo – that I started to giggle, then tried to twist my face into a grimace of seriousness rather than a wide toothy grin, which only made “ssss ssss ssss” sounds come from my mouth, which made me feel even more ridiculous. I could not stop giggling until the man asked if I was ready to pay. Having not understood anything, I didn’t know what I was to pay for, so with great embarrassment, I took out my wallet and dropped a ten yuan bill in to the slot marked for donations. The wise man’s eyes bulged out at me and he underlined the numbers he had written under my birthday: “300 600 900.” I understood then that I had three levels of sooth to be said, and what I would get would correspond with the amount of yuan I was willing to part with to hear it. I backed away with my palms held up and said, “No!! Don’t want!!” and left the room. I heard the man spitting on the ground after I left.

Then I wandered around Tian Chi. We were free of the tour guide for an hour. That was nice. Pretty. Then foolish Brian compared it unfavorably to the Sierras. Back on the bus, more chatting with the retiree, fatigue, hotel, street food ordered in travel-special style (“What do want?” “Whatever that is [pointing]” “We don’t serve that anymore” “Okay that [pointing]” “Do you want it cooked with blingee blongee or bloop blap?” “[not comprehending] Sure,” bowl of surprise placed before me ten minutes later, 10 kuai goodbye), disgusting Internet café.

turpan to urumqi by bus

2011-10-11T05:06:00.000-07:00

After the tour, I walked the half mile from Tulufan Bing Guan to the bus station and bought the next ticket out of Turpan. In the crush of people, bags, and onlookers in the parking lot, I boarded the wrong bus and was shouted off by the rightful ticket holder a few minutes later. I took a few minutes outside that bus to repack my bags but it was tricky trying not to let anything touch the ground, the many darkened circles indicating dried phlegm or worse. There were also potholes full of opaque gray liquid; anyway, not a ground upon which to put anything. (There’s also a mysterious spot of something greasy and brown on the hem of my pants. It appeared after I exited a particularly disgusting squat toilet heaped up in shit. I’ve declined to investigate the stain further.) I bought my consolidated bags on board, as well as a plastic bag of food I acquired for the three and a half hour trip: (1) two hubcaps of Uighur bread, which I realized would be better described as pizza crusts; (2) two tea eggs; (3) remainders of my sweet crackers; (4) raisins and grapes; (5) a prepackaged cooked hot dog which turned out to be the texture of tofu and tasted exactly like something that will lead to colorectal cancer should taste. I took a bite of the last and spit it out immediately.

The bus was at least twenty, maybe thirty years old. The seat covers said “BMW,” but upside down. Everything smelled like old sweat. It was in the upholstery. The vents did not work. Somebody had inexpertly cut a hole in the wall behind the driver to thread the power cord of a television through. I sat next to a pretty Uighur woman who partially covered her hair in a scarf and spent at least half of the ride grinning at text messages on her cell phone. She battled with the Uighur woman sitting in front of her for the square of curtain that could block the harsh sunlight from one, but not both, of their seats. Most of the people on board - I don’t know if they were Uighur or Kyrgyz or Kazakh, but they were not Han Chinese. The oldest men had long white beards with no mustaches; the middle-aged men had dark mustaches but no beards; the youngest men had neither or just scruff. Many of them wore oversized cheap coats cut like blazers, worn button down shirts, worn nylon trousers, worn shoes, and puffy berets or crocheted white skull caps or green tufted caps that look like mini pillows. Their features were central Asian: round eyes, large noses, broad hale bodies. They brought all sorts of oversized cargo stuffed into unsuitable packages held together with twine. The plastic plaid bag that zips into a overstuffed rectangle that is so favored by poor people in developing countries – Laura liked to call this “circus nightmare bags,” for its coloration – were popular here, too. We piled everything haphazardly under the bus. A woman brought a cubic meter of raw wool or cotton in large paper bags and put them on top of my bag. A Leonardo DiCaprio movie badly dubbed into a language I can’t understand played overhead, except something was wrong with the DVD so that each syllable stretched out into five seconds of very loud metallic reverberations. I put my headphones in and fell asleep to trance music.

We drove across a landscape that was the bleakest I’ve ever seen. Even Rekjavik outside the airport and Utah between Nevada and Saint George were not like this. The hardened lava of Kilauea Iki has more life than the Turpan Basin. It was gray desert in all directions to the horizon. Not even grass or scrub or sand – just gray gravel. There was not even topography for the first 50-100 kilometers. I was puzzled to see, among this, a few people bent over what seemed to be acres of bright red carpeting. We passed by a few such scenes before I realized they were tending to hot peppers that had been laid out to dry in the desert. After a while, rocky hills rose alongside the highway, then bunchgrass, then stands of birch trees, construction zones, and then the smoggy metropolis was in sight. I kept falling asleep and waking with my chin snapping down against my chest. We arrived at the bus station in Urumqi at rush hour, and I was unable to find a cabbie willing to drive me to the train station, so I stopped in a Uighur restaurant, pointed at a random photograph on the menu, and ate a meal of wet noodles with a cup of yogurt and a pot of tea.

Even forty five minutes later it was difficult to find a cab, so I followed a man into an unmarked vehicle and bargained for a 20 yuan fare – still twice what I would have paid in a regular cab. I sat in this car for twenty minutes while the driver roamed the bus station looking for other riders. He found none, then he beckoned for me to switch into another car. I followed. We left. The driver hollered at me when we neared the train station to get out in a hurry so that the police would not see the rider and the unlicensed taxi. I whined (“Hao la!”) and left. Then I had a panic when I thought my ATM card had stopped working, but I recovered, bought train tickets, spent an hour in an filthy Internet café (glowing, snoring, sweating late adolescents; piss-smelling, also in the upholstery, the smell faded when I switched chairs), then followed a tout to a dirty hovel of a hotel next to the train station (peeling paint, single flickering fluorescent, ancient dirty furniture, stains, paper thin walls, paper thin doors, neighbors arguing over the sound of a television, toilet without a handle for flushing, sticky wet bathroom floor, cigarette butts extinguished in a tray of black liquid), and spent the night trying not to touch the surfaces in my room.

The tout instructed me not to divulge that I was an American, lest I be charged twice the rate for my hotel room. He spoke on my behalf and grabbed the key out of the attendant’s hand once it was offered. He followed me into my room and did not seem to want to leave. He asked, twice, “Are you a man or a woman? Which one is it?” The first time he asked, I said, “I’m not telling,” but the second time I said, “A woman dressed as a man.” He said, “I knew it! Because you don’t have – ” and at this, he drew a line across his throat with his finger. Actually, the second time he asked he said, “Are you a male comrade or a female comrade?” “Comrade,” for the younger generations, is slang for gay; I doubt the tout intended this, but I took secret pleasure in saying I was a female comrade. He wrote his surname and a phone number on a piece of paper and insisted I call him to book a tour to Tian Chi. I told him my surname and turned the deadbolt as soon as he left.

gaochang ruins

2011-10-07T00:11:00.000-07:00

I blew my cover. Or rather, I learned I didn't have a cover to blow. Today I solicited the services of a minibus driver to take me from tourist site to tourist site around Turpan. Also on the minibus were five women from Chongqing and their silent male friend. The most outgoing of the group invited me to join them - an unnecessary invitation, since we were all joined together for the day anyway, but I appreciated the gesture and returned it by being especially pushy with my extra raisins and sweet crackers. She also kept turning around in the minibus to ask, "小伙子 (a.k.a. "Hey, champ!"), don't you like traveling with us? Isn't it fun?"

We went to check out a karez museum, Flaming Mountain, the Gaochang ruins, and a minaret on the edge of town. Karez are the underground irrigation channels that the people of this hot dry dusty region created millennia ago to turn this Martian wasteland landscape into the grape-producing capital of the known world. Very cool they did this with primitive tools (ox-drawn winches, wicker baskets) to haul dirt out of the ground to create a channel sheltered from the evaporative punishment of the desert sun. Flaming Mountain is the site of many Xi You Ji stories, and I identified very strongly with the monkey king as a child and was very interested in seeing it in the flesh.

I am wearing the outfit I've been wearing the last few days - chinos, hiking boots, button down shirt, leather belt, and a dour expression - I fear that smiling gives me away instantly as either a gay or a girl. By gay I don't mean homosexual but someone who can't play man. Again I've been trying to take up space and touch things like they belong to me and talk with my mouth full and do all the things that suggest I feel entitled to exist in the world however I please. This to me is also a masculine trait.

After I had some snapped some photos of myself atop a camel, I returned to the minibus and struck up a conversation with the woman directly in front of me. We were chatting about something inane, and she said something that gave me pause. Something about "像你中性的人," which means "somebody androgynous like you." 性别 is gender; 中性 literally means "middle gender." I started because I didn't quite understand what she was saying - whether she was saying was an androgynous man or an androgynous woman. And then I realized it didn't matter, and I poured forth in one long breath all of my secrets: "Here's my secret, I'm actually a woman, I'm dressed this way because it's easier to travel alone as a man, I'm wearing a chest binder, I thought I could fool everyone, it's exhausting to keep up this performance, could you tell I'm a girl and I'm actually 31?" She laughed and said she could tell there was something not quite normal, that she and her friends had wondered about my gender, and that her 19 year-old daughter was a tomboy so she was already on alert.

And thus your neurotic genderbender learned that she is perceived not as a 31 year old woman, not as an 18 or 12 year old boy, but as Pat, asexual, genderless, curious, weird. Perhaps this explains all the people who double take, then stand near me and look at me from their peripheral vision and imagine I can't see. I was expecting people to be more direct about their curiosity, since generally in other countries no one seems to have a problem asking "ARE YOU A MAN OR A WOMAN???" so I took silence in China to mean that I passed successfully as the former. Ooop.

And thus also I remembered that I am not the first person to do this, and there is no need to treat other countries like precious foolish children who must be shielded from the truth of my female masculinity. The woman from Chongqing has a tomboy daughter. There is language in China to describe what I'm doing. This is the country that gave the world Mulan, folks. Once upon a time I knew this and did not need to act like a weird, rude, dour nose-picker in order to convince myself that I fit in. Perhaps I will shrug off the cursed binder (so goddamn hot, and it feels like it's dislocating my shoulder every time I encase my broad sausage body in it) and start going to women's rooms again - but nahhh, why start now?

Gaochang ruins were a sight to behold, mostly because nobody else felt that way and I had a few square miles of hot dust and dead people's architecture to myself. Well, myself and one of the women from Chongqing, a 40-something electrical worker named Yan Ming, with whom I walked and chatted and flirted. I don't know if Yan Ming knew the secret that her other friend from Chongqing knew, and maybe it didn't matter. I for one was very pleased with myself for having the language skills to flirt with older women. ("You don't look a day over 40!" and "What a beautiful scarf that you just bought for only 10 RMB" etc.) There were two signs in the entire site, and two of them offered this spartan guidance: "Big Temple -->" A few kilometers from the entrance we came across the first living soul - the bleached donkey (presumably) bone we found does not count - an ancient Uighur man playing a beautiful stringed instrument with a long curving neck and a drumhead body made of a stretched snakeskin. I paid him 10 RMB to sit next to him, wear his sweaty crocheted cylindrical hat, and strum that thing for a while. It sounded like it had a resonator cone but it was as light and unmechanical as a hollow snake.

We returned to the car and I sat behind the original woman from Chongqing and stuffed sweet crackers and raisins into my face as we drove the hot barren stretch back to Turpan. She wanted to know how much it cost to send her 19 year-old tomboy daughter to study abroad in America, and I ended up drawing up an imaginary budget for someone living in a city, living in a "rural area" (since that's the only demographic place designation I know besides "city"), and someone living in "a place that is in between a city and a rural area" (again the circumlocution because the speaker is an unprepared incompetent who knows 30% of the vocabulary she should know for someone as educated as her). We chatted about grapes, tourist sites, the risk to Han Chinese people in Kashgar (the next destination for this Han Chinese unprepared incompetent!). It was very nice not to have to pretend to be anything but myself to this woman. When I left them, I caught her and said with a wink, "You can tell your friends my secret after I leave." And now I have a bus to Urumqi to catch.

urumqi and turpan

2011-10-06T09:53:00.000-07:00

I believe I have just gone insane for macadamia nuts. I just spent twenty minutes hunched over a low stool with a metal lever in one hand and a sack of nuts in front of me. I ate feverishly through the bag, and when I got to the last five filberts, which could not be opened, I tried to smash them with every hard surface in my hotel room that could be lifted and dropped: my boot, the hair dryer, the bedside lamp. It was when I found myself bouncing on the edge of the bed with an unopenable mac nut under the bedpost that I realized I was not only eating but also acting like a nut and that delicious as they might have potentially been the last five fucking nuts were not going into my mouth and it was time to stop.

Xinjiang turns out to be the land of fruit and nuts. Which is deeply satisfying, since it accords with my primitive understanding of what central Asia is like. Except there are no flying carpets here, which is a little disappointing. Breakfast this morning was an apple, two dozen longans, and twenty minutes of peanuts. The units are time not weight because they were shelled and therefore impossible to gauge as mass. I cracked them open as I read the final pages of a terrible dull uninspired New York Times bestseller, Little Bee, do not recommend unless you want something that makes you think, with every page, "Why am I wasting my time!!!" I went around buying shit on the street in Urumqi last night in the way I do when I’m traveling, pointing at things, saying, “HOW MUCH?” and being too unschooled in the native tongue to request anything but what is offered and then walking away with way more than I want of what I don’t need. And that is why I have a kilogram of green raisins in my backpack. To the apple, longans, and peanuts I added a hubcap-sized piece of Uighur bread and a bottle of water and I called it my peasant traveler breakfast. The bread was inlaid with onion pieces and cooked in a tandoor-like oven. Delicious but farinaceous and therefore completely devoid of nutrition.

Later in the day, I bought something similar in Turpan, except covered in sesame seeds and shaped like a huge bulbous bialy, which I ate lustily while asking a clerk in a China Mobile store how I could switch my Shanghai SIM card to a Xinjiang number. I don’t know why my performance of masculinity includes letting that store clerk see the opening stages of my digestion, but somehow I felt more like his bro doing so. Perhaps this is also why I pick my nose enthusiastically and clear my throat like I’m about to vomit and make fart noises with my mouth when I go into the squat toilets in the men’s rooms – the first two because they are acts I see other men and no women doing, and the last because otherwise it’s kind of weird that a man needs to go to the squat toilet just to pee. I’m only going into men’s rooms now. I doubt my performance is as convincing as I believe it to be – especially after I realized with horror, staring into the faces of cisgendered men sitting on the train across from me today, that I am completely lacking in male secondary sex characteristics (Adam’s apple, facial hair, receding hairline, voice) and not really able to contain my female ones (tits, hips, monthly blood birth, voice), so I am probably not perceived as even an 18 year old boy, as I had previously hoped, but a prepubescent twelve year old, or perhaps as just a weird butchy woman picking her nose and making farting noises with her mouth in the men’s squat toilet. I watch your eyes when you watch me, you know, when they go from my face to my chest to my face and back to my chest.

I unloaded a bunch of unnecessary clothing in Urumqi (and Little Bee, literally a weight lifted off my shoulders to get rid of that load of crap) and wandered away from my hotel this morning with a lightened pack on my back, gnawing on my hubcap. I turned left when it suited me and right when it didn’t. I ended up wandering along street after street of construction supply vendors. The stores selling the same types of materials were clustered together, so there were ten storefronts selling PVC pipes, then another ten selling plastic siding, nylon rope, steel joints, stone lions, kitchen sinks, air conditioning units, lumber, drywall, canvas bags, tile, doorknobs, 15’ by 15’ panes of glass. The air smelled like kerosene and welding and plastics everywhere, even far away from the construction supply store. Maybe that’s just what pollution in China smells like because I have experienced it in every Chinese city I’ve been to: Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Songjiang, and now Urumqi. One of those special Chinese fix-it cargo vehicles – a motorcycle engine on a three-wheeled base with a pickup truck-style bed in the back for cargo but no cab to cover the driver – whipped around a corner and dumped four pieces of drywall, a sack of dry cement, and a bundle of plastic siding hard onto the ground near me. The driver and the passenger hanging on bedside him stopped to load the fouled pieces of drywall back onto the tricycle. Had I been walking a few feet ahead, that mess of shit would have slid onto me and – broken my femur? I don’t understand how people don’t just die all the time here.

Today I also heard my neighbors in the hotel having sex loudly through the thin crepe that passed for our shared wall. It was clear enough that I heard the man’s phlegm popping in his throat and could guess, by the rhythm of the woman’s noises (an interrogatory series of “Ohh? Ohh? Ohh?”s), that she was paying more attention to the television that was playing in their room than to the phlegm-popper laboring over her. I also saw someone trying to beat a stray dog that had run off with a scrap of something with a standup dustpan. Also, the man that shooed me out of the seat I had chosen on the train to Turpan (because the seat assigned to me was occupied by a young man with red rimmed eyes and a shirt covered in nonsense English) ate a bowl of instant noodles, stripped to his undershirt, and fell asleep stretched across three seats and a suitcase. Our train stopped 58km short of my destination, so I followed a tout into a shared cab to make the rest of the trip and waited while he drove circles around Daheyan shouting and honking at pedestrians to fill up the final seat in the car. We never found one so each of the three passengers agreed to pay 5 RMB more for the trip. We rode a twenty year-old Volkswagen whose interior was upholstered with dusty rugs and seatcovers bearing the Beijing Olympics mascots but captioned in a Cyrillic language. I tried to offer a macadamia nut to the woman sitting next to me, but she refused and called me very keqi, which pleased me. The driver shared a cigarette with the passenger in the front seat, who then hocked a loogie out the window that came back to hit me in the face. The driver accelerated into speedbumps. The landscape we crossed was flat, dry, dusty, and so devoid of life that I thought for sure if we were to die in a crash out here, my body would never be returned home. When a Uighur family standing next to a broken down cargo tricycle flagged our taxi down, the driver put the Volkswagen into reverse to get back to the scene. The car made several loud banging noises, after each of which the driver said, “Aiyo!” but kept on reversing just the same.

I’m going to be immodest. I’m fantastic at the mechanics of travel. I’m a champ at buying train tickets, walking out of a transport hub and orienting myself using one street corner and the position of the sun in the sky, collecting provisions before long-distance trips, hunting down a hotel room in a new city, finding a café in which to page through a travel guide, stringing together activities that are the right mix of high energy and rest. Or at least I tell myself I’m fantastic at these things, which gives me an inflated sense of my own competence, which means I don’t make plans ahead of time when I travel because I just rely on my instincts to steer me to the right places once I’m on the ground. Which is dumb, because I end up in mild situations, e.g. running out of money and sleeping in bus stations or riding a subway from terminus to terminus in order to sleep the hour in between, or the one I found myself in last night, dead tired, sweating through my chest binder, needing to find a squat toilet, but with two hours ahead of me of wandering to Urumqi hotels asking the same series of questions: Do you have a room free? How much? Do you accept foreigners?

Today’s activities after my arrival at Turpan from Urumqi were (1) triage my total failure to plan an itinerary by assaulting my hotel attendant with questions about the feasibility of each one of my travel permutations; (2) walk purposefully to the mud-and-straw minaret at the edge of town while gnawing on a sesame seed-covered super bialy, stopping along the way to startle a German woman with a Rolleiflex with my cheerful English language commentary on her choice of camera; (3) eat noodle soup in a big outdoor food stall area; and (4) wander through a supermarket discreetly releasing noxious gasses due to aforementioned noodle soup for the next half hour, buying only a roll of vitamin C candies and a tiny metal spoon but leaving so much atmosphere behind. I also attempted to enter an Internet cafe but my Chinese was apparently so incomprehensible that I was redirected to the second floor, which turned out to be a video arcade where people were bent over bed-sized tabletop flatscreens playing a multiplayer game in which each player seemed to control a type of fish and the object was to throw away one’s pocket change and waning days of youth as quickly as possible, and when I returned to the wang ba to ask for my half hour on the computers I was told that I needed a Chinese identity card to register my time. Why does China need to know which Internet bar I am surfing porn I mean sending correspondences from? Twice today I gave impossible instructions to taxi drivers (“Take me to a busy intersection where I can walk around and shop and eat; you know, re nao!”), once in Urumqi and later in Turpan.

The landscape out of Urumqi went like this: city city city, construction zone, cranes, exhaust chimneys, then suddenly rocks and very low scrub and flat hot dry dusty plain, the color of office carpeting. Windfarms, unexpected dense stands of birch trees, orchards, then back to flat hot dry dusty plain. We passed by wings of dismantled windmills on the cab ride to Turpan. They were so massive I thought they were reclining Buddhas statues at first. Apparently Turpan is the third lowest place on Earth. It is 154 meters below sea level and also the hottest spot in China – though only a merciful 80 degrees these days. The people here look a lot less like me than they did in Urumqi. There appear to be lots of Uighurs, and Chinese language is not getting me as far. Signs here are in Chinese, some language with Arabic script, and sometimes some language with Cyrillic script. Wonderful to have three options to not comprehend.

Tomorrow I will be traveling from local spot to local spot, probably exacerbating my bunions, eating unwashed things bought on the street that will make my intestines go “Ohh? Ohh? Ohh?” Saturday is a twenty-four hour ride on a sleeper bus to Kashgar and the Sunday they will contact the consulate to say that this flatulent woman dressed as a twelve year old boy needs to be repatriated but her body can’t be found. Oh my God I love to travel.

changping

2011-10-06T09:39:00.000-07:00

Blogger blocked and Internet access crappy so I'll write when I can.

First two days were in Beijing, Changping district, with WF and her husband WM. She's pregnant and married now and we're two years older but we're still both nerds fascinated with each other's cultures. I try to disabuse her of starry visions of America as land of free and home of the fair. She's dissatisfied with human rights in China and she tells me horror stories of rich people's kids running over poor people with impunity and the burial of the evidence of the high speed rail crash this May. She's reading books on the O.J. Simpson trial and employment law and Walmart in America. It all seems like roses to her. How does she know about the five love languages? I don't know, but she does. I thumb through my dictionary looking for these words: analytical, leftist politics, discrimination, prejudice. WF reminds me that I was reading "Pride and Prejudice" last time I was in Beijing and she taught me the words for both. I tell her about Troy Davis, per M.W.'s suggestion. WF says her dreams growing up in rural Hubei were (1) open a women's bookstore, with a cafe in the back for people to talk about the books they were reading; (2) open a children's library, so that rural kids would have a place to play together. She asks me whether it's true that in Europe and America people go to cafes and talk about politics. I say it's more likely that people go to cafes to stare alone at photographs of their ex-lover's new girlfriends on Facebook. Then she brings me to a woman-owned bookstore/lending library on the road between Wudaokou and Beijing University - a road we've gone down many times before, with riding the rack of my bike - that has a cafe in the back where WF says she goes when she needs to escape from the crush of city life. It makes me wonder whether she will ever find the American dream she is looking for, because it appears to be in front of her in China. She says she's become more Buddhist since I last saw her, Buddhism to her meaning serenity about the things she can't control, like the heightened possibility of birth defects with her soon-to-be-born child and her sister's estrangement from the family. That, and she begs the old men with slingshots not to shoot down robins and she says an amitofo prayer before closing the lid on a hundred tiny live shrimp she's about to bring to death by boiling. I find a five RMB bill on the ground on our way to the market on the second morning. We're there to buy buns for breakfast and veggies for lunch, and she says, "Look! Five bucks!" I pick it up and hand it to her and she buys jiao bai with it. Later she recalls the story to WM, who cannot believe I would accept the bad luck of taking money from the ground and spending it. He says, "Chinese people believe if you gain something you lose something too." I say, "Zhendema?! Let's go back to the spot and put a five on the ground." WM says, "Don't worry, I took care of it." Meaning he has flung a five RMB bill out the window already. My first two days in Beijing are spent shopping for food, preparing food with WF, playing ping pong with WF and WM, and walking slowly with WF and talking and talking and talking. We try to go back to a memory we have both cherished - a giant bell next to a picturesque pond surrounded by gingko trees on the campus of Beijing University under which we stood and onto which I etched some sort of graffiti. Neither of us could remember what I wrote. WF is in a heavy mood, so she tells me that this pond was the site of many suicides during the Cultural Revolution. I ask her how it is possible that a person could drown in a pond only six feet deep, and she speculates that the suicides dove in headfirst and held onto the bunches of grass at the bottom until they died. The campus is closed, and we can't return to our spot. Qinghua University is closed, too, so we just go back to the bookstore and rest a while. We take buses from place to place and meet WM and her cousin for Yunnan hotpot, yak meat in hot stew, which is surprisingly delicious but leaves my clothes smelling like hotpot for days. So many reasons I love WF. It is her birthday in two weeks and I'll be back in Beijing to celebrate.

there's a man or a woman in the men's or women's room

2011-10-03T16:13:00.001-07:00

People are having vision problems in San Francisco International Airport. For example: I need to swap contact lenses for glasses for the long flight to Beijing. I’m standing outside the restrooms debating which to enter. I’m hesitating. I choose the door on the right, marked with the placard without the triangle-shaped skirt. If the icon isn’t clear enough – which it isn’t, because my silhouette looks like neither it nor the one on the other door – the word underneath assures me that I am properly self-selecting into the club of MEN.

Sometimes you see what you perceive to be a tree – a long trunk and leaves on top – and you get close and you realize you’ve been looking at a skinny person with a bushy hairdo. Then you say to your brain, “Brian, that wasn’t a tree at all! How could you!” With the same myopic little eyes and the same pattern-recognizing little brains we associate short hair, dun clothes, and a boxy build with the bathroom placard without the triangle-shaped skirt.

Today I’m wearing shapeless brown canvas pants, a heavy hiking boots, a thick leather belt (with a flathead and a Phillips head screwdriver built into the buckle), a shapeless black t-shirt, a shapeless black softshell hoodie, a unisex Timex, a chest-flattening sports bra, and fuschia panties with teal trim. Glasses, black travel bag, red day pack. Big hands, callouses, muscles. Broad shoulders, slim hips. Nearly 5’7” in boots. Caffeine deprivation headache. My hair is short and unstyled. I stand with my weight evenly distributed to both feet, which I keep more than shoulder width apart. I sit with my knees spread. I cross my arms across my chest and nod without smiling when acknowledging people. All of this is not an affect but actually who I am in my normal life, but even if I’m behaving as I usually do, it feels like a performance because the space is not one I normally inhabit. I feel self-conscious. It’s the international terminal, with Chinese and German travelers on CA986 to Beijing or UA1452 to Frankfurt . They fail to queue and they breathe down my neck – the travelers begin to take on the culture of the destination country even before we’ve left the ground. The security line is filled with couples discreetly exchanging saliva-based intimacy communications, men with short hair and women with long hair, men in pleated khakis and women in scoop-necked shirts in cheerful colors, and me. I think I read as a young, beardless man. Am I equally disempowered when perceived as a thirty-one year old masculine Chinese woman or as an eighteen year old Chinese boy? Did you cut in line in front of me because (1) you see me as a weaker, younger man, (2) you are taller than me and simply didn’t see me, or (3) because you are Chinese and constitutionally incapable of waiting your turn? Are you staring because you’re scrutinizing my gender, because my fly is unzipped, because I am so attractive you can’t stop looking – or is that just the information-gathering glance you’d give to anyone who crosses your path? If you had to choose one or the other, do I seem more like a wet noodle or a kettlebell? A heavy summer rain or a crisp autumn afternoon? A one or a zero? Such are the preoccupations of your neurotic performance artist.

Yesterday, a man in a hotel lobby in San Francisco addressed me as “Sir – ma’am – sir.” I haven’t gotten that one before, the double switch! Usually it’s “Sir – sorry – ma’am” or “Sir – uh . . . .” How confusing I must have been for the poor attendant! My profuse apologies to all those who prefer decisive gods and cities laid out on gridlines – masculine women must feel so disorderly! Like litter, or dogs with human names. I smiled and said, “Don’t worry, I’m aiming for the middle.” Then he was speechless, so I said, “Which way to the Horizons event?”

Other responses I’ve developed are include, “It’s okay, I’m not sure which one myself!” and “Whatever you’d like, honey!” Which is a different place than where I was ten years ago, when my hair was also short and my clothes were even more masculine and my face was even younger. I used to get so frustrated when people failed to read my sex properly. I don’t think I understood that I was inviting the confusion with my gender presentation. I didn’t have the social skills to turn another person’s discomfort with my gender into curiosity and a conversation that both of us would want to have. I just used to be so pissed off all the time. So many conversations that went: “Sir, can I help you?” “Ma’am.” “Oh, sorry.” It was experimenting with femininity in Chicago – into which I flew knowing nobody and therefore feeling empowered to remake myself via subjectively meaningful but objectively trivial transformations such as (1) non-secondhand clothing, (2) slightly tighter pants, (3) slightly longer hair, (4) slightly looser collars on (5) slightly more colorful shirts, and (6) thinking of learned helplessness not as a form of high-voiced idiocy but as a tool with which to manipulate men socialized to respond to weakness with courtliness, assistance, and a slight flooding of blood to the pudendum – that taught me to be more serene about my gender presentation. Because people are so myopic. Because it is so easy to signal femininity. Because it is my choice to confuse people about what’s happening under the fuschia and teal panties. I could end the sir-ma’am-sir conversations with a big pink bow in my long, flowing hair. I could dress as Miss Piggy! But I am more Barnaby the scrivener than I am Miss Piggy, and I would prefer not to. Once I learned that I could perform femininity, I no longer felt tormented when people read my performance of masculinity as male.

All to say I feel better now. I can laugh about it. I can invite that perplexed hotel attendant to laugh with me about it. One thing I’m learning as I get older is that I can control how other people react to me. When you open a speech saying, “Please excuse my lack of preparation; I’m so nervous,” your audience will receive you as an unprepared incompetent. When you declare what you want, you’re likely to get it. So if I’m cagey and antagonistic about my gender, I’m going to get that in return. If I don’t take my gender too seriously, and I invite you to do the same, you’ll be more likely to respond with curiosity than with pitchforks. This is the theory, at least. Let’s see how far into China this serenity will travel.

(It’s a little different in China because I don’t think I’ll be able to have the nuanced conversations that I want to have about gender. Hard to talk about gender performativity when my conversation is at about the level of sophistication that permits me to say “Me am woman!!” and not much more.)

Post script. The men’s room was a non-event. I strode into the handicapped stall. I tried not to hesitate because it looks really weird when people are indecisive about going to the bathroom. In the stall, I peed as I usually do, sniffing then lifting one leg against the wall and spraying – just kidding! I hovered. Then I switched from a boob-enhancing underwire bra to a sports bra. I have a chest binder that reduces my tits to a nice, mesomorphic set of pecs, which I will wear when I’m not on 13-hour flights. Then I washed my hands, changed from contacts to glasses, and strode out. I don’t know if anyone gave me a second glance, because I wasn’t looking around to see them looking at me. And that was that.

I just ate an airplane meal of beef with rice that was primarily composed of tendons and anuses. I feel sick, so I am going to take myself to the unisex toilet now and ralph in the most ladylike manner possible.

P.P.S.: An older woman addressed me as 小伙子 as she asked me to help her bring her luggage out of the overhead bin. 小伙子 is Northern slang. It's an affectionate way to address a young, healthy boy or man, kind of like "champ" or "buddy" in English. Like, "Hey champ, can you help me get this bag out of the bin?" I said, "Of course!" I was so pleased.

play with your heart

2011-10-02T11:45:00.000-07:00

R. and O. slept over the night I turned 31. As per usual, the birthday girl made a list of [n+1] things to do before she turns [n+1] years old. This year my goals outstrip both [n+1] things and [n+1] years. What a wonderful feeling.

R. and I got to talking about a t-shirt she had seen. It said, "If you want to be a winner, play with your mind. If you want to be a champion, play with your heart." I love the multivalence of this. It doesn't mean only play with passion; it means also that your heart is a thing to be played with. It's a beloved old baseball glove, not a hard, sharp gemstone to be put in a display box and guarded. Because playfulness is a form of risk, and risk is an engine for progress.

I'm going to keep this in mind for the next two months, while I'm traveling and working on the writing that I told myself for years I would give myself time to do. I'm very excited for this time. Who knows what adventures happen when you play with your heart!

I hope to post a lot here, but if I'm not accessible, then just have faith that I'll be thinking loving thoughts about all of you. Off to Xinjiang now!

september 23, 2001

2011-09-23T13:30:00.001-07:00

What I was thinking about on this day, ten years ago:

9/23/01

I spent the last two hours grooming myself and my clothes. Chores are no fun; note to oneself; maintain the lowest acceptable level of hygiene; saves time, money, time. Only what's necessary and sufficient.

As a friend pointed out, time = money, so what I was really saving was time cubed.

teeheeheeheeehee

2011-09-20T17:43:00.000-07:00

I quit my job. I quit my job!!!

I gave two weeks notice. Two weeks!!!!

Before I could enter the HR person's office, I paused in the hallway to compose myself - because I was giggling too hard!!!

Tee hee hee hee hee heeeee!!!

So far the best part is feeling empowered by this decision to:

(1) Leave the office at 5:30 to buy shit from Ikea for my house fuck you!!!!
(2) Tell the senior associate "you made bad life decisions"!!!!
(3) Spend two hours in the fitness room midday yesterday working on my "core" strength!!!
(4) File all of my FSA receipts no more buying Advil and contact lens solution on December 31!!!!
(5) Press that little button on my little ergonomic mouse to confirm purchase of a ticket to take me to the point on the Earth farthest from an ocean fuck you!!!!

I am going to jizz all over the keyboard if I keep thinking about this!!!!! Splurt!!

Isn't that what it looks like? Fellas?

november 15, 2001

2011-09-20T13:17:00.000-07:00

On the tenth anniversary of September 11th, I decided to pull out my journal from 2001-2002 and see where I was then. There are 32,696 words in a Word document answering that question, but to summarize: I moved to the Lower East Side in Manhattan on September 9, 2001. I didn't know anyone in the city or anything about it. I had three duffel bags, a bucket, a guitar, a computer, and a bicycle. I moved into an apartment I found on Craigslist occupied by a woman named Diane. I saw things I didn't expect to see. I learned a lot. Everything felt new, exciting, and a little terrifying.

I'm not quite ready to post my entries from around September 11. Here's a non-event from November 15, 2001:

In other news, I have been trying to steal little things from Diane without her noticing. Mostly it is food. She buys more food than any single woman waif with a bowel condition who is never home than I know. So I steal a slice of toast and a pinkytip of peanut butter every so often, a fourth-cup of grapenuts and a squirt of ricemilk diluted with water and a blot of honey, an indiscernible millimeter of toothpaste, a swipe of the soap. Fuck. I’m starting to get quite bad. I’ve been eyeing the bananas trying to figure out whether or not she’ll notice that a fifth of the bunch is gone. I would take a smaller portion but stealing half a banana is more conspicuous than stealing the whole. This much I have learned in my short but informative life.

terry again

2011-09-17T23:34:00.000-07:00

Here's a repost of something I wrote two years ago on another blog. Reposting it now because I'm about to fly away and I hope to rekindle some of that enthusiasm for connecting with strangers that I felt so passionately about at the end of my time in Chicago.

There was a light sprinkling of rain and a few bolts of lightning in Chicago on Friday, so all outgoing flights from O'Hare were canceled. Terminals B and C were overflowing with travelers, who waited petulantly in hundred-person lines for hours for refunds or reroutes, sat on the tile near electrical outlets with their laptops burning their crotches, and lay supine on the heating vents with Cubs caps pulled over their eyes. I was trying to get to Boston. My flight was first delayed 45 minutes, then two hours, then three, and we shuttled from one gate to another awaiting, what we discovered later, a fictional flight that was never to take off.

At B5, I dozed and snapped photographs of fellow travelers. It was a rare chance to document so many expressions of unhappiness under one roof. I was at peace because I had a soft serve. I was sitting right next to the people standing in line for the United attendant, so I watched them and listened to their conversations. One man had the face of a 38 year-old but wore screened t-shirts, thick leather bracelets, and dark jeans adorned with decorative flat chains in the style of somebody fifteen years younger, in a nightclub, in Hackensack; he touched himself on the biceps and abdomen and adjusted the cuff of his jeans several times, but the intended audience for his presentation was unclear. One man had a small cell phone device in his ear and looked right at me and shouted directions, which I assumed were not for me. I heard a boy named Terry tell a man named Mario about the missionary work he was planning to do.

Half an hour later, Terry sat down next to me. I asked him whether he was going to Boston like me, but he said he was going to New York. We didn't say anything else for a few minutes, but I looked over and smiled a few times, and eventually I said, I couldn't help but overhear that you were going to do missionary work in New York. What exactly are you doing? and from there, our conversation took off.

Terry was 20 years old and headed for a six-week mission in Brooklyn. He was on summer break from his studies in marketing at a small state college in Michigan. He would be leading a group of fifty teenagers from as far away as Canada in restoration projects on a church on Flatbush Avenue whose motto was "Doing Good in the Hood Since 1654." He wasn't going with his church members; his only partner would be a girl about his age whom he had only met once before, at the previous week's mission orientation. He and his crew would be living in the dormitory connected to the church. He hadn't been to New York, but he was excited to go, and he asked me where he should go and what he should do. I said that he might like the city upon first impression but feelings of love would develop after he exhausted his tourist sites and turned to the people around him. He asked where the restaurant from Seinfeld was, and I gave him precise directions and added my own trivia to his understanding of the storefront, but he didn't appear to care too much about Suzanne Vega. Terry had the letters "WWJD" repeated in scrolling text on a tight blue bracelet around his wrist. He wore a baseball cap and glasses, and was exceedingly polite, without being formal, in the way he addressed me.

He was from Niles, Michigan, a town of 15,000 just north of the Indiana border. He said he was from the "cornfields," and that his college was in a town that was even more full of cornfields. He'd spent the entire day, starting from 8 a.m. shuttling by car and regional jet between his hometown and Grand Rapids and O'Hare, and here he was at 6 p.m. a bit tired from travel but happy to have already met so many interesting people. I liked his attitude, and told him this. I said I liked meeting people, but you don't know whether they want to be meeting you. We agreed it was nice when two people who didn't know each other both wanted to talk. One can get a sense of another's values in the way they talk about even value-neutral subjects, like whether to be irritated by a long day of rain delays, or in the simple fact that they will talk openly with a stranger. Maybe it is foolish or dangerous of me to go on believing in strangers like this, but I trusted Terry immediately.

I suppose Terry was something of a cliche, because he was kind, polite, genuine small-town boy who expressed unpretentious, open-mouthed awe when I told him about the institutions I'd been affiliated with ("Is Harvard really as hard as everyone says it is?") and who spoke of his (paltry) summer salary like it was an unfathomable sum of money. It only made me like him more. He wanted to know more about what I liked about New York. The liveliness, I said. Go to the Mermaid Parade. (He was fascinated.) Go to Central Park on a Saturday. Go to the gay pride parade.

At this, he hesitated. Well, you know, I don't know if I would personally feel comfortable about that because of my religion, he said. I had with purpose instructed him to go to Pride; I am making the slow transition from sustaining conversations with strangers by pretending to be more politically moderate than I am to actually speaking my mind, but doing so without breathing stranger-repellent radical fire; so I felt too a gentle missionary zeal in speaking to my missionary about matters of the spirit.

Terry was hesitant but not insulting, and not even conservative. He spoke about his personal discomfort - "I" statements - not about other people's sins. He was a good boy, a curious boy, a cornfield boy compelled by New York, so even though his brain had been taught to close, his heart was wide open. I am gay, I said, and some parts of the parade make even me feel uncomfortable (I said this with the Log Cabin Republicans in mind), but it's good to go and see that people are people no matter how different their identities might seem from yours. Or something equally platitudinous, and probably less grammatical, came out of my mouth; I was trying so hard. Terry responded immediately by talking about how one of his friends had come out to him but prefaced his remarks by saying that Terry was the last person he had come out to. This remark saddened Terry, because he felt that some "out there" Christians had made it seem like the whole religion was about hating other people. Terry sounded hurt when he said that Christianity was about love. God is love. He said he protested against the conservative protesters at his school, because he didn't like how they made others feel.

We drifted from this topic into the next: cops and lawyers. Everybody considered the cops in his small town corrupt. Terry had been pulled over and given a ticket for having expired car insurance because he had shown the cop two copies of his insurance papers, one of which was older than the more recent set. The cop was corrupt, the magistrate presiding over the case was corrupt, and in the end he felt that he had been roughed up by a bunch of jackasses. There was no justice. Contempt for corrupt authority, God as love, curiosity - my dear, dear boy.

Over the intercom, the kiosk attendant announced, triumphantly, that Seating Area 1 was permitted to board. I shook hands with Terry and left, because it was time for me to fly to Boston. Terry wrote down my email address and we shall see if I ever have occasion to see my dear missionary again. I left it up to him.

Seconds after the attendant made the boarding announcement, she got back on the intercom and said, pausing heavily, "Well...sorry folks, but...it looks like your flight has been canceled." This was uproarious for the crowd, who raged, and also uproarious for me, because I found the comedy utterly delightful. O'Hare and its gentle Christians could not control the 12th largest downpour in Chicago history, and there was nothing to do but laugh and laugh! The delays and detours resulting from this uproarious announcement also gave me the opportunity to have half hour conversations with two additional strangers, Blake and Klaus, which I will document here tomorrow.

death in norcal

2011-09-13T15:54:00.000-07:00

I drove to Palo Alto on Sunday to have dinner with my grandma, parents, and extended family. I was heading south on Highway 101 at a normal cruising speed.

This is what happened next. I couldn't have made this up. A yoga mat fell off a Prius a few cars in front of me. The yoga mat unfurled and fluttered in the air like the wings of a majestic butterfly. Then these majestic wings went SPLAT across the front of my windshield. And then for two panic-filled seconds, I could see nothing. My car went forward at 75mph but its driver was blind.

Then I thought, This is it. This is how you die in Northern California.

I hate them.

Post script: It fluttered to the next flower after two seconds, then came to rest on the shoulder. Everyone lived, except the butterfly.

two letters separate celebrate from celibate

2011-09-07T17:14:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, I sat behind a couple during a high school wrestling meet. A boy and a girl. The match was especially close and tense. The boy seemed very invested in seeing his wrestler win. His body language said as much. He clutched at the girl. He hunched over and clenched his fists. He leaned in. He squinted. The girl did not seem to care one way or another about the wrestlers.

When the boy's wrestler pinned the loser, the crowd exploded in celebration, and the boy too. He leapt up and pumped his fists. He shouted, Aaoooaaaaooo!!! Then he grabbed the girl and gave her not a celebratory squeeze, not a kiss and a mess of tears, not happy gurgling noises - no, he turned to her and tried to eat her face.

"I'm so happy my friend won his wrestling match!"

I was so impressed with their face sucking, salivating, dry humping, public works plumbing theatrics that sixteen years later I still remember the clothes they were wearing vividly. (Sweatsuits.) Also vivid is the memory of my confusion: why is the appropriate reaction to seeing your team win frantic making out?

But now that I've had a good few weeks - a good few months - and I'm seeing my efforts to remake my life come to fruition, and I'm feeling good, and I'm feeling triumphant - all I want to do is make out! Team Me is fucking winning! I feel so horny for life! Come here and let me eat your face!

Oh baby!

bait a hook

2011-09-02T01:52:00.000-07:00

Awesome things about country music.

(1) The instrumentation, the sound. The Telecaster over the acoustic playing rhythm. The clear vocals. The constant harmonizing. Twang. The way a pedal steel player can go from a bright major chord to the saddest minor you ever heard with just a slight motion of his knee. Also, in this particular video, the matching matador-inspired costuming, and the total stiffness of the lower body. Buck Owens, "Tiger by the Tail."

(2) The storytelling. Maybe because it's a folk form, maybe it's just the musical convention, but country songs are more narrative than other popular genres. Here's Dolly Parton's "Joshua." Maybe I just like it because I first heard the song just as I was moving into an apartment near the railroad tracks occupied by a huge man named Joshua who had a big dog!

(3) The honesty. Sometimes all you want is someone clear-eyed saying, This is my truth, and I'm going to share it with you. Even though my truth might be sentimental, or boring, or conventional, or fantastical, I'm not going to hide it with loud guitars or complicated turns of phrase. Country is a very sincere form of art. Here's Zac Brown's "Highway 20 Ride," telling the story of a father who rarely sees his son.

And Taylor Swift's "Tim McGraw":

(4) The themes. How can you argue with a sentiment like "cigareets and whiskey and wild, wild women / they'll drive you crazy / they'll drive you insane"? "Cigareets and Whiskey and Wild Women," recorded by Buck Owens.

I'm listing the things I like about country music because I recently heard two godawful country songs that made me want to pull my car over and stab myself in the face. The first is a crass stupid song-length pun called "Fish," by Craig Campbell. The key lyrics:

Jumped on in and we drove to the lake
Put her hand on my knee and said I can't wait
I had everything we needed in the bed of my truck
Turns out my baby loves to...fish

"Fish" stands in for another four-letter F word, get it??? Get it?????

Sometimes that's the problem with being so sincere! It's not that I don't find songs about sex sexy - but would it kill you to add poetry to your expression of desire?? See e.g. this or this. Also, I don't like songs that make me think about gender-conforming Republicans having sex, and this one does just that.

Then there is Justin Moore's "Bait a Hook." This song just makes me feel sorry for the singer and his anxiety about times a-changing. It's the kind of anxiety that's disguised as boastfulness. He's upset that his ex-gal is dating a namby pamby with a hybrid car who likes to eat un-American things, so he responds by strutting around listing all the things he is capable of doing that the namby pamby can't do -

I heard you had to drive him home after two umbrella drinks
I heard he's got a Prius, 'cause he's into bein' green
My buddies said he saw ya'll, eatin' that sushi stuff
Baby that don't sound like you, that don't sound like love, sounds like it sucks...
He can't even bait a hook

- which doesn't change the fact that he's singing from the reject pile. I feel embarrassed by Justin's delusional sour grapes act.

Also helllllooo hating on Toyota and sushi and Japan is so played . . . 'cause China is the new boogeyman! Justin Moore didn't even try to identity new foreign (pronounced "farn") things to be irrationally scared by; he just relies on tropes developed during the 1980s! Maybe your ex-gal didn't want you because you were LAZY and UNCREATIVE, Justin!

Sometimes country music can be just as conservative and stupid and white and conforming as everyone who says "I like all kinds of music except country" fears that it is. I listened to this big-legged fellow ask, at a concert in Chicago, "Where my rednecks at???" And the crowd went "Wooo!!" And those of you who know my sallow pallor don't need me to explain why I couldn't wooo at that question. I retreated to the concessions stand for a sausage. Seriously friends, that man has such large, thick legs. They're like body pillows.

Let me leave you with something positive, a song and a video that I really like. Townes Van Zandt, "Waiting Around to Die."

what a pickle

2011-09-01T02:07:00.000-07:00

You don't wake up in the morning thinking, Oh I know! At 2 a.m., I'm going to take all of my clothes off and wander into the kitchen and empty a jar of extra large pickles into a plastic bag and then I'm going to put on a shirt and size 10.5 Ferragamo slingbacks but no pants and carry a massive painting of the background farm house from American Gothic from the laundry room to my bedroom, but then sometimes it's 2 a.m. and that's exactly what you just did!

There are so many more where these came from.

Some days you go to bed with monkeys and parrots linguistics like this in your head:

i want so badly to fuck you
i want to fuck you so badly
i want to fuck you really well

And then you wake up to a thank you email like this:

When my earnest 22 year old assistant brought in the book, and the postcard featuring an abstraction in a thong, i immediately thought "she shouldn't have", and then realized that was a saying, and apt on a whole lot of levels. If I was less lazy, I would send a tasteful dildo to your office, half wrapped in old sports-pages from the palo alto daily news. Fortunately for you, I am lazy (which is one reason i don't deserve such kindness). And while i send nothing to help their arrival, i do wish you a hundred additional leg-numbing orgasms this calendar year.

Men's legs! To be numbed.

And later in the day you sit in your car you can't stop giggling. Not maniacal laughter, not cheerful chortles, but the kind of giggling that happens inside a car in Sunnyvale, California, with a secondhand Ikea table top in your backseat, awesome news on your phone, and you're saying to yourself "HEE HEE HEE HEE HEE HEE HEE."

I am never going to let this painting go.

And then your favorite ridiculous person calls just to confess that she finds breastfeeding disgusting except when done by one particular weird-looking person she knows. You shush her because you're progressive. She goes on: "Sometimes you just don't want to see someone you're not really friends with have their nipples licked by another person." The problem with the latest feeding, she said, was that the person doing the licking - i.e. the baby - "took charge." You ask but she cannot elaborate on the meaning of taking charge.

I LUV MY LIFE!

people are going to listen

2011-08-29T13:49:00.000-07:00

J. stayed with me this weekend. We lived in the same co-op in college but hadn't seen each other in the intervening decade+. We got in touch somewhat randomly, I had a place to stay, he needed a place, and lo - there was his luggage open beside the extra bed. The night he got in, we shared beers and conversation that opened with the question: "What have you been doing in the last eleven years?"

Yesterday we met up with other friends from the co-op. H., a woman I remember to be a beatnik stoner with impossibly long hair, and J.M., whom I saw last in 2002 when we hopped a fence in Bayview and rambled around what turned out to be the police impound lot, taking photos of crushed cars. And M., whom I've seen more recently, who was a punk with a double mohawk and a multitool belted to his Carhartts when I met him and now is a resident in surgery at a prestigious San Francisco hospital.

I recognized H.'s mellow affect. And there was J.M.'s frantic, ex-raver energy as she led a woman in a lindy hop, when 1920s jazz came on the juke box last night. M. and I talk in the same way we did when we were in college - like men, looking away from each other, at something a distance away, addressing not the thing itself but rather the events and imaginations we observe in the moment. Sometimes talking about the superhero power you'd most like to have is a way of getting to the things that are harder to say.

This weekend wasn't the first time in recent memory that I've felt delighted to reconnect with someone once meaningful to me but with whom I've lost touch. There was also C., whom I saw randomly on the corner of 18th and Dolores on the Sunday morning of Pride, when I was walking back to my apartment wearing last night's clothes. C. and I were in a poetry class in 2000. Her writing affected me so much that it came to represent entire concepts, new terms, in my head. I wrote this about C. in a courtship email to another person a few years ago:

A college friend of mine, after reading Elizabeth Bishop's "Sestina," wrote something she called "Sweetness Sestina." I don't remember the poem but I liked the sibilance of its titular phrase so much I have whispered it to myself for seven years whenever something makes my heart want to explode with happiness. It is most often invoked by that combination of threat and intimacy we refer to shorthand as romance.

I've been thinking lots about longevity, continuity, the lifecycles of friendships, creating communities (and then staying, to strengthen those communities), giving and receiving mentorship, and the choices you make in life that ten years later you realize were important junctures but at the time just make you feel out of focus. For example, I just bought a home. It seems like the right thing to do but I'm not sure. I don't know if I can be sure. But a few months ago I started to imagine my toes turning into roots and plunging into the earthquake liquefaction zone that is San Francisco topsoil - a weird feeling, a physiological tingle, a foreign body sensation for somebody who has switched homes once a year for the last thirteen (!) years. I have no books left! I give them all away when I move. I want a room of my own to fill with books. But is it going to bankrupt me? Or tie me to an income I don't want to sustain? Will I be robbed? What happened to the dream of collective living that I nursed for so long? Or biking to work in Beijing? It's next to the PG&E substation, and electromagnetic fields have been linked to childhood leukemia, so will I have a partner, and will she move in, and will we have a child, and will that child be more susceptible to childhood leukemia, and how can I afford the health care???

My brain sure likes to ride that crazy train. God only knows what the next station will bring. So it's really pleasing to hear the older community members I work with say things like, "Oh, I've known C. since she was a baby dyke. We started a queer Asian women's group in New York in the late 1980s," or "We worked on affirmative action together before we worked on queer issues." And to have recently made some younger friends about whom I intend to say the same sort of thing, in the late 2020s. And have J. summarize the last eleven years by saying, "All of the good things in my life are the results of risky decisions I've made with imperfect information." And to remember that so much can happen in a decade but at the end of it we are still who we are, like C. now queer and shorthaired but still making magic with her words, or H. now with a Stanford M.D. but still sending out the same space cadet beatitude while wheeling a crooked bicycle down Lapidge Street.

And me, wrinklier, slacker, but still the same mix of anxiety, optimism, and premature sentimentality. Apologies for the last six months' mood, readers.

I'll leave you with one concrete outcome of this mood. A recent email exchange with someone I really wanted to mentor/adopt me when I was younger and unaware of how much fog was in my head:

From me to N.:

N.,

You may have no recollection of me. I met you when I was 23. It was a while ago. I had just started a Vaid fellowship at the Task Force.

We only worked together about two weeks before you left, but you said something to me that I haven't forgotten. We went to Nowhere Bar to get a drink. You were talking about the morning you turned 30. You said that as you lay in bed that morning, you realized that being thirty meant people had to take you seriously. That your opinion mattered.

I'm nearly 31 now. I've repeated your wisdom to hundreds of people. I started saying I was thirty more than two years before my 30th birthday because I was so eager to get to the state you described.

Anyway, I found myself saying that to a friend this morning, and I decided to look you up and let you know that even though we only knew each other for a brief moment in 2004, it was meaningful to me. I remember you very fondly. I hope you're doing well, wherever you're at in life!

[Bananarchist]

From N. to me:

Hey [Bananarchist] –

Of course I remember. This is a very kind email and I thank you for it. I believe what I said was that I thought: I’m thirty now, I’m going to say what I want to say and people are going to listen. As for other people taking me or my opinion seriously – that’s another matter.

my book about me

2011-08-24T12:52:00.000-07:00

I'm on OkCupid. Again. Sort of.

Sort of because I don't use it for dating. I use it to exchange stupid messages with friends whose profiles I come across. For example, with B..:

(Also please to send the Social Security number)

And with J.S.:

(I flagged a magenta hanky during Pride but nobody approached me! Sad face!)

Very few people contact me and I almost never respond. Responding feels unnecessary. I meet plenty of nice people in the flesh. And more importantly the thought of getting strangers' hopes up about my emotional availability - the things we'll say, the faces we'll show each other, the friendships we'll foul, the FEMA tents that will replace our hearts in two months time - and the reputation that will follow me - makes me want to run away screaming. The last incarnation of my OkCupid profile had not one but THREE warning labels to this effect:

"Quick to love, but not looking for it at the moment."
"Open to other suggestions, but not looking for romance."
"I make an excellent wingman."

(Caveat emptor, ladies!)

So why bother, if I don't actually want to meet anybody?

First, I like thinking about and honing my social media writing style. In the last year, I've micromanaged at least five friends' OkCupid profiles. I have strong opinions about how to not come across like a fool in Internet writing. So many things can doom a profile, including but not limited to 1) saying too little (reads as lurker), 2) saying too much (one should not have to hit Page Down more than twice), 3) misspelling words, 4) claiming middlebrow tastes, 5) claiming elite tastes, 6) identifying interests as if they're friends, like "Ani and Adrienne," 7) using the username "ilikeboobies" (a bona fide profile), 8) photos taken from a consistent angle, 9) excessive use of "Wheeeeeee!!! xoxox !!! :) <3 >.< "-like statements, and 10) being too literal in self-summary (e.g., "I was born in San Jose. Then I moved to Milpitas. Now I'm a dogcatcher. My favorite food is Greek yogurt."). So much to beware. But worst of all are those handwringers who backspace even as they type by saying "I never know what to say in these things!"

Profiles that work are those that embrace the genre and spell out the prospective's opinions clearly and unapologetically. On Friday night, I'm in the northeast corner of Washington Square Park, killing a game of Scrabble. The Ghost Writer blew. Fun Home wets my whistle.

If you would like me to improve the writing on your profile, I charge lawyer's rates - but your reward is life partnership so . . . you choose.

Second, I'm a little obsessed with the self-definitional aspect of it.

I like OkCupid for the same reason I like the Myers-Briggs types and love languages and astrology and other personality taxonomies. It gives me the opportunity and vocabulary to understand and describe people, and by people I mean myself.

(OkCupid reads my palm.)

Like the other social networking websites, OkCupid asks you to create a persona through words and photos. Your choice of words projects a certain image. You have to think about who you are and what part of that you want to let the world see. Except a dating profile probes a little deeper than Facebook. Your photo of you doublefisting Coronas works differently from one of you digging postholes for an environmental restoration project. How do I self-summarize? What six things can't I do without?

One day in May 2010, I blew off work for an afternoon and fell into an OkCupid wormhole. I browsed through all 56 pages of profiles on OkCupid meeting these parameters: gay women, 28-33, with 25 miles of Brooklyn. Then I had a mild panic about not being able to answer the OkCupid profile questions, and what that meant about my self-awareness:

Yesterday I was trolling for profiles of people I knew. I found the online dating profiles of A., B., C., D., and E. I was expecting more to turn up, but those that did were treasures. I read and reread and looked at pictures. I was most interested in A.'s. I was cruising along on her profile thinking, Yes, I have everything that she wants, strong shoulders, goofball tomboy personality, baseball glove, tree differentiating skills, "dizzying linguistic capabilities" - I mean, I wasn't lifted because I was flattering myself about my own attractiveness, or that I was hopeful that I could be with A. again, but because I felt like I had found a clear description of what I too valued - but then - wait. She also wants her dreambutch to have "self-knowledge and humility."

I stopped there. Is that what was wrong with me? That I didn't have either? And all that compatibility, all my androgyne to her androgyne-seeking, meant nothing because I didn't know what I wanted, or I was scared of what I wanted, or I couldn't express it, and I was a coward?

I take breaks every few years. I take long, lonely trips, dislocate myself, make myself confront new things. This, I say, is in the service of making myself a better, more self-reflective person. But I must have had the wrong idea. I think I should stay put. I think I need to sit down where I am and pay attention to what makes me happy and what makes me unhappy. I should be able to fill out questions about the movies that matter most to me without referring to my NetFlix history; because the movies don't matter when you don't remember them, and it's a lie to say that they do.

I was probably right to panic, because at that point I had wandered somewhat far away from the interests, activities, habits, and communities that I feel are part of my identity.

I was also interested in the metaphysics of self-description, i.e., how do we know we are describing ourselves accurately? How to not be three blind men describing an elephant?

I remember how dishonest the act of self-summary seemed from last year's online dating adventures, how your profile is a mixture of who you are and who you aspire to be, and how confusing it gets to differentiate the two. Yesterday, O. showed me the "Leadership Compass," a concept she picked up at a workshop at Creating Change. It's a personality chart with different characteristics on two perpendicular axes. North and south are relationship- versus goal-oriented. East and west are prudent sloth versus reckless speed, as working styles, or so I gathered, because I didn't find anything describe the axes in any coherent way. I glanced over O.'s chart and decided that I was all of the characteristics of all of the quadrants. It was baffling. On the underground walk between the Q and the 6 trains at Union Square, I told the back of S.'s head (she was tugging in front of me) that personality tests should really be filled out by the people who know you or work with you, because you can't be trusted to represent yourself honestly. Somebody has to tell me what my leadership style is, because I can't seem to perceive my inability to perceive myself as a personality dominated by indecisiveness.

On these websites you see dozens of people who appear to be within a standard deviation of yourself and your desires, with similar modestly pleasurable and unwasteful tastes, life goals, and interests, but the sell seems so different from the reality. When you meet face-to-face, why can't you two banter like your profiles do? Why are you so old and misshapen when you're not a 121k jpeg? And how much of this careful differentiation matters anyway? I found it so easy to judge a person's coarse tastes in art, poor grammar, seeming immodesty, embarrassing proclamations. But seen from outer space, how much difference is there really between somebody who likes Arrested Development versus somebody who likes Freaks and Geeks? Somebody who makes $185,000 as a corporate lawyer and somebody who makes $29,000 as a freelance radio producer/non-profit admin? In the end, we all turn bland-colored and die.

Note how my emotional defense mechanisms steered thoughts about romance toward death.

(The first thing people notice about me: halting motions, rotting flesh, blood on mouth, cute haircut!)

As I've written before, the last few months I've been busy hunting for identity in a period I'm calling a spastic second adolescence. Somebody following my profile in the last few months would have witnessed the schizophrenic evolution of my self-awareness. When I first reposted my profile, this was my self-summary:

A man set sail on a stormy sea. The boat that bore him yawed. Fleas set upon his collar. The air was salt; the food was salt; the medium was salt. He played the tin whistle and never slept. In his low voice, he said, to nobody in particular, "This is neither allegory nor reality, this is just something somebody wrote to meet the minimum word count demanded by an online dating service."

A good Samaritan sent me this helpful tip:

I left that profile up for about three months. Then I changed it to this:

Things I like: nattering on with someone awesome, learning new things, viola jokes, feeling dislocated in a foreign setting (this includes international travel as well as Billy Graham revivals in the Superdome), stringed instruments, an efficient sentence, a well-considered opinion, feats of strength, playing catch, giving gifts, walking out of a museum with the memory of just one piece of art.

I spent college in a hippie vegetarian co-op, baking bread, nerding out on art and politics. That's still my ideal household and community - warm, open, caregiving, nontraditional. I'm trying to figure out how best to live this ideal.

But this felt like too much, too humorless, too open to ridicule. Embarrassingly direct is not my style, colonoscopy cam though my blog might be. And guardedness is as much a part of my personality as the things I value. So I wanted a self-summary that would be honest and sincere but also creeping toward void for vagueness.

Which brings us to the present:

Warm, sloppy, enthusiastic, verbal, bicultural, non-judgmental, curious, searching. Sometimes uncertain, sometimes destructive, always attentive. Obscene in thoughts but traditional in unexpected ways. Values education, distrusts power. Cocky yet fearful. Too old to suffer fools. Very interested in limits. Quick to love, but not looking too hard for it at the moment.

With each revision, I feel like it's getting closer to the truth. It's a funny way to go about pinning down my identity, questions on a dating profile, but I suppose it's no less funny than the personality inventory tests that my high school sociology teacher made me take to identify my future profession. And before that, at age 5, circling professions that looked interesting to me in "My Book About Me."

In this book, I circled "Rabbi." Why? I misread the text. My life aspiration at age 5 was to be a rabbit.

i miss these kinds of conversations

2011-08-18T16:34:00.000-07:00

December 23, 2009:

X: what are you wearing?

B: exactly the same outfit as yesterday with the exception of brown underwear with pink piping instead of blue underwear with green piping. sweater with holes on the sleeves, t-shirt, pinstripe black pants, ski socks, canoe shoes, bad posture, mullet. oh la la. you?

X: what color sweater? holes on both sleeves? did you get new canoe shoes that don’t squeak? i can’t believe you never told me! me: grey cardigan with pin (wood, floral, round), red button-up shirt with silver threads and “peter pan” collar, high waisted thick wool skirt, mud colored, white sweater tights, round brown shoes. hair pinned up. bags under eyes. i look like a substitute teacher/crazy person.

B: sweater: black, wool, banana republic via goodwill. hole (patched) on left elbow where boo’s declaw caught once, another hole on left wrist, still unpatched. same canoe shoes, same squeak, don’t care anymore. your description of your outfit made me think thoughts of you inappropriate for the workplace.

X: this is fun. what have you eaten today? please list. let’s see if your fruit/vegetable intake is greater than the number of woolly clothing items i am wearing.

B: blueberry yogurt cup, oatmeal (almonds, pecans, apricots, sunflower seeds, shredded coconut), coffee. oatmeal raisin clif bar. sliver of fudge. potatoes au gratin (not sure what that means but includes grease and salt) and spinach heap with blueberries and walnuts and thumb of smegma. feel very unhealthy eagerly awaiting 2:30 p.m. free lunch time for chinese food leftovers. you?

X: coffee, emergen-c, toasted cinnamon raisin bread spread with smooth peanut butter, bowl plain yogurt with fresh fruit (orange, canteloupe, honey dew, pineapple, blueberries), small plain bagel with veggie cream cheese, two ginger cookies and an italian butter cookie stick, leftover stir-fried beef sichuan style with celery and carrots, jonas gold apple, bag of ritz bits cheese sandwiches, earl gray tea. gonna make myself some swiss miss soon and graze for more snacks.

B: num! eat more. what’s on your plate tonight? also you know what’s totally liberating? writing short imperative sentences, e.g. “send me the sentence when you’re done.” i prefer this to indirect feminine questioning, e.g. “um could you send me the sentence please?” what are you drinking tonight? killian’s red [emphatic hoof stamp].

X: oh yes, i’ve been transitioning to the command versus the fake-ask as well. it’s awesome.

B: sit on my face.

永远不会嫁给你啦

2011-08-16T02:17:00.000-07:00

Tonight I recorded a cover of a song called 明天我要嫁给你 (Ming Tian Wo Yao Jia Gei Ni) by 周华健 (Emil Chau).

Lyrics:

秒针分针滴答滴答在心中
miao zhong fen zhen di da di da zai xin zhong
我的眼光闪烁闪烁好空洞
wo de yan guang shan shuo shan shuo hao kong dong
我的心跳扑通扑通地阵阵悸动
wo de xin tiao pu tong putong de zhen zhen ji dong

我问自己要你爱你有多浓
wo wen zi ji yao ni ai ni you duo nong
我要和你双宿双飞多冲动
Wo yao he ni shuang shu shuang fei duo chong dong
我的内心忽上忽下地阵阵悸动呜...
wo de nei xin hu shang hu xia de zhen zhen ji dong

明天我要嫁给你啦
ming tian wo yao jia gei ni la
明天我要嫁给你啦
ming tian wo yao jia gei ni la
要不是每天的交通烦扰着我所有的梦
yao bu shi mei tian de jiao tong fan rao zhe wo shuo you de meng
(要不是停电那一夜才发现我寂寞空洞)
(yao bu shi ting dian na yi ye cai fa xian wo ji mo kong dong)

明天我要嫁给你啦
ming tian wo yao jia gei ni la
明天我要(终于)嫁给你啦
ming tian wo yao (zhong yu) jia gei ni la
要不是你问我
yao bu shi ni wen wo
要不是你劝我
yao bu shi ni quan wo
要不是适当的时候你让我心动
yao bu shi shi dang de shi hou ni rang wo xin dong
(可是我就在这时候害怕惶恐)
(ke shi wo jiu zai zhe shi hou hai pa huang kong)

Here's somebody's somewhat clumsy translation, a shame because the words are actually kind of pretty:

Second hand minute hand 'didadida' in heart
My eyes gleam blinking so emptily
My heartbeat 'putongputong' rhythmically beat
I ask myself want you love you how deeply
I want to live and endeavour with you how recklessly fast
My heart goes up and down rhythmically pulsing

Tomorrow I'm marrying you
Tomorrow I'm marrying you
If it isn't everyday traffic bothers all of my dreams
(If it isn't the night that blackout only discover my empty loneliness)
Tomorrow I'm marrying you
Tomorrow I'm (finally) marrying you
If it's not you propose to me
If it's not you advise me
If it's not the suitable time you moved my heart
(But I'm just at this moment terrified)

But can you blame the translator for not capturing it? The languages are so different. The translator renders the title phrase "明天我要嫁给你啦" as "Tomorrow I'm marrying you." In English it is eight syllables as it is in Chinese. But there is no poetry in the English sounds - you get the unattractive rhotic right away in the second syllable and again in the fifth, and "I'm" vivisects the rhythm of the phrase. In Chinese, you get three pleasing trochees and an iamb, which track the simple 4/4 time signature of the music behind the words. Listen to that triphthong on the upbeat: woh-ya-oo. Feel the way the phrase moves from sounds at the front of your mouth to your throat to your teeth to throat to teeth to tongue.

There's no poetry in the English words, either. "Tomorrow I'm marrying you" is a literal translation of what the singer is saying, but it sounds embarrassingly direct compared to the original, like the one-year-later sequel to the future tense verb conjugation lesson that is Enrique Iglesias's obscene little hit "Tonight I'm Fucking You" (or the radio-friendly "Tonight I'm Luvving You"), the others in the series being "Yesterday I Got You Pregnant" and "Next Year I Will Have Divorced You" and "Forever I Will Be Having Deep Regrets."

Here's my translation:

You meet a small, cute, mean, brilliant, sexy, psychotic Chinese-American gal who writes like a champion, reads for pleasure, and makes quiet, precise observations about the world through her corrective lenses. What do you do?

CALL THE POLICE!!!! 救命!!

I posted to YouTube since I don't have audio hosting. The image in the background is Ivan Aivazovsky's "The Ninth Wave." It came through the Guggenheim in late 2005, just as I was meeting the first of it turns out several small cute mean brilliant sexy psychotic Chinese-American etceteras I'd get to know. Another sexy etcetera introduced me to this song in 2009.

N. and Z.

2011-08-15T01:24:00.000-07:00

I'm standing on my desk chair trying to drill pilot holes into my window frame for a curtain rod, trying not to fly backward off the swivel chair and out the window. N. and Z. dart into the room with bright yellow t-shirts wrapped around their heads. They duck behind my bed. They crouch behind my desk. "What the fuck are you doing?" I say. "We're ninjas!" they say. "You're wearing bright yellow t-shirts," I say. "What kind of camouflage is that?" "We're ninjas!" they repeat.

(This isn't the ninja look. This is Z. trying to make N.'s hypercolor shirts turn colors.)

We have a conflict with the sublessor about pets in the household. N. keeps saying, "We want to make room in the household for both our human animal friends and non-human animal friends." He will not refer to dogs as dogs. I think he does this in part because he knows it is ridiculous, in part because he is a bona fide hippie.

Z. comes into my bed when I and other person are undressed in it. "Can I lay down thanks!" she says. It's not a question, but a statement, and before it is completely out of her mouth she is lying between the two of us. "We're going to the Pork Store," she says. "Wanna come?" She recalls how recent dance rehearsals have been. Her friend, a Filipino boy with hair down to his waist, hangs from my pull-up bar and explains how another hair-collecting charity is better than Locks of Love. Then they leave for brunch.

Sometimes when Z. and I hang out in the kitchen, she plays music from her laptop right toward our faces, and it is so loud that we have to shout at each other to be heard.

N. pulls out the measuring tape fifteen feet and lines it along the wall. He shows me the technique for a gap jump from standing - where to throw my weight, where to place my hands, how to land. We take turns leaping for distance in the hallway. I can't get past seven feet. N. launches like a spring and lands like a cat.

Sometimes Z. comes into my room crying, and then we lay down in my bed and I put my arm around her and give her a hanky to blow snot into, and then we talk for a little while and sometimes I will command her to stop crying. Sometimes this works, and she'll smile. Sometimes I'll get choked with fear and doubt thinking about an ex-lover/doctor's mental health diagnosis, and Z. asks questions that only convey curiosity, no judgment, until I am calm and capable again.

N. and Z. shout down the hall, "Want some FRIES??" so I join them in the kitchen. They're eating enormous burgers, even though N. hardly ever eats meat and Z. is 4'10" and hardly needs food to remain alive. I clean their plates of curly fries and normal fries, then apologize for eating everything. "There's Chinese food in the fridge too," they say. We talk about Z.'s apprenticeship with a healer and her own approach to energy work. N. is quiet, because there is something else on his mind.

Z.'s parents stay for three weeks in July. They cook Ecuadorean chicken dishes and serve me a unique pineapple-oatmeal beverage. Q. pronounces it Cuaker. He says, "That is how they say Quaker Oats in Ecuador." They leave behind gifts: for Z., a matching pajama set in lime green, with the words "I <3 Me" printed all over; for me, a giraffe's head on a cork; for the apartment, an old black and white image of Z.'s mom, a beauty in her youth, which we put on an end table next to a wood cut-out in the shape of Israel and the Palestinian Territories.

I come across N. and Q. stoned in the living room. "What are you doing?" I say. "Watching trailers," they say. We don't pay for cable. All we seem to get on the television is video on demand trailers. They have passed hours watching trailers. "It's better than movies," they say.

We're all leaving the apartment at the end of the month. Moments like these only happen between people who see each other all the time, in unstructured ways, in shared spaces. I'm going to miss these fools.

philip levine

2011-08-12T12:15:00.000-07:00

Philip Levine is the new poet laureate. These things don't usually find me but I heard an interview with him on the drive to work yesterday. His biography is a little unusual: working class, Detroit, teaches at Fresno State.

Fresno State! How many poets of poet laureate stripes choose life in the dry, dull, middle-of-nowhere inferno that is Fresno? It says a lot about his values. Color me impressed.

Here's a poem worth reading:

The Simple Truth

I bought a dollar and a half's worth of small red potatoes,
took them home, boiled them in their jackets
and ate them for dinner with a little butter and salt.
Then I walked through the dried fields
on the edge of town. In middle June the light
hung on in the dark furrows at my feet,
and in the mountain oaks overhead the birds
were gathering for the night, the jays and mockers
squawking back and forth, the finches still darting
into the dusty light. The woman who sold me
the potatoes was from Poland; she was someone
out of my childhood in a pink spangled sweater and sunglasses
praising the perfection of all her fruits and vegetables
at the road-side stand and urging me to taste
even the pale, raw sweet corn trucked all the way,
she swore, from New Jersey. "Eat, eat" she said,
"Even if you don't I'll say you did."
Some things
you know all your life. They are so simple and true
they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme,
they must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker,
the glass of water, the absence of light gathering
in the shadows of picture frames, they must be
naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.
My friend Henri and I arrived at this together in 1965
before I went away, before he began to kill himself,
and the two of us to betray our love. Can you taste
what I'm saying? It is onions or potatoes, a pinch
of simple salt, the wealth of melting butter, it is obvious,
it stays in the back of your throat like a truth
you never uttered because the time was always wrong,
it stays there for the rest of your life, unspoken,
made of that dirt we call earth, the metal we call salt,
in a form we have no words for, and you live on it.

You can hear him reading it in the interview, starting at 9:40. He is old, and his voice sounds spittle-rich.

engine gunk!

2011-08-08T12:07:00.000-07:00

If you pump gas at the Shell Station on El Camino and Oxford Street in Palo Alto, this woman smiles down upon you while you slake your thirsty car:

Things of note:

The ad is cheap. Probably literally cheap to make: a model, her clothes and makeup, a photographer, two engine valves, a copywriter, and a designer. Also, cheap-looking: crappy design (note the bright red arrow pointing to "Engine gunk!", and the excitable "Engine valves after only 5,000 miles!" badly squeezed between the two valves), questionable color palette (pink, red, yellow, light blue, like the baby department of a paint store). And is that New Century Gothic?!

Design principles. Two vertical lines frame the person. Her gaze draws yours toward the valve on the right. So does the color and light balance. Left is sinister, right is right. Left to right motion is progress, so valve on the right is evolutionary improvement of valve on the left. Little Shell logo on the coat tells you which is the Shell valve.

They think I'm simple. A helix of blue beads juxtaposed with a greasy valve is supposed to convince me to patronize Shell.

The image that is supposed to convince me is that of a scientist. Somebody in a white lab coat. That person is a woman. Woman is older. She is Caucasian. They could have Photoshopped the lines in her neck out, but chose not to. She does not wear a wedding band or engagement ring, which is probably true to life given the partnership and family prospects of women who pursue terminal degrees. She is thin-lipped and shapeless but not entirely without suggestive flavor - her pink shirt opens with a vulvar collar and a light application of makeup says that she has only given up on sex 90-95%.

Why not an older, white, male model? An Asian model? I'm not saying that because I'm concerned about API visibility and empowerment here but because I expect ad writers to cash in on the model minority stereotype. Is the choice of an older white woman supposed to signify Shell's social consciousness - that it is aware of and fighting the bias against women in the sciences? Because the demographic filling up their tanks at Shell gas stations skews toward older white women, who are more likely to trust reflections of their own faces? Because sex and dependability are at odds? I suppose you don't really see nubile young things pitching fire insurance.

Just things to think about in the 90 seconds one patiently endures in order to rejoin the road trip toward environmental destruction, suburban sprawl, unsustainable development, resource dependency, geopolitical gamesmanship, war and death.

challed prawn agrafee

2011-08-06T01:06:00.000-07:00

Here's this horrible thing I did once before I had a slightly firmer grasp on professionalism. (Slightly.) I had a summer job. I thought it would be funny to tease my officemate by sending him an email. The email was very simple. The subject read: giled pinografie.

Please note that it did not actually read "giled pinografie." It's just that I refuse to write on my blog what I actually wrote, lest the feds descend upon me. Say it aloud, and the meaning will become clear to you.

Then, in the body of the email, I wrote, "Just kidding!"

Then I hit send.

When my officemate got this email, he put his head on his desk and cried. The man literally cried. He said we would both be fired. Maybe arrested too.

Neither of us were fired or arrested. Happy ending!

eight of keys

2011-08-03T22:25:00.019-07:00

A. saw the future on Monday and told me what was to come. It started with tarot cards on a scrap of fabric she had laid on a sunny patch of grass. Not tarot, but some lefty re-invention of the tarot set, with images of hipsters and single speeds instead of sword mages and skeletons. We were out in Dolores Park. She got a sunburn. I got a vision.

She said, Ask the cards a question. I thought a minute about this.

B. and M. were sitting in the grass next to me, B. lackadaisically eating potato chips, M. doing I'm not sure what. We sat on a slope and looked down toward Dolores Street. I asked B. why so many people were out in the park on a Monday morning. Don't they have work? I said. I guess we didn't either.

My question was: Will I find the direction I am looking for by the end of the year?

Context for the question. After a blistering, bewildering, exhausting May and June, I spent July doing a monthlong no-fruit diet. A detox plan. Finding my center, spotting the ground. No drinking, or only cosmetic drinking, meaning where you hold a glass as you would a purse, for the colorful visual effect, but you wouldn't drink out of it any more than you would drink out of a purse. Sleeping, reading, writing, and strengthening my back. Therapy. Acupuncture. Spending time with old friends, Mom, Dad, Grandma, and a border collie mutt. Focusing on work and finding a home. And most importantly, no fruit!

(Let me gaze upon your euphemism.)

I finished the detox plan, accomplished a bit of what I wanted to accomplish, and then ended July unexpectedly filled to the brim with love: I spent last weekend at queer Asian summer camp, the NQAPIA Leadership Summit in San Jose.

The recurring theme there was making room for ourselves where there was not room before. Over a hundred activists squeezed into an LGBT community center, sharing skills and stories and an unarticulated feeling that we were working together toward something we all wanted. Someone taped a handwritten sign reading "Gender Neutral Bathroom" over the triangle-skirted Bathroom Woman placard. Five homos sardined in a bed, with a sixth lying like a plank across the top. We hustled tables and chairs to fit everyone at lunch. I tapped undiscovered resources in my heart during a heavy conversation with a beloved old friend. We aspired for more than the .02% of total nonprofit funding we get now.

Making room. Finding a spot in a schedule. Rearranging the furniture. Clearing space for a new demographic: gay, Asian, hot as fuck, ready to fight.

So.

As the weekend wound down, I wanted a hint of what was to come. A. recommended tarot.

The cards I chose were the six of keys, the eight of keys, and the ten of bones. A. read to me from a small black book the explanations for each. Keys symbolize readiness for forward movement, transitions, opportunities, and next steps. I use my fourteen keys to open doors, start cars, and unlock bikes. Bones are currency are wealth: energy, health, emotional strength, money. Ten bones is the most wealth one can acquire.

(In traditional tarot this card is call the Ten of Pentacles. In activist tarot this card is called the Pen of Tentacles.)

I understood these cards to be answering not only the question I posed to them in Dolores Park, but also the questions I'd been mulling over since the start of the conference.

For example, on Saturday morning, E. had screened her trailer for the Asian Pride Project. It was about fifteen minutes of interviews with LGBTQ API folks and their family members, a mix of bright faces acknowledging triumphs and challenges. K. talked with a smile about her Japanese father lauching into a lecture on historical Japanese homosexual practices throughout the millenia when she came out to him; R. said he didn't have the vocabulary in Chinese to describe what he was experiencing to his parents. Many of us watching in the cafeteria of that modest suburban community center suppressed sniffles when E.'s grandmother said E. wouldn't meet her grandmother's expectations of a husband and family, and then burst into loud, relieved laughter when E.'s grandmother said that dating girls was okay as long as they were educated and financially stable. Same status expectations from an Asian granny even for a partner of a different gender!

I looked around the room while the video was screening. I had closed the blinds so we could see the projector but the brilliant California daytime spilled through and illuminated the room anyway. Solid, tireless B.G. adjusted the PA speakers to minimize feedback. There was an asymmetrical haircut or two that I had grown so fond of in just a short time. An old friend from New York gave a new friend from San Francisco a massage. Half eaten pastries and banh mi scraps lay on paper plates on the tables. In one corner, the stylish young interns from one political advocacy group sat together, a little wide-eyed but eager to learn, roll up sleeves and help. Their teddy bearish boss, who asked such intelligent questions about decisionmaking at our board meeting on Thursday. The silver-haired elder who loved the sound of her own voice, the sharp Chicagoan who reminded us that not all Asian folks had Asian parents, the important community leader who made me feel special when she showed a few minutes of Clintonesque personal interest in me a few years ago, when I was more wide-eyed myself. How I swoon for a bow tie and a checked shirt. What were we doing here? Why did we take off work to crowd into a cafeteria in San Jose? Where did we find the patience for frustrating, unfocused meetings? For the difficult labor of building something from nothing? What wellspring of good feelings made us grin at each other passing in the hallways? How do we bottle that spring for refreshment when the conference becomes a distant summer memory? How did we all know to take off our shoes when we entered each others' hotel rooms?!

These were the kinds of questions I wanted answered.

Monday after the conference, in Dolores Park, A. concluded her description of the ten of bones card by saying: "You will be getting used to the feeling of being full."

Or . . . something like that. I was too preoccupied with the prospects of my good fortune to hear the actual thing said. I loved to think about my metaphysical pockets crowded with keys and coins. Of the image of a hundred people unlocking bikes and riding into the starry night. This we call a movement. I practically applauded when A. finished her reading.

Let me find the takeaways for you:

Now is a good time to be alert and alive. The answer to all of my questions is yes.

(Get in your go-cart and go little sister, get in your go-cart and go

Get in your go-cart and go little sister, get in your go-cart and go

Get in your go-cart and go little sister, get in your go-cart and go)

big two-hearted river

2011-07-27T14:04:00.015-07:00

I woke to an email early and read it in a hurry on my phone before running out for a class that turned out was not being held. So I walked home past all the people who either grimaced, smiled, or expressed nothing at the short-haired girl in sneakers without socks and a bright yoga roll under her arm. Yoga nixed, wanting a workout, I drove to Aquatic Park with my wetsuit next to me for a twenty minute dip in the freezing bay.

It was overcast. I left my shoes on the stone steps beyond the beach. Just as I waded in, another swimmer, standing in the shallows, said to me, "There's a seal over there." I asked him the risk. He said that last year a seal had been out biting swimmers.

(This is the face of terror.)

For the first ten minutes, I paddled breaststroke and refused to submerge my head into the water, lest my last view be a fatty, black shape materializing from the green murk to take a nibble out of the floating, flailing steak before it. Not that I could, anyway. The cold of the water was so shocking at first that putting my head into it made me breathless with alarm and fear. After a while, my limbs warmed. My fear subsided, and I was able to coax myself to swim five sets of freestyle for thirty strokes, ten breaths, before I called it a workout and swam in a diagonal line to the spot I had left my shoes. Earlybird tourists gawked at me when lifted myself from the water. I smiled in a manner that I felt to be inviting. This is an ordinarily early morning in my city, I wanted my face to say. And we are sharing it today. Some smiled in return. Others looked away quickly. I suppose my face was also saying, I am a soaking lunatic in a rubber suit walking barefoot on a city sidewalk. I will nab your footlong camera and run for the hills. Only on the drive there and back, in local traffic along Van Ness, did I let thoughts penetrate my mind. The noise of these I drowned out with a mixtape from 2008.

It's the drives that get me. I'm okay when with other people. Kevin asked a chimney sweep to come in and tell me about the condition of the fireplace - needs at least $350 in repairs, more if you account for the stacks on the roof. We stood near him and spoke about the upcoming appraisal in Chinese while the sweeper made clouds of soot with his industrial vaccuum cleaner and primitive scraping tool. The seller complained to me about something, and his freshly washed mini mutt danced all around our legs. ("Dr. Bonner's," he kept saying, "The suds are much easier to wash out.") All this time I was all right. There was a living room to consider, a window lock to be tested, papers that needed attending to.

But once I got back into my car for the long drive to Palo Alto . . .

It may just be my mood today, or this week. I've been looking backwards. Yesterday I had a Proustian moment applying a bright yellow highlighter to a page: neon shorts, mini-golf, dark arcades, riding in cargo bay of station wagon, dry California heat, mid-1980s. In the car home last night, after another grueling late night of uncertainty and zero communication from the partners and then sudden floods of work, Rihanna came on the radio and reminded me of the sharp tack of a woman who exited my life right around when that song was in fashion. I remembered sitting in Astor Place in late July, a house party, a peridot Monroe that I loved to kiss. And then this morning, just the memory of a seagull with a pine cone, a playground slide, the wooden interior of a tram on Market Street can do so much. It's like my brain cannot decide what era to settle down and cry in, so I swing between years, sniffling at everything.

(Once upon a time, a stranger gave me a dollar on this tram!)

Today's mantra, which I repeated over and over in a message to myself last night, is this: Find your spine. I meant it in the context of toughing out the stressful work/extracurricular week, but it applies equally to my weak heart. The MRI says there is foraminal narrowing in the C3 and C5-C6 area, but what I cannot see I don't believe, and so I know only that when the overstretched balloon of my heart temporarily deflates, the structure that keeps my body upright is my long, trustworthy backbone. The most private thing I am actually willing to admit is that I abhor weakness in myself, even though it is everywhere.

(The thing that ails me.)

So I turn the radio off. I don't need the falter in the singer's voice to send me on another trip. So I put the email away. I am not ready for this. So I look out the window. If the perspective is not in front of my face, find another view. So I put the memories away. I listen instead to a voicemail from Stern: twenty seconds of her meowing to the tune of "Let's Get Physical." I laugh. There. Better.

孝顺 (a.k.a. filial piety)

2011-07-19T19:27:00.007-07:00

Just yesterday I was literally unable to tell my therapist* how warring parts of me craved but felt oppressed by my parents' approval because my throat was too choked up to express how craptastic it felt when my dad sat me down on a bunk bed in Zhong Li and suggested that I was a prostitute for performing music live in front of other people. "Somebody's daughter sings and dances in front of other people," Somebody said. Made me performing my sexless country music compositions sound like Mata Hari. Angry words, slammed doors, tears on my pillow - oh, you know the drill.

Then today I get this email that kind of illustrates my point. My mom congratulating my parents' tenants on a new baby:

Dear H____ & T__!! Congratulation new parents!! We are so happy to see your baby’s picture. He is a healthy and handsome boy. Also he is the 8th baby born in this house. The first one is our daughter. She graduated from Harvard University & NYU Law School, she is lawyer now. Your son will be a doctor too!!!Thanks so much for sharing your happiness with us. Best wishes for you and family. Regards!!!

On the one hand: they seem so proud of my accomplishments! Yay, I'm loved!

On the other hand, my identity as their daughter is described as "She graduated from Harvard University & NYU Law School, she is lawyer now."

Laugh, or cry, or both?!

*A new development in my adulthood! She's queer, andro, empathetic. I think she gets it! It feels therapeutic!

B♮

2011-07-17T03:06:00.012-07:00

Big changes recently, all for the best, but things that make me think, Oh, yes, I'm thirty. I'm separating needs from wants from aspirations. Taking self and community surveys. Deciding what I need in an apartment, a job, a relationship, a community, and how much I can give to each. Figuring exactly how short I can wear my hair before I go past the point of androgyny.

I prefer not to think of what I'm doing as being lost but as being in transit. It’s not that I don’t know where I am, it’s that I am getting to where I want to be.

(The map of my travels.)

So I'll get to writing down this story when it's reached a destination. But sometimes in the middle of the journey it's nice to look back at where you started.

Here's an unsent letter I wrote about six months ago, when I first moved to San Francisco:

Tonight I went to a bluegrass show at a club about one mile from my house. I drove there straight from work, mostly because Elyse had parked in the spot in front of the house and I didn't feel like hunting for another spot just to change out of my work clothes.

It reminded me of how I used to spend my time when I was learning another city alone. In total I didn't do it more than ten times, but it felt like I often went to shows alone in Chicago, just to get out of the house, hear some music, try a new beer, look at some people. It never fails to make me feel lonely and alien. Even though I was just about average age in that bar, I felt so much older, older than even the wrinkled ladies in front dancing with each other, older by decades than the taut-fleshed young people wearing all manner of fashionably dull button down western shirts or horrifically unfashionable clothing - I forget sometimes that San Francisco built its modern wealth on the backs of khaki-clad nerds - God I just spilled hot herbal tea all down my mouth and pants, and I can't even remember what I'm talking about. Oh yes, how alien I feel.

The music was nice. The first band, The West Nile Ramblers, played old time country western music that veered oddly toward eastern European party music. Lots of minor chords and upbeat oompa sounds. I was reminded of Tetris. The second band was musically duller but lyrically more exciting, more traditional country themes with a wry, modern (but not too modern) twist and a weary, conscientious sensibility. Lyrics like, "I like my Mustang, but it's just one more thing / I like my flat-screen but it's just one more thing," if that helps illustrate anything. I liked them a lot. Mostly they just seemed like they were having a good time onstage together, and they appreciated the audience. In contrast, the third band was all frowny face and then guitar face from the lead singer. Apparently he was pissed that he wasn't getting enough sound out of his monitor. But really though, must you look like you sucked on a lemon? I left after one song.

What especially caught my eye was this pair of women who kept dancing together. They were the only pair brave enough to attempt real western swing dancing, square dance style, rather than just half-hopping in place like the unrhythmic young people seemed to prefer. These two women were probably late-30s or early-40s. The woman who led wore her hair short and the woman who followed wore slightly longer (but still short) hair, but otherwise they were dressed similarly. Discreet cowboy boots, trim bootcut jeans, tight cap-sleeved t-shirts. Both were fit and athletic, poised, and smiling. I found myself totally captivated in a way that I might have been if I had been thirteen years old and seeing two women dancing together for the first time. I could not stop staring. They were polite to me - the slightly butcher one looked over a few times and smiled at me, and I looked away, aghast. But then I returned my gaze. I could not stop staring. I admired how trim they were, how nicely the short haircut offset the leading woman's neck, how they seemed fearless before the crowd - but mostly I could not stop watching how they looked at each other. They held each others' gazes and looked at almost nothing else, as if there was nothing in that room but the two of them and the sound of country music. I thought about my earlier experiences with country music - in Santa Fe, in Nashville, in Chicago - and only then realized that I had been thinking of country music as only something for straight, white, conservative people - I still have that feeling despite having played country music myself and declared that it was for everybody! I guess I really didn't believe it. Hate to admit, but there was part of me that year living in Chicago that desperately wanted to fit in, and somehow I felt country music would make me more normal.

Part of my alien feeling was due to standing next to presumably straight people, or at least women and girls who wore the feminine articles of the day - high boots, jeans, tight long scoop neck shirts, etc. - and swung their hips side to side. I was half cynical, half generous. The first half thought these women pathetic for wagging their asses in front of men, so obviously seeking attention, so obviously performing a tired (universal! many girls wore the same girly girl outfit!) expression of femininity but attracting the boys anyway. The second half thought, how wonderful, these lovely girls are moved by the music and they just need to dance! The first half was winning until the butcher of the two in the all-woman pair smiled at me, and made me feel like a curmudgeon for begrudging anyone their happiness while dancing.

I spoke to nobody in the bar, even though I looked around rovingly a few times in hopes of catching somebody's eye. I stood next to a single man for about half an hour, trying to think of entrees for conversation - like "Hey, do you know what the name of this band is?" or "How come they asked everyone to record this song on their phones?" - and wondering why he wouldn't look over at me, another single person, and attempt conversation himself, and feeling so neurotic that eventually I just fixed in a spot six inches behind him and focused on the musicians, saying nothing. I wasn't looking for sexual attention, just any kind of attention, though of course I admit that because he was alone and I was alone any kind of attention between the two of us would feel to me to be sexual. Or maybe not - maybe I can't make presumptions about San Francisco like I did about Chicago.

Anyway, feeling like a loser, but having enjoyed the music, I headed out to my car. On the way out, I caught the festival producer standing alone and decided to thank him for organizing the show. We made some small talk. I told him this was the first I'd heard of the bluegrass festival. He said, "Oh yeah, did your friends drag you out to this?" and I said, "No, I came alone." He said that was really unusual, and I said, "Because nobody goes out alone?" and he said, "No - " he seemed a little embarrassed - "but nobody admits it." I said, "Well, I just like the music." Which is what Harry would say, which made me feel extra pathetic. But I guess it's true. None of my friends wanted to go, and I wanted to hear the music. And more than the music, I wanted to stand in a bar crowded with people and watch a few people and try to make eye contact. I felt validated when that handsome butch woman looked over at me and smiled. I wanted to run up to her and ask her and her partner to adopt me. I think this would have been an awkward conversation.

Being around all these single women and single men today also made me really resent you. I projected you right on the woman standing in front of me, and I thought all sorts of insulting thoughts about her. I resented you for my feeling inferior to men, so totally foreign to me until I started dating a girl I worried was straight. You know where my imagination goes. Like even though you had all the attention I could give you, it still wasn't enough for you, and you wanted men to pay attention to you too. Maybe only a man, not just somebody playing up masculinity, can make you feel wanted or give you the whole package of gifts - status, validation, universality, acceptance - that goes along with coupling with the opposite sex.

I don't know, X. It makes my head hurt to psychoanalyze us and I wonder why I even waste my time. There are plenty of hot, confidently gay women in the world, it turns out. I wanted so badly to be part of that pair on the dance floor. I really hated you then. I really missed you, and I hated you too. How the hell do these feelings all get wound up in my head?

That is all the bullshit from me tonight. It's 3:30 in New York now. You're probably asleep. At home? At J's? Have you found somebody else already? Have you called R? Are you dreaming? Are you snoring? There's that ambivalence again - as much as I resent you and imagine you in places that only hurt me to imagine, I wonder what your hot baking body feels like under your pile of sheets. I wonder if I might not fly to Brooklyn with a rocket pack in time to let myself in with your extra keys and slip into bed with you and feel the warmth of your body in person.

I wish you had not let me love you so much. I wish you had let me cut this off a year ago, when the pain of losing you would have been much easier for me to bear. But now I love you, and I miss you, and I hate you.

Harsh words, but my feelings were what they were. Now I don't read it as evidence of horrible things that horrible people did to me, because the things weren't that bad and the people were adorable. I read it with a sense of curiosity about myself: how did I let myself go astray from the things that I wanted? Or feel that level of self-doubt? Or endure this quantum of negative feelings before making a change?

Things are changing. There was a spell between May and June where I could hardly sleep. I'd wake up after four hours of rest with my heart ready to lace up and run out the door, even though my body and brain wanted to be back under the covers. I described this to anyone who cared as feeling too excited about life to be patient enough to sleep. Every day felt like the first day of warm weather.

This extreme zest for life also had its consequences - e.g., exhaustion-related physical and mental deterioration - so this month I have tried to break my feast-or-famine pattern and find what is referred to in Northern California as Balance. (That's another thing I am learning about myself - if you said any sentence containing the words Healing, Garden, Wellness, Balance, Community, Kindness, Organic Produce, Non-Human Animal Friend, Cisgendered, Spirituality, Self-Study, Empowerment, or Nourishment, chances are high I would nod in agreement! I am serious! I love San Francisco!) That story is for another blogpost, TBD.

Until then, I leave you with my latest journal entry, to counterbalance the heaviness from February:

I saw graffiti on a Palo Alto overpass that said simply "B♮." Took me a minute but then I laughed out loud. The symbol after the B is an accidental. The tag reads "Be natural." Excellent advice in modern times.

monday morning

2011-05-23T12:47:00.004-07:00

Monday morning commute with Boo. Heading back to Palo Alto after long glorious weekend in San Francisco filled with friends old and new, sunlight, dog love, wind-whipped sand, golden pork buns, hot professional lezzies. Highway 101 South is a parking lot but I don't care. Blasting Erasure greatest hits all the way to work, windows down. Boo sniffs for a while, then tires and falls asleep. I'm wearing a black suit, white shirt for tomorrow's depo. I'm dressed like the border collie in the backseat.

I drop Boo off in the backyard of my parents' home and drive the remaining 1.5 miles to work. More slow traffic. Left arm out the window baking to a deeper color than the right, heart-shaped sunglasses, singing Erasure's cover of ABBA's "Take A Chance On Me" as loud as I can. Nodding and grooving. Day is bright in the valley, with fog at the top of the Santa Cruz mountains. Man in forest green SUV pulls short of the light so that our windows are aligned. I look down my sunglasses at him. He looks down his sunglasses at me. He drives off craning his neck backwards. We meet again at the next light. He rolls down the window. I'm singing, "If you change your mind / I'm the first in line / Honey I'm still free / Take a chance on me . . . " He shouts, "HEY DO YOU WANT TO GET COFFEE!?" I keep singing and shake my head and hold up my left ring finger. Wag it at him, smiling. Take an abrupt right on my street and never see him again.

This week is gonna be GOOD.

shakespeare's bed

2011-05-16T11:32:00.006-07:00

When my relationship died, I took a hiatus from, of all things, reading fiction. Don't know why, but I just couldn't stand it. These days I seem to spend more time sweating outdoors and in with strangers than I do building my brain. To the extent that I consume any media, it is in the form of self-help books, news and variety magazines, science or business related podcasts, and a couple of choice Erasure songs on loop.

Yesterday, I hardly left my room. Still fighting with death cough. Nurse napped at my place post-shift, and as she dozed, I fished a book out of my pile and started reading.

The book is a collection of interrelated short stories by Lore Segal called "Shakespeare's Kitchen." I'd never heard of her until I heard her story on a fiction podcast C. recommended to me.

I love this book. Let me share some pieces with you. The heroine is a 30-something Vienna-born naturalized American named Ilka. She has recently been appointed a position at an institute affiliated with a private university in rural Connecticut. She is lonesome for people as intelligent and warm as those she knew in her pre-institute life. In the next two group scenes, Ilka has just met some people she likes and wants to impress, but she doesn't know how to make her personality known to them:

People were moving in from the porch. Ilka saw the new director momentarily alone, slipped out, and said, "I have a theory," and told him about the Egyptian sculpture. It seemed to take a very long time.

The new director said, "I understand that we've got you teaching in the adult program at the university."

"English for Foreigners. I'm a foreigner," said Ilka in despair: once embarked on this routine of self-conscious inanities there's no way back to good sense and propriety. If Ilka had met herself at this moment, at this party, she would have written herself off as an ass and walked away. The new director with the beautiful head and the English voice did not walk away and seemed not to be looking for some better opportunity over Ilka's shoulder. He regarded her attentively, without pretending to any peculiar interest. Ilka understood that she was talking to a patient man who might choose to distinguish between an ass and a person showing off at a party. Ilka said, "Talking to you makes people nervous. I wonder if my students feel like that talking to me?"

Leslie Shakespeare's eyes widened ever so slightly; he could be seen to be thinking. He said, "Probably so." Ilka was relieved and sorry when Joe Bernstine came to fetch his guest of honor. "Leslie, we need you to circulate. We need you to come in and eat."

The new director said, "Well then, that's what I'll do." He looked behind him, saw nobody, and putting his hand not on but just in back of Ilka's back, moved her through the door ahead of him: he was not going to leave anybody alone on the empty porch.

"It is possible," Ilka said to Martin Moses at the buffet table, "that our new director is a nice man."

And later, in the kitchen of Leslie and his wife Eliza, with a professor named Winterneet:

Sunday morning Leslie called and fetched Ilka in the car. Ilka walked into Eliza's kitchen and there was Winterneet sitting at the table smiling at Ilka.

Ilka was not some young thing; it annoyed her not to be able to keep up her end -- like Eliza, who could cut and slice, correct the seasoning, and perform last-minute maneuvers at the stove and keep the conversation flying like some high-wire act. Ilka developed a crick in the neck looking from a joke of Eliza's to Winterneet, who swung with it into a mutual reminiscence. Eliza, tossing and tasting the salad, elaborated a very tall tale that Winterneet topped with a deliciously nasty quip. Ilka wanted to play with them, up there, in the middle air, but the palpitation of her heart preempted her breathing. Ilka hunkered down waiting for the laughter to run its course before she took the running start to get her own joke airborne with enough breath for the punch line, but Eliza, removing her beautiful French bread from the oven, had started a story that grew naturally out of Winterneet's point, which Ilka missed, because it took off from what she suspected herself of not having recognized as a quotation. Ilka crouched to wait for the next opening in the hope of having thought of something that would fit whatever might by that time be under discussion.

Leslie, leaning back in his chair, observed his wife and his friend with the air of a man eating the best bread and butter, and listening to the best conversation, in his own house, at his own breakfast. Eliza had glided two coddled eggs onto Leslie's plate when the doorbell rang. Leslie looked regretful, got reluctantly up, and went to answer the door. He came back. He said, "Dear. It's Una."

Notice that in that passage you don't know the topics of the conversation, just the mood and pace, and there is not a drop of dialogue, but the scene is so vivid you could probably supply the lines yourself. How does she do this?!

And when she does dialogue, it's so sharp and perfect. Here Una, the unwanted guest, is at the Shakespeares' door:

"Tell her no," Eliza said.

"She's come straight from the airport," said Leslie. "She has her bags."

Eliza said, "I recommend the Concordance Hotel, corner Euclid and Main, a clean, well-lighted place."

Leslie went out.

"You can't do that! Can you do that?" asked Ilka in an excited whisper. "Can you tell someone to go away?"

"Watch me," said Eliza. "Or watch me tell Leslie to tell her."

"But I mean - imagine having just arrived from New York . . . "

"From London," Eliza corrected her.

"What can you say to her?"

"You say, 'If you bother me, I'll set the Concordance police on you.'"

Leslie returned. Eliza gave him back the eggs she had kept warm for him and said, "I make Leslie go and do the dirty work."

"Yes, you do," said Leslie.

Ilka said, "What were the actual words you said to her?"

"I said, 'There's a nice enough family hotel on Main - medium priced.' I wrote the address on a piece of paper and hugged her good-bye."

"You hugged Una!" cried Eliza.

"Yes," said Leslie.

"She's Paul Thayer's neice, no?" asked Winterneet.

"Niece by marriage," Leslie said. The doorbell rang again. Eliza took Leslie's eggs and covered them with foil.

When Leslie came back he had his jacket on and the car-keys in his fist. "Her driver has driven off. I'll take her to the hotel."

"She's driven her driver off!" said Eliza. "Our little Una likes Leslie to drive her. Una is always having to be driven. Una always needs picking up."

Ilka said, "You must have once liked her?"

"Una is a chilly English schoolgirl who came to America and caught the sixties."

"Why isn't that a good thing for a chilly English girl to catch?"

"Because she had to work so hard at it. Have you ever seen a hedonist with gritted teeth?"

"Poor Una," said Ilka.

"Poor, poor Una," said Eliza. "Like the baby kangaroo in Pooh Corner who keeps jumping out of its mother's pouch, saying 'Look at me jumping!' Una jumped into everybody's bed saying 'Look at me screwing!'"

"But you have to imagine having been born chilly. What was Una supposed to do?" Ilka looked at Winterneet for acquiescence. Winterneet was eating Leslie's coddled eggs. Ilka said, "Don't you think there's something gallant about warming yourself up by your own bootstraps? What do you want her to do?"

"Go back to London," said Eliza.

When Leslie returned from driving Una to the Concordance Hotel, he drove Ilka home to the Rasmussens'.

So elegant and spare. No words wasted on descriptions, no perspective jumping to explain what Leslie did between going to the door the second time and returning with his keys in hand. You're just getting to know all the characters, but right away you can sense that Leslie and Eliza trust one another but that there is also some history behind Eliza's dislike for young, clumsy, flirtatious Una. You get Ilka's worry that she is Leslie and Eliza's new Una - the clever foreigner girl once welcome in the house, later shooed off the porch - and her attempt to express mercy for Una without chiding Eliza.

I woke Nurse to read the above passages to her. She said, "I'm as interested in the writing as I am in why you chose to read me those particular passages," and fell back asleep. That was so fucking deep it left me speechless - her scrutiny from my bed of my empathy for Ilka's empathy for Una's desperate, slutty socializing in the face of Eliza's scrutiny. Which is just as well, because Nurse was unconscious by the time I parsed these subjectivities, so I had nobody to tell my thoughts to anyway.

hawaii with D.

2011-05-16T01:41:00.011-07:00

D. says there are eighteen phonemes in the Hawaiian language. She says one incredibly boring way to spend a date is to go on a walk and read street signs aloud. In a diner in Volcano where the waitress cannot stop singing - Guantanamera first in a high key, then in a low key, then another song, and another - D. tells me a horror story about the roommate who sang loungey adaptations of songs like "Zippity Doo Dah" morning to night. "I don't know what it is - I just love the sound of my own voice!" he said when she confronted him.

Then D. spends car rides singing and pronouncing street signs using only Hawaiian phonemes. "Walmart" becomes "wa ma" which becomes "gna ma," and then "gna gna," and eventually D. is just making babbling noises. She pronounces "snorkeling" with a pirate accent so that it becomes "snarrrkeling." She says "island lava java" with an accent that is an indeterminate hybrid of Jamaican and - Irish? She particularly likes the sound of herself saying "I wanna banana" while keeping her tongue against the roof of her mouth.

The day I land, I get a terrible cough. Must be all the stress leading up to the vacation, the crush at work, the hysterical collection of time with new friends, the lack of sleep. I clean the pharmacy out of medicines with the word "mucus" portmanteaued into their names. By day two I've lost my voice completely. Neither of us can sleep at night because of my death rattle. First, D. expresses sympathy. By day four, she is mocking me. She coughs theatrically whenever I cough. "A-hwuh hwuh hwuh," she says. "Hwuh hwuh hwuhhhhh."

I give her my extra rash guard. A rash guard is a spandex shirt you can wear while swimming so UV rays don't permanently destroy the elasticity of your skin's collagen. D. insists on calling these nipple guards. "It's not guarding my rash," she says.

This is how a day goes. We wake up when we wake up. I get up and turn off the white noise machine D. has brought with her to the Big Island. I put contacts in, brush teeth, wash face, and I am dressed and ready to go in ten minutes. D. is still in bed, wearing the eye bra that blocks out the harsh, low-latitude sunlight. I do push-ups and sit-ups while she gets ready and I cut a mango for us. She apologizes profusely for making me wait, but I don't care. We drive ten feet to eat breakfast somewhere. Me egg whites plus fatty meat, her vegetarian and healthy. We drive to a beach. Nipple guards go on. Drop in the water face down. Float for an hour looking at coral reef five feet from our faces, teeming with shining fish. Burn backsides. Return to car. Drive to lunch. Drive to new hotel. Drive to scenic spot: volcano, beach cliff, amphiteather valley, mountaintop, museum, inside of a yoga studio. Snap a million glamour shots, many of us pretending to eat or hold or hug the scenic spot. Talk about boyfriends and girlfriends. Talk about our on-the-job leadership lessons. Talk about that annoying boy with no life experience to share who would respond to stories by talking about Nietzsche. Talk about the 100 essential wardrobe items every woman should have. Argue about whether I could find black knee high boots suitable for my gender presentation. Get into a horrible argument involving crying about whether "person of color" is a useful demographic category. Drive to dinner. Buzz on half a drink. Drive to hotel. Lay in bed eating mac nuts from a jar, reading maps. Write postcards. Make fun of postcard images. Sleep. Cough. Make fun of coughing.

D. loves plants and birds. She makes me pull over on the road to Kohala so she can investigate wild morning glories by the shoulder. I sit in the car and eat carrot sticks while she does this. She explains the experiment she and A. ran on their morning glories to see whether they actually bloomed only once. They did.

That's a flirty little hibiscus, not a morning glory.

On day seven, in Hilo, termites descend upon our room while we are out for the day. First I spot one on my bed. "Yuck!" I say, and swat it away. Then I notice the floor is moving. The bottoms of my flip flops look like a fly strip after I walk across the room. Termites everywhere. We had left our bags open. Termites on my contact lens solution, in my shoes, in my bikini bottom. I revise my opinion and prefer the dry, sunny Kona-side of the Island to the seamy, jungley, termitey Hilo-side. The hotel owner gasps and says we can take another room. We get to work and don't talk to one another. My method of coping: shake out article, stomp on floor until all termites shaken out of article are flattened. D. says, "It's so against my religion to be killing these things." I say fuck that, we dominated Termocalypse 2011. Wish I had photos, but we were so focused on cleaning house we couldn't pause for the disgusting photo op.

While snorkeling, we catch each others gazes underwater and gesticulate toward cool things. Big ass fish! Sea turtle! We hold hands and flipper-kick out to where the reef drops off and the ocean becomes an imperceptibly deep, profoundly terrifying blue nothingness. Our grips tighten. It's the kind of scene where in the movies a shark suddenly materializes out of the blue (is that where that phrase comes from?) five feet from your face and gnaws off your arm. But no shark materializes, and we float around like otters holding hands for a few minutes, circling the bottomless depth, looking wide-eyed at each other through our snorkel masks, before kicking back over to the safe known world of the reef.

We look at the world underwater. We look at the world's volcanic insides. We go to a 14,000 foot mountain and look for Arcturus, Hawaii's most important star. At the observatory, a video tells us Earth will one day lose its magnetosphere and we will all be broiled to death by a solar flare. D. and I split a bag of mangosteens while watching this video. I eat a teriyaki chicken musubi.

D. says I enable her. She doesn't want to jump off the cliff at South Point, but I do it, so she does it too. She doesn't want to put on her wet swimsuit, but I want to go snorkeling, so she does it too. She says it's good, because she would tend toward passivity without me.

But I tell D. she is the ultimate enabler. She emailed a month ago to say, "I'm going to Hawaii. Come!" It was all her idea. I wasn't planning any vacations but I'm of the mind these days to say yes to every invitation. So I said yes.

And that is how I spent nine days on the Big Island, listening to D. say, "I wanna banana" over and over and over again.

next thursday, i'm still in love

2011-04-29T17:30:00.005-07:00

Bike commute group gets canceled but I show up anyway. A couple shows up too - let's call them David and Sigrid. Sigrid is not as fit as David, so while I ride up with the latter, he curses the former, telling me she lacks motivation and prefers to sit on her ass. "Just follow my wheel!" he says, exasperated. As the sun warms up the bay so too does David shine upon Sigrid, eventually giving her a sweaty peck at a stop light. Still they bicker. "The bike fitter will measure the power output in each leg," she says. "No, don't be ridiculous, that's not what he's doing," he says. Eventually I shout, "I'm never riding with a couple again!" It's light enough to be said with a smile, but passive aggressive enough to make them sheepishly stop the quarreling. Sigrid tells me how her bike seat relieves pressure on her "soft tissue" and I complain that marketing around women's bike seats is so euphemistic that I can't tell what's supposed to be happening to which portions of one's beef flaps.

Then work. Pull on the spandex again to run Thursday errands - walk Boo, date with Grandma to shop at Costco. Back into business casual for three more hours of work, then back into spandex for the train ride home.

I'm exhausted and all I want is 6 oz. of beef flaps ground up into a burger with blue cheese, caramelized onions, sauteed mushrooms, honey dijon sauce, lettuce, tomato, and a crisp plank of pickle. While I eat alone at the bar, I take great pleasure in a local IPA and an article about Hollywood's lessening disinterest in a raunchy blond comedienne.

I finish the magazine an hour after I finish the food, then wander out drunk (one beer! blame it on the bike fatigue). I follow the sound of coronets to the corner of Valencia and 22nd Street, where ten musicians all on brass are playing Balkan folk music as they move down the street. Like many others, first I ogle then I join, walking slowly with a growing pack of people right behind the band. Diners in the restaurants look mesmerized. Hippies (dreads) and hipsters (tattoos) pour out of one particular bar and soon there are clouds in the air and people dancing along. A woman in a red boatneck shirt and leggings appears to be having the time of her life. A younger Asian woman named Kim in a crocheted hat and a crocheted waist-length poncho smiles at me and we chat about the experience. One of Kim's friends randomly bikes by and she convinces him to join. We follow until the band turns inside a venue and sets up on the stage. Another of Kim's friends joins. Kim takes out a beaten-up soup thermos and sets it on a table, and turns to me and says, "We're going to go smoke pot!" I demur, and they smoke outside the bar and while I keep watch on the companionate thermos. It stays with me like a quiet friend. Kim returns with a third friend and says, "Let's dance!" And then I am dancing, awkwardly, hands nowhere, feet out of time with the incomprehensible 5/4 or 9/8 or whatever it is Balkan rhythm, and Kim's second friend is doing that dancing thing where you hunch up your shoulders, keep your fists near your chest and make a motion with them like you're turning a crank, with your brow furrowed and lips pursed all the while. It's charming. Then she cranks over to me and rubs her shoulder against mine to indicate that I should be dancing more zealously, and I should be having more fun. After the Macedonian love song, I say, "It was so nice to meet you all," and leave. Half an hour after seeing the band on Valencia and 22nd Street, I'm right back where I started, except there is a sharpie mark on my hand and $5 less in my wallet, and I have been hugged by four strangers.

Nurse texts to ask can I meet at Tartine for coffee at 7am? She gets off the night shift then. I am not sleepy and I am not ready to go home, so I buy a 24-pack of Ferrero Rochers from the drugstore - she says that nurses on the night shift need two things: chocolate and coffee - and walk the mile to the hospital. Halfway there I get bored of walking and pick up my bag and run. I show up at the emergency room and there is a man shaking on a gurney and vomiting into a bed pan, and a girl holding a steady wail in the waiting room, and dozens of other people in states of disrepair. I find my nurse in a low-ceilinged, well-lit room partitioned by curtains and filled with unwell, unconscious people. Chocolate hand off. We sit in her car while she takes her break and she shows me the tools she keeps in her pockets. Stethoscope, scissors, pen, pill pushing thing. Half hour later she texts to say the chocolates are almost gone.

At home, Z.'s meeting ends and she and the attendees play around on my gymnastics rings and talk about a contortionist friend who teaches "extreme stretching" at a local acrobatics gym. Z. shows me the paltry, unlovable responses to her w4w Craigslist ad, and I bully her into responding to one promising ad and she dutifully drafts an email until we realize that the promising ad belongs to our roommate A. A. comes down the hall and we have a laugh about this most awkward of situations. Thursday is starting to be my favorite day of the week.

thursday i'm in love

2011-04-22T22:27:00.013-07:00

The alarm sounds at 5:45. I'm face down in my pillow for five more minutes, debating if I should get up for the ride or sleep for another two hours. The ride wins, but I'm so groggy that I list into a wall while climbing into my armor: spandex bike shorts, running capris, bike socks, bike shoes (the clipping kind), spandex bike jersey, spandex arm warmers, Oakland Half Marathon 2011 plastic long-sleeve shirt, generic gloves, watermelon helmet, running backpack with extra tube, pump, tire levers, phone, wallet, keys, and two Power Gels.

(The bike looks pretty tired in the mornings too. Yes, N., that is your Thomas Jefferson wig in the background.)

Meet up is 6:15 at a cafe down the block. I bring my bike inside and ask for an espresso in a cappuccino cup, which I pour two fingers of half and half into and gulp down with a blackberry scone. Fuel for the next three hours and 42 miles of biking.

(Dawn roll-out on Cesar Chavez Blvd. Photos are someone else's from other rides.)

My companions today are six Googlers and one Oracle engineer, all male, ranging from the 23 year-old marketer who keeps a single flip flop strapped to his seat and brakes erratically in the pace line to the 60 year-old who teases me for pulling the pack at 20 mph. I don't actually go that fast. He's just being nice.

The craziest rider hauls a baby trailer behind his bike. Only it's not a baby in the trailer, it's a 50 pound goldendoodle named Muppet. Bryan has shared dogsitting duty, so if he bikes to work, Muppet must bike too. I ride behind Muppet for ten miles or so. He stands, looks seasick, and spends the rest of the ride curled in a ball.

(Muppet wants to hurl. Photo credit: dgolds)

Our shepherd is a broad-shouldered 6'4" Teuton perched on a featherweight Specialized Roubaix. He wears a traditional wool jersey with "craigslist" emblazoned all over it, and sweeps behind periodically to make sure his wooly creatures don't wander from the path.

Sometimes I keep my eyes on the jersey four feet in front of me, sometimes I fall two hundred yards behind the last rider, sometimes I drift into a conversation with another rider. Topics today include: the Boston seaport, a mutual friend (my Lawyering TA!), Target's collection of consumer data (the 23 year-old marketer says, "If they know your age and race, they know what color boxers you wear"), Texas topography, what a user experience design engineer does, and how to dress like a watermelon. The answer is pink top, green bottom, and seeds. Everybody is so nice.

The route is becoming more familiar on my fourth ride. Notable passages are (1) a quick, breathy climb up Cortland Street; (2) a terrifying, clenched descent down Cortland Street; (3) a man-sized pothole on a awful stretch of half-paved zombie-flesh asphalt in front of South San Francisco auto repair stores with the most stunning view of the green behemoth, Mt. San Bruno; (4) the road through San Francisco International Airport; (5) the bike path just past the airport, on the bay, with jumbo jets touching down just to the left:

(6) the dart through the Marriott parking lot; (7) a good for nothing bridge where I took a 0 mph tumble a month ago; (8) and too many other beautiful instant vistas to name.

Waking up at dawn is the hardest part. But then this is how you start the work day.

My telephone tells me which way I came and how fast I went, and then it draws this picture:

After the last stretch through the East Palo Alto salt marshes, I turn off on the Oregon Expressway overpass. The route passes right by my parents' house. I go home. Boo greets me ecstatically at the door, literally leaping with happiness. We collapse on the ground and I scratch him for ten minutes while Dad dresses for work in the other room. Dad says hello and leaves. I shower, and still naked I eat a ramen-sized bowl full of lotus root and mushroom stir fry, celery and carrot stir fry, beef and potatoes, and brown rice, get in bed and play half a round of solitaire Scrabble on my phone before pulling on the eye mask and shutting down immediately.

An hour later, I wake, check my email, pull on my sweaty plastic clothes, and take Boo out to play soccer. At the field I run into an older woman with a corgi. I say, "Can they meet?," and she says, "Oh sure!" and I squint and look into her face and say, "Mrs. Warren?" I do not recognize the aged face of my AP US History teacher but her Marblehead, MA accent remains as distinct as ever. We chat. She's forgotten me, and then when we part I forget to tell her that she was one of the best teachers I've had.

(You taught me all about this man, but now all I know of him is his hair.)

I stop by Grandma's house on the walk back and sit with her and rub her creaky knee while she eats tofu and vegetables and watches a Chinese language program about scabies. Somebody has given my 89 year-old grandmother a Kate Gosselin haircut, so I tease her and compliment her stylishness. I ask how she has been and she says she is the same. Nothing changes because nobody takes her out. I tell her I have to go to work.

Work by noon. Here is a fire, put it out. There is a fire, put it out. This fire we lit ourselves - put that one out too. Text S. romantic thoughts and safe travels. Relearn the parol evidence rule. Eat more: grilled chicken, spinach salad, brown rice, two bowls of cereal, apple, three slices of supreme pizza. Spend even more money on bike shit online: click, click, fifty dollars gone?! Type out claptrap in easy-to-digest, numbered list form. Rush out at 7:49pm to catch the 7:53 train, which comes at 8:03.

(Caltrain bike car, go multimodal transportation! I prefer the ground level seats, so I can hover over my bike when drunk SF Giants hooligans threaten to crush it.)

The conductor is horn-crazy tonight. He lays it down like its a musical instrument so that we toot all the way back up the Peninsula to San Francisco. Infuriating, because the bike car is the engine car, and I am trying to talk to S., who can hear nothing. I say, "Sorry for the noise, I'll just text you what I want to say," and she says, "What??" We repeat this comedy three times over the bleating horns until I catch the tail end of her sentence - " . . . meaningless expressions anyway" - what does she mean?? - and then the spirit leaves me and I deflate. The conditions just never seem right for this. The noise, the fatigue, the travel. Maybe its better to talk when there is quiet and spirit and peace. I exit 22nd Street, bike two more miles through Potrero and the Inner Mission until I open the gate on Guerrero, pick up my bike, and walk it up the stairs.

N. and Z. are stretching on the carpet on the landing. N. is a parkour trainer and Z. is a dancer. Z. begins stories, "I was doing a back handspring when . . . " N. does elbow stands and Z. stretches against the banister.

I join them, alternating between uninspired toe touches and corpse pose. I insist they eat slices of my orange, and have to explain to Z. how Chinese people are pushy as a way of expressing love. We talk about dating versus being in a relationship. Z. laughs at me for saying I have accepted the "partnership model of social structuring" because I guess it is total nonsense no matter how you slice it - as language or as an idea. N. shows me the PVC parallettes he made to practice gymnastics skills. I do handstands against a wall, reinjuring my wrist. Z. explains the advantages of an all-glass dildo. (Mostly thermal conductivity, turns out.) We play with N.'s Hypercolor shirts, wrapping them around our faces and exhaling.

Z. is showing me her OKCupid photos when S.K. rings the doorbell. He is just in from New York and is staying with me for just ten hours. I force him to look at OKCupid as a condition for giving him a glass of water, and then force him to talk to me about his life plans before finally releasing him to sleep at 3 a.m. EST. Then I shower again, finish the half-played game of Scrabble, and read one page of Red Badge of Courage before closing my eyes and shutting down instantly.

bikram yoga

2011-03-27T00:53:00.005-07:00

Sorry about the last post of utmost boringness. The short version of the story is that Matt of the $7000 was a drug dealing loser probably with erectile dysfunction issues. NEXT!!!

Bikram yoga. That is the copyrighted/patented/trade secret nickname of hot sweaty yoga, where a carpeted room - important detail! more on this later - is heated to the temperature of a nice cool bag of testicles and then filled with sixty foolish yupsters with income to spare. They are led in a 90-minute cartilage ripping routine by a glistening, sadistic hipster Adonis whose religion is apparent through the very, very thin fabric of his tiny shorts. Some pass out! Some lay on their towels in immobile protest! Others open and close their mouths slowly, like dying fish, awaiting the end.

I blame fucking GROUPON. This shit needs a warning label. The first few days after you sign on DON'T BUY SHIT. Because you're like, "Oh! $14 of meat for only $7. Great deal!" And all it takes is a little *click* sound and you are down seven dollars in real cash form and up fourteen dollars in meat form. What the fuck? How many of you fools bought $6 tickets to see Meathew Meatconaughey's new meatvie last week? STUPID!!

So the Groupon for San Francisco posted a sale at a Bikram yoga studio on Polk Street, $39 for two months of unlimited classes. Which would be a great deal if it were anything other than armpit donkey heat yoga! Unlucky for K. I convinced her to buy one also, so we could share these experiences together:

A room the size of my bedroom for forty women to change in. I put my buttocks right on somebody.

I'm going to write that again in case you missed it. I put my ass. On a person's shoulder. By accident. I was bending over to swap business casual for shorts. She was bending over to do the same. There was no room to maneuver. Like ships passing in the night, I sat right on her. My apology was very awkward. "Oh my God, I sat on you. I'm so sorry. [Namaste!!]"

A carpeted room that hundreds of people sweat into day after day. It smelled like a family of wild dogs. No wait . . . just picture - really try to imagine the visual - 40,000 disembodied, unwiped anuses. From dudes who watch hentai eighteen hours a day. For sale at the butcher counter. In a heap with a "$7 for $14 of meat!" flag stuck into the topmost anus. That's what the studio smelled like. I saw the cleaning people dry vacuuming the carpet after my class - hmmm how is a dry vac going to suck your sweaty anus smell out of a carpet??

The actual yoga would not have been terribly difficult if not for the balls-like temperature. That was enough to send my heart rate skyrocketing even for moderately engaged poses. At times I simply lay on my borrowed towel and panted. This must be very good for the skin.

Body anxiety. The regulars are lithe, ropey creatures with tight bunz. Proper attire is as little attire as possible. And there are mirrors on all walls, so you see everything from all angles, including the flaccid body of the tubby Chinese miser who can't pass up a good deal! Some poses gave my rolls rolls.

But lucky for me, there's no better person than K. to do this with. K. has an uncontrollable giggling problem, triggered by things like a David Koresh figure announcing pavana mukta asana ("Everybody get into wind-releasing pose!"). After the class, K. told me a story about how she could not stop laughing at a trial when she saw that the stenographer had accidentally ascribed to the judge the words "Now is a good time to take a dump" rather than "Now is a good time to take a break."

I felt full body torpor for about twelve hours after the class.

I'm going back tomorrow!

139th Street

2011-03-09T23:14:00.005-08:00

One spring afternoon, when I was living in the fourth floor apartment on 139th Street, I heard a man on the street shouting up at our windows.

This was not unusual. Our buzzer didn't work, so whenever friends came over, they would shout from the street to be let in. We kept a roll of socks next to the windowsill, which we would tuck a set of keys into and drop to the visitors below.

What was unusual was the tone. The shouting from the street was agitated and urgent. The man's voice grew hoarse as he shouted, "Anna! Nerdy! Are you there? Let me in!"

Anna was the master tenant. Nerdy was her younger sister. That was Lo's anarchist nickname. That was not what I called her.

Lo and I were home together that afternoon. We went to the window together and looked out. The man gesticulating from below appeared white, standard height, normal build, middling face, average intellect, late 20s, wire glasses, unshaven, with black leather jacket, with motorcycle helmet in hand. The left side of his clothing was torn and embedded with gravel. The motorcycle was not there.

It took a second for me to parse the visual details and then focus on his face: angry, hurt, demanding, but not wild, just impatient.

This was Matt.

He saw us looking at him. "Nerdy! Bananarchist! You gotta let me in!"

We delivered the keys by sock. Then we stood at the apartment door, listening to him come up the stairs. He limped.

Matt had been in an accident. Half a mile away, on the on-ramp to the Major Deegan Expressway. He saw the gravel on the road too late to steer around it. He slipped and skidded out on his left side. He left the bike on the shoulder and walked.

"Why didn't you stay by the bike and wait for the cops?" I asked.

He didn't answer and instead handed me his leather jacket. It was very heavy. There was a thick protrusion in the left breast pocket. I set it on a chair.

Matt inspected himself. He pulled his shirt up, and he pulled his pants halfway down his thigh. "Ugh!" he said. "Jesus Christ!"

It appeared as if a craftsman of model airplanes had lightly applied the finest grain sandpaper to a hand-sized patch of Matt's mid-section. His skin was slightly abraided - here and there I could see pinpricks of blood, maybe burst capillaries - and reddish. It looked as if a bruise might form on his hip. But otherwise his damage was mostly dignitary. His helmet and heavy jacket had protected him from harm.

"Fucken gravel," Matt said. He winced dramatically at every movement.

Anna at the time was exploring eco-alternatives for feminine hygiene. She had taken an old flannel sheet and cut it into rags. She stuffed rags into her underpants to collect the flow of her period. I tried this for a while. I spent a lot of time washing my pants.

Anna saved her rags, and at the end of the month, she stewed them in a pot of boiling water and poured the runoff onto the base of the ficus tree, the Wandering Jew, the pothos, the jade, the spider plant, the cyclamen, the ferns, the violets, the lilies, and the succulents.

"Iron encourages plant growth," Anna said.

So I was not impressed by a little blood from a bike spill.

"You just gave up your bike? Why didn't you stay there and wait for the cops?" I asked again.

Matt glared. "Why don't you check my jacket?"

I went to the jacket and patted it down. That thick protrusion again. I opened the pocket. Inside was a three-inch stack of bills. Seven thousand dollars. Cash.

borderlands

2011-03-06T17:02:00.011-08:00

Rainy Sunday afternoon copyright law study at Borderlands Cafe, Valencia between 19th and 20th. No music, no wifi, brightly lit, big windows, clean couches, recliners, blue-shade bankers' lights on wooden tables, resonating hardwood floors. Like studying with thirty other people at your shared kitchen table. Believer and Foreign Affairs and Yoga Today and coffee and pastries for sale.

Things observed:

South Asian man, late-20s, with a Facebook logo backpack and thumbs on a smartphone and a periodical called Game Developers.
Two white women, mid-20s, one typing on a computer with a sticker of a fist clutching a radish on it. Both are reading reproductive rights manuals. A third woman joins and says, "Huge conference this week on contraceptive technology." She is reading a book called Tel Aviv Stories. I make eye contact. I smile.
Man and woman on couch talking about the design on the copy of the Great Gatsby she just bought next door: "I'm glad the publisher didn't succumb to the modern cover."
Four skinny-necked white men, early to mid-twenties, sitting at one table silently, hunched over paperbacks; the bookstore adjacent to the cafe exclusively sells science fiction.
Five foot tall transman with tufted goatee enters, leaves door open. Woman in knee-length felted sweater rises to shut it.
Nose-pierced 45 year-old baristo calls "Decaf!" and I rise to fetch a cup.
Leather fedora enters, surveys seating situation, leaves. Woman asleep on armchair with mouth open, book in lap.
White man with Asian woman enter. Asian man with white woman and hapa baby in colorful stroller walk past the window. White man with Asian man sit next to me, reading matching his and his New Yorkers. I make eye contact. I smile.
Heavyset man with unkempt hair has the word "haircut" written on his hand.
A couple at a window table peck.
Asian girl, mostly eyelash, rifles through gold crepe Shiseido tote bag for a battered copy of a psychology textbook.
Piece of conversation: "I moved here in 1996, at the height of the boom, to work on text-based paging services."
Seventy year old white man with footlong beard and stoned affect says to me, when his conversation partner leaves for the bathroom, "These chairs are so comfortable!" I make eye contact. I smile, then return very quickly to Perfect 10 v. Google.

When the man with the footlong beard's conversation partner returns, they have this exchange:

Her: The body has a system for restocking the flow of cranialsacral fluids.

Him: Oh yes. Once I was dancing with this woman. She put her arm around my body. And I can't describe the feeling of her arm except to say - her arm was my tongue. When we were dancing, whatever we were touching and tasting and sensing with our tongues was strong. Our whole bodies connected - as tongues. It's just a name for an area. But what I mean to say is, our bodies were . . . enormous . . . tongues. It's the best way I can think about it.

Her: It's very sensitive. If you are one with your body, it is very sensitive. That's why we feel such pain.

Him: Attend to the pain.

Her: Attend to the hurt.

I put my nose in Perfect 10 v. Google (9th Cir. 2003). Google image search pulls up thumbnail images of porn site's copyrighted photographs, and inline linked full-size images of the same. Porn site sells thumbnail images of porn to mobile users, so Google's images presumptively carve into market for theirs. Still, this is fair use, not copyright infringement, which is why you can still look at thumbnails of perfect ten vulvas using a humble Google search.

But I took notes on conversations as much as I took notes on cases. I missed my stupid fucking girlfriend and I wanted her to see all of this. I thumbed my Blackberry every ten minutes looking for signs of life. Nothing. I left after three hours.

morning bun

2011-02-22T17:05:00.004-08:00

It's pretty great living on the fatness corridor. Tartine is literally across the street. Delfina is next door. Bi-rite is halfway down the block. Pastries, pizza, and ice-cream. As Roger Taylor says: sheer heart attack.

Tartine is my coffee spot. I go every morning at 8 a.m., fill up my travel mug, and make the long drive to work listening to NPR or a podcast, sipping caffeine. There's no line on weekday mornings (in contrast to the ridiculous half hour lines that form on the weekends). Coffee costs a different price every day depending on who is charging me. Still can't figure that one out. But all the change I get for $2 I leave in the tip jar anyway, so why does it matter.

Tartine makes morning buns that are famed across the region. Morning buns are profoundly appealing pastries that combine the best elements of croissants and cinnamon buns - they're flaky, buttery, unheavy, not too sweet but studded with sugar crystals and atmospherically flavored with cinnamon and orange peel. I try to restrict myself to one per week. Hard to do when you live on the fatness corridor. If I eat one on the commute to work, I emerge from the car on the other end with buttery crumbs mashed into my clothes.

Friday I needed a few paralegals to stay until very late. I got emails from them up until midnight. Friday night. They saved my ass. I cannot say that more emphatically: they saved my ass.

So this morning I cleared Tartine out of morning buns. I ordered ten. Tartine is too gourmet to be the kind of place where you order ten of anything. The teddy bearish hipster with monster eyeglasses behind the counter said, "Wait - really?" I said, "I'm serious." He counted ten out and, with a wink, threw in an extra. My heart blew up.

I made this offering to the paralegals. They were effusively appreciative, to the point where I became embarrassed and hid in my office to avoid any more interactions with them. My favorite paralegal said she would bring the extra one to her daughter. My heart blew up.

I just checked the Yelp reviews for Tartine and saw that one of the paralegals posted a review today: "This is totally making my morning... I am lucky though - no need to wait in line - someone brought them into the office for me..."

The moral of the story: living on the fatness corridor will make your heart blow up, in more ways than one.

drive zen

2011-02-17T11:54:00.003-08:00

I started a new blog. Dumb title, but it was the first available one I thought of. It's primarily intended as a way for me to document the best of the audio that I listen to on my commute to work, but it might also help some of you kill time during the work day.

Each day I'll post a link to the most interesting thing I hear. Talks, music, readings, podcasts, quiz shows, etc. Check it out if you want to.

I'm also on the look out for more better audio, so if you have a new favorite podcast or musician, please send a link my way!

thoughts on boo

2011-02-03T18:01:00.007-08:00

I went home this afternoon to walk Boo, as I do every Thursday when the gardeners need access to the backyard. He barked as I approached, unsure of the unseen visitor, but danced with delight once I opened the door and showed my face. I stayed in San Francisco last night, so we haven't seen each other in two days. I patted his side a few times. It made that satisfying thump-thump sound that says everything is just right. He leaned against my legs and looked into my eyes.

(I love this dog. Palo Alto, February 2011)

As is our habit, I ate a lunch of leftovers while he waited, patient but visibly agitated, for me to hurry up and finish. He paced. Sat next to me craning his head toward my lap. Slumped onto the ground a few feet away. Sighed heavily.

I fed him bits of my sponge cake. He rejected these at first, spitting them back on the ground, and only ate them after I pointed at a piece and tapped my foot next to it. He very gingerly nibbled the first piece, then, recognizing its deliciousness, eagerly swallowed all the pieces I offered thereafter. He did the same with a fried chicken skin. When I said, "Ready to go?" in a high voice, he leapt up and wiggled with excitement, circling all around me like a shark as I slipped on my shoes, prancing toward the bushes opposite the front door, changing his mind and circling back, panting all the while.

While watching his excitement at our walking adventure, I started to feel that intoxicating combination of sadness and happiness that I guess one could describe as speculative nostalgia. The feeling that one day this happy view of my dog's comic trot, his shining black coat and bouncing tail and flopping ears and alert eyes and panting smile, his excitement at simply being in the sun and sniffing things - one day this would be gone. Have you ever noticed how cute and small a dog's feet are, proportionately, compared to human feet!?

I caught myself before my silly emotional trip went too far. Here was the thing itself, right in front of me - what was the point of preemptive sadness at its inevitable loss?

Lucky for him, Boo's merriment is oblivious to sad Asian clowns in business casual plus sneakers obsessing about mortality. He looped around an ornamental kale several times before dropping his rear to spray the plant with a stream of pee. He took a dump on the soccer field and then jogged toward me, ready to play ball. I bent to the ground with my inverted plastic bag, checking first to see if Marina Market had provided the kind of holey bag that every shithandler fears.

Though we love wrestling, tag, and tug-o-war, our favorite playtime activity remains soccer. Boo is defender, I am striker. I try to manuever his beloved yellow soccer ball around him, and he leaps from side to side trying to prevent me from getting past. He blocks the ball with his chest and body when I try to kick it past him. If I succeed, which I do one out of every four kicks, he'll chase the ball down and bring it back to a spot ten feet in front of me - never all the way to me, a confounding training failure on my part that I haven't been able to rectify. I know that this is over-anthropomorphizing here, but I swear sometimes when we're playing soccer on that big field in the sun, and he is dodging left to right trying to cut off my advance, it feels like he is laughing. And sometimes, if I'm not afraid that he'll die before I collect enough moments like these or distracted by other things, his delight catches me by surprise, and I'm laughing too.

(Driving in Vermont, August 2005)

Afterward I took the long way home and stopped at Grandma's to say hi. I left Boo in the garden with a dish of water while I massaged Grandma's shoulders and collected some of her beef jerky to take home. Grandma and I talked about those vibrating weight-loss devices that you wear like a belt, and the plants in the yard that despite a decade of nurture have never flowered like they were supposed to, Chinese New Year, weekend plans, birthday celebrations, everyone getting older. The weather was sunny and warm, so Boo lay out front against the cool cement and panted. When it was time for me to go, Boo insisted on pushing past me into the house to lean on Grandma's legs for a spell. "He wanted to come in and kiss me!" she said.

Boo has been so good to me in recent weeks, and my need for his companionship hasn't been greater. It scares him when I'm unhinged because he doesn't know that my fury isn't directed toward him, so his instinct is to cower under my bed and sink his head between his forepaws. But there was a moment last week, like many moments the week before, where I found myself alone in the house, cursing and crying, shouting things, leaving ropes of snot hanging from my face - that kind of crazy - when Boo forced me to pet him. Just like that. He flipped my hand up with his nose so that when it fell, it fell in a petting position. And he kept his head there and waited. When a cute dog begs you to pet him, you pet him. So I pet him. And a few minutes later, when my mind wandered and I went back to the craziness, he did it again. Flipped my hand again. And I laughed, because I finally saw what he was doing.

(Looking for love in Brooklyn, March 2006)

I've been talking to him because I read somewhere recently that dogs, like potted plants, like to be talked to even if you think they can't comprehend. So I have been holding one-sided conversations with him about S. "Still don't know what to do today," I will say. "Can you tell me what she was thinking?" No answer save for the same old sniffing around. I tell him my perspective on things, and what I think is hers, and what I know and don't know and fear. He could really care less. I tell him about seemingly unconnected events that I nonetheless tie back to me, to my stupid heart, like the couple I went backpacking with this weekend, Garth and Lindsay. Garth bossed Lindsay around in that familiar boy-on-girl way, directing her with in short, imperative sentences, being a know-it-all about camping despite having only marginally more outdoors experience than her, exaggerating the difference between his toughness and her helplessness notwithstanding his all-around incompetence and his unfit body. ("Now you ladies just go over there and let us men pee on the campfire". . . oh please.) Since neither of them had much camping gear, R. lent Garth a nice inflatable sleeping pad to give to Lindsay. Instead, Garth used that nice pad himself, and let Lindsay use a crappy foam pad. Garth carried a slim ultralight pack while Lindsay carried a big old piece of shit borrowed bag. Garth ate first, then handed the trail mix to Lindsay. So I relate these facts to Boo and say, "All the bad parts of masculinity with none of the good. All chauvinism, no chivalry! What kind of partner is that? That's what's out there to be discovered, can't you see?!"

Again, Boo doesn't give a shit. It's really not clear who I am talking to.

I moved up to San Francisco this week. The apartment is clean, spacious, sunny, and in the dead heart of the yupster neighborhood. Already, in three days, I've felt more stimulated living here than I have in a year plus living in Palo Alto, though granted the latter I conceptualized as a holding pattern en route to New York. Last night was Japanese vegetarian noodle soup on Valencia with J. and afterward playing Beatles duets with two guitars in my bedroom. This morning I woke early from the sunlight and went for an exhausting trot west through the Castro toward Twin Peaks - I didn't make it, it was too hot, too sunny, too beautiful, I couldn't take any more of the 17% grade. Afterward I stretched under my windows and then went downstairs for coffee and a morning bun from Tartine. A man stopped to take a photo of a cat lounging in a bay window. I want to rush to the phone to tell S. about everything that I'm experiencing, everything I think she'd like to experience too . . . but I can't, I won't, I don't know if I exist in that way anymore.

When Boo saw me packing my things all of last week, he seemed upset. He hates the sound of packing tape. He hid under the bed. Here we go again. He's seen me pack up and move now five times. Each time I abandon him in a different way. This time it's not like I'm moving to some shitbox in Brooklyn where I'll neglect him to prize my own social life or academic plans. Or Chicago, which will only release me to see him three times in a year. It's just San Francisco, thirty-five miles away, and I return to Palo Alto every day for work anyway, and I'll still visit a few times a week and take him for walks. And I need to go, because his nose under my hand is not enough to keep me from falling apart in Palo Alto. I must be on my way. But there is no way to communicate this to him. He only knows that I'm going somewhere. He doesn't know why. He doesn't understand that I'll come back. Things are changing. Change is scary.

That's the difference between his kind of anxiety and mine: I worry that I will lose him so I take pictures, walk with him, write about him in my journal, spend as much time with him as I have; I have methods for managing this kind of anxiety. He worries that he will lose me but there isn't a damn thing he can do. He hides under the bed. He pushes his nose under my hand when I'm there. But when I drive away, as I did on Monday night, he watches helplessly from the garage, silhouette slumping, convinced I'm gone for good.

Attack Vulnerability - Deny Weakness

2011-01-27T00:49:00.009-08:00

Lawyers have to take continuing education classes as part of their professional development. California requires its lawyers to take a class on substance abuse because the problem is common to this occupation. I watched my course online last October.

(I'm on the left.)

I took notes because I thought the presentation hilarious. Finding them very illuminating now.

Lawyers v. General Population:

As Pre-Law Students
Characterized by:

Need for dominance and leadership
More authoritarian
Low interest in emotions and others' feelings
Normal levels of psychological distress

Effects of Law School

Increased aggression under stress
Preference for competition
Failure to rely on peers for social support
Increased tension, insecurity, and substance abuse (confirmed by numerous studies)

As Lawyers

Competitive, argumentative, aggressive
Low interest in emotional concerns (theirs or others'); disproportionate preference for "thinking" versus "feeling"
Higher incidence of distress and substance abuse
Pessimistic outlook on life

Successful Lawyer Techniques	Successful Relationship Techniques
Win	Compromise
Cross-examine	Discuss
Avoid error	Admit mistakes
Argue	Concede
Attack vulnerability	Allow for vulnerability
Think for others	Respect partner's opinions
Deny weakness	Trust

dallas

2011-01-04T23:06:00.004-08:00

Picture me in Irving, Texas, in a parking lot of an office park like any you would find in Santa Clara, Reston, Redmond, or Waltham. The sky is gray. The grass is dead. I'm reclined to near horizontal in the driver's seat of a rented red Corolla, at 10:07 on a Tuesday morning in January. My eyes are closed. My watch alarm is set for 10:25. I'm wearing my peacoat and business casual underneath - a suitably feminine blue cowl-neck wool sweater, pinstripe pants, desert boots with low heels, but not so feminine that I escape being called "Sir I mean ma'am" by the rental car attendant. My Blackberry light is flashing red on top of a messy accordion file on the passenger seat. I am 23 minutes early to a meeting and recovering from a cold and dead tired because I could not fall asleep in the creepy Overlook Hotel where I stayed the night before, popping M&M Peanuts from the minibar and watching a reality show in which psychotherapists coax people with obsessive hoarding problems to stop living in piles of shit. (Literally piles of shit - one featured couple let 22 roaming pet rabbits cover their house ankle deep in shit pellets.) I am trying to catch some sleep before the meeting, but instead I just fall in and out of the zombie zone of consciousness for fourteen minutes, and then get up before the alarm and make my way to the office building, where I collect my security tag, brush a stray piece of potato hash off my sweater, and prepare to dazzle a client with professionalism.

Today was one of those days where I couldn't decide whether I loved or hated traveling. There was, on the one hand, dozing in a parking lot in an unheated rental car in front of squat, lifeless office buildings. On the other hand, there was the bartender I met in my quest the previous night for gay Dallas weeknight nightlife. Check out her biography: poor, Mexican-American, lesbian, ex-Marine specializing in explosives, ex-alcoholic, ex-world champion welterweight boxer, seventeen years a bartender, now a rugby flanker with no natural ligaments in her left knee trying to save money to move to New York to write her book. She was my height, slightly taller, all muscle, nothing wasted. (Later, S., a little too breathily, asked me to describe the bartender's build in great detail. She benches 225.) We connected because I played the same position in rugby; before long she was saying things like, "You understand how it is, you're a jock" and telling me that after she made a little extra cash over the holidays she treated her girl to a shopping spree at Forever 21 and treated herself to nutritional supplements. "I took myself out and got everything I wanted: my magnesium, my whey protein, my NO2 platinum caps . . . " She said it like that, prefacing each supplement with a possessive. Her handshake was like a hungry mastiff. I skipped back to my hotel feeling high having made a new friend in a new city.

My meetings the next day didn't take but two hours and afterward I had four hours to kill before my flight. I found an artificial creek in Irving and in the backseat of the Corolla swapped business casual for running clothes. I admit I was psyched up for fitness from the girl jock talk of the night before. I did not bench 225 but I did jog the length of the creek at a shade above a walking pace and then kicked like a drowning dog through three pull-ups on the jungle gym next to Indian-American tots oblivious to my raw power. Apparently 100% of people who use this park in the daytime are South Asian toddlers, South Asian women, or South Asian old people strolling along in unnecessary winter wear. Then I put half a pig in my face in the form of a barbecue sandwich followed by green beans with bacon and black-eyed peas cooked with fatback. I had vanilla soft serve, again sitting in the driver's seat of the Corolla, pointing toward Boston Market, jawing to S. about Hoarders.

On the way to the rental car return, a megachurch caught my eye and I pulled over to snoop around. "I just want to look at your church," I told the receptionist in the front office. "I've never seen a church so big." She and the people in the waiting area laughed with pride. Nothing was happening midday on a Tuesday, but many days of the week the church offers services in English, Spanish and (?) Nepali, as well as break-out groups for kids, teens, college-age students, young adults, parents, seniors, women, men, music aficionados, and the Nepalese. Plus a cafe. I have nothing epiphanic or derisive to say about the church or the people I met there; it and they were plenty nice. Anyway I was not paying close attention. Half of the time I was supposed to be peering through the windows at the chapel, I was admiring my own junior welterweight form in the glass.

So, the jury is out. Was it a good time, because a sly shopclerk called me "honey" while I perused cock rings at the porn/rainbow flag necklace/And the Band Played On gay general store? Or was it a bad time, because I had to bury my nose in a book to avoid the desperate, smiling eye contact of the woman next to me at my airport gate who wore sandals with socks and said, "Oh, I don't travel so much!" Sorry I cannot tell you why the kiosk attendant cannot tell you more about the status of our flight, lady, I have to read this important book!

No, it was merely a time. A short time - 22 hours total on the ground in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. I came home and my parents barely registered my absence. Dad said "You're back!" and then rushed Mom to Home Depot to buy caulk. I felt like a long time had passed since I had been in the zombie dreamland of a reclined driver's seat in a parked car in suburban Dallas, so I wanted more ceremony on return, but only dear Boo paid me any attention. Now on my list of New Year's resolutions: bench 225, move out of the suburbs, sell my Corolla.

december 23

2011-01-03T22:30:00.002-08:00

Work ended slightly early. I came home and T. of the Pinenuts was waiting in the living room already for J. to come drive us all to Maryland. The drive was fun and not terribly slow, though there were snafus with traffic upon entering New Jersey and with J.’s EZ Pass not registering, but as he explained to the snippy EZ Pass attendant, “That’s your problem.” We ate at Dick Clark’s Horrible Food Diner while watching videos of Hootie and the Blowfish. We contemplated buying Cinnabons but were dissuaded by the fact that they are 850 calories and your recommended lifetime allowance of fat. T. got excited by the prospect of hoverboards in the year 2015, as predicted by Back to the Future II. T. failed to guess herself as the clue to a short game of Botticelli. We fell asleep and woke to a funny Canadian radio program. I asked S. and T. and J. to explain everything they knew about Maryland. J. was very knowledgeable about the ugly Maryland state flag and the regions of Maryland. He spoke enthusiastically about “Blast,” the annual high school musical variety show, the lead roles of which became yet another prize for parents to compete by proxy through their kids for. Like my Palo Alto public school experience, S. and J. and T.’s P____ public school experiences were peripherally touched by charismatic, pedophile teachers. J. was incensed enough about the new speed cameras in P____ that he remarked upon them twice.

We dropped T. off – she momentarily panicked that a thread of her scarf that had gotten caught in the trunk door would decapitate her, but this threat was defused and S. and J. and I continued on to P____. Their parents were still up waiting for us, and the chatting began immediately. Daddy, who referred to himself as Daddy, and Mommy, who referred to herself as Mommy, said they wished Carly would come over for a visit but that she might not get the chance. Then Daddy pulled up pictures of Carly on his iPhone. Turns out she was a poodle. They insisted we eat pears from Harry and David but it was late and we were tired, so we just went to bed. I paged through S.’s yearbook reading her many inane declarations (“Let me just tell you, I believe this year we were most spirited” and “In my opinion, the P____ Picayune is a great opportunity to improve your editorial skills”). I molested S. until she beat me back with the high pitched whine: “Can I pleeeease just go to bed?” Both heroines fell asleep immediately thereafter.

don't eat shrimp with orange juice and vitamin C, it will make "有毒的三鉀砷 (即亞砷酸酐)，又稱為三氧化二砷，其化學,式為(As2O3) " you'll die right away... sorry to irritate yo

2010-12-21T14:22:00.001-08:00

Above was the subject line of a recent email from Dad. Below, the text, all in Chinese, translated by Google:

** Very important to eat them .... taboo ***

*** *** Shrimp + orange = dead **

** Eat them drink orange juice is suicide, when **

*** Shrimp + vitamin C = arsenic ***

Taiwan, the night the girl died suddenly ** ***

lawyers in love

2010-12-12T13:34:00.001-08:00

B.: In the year and a half we've been dating -

S.: We haven't been together for a year and a half.

B.: August 2009 until now. That's a year and four and a half months.

S.: See?

B.: I rest my case!

S.: I would have said sixteen months.

defensive line

2010-12-06T01:43:00.003-08:00

It's really cool in football how when a defender intercepts a pass, the defense suddenly switches into offense mode and the defensive linemen start blocking a path for the runner. I like both when cornerbacks make interceptions (because they are fast and agile) and when tight ends make interceptions (because they are not too fat and not too fast, perfectly average, like the Mario character in Super Mario Bros. 2), but best of all is when a defensive lineman some how gets the ball in his paws and bolts toward the end zone. Because once you get past the defensive line, how in the hell is a quarterback going to stop a runaway refrigerator? Here's a good video of the unstoppable defensive lineman:

That is my only real thought of the day.

Also, today me and my brother and his fiancee took Grandma to two amazing things: (1) Silicon Valley dim sum, meaning it was authentically delicious Chinese food (Chicken feet!! Mmmmm!!!) in a pleasant, clean, upscale atmosphere (so hard to find!); and (2) Costco. Costco is ordinarily spectacular enough, but this time it was especially fun because we got a motorized cart with a basket in front for Grandma to motor around in. It was built low to the ground and heavy, like a Corvette, and she loved steering through the crowds, saying, "Ex-Q me!" She even picked up a few driving habits naturally, like looking over her shoulder before turning and not stopping and starting suddenly in traffic! I foresee a new way to spend time with Grandma!

argumentative

2010-12-06T01:42:00.001-08:00

Bananarchist to S.: "You're argumentative."

S.'s response: "No, I'm not."

Note to self: S. doesn't like it when you point out irony to her.

blogsilog

2010-12-05T00:11:00.006-08:00

B. met me today at the Daly City Toyota dealership for brunch. I was there to take my Corolla in for routine servicing. They turn the engine light on at 20,000 miles so you have to go and spend $90 to get a boy named Johnny to flip that light off. I almost took a picture of the Daly City Toyota dealership's Valued Customers Wall, where Siu Fong's name tag was pinned next to Jerry Asuncion's and Jin Park's, etc. The population in the dealership was 95% Asian. The girl at the cash register told me to take a Santa-shaped chocolate from the mini-sleigh it was riding in because the dealership had "hella chocolate." It also has huge TV screens, a cafe, and a lounge area where people can wait with their complimentary coffees and pastries.

We opted instead to eat the bagel sitting in B.'s brother's Camry, with the shockingly violent Bruno Mars love song "Grenade" playing in the background. ("I'll catch a grenade for you / I'd jump in front of a train for you / Throw my hand on a blade for you / Take a bullet straight through my brain.") B. misheard me when I said, "It's pretty early," and she repeated, "Yeah, this bagel is really herby, isn't it?" God I love how validating B. is, even when she validates what she hears from me as complete nonsense.

We drove through Colma to have Filipino brunch at Lucky Chances Casino. Let's see what Wikipedia has to say about Colma:

Colma is a small incorporated town in San Mateo County, California. The town was founded as a necropolis in 1924.

With much of Colma's land dedicated to cemeteries (17 for the interment of humans and one for pets), the dead population outnumber the living by thousands to one. This has led to it being called "the city of the silent," and also has given rise to a humorous motto among some residents: "It's great to be alive in Colma."

Lucky Chances Casino is where animated human forms in this necropolis go to make the transition to their final resting places. It is a 100' x 100' room lit by fluorescent tubes 50 feet above the floor. Everybody under this light looked appalling. Here, too, the population was 95% Asian. B. and I stood behind a table and watched men in sunglasses stack plastic circles in front of them, and earned a dirty look from a card dealer. We ventured to the cashier, where I asked a series of idiotic questions in an artificially high voice ("Umm, can you tell me how this works???"). The man thumbing chips behind the counter was laconic. ("No.") But this is what we gathered: the casino operates because the house does not play; the players take each others' money, and the house takes a fee for each bet made. This was the most sense we could make of a nonsense situation. B. noted that even though she understood every word in "Progressive Omaha Jackpot," as a phrase it evoked no meaning in her mind.

We had a similar experience moments later in the Cafe Colma, a 24 hour diner serving Filipino breakfast that sits inside the Lucky Chances Casino. All of the letters on the menu were recognizable, but they were all jumbled up into meaningless order. Spamsilog? Sinigang bangus? Siopao? Neither B. nor I had had Filipino food. After much consultation, spying, and solicitation, we learned that the suffix -silog added to a dish means you get garlic rice and eggs on the plate, with whatever precedes the -silog. Spamsilog = Spam. Bangsilog = bangus. We ordered tapsilog, chicken adobo, and siopao. For some reason I expected Filipino food to be cold and vinegary and salsa-like (because of the necropolis setting), but the chicken adobo was a savory stew of spices I associate with Chinese food, garlic and soy sauce. Quite good. The siopao was a gigantic steamed bun filled with sausage, ground pork, and egg. We concluded, upon palming it, that it was a C cup. "At least," B. said.

Later, B. sent me an email saying, "Thanks for the depressing morning. Casinos and cemeteries - can't wait for our hike next time we hang out!" and the forwarded three NSFW amateur videos of women giving birth. I recommend you go straight to 3:30 on this one:

I thought I would finally have some time free today, so I wore my sports bra and running shirt all day, expecting to find some hilly paddock on the mid-Peninsula to trot circles in. Finally, Saturday - after a long week of working like a dog, meaning working not at all like a dog works, sans-exercise, having no time to move myself from anything other than a staring-at-computer or eating-at-desk position, letting my body revert to the jellyfish-like consistency it had before I started P90X - I would have some time to jog.

Instead of jogging I went to the Hillsdale mall to make my annual purchase of lesbian business casual work attire. Did I tell you that last year I got a invitation to a lawyer event in San Francisco that read "Attire: Festive Northern California Business Casual." Readers, what the fuck is Festive Northern California Business Casual? S. said it meant sweaters embroidered with Christmas trees. I thought it meant Santa suit.

S. thinks I have a bad habit of justifying everything by saying it is "California casual," e.g., why I can call my boss an asshole (I really did this, to his face!) and have him laugh it off, why R. takes a break from her workday to run a company-sponsored 5k in a salt marsh, why S. and me and my brother and his fiancee spent an additional 90 minutes after finishing our food at the Benihana in Cupertino chatting with the cute young Bengali family sitting at our table about methods parents use to hide video gaming systems from their addicted children. Sometimes I use California casual to excuse my fleece outerwear; sometimes it means obsessive outdoor fitness; sometimes it means matter-of-fact ethnic diversity. California casual is actually a car dealership employee inviting you to have hella Santa-shaped chocolate out of a mini-sleigh! My life aspiration is to always be Festive Northern California Business Casual.

Then work called. As I hauled my new oversized trousers and undersized shirts to my car - DAMN THIS RECTANGULAR BODY - I got an email. Opposing counsel is motion-happy, and you are to write an opposition brief. Come to work.

So I went to work.

Here's the weird thing. It was okay. Work has been really good recently. I try not to talk about my job on this blogsilog, but I'm going to make an exception. Something changed a few months ago. A partner took a chance on me and asked me to do some work for him. I think he thought it was okay. I think he thinks I'm okay. And so I've been getting more and better work.

And even weirder, the more work I get, the more I like it. The nature of the work has not changed - Big Computer Company A sues Big Computer Company B over a invention both sides claim as their own, Law Firms C and D litigate like beavers - but my feelings for it have. I like being given responsibility. I especially like when this beloved partner sits me down at the beginning of a project and explains exactly how hard it is going to be and how high his expectations are for what I will produce. I like to be pet on the head and told I've done a good job. I like to feel crushed when I've disappointed the partner with a crappy draft, and I like to feel eager to prove my worth the next round. What it comes down to is that more work for me means more approval from this Daddy figure. Of course by now you realize I've imagined NC-17 rated sequences with him re: management technique.

I'm in this feedback loop where the more work I get, the more useful I feel in the firm, and the more useful I feel the more confident I act, and the more confident I act the more I feel empowered to ask questions, to ask for the guidance I need to produce better work. More confidence also means I behave more like myself (i.e. Festive Northern California Business Casual) rather than the scared shy person I was being before, which makes less stiff, more likable, which I think makes it easier for people to work with me. All of which, I think, gets me more work. Which I like, because it makes me feel useful, confident, etc.

I had a hard time adjusting to the corporate culture of BigLaw for almost a year. I hid in my office and just did whatever work came my way and tried to draw as little attention as possible to myself. I think what I found hardest was that I felt I had to suppress any hint of weirdness and silliness in order to fit in, but I still had to be chummy in that way professionals call "collegiality," which felt fake. Like a laugh track, or something.

It did weird things to me. At the beginning of this year, I had just returned from three months of international travel. I had moved from my shared apartment with beloved O. in the big faraway city of Chicago - where I had clearly-defined schedules, income, expenses, habits, friends, and hobbies - back into my parents' house in the suburbs, where, if things felt familiar at all, they were familiar in an infantilizing way. (Like being told to take a bath at night, or forced to put ugly XXL t-shirts on my car seats to prevent scuffing.) My known world was disrupted enough as it was, but on top of this feeling fake at work did funny things to my emotions. I hit a nadir sometime in February when I went out to a cafe with R. and O., best friends since childhood, and felt uncomfortable. At a loss for words. They said I didn't seem like myself. I lay on that divan in that cafe like a clam, cold, heavy, buried in underwater sand. I love that stupid fucking metaphor! A woman I had just met told me "Your personality is usually light, but recently you've been heavy" before offering to spin crystals over my heart chakra, and my reaction was not to run screaming but to say You are absolutely right.

Nobody at the firm said act straight or die. I must have imposed the burden upon myself to suppress my personality. I'm overcautious and guarded when I'm in a new social situation. I am hella shy but people think I'm being aloof. I scribbled a furious note on my notepad during the first session of the memoir class I took at Stanford this fall, as people went around the room introducing themselves: "BE MORE OPEN ABOUT YOURSELF." I felt embarrassed for being too guarded to be loose/flexible/creative about describing myself, while my fellow memoirists let their wacky personalities out right at the beginning. My nickname on my college rugby team was "Buddha" because people thought I was shy, quiet, and inoffensive. I spent my first six months in Chicago pretending I was straight. What the f?? You get older, you think you've found your confidence, and then you experience something new and it throws you back to square one. You know? I'm so slow to adjust.

I discussed the taste of human flesh with a colleague at the copy machine last night around 9:30. He called it "long pork." I told him to cut his hand off and try.

I consider this a victory.

evening with large

2010-11-16T23:41:00.006-08:00

Yesterday, I took R.K. through a workaday evening on the Peninsula. He is in town for a wedding - a delightful wedding for which I was his plus one, more on this later. I worked while he wandered around San Francisco, Ferry Building to Fort Mason. At six, I picked him up from the Palo Alto Caltrain and drove in local and highway traffic down 101 to the Google campus, where with our chatty tour guide we enjoyed a cauliflower pinenut spread on cheese toast and banana chocolate mousse, and encountered a living wall, a solar-powered trash compactor, a collapsible fence made of polyethylene paper, and comfortable nooks full of intelligent-looking young people working past work hours. After touring the foosball table and the mystery pair of socks on the floor, we turned the corner and found two people playing at a grand piano.

We left. At my house, R.K. sung a soft tune and plucked out a few notes on the banjo while I thumbed the pearl of my Blackberry Clitoris looking for fires to put out. Dad set up R.K. in the extra bedroom and booted up a 2001-era desktop so that R.K. could be forced to view family photos. Boo remembered R.K. from Brooklyn sleepovers and leaned hard against his legs, begging to be patted. I coaxed my toes into the five-fingered shoes that R. had lent me, and Boo and R.K. and I walked the hundred yards to Grandma's house, where I applied tapotement therapy to her shoulders with an 18" daikon and Grandma told a story about losing a bunch of radios while doing her daily tai chi exercises in the schoolyard of Taiwan University. Obedient and well-mannered R.K. gamely carried on his end of the conversation and offered his name, but Grandma misheard him, gestured widely with her hands, and referred to him as "Large" several times. On the slow walk back home, Large and I stopped at a mystery spot that smelled like jasmine. We tried to delineate the edges of the sweet smell, sniffing the air in three dimensions until Large said he was going to pass out.

I subjected Large to P90x's Chest and Back disc. He stopped after half of the DVD, saying he was going to throw up. "I ate too much," he said. I believe you, Large. He sunk into our twenty-year old gray pleather loveseat and watched me finish the exercises and transition into the ab-ripping portion of the evening's festivities. I told Large of my parents' and my shared love of useless tschotskes, how a year ago S. said she would not permit me to bring any of these beloved trinkets into any shared household we would have, how I reduced my toys into one tissue box of useless crap, and then dumped out said box of crocheted sushi, rubber Cup o' Noodles, a baseball inscribed with the Constitution, a Barack Obama face towel, a Swan Lake music box, a miniature mace, a plush rat, and a $3.99 spinning Made in China LED toy onto my bed. We played with these while talking about relationships using terms like "aromantic" and "family love."

I had to wake at 7:15 for an East Coast conference call, so afterward I roused Large and we had breakfast at my favorite diner in town. I accidentally ate roughly 15-20 egg whites while Large said things like, "A hash pie is basically a potato pancake, except with bacon because it's not Jewish." I am pathologically unable to not chat so I flirted with the sixty year old lady at the cash register about buying Pez dispensers on Valentines Day, and then I drove Large three hundred feet to the Caltrain, where we did not hug goodbye because I anticipated seeing him up in the city after the work day. Well, the work day has left me wasted and I am unable to drag my tired ass north, so a remote hug from Palo Alto, dear Large, and thank you for visiting.

j.

2010-11-11T23:52:00.008-08:00

I was scared to meet J., so when she finally arrived, I rose to hug her, saying, I've heard so much about you! and then returned immediately to my supine position on the floor. I was "stretching my back" but really I was just nervous I'd stutter, or fail to be scintillating, or just flat out say something stupid. S. hadn't fully furnished her new apartment - it wasn't that strange that I would be on the ground.

J. is one of S.'s best friends. They met studying abroad in Beijing when J. was drawn to S.'s cherry red Fluevog boots. She is tall and slim, with a rangy stride, and glasses and eyebrows that always seem raised in excitement. Her face has Lucille Ball-like elasticity and humor. She gestures a lot. Favors large scarves. Speaks quickly. Leans in when listening. When she learns that a friend has a piece of new information to share, she shouts at her partner, "Why haven't we plucked this apple from the tree??"

Before I met her I heard stories. J. took care of S. in times of great need. J. is the type of person you invite over for dinner, but then she cooks - she walks casseroles of delicious food twenty blocks to your house, and then lets you keep her pretty pottery for weeks because she knows you don't have dishes.

The first time I met J., she talked about preparing for a winter train ride up to central Canada. All I could think to say was that the previous tenant of S.'s apartment had left behind a half dozen issues of a men's bodybuilding magazine, and she should bring these for the trip. Isn't it gross, I said. Look at their bodies.

At dinner with J. and her partner a few months later, J. asked me what S.'s brother was like. I had just met him. I said, He's just like S., but nice. I was teasing; of course I find Couchzilla nice. I meant that S.'s brother was more relaxed, less driven than his sister.

J. responded with her body and with her words. She pushed herself away from the table, sat up straight in her chair, and said, What do you mean S. isn't nice? She's so nice.

I fumbled around for an explanation. I meant, I mean, she's nice but he's like chill . . . J.'s socially adept partner rescued me by smoothly changing the subject.

Thus I learned something else about J.: she's fucking loyal. She is that friend. The protector. If I ever wronged S., J. would be the first person in line to disembowel me with a pitchfork. That snippet of conversation laid out the ground rules. Strange, knowing that only made me respect J. more.

S. and I tiffed earlier in the week about where to spend the holidays. Plaintiff/Counterclaim Defendant wanted both parties in California for Thanksgiving. Defendant/Counterclaim Plaintiff wanted to be at home. Both sides had compelling evidence for their arguments. They came to no resolution and Plaintiff left the call in a huff.

S. had dinner with J. tonight. I took a break from work to have dinner and exercise. When I returned, I saw in my inbox S.'s itinerary. For a trip to San Francisco. For Thanksgiving.

I knew right away what had happened. This is the chat we had after I got that itinerary:

me: really1?!?
no really, ??!?!!?
REALLY!?!?!?!?!?!?!?

S.: hi!!!!

me: OMG!!!!!!
i love j.!!!!
did j. have anything to do with that?
i love j.?!!?
i love you!!!!
really1?!?!?!?
wait am i reading this correctly

S.: hahahahahaha
why do you love j.?
what about ME?!!??!!?

me: you too but first j.!!!!

S.: what!
what does j. have to do with anything?!

me: oh i don't know
just a guess
HOW AWREYOOU?

S.: why did you guess j.?

me: LOVE OFMY LIFE!
am i right?

S.: tell me why you thought of j. immediately!?

post-halloween

2010-11-11T23:16:00.003-08:00

A dangerous time. Orange and black candy 75% off at CVS. Little blue piles of mini Crunch bar wrappers all over my desk at home. Little balls of Reese's cups foil all over my desk at work.

Can anybody tell me, are Butterfingers like vegemite? Captured waste from another food-making process given a second chance at a supermarket shelf? Because I cannot understand why else candy makers continue would continue to manufacture them. Or black jelly beans. What's the point??

giants won the world series

2010-11-06T22:57:00.009-07:00

The Giants won the World Series on Monday. R. and I watched Game 5 at Antonio's Nut House with the folks I met while watching the NLCS - I complained about one of them in a previous post, but truth be told it has been nice to see the same people over and over in the same bar and have friendly feelings toward them. Makes me feel like a real townie.

The game was a pitching duel, a shutout on both sides until the late innings. We were on edge, waiting for a team to break through with a hit, two hits in a row. Lincecum was flawless. Cliff Lee seemed so too, until Ross and Uribe stacked up hits, Huff moved them up with the surprise bunt, Burrell whiffed (again!) and then Renteria hit a ball that looked for a breathless moment like it might drop in the field and turn into a pop fly. But it didn't. It slipped between the first row of the bleachers and the center field fence. A perfect clutch home run. We all lost our shit. The bar erupted. I leapt up on the footrest of my barstool and almost tipped myself face-first into the guacamole, screaming with my arms over my head. "That's the World Series! That won the World Series!" I said.

Two innings later Wilson closed it out. Hamilton struck out looking at a sick breaking ball; Guerrero grounded out. Wilson built up the count to 3-2 with Nelson Cruz. We waited. The next pitch: fouled back. The next one. No one dared to breathe. Nelson stepped in with a huge swing. And - he missed!

I must have stepped through a worm hole or something because it felt like I lost about five seconds. I blacked out after the last pitch and came back to find myself screaming, jumping up and down on the peanut shells underfoot, screaming and screaming with a hundred and fifty people in the bar. It was like we were locked up in a champagne bottle and and then Brian Wilson popped the cork and we just blew up and spilled over. I peed in my pants, only a little bit, I just couldn't control myself. We were just making sounds, not even words or "Yeah!!" but "AGHHHHHHHHH!" R. and I bear-hugged, then threw our heads back and jumped up and down screaming "AGHHHH!!!!!" in unison. We broke off, stepped back, double high-fived, did the same with the people around us, and then went back to jumping up and down and screaming. I even gave the woman with the talking problem a two-handed high five. We cut loose, I mean literally, physically; R. said later, "I was just farting and peeing all over myself when they won."

Things subsided into a general din punctuated by occasional wooting crescendos, but after that petered out very quickly. Within about ten minutes the packed bar had half-cleared out. The Giants were dogpiling by the pitcher's mound in Rangers Ballpark. I bought vodka shots for me and R., because I didn't know what else to do. We seemed shell-shocked. We watched the Giants spraying each other with champagne, and the inaudible post-game interviews for a few more minutes, then drove back to R.'s house to watch the news.

I was still in a blissed-out daze on Wednesday morning when I woke up, so I decided to take a half day and get myself up to the ticker tape parade. What a trek: traffic on the highway to the commuter rail, thirty-person lines at ticket machines, lines to get into the station, lines to get out of the station, almost standstill shuffling in Civic Center Plaza. Took me almost an hour and a half to get there.

I didn't think the parade would be amazing, but I thought that something ceremonial would satisfy my psychological need for closure. What happened in the bar after Game 5 felt strange; twenty minutes after the spasm of victory, most people were gone. R. and I and a few strangers sat around a table beaming at each other, and up at the TV screens, but in the corner a few people had started shooting pool, the kitchen staff kept pushing out orders of fajitas de camaron, and the peanut shells went untrampled. It seemed to come down awfully quick. There weren't riots in Palo Alto. Nobody danced in the street and fell down drunk into a crowd of fans. I went over to R.'s and ate half a bag of kettle corn. Life just went on.

So I wanted a ritual. Plus I was curious. I wondered if people would be excessively polite and giddy in San Francisco the way they were in Grant Park the night Obama was elected. You know when you experience something intense and you want to be around people who feel the same way? How your private joy about a non-private event finds special meaning when it is shared by a hundred thousand people? Freud calls this the oceanic feeling. I'm into mob scenes, and San Francisco is a really fun place for a feel-good mass gathering. Maybe because of all the pot? Gay Pride, Dyke March, Dolores Park on a sunny Sunday - when it's good it's really good.

In the Daly City BART station, I stood in line behind a man named Norm. Norm had taken the bus from Half Moon Bay (a town on the Pacific about 40 miles south of San Francisco) to the BART. His trip by public transportation was going to take him more than two hours. Norm didn't understand how to use the ticket machines, so I bought him his ticket with my credit card when I bought mine. He seemed really happy about this. We sat next to each other for half an hour on the train and chatted about his Ty Cobb impersonation, the VA Hospital where he was going to get his eye fixed, how he worked up from a menial job at a photography agency and became a photographer himself. I told him about my girlfriend in New York; he was from New York, too!

(Norm.)

We stuck together and split up when the throngs exiting the station pushed us apart. I shouted "Goodbye and good luck!" over my shoulder and ascended to the street.

(Norm in the crowd at Civic Center station.)

The event itself was kind of a crowded mess. It was clear that the city had only had one day to plan. There were no speakers or projection screens, so basically if you weren't seven feet tall or hadn't started lining the parade route at 8 a.m., there was no chance for you to catch any of the action. No bathrooms or vendors or water, either.

(The crowd at Civic Center Plaza.)

People climbed whatever they could. Crowds of people gathered on the public bathrooms. I saw about twenty on a big white van.

During the World Series, I would tell anyone within earshot that the Giants were superior as a team not only because their players were scruffy nonconformists who seemed to love each other but also because their fan base is far more diverse than the monochromatic crowds in Arlington, Texas. Seriously, in the pans of Rangers Ballpark, the only people of color you'd see were Giants fans. Watching that made me feel like a female executive must feel walking into a meeting filled with men, or a Jewish person must feel in a supermarket where everybody has a little Hitler mustache. This coupled with the alarming habit in some ballparks of putting up "K"s whenever a pitcher gets a strikeout - do they realize that it says "KKK" all over their stadium?? I was so happy that that kid dressed up in a bright red full-body crab costume (in homage to San Francisco seafood, I think) sideways-walking around the ballpark after Game 5 was Asian. I cannot understate the importance of this.

I don't mean to sound triumphalist. All I mean to say is that on Wednesday I was as interested in the people around me as I was in trying to catch a glimpse at my favorite ballplayers. I took a bunch of photos with this fancy new camera I bought last week.

(This kid is holding this man's ears like they're handles!)

(It can't be all feel-good. This tattoo captures everything that is wrong with San Francisco. No taste. So tacky.)

I stood in a throng on Larkin Street and roasted (80 degrees in the city?!) for an hour, getting a glimpse of (I think) Cody Ross's arm, and the backs of lots of people's heads, but not much else.

I don't know if I found the oceanic feeling. The mood was mixed. People were getting irritated at the heat, the crowd, and the invisibility of the hometown heroes. I freaked out because the cell towers were all clogged up from the crowd and I got a work email 45 minutes after it had been sent. Even so, when Tim Lincecum's bus passed on McAllister, giving us a split-second look at our long-haired super Freak, we all cheered him like a champ.

###

I used to be one of those nerdy, sarcastic adolescents who derided sports as frivolous and athletes as overpaid meatheads. This despite my fascination with the World Series-winning A's team of 1989 and the Superbowl-winning 49ers team of 1995! First sports was just baffling: I just didn't get how my seventh grade homeroom teacher could chat it up with a twelve year-old boy at 7:45 a.m. on a Tuesday about how a team that wins over 100 games per season should make it to the postseason no matter the standings. Then it became contemptible: only 39% of Americans believe in evolution, 65% don't show up for midterm elections, one in four read no books, and you're wasting time on rich men playing with balls???

I recently hung out with Matt, a friend who grew up down the block. I was a year ahead of him in school, so I supervised his work on the high school newspaper, and I always felt that because of that, he respected my opinion more than it deserved. I haven't seen him for maybe a decade. Making idle chat with him on a walk around Stanford campus about two months ago, I asked him what his recent trip to San Diego had been like. He said it had been "nice." Then he self-corrected: "Oh God, 'nice.' What an insipid thing to say. San Diego wasn't just nice."

I couldn't help but feel that this was some sort of performance for me. Back when I knew Matt, I think I was the kind of person who'd judge a description of something as "nice" as insipid, just as I would judge sports fans as mindless consumers. What a snot I was! I wanted to hug Matt and apologize for the person I had been. I mean who knows, maybe he really thought "nice" didn't capture what he wanted to express about San Diego and it had nothing to do with me, but nonetheless I read the whole situation as an indictment of my adolescent snobbery.

Hold on, I have to stop myself from going where this writing is going. Who am I fooling, writing this narrative of enlightenment, as if I have gone from snob to loving, nonjudgmental Buddha. Nope - still a snob, also a hypocrite. I still think people are empty-headed cabbages for preferring mindless entertainment to reading and voting; it's just now I also happen to enjoy that mindless entertainment. It used to be that I liked country music because I found it comically conservative but now I think I really like comically conservative country music OH GOD it's hard to be a guilty, neurotic bitch! What the fuck am I saying? I can't really just enjoy something - I have to stay alert, observe other people's faces, question the social implications and politics of their pleasure and mine, and basically just con myself out of a good time. What rapture I have is secretive and rare. Ask my exes.

Eh. So thank you, Giants, for letting me jump up and down and scream with my best friend in a bar full of jumping, screaming people. It felt so foreign that I had to describe it above as "passing out" - like an out-of-body, out-of-consciousness experience. But really it was just happiness. For that moment. Unfiltered, unquestioned happiness. Thank you.

###

Sorry for this upchuck of a blogpost. You see my brain is actually just scrambled egg whites, high in protein, low in fat, nutritionally superior to whole eggs but still just a mess of shit on a plate. HIRE ME, EMPLOYERS.

###

Another thing I am grateful to the Giants for is the excuse they gave me to spend time with beloved people:

May 14 regular season game at the stadium. R. and C. and I took Caltrain up and met O. and N. Spent 2 1/3 innings walking around looking for hot dogs and garlic fries and admiring N.'s toe cleavage, and most of the game checked out of the action on the field. A view of the water and the shipping containers all the way over on the Oakland side of the bay. R. and C. and I took the train home with the entire Palo Alto Swim Club boy's team, about two dozen white, Asian, and hapa kids with skin browned to almost the same color as their chlorine-lightened hair.

Game 4 of the NLDS. Came down from my office to watch half an inning with my colleagues in the lunch room. Beloved partner P. looked bemused and said, "Do you follow baseball?" This warm beam of attention alone made the entire baseball season worthwhile.

Game 2 of the NLCS. Went to W.'s house in Fremont with O. He cooked balut and fried fish for us while we watched the Giants implode. They lost 6-1. My very first balut was tasty! No little duck beak or face or bones, as I had feared, and only a savory, brothy flavor with a hard cap of egg white and a slightly veinier, tougher yolk.

Game 5 of the NLCS. Met chatty Cathy and her less chatty friends at Antonio's Nut House. Beer, peanuts, baseball, and solitude (+ Cathy) = nice.

Game 1 of the World Series. Met R. at her house, where she had been waiting for two hours to start watching the game. She came to the door going, "Wheee!!!!!" and clapping her hands in excitement. C. successfully stayed awake for the entire game. R.'s fitness challenge for the game was to do 10 burpees per run scored. Most Giants games this season have been low-scoring games, 3-2, 1-0, etc. World Series Game 1 ended with the score at 11-7, so . . . R. did 180 burpees! My fitness challenge was eating Cheetos.

Game 2 of the World Series. R. and C. and I went back to Antonio's Nut House. Chatty Cathy and her crew were there; I waved. We grabbed seats in the front and watched the Giants dismantle the Rangers. R. and I made orange pom-poms with the yarn from a discarded knitting project - a wedding blanket for me, but the marriage ended before the knitting did, ehhhh, so we turned the yarn into rally poms. We also wore our matching Brian Wilson beards, which we'd picked up a few days before at a Halloween store where a California stoner dude had asked us in his low, druggy voice, "So, uhh . . . where you guys get those beards at?" We pointed him to the beards aisle.

Game 3 of the World Series, Finnerty's in Manhattan. R.M. and R.T. met me at this densely packed bar. Poor R.T., trying to read her Stephanie Meyer novel on her iPhone while meatheads pushed past her to get to the bar. Eventually she succumbed to the television and R.M. and I took turns explaining to her the rules of the game. Met R.M.'s friendly Fresno folks, observed some people flirting, listened to some idiots behind me talking loudly about girls with fake boobs.

Game 4 of the World Series, Pacific Station in Brooklyn with S., who tried to escape her baseball-watching duties by eating her pre-game baigan bharta very slowly. Found seats on a bed buggy couch next to a man in a Buster Posey jersey reading Foucault. S.'s initial irritation at her girlfriendly obligation turned into mild interest in the game. Tried to teach her about pitches but I couldn't get clear in my head the difference between a breaking ball, a cutter, and a slider. We made out in the corner between innings, and left when it was clear that the Giants would win. Sorry for writing that, but I'm really proud of the fact that you will make out with me!!!

Game 5, as described above.

I congratulate you on making it to the end of this post, though I question your judgment and your interest in mindless entertainment in the form of reading some lezzie's blog. Please send your mailing address to me. To express my gratitude for your patronage, I will mail you a Giants snuggie. Go team.

-ine

2010-11-05T00:40:00.002-07:00

I get a lot out of knowing that one of my friends is in a 16-person graduate program where 31% of her class has a name ending in "-ine":

Christine
Bernadine
Geraldine
Josephine
Delphine

pinafore

2010-11-01T16:24:00.003-07:00

December 5, 2009

S. called and said, “Guess where I am calling from? You’ll never guess.” I guessed. Hotel? Potomac? D.C.? All wrong: in a Marshall’s store in Pentagon City, Virgina. It was across the street from her hotel, and she was shopping with T. She asked me what I was doing. “Looking at maps,” I said. I was going up to Sacramento later in the day. We talked about this and that, but mostly S. prattled on about what she experiencing at the store. She paused for thirty seconds to take a call. It was T., calling from pants. Do you need to go? I asked. “No, we’re all caught up!” she said. She said, “Oh! Were your canoe shoes with jiaozi detail a brand called J. Company?” No, I said they were more name brand, and that canoe shoes with jiaozi detail were a popular style this year. I had seen several of the same kind. She said, “I want to buy these shoes. So cheap! And these! Oh no! So expensive. Sixty dollars?!”

T. came over with some potential purchases, and S.'s voice rose an octave as she said, “I like this one. Oh, this one is really cute.” Then it suddenly dropped. “This one—don’t get it; you never wear red.” I concurred and advised T. not to cause cognitive dissonance. The T. I know has never worn red. They were inspecting, according to S., “A bright red blouse, and a bright blue blouse.” T. went to the register, and S. said, “I wish you were here at Marshall’s with me.” She speculated that she would make me try lots of clothes on. “I would just get bored and wander over to the bargain bin and bags,” I said. “That’s right, you would probably go and try perfumes, you would open the boxes and spritz yourself,” she said. I said that’s what boxes were for, to be opened. She said, “No, they’re not.” I protested: I would repackage the perfumes.

I told S. that I loved to listen to her voice, and that hearing her moving around the store was like listening to a chaotic radio piece. I wasn’t used to other events happening while we talked on the phone; though often I am walking or biking or driving while talking, S. is most often stationary and indoors (except when walking to the subway). I said the sound coming through the phone was like War of the Worlds. She expressed interest in “sweater boots.” What are sweater boots? “Oh, you know, boots that look like sweaters. The least practical thing in the world, but they look so warm.” She said, “This store is so absurd. Clothes are so absurd. Look at this: leggings with buttons down the side!” I said, “I know, why can’t there just be 5-10 practical styles for us to choose between?” “Oh no,” she said, “I like clothes.” I related to her my broken windows theory regarding shopping: Marshall’s is chaotic, so it feels appropriate to deepen the chaos, and to not rehang items you’ve tried on. S.: “Oh, you’re so right, T. and I totally just draped this shirt over the rack.” Some smocks caught her eye. “I love plaid smocks!” I asked her if she had ever had experience with a plaid smock, so that she could make that ridiculous statement, but she ignored me. “I kind of want to buy this smock,” said she. “But the time has passed for me to wear smocks.” I asked her to define smock: “Too short for a dress, too long for a shirt.” Like what Britney Spears wears as dresses? “Exactly.”

I asked why the time had passed for smocks: “I am too old to wear things that look like pinafores.” I asked her what pinafores were: “Oh, nevermind.” She hung up and called me back a minute later. “I said goodbye to T. Now I’m going to walk to the train!” I told her to be careful because it was snowing and suburban, and there were bound to be terrible drivers. She said, “It’s a two minute walk, all within the mall.” So I said, “Oh, then throw caution to the wind! Talk to me, baby!” She said she had to go, because the train was going underground.

December 10, 2009

S. recalled to me the entire plot of Jane Eyre, and said that race generally and specifically the “blackness” of Mr. Rochester’s wife kept coming up in funny ways. I said that descriptions of men as “square-jawed” and rice as “fluffy” had failed to conjure any image for me as a young reader. We debated whether rice was adequately described as “fluffy,” and I concluded that S. approached rice on a visual-macro level, hence seeing the entire bowl as fluffy looking, where as I was tactile-micro, imagining the density and chewiness of each grain of rice as incompatible with my understanding of fluffy (voluminous but light, like cotton candy).

I asked S. again to define a pinafore, since she had described a smock as a type of pinafore, and then forgotten to define pinafore. She said, “A pinafore is a nursery school type of jumper.” I gave up. S. is a self-referencing dictionary.

August 26, 2010

S. called to say, “I almost bought my mother a party frock from the vintage store.”

I said, “Isn’t a frock just a large shirt?”

S. said, “Would you call a dress just a large shirt? Or shoes just . . . hard socks?”

introducing the giants

2010-10-26T23:03:00.008-07:00

Productivity is at zero. Reading everything on the Internet about baseball.

Lots of reasons to love the Giants. Let me tell you about it. Primarily, like the city they represent, they're casual and fun with their weirdness. They bought out this lady with this hat (of the San Francisco skyline) to sing "God Bless America" during Game 5.

The remaining living members of the Grateful Dead sang the national anthem.

I especially like the weirdness that plays with masculinity. Take this guy, Brian Wilson. His punk/hipster style. His brown beard dyed black, which he claims he colors with a black Sharpie. In affect, hyperconfidence, alpha masculinity, wildness: the closer personality. A long clip, but you can see some of it here. Look how much this other man wants to impress him.

He pulls pranks like this one. It starts at :43.

Shit like this makes me wonder if he is a raging homophobe. If they all are. Aubrey Huff wears a red, rhinestone-encrusted "rally thong" for luck. These are frat boy jokes. A friend of mine, one of eleven female firefighters in FDNY at the time, told me that in the fire houses the men would pretend to hump each other; apparently this is how they expressed their disdain for homosexuality? The ways of man-groups are unknown to me. Still, because my sickness for Giants baseball is at fever pitch, I find this endearing, not yet abhorrent.

Then there is the man they call Panda, the pudgy third baseman who missed a tag in Game 5 because he couldn't stretch his leg to the bag. The catcher is a cherubic rookie with the fake-sounding name Buster Posey. Cody Ross, a man who pulls off the bald head and beard look, a reject from the Marlins picked up by the Giants two months ago, aspired to be a rodeo clown:

For years, Cody sat in the stands at every rodeo in full clown regalia - baggy pants with billowing colored scarves in the pockets - and full clown makeup.

He didn't abandon the dream until his dad quit the rodeo and moved the family to Dallas, where Cody blossomed as a baseball star.

But my favorite Giant by far is the skinny ace Tim Lincecum, the 26 year-old hippie/skater/stoner who was busted for misdemeanor pot possession a while back. After signing his contract, he told his agent his ambition was to buy a Volkswagen minibus. He can't stop saying "Fuck yeah!" on live television. He looks like he's sixteen and gets mistaken for the bat boy at away games. He walks around AT&T Park in flip-flops with his French bulldog. And he's a two time Cy Young winner and the best pitcher in the league. His demeanor is that of your average idiot stoner brother (we have all had one), as seen here in his promotional shoot for Giants Snuggies:

The outcome:

As if this is not enough, Lincecum is Asian-American!!!! Okay, half. His mother is Filipino!! Nawa'y pagpalain ka ng Diyos ng marami pang kaarawan!!! I bought a t-shirt.

comparison shopping

2010-10-24T23:05:00.012-07:00

Okay, BH says the switch from Georgia to Arial is disorienting. Let us compare these clean squiggles with the old, serify squiggles. I'll tell you what I did in Georgia, then I will tell you what I did in Arial.

Let me tell you what I did this weekend. I masturbated twice and spent probably two hours altogether watching porn or searching for "impotence" on Google Images (tip: HILARIOUS!). I have no idea why so many of my recent blog posts concern sex, except it probably has something to do with me turning thirty and not having something sucking on my nipples once every 2-6 hours. Immediately before time number 1, I ate probably two-thirds of a pillow-sized bag of Doritos Cool Ranch chips while reading about the Giants' NLCS victory. Friday night I already told you about. Saturday I woke at 11:30, did an exercise DVD called "Core Synergistics," played rainy day soccer with Boo, then took grandma and her five million pound wheelchair to a local cafe, where I taught her how to say "One low-fat decaf latte, please" and where we split a madeleine and a ham and egg scramble. In the early evening I drove up to Oakland listening to Katy Perry at deafening volumes, despite hating that b. Seriously, I detest her music like it's Pepsi or Burger King, Katy being Burger King to Lady Gaga's In-N-Out. Nobody likes a Number 2. Except Mao Asada, you cannot blame her for the freak bad luck of competing against the best figure skater of the millennium. Fucking Katy Perry, your contrived edginess, you imagine she's like the first of Eddie Murphy's marriage prospects in Coming to America, obediently jumping up and down on one foot and barking like a dog because she's been told to do so, putting on a blue wig because some music exec thought up the candy aesthetic right before a nocturnal emission. Lipstick on a pig, sheeple!! Artificial coloring! The soulless "Fine fresh fierce we got it on lock" versus the snarling "I want your ugly, I want your disease": no contest! What the fuck am I saying. OH despite detesting Fräulein Perry I NONETHELESS screamed along to "Teenage Dream" on the drive to a most delicious Laotian food dinner in Oakland. The lettuce-wrapped rice balls were like an erection of the mouth, but JY seemed extremely disappointed that Champa Garden was out of fried bananas and ice cream. Afterward, we retired to JY's artfully-arranged studio, where SW disclosed her foot anti-fetish (a story about a blood blister made her recoil in horror from the storyteller) and JY described her ambition to become a well-compensated personal organizer. ("I'm really good at packing trunks," she said, for the THOUSANDTH time.) Came home, Cool Ranch and consequences as described above. Sunday woke again after 11 a.m. Tiramisu, a mango tart, more Cool Ranch chips, coffee, cheese and even more chips went into my face within 120 minutes. I was so fucking bored today, ladies. Holy shit was I bored. I called my parents to hang out. They were busy. I called my grandma to hang out. MY GRANDMA REJECTED ME. Carry on with the TV and nap, Gram, I didn't want to hang out anyway. A colleague's work-related celebration only distracted me from excruciating unoccupied rainy Sunday afternoon boredom for an hour, then I went to a bike store and a camera store and barely managed to refrain from buying some very expensive new toy (the contenders were a new single speed and a micro four-thirds digicam) to fill the void of companionship in my life. Physical fitness, then more Giants-related Google searches, then two dinners and a half of a Sausage McMuffin have brought me to the present. I am such a fucking WASTE. I cannot WAIT until Monday. I am going to catch up on Jersey Shore now.

Now contrast the sedate new font for the new age: My weekend was marvelous! Today I dressed in matching clothes and unsoiled underwear, and attended a polo match fundraiser for Shih-Tzu Rescue with Brad and Chad. Afterward, Madison and I got couples' colonics at the new wellness studio in Aptos. The water was perfectly clean throughout!

GUI

2010-10-24T21:20:00.002-07:00

I fiddled a little bit with the fonts on this page. Hysterical serifs seem so late 20s. Clean old Arial is more appropriate for my new decade. Tell me if this improves readability.

Faaaaack, guys, I have been writing this blog for six years. Twenty percent of a life! That's two bar admissions, three relationships, three cities, three laptops, three full-time jobs, three bands, four bicycles, four apartments, five internships, six roommates, a marriage, a divorce and a law degree.

I had a Friendster account when I started this blog. Yeah. Friendster.

It's time this goose started laying golden eggs, don't you think? I'm open to ideas on how to monetize six years of verbal diarrhea.

*correction

2010-10-23T02:44:00.002-07:00

By "magic finger," below, I meant "ring finger." The finger which indicates marriage and conservative family values. I intended no other meaning. Dear God, readers, scrub your minds. Bananarchist is a PG-13 blog.

we are here for each other

2010-10-23T00:54:00.010-07:00

How fitting that a day after writing off all of God's children as imbeciles I should have an experience that renews my love for all of God's beautiful imbeciles. For anybody feeling disenchanted with life's offerings, I recommend volunteering for a queer youth Halloween dance.

The kids. Were so. Adorable. Have y'all seen teenagers? They are babies!! They are pimply, uncomfortable, mumbling babies. The younger teens arrived in the first two hours, in pairs and small groups, and stood around awkwardly fingering stray bangs behind their ears. They alternated between shyness and hysterical confidence, going from focusing intently on their sodas to running at each other for piggyback rides and then back to self-conscious, disconnected chatter. My camp counselor/herding instinct kicked in and I tried to corral the kids at one table so that they would speak to each other, and I was delighted when they finally did. This lovey-dovey pack of cute, uncomfortable midgets dominated until a large contingent of older kids from the queer Latino youth group (how I love the Bay Area!) showed up in drag and in high heels, and towered over the younger lumpen, who shrank off the dance floor and returned to their spots by the candy bowl. I spent a fair amount of time on the parquet inadvertently doing moves from Cardio Hula; pop music in 2010 is so good! I could listen to "Bad Romance" forever.

Tonight settled the outstanding question of what costumes will predominate at this year's Halloween parties. Long have I bored dearest patientest S. with "No costumes came out of this year's blockbusters! How can you dress Inception or Winter's Bone???", and now I have my answer: Jersey Shore and Lady Gaga. Italian-Americans of the mid-Atlantic win in 2010, so don't go running off to your carniceria, because half a dozen other Lady Gagas will be at whatever party you're heading to, attracting flies with their room temperature meat dresses. Remember that year everybody dressed as Roy Horn, with plush tigers attached to their faces? Halloween is so topical. Of course tonight the kids' costumes divided along the same lines as adults' costumes do, with slutty maids and slutty kitties on the one hand, and, for example, body-sized pumpkins on the other. My favorite was a kid who wore a gray sweatsuit and pieces of gray-painted cardboard and a gray bike helmet and swung a plastic sword and called herself "Joan de Arc," because I did the exact same thing when I was a wee lesbipup, except much worse, with my story ending with three months of hand-painting going into a school garbage can and me walking the elementary school Halloween promenade just wearing the gray sweatsuit, sniffling, and her story ending with happy calisthenics and triumphant self-assurance on the rented Jewish Community Center dance floor. I pretty much thought I would die from a heart attack of cuteness tonight. I told S. it was like watching Puppy Cam.

I've been volunteering for this organization for almost a year now. This is the same youth group I was in when I was a lad of sixteen. At a fundraiser for it I attended in March, I learned that my third grade teacher, a now 85 year-old man, was a flaming 'mo; later I visited him for tea at his house, which was decorated with Judy Garland photographs and Fauvist paintings, and he corrected my memory of my beloved fourth grade teacher, who was actually a bigot who disfavored black kids and made snide comments about the fey faculty members. He held his bad feelings against her for twenty years after her death! What I'm saying, I guess, is that these things come full circle. At least that's what the Mexican-American drag diva who performed tonight said. Mama Dora said seven gay teens had committed suicide in the last few months. Seven known suicides, that is, how many others we don't know. We are here for each other, she said. We are here for you. You are here for me. I fixed my eyes on a slim boy in sky blue Daisy Dukes and imagined him pulling me out of the rubble of my earthquake-destroyed metaphorical house. I believed, yes I did, I believed it could be possible.

Then Mama Dora said, "And now it is time to dance," and she began a Donna Summers song, and the older volunteer sitting to my right leaned over and said, "She was before your time, but this song was a huge hit when I was in high school." Let us all hope the boy in Daisy Dukes will someday be leaning over someone else and saying the same thing about Lady Gaga and her bad romance.

* * *

Post Script. The only negative thing I will say is that we are killing our youth from the inside. Edibles tonight were cheese pizza, chocolate Halloween mix (Snickers, Twix, M&Ms, and Almond Joy (vom)), candy Halloween mix (Nerds, Sweeties, LemonHeads (just three letters from NoEnamelHeads)), gummy candies, barbecue chips, tortilla chips, Doritos, Red Vines, chocolate chip cookies, mini-brownies, and Hansen's soda. The healthy offering was water. Wake up, sheeple! We must STOP feeding the FUTURE OF AMERICA this SHIT. Naturally I filled my face and went back for seconds, and carried on conversations with the uneaten half of a Red Vine wagging out of my mouth, but whatever, I have my degrees, my development is finished.

blocking the plate

2010-10-21T22:36:00.003-07:00

I went to a bar after work to watch the Giants game. Finally. All I ever wanted, all I ever needed was here in my amber ale, a cup of peanuts, a late October baseball game, and a noisy room full of unfamiliar faces. I intended to enjoy my tipple anonymously for the last three innings, then go home satisfied after the Giants had secured a World Series spot. Nobody talk to me, words are very unnecessary, I see nothing except Cody Ross's intriguing bald-head-with-full-beard style. Said my stern expression, my closed-up body language.

Bar was packed. I snagged a stool at an occupied table. Folks at the table - three middle-aged men and a middle-aged woman - were friendly and didn't seem to mind me joining. I settled in, jawed happily at my peanuts, and moved my eyes from one big-ass HDTV to another, trying to find the best view between the bodies of the bar's Silicon Valley worker/Stanford student clientele.

Then the woman chatted me up. I thought she was just being friendly because she identified something lost about me. She wanted to know my opinion about a San Francisco cabaret show. About Jackass 3D the Movie. About Borat. About the bartender. About the Phillies Phanatic. About non-native Californians. About Palo Alto High School. About Lockheed-Martin. About H.P. Lovecraft. About whether it was rude to check text messages while some chatty lady talked you up. (Guess whose thumbs were on whose phone when she said this.)

Half an hour into this, I realized that shouldn't feel guilty turning my attention back to the game even as she hooked me with these open-ended questions. I had thought at first how nice it was that she welcomed me, acted friendly, and wanted to know my opinion, and I felt obliged to give her all of my attention, until I realized that she was one of those people for whom talking is survival, and that she might die if she did not keep sounds coming out of her mouth, and that she talked to me not because I was interesting but because I was necessary, in the same way that people lost in the desert drink urine not because it is interesting but because it is necessary. I missed the f-bombing home run in the ninth inning because she was talking to me.

What clued me in to the selfishness of this woman's thirst for conversation was when she said something that made it clear that who I was had nothing to do with the conversation. She leaned in at one point to say, "Oh, those men. They're talking about signal-to-noise ratios or whatever, work stuff. Let's tune that out." For real, lady, you can't tell that a surly, articulate lezzie doesn't want to find camaraderie with you in acting like a bimbo? Once upon a time, I think when I was very very lonely, I thought talking to strangers was God's gift to human happiness, and I had often inane conversations with people I didn't know. Some conversations kept running because instead of stamping my foot and saying, "Sarah Palin thinks Africa is a country, you fucking redneck!" or "That huge SUV that is the object of all of your desires is one reason our youth are being blown apart in Iraq," I withheld my judgment and nodded my head as if what the person opposite me said made sense. I'm just a get-along, take-it-easy kind of person, I would think to myself, I'm learning a lot about the goodness in everybody by just being patient and overcoming my judgmentalness. Talk about insipid (and delusional, because deep down I still judged them) self-regard. I couldn't even identify when I was getting bored because I welcomed even the dullest sensations as reprieve from my horrible, insomniac loneliness. So I bit my tongue and withheld my judgment and pretended to see reason in beliefs I didn't agree with and had lots of very boring conversations and thought each one of them brought me closer to God.

Well, we are all God's children but some of God's children are imbeciles. It's taken me a while to admit this, and I don't know how to square it with the harmonious let-a-thousand-flowers-bloom persona I have cultivated on this blog in the last two years, but sorry, it's true. Some people are just not worth your time. I'm sure they are fine people who donate to charity and recycle and make their pets happy but I would rather just not know about it. Me from Chicago 2008 might have shrugged and said tp the woman, "Sure let's talk about something else," but I am thirty now, and as I have discussed below, being thirty means putting up with less shit, discriminating between productive and pointless uses of time, and feeling entitled to have my opinion considered. I did not want to swallow my bitchy smart-ass personality and pretend to be that insubstantial female who is confuddled by scientifrical words, for the sake of propelling a pointless conversation forward. So, I withdrew from the conversation, slowly, leaning away from the woman, keeping my eyes on the screen even during (ugh, why) credit card commercials, responding to her questions monosyllabically and only after a delay, until she returned to her husband and his colleagues' conversation about somebody's plush Cthulhu doll.

In writing this I see how passive I actually was. But I think that's fine. I didn't feel I needed to reject her more directly or make her feel bad; the important thing for me was just identifying when the costs of the conversation outweighed its value, and to stop burning up my energy on it when it happened. How come it took me thirty years to learn that not all experiences are good experiences? (I wrote a very similar sentence a year ago. I am apparently still learning.)

I still feel like a total a-hole.

And the Giants lost tonight. A major earthquake successfully delayed at least until Saturday's game.

loma prieta, 1989

2010-10-20T23:48:00.006-07:00

The Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989 struck during the warm-ups of Game 3 of the World Series, Battle of the Bay, San Francisco versus Oakland. I loved baseball and was thrilled to have its October epicenter in my home country. Everybody on the planet was watching Candlestick Park when it swayed on live television, when the live feed went to emergency broadcast, when the stadium steps buckled. Then when a truck nose-dived off a missing chunk of the Bay Bridge. When the Cypress Structure pancaked forty-two motorists between its upper and lower decks. When homes slid apart like matchstick architecture. When sixty-three people died.

I was nine years old. I had just taken a break from watching TV with Richard to pee, and was sitting on the toilet when I realized the water in the bowl was splashing up at me in a funny way. The house was swinging - exactly like that, like our house had been placed on the seat of a swingset and given a violent push. A crash and a yell sounded from the living room and then I was in the hallway, bracing against the walls, barely walking, feeling upended in a way that a decade later I would come to associate with uncontrolled intoxication, and pulling myself down the hallway to the backyard, where my brother and mother and I gathered and huddled and watched as the water from the neighbor's pool splashed over our fence. The palm tree behind the house bent like it was going to break its neck. All the while, there was this rumbling, rumbling, rumbling . . . like a train rushing through the neighborhood.

In my memory, the shaking went on for forty-five minutes and then turned into the dull vibration of constant fear which was not fully calmed until I left the Bay Area, nine years later. In reality, the quake lasted forty-five seconds, and the dull vibration of fear - well, I can't speak for other people's realities.

One strange thing that came out of the experience for me was learning to associate the warm feeling of belonging to a community with natural disasters. The earthquake gave me the opportunity, for the first time, to see all of my neighbors at once, emerging dazed from their homes, moving slowly from their driveways in clusters toward the center of the street and then just standing there, dumbstruck, immobile. I had never before believed these ghost houses held life - all one sees in the suburbs is one lonely metal capsule pulling in or out of a garage once an hour - but all of a sudden there it was, my street, my neighborhood, my people. Despite her shyness and crappy English, Mom must have exchanged comments with the prolific Mormon parents to the south and crotchety dog owners to the north, but I can't remember, and it didn't matter; words spoken or not, those were the people who would be pulling my skinny, golden brown California body from the rubble of my flat-topped three-bedroom house (should it tragically come to that). A powerful aftershock shook the leaves on the sycamore trees as we stood out there waiting.

When the earthquake hit, my spry eleven year-old brother had leapt out of the way of the three eight-foot tall entertainment center cabinets that pitched forward on the very spot he had been sitting and watching the game. That was the crash and the yell I had heard from the bathroom. I didn't really register the danger he had dodged but greatly admired my older brother's taekwondo-trained reflexes. Later, Richard and I busied ourselves sweeping up the detritus from the cabinets. "It's safety glass," he said, noting that the glass had broken into corn kernel-sized chunks rather than slivers and splinters. I thought "safety glass" meant safe glass, so I plunged - I don't know why I didn't test it first with some gingerly touching, but that's just how I did things, I guess - I plunged my hand into a bag we'd filled with pieces of glass, and pulled it out etched with itchy filamentary cuts. Nobody supervised this; Dad had yet to send word or show up from work, because the phone lines were dead and the bridges were closed and traffic was standstill on the highways, and Mom had her hands full with worry.

Public schools refreshed their earthquake curricula after the quake. How to horde water, flashlights, canned food; how to duck and cover; how to cower in a doorframe. I sat through the instruction thinking, "Why couldn't you have taught me this earlier??" Some strange Pavlovian conditioning made me associate the sound of the school bell with earthquakes: it rang once for recess, and twice for an earthquake drill, of which there were plenty in the days following the quake, but soon I came to associate the one-ring recess bell with shaking and violence and death, and for months afterward the sound signaling gay childhood playtime would also trigger in me physiological reactions of panic, i.e., elevated pulse, sweating, anxiety. My teacher never seemed to notice my fright at the beginning of every recess. The same thing happened with the rolling closet door in my parents' bedroom: its dry rumble sounded exactly like the rumbling I heard during Loma Prieta, so each time my parents went for a change of clothes, I would lay in bed gripping the sheets, breathing raggedly, waiting for the shaking to start. 1989-1990 was a very emotionally difficult year for me.

In school we learned that the San Francisco Bay Area straddled the San Andreas and its dozens of splinter faults. We were told to expect one major earthquake every 20-30 years. I recall thinking, as a nine year-old, that I loved California but wanted to leave it because earthquakes terrified me; I vowed to return in 2019, after the window for the next Big One closed. As it were, I left California but moved back in 2009, exactly when this big, dark Transylvanian castle of a window opened.

All to explain why as delighted as I am that the San Francisco Giants are one win away from another World Series, I hope to hell they don't make it all the way. I blame everything that happened in 1989 on the Giants reaching the World Series. I was an A's fan. In sum, go Phillies.

bike shorts

2010-10-17T15:40:00.002-07:00

So nice when friends recognize my love of obscenity. O writes:

K and I saw these in Florence, thought it was bike shorts designed for you, but they aren't padded. So we thought a picture would suffice.

claire de lune

2010-10-15T14:49:00.008-07:00

I could not tell if K. was being sarcastic when she told me to help myself to her parents' heirloom tomatoes. She seemed to be embarrassed by how much care they had taken in growing them . . . so was she inviting me to eat, or to share her disdain for the hobbies of old people? I went to the kitchen counter and rooted out the sweetest and least damaged-looking ones while she sat down at a piano in another room and started playing Claire de Lune.

After I had picked over the crop, I stood to the right of the piano, eating tomatoes and turning the pages for her. She was nervous - "I don't ever play for anybody, I just like to play for myself," she said, with some defensiveness - but I watched her slender fingers hesitate and then find purchase, over and over, and I remembered those distant feelings of fondness that I used to feel when watching her, a dozen years ago. When she finished, I played a few bars from a vaudeville song and then a drinking song, but stopped when she said, faintly, "You're pretty good."

Except for the music, the house was dead silent. Her parents were backpacking at Mono Lake. Things in the house were as I remembered them from a dozen years ago, but slightly improved. The central heating had been replaced with a woodstove, though neither were necessary in July. The wallpaper in the bedroom was still a floor-to-ceiling photograph of a nature scene, but the alpine forest from our teenage years had been replaced with a stand of autumnal birch trees. K.'s belongings, once packed into two duffels, were exploded all around the room. Books, clothes, gadgets. Immigration would not yield the visa she needed to get to the job promised to her in London, so she was stuck in Palo Alto.

It was nighttime and past the very large windows of the living room I could see the tattered windsock under the porch light, moving in the summer breeze, and nothing more. There was only a windsock and darkness outside of the house. So the vampire fiction K. favored of late was hard to stomach after sunset, she said. "It's fucking scary."

She told me about spending entire days lying on the ground, reading, failing to find the motivation to leave the house. "I just don't see any reason to get out anymore," she said, half laughing. "But if I'm really motivated I can get myself to the coffee shop . . . highly recommend it." I lay on a couch opposite her, not looking at her, pressing her family's collection of tropical seashells into my eye sockets. "Damn," I said, "Damn." What else do you say to somebody so unhappy? What do you say when somebody's inflection makes it impossible to ask, in a quiet voice, what you really want to know: "Why do you still believe sincerity is weakness?" What happened to you? I left by bicycle a few minutes later.