MEAT, MEAT, MEAT, ALL THE TIME MEAT.

I'm off for a weekend of drunken, meaty carousing in Sparks and Reno, Nevada, with Davey and my dear friends Laurel, Jeremy, Jenjen, and Raquel.

In addition, I get to spend a few extra days with Surfrunner and to have dinner with her and Sidewalk Monkey on Tuesday.

My heart is so full and glad.

I love the entire world right now.

Peace out, New York. See you on the flipside . . . after I've consumed so much meat I'll probably be eating salads for a month.

"Dark Desires after Dusk."

I don't often really "pick" per se the smut novels I read, usually inheriting them from Wife who has a supplier through HarperCollins romance division. I say this in defense of my reading choices, like if I tell you this you won't judge me for choosing to read paranormal smut, despite the fact that I like it.

I really, really like it.

Who knew?! I once was much more of a Sandra Brown/Nora Roberts kind of gal, you know, male, female, cute meet, hate each other, make out, hate each other, have sex, really really hate each other, then get married and have babies.

But it sure turns up the heat when you're Valkyrie-Siren-Human and he's a Demon and all the other creatures are out to either (a) kill you, (b) kill him, or (c) impregnate you with either Good or Evil spawn. There's not as much room for bullshit, because there are things out to kill you. And Cole is good, she spins around the reader this entire alteruniverse such that it's impossible to find your way out until the book is done. Kind of like Charmed, but with explicit sex scenes.

Dark Desires after Dusk was another that kept me up till 4am, after which I had some very interesting dreams, let me just put it that way.

Quotes of the day: Obama's acceptance speech highlights.

QUOTES FROM BARACK OBAMA'S ACCEPTANCE SPEECH:

"America, we are better than the last eight years . . . We love this country too much to let the next four years look like the last eight . . . EIGHT IS ENOUGH!"

"McCain voted with Bush ninety percent of the time. I don't know about you, but I'm not ready to take a ten percent chance on change."

"We need an economy that honors the dignity of work."

"America, now is not the time for small plans."

[On education] "Michelle and I are only here today because we were given a chance. I can't stand for an America that doesn't give all children that chance."

"We cannot meet 21st century challenges with a 20th century bureaucracy."

"We are the party of Roosevelt . . . We are the party of Kennedy . . . don't tell me Democrats won't keep America safe."

"If John McCain wants to have a debate on who had the judgment and temperment to be Commander-in-Chief, that's a debate I'm ready to have."

"This election has never. been. about. me. It's about YOU."

"Change doesn't come from Washington . . . change comes to Washington."

QUOTES FROM MAYUMI, TALKING TO HERSELF WHILE WATCHING SPEECH:

"Sooob. Soooooobbbbbb. Soooobbbbb."

"Please God, please let him be President."

"I'm sorry but how does Michelle Obama not burst into tears?!"

[While Obama spoke of individual and mutual responsibility and specifically how fathers need to be there for their kids] "Sooob. Soooooobbbbbb. Soooobbbbb!!!"

Mushy of heart.

Obama will be introduced in about eight minutes, to give his speech accepting the democratic nomination. Right now, commentators are heatedly discussing what Obama needs to say, how he needs to say it, what the speech must do.

But my eyes are on the crowd: more than 70,000 people waving American flags, singing or swaying to music, eyes bright, looking ecstatic.

Just to hear a man give a speech.

Just to hear this man give this speech.

I feel hope. I feel mushy. I wish my walls were soundproof, because I predict that I'll be sobbing through the next hour or so.

Moloka'i missed connections.

From Craigslist Moloka'i, missed connections listings:

"i saw you. you were drinking a very large bud light while riding in the back of a pick up truck. i like that about you. i yelled at you from the beach and you waved. come over and drink beer in my truck anytime."

Amen, sister.

There is something inexplicable about how sexy the combination of pickup trucks, beer, and local men can be. I am so glad I went away for college. If I had stayed, I'd totally have gotten myself into some rotten trouble. :)

R.I.P., Moloka'i Ranch.*

This makes me sad: Moloka'i Ranch closed.

Now, before anyone gets huffy, I don't miss the luxury ecolodge or the fancy golf course. I miss the Moloka'i Ranch of circa 1997, when the graduating class of Iolani '98 took a trip off-island, rode horses, hiked Kalaupapa or planted kalo, pounded poi, and bonded. I miss being covered with red dirt and being a little sunburned, and you know what, for once not worrying about what my classmates--especially the million boys I had crushes on--were thinking of me. I miss the feeling of Moloka'i, island living at an even slower speed than O'ahu, and the spiritual essence that infused that island, something you can just feel, you know, in the air. Like the difference between being on Kaua'i versus O'ahu, some feeling that magic had so far managed to coexist with modernity--not that Moloka'i was very "modern"--but you know the mana of the place kept pace with the changes happening to it.

Also, call me crazy but the younger paniolo they had working at that time? Oh MAN, two of them were so cute they just about killed me. I was not a jump-up-and-volunteer kind of gal, back in high school, but let me tell you, I nearly grew wings and flew when those two paniolo asked for volunteers to pound poi. If it meant standing close to and talking story with those two, I would have helped a cow give birth, or branded a calf, or, like, dealt with, ahem, "fertilizer."

Now, I'm sure Moloka'i still has its magic, and that the boys of Moloka'i are still dropdead gorgeous. I'm sure I could fly in to Kaunakakai and have a grand time of it. But sometimes you miss the exact thing you knew, a particular memory. And right now, I'm missing that trip. I'm maybe even missing that class. This year is our ten-year reunion and no one seems to be planning it. What rumors I've heard have involved a dinner at the Headmaster's house (because his son was in our class). I'm pretty sure I'll have to miss it, airfare prices being what they are back to Honolulu. And, anyway, it's a bit hard to ramp up the desire to spend hundreds of dollars (probably over a thousand for both D. and I) to fly home to chill at someone's house . . . even if it is the Headmaster's house and therefore much nicer than most other someone's houses.

I kind of cannot believe the person I am, that in this one year, 2008, I've moved back across the country only to learn that I finally am homesick for Hawai'i and that I can finally stomach and put behind me all that high school bullshit and see my former classmates for the grown-ups that we all now are. I can't believe I want to go to this reunion, when I've been fighting the concept since 1998. I can't believe I want to go and most likely won't be able to. I even dreamed of it last night, a hoard of my classmates (I won't name names but I did see particular faces) and I on some big yellow excursion bus, headed . . . somewhere. But the feeling of comraderie, of being the who I am now, confident enough to not take B.S., getting to know the whos they are now . . . it was amazing.

Anyway, R.I.P. Moloka'i Ranch. Maybe you should have stayed the way you were, rather than going all crazy ecotourist on us, but still I mourn you.

---
* Yes, I know I'm about six months behind on this reporting, but the news takes a while to cross an ocean and a continent. Or, actually, it just takes a while for it to occur to me to Google a place I haven't been in, oh, ten years.

Hey, now, I don't need more work!

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): I say, Go ahead, cram your off-the-cuff remarks full of enticing ambiguities, sort-of-secret(-but-not-really) hidden meanings and saucy double-entendres… enough, at least, to preserve their interest in you (whatever that may be) relevant and fresh… aiming for one type of hot-and-sticky palpability in the air or another… some vibe that sits dense over everybody's heads, threatening to pour wet showers of storm water down at any instant… but, for at least right now, not just quite yet. You want to give 'em something to hold onto, to ensure their fires will remain burning for you even if/when you must temporarily step away (or fly off on another adventure). The reality, Taurus, is that you're about to face an increase in workload, as duties and responsibilities begin to pile up on your plate. Yet, beautifully, all this happens just as you're hitting a limit to how many more exciting twists-and-turns on this latest certain rollercoaster ride you can actually stomach, before it threatens to consume your entire life. The timing for this shift couldn't be better. You'll soon have practical nitty-gritties to focus on for a while, giving the interpersonal stuff a chance to simmer down. But before you go, of course, throw the interested parties some long-lasting bone: a suggestive wink, a dangling proposition, a provocative glance to leave 'em wondering what's coming next. Make it good.

On the one hand, thank GOD for a break from "the interpersonal stuff," but on the other hand, what the hell is Barry talking about with an "increase in workload"?!

On entitlement versus humility.

K. over at The Indulgence of Self just posted an impassioned entry about one of the differences between McCain and Obama: McCain's sense of entitlement versus Obama's quiet humility. She writes:

I wonder how many times in his life has Sen. Obama experienced racism in America? How many times has it made him feel, if even for a moment, less than?How many times has he felt that America, his home, was not, in fact, his home? But how many times has he blamed it on a life experience that he had little control over? How many times has he claimed that the struggles of being raised by a single mother, being a biracial child in a time where interracial [marriages] were still not common, or that the work it takes to be a successful black man in America, entitle him to be the leader of this country[? . . . ] Well, he hasn't.

Go read the whole thing. She's smart and pretty and spot-on.

Books and babies.

This morning I was writing to an old friend, and as he is a big pidgin buff, I always take care to drag my pidgin down from the attic, dust it off, and attempt to make sure all parts are still working when I write to him. For the most part, I imagine I make him cringe with how rusty I've become, but occasionally I can get into the flow of it again. I was in the midst of explaining that we had moved back to New York and that I had started my MFA, but then I felt I better explain not just where we were but where our hearts were, so I wrote:

But jes to make um more confusing, brah, I like move west again and make baby-baby and book-book*--eh and I guess book-book baby-baby** cuz David-David is half-Filipino--and I like get one house and dog and yard. Like I said, jes for make um more mental.

And then I died laughing, alone, mind you, because sometimes it feels so good to use pidgin and that irreverent Hawaiian racial humor.***

---
* I forget how this joke started, but for some reason this friend and I double a lot of nouns when referring to me. It has something to do with the fact that I have other friends named Jenjen and Jojo and Lala.
** Book-book is pidgin for Filipino. It literally means "termite," according to one of the kings of local comedy, Frank De Lima.
*** Which may rely on cultural context to be funny.

I am now published . . .

in American Anthropologist. Hey, after seven years with them, this is a triumph!

The von Hottie takes over Tyra update.

Bummer. It appears the Tyra episode in which von Hottie would appear is postponed (for now).

I'll do my best to keep you posted.

I Officially Give Up ... for tonight.

It is 4:25 am and I now have a full outline of my critical paper with about, oh, 20 too many quotes. (Reminder to self in the a.m.: This is supposed to be a THREE-PAGE paper, you eejit.) Seems like a good time to say "fuckitall" and go to sleep.

Sweet dreams, all!

Rusty critical thinking skills.

Oh man oh man oh man, this is as bad as writing those damn graduate school application essays. Maybe worse. According to RG, my advisor, I should explore:

an examination of the use of Pidgin and how it communicates humor without relying on the “it sounds [so] funny it tickles” factor. I think that there is something a little more sophisticated than readers (and sometimes writers) care to admit about the use of dialects, accents, regional speech, etc. And since you are exploring that territory, I want you to take a close look at how Linmark or Yamanaka use it. Why is it funny? How do we Western proper-English readers keep these characters from becoming clowns or fools? How is their complexity established and maintained? I want you to be very conscious about this when you read and write using Pidgin. Otherwise, you will be relying on the funny-sounding things that come out of characters’ mouths. It should not only be funny because it sounds different. But how do these characters display depth? There is something very cultural and working class about speech, but it should be handled delicately, respectfully.

My desk is covered with books, my thick file of articles and research about pidgin/Hawaiian Creole English, and another thick file of my undergrad senior year-long paper, "The Viscosity of Vernacular: The Politics of Employing Endemic Language in Literature." I reread that paper and I think damn I was a genius back then, and now every critical part of my brain had rotted away to make room for proofreaders' marks and the AAA Style Guide.

I do not have high hopes.

Why is this so fucking hard?! I used to write 30-50 page papers a few times a semester in undergraduate, and now I am being felled by a single three-page paper? WTF?!

Kurt Vonnegut's Creative Writing 101.

In some nervous stab at pinpointing fiction markets, I also signed up for the Gotham Writers' Workshop. In the July newsletter, the editors of the newsletter included writing tips from Kurt Vonnegut.

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. 9. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

In closing Vonnegut adds, "The greatest American short story writer of my generation was Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964). She broke practically every one of my rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that."

See tips from other masters.

AMAZING.

In doing some research on contests and markets for fiction, I came across the following ad:

PERMUTED PRESS
http://www.permutedpress.com/novels.php
Permuted Press is a small publishing company with a strong presence in the apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic, and zombie fiction market(s). Seeking completed novels between 70,000 and 110,000 words (85,000-90,000 words is ideal). We are not considering novellas or short story collections at this time.

Dude. Wow. I mean, just wow. Who even knew there was a "zombie fiction market"?! Talk about a niche! Secretly, doesn't that totally make you want to write about zombies?

And a last quote from Anne Lamott, in polishing off her book.

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, by Anne Lamott, was an enjoyable and quick read as far as craft books go. However, here is the thing for me. So far, with craft books, I've realized that mostly they tell you the things you don’t want to hear, the things you know already but had sort of hoped you could bypass or avoid because by reading said craft book you’d learn The Secret that had been kept from you, which allows scores of other writers to breeze their way through book after book after book. No such luck. Anne Lamott reminds writers not to fear the shitty first draft and that it is only by thoroughly knowing your characters that you can figure out any of the rest of it: plot, dialogue, structure, POV, setting, etc. That you must write your way through a draft, then rewrite and reach the end again, only to realize you’ve mistaken one character all along and so now must go back and rewrite again. And again, ad nauseam. And she reminds us of all of this gently and with wonderfully dark humor.

There were a few pieces of advice that stuck with me, though:

* When you get overwhelmed by your project, simplify. Write what you could see through a one-inch picture frame. Take it frame by frame, bird by bird, and eventually you'll reach an end to it.

* Following up on this photography metaphor, write as if you inspired by a Poloroid picture you'd just taken. Write what you can see, then see how the picture (and your writing) changes as the picture continues to develop.

* When having plot trouble, go back to your characters. When having terminal plot trouble, try Alice Adams’s ABDCE: Action, Background, Development, Climax, and Ending. (I'm not terribly convinced this would work for me, but hey if I get desperate I may try.)

* Each day try rereading the material you wrote in your last writing session, then move forward from there.

* When you lack a body of information, contact people that do have it. Ask them to tell you everything they know. They'll love it.

* Shoot for, at least, 300 words a day.

And, lastly, one final quote:

“You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander. We build this place with the sand of memories; these castles are our memories and inventiveness made tangible. So part of us believes that when the tide starts coming in, we won’t really have lost anything, because actually only a symbol of it was there in the sand. Another part of us thinks we’ll figure out a way to divert the ocean. This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won’t wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be” (231).

--Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. New York: Anchor Books, 1994.

Quote of the day: Best writing advice . . . ever.

Anne Lamott, on libel:

"If you disguise this person carefully so that he cannot be recognized by the physical or professional facts of his life, you can use him in your work. And the best advice I can give you is to give him a teenie little penis so he will be less likely to come forth” (227).

--Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. New York: Anchor Books, 1994.

Quote of the day: From Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott.

"Writing is about hypnotizing yourself into believing yourself, getting some work done, then unhypnotizing yourself and going over the material coldly."

--Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. New York: Anchor Books, 1994.

Simplification, continued.

I have cancelled my Friendster account. MySpace probably soon to follow. I can only handle so many ways to waste my own time.

Casting about on the 'net: Army, Marines, R&R, PTSD.

HELP! HELP! HELP! I'm totally flailing here. I have to mail my second VCFA packet by Wednesday of next week, and I'm really trying to get through a full first draft of a new story but have been utterly marooned by my own lack of knowledge about the armed forces.

* What is the real difference between the Army and Marines?
* How exactly does R&R work? How long is it? Is your whole unit sent home for R&R at the same time?
* How are people grouped into units in the Army? Is it geographical? Would there be a bunch of Hawai'i residents together in a unit? Or are people put into units, regardless of geographical affiliation?
* How are travel plans handled for R&R? Does the Army pay for and book your tickets?
* Would you have to be debriefed if you were just on R&R? If so, what happens in debriefing?
* What are some names for the kinds of vehicles you would drive in Iraq? Can you say humvee? Can you say armored car?
* Is it realistic to have a member of the Army fly home on a commercial flight? How about a Marine?
* How would one fly home from Iraq? What is a typical flight path?
* Could you be on R&R and then get honorably discharged if your head was fucked up?
* What are the rules about coming home on R&R? Would you be wearing a uniform? Is that a choice that the soldier makes? Do you have certain conduct rules, or only if in uniform? If so, what are they--especially in regard to drinking alcoholic beverages?

Please comment or gmail me! I need this help ASAP!

For the 3% who know Laura von Holt and haven't heard ...

She's going to be on the Tyra Banks show.* Miss Banks better watch herself. If anyone could out-Tyra Tyra, it's Laura von Holt. Seriously.

Evidently, the episode concept was that she (and some other women, who cares) have to stand on pedestals in Central Park in their bathing suits, and if that doesn't have von Hottie written all over it, I don't know what does. It probably has something to do with self-esteem and a healthy body image, and Tyra is so going to say, "Girl, you're fierce!" and then toss that mane of hair. I can see it now.

Although, to be precise, I'm wondering if Laura will be going as Laura or as von Hottie? Hmmm. Wife?

---
* Particulars of when the show is airing to follow . . .

also? christ, I'm a bloodthirsty mo-fo sometimes!

This is what I commented back to her, after she blogged about being late to meet me:

hahahahahaha. you are so lucky this conversation took place via text, because if you had said you were still in manhattan to me on the phone i think i might have bitten your head off and enjoyed chewing on it and swallowing. Love you, my tasty. I mean pretty. I meant my pretty!

I suspect that's a kind of fucked-up comment, except I think it's funny.

Oh well.

It's true: Wife was late to meet me. Again.

I had threatened to not open the door and send her back to Manhattan if she was late . . . but you know, sometimes I'm a softie, ultimately and especially when it comes to her, so I let her in, anyway. :)

But what's also true? We totally had a successful writing date, wherein for at least an hour or maybe two we were able to ignore how much we always want to talk to each other and get some writing done. IT CAN BE DONE!

I love writing dates. They turn a solitary act into something almost social, make a painful process a little less painful because of the empathy sitting in the room with you, and apply the necessary peer pressure from the rapid sounds of someone else's keys aclacking to inspire Great Works of Art--or at least some crap that you can wade through later and find something to work with.

"Happy" (?!) statehood, Hawaii: 49 years.*

This breaks my heart a little.

I'm not informed enough about Hawaiian sovereignty to truly argue for or against it. I completely understand that Hawai'i's statehood was not something to celebrate at the time that it happened, I know that Native Hawaiians in particular have been oppressed in countless ways by the arrival of "Western" ways and governing, but I have to admit that I can't really imagine what a real, working alternative to statehood would look like.

In theory I'm in favor of sovereignty but I hope that doesn't mean kicking me--and those I love, including some who may have been part of that colonial history--out of Hawai'i.

But this video, from a statehood celebration** a little over year ago that went awry, just makes me sad. It shows the whole complicated problem . . . and the high-running emotions on either side, both of which I think can be empathized with.***

In 2009, we will come to the 50th "anniversary" of the annexation of a native people, made only more poignant and painful as America continues its imperial destiny in Iraq.

It may be history but none of it is behind us.****

---

* Math is not my strong suit, so if I counted wrong please let me know ASAP!

** Hawai'i became a state of the union, for better or worse, on August 21, 1959.

*** Here is a link with some of the various arguments. (Conklin and Apio seem to be extremes at either end of the possible spectrum on the issue, and so rabidly opinionated that even when they might have a valid point, it's hard to hear them at all, because they so anger you with their words.)

**** Regarding the significance of the four flags pictured . . . in the top picture, the U.S. flag flies dominantly over the Hawaii state flag, pretty much picturing our current status quo. In the bottom picture, the Hawaii state flag flies upside down, indicating distress, over a three-color flag that is reputed to be a flag--the flag?--of an indigenous Hawaiian nation that lives in the state, camping long-term on beaches to get back to the 'aina (land), protesting at statehood celebrations, and motioning through legal strategies and rallies for sovereignty. But I'm not 100% sure of the origin of the indigenous flag because I learned all this information from an old Hawaiian homeless ("houseless" ?) guy when I worked a kiosk at Ala Moana Mall back when I was a gullible teenager. I think it's pretty clear that the second (bottom) picture depicts an ideal Tomorrow for Hawaiian sovereignty activists.

On wifely solidarity.

Laura: Gave up. Fired myself from playwrighting.

Mayumi: I think I'm having the exact same writing day as you are.

Mayumi: I feel like firing myself, too.

Mayumi: Except that now I have a shitload of graduate loans already taken out, so I think I might as well keep going, since the debt has been accrued.

(Hopefully our writing date tomorrow will go better than both of our todays.)

Just . . . yes.

"The Wild Rose" by Wendell Berry:

Sometimes hidden from me
in daily custom and in trust,
so that I live by you unaware
as by the beating of my heart,

Suddenly you flare in my sight,
a wild rose blooming at the edge
of thicket, grace and light
where yesterday was only shade,

and once again I am blessed, choosing
again what I chose before.

---
* From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, by Anne Lamott, New York: Anchor Books, 1994.

Well, that's one way to do it.

Hahahahaha, I get a huge kick out of how my wife has chosen to up her blog page views.

Metaphor, shmetaphor.

I was Googling Crayola markers for something I was writing, something involving cultural and racial heritage in Hawai'i. I was going to play around with some metaphor involving the different color families of markers, but this just took the wind straight out of my sails.

Back to the--ahem--drawing board.

My thoughts on VCFA packet no. 1.

[excerpted from my August 5, 2008 response to my VCFA advisor's letter]

The crux of your response to my writing hinges on the choices I made while writing “race/culture” in my stories. As you put it: “All that to say that with writers everything is political, and personal when it comes to the specific communities. There are beyond your control, but you cannot ignore them either.” First, I want to thank you for being so forthcoming about your concerns. It took me a few reads of your letter to be able to digest fully what you were saying without having a gut-instinct defense of self kick in. But these ideas are percolating on high in my brain now, and even if I don’t agree with you uncomplicatedly, I thank you deeply for making me think about these things.

Regarding “A Manual for Landing”:
When I wrote Charlene, I was thinking of several things: my own upbringing in Hawai‘i, Caucasian friends of mine in Hawai‘i, and The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. While to a certain extent there are many similarities with communities of people of color the world over, I’m sure you’ll agree there is something to context. And in my experience of growing up in Hawai‘i, while it is true that people of color were—and especially in the case of Native Hawaiians and some Asian Americans still are—colonialized, oppressed, disadvantaged, et cetera, they’re still very much the majority. Yet for all our shared oppression, there is a lot of small-minded thinking about “in” versus “out” groups at home. For my mother, who moved from CA to HI when she was in her early thirties, this translates as the fact that there are some that don’t see her as “local,” despite the fact she’s lived there half her life, worked deep in the community on many levels, and looks like and talks like them. For me, it translates to the fact that I was excluded for not being “born and raised.” Other times, the exclusion is simply based on race: in undergraduate I was obsessed with Hawaiian mythology and used its paradigms in my fiction writing, but when I showed my work to [a Native Hawaiian friend . . .], she criticized me as not having “the right” to do this research. Or consider some of the “pure-blood” Japanese and Chinese parents (of my friends) who still—third generation from the motherland—won’t allow their children to date outside their race. These are just little examples. I’m very interested in the fact that we all feel this need to label each other as “in” in some instances and “out” in others, including and excluding ad nauseam, when the fact is we’re all stuck on the same small-ass little rock in the middle of the ocean. Not to be naïve, but Christ can’t we all get along? Perhaps it operates differently at the adult level (I have never lived as an adult at home) but, in childhood, sheer numbers = power, difference is marked, and we ape the things our parents say and believe.

Being Caucasian—haole—in Hawai‘i [may be] the most heightened difference of all. Knowing a few Caucasian girls who had weathered this difference, I was very interested in exploring these notions of inclusion and exclusion that we all go through . . . but through the eyes of a character who in most parts of the world would be in the most innest group of all but who is living in a place where finally her privilege is not at all a privilege to have. The description that later became the customs forms was directly inspired from the fairly rapturous prose Morrison writes from the POV of Pecola about being black and wanting to be white. And if Pecola can wax poetic about wanting to be white, can’t Charlene wax poetic about wanting not to be? I actually think it’s a more interesting choice to embrace the POV of a character who would be assumed to embrace her privileged whiteness but instead deeply resents it.

. . . Charlene is triply outed: by her skin color, by her privilege, and by the fact that she’s a teenage girl. And enough has been made of that latter item in mainstream literature and film to be universally understood—so, there, I disagree that Charlene is “a typical American girl without anything heavy-duty to worry about, and her biggest drama is fitting in.” Sometimes “fitting in” is drama enough. But, then again, whiteness is still a skin color, so Charlene also has to deal with “all the politics of race, colonialism, language, class”—but from the flipside of the situation. And consider, too, this: that we don’t even identify white people by their specific and rich cultures and races, we lump them together as a skin color. They are Caucasians, white people, haoles, whereas the rest of us get to be Japanese American, or Mexican American, or Hawaiian-Chinese-Filipino-American. I mean, how pissed have we all been when referred to as yellow people or brown people? ‘Course this point is complicated by the fact that a lot of Caucasians refer to themselves as white people—whether in apology for not being not white or in apathy because they don’t know [about their specific heritages], and we as Americans don’t as much value, the specific heritages that make up whiteness. I don’t fully understand what I think about this issue, but suffice to say I’ll keep thinking.

That said, I absolutely agree with you that Charlene can be made more interesting. Sometimes when I write in the first person, I have a hard time making my characters active agents rather than passive observers. It has a lot to do with the “I” of the character getting stuck to the “I” of the writer—I was quite a passive person growing up, owing a lot to the kinds of inclusion and exclusion games that were played. But you’re right to note this. Charlene needs to either embrace her outsiderness or try harder to fit in. She has choices: she can keep her own identity as being from NY but befriend locals; she can try to lose her identity and fit in; or she can embrace her outsiderness and befriend other outsiders. How does she feel about Charlie’s ability to fit in, is this almost an insult to her? Also, why does Kalei befriend Charlene? Just because Kalei is dating Charlie? Is this suspect—a way to get in with the brother? More can be done with the tension of who Charlene was in NY versus who she is in HI: “I’m not the person they think I am. I was cool in New York,” etc. Obviously, lots more could be done, period.

Regarding “Drunk on a Holy Day”:
No argument here. I agree wholeheartedly that the significance of the professor’s race/culture/religion needs to be more fully dealt with, especially since I make such a point of highlighting it at the start of the story. I should have flagged this in my cover letter to you. My rough idea going forward is that Kamal is experiencing a loss of faith, both in the literal and figurative sense, both from his throwing away his cultural upbringing and from losing the child. In the story we’re at this place where this couple has experienced a traumatic loss together, but instead of facing it together, it has driven them apart. Kamal comes from a strict culture/religion of rules and constricted behavior, and he is represented by prose. Sylvie in Kamal’s life is a movement away from structure, and she is represented by poetry. But with the loss of the child, they are forced to contemplate what this means to them each, individually, and they separated by their difference. Alma comes in as a bridge between them. Alma is familiar to Kamal, whether he admires her mind/way of thinking, of because she reminds him of his wife; there is some kind of duality between being attracted to her but also seeing her as he would a product of he and his wife: a child. How does structure (or lack thereof) help/influence/define the relationship between Kamal and Sylvie? What revelations does Kamal come to as he assists/guides Alma’s scholastic research into prose poetry? How can the definition of prose poetry parallel the relationship between the three characters? I have a million questions regarding this story, still.
I agree that Sylvie doesn’t need to be white. I just want her to represent Kamal’s reason for leaving behind his religious upbringing, but it’s more about her personality than her race, so I definitely hear you on that point. And I also agree that Alma needs to be raced as well, because race/culture/religion seem to be important to this story. You’ve given me a lot to think about regarding Kamal’s identity as well—perhaps when I’m done with this story, the Muslim vein of the story will have been edited out, but right now I’m going to try running with it.

Regarding writing as a writer of color:
I am a writer of color, but being Japanese–American Indian–Scottish–English–German I think I’m also writing from “mutt culture” (a joke!), a space of being a person of all kinds of colors, including white. In the context of Hawai‘i, my “generation,” and my situation, I wonder if race in terms of colonial history has salience in the same ways it did for earlier generations. We all come from a culture that experienced a history, but are we to carry around issues that we didn’t actually experience ourselves? Is my mom to both apologize for the atrocities the Japanese army committed to her Filipino and Korean friends and suffer PTSD regarding her parents’ WWII internment? Am I to carry around all of that, in addition to being part Native American and three kinds of Caucasian? (I mean, if so, there’s a war of worlds within and certainly plenty to write about!) But perhaps “race” doesn’t operate in the same way for me. Perhaps I identify more with “hapa culture,” being of several races, or with “local culture,” being of a certain place—Hawai‘i—no matter what race(s).

That said, while I certainly don’t feel “limited” in writing from the POV of being Japanese–American Indian–Scottish–English–German, I am endlessly curious about a range of POVs. I’ll definitely pick up Nam Le’s The Boat ASAP and let you know what I think in my next packet cover letter. I understand and appreciate, though, your opinion that I need to do more with the racial and cultural elements in my stories. I thank you, really, for not pussy-footing around and being very straightforward with me. You are pushing me and asking the hard questions, which will only serve to improve my writing. And, I think it must be said, despite four years of workshops at Sarah Lawrence—including two semesters with professors who were Latin American and African American—no one has pushed me to think about the politics of what I choose to write, from what POV, in consideration of who I am. Important things, indeed.

What monday tasted like.

I may be one of the last people in all of New York to say it, but the Shake Shack is the shit. In a good way. MMmmm for thick strawberry shakes, a perfect-sized Shack burger, the meat all fally aparty and cheesy, and some old-school crinkle fries.

The Dave concensus:

* better than Five Guys? Yes . . . (although you can personalize your burger more @ Five Guys and they have some MEANGOOD fries there.)

* better than In and Out? No way.

Postcards from my wife.

My wife is one of the only people who ever sends me postcards. (With the exception of maybe Khaliah, who sent me one when she was abroad in Asia, doing her admissions thang.) Wife has sent me postcards from the Grand Canyon and more than once from Hawai'i.

This one (from Wife) is pretty great, though:

Below, the postcard reads: "It's true. You are! I'm excited for SF sandwiches and your sexiness. I hope you wear an apron. Maybe I'll get one too and we can wear them while we write. Love, wifey."

I let her know that I own enough aprons for the both of us, so come Thursday we'll be found at my house wearing aprons, eating these sandwiches, gossiping, and godhelpus hopefully actually writing on our writing date.

The only thing inaccurate about the otherwise lovely postcard is that it doesn't note that I'm also the ONLY Wife Laura von Holt will ever have. The ONLY one. So, the rest of you ladies can just give up and go home, hear me Khaliah? (Be afraid!)

Hi, my name is Homesick, redux.

I dreamed I was visiting home, I was in Hawai'i. I was camping on the north shore of O’ahu, somewhere near Waimea, inland aways, and I was with a large group of people I loved. At one point, two people from HYOC (my childhood choir), Auntie Diane and Mia, and I decided to go kayaking. We were barefoot, carrying a kayak across dirt carpeted with ironwood pine needles and cones, which eventually turned into sand. The sand felt good between my toes. For some reason, I was the only one with a paddle, and I was seated backwards, looking from whence we had come, whereas the other two were paddling with just their arms and they were looking forward—“facing future,” as Bruddah Iz once put it. Still we flew down the Waimea River, from the mauka back out to the makai, from the calm face of a slow-moving river out to the high motion of the sea. And it required my paddle and their two hands, and I could feel my muscles dusting themselves off and eagerly springing to use. It felt wonderful to use my body in such a physical way, so unlike the ways the body lives in a city, mostly walking, perhaps occasionally running to make a train, once in a while hefting a large package or suitcase but otherwise sort of lying in wait—ready but still, looking for a chance of real living. Finally, we stopped on a beach and hauled the kayak ashore. We dropped the pareus we had been wearing over our suits onto the sand and ran into the ocean. It was cold but it didn’t stop us. The cold and the freshness embraced us. The salt healed the skin and the soul. For some reason, Auntie Diane and I began discussing Mia to Mia, telling her what a wonderful person she was. This discussion went on for a good five minutes, Mia blushing rather furiously but us not stopping, not able to stop until we had listed every single way her person meant something to us. After that exchange, we picked our kayak back up and started making our way back, all three of us facing forward this time, all three of us still paddling.

In my dream, this day, this sequence of events, was an epiphany for me. I decided to move home with David. I decided to move home, buy a house, buy a kayak, live near the sea, live more simply, feel sand between my toes every day, feel my muscles strain from living life fully every day, feel the salt of the ocean on my skin every day, be near those people that loved each other so well every day and leave the rest, the ones caught up with the games of inning and outing people. I decided to have babies and be with our parents and make memories and take pictures and have potlucks and notice sunrises and sunsets and be where the air itself is in bloom. With that resolve, I paddled inward until I woke up.

I amaze myself.

Okay, there was a lot of whining and pity partying when last I wrote. Sorry about all that.

Today I come with good tidings. It is Friday, or actually 4:34AM Saturday, and I have met another deadline. That's right, another 10 pages written this week. That means I have twenty new pages of a brand new story toward my deadline of thirty new pages by August 30. Friends, I am actually on track here. And I think--I hope--I'm lacing in enough racially charged scenes/themes/"tropes" to show my advisor that I am trying to learn from his advice to do more with race in my stories.

Actually read a great story--Nam Le's story "Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice" (from The Boat)--about that today, about the somewhat artificial endeavor of sitting down at your computer to write an "ethnic story."

But, hey, I don't know, maybe Rigoberto is right: maybe a writer of color--any color!--can't write without being political. Maybe the act of writing is a political act, no matter what, so if you're going to be wearing your politics on your sleeve, you better damn well know what you think and believe.

Maybe.

I don't know.

I'm just a fledgling young writer here.

If you figure it out first, will you let me know?

I've only finished reading the first two stories of The Boat, but already it is love. Le is absolutely the kind of writer I want to be. Someone versatile, someone not pigeonholed. I mean, I don't want to see writing as a motherfull, fatherless, Japanese-Scottish-English-German-American Indian woman raised in Hawai'i as a limitation . . . certainly there are enough layers to that identity to write about it for a whole lifetime! But, at the same time, if I want to write about something else, about races I am not, and places I've never been, and experiences I've never had, I want to give myself the freedom to do so.

In "Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice," Le writes of a friend who explains why he likes Le's writing, saying, "You could totally exploit the Vietnamese thing. But instead, you choose to write about lesbian vampires and Colombian assassins, and Hiroshima orphans--and New York painters with hemorrhoids" (p. 10).

That's it exactly. If a story idea pops in my head to be written from the POV of a lesbian vampire, I am so going to just go for it, you know, rather than worrying that it doesn't fit into some person's idea of what my ouevre should be.

'Kay, wait, that's worth at least one sob.

SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB.

I miss California. I miss the Ferry Building Farmer's Market. I miss Autumn Flames and Emerald Beauts. I miss the SF lox sandwich, served by the bay, as you stroll, the salt air wisping by. I miss Bluebottle Coffee Company's Louisiana-style iced mud-like coffee; and while I know that doesn't sound delicious, it totally is, so much so that I would wait sometimes 20 minutes for a damn cup of coffee I'd finish drinking in another five minutes. I miss doing dim sum at Koi Palace with Jenjen, my always and ever guide through the intricacies of Chinese cuisine, who knows what things to order that I will (a) devour but (b) not be grossed out by. Sweet! I miss mah jongg and dinners homecooked by other people, LOL. I miss the perfect weather, wine country, Woodhouse Chocolates, weekend getaways, and having a car. I miss Costco, and their hot dogs (!!), and BevMo and Mollie Stone's and Burlingame Library. I miss Primrose Street and our apartment and the SF Bay Trail and actually riding our bikes, rather than letting them accumulate dust as sculptures/square footage hogs. I miss being able to afford a gym membership and having one in close enough proximity to use it often, and feeling while not, you know, the most skinny in my life, feeling strong and growing stronger (the other day, I carried two boxes with some paper in it to the Post Office, and I swear to you, this is how weak I am now, I've been aching all day.) Whine! Whine!

I know, I know . . . shutup already. I know there is a lot to love about New York city, and about Brooklyn, but sometimes? Whine, whine, pine, pine, sorry but that's how I feel. I want to move cross-country--again--and buy a house in wine country with real fruit-producing trees in the backyard. I want to write fiction, and cook elaborate meals, and make babies, and play music, and breathe country air.

Here are the only SF downers I could come up with:

1. Dave's career would suffer. As in he might not have one, SFO constantly downsizing being the reason we moved from SF to NY in the first place.

2. They have more earthquakes. And, in particular, Dave tells me that with the way the tectonic plates have been shifting over in that region, he's just waiting for a big earthquake to happen. He said they've already had pretty big earthquakes recently in Japan and Los Angeles and that a biggie is going to hit somewhere over there and soon.

3. I'd pay more to fly back to Vermont in December.

4. I'd--again--have to try to form a writing community around me.


GOD. I AM SO LAME. AND CONTRARY. AND HOMESICK, NO MATTER WHERE I MOVE. I SUCK! If the grass is always greener somewhere else, is it actually true that I see the grass as always brown? Hmm.

The SF lox sandwich.

Like Mark Bittman said (reposting from David Latt), it is sooooooooooooooooo good. The original sandwich is San Francisco's own Acme Bakery sourdough, Cap'n Mike's smoked salmon, height of summer heirloom tomato, and red onion, sprinked with lavender salt.

P.S. Wife? This is the sandwich I'm making for our writing date next week. :) Yum-yummm.

My horoscope sounds like a writing lecture.

TAURUS: By the time Cal was seven years old, he was lit up with a desire to know how things work. Sometimes that caused problems. When he dismantled the toaster to examine its innards, for instance, his parents reprimanded him. In a working-class family of 12 kids, losing a valued appliance caused a financial crunch. But Cal kept taking things apart to understand them better. In time his research led him to develop a skill for putting things back together again, often in better shape than they were before he got a hold of them. As an adult, Cal creates interactive robots that perform in shows all over the world; he's a master builder. I hope you'll try a telescoped version of his story in the coming week, Taurus: disassembling stuff in order to ultimately make it work even better.

(With thanks to Free Will Astrology)

oh and p.s.?

You totally learn more about persons and characters in how they have sex than how they fix waffles.

Turbulent Sea, indeed!

So, one result of the VCFA residency was that, with my semester advisor, I was began a Proposed Reading List for The Semester Ahead. It is chock full of high-brow Literature, with a capital L, by which I mean "literary fiction" and "craft books," you understand. And, don't get me wrong, I am excited by them and thrilled to have my literary horizons expanded and my craft honed.

But everyone deserves a little brain candy.

I'm not even going to front. I totally loved Turbulent Sea. It was trashy and steamy and it kept me up till 4am and I totally loved it. It struck the perfect balance of detailed oofing, intrigue, murder, violence, bondage, clothes ripping, rock stars, Russians, undercover ops, and paranormal activity.

Really, all six of the Drake Sisters' books have been fantastic, with perhaps the notable exception being that Magic in the Wind, the first book in the series, which concerns oldest sister Sarah falling for Damon Wilder. It seemed Feehan started the series with Sarah and used this very slight book to introduce readers to the whole family, but frankly Sarah and Damon were not even fractionally as compelling as the other six sisters and their mens. I love how predictable romance novels, in general, and the Drake Sisters books, in particular, are. I realize that is usually not a compliment to a writer: to have written a predictable plot. However, hello, it is romance-smut, so it sort of goes without saying that plot is formulaic. By halfway through the series, perhaps even earlier, the reader knows quite well who each of the sisters is going to end up with: whichever man irks and irritates her the most. Eventually, the two will stop dueling and start oofing wildly and inappropriately, fall madly in love, break each other's hearts with some stupid miscommunication, sort it out, oof some more, then one or the other will announce to the whole family that they are getting married, and usually said Drake Bride is already preggers too.

But Turbulent Sea was especially awesome because . . . well, damn, did Feehan write a sexy motherfucker in Ilya Prakenskii.

Less so in this music video book trailer (what the hell is that, anyway! I have never heard of that before in my life). I definitely pictured Joley and Ilya to look more like the hot pink cover of the book: her all tiny, blonde, and powerful; him all muscles and dark good looks, like a more chiseled and Russian Olivier Martinez, definitely circa Unfaithful (2002).

Recently I read Overleaf Hong Kong, a book of short stories and essays by Xu Xi, one of my workshop leaders over the summer at VCFA. I enjoyed the book and liked the conceit of combining one's writing with one's essays about (among other things) the process of writing. In one of her essays, Xu Xi opines that "we write of things sexual because of what they tell of humanity. Yet language that is blatantly sexual quickly falls flat, descending into the predictable and unexciting" (p. 168). She tells of the (successful) eroticism of Nabokov, writing "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul," and she explains that "these opening lines are erotic because they do disclose, but with an underlying promise of something half concealed" (p. 168).

I see her point. Sometimes the sexual act on the page can seem formulaic, staid, boring, and definitely predictable. I mean, pretty much once the clothes ripping ensues you know that eventually both people are going to cross the finish line. Eventually. (Unless it's not a smut novel, and it's actually Literary Fiction and then any amount of disfunction between start and finish line can be imagined.) Sometimes you're not in the mood (ha), or you're in the hands of a writer who cannot write good sex, or maybe you're on the subway and just realized how embarassing it is that you're reading a book called Turbulent Sea with a busty blonde on the cover and that the words "STROKED," "BREAST," and "HIS MANHOOD" seem to be jumping off the pages of their own accord and panhandling your fellow subway riders. In those times, you might skip past the sex and assume you can figure out what happened.

But as a writer who does write some detailed sex scenes in stories, I have to speak in defense of sex, smut, and the American way. To me skipping over sex is like skipping over an important fact of life--yes, sometimes smutty, sometimes messy, sometimes unpleasant, and definitely complicated, always. But to gloss over it with euphemism ("they made love. she felt like time stopped. there was no other man in all of eternity but he.") or with some carefully placed white space indicating a lapse in time--going, for example, from two people laying down and turning out the light to the next morning when they're fixing post-coital waffles--well, to me, that's just dishonest. You learn a lot about a character--or for that matter, the people in your life--about the way they have sex in their lives: the whos, whats, wheres, whens, whys, and hows. You learn even more by understanding what sex means to them, how much they will or will not talk about it, how they talk about it, and more still by how they deal with the intricate complications that enter their lives because of it. As Xu Xi herself points out, we write about sex because it is writing about being human.

Changing one's life takes practice.

Notes on becoming a morning person:

1. The three-alarm charm works every time: set an alarm for an hour before you HAVE TO be awake; another 1/2 hour before; and the third 15 minutes before you do. Thus, when the first alarm goes off, wake in a panic, look at the time, and snuggle back happily into bed for a half-hour. When the second alarm goes off, panic, look at the time, and realize you still have 15 minutes to lay there but you probably shouldn't fall back asleep. Then do fall back asleep. When the third alarm goes off, pout and groan and continue to lie there, forcing your eyes open until the time you HAVE TO be awake and then roll out of bed.

2. Eat three meals a day. Because otherwise you'll starve, with those long stretches of being conscious ahead of you.

3. It's okay if one of the meals is a smoothie, as long as it's chockfull of goodness. It is not okay to use vegetables or herbs to do so. You are not V8, you clearly don't do fusion. The rule of cocktails is not the rule of smoothies: mint may make a mojito but has no place in a smoothie.

We'd totally fit in your size-wise luggage, oh western-bound friend!

May: You know, I heard back from Will. The big news is that he's moving to San Francisco.

Dave: What?!

Dave: Can he take us with him?

May: I know! That's what I said!

. . . time passes . . .

Dave: Everybody moves from New York to San Francisco. You never see it go the other way. That's because it'd be stupid to do it the other way.

May: . . . [points at self, points at him]

Dave: Oh, right.

Blogitecture: minor renovations.

Besides unburdening myself with old blog links, I decided to put up a new header. What do you think? I may need to tinker with font size and placement more but generally I like the picture.



It was from a set Dave and I took while on a walk the other day, along the promenade, down by Pier 1 and the waterfront, into Brooklyn Bridge park(s), and then back home through DUMBO. I took this one because I like the juxtaposition of the wee boat and the looming city, ye olde and the most modern, and above it all what a sky. I had a few I liked even better, many of which incorporated the poem railing on the dock in front of the Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory. It's a nice poem. My love of visual puns had me framing the part of the railing that reads "scallop'd edged waves" with some waves and the part that reads "the tall masts of the Manahatta!" with an exuberant shot crammed with the words, the Brooklyn Bridge, and as much of Manhattan as can fit in a tiny lens. Unfortunately, those shots were too vertical to feature as a banner.

Anyway, that's it. Putting away the hammer and nails for now.

Because I am OCD . . .

I am plagued by a list of things I've meant to blog about but can't seem to get around to. In case I never get around to them, I am going to blog the list, at least, to fulfill some deep neurotic urge to do something with the topics and thus check off some invisible box in the "to do list" in my head.

BLOG LIST OF IDEAS:
* Paul Madonna’s All Over Coffee
* Redefining the canon (of literature that we force students to read)
* 100 things about me
* Old journal entries (?) from like, waaaay back in the day?
* http://www.futureme.org/
* http://www.x365.org/index.html
* http://www.bravenet.com/webtools/guestbook/
* http://books4breakfast.blogspot.com/
* SF TIGER ATTACK + “zoo issue of the sun and webkinz article in scratchpad.
* Poem about death and article in the sun about death of a loved one
* BARBIE! Paper project repost it!!
* Write the letter I would like to have received from my father
* SAKE proselytizer
* RAMEN wars
* Stomp the Yard the movie
* Krissa's lady party
* New Orleans-themed Stan's Place eggs benedict (Atlantic Ave., Brooklyn)
* Yellow the movie
* Murakami exhibit
* Brooklyn flea market
* Desperate Housewives and Cashmere Mafia
* Luke writing date with Laura
* my birthday in the Hamptons
* April in review
* May in review
* SUMMER in review

The funniest thing about this list is that even I don't know what I meant by some of those notes.

Thanks for humoring me. Consider my neuroses soothed.

Covetous, part II.

Kaui over at How To Party with an Infant doesn't think I should be jealous of her life, but I totally still am. So, there, Kaui! You are totally hot, even if you are a "dysfunctional writer" dealing more with your daughter's diarrhea and speculating about Clifford's bits than writing your novel.

Preschool song.

This morning, my mom reminded me about a song from my preschool that I had forgotten about. It seemed appropos to all my musings about life and friendships as of late. Here it is for you:

Don’t walk before me cause I may not follow,
Don’t walk behind me cause I may not lead,
Just walk beside me and be my friend,
We may not pass this way again.

writing goal: met.

I wrote about 4,500 words this week. Roughly fifteen double-spaced MS Word pages. My goal was ten. Dude, and all this with carpal tunnel and two deadlines at work. I rock.

Ok. Qualify. I rocked at writing, I sucked at editing. Which explains why I am still up at 2am. I know, I know, it might go faster if I didn't stop to check Gmail or Facebook every 20 minutes. LOGGING OFF EVERYTHING NOW, promise.

Facebook status.

"Mayumi had brunch today at Gemma* with Hubby, Wife, Luke, and Roman. It was yum, but the portions could have been DOUBLED, in her humble opinion."

That's what I think about that.

And no I will not be blogging about the food further, because, like, I didn't eat an Eggs Benedict. Dave did, though. Maybe I should have my hubby guest-blog in the eggs benedict chronicles?

Some musings about the brunchage:

* As aforementioned, food good but tiny.

* I love me some Wife, Luke, Roman, and duh Husband.

* I love my wife, but seriously if she is late to brunch one more time, it is off with her head. Hear me, hear me, Internet, I am going to start lying to her openly and without guilt about meetup times. But I couldn't even scold her because within five seconds of saying hi, she turned to me and said she brought me a gift. Bitch! Way to steal my steam. haha, J/K, but seriously how can you stay mad at someone who brings you a whole bag of trashy romance novels?

* I feel like I may never successfully eat brunch at Five Points, as we got turned away for a second time today.

* Sometimes it feels like no time has passed and nothing has changed if we can be eating eggs, drinking cocktails, nursing coffees, wearing our Sunday best, and bitching about shitty jobs, tiny apartments, the quest for artistic fulfillment, and boys and girls.

* Only sometimes everything has changed, like I can't drink coffee after noon because it keeps me up at night (old lady), we lost a Delia and gained a Roman, we all like boys now (except Dave, who only likes me), and Wife seems to be having the most "escapades." (Ooooh. I like that euphemism, it makes her sound like a caped crusader off to save the night!)

* Dave was pretty quiet at brunch. But then he often is. It makes me worried, though, that I am both his main social interaction and main support system. As much as it worries me, though, I understand it, a little. Not that there is anything wrong with my friends--AND THERE ISN'T, THEY ARE PERFECT--but they are still my friends, not his. I wish we lived somewhere where he had friends that were his alone, so that he could like and enjoy my friends but not have to like and enjoy my friends. I wish we had more friends that were ours together, that we met and befriended together. Ok, goals, clearly.

* Um. That's it, I think.

---
* This is Gemma.

heart cupcakes?

Then you will love La Petite Pâtissière, the delicious blog of a poet-cum-pastry chef. And she's a pretty darling little tidbit, herself, this lady. I knew her at Sarah Lawrence when I was her largely useless but quite fond Resident Advisor. She was lovely and erudite then and is so now too. That and all those pictures of cupcakes have me literally drooling into my ergonomic keyboard.

Why I'm homesick.

Because THIS is the view from the top of the stairs headed down to my mother's house:

Because this is what the air smells like, flowers in bloom:

Because the sun is brighter there, or warmer:

Because when surrounded by so much beauty, how can you not be grateful for life?:

This is excellent advice

. . . for Taureans on the week of August 7, and heck probably for the rest of y'all, too:

In my vision of your ideal future, you would spend the next two weeks both way out on the frontier and yet close to home. Paradoxical? Yes, but that's the magic and mystery of the unusual opportunity you have before you. Don't just take my word for it, Taurus: Meditate on how you could wander free on the outskirts of everything you know even as you feel as stable and secure as a monarch in your castle. Be on a far-flung adventure even as you draw deeply from the mother lode. Enjoy the pleasures of unexplored territory as you draw on the power of the familiar.

(Thanks, Free Will Astrology.)

Anonimosity.

Yesterday morning, I was drinking some coffee and perusing my daily-read blogs when I came across this entry at The Indulgence of Self, followed by this one, both of which were based on a comment made on this one. Basically, an anonymous commentor* took it upon him- or herself to tear K. a new one, for no readily apparent reason. The post to which the comment replied had nothing to do with this anonymous person, it was merely a teaser about a meme K. would soon be doing.

The sheer viciousness and the unevenness of the situation took me offguard. Without even considering the time difference, I picked up the phone and called K. and we had a lovely time bitching about anonymity on the Internet.

This is what I don't get. K. absolutely will tell you what she thinks about you--and about anything else, really--but that is what I've always appreciated about her. She does not pussyfoot around. You know exactly where you stand with her. She is honest, perhaps sometimes to a fault, but she is really--for lack of a better word--real.

Let's be frank, here. Writers as a general sort can be pretty pretentious, self-involved, and even, you know, somewhat flighty. And I can say this confidently, because (1) I have known many writers and (2) I AM one and have been known to display all of those characteristics at various point, though hopefully never all at the same time.

So, what if K. did call it how she saw it? At least she was doing it openly, with her face and name attached, standing behind her opinion, and allowing for room to be challenged back.

This, then, is my problem with anonymous commentors.

In seven sentences, K.'s commentor called her a drunk, announced she was full of shit, and laid the sarcasm on pretty thick. So, okay, clearly there is an opinion, but there is no one standing behind it.

I had a similar brush with anonymity back in May. I had written a post about an acquaintance of mine who had had a big debut in New York, wherein I was very conflicted about the situation: I begrudged this person none of their success but, rather, wondered why he didn't thank certain people who had assisted his training. A certain anonymous commentor decided to "school" me on certain "facts" of the man in question. When I responded, clarifying my meaning and indicating that I certainly begrudged the man none of his success, I invited the commentor to respond further to me, personally, but to please "have the courage to identify" him- or herself. The commentor took this as me calling him or her a coward, and further accused me of having a double standard for asking him/her to reveal his/her identity but letting another Anonymous stay anonymous. (I hadn't asked the other Anonymous to reveal him/herself because [a] s/he weren't getting into a skirmish with me and [b] I already knew who s/he was.)

At the time I absolutely was not viewing or calling Anonymous a coward, but in retrospect now I would.

I'm sorry, but it is cowardly. If you feel so strongly moved by a certain subject matter (whether happily, angrily, or something in between) that you have to comment, how can you not stand by your strong emotions and words? How can you not want to own what you are feeling? I mean, unless your life or your bodily integrity will somehow be endangered or compromised, I cannot understand the impulse to contribute to a conversation without being willing to stand behind your opinion.

If you aren't willing to sign your name to what you're saying, maybe you shouldn't be saying it.

My own situation was resolved as follows. I responded quickly to the commentor, backing down in a fashion by writing: "Touche, "Anonymous."I have no interest in an Internet war. Those get awfully sticky awfully fast. If you wanted to continue the conversation, I merely wanted to know who I was talking to. I was not calling you a coward. However, in the interests of all honesty, I didn't "call out" the first Anonymous because I knew who it was. I, in fact, had to ask that the person repost their comment because the first draft of it was too harsh on [redacted], and I have no desire to become hate central. M."

And surprise, surprise . . . Anonymous had nothing else to say to me and stayed anonymous.

Because of the fallout, I to this day somewhat regret having posted about it at all, except that I, like K., find it important to be honest about my feelings. Sometimes this involves being honest about those feelings to a fault or being brassily loud about being honest, without having all the information about a situation. I considered erasing the post because I didn't want to deal with more fallout and because this one tiny post was hardly the main content of my blog. But honestly what was so wrong with that first post? I spent over an hour drafting it, trying to make sure it was a careful expression of my feelings on a subject rather than an ad hominem attack on my acquaintance. I tried to make the post pose a question that begged an answer, rather than one that proclaimed my opinion. And I invited comments, because heck I don't have all the information, by any means, and I welcome others who are more knowledgeable to share their stories and information with me.

I don't know if it was the nature of the post (questioning someone successful rather than taking the easy route of praising them) or whether its just the nature of the Internet. Whether anonymous or not, I find that people on the Internet are willing to be not just honest with each other but at times downright vicious. Part of it is the fact that tone is difficult to convey and read via Internet/text/e-mails, a technological advance and communicational breakdown. Part of it is the nature of the quick click-and-send, which makes us hasty with our judgments and actions. And part of it is the missing sense of consequence following a conflict that is due to the anonimity of ALL of the Internet, what with the necessary protection of identity and our clever "screen names" and so forth. We can make rash judgments and then turn off our computers, as if "done" with the situation, not holding ourselves responsible for the repercussions of our actions.

---
* Commentor is not recognized by Merriam-Webster's 11th edition. But commentator connotes something a little different, so commentor it is. Deal, bitches. I'm in the field of fiction. This is what we do. We make stuff up.

feeling not so chatty.

Blah, blah, blah, life hard, feel sad, want to live wherever I am not, whiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinnnnne. For good measure? Want a house, a dog, a baby and don't care if that makes me really suburban, domestic, and predictable.

So. What else can I say that you haven't read here before? :)

My VCFA college advisor confronts me to think about race in my writing. What am I doing with it? Every decision is a political decision. He challenges my views and my decision-making, and while part of me wants to crawl in a hole and hide, the other half wants to meet him head on, because I know I'll emerge a better writer from it.

Likely due to continued writing dates with Krissa--the sound of someone else typing rapidly is a curiously effective form of peer pressure--I actually made my writing goal this week. Went over my projected pages, in fact. Started a brand new story in which I write from the POV of a young Filipino mother, a young Chinese-Hawaiian woman living in San Francisco, and a white man in the Army. Hopefully it will be a step in the right direction with the "race stuff" with Rigoberto.

dude.

I feel like I just bought myself back an extra year of life! (Especially by abstaining from NonSociety + Perez.) Imagine the sheer stretches of time in front of me like sun-drenched fields of daffodils through which I lark and twirl and plunge!

'Tis time: bloggy goodbyes.

Clearly I spend too much time on the computer if I can give myself acute carpal tunnel.

Clearly there are never enough hours in the day, especially if you spend several of them "jogging around Blogland" as I prefer to call the activity, making it sound like some form of strenuous and worthwhile exercize.

Clearly a better use of some of my time would be actual, real jogging.

Clearly it would be good for my mental and physical health if I actually knew if it was day or night and left the house at least once a day.

Clearly if I am at times stressed out by that feeling of drowning in the swirling depths of To Do Lists in my life, I need to rethink and reframe my situation, and that means letting some fluff stuff go in favor of substance.

Clearly if my husband constantly mocks me for my ability to unplug, I must have a problem, because he's, like, usually a pretty nice guy.

Clearly I am having a hard time saying goodbye, and thus keep having to make further justifications for breaking up with the following blogs.

Dear Blog:

We had some good times. There were some days that *you* were what got me out of the bed before noon. But we've both known where this was headed for some time. It was just a fling, it wasn't something serious. I hope you know I'm sincere when I say it isn't you, it's me. I am Officially erasing you from my Favorites List, sorry. Please don't write and lose my number.

Cordially,
May in the Bay

Books for Breakfast
Gawker
Gothamist
MFA Weblog
NonSociety: Julia*
NonSociety: Meghan*
Nonsociety: Mary*
People Reading
Perez Hilton*
Po Bronson
PostSecret
ReBar
Reblogging Julia
Sadie Lou
Shoebox Blog
Six Sentences
We Feel Fine
Writer's Rest
Xiaxue (Everyone's reading it!)

* Oh, I will miss you, ladies. I will. But my heart will go on.

covetous.

Kaui Hart Hemmings over at How to Party with an Infant has the life I am meant to live. Seriously. I mean, she's hot, she's from Hawai'i, she's published two books, she's a young and "cool" mommy, she's moved home to live in Hawai'i, she has a backyard, she throws BBQs, for christssake.

And I can't even hate her because I happen to (1) know her and (2) adore her. Goddammit.

"Dawesome love."

a.k.a. a reality tv show I would actually watch.

ok, ouch.

That may have seemed like a simple cut and paste, but all that italicizing killed me.

I'm off to ice my wrists!

Updated "Librarian."

I'm currently reading:

* Overleaf Hong Kong (Xu Xi)

* Writing Alone and With Others (Pat Schneider)

* The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel (Amy Hempel)

* RE-reading The Bluest Eye (Toni Morrison)

* The New Yorker magazine, The Sun magazine, Hana Hou! magazine, and Real Simple magazine

But I also read and either loved or hated these books and these films.

On the shelf next:

* The Boat (Nam Le)

* all the other books I'm supposed to read for my study with Rigoberto Gonzalez

On my literal bedside shelf of books I long to read:


* Hunger Mountain, Fall 2007 issue

* Atonement (Ian McEwan)

* The End of Mr. Y (Scarlett Thomas)

* In the Unlikely Event of a Water Landing (Christopher Noel)

* The Love Poems of Rumi (ed. by Deepak Chopra)

* Ghostwritten (David Mitchell)

* A Million Little Pieces (James Frey)--I know, late to the game on this one

* How to Become a Famous Writer Before You're Dead (Ariel Gore)

* The Selected Letters of Wallace Stegner (ed. Page Stegner)

Proposed semester reading list.

*The Right to Write (Julia Cameron)
*The Art of Fiction (John Gardner)
The Collected Works of Amy Hempel (Amy Hempel)
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (Haruki Murakami)
I Sailed with Magellan (Stuart Dybek)
Birds of America (Lorrie Moore)
The Evolution of a Sigh (R. Zamora Linmark)
Loose Woman, Woman Hollering Creek (Sandra Cisneros)
A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (Yiyun Li)
The Boat (Nam Le)

Additional books that may become part of study …
*Bird by Bird (Anne Lamott)
*Naming the World and Other Exercizes for the Creative Writer (Bret Anthony Johnston)
The Eye of the Fish (Luis Francia)
Makau (Kathleen Tyau)
The Umbrella Country (Bino Realuyo)
Bone (Faye Myenne Ng)
The Interpreter (Suki Kim)
Miguel Street (V.S. Naipaul)
Troublemaker (Christina Chu)
The Electrical Field (Kerri Sakamoto)
POSSIBLE REVIEW OF Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s early oeuvre: Saturday Night at the Pahala Theater, Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers, Blu’s Hanging, Head’s By Harry (maybe stop there because Father of the Four Passages was really weird).
The House of Breathing (Gayle Jones)
Lust Caution: The Story, the Screenplay, and the Making of the Film (Eileen Chang et al.)
In the Bedroom: Seven Stories by Andre Dubus (Andre Dubus)
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories (Alice Munro)
The Broom of the System (David Foster Wallace)
Feast of Love (Charles Baxter)
Bartelby the Scrivener (Herman Melville)

67 dollars later . . .

I am typing at half speed with double the typos. fuck.

I've invested in wrist braces, muscle balm, over the counter pain drugs, and a keyboard wrist gel thingamajingy.

Still hurts, though. This sucks.

F. U. carpal tunnel !!!!!!!!!!!!

If you feed your belly with editing, and your soul with writing, and your OCD with blogging, it is a bad, bad thing to develop carpal tunnel syndrome.

Oh, sure . . . I'll just "stop typing."

WAAAAAAH. What am I going to do?! It hurts to even type this much.

Any home remedies or suggestions?!