Mayumi, in Hawai'i, without the passport that is Dave.

To be here, you need to belong or not care.

Lilikoi (passionfruit) flower.

This is what you get when you come home. You get to walk down the 63 stairs and see that rampant lilikoi has taken root in the neighbors' yard since the last time you were home. You get to wake up at 5am to this certain bird your mother calls the wind-up bird, and there is not a better way to describe him. You get to lay there while the trades put just enough of a chill on your bare arms to keep you under light blankets. You get to contemplate the day before it's actually begun. You get to imagine living here again--which you can and cannot at all picture. You get to feel the hundreds of ways you have changed too much and not enough. You get to try, and try, and try to belong, like a missing piece trying to jigsaw back into the wrong puzzle. You get to realize that staying away for so long has been about holding yourself apart, about proving to yourself and others that you are bigger, better, tougher, smarter, prettier, more talented than people here let you believe. And then you get to be honest, for where are those "tormentors" now? And who really cares about them? Even they are no longer themselves. Just shades. You have spent all this time being bullied by memory, which has served to protect and cripple you both.

Welcome home.

Beloved Books (including Mary Sutter).

It's funny but sometimes the books you love the most are not the ones that necessarily continue to provoke thought the longest.

For example: Nicole Krauss's A History of Love. Adam Haslett's You Are Not a Stranger Here. Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad. And now, Robin Oliveira's My Name Is Mary Sutter.

These are all books that utterly transported me, that made me feel/live in another place and time, that even allowed me escape from my own life (though perhaps choosing a book that held at its core so much midwivery when depressed about another negative pregnancy test wasn't the wisest). They were books that spun a spell that allowed me to breathe them in, books that I wasn't dissecting to see how they worked as I read.

But they were also books to which my main response having finished reading them was: WOW. The most capitalized, boldfaced, large font WOW you can imagine. But also just WOW. Nothing more coherent than that. Nothing that I could add onto or digress about. Perhaps because they were books I couldn't imagine having written. I deeply admired the authors and envied their accomplishment but also saw their books as a finite experience for me. I read them, I experienced them, I was transported, but now I am back. This is not a detriment; this is not any failure of the book; this does not make me love any of them any less.

Maybe sometimes you learn more from the books that you don't love, the books that don't quite work?

All this is well and good, but I simply cannot let My Name Is Mary Sutter not be spoken about in more depth. Because it was that good, also because I adore Robin Oliveira, who I met via Vermont College of Fine Arts. My first summer there, she was a graduate assistant, and I was lucky enough to be one of the new students assigned to her for a private critique of some of my work. She continued to be such a presence on the VCFA campus, returning often to participate in the community making, and I will never forget, particularly, the sight of her beautiful smile and the time she wore this ruffly sort of pencil skirt in the dead of Vermont winter, and I was like, my god, she's wearing an outfit whereas I am wearing pajamas under my jeans under the giantest puffiest coat of the entire east coast and I am still cold, and yet there she stands, gorgeous and smiling like it's not zero degrees.

But I digress.

My Name Is Mary Sutter is a masterful novel, such an elegant conception of plot, beautifully written, and Robin Oliveira deeply and carefully researched but then managed to integrate her research in an organic way that never pointed out, "Hey, look, I really know my shit! I really did a lot of research!!"

(That said, do not miss Robin's wonderfully informative and humble Acknowledgments section, which will make you appreciate what she put into the making of this novel. I really love the Acknowledgments because they made me feel both daunted and inspired, simultaneously--I couldn't imagine undertaking that amount of research. But then I kind of could. Because Robin so loved her subject matter, she was incredibly thorough and careful. She made herself an expert, but she did not begin as one. That is so heartening for another writer to know. That the world of what you can write is so wide. That you can learn as you go along. That you can become the expert you need to be down the line to write the things that must be written.)

What I loved most about Mary Sutter, though, is that title character. Not since Jane Eyre have I fallen so in love with a female protagonist. She is strong, and plain, and sturdy, and willful, and driven, and soft, and carries a heart full of hurt. She is nothing short of amazing. And what's even better: she's a twin. I mean, there is practically no better literary trope, in my humble opinion, than that of the twin. It just sets up this wonderful question of how did these two people, with the same genes, of the same womb, born just minutes apart, turn out to be who they each are? Wonderful stuff.

So, read My Name Is Mary Sutter because it's a wonderful novel. Read it because, if you are a writer, you will be able to forget about writing and just enjoy reading. Read it because you love me, and I love Robin. Read it because this is my blog, and I'm bossy, and I say so.

A thought for today.

“Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.” ~Elizabeth Stone

((from Tired & Stuck: Three women on a mission to get knocked up. I recommend this blog to those struggling to get pregnant. It makes you feel so human.))

I wrote this yesterday after I peed on a pregnancy test and then was very, very sad.

This is fertility. Don't fucking look away. It's not all baby names and "knowing" which time you made love resulted in conception. This is fertility, I say, not infertility. This is fertility because it is not easy for everyone. Because you're not abnormal if it doesn't happen on the first try, or the fifth, or the twenty-fifth.

I often doubt myself about how much I share on the Internet. I fear that, especially in retrospect, I will regret having made private struggles so public.

But I also can't worry about hindsight. I can only think about now, about one foot in front of the other, and this road that feels long even though I am only 31 and this is supposed to give me hope.

Hope is the thing with feathers, said Emily Dickinson. Well. Either it's flown or is molting. I just feel bitter. Resigned. Trapped. I hate my current life. I hate trying. I hate testing. I hate waiting. I hate hoping.

I want to be one of those obnoxious people who goes off birth control and reveals pregnancy to be a lark rather than an odyssey. "We weren't trying, but we weren't not trying."

I hate how simple it is for some. Or maybe I hate how not simple it is for some. Not sure, it's a little confusing. But I definitely hate. I am filled with hate, and I am fucking telling it how it is because fertility is not all baby showers and fucking onesies with paws and bear ears on them.

It's just not.

Tigercubs and bearcubs.

Wesley Yang's recent New York Magazine article is a meditation on being male, Asian, and trying to "succeed" in America. The article partially hooks onto the controversy stirred by Amy Chua and her now-infamous Chinese Mom parenting articles* and book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, asking, "What happens to all the Asian-American overachievers when the test-taking ends?"

I'm not sure that Wesley Yang and Amy Chua are really talking about the same kind of parenting. Wesley Yang seems to be referring to a more first-generation kind of "Asian parenting." If we can generalize such a thing, it might gloss as follows: cut out social life and extracurriculars (unless necessary for college applications), study hard, get the best grades, become a doctor or lawyer or otherwise respected and well-paid person. But Amy Chua seems very next generation: her parenting isn't just about test scores. It isn't just about getting into a good college and then a good career. Her parenting seems to be about how life itself is one big test. Or perhaps a stretch of near-daily pop quizzes. Her approach to parenting--while extreme and something I predict that one of her daughters will provoke a very dramatic fight about later in life--is a life-prepatory academy. If you want to succeed, you have it want it badly, do everything in your power to get it, and then be a little lucky.

But Yang has a point about the kind of parenting he discusses. How America is not a meritocracy. How even with a black man in the White House, we're still not "postracial"--and will we ever be? And would we want to be? What would that even look like? I want to be postdiscrimination but not postdiversity. The idea of a melting pot has always terrified me. I much prefer the metaphor of a tossed salad. I can see how growing up with "Asian" values about cramming, test-taking, keeping your head down and your nose clean, respecting elders, respecting others, respecting the group over the self, and remembering with an acute sense of shame that the nail that sticks out gets the hammer would affect one's career. Those values can get you down much of that factory belt: good grades, good college, good career. But then at a certain point, you hit what the media has decided to call "the bamboo ceiling."

"Success," depending on how it is defined, can seem to draw on a variant of W.E.B. DuBois's notion of "double-consciousness." Navigating life doubly, grounding in yourself the values with which you were raised as well as the exact opposite ones that will help you obtain success. Of being able to hold one's self at a remove, as if simultaneously sitting at your desk and floating in the ceiling's corner critiquing your slouch and the fact that you can see that Facebook has been open for three hours whilst others surely have been teaching/writing/ applying for jobs/grants/contests/opportunities. Constantly trying to see yourself as others see you--and then correcting the difference between yourself and others. Maybe that means that you need to overcome your inherent respect of elders and interrupt your boss during a meeting. Maybe it means that you should walk a certain way or approach women a certain way.**

Or maybe it means forging out on your own, becoming your own CEO or your own dark, angry artist/writer type. Maybe it means saying "Fuck filial piety. Fuck grade-grubbing. Fuck Ivy League mania. Fuck deference to authority. Fuck humility and hard work. Fuck harmonious relations. Fuck sacrificing for the future. Fuck earnest, striving middle-class servility," as does Yang.

What Yang seems certain of, though, is that this is an acquired knowledge--something you learn to negotiate, not something innate or taught by tiger moms (and dads). I think he's mostly right there.

But we can look to Amy Chua's own daughter, Sophia, for an alternative opinion on what the tiger-mom upbringing produces. Her elegant letter to The New York Post this January pretty much makes me feel like we all had our panties in a twist over nothing.

What does it really mean to live life to the fullest? Maybe striving to win a Nobel Prize and going skydiving are just two sides of the same coin. To me, it’s not about achievement or self-gratification. It’s about knowing that you’ve pushed yourself, body and mind, to the limits of your own potential. You feel it when you’re sprinting, and when the piano piece you’ve practiced for hours finally comes to life beneath your fingertips. You feel it when you encounter a life-changing idea, and when you do something on your own that you never thought you could. If I died tomorrow, I would die feeling I’ve lived my whole life at 110 percent.

Maybe the trick for you tigercubs out there is to suck it up for childhood and high school, and then pick and choose the values/lessons you want to still live with in your adult life. Like a values code-switching: having two bodies of knowledge from which to pick, and choosing the appropriate one based on situation. Like being at an Asian buffet with your Asian family and knowing better than to make the rookie mistake of going for the rice or the salad. Going straight for the crab and the lobster and the prime rib--the things that hold within them the most value.

Winding down here, let me add some final anecdotes to get this out of the way: I did not have a tiger mom. Or at least not in the way you're thinking.

She was Asian--but not Chinese; she was Japanese. And as a nisei born and raised shortly after my grandparents got out of WWII internment camps, she wasn't as Asian as first-generation immigrants or perhaps other Asians who had been born at a different time. Or perhaps it was that she was a different kind of Asian, not an Asian born as much as constructed. Living in the United States at a time when one's ethnicity could be seen as a crime, my grandparents were intent on conveying stalwart Americanness. By the time they got out of the camps, my grandfather had served in the U.S. Army and had assumed the nickname "Smokey" (to replace "Hideo"). They opened a diner in Sacramento called Kampus Kitchen--the kind of diner of which Johnny Rockets is a caricature. What would seem more quintessentially American to the Asian immigrant observing than a "greasy spoon" where if rice is on the menu it is the long-grain kind and served with a side of butter? My grandparents wanted to have, in my mother's words, "low-profile children"--quiet, excessively compliant, unchallenging of authority. She tried to tape her eyes to make an Aryan crease and bathe in lemon peels to attempt to bleach her skin whiter. Blending in worked for a while--that is, until my mother reached the rebellious stretch of her teen years, and in the face of the American her parents wanted her to be, my mother decided to be Japanese.

She would wear geta around her college campus, and kimonos to bed, and decided to study Japanese--to which my grandfather responded by "helping" her study, purposely feeding her incorrect answers. When she confronted him, he furiously told her that she was an American first. That she had no appreciation or understanding for what it had taken him to be American. That she should not shame him in this way. Ultimately, in some ways, her upbringing sounds very much like the upbringing of a "tiger cub"--and her "test-taking" being how to pull off being 100% American when American fails to tell the full story.

So she was Asian, and she was ferocious--but only in protection of me. Less like a tiger, more like a bear--which of course makes her pet name from me, "Mommabear," obvious. Did she spend money she didn't have to send me to a college-prepatory high school and my dream college? Yes. Did she want me to get good grades and embarrass me by calling the Assistant Headmaster and creating an enforced studyhall, wherein I had to go sit in his office and do my homework after school because I had gotten some Ds in math and science? Oh, hells yeah. But didn't she also allow me to sign me up for ballet lessons, halau, orchestra, color guard, and community choir? Didn't she practically frame every story or poem I ever wrote? Didn't she tell me a hundred times a day--in the teenaged years, oppressively so--how much she loved me, and believed in me, and thought me to be a creative, brilliant, amazing individual? Didn't she march me into that fancy high-school with all the people who could actually afford to be there and tell me I deserved this education as much as any of the rest of them, even if I was there by combination of financial aid, workstudy, extensive loans, a generous gift from her then-boyfriend, and the grace of God? And let me just add, not once, ever, did she suggest I become something more "practical" like a doctor, lawyer, or engineer.

So, my mom and I? We're Asian, sure, but don't count us in the tiger tribe. We're another animal altogether.

---

* Sorry, but this is a GEM, and one with which I totally agree: "What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you're good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences." Also: "Western parents try to respect their children's individuality, encouraging them to pursue their true passions, supporting their choices, and providing positive reinforcement and a nurturing environment. By contrast, the Chinese believe that the best way to protect their children is by preparing them for the future, letting them see what they're capable of, and arming them with skills, work habits and inner confidence that no one can ever take away."

** To be honest, though, the whole section on picking up women ICKED ME OUT. If a supposed "alpha male" came up into my space, turned me around by my shoulder, and then grinned widely and started talking to me, he'd get a pretty heated and negative response.

Awesomeness, CA: Booksmith in The Haight.

Went to Booksmith for the Zyzzyva spring issue reading last week. It was so packed that I could only see the readers if I stood on my tippy-toes, glancing over this magazine rack:

Which proved to me verily that I was indeed smack in the Haight.

Probably my favorite thing about the reading was the bookstore itself. Filled with bestsellers, sure, but also quirkier books arranged in wonderful thematic shelves. This is clearly for zombie-philes.

Another thing that made the store so great is that they had staff descriptions of books, kind of like going to a fancy wine store and hearing about all those blackberries, smoke, and cacao nibs you're supposed to be tasting in such and such a bottle.

Instead, it's book tastings. Love this.

I suppose I should say something about the reading. I only heard two or three people read. I bought the issue. I'm excited to peruse it. But it was difficult for me to get a handle on their aesthetic from just those few readers.

Plus I was just pissed that SF's public transportation was doing me no favors. It was a comedy of errors after the Caltrain. Get on the MUNI metro platform, ask where to buy a ticket, get told you can buy it on board. Ask someone else can you buy the ticket on board, and they say they think so, and so ask does the machine take cash, and they say no. Scratch your head like WTF, it's San Francisco, doesn't everything take debit/credit? Go get cash. Wait again on the platform. Catch the right train in the right direction, only to learn that if paying cash you need to be in the first car. Get in the first car. Read the sign that says, exact change taken only. Realize you only have a twenty. Get off at the next stop. Wander aimlessly about, realizing there is only one thing you can do to break your bill, and that's go have a drink. Walk into an overpriced sports bar near the ballpark, order the cheapest glass of wine there is, and read Tiger, Tiger whilst slamming down the wine. Be the only person in the bar not hollering at the television, which is playing several different games of different sports. Catch the train again. Get all the way to Embarcadero station before you start feeling nervous about not having a ticket. Decide that this station looks like where you can buy a ticket. Find a ticket machine! Buy a ticket! Wait for another train! Take the wrong one, going back in the wrong direction. Get back off, wait for the right one headed in the right direction, have it be so damn packed that you can't breathe for the half-hour-plus it takes to get to The Haight. Get off in relief at your stop, which you only realize is your stop because you've put on your glasses, not because you know the map or because any kind of notification exists on board for what stop you are at or are headed to. Head down the street on your own two feet, wishing this city was more walkable, but at least it is sunny and beautiful and there is a literary reading ahead and you are buzzed. Realize as you silence your phone and dart into the bookstore that after all that F-ING drama, not one MUNI worker on any of those ill-fated trains ever asked for your ticket.

If I weren't already married to Laura von Holt, I would marry her again in a hot second.

You already know about her bombchikabombness, but take another look: her brain is just as sexy. http://happydeadmomday.blogspot.com/2011/05/how-to-have-adult-relationship-with.html.

Margaux Fragoso's "Tiger, Tiger" burns bright.

I devoured Margaux Fragoso's Tiger, Tiger in a greedy gulp, between yesterday afternoon and this morning.

It seems a strange compliment to give, though, and a stranger one still to admit aloud: that I was captivated, enthralled, thirsty for this memoir about her relationship as a child/young woman with a pedophile/sexual predator. I mean, can I write that? Can I admit that?

Well, I sure can, because I am far from the only or the first to sing the memoir's praises.

By the time I had finished the prologue, I had already promised myself that, even if five years down the line some talk show host is cussing out and denouncing her, I won't care because she utterly transported me (not, albeit, to a very nice place) and I can't see her sleight of hand.

Fragoso utterly immerses us into this fierce, wild kingdom wherein she as Margaux spent her childhood. We are shaken to be in this world where children are savage and bare, and all the corners have not been kiddy-proofed, and where danger does more than lurk--it walks down the street in broad daylight, holding Margaux's hand.

What I think I appreciated most about her book is that it is not tidy. By the end of the epilogue, by no means have all things been tied up. It's not episodic like an episode of Law & Order: SVU, you know, where we can neatly justify everything that has been done to a child as the perpetrator's own history of being abused, and that the child never spoke out, never ended things, and/or was completely brainwashed, etc. because of Stockholm syndrome. Some of those things are true, but in the same moment, paragraph, sentence, so are other, conflicting things. Peter worships Margaux as the idol of his own private religion; he also sometimes punches and slaps her. Peter only likes little girls; but later on there are allegations of sexual abuse from his stepson that are never resolved as being true or not. Margaux loves and wants to marry Peter and have his children from the time she is eight years old; she is also often repulsed by him. Peter likes little girls, yet he is still involved with Margaux right up until his death, when she is 22 and he 66. Did Peter molest his daughters or not--and did it make any difference in his pathology that Margaux was not his blood? Did Peter molest Karen, and the other female foster children he had, and what was up with Jill, anyway--just a crush? Did Peter molest Ricky or not? And how could Margaux's parents (esp. her mother) not think this thing was weird/off from the very start?

All valid questions that will linger because neither Fragoso nor her child persona-voice of Margaux can answer all those questions. And all I can say is thank GOD. Nothing tacks "-ifice" onto "art" like tying up all loose ends. Life is full of questions we'll never, ever answer. Ones that others think we should answer, but perhaps we are more interested in a different set of questions altogether.

Fragoso doesn't tiptoe around what happened to her, but neither is she graphically explicit in a sensationalist way. Margaux Fragoso isn't try to shock you, she's remembering. She's not trying to sob out the story of how her childhood was taken from her; instead she claims agency throughout this book, complicating the power dynamics incredibly and honestly. This extends to the framework of the prologue, which introduces the reader to Margaux the young adult, and the epilogue, which importantly extends the tale beyond its set parameters, to speed through time and introduce us to Fragoso the grown woman and author and mother of a small daughter. It is this epilogue, especially, that I think grounds us in the why of her writing: she was processing, remembering, grieving, healing, thinking, feeling, and so forth, and she still is, and still will be perhaps for her entire life. Instead of a pair of rose- vs. shit-colored glasses, which are inherently removable and changeable, Margaux Fragoso's had laser surgery and her childhood experiences will always be part of--though not all of--her worldview. She uses that epilogue to trace what it is to be the daughter of her mother (and father) as well as to be a mother to a daughter, and she uses it to think through what needs to change at a societal level to prevent other children from coming to harm.

It's a beautiful and important book.

"The Sweet Spot."

My friend Robin (of Woodbird) suggested I watch this interview, and now I'm going to pay it forward and suggest you do, too. It's about finding "the sweet spot" in life, meaning that point where you know you are where you should be and are doing what you are meant to, where you wake up and feel lucky to be living your life.

The Desha Show - Episode One from Desha Peacock on Vimeo.

I LOVED this interview, took away a lot of gems about how to be more proactive at creating that sweet spot for myself, but I also had a single moment's pause. The interview subject, Suzanne Kingsbury, described how/why she came to create her own writer's salon:

If you want to receive something--I wanted to receive the feeling again of bliss--then give it, you know? And you will eventually ... receive what you want.

And it just made me pause a little because I wonder how much waiting do you do, even as it discourages you, before you can't wait any more? Suzanne Kingsbury also urges us against this feeling of a schedule, saying, "The Universe works on an interesting timeline." The way I look at it is that I tend to fling myself into situations, into projects, into/at people, and sometimes I am met halfway, sometimes more than that, and the times when I am standing there, fully flung and not met, it's awkward, you know? Uncomfortable. And I'm just in one of those periods right now where all my flinging feels like it's getting me nowhere. I can't stir up the same intensity of fling in the people around me.

Another friend last night cautioned me to not ... "lower" my expectations as much as to cultivate patience. Which is sort of the same advice of Suzanne gives above about the Universe and its timeline.

I want to be grateful for what actually is ("the now"), not just long for what I desire, but ... how can you not measure the distance between your dreams and reality? How do you lose that yardstick? And why is it not good for yourself and your self-respect to stop flinging where it isn't wanted?

Writers and their dogs.

Loved this post.

Famous WIFEY.

Comment to a stuck writer.

It’s not that I don’t sympathize as much as I about about to play BAD COP. Don’t open a document, then, open a notebook. Or flip to the backside of a grocery list or an envelope or whatever intimidates less. Put on music; turn off music. Write outside, write inside, write in a loud public setting, or the quietest, most desolate corner you know. Read: blogs, newspapers, magazines, and books books books. Read, and journal privately, and blog publicly. Just BEGIN. Take the pressure off. Words are just words. Let them accumulate until you are back in the swing of things and don’t selfl-censor* or self-edit.

In short: Don’t hunt; GATHER. Don’t be frightened; FORGE ONWARD.

Do you know The Right to Write by Julia Cameron? It has helped many a stuck writer.

Sending love and tough-you-up vibes,
Mayumi

---

* How ironic is it that this editor just misspelled self-censor?! I itch to correct it, but I guess it'd be a bit hypocritical. Damn that trigger finger.

Mood of late being somewhat involved with this song.

The first line of lyrics go, "Fuck California. You made me boring."

Uhm. No comment?

Trajectories.

Yesterday, I was cleaning out some old files, including one labeled "future interest/career stuffs." And what do I stumble upon but some wonderful old hand-drawn brainstorms/flowcharts about where I imagined life possibly taking me. These are circa 2003, I think.

Save obtaining my MFA (even then it was from nowhere I planned to attend, though I would argue that my MFA came from exactly where it was meant to), I went on to do almost none of these things.

I am not sure if that's amusing or depressing. Does it show, as they say, how life is what happens when you make other plans? Or does it show that I have been damn lazy or scared for the last nine years, too scared to move or change, despite all the other literal movement in my life? Or does it prove the wide-flung wonder of the self, how much more we always have to know about ourselves? How little I could predict my own destiny at age 23.

The answer to those questions depends on morning and mood.

The other thing I found was a manila folder labeled "job advice." What it held was printed-out e-mails to me over the years from my blood uncle and hanai family of aunties and uncles--especially from 2003 when I had written in distress about difficulties I was having then at American Anthropologist. I spent the afternoon yesterday reading through those wonderful e-mails again.

Who would think that in 2011, I'd have stuck it out with American Anthropologist and STILL be editing there? That I'd be living (again) in California? It certainly wasn't the advice I was given ... or was it? Many of my family told me to find the difference between earning a living and making a life. Obviously I'm still figuring that out, and the words hold as much weight as ever.

But it made me miss that sense of being always enveloped by family, a strong set of shoulders squared at the world but around the neck is many, many lei, and wherever those shoulders went, color and fragrance and presence would go, too.

It made me miss that sense of family woven because, over the years, with all the distance, much of that sense of family has faded. Friendships back home with my mom shifted. I stopped writing as often as I should have, I stopped telling them how much they meant and making it home a few times a year and going out running with them, and I hate the phone so I never called. And they stopped writing back.

Family isn't always born, sometimes it is made. But either way, it is not a given, it is something that must be worked at, constantly maintained.

These are the things I cannot get away from thinking about: family and place. I love California and my friends here, but I have a near-constant sense of dissatisfaction because moving here was supposed to be about that next chapter: family. And we're in the fertility trenches, for sure, with ovulation tests and schedules for having sex and a handful of vitamins and hormones and all kinds of goodies, but ... in the trenches we sit. We sit and wait for our lives to change enough to feel like they are moving forward. And meanwhile I train myself not to think of New York, where I have another family of friends and a known writing community, and I train myself not to think of Hawai'i, where I have another family of friends and my actual family (mom and the poes) and where I've always imagined returning, ultimately, to put down roots. Meanwhile the roots all are drying, and the wings overtired.

Last night I had a dream that I had gotten another tattoo. It was four words, on my right hand's middle and ring fingers. Seems a shame I cannot remember what the words were, because you can't get more metaphorical than that: words of indelible ink tied around my fingers. I'm pretty sure the first word was "trust" or "faith" and the second "in," but I don't remember the last word. That was the tattoo I intended to get, but there was some sort of conspiracy and the tattoo artist took it upon himself to add the word "social" before the last word. So:

TRUST IN SOCIAL __________.

or

FAITH IN SOCIAL ____________.

Really wish I could remember. Seems my subconscious wanted me to.

What the library yielded.

Where to even begin!