Environmental Munchies

Last night, Russ and I finally watched An Inconvenient Truth, interrupted periodically by the kitchen timer letting us know that our espresso snowcap cookies were ready to come out of the oven.

It is a combo that I highly recommend. An Inconvenient Truth is, by turns, a bit hokey and surprisingly touching. It was a docu-presentation that I'm glad I watched, if not only for a bit more insight into the history and issues surrounding global warming. And how can you not love a man with a drawly Tennessee accent? (I'll tell you, for me, it's just impossible.)

Our cookie choice fit in well with the images of polar ice caps melting and dramatically crashing into the water below them. I'm usually relegated to the land of dishwashing and cleanup, but these were so easy, even a kitchen-phobe like me thought they were a breeze. A gentle, clean breeze with no poisonous greenhouse gases.
Espresso Snowcap Cookies

1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
4 teaspoons instant espresso (We used Folgers Decaf Instant Crystals and it turns out well)
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/8 teaspoon salt
4 tablespoons unsalted butter, room temperature
2/3 cup packed light-brown sugar
1 large egg
4 ounces bittersweet or semisweet chocolate, melted and cooled
1 tablespoon milk
1/2 cup confectioners sugar, for coating

1. In a medium bowl, whisk together flour, cocoa, espresso, baking powder, and salt. With an electric mixer, beat butter and brown sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in egg until well combined; mix in cooled chocolate. With mixer on low speed, gradually add dry ingredients; beat in milk just until combined. Flatten dough into a disk; wrap in parchment paper. Freeze until firm, about 25-45 minutes.

2. Preheat oven to 350°. Shape dough into 1-inch balls. Place confectioners’ sugar into a medium bowl; working in batches, roll balls in sugar twice (the more sugar, the better).

3. Place balls on prepared baking sheets, 2 inches apart. Bake, rotating sheets halfway through, until cookies have spread and coating is cracked, 12 to 13 minutes; cookies will still be soft to the touch. Transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.

Makes 18 small-medium sized snowcaps
(Adapted from Everyday Food Collectible Cookie Edition)

Kung-Fu Boogie

Russ and I received this as a gift and I'm looking for any (and all) creative solutions to properly destroy it. You know. Accidentally destroy it.

Snow Days in the Southwest

As I've been telling everyone that I meet in a five-mile radius who doesn't looks like a secretly plotting rapist, I loved Miracle in the Andes, almost as much as I loved the movie Alive. Actually, honestly, much more so. I've realized that I love anything that includes crashes, certain death, a surgery scene, and a hopeful tune somewhere in the middle, that sounds like "We're gonna die/Shoo-bop-shoo-wa/But I'm gonna get us out of this situation with total craziness and moxy/Shoo-bop-do-wa-wa..." And so on. I don't know why tragedy has to be set to 50's style pop. I guess it doesn't. I'm sure that there are some tragedy-narrative fans who hear the hopeful tune, as sung by Hank Williams or Sarah McLachlan or maybe even Fifty Cent.

Anyway, after this, I've been obsessed with moutain climbing. So, of course, I've been rabidly following the developments of the three (now two) missing climbers on Mt. Hood. If I could have a secret earpiece with five-minutely updates, I totally would, but so far as yet, the CIA and Madonna have been unwilling to lease me this technology, so I'm stuck with Internet updates. Until I got to Russell's parents house in Arizona and was blessed with the semi-miracle of cable TV. Ahh, news. Ahh, Discovery channel.

Which is how I became hooked on another climbing-related fix: the show Everest: Beyond the Limit. Last night, there were lots of frostbitten toes and fingers (some of which had to be removed), egos the size of the mountain that refused to descend even when they were running out of oxygen and falling asleep in the snow, and most disturbingly of all, climbers who had given up and laid down on the sides of the trails at Everest's summit to die. The climbers descending have to pass these climbers, sometimes still breathing, and instead of being able to do anything about it, they have to keep descending. Because the sad truth of it is, those people laying down can't be carried and won't get up and walk.

Even freakier? Because the summit of Everest is 29,000+ feet, there's no mold or heat and thus, the bodies don't decay. So one climber relayed the surrealness of climbing the summit and seeing, sometimes near the trail, the dead bodies of past climbers, perfectly preserved, still laying in the snow.

Stickshifts and Safetybelts

Yes, I know, it's that one Cake song that we all put on mix CDs for our crushes in college. But even more so, it's been my nighttime activity this last month.

I grew up in a family that drove American-made, beast-like automatics. Cadillacs and Oldsmobiles, mostly hand-me-downs from other relatives. I think there was this general feeling among that hand-down-to-me generation, who were all mostly farmers or farmer offspring, that driving cars had to be automatic.

I learned how to drive on my grandma's Cadillac Seville and my parents' Pontiacs, so there was no way that a manual transmission came into the picture for a moment. They were definitely automatic people. I don't think I would've even known that manuals existed, if it weren't for my friend Diana. I was with her as she learned how to drive stickshift in her aqua Saturn. I was with her when she stalled on a few roads, intersections, and drive-throughs, while learning. I thought, at the time, that it was all rather stressful. Why would someone choose a car where you have to think that much?

Here I am now, an Angelino who relies on her car and has discovered that stickshifts are not just about being cheap and overthinky. They take less gas, they cost less money, and -- well, there's generally a less-is-actually-more associated with all aspects of stickshifts. They make sense (as opposed to cost cents).

In addition, Russell drives a stickshift. In fact, almost everyone I know drives a stick. I am a lone holdover from another generation with my Nissan and its $45 gas fill-ups. One day I was thinking about what would happen if I, in some unlikely hypothetical situation (situations that I, with my love of scenarios, come up with daily), had to drive somewhere and Russell's car was my only option? I wouldn't even be able to leave the driveway. I hate these sorts of realizations because it means that I take myself out of the hypothetical and decide upon one of two responses:

1.) Stay exactly in my present state of automaticy, feel the shame of knowing that I could better myself, but was just too lazy/unmotivated/ignorant to do so
or
2.) Put my money where my mind is and start asking for help to learn how to drive stickshift (and as a bonus result, also feel empowered, excited, and -- well, I can't think of another e-word, but basically, good).

I hate option two. But it's the only one that lets me function without anxiety-induced bodily gas.

So I've found myself driving around empty parking lots on weekend nights, with Russell in the passenger seat, giving me directions while I stall and have near misses and get laughed at my the security guard in the golf cart (who incidentally, doesn't drive a stick, so although I would technically be able to tell him to go suck it, I can't because his golf cart is electric and thereby, unsucky). I've never driven a truck before, so even being up high is a change of pace for this down-low (sedan) girl. Nothing, though, has rocked me harder than learning the fine art of, in Russell's words, "let up on the clutch, push down on the gas." Actually, those are Russell's dad's words that we laugh about because of how frustrating they can be, repeated in rapid succession in monotonation. What Russell actually says, as my stickshift guru, is that there's a moment when the clutch "catches," and once you feel that catch, you let up gently on the clutch and press down on the gas.

It all sounds like goobey-frubu to me. At least, it did at first. Then, I had my moment of catch while zooming through the lot a few weeks ago and I figured out what he meant. One day, when I'm a stickshift guru, I will tell my inductees that this catch means convergence. When both the gas pedal and clutch are at the same place at the same time, it's this magical moment. Then, they must continue and move away from each other again, thus breaking said magic. But it's a beautiful moment when they're together and they catch. Maybe it's what catching a wave while surfing feels like, although I'll never know since I draw the line at learning new skills that may include shark attack. In the end, it's knowing I made two disparate elements come together, just for a moment -- call me gear-heard, but it really is a thrill.

Don't let me fool you entirely with my fresh-faced idealism, though. This stickshift business is tough. There's a new place in my brain that I have to break into in order to mentally understand and get up the gusto to go do this driving. Sometimes, I get frustrated with myself, Russell, the security guard and I know I've done some damage to Russell's transmission. But I'm going to continue practicing because, as far as my life goes, driving a stickshift catches.

The Joys of Teaching

Today, I was teaching a lesson on not relying on "to be" verbs in essays and I used an activity which required my students to write and then, revise a statement, one that most likely included a lot of versions of "to be" verbs. It was harder than they thought; a few of them even claimed it was impossible.

But then, the light came on and they saw what I was getting at (it helped that I told them exactly what I was getting at). The light coming on in one student sounded like this: "Hey -- is this what we're supposed to do in our papers?"

(This was also the student who posed the question: "So if Jesus says he's coming back when the world ends and it takes 48 nuclear bombs to blow up the entire world, then if we detonate all those bombs, wouldn't that mean that Jesus has to come back?")

The Best Eye/Ear Candy of the Year

I've noticed that a lot of blogs I enjoy have been compiling their top tens of the year. So. I like lists. And I like sharing them. And I like blogging. This trifecta leads me to compose my own tops of the year:

Top Ten CDs (that actually came out in 2006) In No Particular Order:
1. Sufjan Stevens: Christmas Songs
(Seriously the most fun Christmas album ever -- you know it's gotta be with songs such as "Get Behind Me, Santa" and "Did I Make You Cry on Christmas? (Well, You Deserved It!))
2. Lily Allen: Alright Still
3. Regina Spektor: Begin to Hope
4. Madeleine Peyroux: Half the Perfect World
5. Cut Chemist: The Audience's Listening
6. Zero 7: The Garden
7. The Ditty Bops: Angel with Attitude
8. Ballaké Sissoko & Ludovico Einaudi: Diario Mali
9. Tally Hall: Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum
10. Paul Simon: Surprise
11. Gotan Project: Lunatico
12. Bob Dylan: Modern Times
13. Belle and Sebastian: The Life Pursuit

Okay that was 13. Ten was very, very difficult. And I like 13. I got married on the 13th. So it's a lucky-unlucky number.

Now, My Top 10 CDs That Didn't Necessarily Come Out In 2006 But That Received Heavy iPod/CD Mixing/Blasting-While-Housecleaning Rotation:
1. Sonny Rollins: Saxaphone Colossus
2. Buffy the Vampire Slayer Cast: Once More, With Feeling
3. Johnny Cash/June C.C.: 16 Greatest Hits
4. Shelby Lynne: Suit Yourself
5. Imogen Heap: Speak for Yourself
6. Neko Case: The Tigers Have Spoken
7. Tony Allen: Homecooking
8. Beach Boys: Surfin' Safari
9. Golden Smog: Weird Tales
10. Little Richard: The Best of Little Richard

Honorable Mentions: Monk: Thelonious Monk Orchestra At Town Hall 1959; Sufjan Stevens: Illinois; Natalie Merchant: Retrospective; Queen: Night at the Opera

Okay, again, too many CDs.

Top 5 Books (That Were So Good, I Just Had To Read Them Within a Few Days):
1. Don't Get Too Comfortable: The Indignities of Coach Class, The Torments of Low Thread Count, The Never- Ending Quest for Artisanal Olive Oil, and Other First World Problems (Rakoff)
2. The Los Angeles Diaries (Brown)
3. Doubt (Shanley)
4. Garlic and Sapphires (Riechl)
5. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles (Murakami)

Top 5 TV Guilty Pleasures (non-cable, because I don't have cable):
1. The Office
2. 30 Rock
3. Heroes
4. Ugly Betty
5. So You Think You Can Dance

Best TV-DVD Guilty Pleasure:
Seasons 1-7 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (obviously!)

TV-DVD Series I Can't Wait To Watch This Next Week:
Season 1, Weeds

TV-DVD Series I'm Planning to Watch After Dec. 15:
Veronica Mars

Top 5 T-Shirt Designers
1. Ella Moss
2. Nicole Miller
3. Velvet
4. Deletta
5. Marc Jacobs

Best Flip-Flops Ever
Clarks

Best Time To End?
Now.

Blocking

The weather has been chilly and clear lately and I have been so needy of outdoor time that I've been walking a lot more than usual. Tanya, though still working on the whole trotting-alongside-her-master-faithfully bit, is a great walking companion. But she stops to sniff a lot. She pauses at bushes, fences, rocks, trees, lumpy patches of earth, cats, cat shit, cat hair, and the empty Wendy's containers that the local population never minds leaving on the sidewalks. This morning, we were doing the walk thing and she found a dead squirrel in some patchy bushes. I wasn't watching closely and the situation didn't register until I looked down just in time to see her bury her nose into its bloody fur.

I pulled her away and stooped down to look at it. It's weird to see a squirrel dead. They're such hyperactive animals, so reminiscent of that one kid in first grade who got hopped up on the Kool-aid, that it's otherworldly to see one down for the count, totally still, not even breathing.
Sometimes I get annoyed with Tanya stopping to smell every rock, tree, and Wendy's wrapper. And then, other times, I'm pretty glad that she gets me to slow down, stoop down, and fully appreciate the walk.

Things You Don't Know Just By Getting Older, Part III

Like any musical worth its jazz hands, "Once More, With Feeling" episode ends with a kiss, but before that, a confrontation. It's the structure of a good spooky story -- you acknowledge, you confront, you dispel, and then, the kisses abound. When Buffy confronts the musical demon, though, she almost doesn't make it out alive. She's been holding on to a major secret, one that she's told no one except the vampire who inspired Billy Idol's famous bleached coiffe. Her friends are beyond clueless and she thinks that she can hold on to this secret without any repercussions. And then, there's the singing and the dancing and the almost-combusting, and finally, her friends know what's really going on. Of course, that doesn't end it. It's just the beginning of the secrets that follow her throughout the season.

As I've been comparing notes, I see now that I'm getting older, too, and that secrets are much easier to keep now than they were when I was in high school and college. There's not the thrill of allowing certain people access to my own self-knowledge or a glimpse into my mirror, darkly. I think secret telling-and-keeping is a way of making friends, keeping friends, and figuring out who you can trust and not trust. It's like Survivor, just in hallways and dorm rooms. But secrets can become a way of life, something you don't even realize you're doing until it's three months later and you start to see a pattern of singing a certain soundtrack in your car every Thursday night after work.

I didn't see, for the longest time, that listening to O.M.W.F. had more to do with my state of mind than my love of a TV series. And even once I did realize that I was turning it on every weekend, and not just singing, but really feeling the idea of "going through the motions/walking through the part/nothing seems to penetrate my heart," I kept it a secret. I didn't tell anyone. I didn't know how to explain it. And in a way, I didn't want to. There was something delicious about having a secret and keeping it all to myself.

I worked at a summer camp in the mountains one summer in college. It was one of the most difficult jobs I've ever had and emotionally strenuous, too. I didn't feel like I fit in well with many of my fellow staffers and I started to suffer from not being understood nor able to talk well. I lived the weeks, especially the first two months, just trying to get to Saturday morning, when I could take off for the weekend and hang with my pals. It was one of the most lonely times in my whole life and even at the end, when I made a few friends, I never felt part of that environment. And what made it worse was that the work didn't suit me well, either.

But something valuable came out of that experience. In the late summer, I sat down with my boss, who was giving us evaluations. I'd never been evaluated, as an employee before, so this was all very nerve-wracking and twitchy for me. She started out by saying that I was dependable, respectable, that the campers loved me, and none of my fellow employees had conflict with me. "You're pretty much perfect," she said, "except that you're not very good at multi-tasking." I thought about it and I must have had a what-the-hell look on my face, because she proceeded to explain that though I was good at a number of different tasks, I was not very good at doing them all at the same time.

How does it relate, you may ask. Well. My multi-tasking problems extend to my emotional life, too. Changes in life make it easy to keep secrets. I'm working my first "adult" job and that change rocked me hard, unexpectedly hard. It made me feel unsure of and often, disappointed in, myself, and that is what I've been focused on for the last few months. And it became a secret, all those feelings. Once you have secrets, it's easy to focus on them instead of clawing your way out, the honest way. If you're mono-task, like me, it gets even worse because you focus so hard on the feelings surrounding the secret and not on changing your life. I really think it's why I've been so no-show with my creative writing lately; it's not that I couldn't carve out the time to do it, it's that I couldn't focus on anything except my own special Sarah stew. I've been fixating on what makes me feel the whole going-through-the-motions feeling.

Unlike my teenage self, I'm not getting any kind of pleasure from all this secret-releasing. It's difficult. I'm embarassed that I've been so un-self-aware, so unable to voice this to anyone. But it is a way of transformation, a way of re-circling my square stake back into the kind of device that can penetrate. And I think even more change has to be the way to go in this case. Confrontation, in a sense.

In this vein, I went out and found myself a few writing buddies. One in particular is helping me get excited about writing again by letting me co-compose a writing manifesto with her and meet-up every week with our writings. It makes me un-mono myself once in a while and besides, it's a load of fun. Also, as odd as it might sound to say, I've volunteered for the session of my church, the twelve elected members that make decisions and keep the congregation from burning the mother down. My thought here is if I find a way to get ouside myself more often, a way to exorcise the whole me-centric stewing on a more regular basis, it will help get me back to sustaining a creative trickle at least.

So the musical here doesn't end with a kiss, just some messy realizations and a few good intentions. We'll see what the next act brings.

Let's Mix

I've been listening to the wickedly cool mix that Kristan sent me last week, falling in love with new artists and songs, and feeling the kind of lucky you only feel when a friend connects you to a great thought or feeling via song.

So I want to spread the lucky. I'm mixing today, and if you want a copy, leave me a comment or write me an email. It won't be fancy, but it will be musical.

Things You Don't Know Just By Getting Older, Part II

As many of you know, I spent a large chunk of my summer watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the TV series, not the movie-vehicle for Luke Perry). Originally, according to Joss Whedon, wunderwriter and creator, the show was imagined to end after the fifth season. Everything in the series was pointing toward that ending and when it happened, when I watched those last few minutes of the fifth season, my heart dropped and I even shed tears, but my heart and brain and need for closure was more than adequately fulfilled. It was a beautiful ending, full of both mythological and deeply emotional importance. It was the only way to end Buffy's story.

But, as many of you also know, Buffy was picked up by UPN for two more seasons and so, Buffy 5 = not the end. When I came to the end of season 5, I wondered where they could go, what they could possibly do. And so it was that I slipped in the Season Six DVD with a a bit of nonchalance. I had gotten word - from a good authority - that season six wasn't exactly bad; it just wasn't seasons 1-5, part of that stellar (and originally conceived) story arc.

There were some good episodes; some episodes that clearly set the tone for the season, one of diving into darkness, uncertainty, and numbness. And then, there was "Once More, With Feeling."

I could detail all the ways that "Once More, With Feeling" is amazing and beautiful and funny and bitingly aware, but I'll skip all that and just tell you that O.M.W.F. is a musical episode of Buffy, where a demon named Sweet takes over the town and as a result, everyone starts singing, dancing, and unfortunately, combusting. The singing is due to the fact that all the characters have a mega-warehouse of secrets and bottled-up emotions that they've been carrying around for the first six episodes of the sixth season (or in some cases, much longer), and the combustion, a by-product of all that emotion. And even better? Sarah Michelle Gellar can really belt it out, as can most of the cast, which is a relief when you're watching an almost hour of singing and dancing.

As soon as I saw it, I knew I had to own the soundtrack immediately, if not sooner (thank you iTunes, for the gift of instant gratification). And I've been listening to it a lot the last few months, while washing dishes, while typing out lesson plans, and often in the car on my way to and from that one university at which I'm teaching that's more than a few miles down the freeway.

Incidentally, I started the sixth season right around the time that I began working, right around the time that my life began to be a parade of lesson plans, essays to grade, and handouts to photocopy. My life went from being that of a grad student and writer, someone thinking about her own writing all the time, to being that of a worker, someone thinking about how to teach a bunch of freshman how to think and write. My own writing, as you probably know by now, has not been on my thinker much lately. And I know that's a problem, a Kevin-Britney size nightmare. Unlike Kevin and Britney, though, my writing is not something I can divorce, no matter how much I neglect it. It doesn't go away. It's my second, inner skin. The more I don't think about my writing, the more that skin gets squirmy -- and just like in O.M.W.F., secrets can't stay secrets forever. Sooner or later, a (metaphorical) musical demon is going to show up on the scene and all that secrety stuff comes out. Which is what happened in my last week.

The sixth season of Buffy is unique, too, in that the characters become their own worst enemies, their own worst nightmare versions of themselves. They're are all far away from high school at this point, but with no parental figures to help ease the blows of reality. They're older, but not exactly wise yet. Even though they were in college for seasons 4 and 5, it's season six when their lives begin to crumble from within, not because of some "big bad" trying to start an apocolypse. This crumbling is all about bad choices, miserable communication skills, and most of all, the failure to take responsibility. (Again without spoiling too much,) Buffy is slaying demons by night and flipping burgers by day; she's making out with one particular vamp just to feel anything, even if it's revulsion and pain. It's poignant, then, that the opening of O.M.W.F. is Buffy's song called "Going Through The Motions," as she's slaying in the graveyard. Even the demons notice (musically, of course) that there's something lacking in her staking.

On Thursday nights, when I drive home, I like to sing "Going Through The Motions," because that's exactly how I've felt lately as an all-worker-non-writer. I think that's how most people feel when their lives get away from them. Although I love and value my students, most of the time, without my writing, it all just feels like sub-par staking.

Things You Don't Know Just By Getting Older, Part I

Once upon a time, I was a writer. A novelist, I should say, since I have a strange resistance to writing anything short. Or perhaps it's not so much a resistance as it is that I'm long-winded and like the big picture better than nitpicky details. Or perhaps I can't help myself -- when I start getting attached to a character, say a forty-year old female character who suprises me by turning out to have a bit of fetish for not-even-out-of-college boys, I want nothing more than to keep exploring how those desires are ultimately going to lead somewhere a little shady.

Sometimes I forget how great being a writer is. It's easy to think it's not great and that's possibly because there are so many books out there - some great - proclaiming that it's not great. That's it's hard and full of "KFKD" moments, as Anne Lamott says. Sure. But it's also not a Britney-Kevin situation, where just looking at them in awful cutoff jean shorts or bad hairdos makes one want to lay face down in a red tide. There's a lot of reminders out there that it's hard, and so, it becomes hard to see that cheery, slightly cultish ray of sunshine poking through the process.

I had a conversation with an old professor a few nights ago, a guy who is now my colleague. I see him in the hallways and we always toss out last names, sometimes arm punches, but we haven't had lots of leisurely time to chat. But I caught him on the lamb from advice-seeking juniors and took the opportunity to ask him about anthologies. Now although all evidence points to the contrary, this doesn't make me the world's lamest person. I'm teaching three sections of literature next semester, haven't done it, and hate anthologies. But, because it's an intro class and because I can't think about putting together my own packet right now without the whole red tide scenario, I decided I would go with the monolith and be done with it. Sadly, few anthologies have my favorite short stories, such as Russell Banks' "Sarah Cole," but at least I found one that still offers Melville's "Bartelby the Scrivner." Point being, I was all ready for an anthology bashing session, but my collegue/professor wasn't having any of it. He did not want to hear my anthology-junkie-backlash. He wanted to hear about my stories, my own writing, and what I was doing with it.

There's a funny thing about being a writer, or at least, a person who actually tells others that he/she is a writer. It's a commodity at a party -- people always want a detailed summary of what your story or novel is "about." But, on a day to day basis, among my friends and family, I have very few people who ask me, "So, how's your writing going? Are you working on anything right now? Are you reading any time soon?" Perhaps it's just assumed that my writing is always going. Perhaps it feels invasive to ask any kind of artist what they're working on. Maybe it's the whole I-don't-exactly-know-how-to-put-this-into-words thing. But the people who ask me on any kind of regular basis how my writing is going are Russ, Eileen from church, and this collegue-professor of mine.

And the truth is, my writing has not been going. I have been using this blog and my reviews as my only form of writing, which is still some sort of practice, but not the kind of practice that this old professor of mine was hoping to hear about when we talked a few days ago. He wanted to hear what stories and chapters I was sending out, what nonfiction pieces I was submitting to journals and literary magazines. I think he wanted to believe that I was not just one of those MFA students who gets the degree and then, stops writing. But sadly, I haven't been much in the creative way at all for a while. It's painful to admit that because I never thought I would be one of those writers who didn't write. I never thought the "hard, no time, KFKD" part of it would ever eclipse the "cheery, cultish" part of it. And yet, here I am: No ray of sunshine, just the horrible jean shorts.

Whe'ever I Hear That Old Southie Swagger

Russ and I saw The Departed on Friday night, which was a hysterically funny and incredibly gruesome marriage of cinema, a perfect Scorscian Frankenstein of a film. All the hysterical laughter was due to Mark Wahlberg, a.k.a. Marky-Mark of the Funky Bunch, who stole the show every single time he opened his mouth. This happened in I Heart Huckabees, too. The guy's just pitch-perfect comedy, whether it's because he's jumping over a counter and yelling to Jason Schwartzman, "I'll cover you!" or encapsulating all the known curse words in a mere sentence with a deeply Southie accent.

Russ and I spent our entire walk home from the theater discussing how much we love Boston, even though neither one of us has ever been there. Russ said he thinks of it as a mythological land, where the linking verbs are repalced "motherfuckin'" and men make even the ugliest gold chain look, if not good, then at least right.

My own realization, walking home, is that Matt Damon is not attractive unless he's speaking in his dreamy little Southie accent. As soon as he opened his mouth - I think his first line was something like, "Those firefighters are homos" - I was instantly hooked. My love of his way with words had me oogling his booty, something I haven't done since Good Will Hunting with any real conviction. And for the record, let me say that I'm not someone who even cares about butts. Not even in high school, where it's like a part of the unspoken curriculum that you check out a few butts each day. I just rarely visually engage with the derriere. Not my thing.

So it got me thinking about the connection between accents and butts and I have come up with the Matt Damon hypothesis. Think about it -- Good Will Hunting? Accent - check. Checking out of the butt? Big check or as Buffy would say, "Wake up and smell the hottie." Didn't we all enjoy those long, numerical whiteboard scenes, with Matty face forward? But then, there was The Bourne Identity-Supremacy-Whatever the third one was/will be. Accent? Bland as American cheese. Butt checkage? None. There was no even curious attraction to the superman-type-fighting-world-governments. The Talented Mr. Ripley? He shows it all in the bathtub scene with Jude Law and I felt nothing. While I could go on, cataloguing Damon's movies and my own not-noticing, I'll take the road less long and present my hypothesis: Matt Damon imbibing Southie = attractive. From that wicked smile to that freckled, turned up nose to that cute little bum, I am deeply moved. I notice everything, like the subtle yet important difference between butt-in-khakis vs. butt-in-jeans. And yet, take away his accent and there's nothing there. His smile loses its edge and he's returned to my peripheral land of look-a-like butts.

Curse word verbs, gold chains, accents that make butts magically attractive -- Boston really is a mythological land.

Happy Spooky Day

Some neighbors are just destined to be topics of conversations. This is one that never holds back on the decorations, especially during spooky day. She also has a license plate rim that says, "I pull the wings off fairies." I'm not sure exactly what that means, but I think it has something to do with the fact that her yard, at present, is filled with caged fairies, subjected to pirate-demon tortures.

She's also somewhat of a shadowy, never-seen, decorates-at-night kind of woman. It's probably because of the wing-pulling.





But there's still nothing scarier than a bad haircut and junior high. I worked the lethal combination of both and if I were braver and had time to download one of my afro-with-bows-in-it photos from that time, I would show you exactly why that is. Perhaps if I was drunk or dared, I might show you my I-want-to-be-Amish hairnet/middle part phase in eighth grade. As I told my fellow pumpkin-carvers at Christina's on Saturday night, there's nothing scarier to a twelve year-old that this story:

I was in a girl scout troup of four in seventh grade and one time, in the car, one of my fellow girls was looking at each of us closely and made the following statement: "Gretchen, I want your hair -- Annie, I want your hair -- Sarah, I do NOT want your hair."

When Stinky Cheese Just Don't Work

Russ and I just discovered that an alley cat decided to have kittens underneath our house. The cat is gray, with a white mask, and has lived in the alley for a few years. Every time it goes away for a while and I think that natural selection - the other feral cats in the alley - has finally occured, she shows up again, slinking around the corners of the houses, ducking out of grasses in the backyard. Tanya is never happier than when there's a feral alley cat to chase down the alley. If she could talk, I think it would be her main topic of conversation.

But the fly in the ointment is that they're under the house, access to which consists of a small cat/Chihuahua/rodenty opening under the house. It is smaller than a bread box, no joking. So Russ and I have been thinking of clever ways to get those kittens out from underneath the house, before they join Mama Cat in the grand tradition of shitting in our yard, getting impregnated and making new generations of kitties, and (of course), streaking down the alley in total fear as a 10-pound dog lives her dream.

Russ had suggested an elaborate scheme of drawing out the kitties with smelly food, and then, coming at them from different directions, and nabbing them with a burlap sack. It was very Charlie's-Angels-meets-Reno-911. And it almost worked, but I, the Reno part of the equation, let the kitten scoot past me and back under the house. It was those eyes -- Kitty looked at me with those little blue eyes, terrified, and I got paralyzed. We were both frozen for just a second and then, she unfroze. I just watched her disappear.

So now's there the problem of drawing them out again and it seems as if they've gotten wise to the whole stinky-food-lure because neither Mama Kitty nor her kits have ventured out again. A few times in the last week, I've been sitting still for a while - and that tends to happen with the paper volcano of grading that is my job - and heard their wavery mews from under the house. But there's no way to reach them unless they come out on their own.

Photoshop, Program of Wonder!

Night

Yesterday, I started and finished Elie Wiesel's Night. I managed to make it to 28 without ever having been required to read it, which somehow feels like the result of the world's least read-y high school English education. No kidding. We spent over a month designing a new planet my junior year of high school - what does this have to do with literature? - and another month or so writing a group novel. Of course, my role, being known as the "writer" of our class, became to write and edit the whole damn thing. Luckily, I had a friend named Jed, who took compassion on my sorry task and helped me out in the whole writing-compiling thing. I wish I had a copy of this novel -- I think it involved a ski accident and possibly, a jewel heist. Jed, if you're out there reading this and still have our novel on your computer, send me a copy stat.

I have always wanted to say stat.

The point is, I don't remember reading much of anything except the Count of Monte Cristo, which was so good I raced through it in a few days and spent the next month doodling in my notebook, occasionally writing notes. I didn't say I was a good student in high school -- but had we read more books like Night, I might've sat up a little straighter.

I was finishing it yesterday morning, at Peet's, and the guy at the next table struck up a conversation about it, about how he'll never read it again, about how heavy it is, how it ripped him open. He had plagu-ed artisty hair, so I knew he was not just being dramatic, or maybe just a teeny bit dramatic, but just for emphasis.

"It's very haunting," I said. And I couldn't help it -- I started smiling. But just for emphasis.

A Chihuahua Will Change Your Life...In Bed

The other day, I woke up to find Tanya, la chihuahua, sleeping next to me, with her furry little sea-lion head on my pillow, her body under the covers, her front legs stretched out over the top of the duvet. She seems to be evolving.

In Praise of White After Labor Day

There were many times in my life when I thought I'd never get married. There were many factors contributing to this, including, but not limited to, my own parents and their marital buffet of dysfunctions, the boys in my high school class being more interested in basketballs and guitars than hanging out, and the fact that I read Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own," and vowed to always have my own room. I just assumed that as long as I was single, I would have that room all to myself and no one would ever be the boss of me. I would be able to write and dream and be as silly as I was in my secret journal, which my friends and sister kept finding and reading. Very annoying for a slightly self-conscious high school cheerleader. So I began keeping a decoy journal and kept my real journal very, very secretly hidden in the back of my underwear drawer.

So there I was, all cozy in "A Room of One's Own," only I was sort of lonely. I didn't know that I'd be lonely, but I was. There were friends and later, in college, roommates and some random flings, and there was all the books and essays and academic work my little old brain would ever want, as well as cool art and cheap wine, but none of that really made up for the fact that I would always go back to my own room, and though my own, it was just me.

In my times of lonely living, I came back to stories. All my family, no matter what our other faults, are excellent storytellers. I always loved being part of a crew that would linger until 1:00 in the morning, sitting around with high school yearbooks, letting the stories roll about classmates, some of whom I still knew. My imagination roamed as I heard about the jock who died in the water at Starved Rock and the cute black girl named Lamb who my dad secretly dated in junior high. She had one of those plastic pink bow barrettes stuck in her huge afro -- I have yet to use her as a character in my own writing, but somewhere, sooner or later, I'm sure she'll emerge, pink barrette and all.

One story that stuck with me later in my own room came from my Aunt Sue. She was always content in her singleness, and as I got older, I understood why. She'd been engaged to married when suddenly, her fiancee stopped talking to her for the last three months leading up to their wedding. Bad. But even worse, in a sense, was that as a twenty-something, she found herself going to a lot of weddings and sitting around tables at the receptions, making bets with her fellow receptionees about how long the marriages would last. There was usually much green put down on the year-or-less category. So many of her friends, she told me, were just getting married because they were afraid of being alone, not because they loved and even particularly liked the other person. I would vow, fervently in my idealist teenage way, that no matter what, I would never get married just to have another body in my room.

And she smiled, maybe a little idealistically herself: "I'd rather be single forever than realize that I married the wrong person for the wrong reasons."

You know, I thought she might be single forever. I thought I might, too, at one point. But here it is, 2006, and as of two weeks ago, she's engaged to be married for the first time to a really wonderful man. She's getting married in February and moving into a new house after she sells her home.This is radical upheaval, the kind that only love inspires, and here, after fifty years, she's found it. She's currently throwing her life into mix-up-mix-down of future homesharing, trying to figure out what this new way of living is going to look like, because, let's be honest, these transitions rarely happen like they do in good writing. Smoothly, connectedly, without total randomness. As much as I admire good writing, I admire the willingness to mix it up-down even more. Especially years after you're supposed to be done doing that kind of stuff.

So, this is in praise of all the things that are supposed to be over at certain points of your life: high school, loneliness, conversations about "the way it is," secret journals to throw off your friends (or maybe blogs), artistic careers, starting over, new houses, engagements, and walking down the aisle for the first time as a mature woman in a fancy white dress in the middle of winter. These things are never off the table, something I remember in a room of my own, in a chair of my own, in a home shared with someone who respects my room and chair. Virginia would be delighted, I think.

Two Things Happened This Week

One was that Russ and I celebrated our fifth wedding anniversary. I think that means we're officially at the point where things get celebrated on fivesies instead of onesies. Playing jacks, marriage -- it's all part of the same circle. And I'm referencing my friend Chad and metafictional circles, not Simba and the circle of life circles.

We went to the Aquarium of the Pacific and took a behind-the-scenes tour. This means we saw all the secret labs where horseshoe crabs are (as we speak) being bred with humans to produce new superhumans with amazing pinching capabilities. We got to feed sharks nori and explore the world of aquarium-style water filtration. I realized the novel I'm writing, which includes a character who works in an aqurium, needs to be totally rewritten and imagined. I'm talking Eternal Sunshine revision, which includes memory erasure and lots of deletion. But far from being an anguishing thought, it's completely exciting. I like learning enough about a subject to get more ideas about how to tie characters to events and places; for instance, I learned yesterday that although the A.P. has about 1,000 employees, only about 200 of them are full-time and paid. So now I have to figure out how to translate my newly acquired smarts about this into the novel and account for how, if my character is one of 200 paid employees, she managed to finagle such a cushy gig. She must be a cut-throat and probably, a bit devious. Dark.

The other thing that happened this week is that we had an infestation of ants. Ants covered our kitchen walls, marching around like the Israelites around the walls of Jericho. Before everything fell to the ground, we crushed so many of them that our house still hasn't gotten rid of the stink of ant death. We had to vaccuum ant carcuses off our walls and floors and doorjambs, mop them up, sweep them up, pinch them off the utensils and pots and pans.

As I was driving to Vons for the third time in one night -- once to find a DVD-R for Russ, once to get ant spray, and then, to get Russ butterfly bandages after he split his head open on the corner of a cabinet while killing ants -- I thought about why we haven't domesticated anteaters yet.

Doubly Entendretic

The other day, when I went to buy Tanya her dog food at one of our local doggy merchandisers, I noticed that the Shakey's restaurant next door was fenced off and had a SOLD sign hanging above the entrance. I've never been to Shakey's, but my students tell me they had an excellent salad bar. There was actually much discussion about the excellentness of the salad bar.

I'm always curious about what's coming and going in my homeland. For instance, to my great delight, I noticed the other day when I was walking Tanya to our local coffee joint that Monrovia is getting with the classy and welcoming its first wine and cheese store. California wine and cheese, no less. This is cause for great excitement in a town where we have much in the way of eyeglass, stationary-and-stampin', and antique stores, but little in the way of spirits and curdling (e.g., things I might actually purchase). I think I speak for all Monrovians when I say, "Welcome, spirits and curdling!"

So when I was ready to pay for my cans of dog food, I noticed a bright blue sheet on the counter by the cash register. Being a read-y sort of person, I distracted myself from an awkward interaction with the cashier by brushing up on the latest canine literature. Turns out, it was not just doggy-centric.

I left the store with two cans of dog food and a shake of the head in disbelief. Because, despite the extreme irony, the powers that be are trying to turn that Shakey's into a strip joint. Shakey's, indeed.

The Well Running A Little Dry is Relative

It's September, which means it's almost officially fall here in southern California. It doesn't really become fall until the end of October -- the air starts to smell of burning leaves, or maybe just burning hillsides, and Russ and I usually celebrate by ordering a pizza of sausage, garlic, mushrooms, and tomatoes. Very fall-y tastes. We sit around our coffeetable, eating pizza, marveling at how dark it is at 6:30 and sometimes - if it's Halloween, which often coincides with this autumnal celebration - keep the door open and listen to how many kids are walking by, but not stopping, at our house. And we always get the good candy, too.

I've always been on an academic calendar, so fall to me has always meant the beginning of things. This is in contrast to the real calendar, where the beginning of things coincides with buds and pastels and the smell of jasmine. Now I'm teaching instead of taking classes, which means that this signals the start of grading papers, trying to rouse college freshman with witticisms, and the loss of freedom. In a way, teaching college is an easy gig -- I only have to show up three days a week and on these three days, I don't start earlier than 10:30 in the morning. It's wonderful and I'm spoiled. But work is still work and writing all day (with random trips to wikipedia and Ebay, of course) is real freedom. Checking eBay at work just doesn't provide the same thrill.

And this is why I've been so absent of late. My energies have been going into work and curriculum and thoughts about how to best communicate to my students about how wide the world is, how many factors there are pressing down on their cute little brains trying to get them to think in certain ways. These are all exciting, in their English-y way, but by the end of the week, I'm seriously wiped. Not just from communicating, but from performing, because that's a big part of teaching. Being a performer, making subjects fun (and, as some tell me, a little sexy, as in cool and attractive) is hard work. It's putting both your body and your brain out on the line with the hopes of communicating the real, the important, not just random blah-blahs of the Charlie Brown school of learning.

But writing is writing and to do it, you have to practice a lot. At least that's what I tell my students. And I don't want to be one of those teachers who tell their students to do something that they don't do themselves. It always bugged me - and still does - that various gym teachers throughout my school-life would assign us miles to run without running them with us. So here I am, a writing teacher, and the writing part of my title has been sadly lacking. I need to get out there, like the gym teachers of school years' past, and do the work myself.

For starters -- I'm writing for the very cool Not For Tourists Guide as a L.A. Radar Writer. I think this is just a fancy way of saying that I'm a reviewer. So, if you're interested in my reviews of off-the-path San Gabriel Valley establishments, check out the website.

If not, fear not. I'll be back soon, doing my laps along with the troops.

On Being Mortal and Stupid

Today is that most infamous of recent American dates and I am commemorating it by not listening to any TV or radio or even reading published media about the day. There are many reasons for this, but me being a cold, heartless bitchy-type is not one of them. In fact, I feel certain that by not intaking all the spewed sentimentality, the forced photo opps, and the countless coverage of questions that are easy to ask - as opposed to difficult, complicated, and necessary to ask - I'm actually memorializing a tragedy in a way that's meaningful, at least to me. Thinking about it. Chewing it up. Digesting. Rinse. Repeat.

Yesterday, our pastors mentioned that 9/11 was the day that the world changed. I love and respect both of them, but I totally disagreed with that statement and sneakily wrote so on my bulletin. There's nothing about the world that changed today or any other day -- it was only our perceptions of our place in the world, our status, our own inpenetrability as a nation and people that changed. After all, there is death all around us and always has been; as Anne Lamott says, we are all terminal on this bus. I think what this day did was just remind us that our own terminalness was and is crouching on the doorstep, that our notions of safety were a myth, and that our actions in the world - shock and awe! - had consequences.

When it happened, I was addressing our wedding invitations. It's probably one of those moments that people remember exactly what they were doing, a la Kennedy. I watched the coverage on TV all day, sometimes on mute in order to get the NPR version of what was going down. I listened to the coverage pretty obsessively for the next three weeks. I was trying to understand all the layers, all the pieces that made up this attack. There were lots of them. My work was definitely cut out for me and I dug in with much moxy. I wanted to understand; I wanted it to be logical and seamly, as in having neat, straight seams with no gaps or snags. Like Martin Scorsce, I was looking for the narrative thread, the thing that tied all the information and loss and anger and meltdown together. But, it's never been seamly, at least for me, and that's why I've been so chafed at how it's being remembered, memorialized, talked about these days. As somewhat neat and condensed.

It just so happened that I watched the Buffy episode "The Body" today, which is about loss and anger and meltdown. Above all, it's about death, sudden death. Buffy's been dealing with death ever since she became the slayer, but not natural death. Quick, unexpected death. And in this episode, she has to deal and so does the rest of the Scooby gang. At one point, Buffy is talking to Tara, the only other person who's experienced the death of family member.

Buffy: "Was it sudden? Your mother?"
Tara; "No. (pause) But yes. It's always sudden."

And at another point, Anya (a now-human-once-vengeance-demon) asks about what's going to happen at the morgue, what happens to the body, what do humans do with the body and Willow explodes. Tells her how inappropriate all these questions are. Anya, looking unusually helpless, says "But I don't understand! I don't understand how this all happens, how we go through this. I mean - I knew her, and then she's... there's just a body, and I don't understand why she just can't get back in it and not be dead anymore! It's stupid! It's mortal and stupid! And... and Xander's crying and not talking, and...and I was having fruit punch, and I thought, 'Well, Joyce will never have any more fruit punch - ever, and she'll never have eggs, or yawn, or brush her hair, not ever,' and no one will explain to me why."

I found truth in this today, much more so than watching memorials or speeches or unity gatherings. Because on today, 9/11, it's still sudden. It's quiet. Like the Buffy episode, there's no musical score to make it more comforting. What happened then and what's happened since seems so mortal and stupid. And I, for one, still have the feeling that I don't exactly understand and no one will explain to me why.

We Do Not Interrupt Anything Like A Broadcast For This News

My posting life has sadly ebbed as new responsibilities and schedules have taken over. I have only had the urge to sit down and pound out some blogs on this front about a zillion times in the last week. So many changes spark my interest in the new and the old in life -- for instance, my new life-gig involves something new, as in new curriculum, and something old, as in I'm teaching at the university from which I graduated six years ago. Now all I need is something borrowed and blue and I'll be ready to really take the plunge.

In between all the driving and teaching and taking in of surrealness, I've been flying through Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes. I'm in the middle of season 4 (Riley Finn territory, as Hillery says) and seemingly unable to think of anything else meaningful or carry on normal lines of thought without wondering what twists Joss Whedon is going to throw at me next. Oh, and the way you know that both Russ and I are addicted? We throw around "Joss" in casual conversation all the time, such as "That's totally what Joss would say!" or "Do you think Joss likes M*a*s*h?" We now factor him into all our theoretical conversations and try and guage his response.

This is how you know you're really addicted to a show.

Yosemite the Beautiful

Back in the day, before Russ and I said "I do" to marriage, we said "I do" to pre-marital counseling. I think this is fairly standard fare -- you get out all the aggression and shit-storms and dysfunctions before marriage so that you can live happily working on all that stuff as long as you both shall live. Counseling wasn't easy, but then again, I guess that's sort of the point. At least, that was our friend and counselor's opinion on the subject. He told us flat out at the beginning of our seven sessions that he was going to do his best to break us up, I think the idea being that if we could survive this marital bootcamp, we'd be more-than-okay in the days to follow. His methods eventually led to me calling him a bastard during one session, something that he still laughs about when we reminisce.

Out the all the valuable things we took away from the experience, one was that if you want to have traditions as a couple, you have to start them. Even when you're both students and often living off $30. "What sorts of traditions?" we asked. "Well, like vacations. If you don't make them a priority, let money and time stand in the way, you'll never get in the habit of being vacationing-types." I think that was around the time when I was still heavily using whatever and that's exactly what I thought: what-ever. Vacations aren't tradition. You want to go somewhere, you go. It was perhaps my psyche slowly shredding evidence that my family's vacations were indeed ritual -- every year, around the same time, we'd jump in the car and head south. Unfortunately, our choices only showed any consistency, any sort of tradition, in their complete awfulness. Someone always got arrested; mobsters threatened us; my sister got carsick; my dad passed out inside Cinderella's castle; and then there was the year that my sister had to sleep inside the cabinets because our room was so small.

So here it is, five years later C.E., and as of the beginning of August, Russ and I had yet to take any sort of vacation together. And forget traditions. We were just trying to get out of L.A. and it's unbearable 102-ness. He had this idea -- we could camp Yosemite and Calaveras Big Tress for under $100. It'd be cheap and fun and we could be outside and come and go as we pleased. No reservations. Just a truck, a tank of gas, and hopes of finding good campsites every night. Which we did. By streams, by people who caught fish and shared them with us, in places with masses of wildflowers, by lots of uber-efficient Germans, at high, chilly places, and among some of the largest trees in the world.

Check out our photos to get an idea of how not-bad this vacation was. In fact, I think I can safely say that I'm even thinking about doing it again next year. Traditional, isn't it?

You Can't Surprise a Gal with a Chihuahua

Yeah, well, that was a load of crap.

Last Friday, I woke up to Russ gently shaking my shoulder and whispering that I needed to wake up. To the many who have been privileged to see me in the morning previously, a 7:00 a.m. wakeup call is enough to reek havoc on my system for days. In other words, I don't do early mornings, at least not well. In my ideal life, which I have in many ways been living for the last few years, I wake up at 9:00 in the morning. Decadent? Yes. Negotiable? No.

That last part was also a load of crap. I have a whole bunch of potential jobs that are going to call for pre-9:00 wake-up calls and I figure that discriminating on the whole time thing is going to leave me working the lunch shift at the local Canadian Cafe or worse, at Forever 21. Getting a job is the most not-fun way to spend summer and I'm sure I'll go into snivelling detail about it at some point, but for now, just trust me. Not fun.

Anyway, I cracked an eye in order to show that I was in a state of half-communication and simply asked what the hell was going on. And that was when he dropped the bomb that our friends Christina and Emilio were eloping to Alaska. On a cruise. In about two hours. He told me that we needed to drive them to the harbor.

This news helped me progress from half-awake to sitting up in disbelief and wonder. "But she never said a thing about it," I said. Russ then said the only thing that makes a difference in my morning world: "If you hurry, we can get coffee at Peet's."

I went from bed-head to controlled-coif in about five minutes, throwing on every product that would make it seem as if I had been awake a whole lot longer -- as if I was the sort of person, nay writer, who rose with the sun, spent a few minutes contemplating the meaning of it all, and then, sat down to write totally brillant (and coherent) stories.

But, as you all know, that, too, is a load of jack-ole-crap.

As the coffee kicked in and my monkey mind slowly calmed down, I began asking questions. Why Alaska? And a cruise -- it didn't seem like either of them. They had invited me over to dinner last night, and I had gone instead to play/watch soccer with Russ, and now, I felt like kicking myself. They probably wanted to talk to me about this whole crazy plan of theirs. And what about witnesses? I was not a fiancee for six hellish months without picking up a bit of the marriage lingo, insights into the whole procedure.

I asked Russ these questions. He answered each with a very logical response that totally satisfied my questions, each one hinging on that old Southern saying, "Well, that just goes and shows you how some folks would do." We arrived at their house and I took a deep breath. I realized I was nervous. I hadn't had adequate time to rearrange my world in which Christina and Emilio were married people, married people whose first ceremony I wouldn't get to attend, and in a way, I didn't know exactly what to say. I was happy, of course, but also, totally unsure what to expect. And that uncertainty always makes me a little anxious, a little nail-bitey and a little more quiet. I desperately needed Emily Post at that moment, or at the very least, Dear Ann Landers, but unfortunately for me, I've never read either of them. The most mannerly writer in my repertoire is Alice Munro, but I suspect her courtesy is just part-and-parcel with her Canadianness.

When I walked inside, I said my, "Hi-I-can't-believe-this-is-happening," and was then handed an itinerary by Christina. It took me the better part of a minute to find that instead of Alaska, this cruise was going to San Francisco, and oh, yeah, it wasn't a cruise at all but a train, and Emilio's name was nowhere to be found, but there was mine, at the bottom. I looked up, probably with that fog of a look that seemed to be a permanent fixture on my face that morning, and everyone else burst out laughing.

It was my birthday present from Christina, a wonderful present, and it was a wonderful weekend. She's written about it at length on her blog, recounting it much better than I could, and so, if you want to know what we did, who we met, what we saw, you should definitely read her account of the weekend. You'll be amazed at all the events you can pack into two days, if you try hard enough.

I was also enormously proud of Russ -- he has made himself quite a reputation, over the years, for being a horrible liar and keeper-of-secrets. I never thought, in a million years, that he'd be able to pull of a verbal heist this elaborate. He completely surprised me with this one.

And that's the truth.

Sarong, So Right

As the World Cup and all things soccer slowly fade from the American public's mind, I'm just starting my own education on this ball-kicking phenomena known as the beautiful game. Let me say, for the record, that I'm just about as American as they come. Raised in the Midwest on corn and parades. A grandpa who would rather die than drive around in a car built by any nation from the dippy Axis powers. Or as he called them, "meatheads."

He would've appreciated the match between Germany and Italy. But that's beside the point.

Funny enough, Russ and his family have a long history of soccer-love. Russ's dad, George, superstud and soccer beefcake, was so talented that he tried out for the national team in the seventies. But he said that it was all political and thus, was shut out from ever putting on the (very bland) uniform of red, white, and stripes. Russ and his brother grew up with soccer in their blood, so they played a lot. Russ was a goalie and when I really want to get a rise out of him, I state that goalies are simply the laziest players on the team. You should see the indignation, the pursing of the lips, the shaking of the index finger. I find great entertainment in this.

But I - American as Peanut Butter, as my friend Danielle would say - didn't grow up around such soccer love. I grew up around parents who yelled and shrieked at the Bulls, the Bears, and the Cubs. Chicago fans ARE just as scary as all the rumors. I remember lying in bed some nights as a kid, listening to the Rebel yell of my parents as they watched those games and wondering how someone could get so worked up about a stupid game. I don't know that I would've known the difference between them being slowly murdered by intruders and Michael Jordan shooting a game-winning three pointer.

My first encounter with soccer was a bit violent: Within the first five minutes of playing the game, I kicked at the ball and ended up missing it, kicking a fellow player in the shin instead. She had to be taken to the hospital because her leg swelled to the size of a purple Japanese lantern. She walked around in a splint for the next few weeks. It might not have been so traumatic if twenty minutes later, I hadn't pushed against another girl and she hadn't sprained her ankle. Again, more weeks-long splints. Let it be said: I am clearly suited for American football with all my brutishness and injury-infliction.

Despite all the emergency sirens in the background, I had a good time playing soccer. And when I met Russ, I could see that he was clearly in love with that kicky little black-and-white pentagonal ball. So, I did what any good person would do: I faked it until I made it. (That rhyme doesn't sound nearly as good in the past tense, by the way.) I indulged his need to watch Fox's Soccer station whenever we were in the same room as a cable TV. I hung at British pubs when they showed the Euro Cup or Manchester United. I kicked around the soccer ball with him, though I did not get anywhere near the shin-ankle area.

But never did soccer really take hold in me until recently. And it wasn't even the World Cup games, which we watched at our local Brit-Cal pub with a bunch of other regulars, although that just sweetened the whole finally making it thing. For me it, of course, took a writer and that writer would be Nick Hornby.

Let me say that I don't love all of Hornby's work -- I'm not a Nick slut. I started A Long Way Down and closed it in frustration after 50 pages. I wanted to like it, but in this case, I couldn't fake it or make it. I was just annoyed by the style of the book. But that wasn't the case when I opened June's National Geographic to his essay on what makes soccer such a great sport. The whole issue was dedicated to soccer and what's more, there were journalists and writers representing and writing about different countries, giving us (soccer-ignorant) Americans insights into why it's such a big deal everywhere else but here. The introduction to all these essays, written by Sean Wilsey, was hilariously accurate: "There are many beautiful things about being an American fan of men's World Cup soccer—foremost among them is ignorance. The community in which you were raised did not gather around the television set every four years for a solid, breathless month. Your country has never won. You can pick whatever team you like best and root for it without shame or fear of reprisal. You have not been indoctrinated into unwanted-yet-inescapable tribal allegiances by your soccer-crazed countrymen. You are an amateur, in the purest sense of the word. So with the World Cup taking place this month in Germany—and the World Cup is the only truly international sporting event on the planet (no, the Olympics, with their overwhelming clutter of boutique athletics, do not matter in the same way)—you can expect to spend the month in paradise."

It made sense to me, coming from a family with a dad who only owned shirts with Chicago sports team logos on them and a mom who decorated in Cubs paraphanalia. Had I decided to root for the Detroit Pistons in basketball or the Green Bay Packers in football or anyone else in baseball, there would've been both shame and reprisal. Maybe disowning, too. After I moved to Los Angeles, my dad once told me that we would always be on good terms, so long as I still rooted for the Bears. "But the Bears suck," I said. "They've sucked ever since they won the Super Bowl." And then I got a classic piece of fanatic sportsman wisdom: The Bears, he replied, were like an ugly kid. You know it's a trainwreck and you love it anyway.

But it was Nick's article, "Faded Glory: Taming the Hooligans," about fanaticism, the riots and the tears and the tear gas after games, about how embarassing and yet, how deliriously addictive it is to love a team as much as he loves England. Also, how complicated it gets when your sports team gets tied up in your national identity. We don't have that so much over on this side of the pond. Our sports teams are only bonded to cities and states and the whole state-supremacy thing sort of died with the Civil War. So we can be fanatical about our sports team and how it defines our city, like say, how the Bostonians define themselves by the Green Monster or how Angelinos define ourselves by our contempt of the Angels, but the Red Sox - no matter how many curses they break or cute butts they show off - are only ever going to be a small part of the whole that makes up our national face.

My recent fondeness for soccer has a lot to do with liking the idea of a national face. One that isn't militaristic or bossy-pants. I'd like to be able to root internationally for some part of my country without being caricatured and for me, soccer is a pretty good deal. At this point, America's team is more like the Bears, the ugly child, a little harder to love than the beautiful teams like Argentina or Italy. But ugly or not, it's nice to feel like cheering. I like events where we, America, come in as the underdogs instead of the favorites. It makes a win that much more thrilling and, I think, it makes the rest of the world like us just a teeny bit more. It's saying that you'll wach and participate, even if you're not the best, because it's great to see the best in action. Which I think is the whole point of soccer and just a little subversive. But in a good way.

The last thing that Hornby said was that whereas the face of soccer used to be rough and tumble, images of Terry Butcher with a messy, blood-soaked head and uniform, it's now represented by David Beckham in all his mohawked and sarong-ed spelendor: "The England fans...were still singing their 'No surrender to the IRA' song, and there's more than a suspicion that they'd rather be watching Terry Butcher and his fixed bayonets than David Beckham, a man who, after all, has been photographed wearing a sarong. But then, that's England all over at the moment. We'd still rather be bombing the Germans; but after 60 years, there's a slowly dawning suspicion that those days aren't coming back any time soon, and in the meantime we must rely on sarong-wearing, multimillionaire pretty boys to kick the Argies for us. We're not happy about it, but what can we do?"

Obviously, I'm more in the tradition of Butcher -- inflicting pain on others, racking up head wounds, messing up my clothes. But I appreciate those who can spruce it up, flash a little teeth for the cause. It should be encouraging to us as Americans, just entering the game. If a sarong and smile can represent the face of soccer, the possibilities really are infinite.

So You Don't Waste Time, Like I Do

Just in case anyone out there really likes the song being played on the July Target commercials, the ones with spinning plates and boxes of dancing Special K, and is annoyed that they can't find the name of the song even after multiple google searches with all the right key words that just don't work, I come bearing good news:

Ragg: "I want more"

Ahh. Enjoy that half hour.

Documenting Summer

The summer after my senior year of high school, my two good friends Rebekah and Rebecca decided on a summer-long mission: They were determined to find the best Caesar salad in the greater Aurora area for the best price. So they embarked on this quest with nothing but loose change from their respective summer jobs and moxy.

They had a running written log of their opinions on each place they visited, each salad they consumed -- had it been now instead of then, perhaps they would've shared their knowledge by way of a blog. But it was 1996 and, being the technological dark ages and all, we only had Hello Kitty! notebooks and cool Japanese pens that broke the third time you used them. Apparently, their detailing of each restaurant was extensive, as was the detailing of the ingredients, quality, and overall combined flavor of each salad. I'm not sure if I ever heard the final results of their summer long adventure, but I'm sure they're still hard birds to please when it comes to a salad with creamy dressings, crutons, and Parmesan cheese.

I have my own version of this, which just happens to also coincide with summer. Russ and I just finished the first season of Stargate SG-1, which was awesome sci-fi fun, and are gearing up to begin the whole Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series, interspersed chronologically with episodes of Angel, Firefly, and Serenity. Before you call me a dork, I need to tell you that it's been claimed by some of the most intelligent writers I know that Buffy is the best written series that's ever been on TV -- and that's a heavy claim, indeed, when up against shows like The Simpsons, Seinfeld, The Sopranos, M*A*S*H, and the X-Files. I'll keep you posted on my own thoughts about Buffy and its place on the medal podium of TV series.

The other thing, besides sci-fi series, that summer means for me is documentaries. I love me a good documentary and summer seems to be the perfect time to catch up on all things weird and wonderful. Documentaries are the film version of creative non-fiction: You can't believe every single detail to be the God-honest truth, but you can relax into the most truthfully entertaining version the creator could muster.

So here is my carefully compiled must-watch documentaries for maximum summer (indoor) enjoyment:

1. Spellbound: I went to the annual Illinois Speech Meet a few times in elementary school, which is nerve-wracking enough. But at least you know exactly what you're going to say going into it. These kids are the definition of graceful as every word in the book (literally) is thrown at them.

2. Riding Giants: I'm a little afraid of ocean waves, so watching people surf 50+ foot waves at beaches like Mavericks almost makes me faint. But it's a thrilling ride nonetheless.

3. Bob Dylan-No Direction Home: Martin Scorsese's documentary is often scattered, but that fits the life and myth of Bob Dylan perfectly. I not only learned about Bob Dylan's 1965 transformation from folkie into electric rocker, but all about the folk movement of the 1950s and 60s.

4. Ken Burns' Civil War: I was just eleven when I saw this for the first time and I've been a fan ever since. Back in the day, I hoped to marry a man in the mold of Shelby Foote. If you watch this, you'll understand why. Plus, Mary Chestnut was the C.W.'s equivalent to bloggers.

5. Grizzly Man: Was he passionate or mentally ill? The questions are as much fun as watching Timothy Treadwell walk up to an Alaskan Grizzly bear and pet it on the neck.

6. Waiting for Guffman: Not technically a documentary, but for laughs, music, and small-town insights, there's nothing better than hanging out in Stool World and then, heading down to the DQ for a lowfat blizzard.

7. Supersize Me: I'm not a "DIE MCDONALD'S!" sort of gal, but watching this guy gain 30 pounds and huff his way up three flights of stairs is pretty sobering. Keep veggies on hand while watching to counter any nausea.

8. Bowling for Columbine: No matter what you think of Michael Moore, this is a compelling look at gun usage in America.

9. Andy Goldsworthy-Rivers and Tides: This is a quiet documentary, almost a meditation, but also a fantastic insight into the life, inspiration, and projects of an outdoor sculptor.

10. Touching the Void: A mix of actors and documentary, this one is full of tragedy and lives on the brink of loss up in the Andes. Russ and I sat on the edge of the couch while watching this one.

Honorable Mentions: Dogtown and Z-boys, The Gods Must be Crazy, Ken Burns' Jazz, This is Spinal Tap

In my soon-to-be viewed queue: An Inconvenient Truth, Wordplay, Who Killed the Electric Car?, K.B.'s Baseball, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Rize, Trekkies, Unknown White Male, Murderball, Born into Brothels, Dig!, The Blues, and Fred Rogers: America's Favorite Neighbor.

Enjoy.

Ye Old Swimming Hole

Up until now, I've been the kind of girl who was in the pool from June until Spetember. I would still like to be that kind of girl, but unfortunately, living in Monrovia doesn't give me a lot of options, pool-wise. There isn't a community pool and that's all the more unlucky because right now, it's hot. Muy, muy caliente. Sticky, too. And our house, cute as it may be, is not a champ when it comes to maintaining a reasonable temperature. Sometimes sitting in my house feels like watching that "Temperature" video where most of the video consists of a thermometer climbing and falling until it looks on the verge of exploding at both points.

You would think that a house built back in good ole 1906 B.C.E. - before (air)conditioning expected - would have all sorts of funky little features that would keep it temperature stable. Things you see in the Gamble House, like ceiling windows that encourage air flow. Unfortunately for us, this seemed to be rustic winter house of rich family who probably felt it was charming to put in lots of air-stopping walls, a fireplace, and a big, stuffy attic just for kicks. Since they only used it during the few winter months, they probably had the option of high-tailling it to the Northern California coast when the heat got a little kicky. I'm thinking it cost about $800 for a summer of luxurious coastal living.

Ah, to be a rich person in 1906.

I once got a fortune out of a cookie that said "Lucky is coming your way." I always loved that -- I think it meant luck is coming your way, but maybe it meant some person/canine/time traveller named Lucky was soon to be arriving on my doorstep. So lucky was ambiguous -- it could've meant anyone, anything. What made me think of it is two-fold: one, that I just recently wrote a section in a novel-chapter that I've been working on that spends time on luck(y) and two, that when it comes to pools and other full-body submersion tanks of cool-cold water, I've always been lucky.

I grew up as poolside royalty at a swim club called Westwind. What made me royalty was the fact that my grandpa just happened to own the joint and so, my family got free summer admission to both Westwind and the tennis club next door which - again - my grandpa just happened to own. You knew we were like the scholarship kids because we were the only people that rolled in ten-year old Cadillac without a muffler and with the windows down, since the air-conditioner was usually broken. Oh, and my little sister was usually hanging her whole head, neck, and sometimes chest out the window as we made our way to the parking lot. Believe it, Gloria Allred.

My cousin Cathy just reminded me a few weeks ago about what terrors we were because of this royal status. It was probably the first and only time that any of us had a sense of entitlement, i.e. our grandpa owns this place so we should be allowed to get on the P.A. system and us girls should be allowed to run through the guys locker room. Which I never did, I swear, except once when I took part in the "All-Female Westwind Sleepover," an event where we hunted ghosts, slept on lawn chairs in sleeping bags, and yes, took that coveted all-access tour through the crappy boys locker room. But my sister and Cathy - never ones to let mere lifeguards get them down - took some excursions through the locker room during regular hours. They also waited for every chance to jump on the P.A. system and when it came, they would page our moms with phony messages. My sister and Cathy were three years younger than me, but I learned everything I ever needed to know about prank calling from listening to them on the P.A. system.

If you've ever spent any amount of time in the Midwest during the summer, you'll understand why we spent almost every day at the pool. Temperatures can and do reach 100 degrees by 10:00 a.m. and that's without the humidity. One thing I enjoy about living in the desert climate - California, in other words - is that no matter how hot it gets during the day, the temperature always goes down at night. In Illinois, that's not so much the case. You can spend the night in toasty 90 degree + humidity sweats. The years of my Illinois life seemed to fluctuate between winter and mosquito season.

When I came to California, I heard what I can only call now a very vicious and hurtful rumor that there were NO mosquitoes. I was told that they couldn't survive, that there just wasn't enough water for their viral reproduction patterns. I was overjoyed. I was the girl who (apart from always being in the pool) always had dozens of small red bumps on her arms and legs as a child, the one who the mosquitoes always attacked first. And I was the one who doesn't just get bit, but whose bites swell up to astronomically red and itchy proportions. So I came to California, bright eyed and like so many others, was deceived by the rumors of this golden land. Because IT'S NOT TRUE. Mosquitoes live, jive, and survive all over this place. And it turns out, that in a way, my saving grace is partly to blame. (But that comes later.) And yes, there are less mosquitoes here than in Illinois, but it's not saying much since there are less mosquitos everywhere compared with Illinois. Right now, I've logged a total of nine bites in the last week. Which is a lot compared to zero.

Sadly, by my last years of high school, Westwind was a shadow of its former glory days. Aurora got the bright idea to open kick-ass community aquatic centers, which were a fraction of the membership it cost to hang out at Westwind. Plus, the aquatic centers had cool slides, wave pools, and the classic mom favorite, the lazy river. So Westwind closed. My mom and aunt Janie got subversive one year by sneaking us into an exclusive neighborhood-only pool by using our grandparents address as their membership address in order to get a key. Of course, their high class version of fence-hopping only made me nervous. I've never much had the constitution for getting in trouble. It gives me gas. We spent one good summer there before a certain Benedict Arnold ratted us out to the community center. We were thenceforth banish-ed. Now that I think back on it, I feel a certain sense of pride that my mom and Janie were cool enough to pull the wool over the eyes of an entire neighborhood community center for a summer. I'll be calling them if I ever have the urge to check out one of those exclusive hipster clubs like LAX or Bungalow 8.

So here's the later part: Russ and I have spent some miserable days in the heat, shutting ourselves up in dark rooms, and sitting in front of fans with our bellies exposed. I once heard that if you put your belly in front of the cold air, it will cool down the rest of your body, which, like the no-mosquitoes-in-California thing, seems to be untrue. Even for all that, it was still so hot and sticky inside. Just when we were considering taking up that old tradition of sneaking into pools, Russ had a brilliant idea.He figured out how foothillers, like ourselves, beat the heat without spending a fortune to drive to the beach or join the Rose Bowl's Aquatic Center. He discovered the hidden pools of the foothills inside all the canyons on a hike last week. Some of the water from the late-melting snow in the mountains is still coming down this way and so, the pools of the foothills are high and beautifully cold. Whole families gather with picnic baskets and coolers and spend the day in the water. Some of the pools are over six feet deep; some are beside waterfalls; the one Russ and I relaxed in on Saturday was about four feet deep and full of tadpoles. We sat on the rocky bottom, reclined against rocks, and let the chilly mountain water make up for the 100 degree heat, the weird humidity, houses without central air, and of course, all those damn mosquitoes.

Don't Roll Your Eyes, People

I know, I know, the ads aren't the coolest. I apologize, but since I'm looking for a job this summer and since Russ and I are living off bulk spaghetti in the meantime, this is just one more way to make a little side change. I had to take drastic measures -- Russ laid out this elaborate plan to turn Saturdays into aluminum can collecting day. So clearly, it was either this or digging through other people's property.

So don't blame me. Blame Russ.

Come on, Feel the Alleynoise! (Part 3)

When I first sat down to write about noise, I was thinking about babies, not because I want to have them, but because visiting Illinois made me realize how people my age beyond the L.A. foothills-coast-loop live. And how they procreate. I have to be careful here, because I could very easily slip into contempt, which is not what I want to do. I have respect for people who choose to be parents -- it seems sort of akin to joining the army or maybe the peace corps, complete with the tagline, "The hardest job you'll ever love." Fine. Great.

But as everyone knows, I have respect for deep sleep, reading corners, days spent at the computer. I have respect for the late movie and the buying of (sometimes) ridiculously expensive cockatils at fun restaurants. Most importantly, though, I don't know if I could be a dedicated parent and a dedicated writer. It seems to me that, as Anne Lamott put it, "When a child comes out, it arrives clutching a third of your brain." So the issue isn't so much that I don't like kids, but that I like writing (and ridiculously expensive cocktails) better. I'm not sure, but I don't think good parents are allowed to love other things more than their kids. And that I want to keep my as much of my brain as possible.

So it's obvious why there may be compatibility issues here.

But being in Illinois sort of threw me for a loop. There were babies and children everywhere, spilling out of minivans and roaming like organized herds through the malls. It felt like almost everyone I know had a baby, or at least wanted one. Even my friend Rebekah, who had at one point joined me in wrinkling her nose at the prospect of kids, now looks forward to the day (way in the future, granted) when she and her man will start their family. And that's all fine by me. It's a question of values, I think, and deciding what you value. Kids are definitely worth valuing and so is writing. So is anything that you love. What happened to me in Illinois, though, was that I began to question what I valued because there was no one else around me who valued it. Appreciated, definitely. But it's not the same.

I was at my aunt Kathy's wedding when all of this struck me. It was sort of a strange day, because I hadn't seen most of my cousins or aunts and uncles in a few years, some even longer. As I was reaquainting myself with my cousin Tom, who is close in age, my cousin Ricky, rambunctious and seven, ran by and Tom stopped him. Ricky had no idea who I was, and so Tom told him that I was his cousin who lived in California. Ricky looked at me for a moment, then shrugged and said, "Okay." I smiled at this response because it felt so authentic for a seven-year old boy -- so I have a girl cousin I've never met before who lives in California. Big deal. (Ricky later told me that I was old enough to be a grandma, which really tickled me.) Tom stopped him from running off and said something along the lines of, "Hey, you guys are cousins. And cousins have to hug." So Ricky gave me a hug and I hugged him back and then he ran off, probably to wash off the cooties I'd inevitably given him via contact.

I've thought about that moment a lot, not only because it was touching of Tom to say that and for Ricky to give me, this grandma-old cousin he's never met, a hug, but because I've always thought that having family was difficult. My parents didn't get along, my sister and I fought for days, my dad was always causing havoc with his sisters and parents -- and it struck me that maybe part of why I've never been interested in forming my own clan was because everything familial was always so grueling. Granted, I've had some fun with my parents and my sister; not everything was Flowers in the Attic. It was just always a lot of work to keep treading water, keep myself above the fights and arguments and incessant noise that happens when people who don't really like each other all that much are forced to interact on a regular basis as family.

This is where my thoughts started looping themselves, as in, maybe all this time, I've been valuing writing as a future because it'd always been easy, uncomplicated. Maybe all these Illinis have it right, that cousins have to hug, that hanging out with family might not end in tears, that children might have more to offer to me than noise and confusion and whininess. That even those horribly posed Sears family portraits have their place in the world.

When I got home that night and dived back into Murakami's Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, my love for good writing and clever plotlines and characterization was renewed and even heightened. That isn't to say I didn't appreciate my new insights about how families can be easy and breezy, but that I remembered again what is my core and that's writing. Kids are great, too, but they don't fit as comfortably on me as they do on some of my friends. Not that kids and writing are an either/or proposition -- but I figure if I'm going to split my time between such huge commitments, I better have more of a balanced admiration. And at this point I don't. Nor does having a family of my own seem easy. And that really matters, I think. Not everything that is hard is right.

There was a time in college when I wanted to study aviation and become a pilot. I thought it was an honorable profession, one in which I could work with organizations I believe in deeply, doing the kind of work that would change the world, one food drop or rescued refugee at a time. (I believe I saw Schindler's List around the same time.) But as I looked at all the math and dimensions that pilots work with, I knew that it would be a case of hard and not right. And though I wouldn't be flying supplies, like I'd dreamed, into war-torn countries, it didn't mean that working as a writer was any less valuable. It was less tangible, but not unimportant in the world. It harkens back to George Bailey (as so much in life does) -- he owned a Savings and Loan, a pretty meager existence, but look at how so much falls apart when he's not around.

In the past, I've felt a wee bit freaky for needing so much quiet time and for the feelings that came up when people like Donnie and my dad impugned on it. I've wondered about whether preferring to raise novels over children was going to turn me into a prematurely weird cat lady. But these are things I really value, freaky or not, and I want to embrace them. While it's sometimes hard to value things that only feel like they get an eyebrow raise from others, I like the fact that I'm shaping my own existence. Perhaps I'm just one of those square pegs when it comes to these things. Accepting it is always the first step to freedom.

Come on, Feel the Alleynoise! (Part 2)

The rumor my aunt Nancy tells me is that when I was a baby, I only cried on two or three occasions. I find this hard to believe, but maybe it's true. She says that every time she babysat me, I woke up angelically, cooing and giggling, happily entertaining myself until someone came and picked me up.

I've heard that there were times when my mom and dad, harried working-commuting people with a new baby, sometimes forgot I was in my crib because I was so quiet. (By contrast, my younger sister Julie, made crying into the casual sport for which Ralph Lauren would design a whole ready-to-wear line.) My aunt Sue once told me that when I used to spend the night at her house as a five-six year old, she would reach down in the middle of the night to touch my back -- I was such a deep sleeper, so quiet, that she was not altogether sure I was still alive.

So. This is where my need for quiet begins. When I think about who I was as a baby/child and who I am now, the differences are only minimal. I'm still a deep sleeper, so deep that whole scenarios have gone down in the middle of the night - with dogs and alley drug busts and thunderstorms - which I've missed completely. People may not describe me as angelic, but I get "nice" and "cute" quite a lot. I'm still pretty even-tempered, not one to get worked up about the proverbial shitty diaper.

A few weeks ago, I was in the Long Beach English Department, hanging with Chad, and he asked me about my family. "You never talk about them," he said. It surprised me. I spent years in therapy talking about them, years telling long-suffering friends about them, years writing in my notebooks about them. I guess I'm a little tapped out. But it did make me think about them, especially back in the day, when they were so different from me, so much louder. As she gets older, my mom is becoming much more quiet, reflective even, choosing to stay at home and listen to the Cubs games on her wind-up radio while floating in her pool. On the other hand, my sister, who has three kids under seven, is constantly in the middle of noise -- even if she wanted quiet, she'd have to work really hard for it and banish her kids somewhere soundproof. My dad, who died (un)suddenly a few years ago, was never quiet. He was the kind of person who talked straight through movies and then, became extremely hurt when I expressed I actually wanted to watch the movie. He was incapable of being quiet and I was usually quiet and so, we formed an odd dance of listening and talking.

My dad was a very opinionated man and like all extremely opinionated people, he liked nothing more than to talk about why he was right. He was extremely racist (he would say that he hated everyone equally) and that also found its way into his monolgues to me on the couch. As I got older, I began to chafe at his comments about celebrating MLK Jr. Day ("He cheated on his wife!") and his intolerance for the diversity of others ("I won't shop anywhere they post stuff in Spanish - this is America, let 'em learn English!"). My eighteen-year old self would sit and squirm and politely give him my attention, but I would feel my insides - my soul, my mind, my psyche - burning under these passionate but extremely offensive rambles. Just like with Donnie in the alley, I would begin contemplating my escape, in the form of a phone call, a bathroom break, a Diet Pepsi refill. But I stayed quiet and prayed for cases of strep throat, laryngitis, voice box removal.

Right before he died, I broke my silence. For the first time in my life, I yelled at him. I told him to shut up. He hung up on me. That was the last time I ever talked to him. A few people who've heard this story ask if it was hard to end it that way, if there was any guilt involved, but let me tell you, I've never felt badly about that interaction. Instead of being the angelic one who never cried, never demanded, I let him know that quiet was something for which I would fight. It's ironic that my need for him to be quiet is what brought out my fighting side. Perhaps it's morbid to put it like this but, in a way, he respected my request.

When I was in Illinois (now) two weeks ago, I noticed lots of things, but the thing that struck me most was the lack of fences in the backyards of houses for whole blocks and courts and routes. One rolling green lawn melted into another and the kids ran between yards with no sense of this-is-mine-and-this-is-yours. Adults waved or conversed from patios and backyard gardens. In theory, it's a beautiful, communal type of living. But I don't think I'd like it and it may explain why I'm so comfortable in the alley where I live. Everywhere you look, there are boundaries and fences. There's no question where you stop and somewhere else begins.