(Un)Urban(e) legend.

Dave: There's a new study that says fellating reduces risk of breast cancer.

May: Oh, yeah? Where's that study from? Maxim?*

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* where it might be from.

A gentle reminder to self.

I know! I've gone MIA. And I don't even have time to blog right now, with two deadlines looming on October 1 and 3, respectively.

Let it just be said, though, that between sweating deadlines, this is what I am focusing on, this is what I am feeling, this is what I am gently reminding myself of over and again:

People. All the people in my life and the ways—littlest to most profound, and how often I don’t know which is which—that we touch each other’s lives. All the ways we are connected.

If I accomplish nothing else in 2009, let me just remember that.

Managing the writer in your workplace.

OMG, this article is HILARIOUS.

Dear God!

Please save Angel's Share!!

A prescription for 9/11.

Today is a different kind of anniversary.

The kind to spend remembering what was lost but being grateful for what was found--for what you still have.

The kind for holding very close the ones you love.

The kind for being kind to strangers--even if all you can give them is a smile.

The kind for a large mug of hot chocolate with as many marshmallows as you want and settling down into the papasan to read Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann. (Just trust me on this last one.)

The One-Year Anniversary.

It's been exactly a year since Dave and I went to the ASPCA, stupidly thinking we were just going to "look" at the dogs. Everyone, including us now, knows you don't windowshop for dogs. Especially not dogs that are as beautiful as Nahe.

It's been a year since we took one look at her and fell in love, ignoring any and all warnings about her behavioral difficulties.

It's been a year since the ASPCA trainer brought her into a room with us, and the third thing she did, after sniffing and running the entire perimeter of the room, was fling herself headlong into both of our laps and lick any inch of our skin she could get her tongue on.

It's been a year since we discovered many a helpful thing like: oh shit, we have a dog, we better go buy somewhere for her to sleep, and something for her to eat, and something for her to eat from--as well as the also-helpful hey-did-you-know-that-dogs-aren't-allowed-in-the-subway-unless-in-a-carrier factoid.

It's been a year since we took her home and set her up and nervously eyed her as she nervously eyed us, and then Dave left for work, and I spent a very sleepless night on the fold-out couch with this dog, who had whined and cried and pawed at the french doors when I tried to lock her away from me for sleep. Every time I shifted on the uncomfortable fold-out couch, she got up and sniffed at me, and stared at me in the dark, and then curled herself closer. Here I was trying to sleep next to a semiwild animal I had just met, not sure that when I closed my eyes, she wouldn't try to eat my face. I was terrified.

It's been a year since she did not eat my face, and she still has not eaten my face. I am glad.

Happy Anniversary, little furry darling. I celebrate you and the multitude of ways you make me remember joy.

"Hit-and-Run Hula" rocks my world.

One of Na Lei Hulu's most recent "attacks" makes me smile so hardcore.



Aiyaaaaaaa! I miss halau. Dave, Surfrunner, our friend Joanna, and I danced with them in the fall of 2006, but then for separate but weirdly near-simultaneous reasons (mostly moving away from SF), we all had to quit. I miss that halau, those people, and Kumu and the aunties and uncles.

WAAAAH!

VCFA, semester 3, packet 1: response.

Hands down my favorite quote from Phillip Graham's response to my first packet:

“Ok, now, you say here that you don’t know how to write a short story, or how to write at all. Well, neither do I. And thank god for that. If I thought I knew how to write a short story or a novel or a dispatch or a memoir … I would be heading towards typing territory more than writing territory. I think you have to not know what you’re doing. Every single story I’ve ever written has been a leap into the unknown, carving stuff out of the air of my imagination, shaping it and forming it. Always different, with no end in sight that I necessarily could predict. I hope never to become considered a master of anything … ‘a master of the form,’ you see these kinds of things in book reviews, and I would rather be the eternal apprentice, apprenticing myself to the exterior world and to my own imagination. Always trying out something I never tried before, always learning, always stumbling, always failing, sometimes triumphing. I think there’s a better way to go about the process of any kind of art. So, it’s okay. I hope you never learn how to write a short story. You’ll be all the better for it."

Research: all work, no play.

With respect and apologies to my hubby, this video is pure eyecandy. YUM.

Also, it was serious research! For my new story "Circle Island"! Serious serious research.

Along with this video of the 2008 Best Male Dancer for something called "Heiva":

The best Hawai'i writing.

Old news to me, but I just wrote this in a letter to my advisor so I thought I'd share with you, too:

Kaui Hart Hemming’s House of Thieves* is not only the most fresh/recent story collection (or novel) set in Hawai‘i but also one of the best (tied only, in my eyes, with the novels Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers and When the Shark Bites). What I like about Kaui's writing is her very dry wit, her unsentimentality, and the intrinsic way she “gets” people. I appreciate her ability to write about Hawai‘i and its unmatchable beauty and perhaps otherworldliness without getting bogged down into an alienating exoticism. The familiar anthropological adage “make the strange familiar and the familiar strange” holds true for writing, as well. Fact of the matter is, people are people wherever you go, and Kaui nails people dead on the head. Kaui also has a novel out, The Descendents, which is being made into a film by Alexander Payne (of Sideways fame) and which actually grew out of one of the stories in House of Thieves.

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* Disclaimer: I knew her at Sarah Lawrence, where I was an undergrad and she was a grad student. But she did not pay me to say this, nor would she need to, as she's gotten plenty of great press on her very own.

My so-called "home office."

As it turns out, it is not quite autumn in New York.

I was ready for the Fall. The temperatures dipping, the breezes, the leaves, all of it.

Damn this summer weather. It has sent me cowering back into the only room with air-conditioning all day.


Please note the sorry makeshift home office: a tv dinner tray with computer plugged into wall adapter on top of dresser heaped with clothing, all the accoutrements of creativity (files, notebooks, pens, crayons [don't judge]) strewn on the unmade bed.

If I am still living in New York come next summer, so help me GOD I will have A/C in the home office. Or at least roman shades to block out all that heat and sun.

Hawaiian History: the unwritten chapters.

If you care for me at all, please, please, please take a moment (ok, an hour and a half, total) to go watch parts 1 and 2 of "The Myth of Ceded Lands," a lecture given by Dr. David Keanu Sai.

I promise you: this lecture will blow your mind and make you question what we know about history as well as what we know about the future. It will likely raise as many questions as it answers, but you won't get to the end of the video without interrogating what you believe about diplomacy, sovereignty, and war crime (also known as "business"), among other things.

To put it plainly, Hawaiian history was not as we know it. Even if you grew up in Hawaii, attended a fancy private school, and enrolled in a class called "Hawaiian History" (like I did). Even if you are actually Native Hawaiian (like Dr. Sai and my husband are) ... and even if you went to the most Hawaiianest high school in the islands, the one set aside only for Hawaiians, to help them prepare collegiately while also upholding the importance of Hawaiian culture/language/history.

How to joke.

"There are three theories of humor. The Superiority Theory--that you laugh when you realize that you're better than someone else. Then there's Freud's Release Theory, which says that jokes are about ventilating forbidden impulses . . . All of the psychic energy you used to repress them gets released . . . in chest-heaving, spasmodic laughter. Then there's the one that makes the most sense to me, the Incongruity Theory, that jokes are about the pure intellectual pleasure we take in yanking together things that seem utterly dissimilar and perceiving similarities. . . . That's the highest form of humor. As jokes get funnier, they rely more on incongruity and less on hostility and superiority or on sex and naughtiness."

--Jim Holt, from "Sunbeams," The Sun, February 2009:48.

The theme of February's "Sunbeams" was humor, but for that matter Jim Holt could have been talking about the act of writing here. The mantra in my head when trying to write is the old anthropological adage: make the strange familiar, and the familiar strange. Rinse & repeat.

Famous baby!

Mister Cooper Daniel Wiley: Only three weeks and a day old, and already too cool for school.

(Also pictured: part of Rachel and part of May.)

Joy of Sake NYC!

OK, so I have a bit of a vested interest, because I am an annual volunteer for the Joy of Sake, but I maintain: The Joy of Sake is a really wonderful event.

If you think of sakes equal raging headaches, you haven't had the right kind of sake.

If you think sakes = awesome but I don't know anything about them so how do I start learning, you should check out their helpful website and consider attending an event near you (Honolulu, San Francisco, New York).

Check out the video of the 2008 New York event. It gives you a good feel for what to expect. A lot of good food and excellent sake in "peak condition," some education, some schmoozing with pretty people, and a heck of a lot of FUN.

The New York event is approaching, on September 24, 2009, and as part of event promotion, the NY festival is offering a weekly chance to win a pair of free tickets via their Facebook and Twitter pages.

So, if you're interested in learning more, please become a fan of Joy of Sake on Facebook and start following their tweets on Twitter!