Sam fed his reptiles on a rotating schedule. Every week, he bought bags of frozen mice from Savannah, the cute manager at the pet store. Norman, the ball python, ate on Fridays, and Hans, the tegu lizard, ate on Tuesdays, unless he was hibernating. Sam wanted desperately to ask Savannah out. Instead, he brought Norman and Hans into the shop. Savannah was feeding the gerbils and didn’t see them come in. It was Friday. Norman leaped. Savannah dodged. The gerbil disappeared. Sam never did get the courage. Norman, however, was happy. That winter, Sam hibernated; hoping to shed his skin.
one hundred word story #4
The last time Esther saw Frank was high school graduation. He had a ponytail and wore overzealous earrings. She was neither attractive nor ugly. One had a crush on the other and was quietly rejected. Twelve years later, she runs into him at the Post Office. He's wearing combat boots, camouflage from ankle to chin. She’s in a smart business suit. He doesn’t recognize her, cuts her place in line. “Frank?” She leans on her hip; a trick. He looks. Looks again. “Wow,” he says. “Hello, …?” “Hello indeed,” she murmurs, soaks that gaze in. Frank leaves without his package.
one hundred word story #3
Once upon a time there lived a critter named Pegasus who lived in Angelica's attic. Pegasus was actually a roof rat who tended to sneak through the tiles of Angelica's roof late at night and practice flying through the crawlspace between floors. Pegasus thought he had wings. Angelica went months believing she had a poltergeist in the house. She banged doors and lit candles, held a séance and tried to rid the house of spirits. Her energies only succeeded in further encouraging Pegasus, who flew through an open window and off the roof. Angelica was right: Poltergeists don’t like Ouija.
one hundred word story #2
Girl and Boy are driving home from somewhere sunny. The year is still new, their eyes tired. Girl at the wheel. The highway ascends steeply, trucks forging through the mountains like charging steer. The sun evaporates behind the horizon. And then the car is swirling through a tumbling mist of snow. Not flakes, not clumps, but tiny little ice crystals zoom in and around the hood, create little eddies on the road. The temperature gauge reads 31 degrees. Boy digs around under his seat, unearths a scarf and wraps it lovingly around her neck. The temperature in the car rises.
one hundred word story #1
Bernadette had never flown before. She circumnavigated the world by boat, train, horseback, and in friendly people's cars. She covered the Argentine Pampas, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, crossed the Sahara on camel. Then the friendliest person she knew was thrown from a horse in northern Italy. Bernadette was mid-mush on a dogsled outside Nome, Alaska, when she found out. She made it to the nearest airport by nightfall and stared at the great beasts in the sky. She considered the earth and how strong it always felt underfoot. Not friendly enough, she thought, and returned to the snow.
When long nights are a good thing
On Tuesday night we tromped up to Muir Woods to celebrate the winter solstice. The park is free on the shortest day of the year, and the park rangers decorate the boardwalk pathways through the redwoods with luminarias, paper bags lit by L.E.D. lights. If you get there before sunset, you can hit up the craft table to make your own wreaths, get red "pajamas" for your flashlights to make them forest-friendly, and grab a cup of hot cocoa before the solstice caroling begins. There are shadow puppets and songbooks for solstice caroling, and the Morris Dancers perform a special dance, wearing antlers and mimicking the prances of deer and moose.
My favorite part of the evening is when the dancers lead the crowd into the woods. The trees are so dense and tall, and once the sun goes down and your eyes adjust to the darkness, the trail becomes everything you know. At one point the dancers stop and begin to sing, and it's an unearthly sound, as if they are sliding out of the trunk of a tree and bringing with it a harmony not heard anywhere else. My tolerance for Christmas carols is modest at best, and I really only enjoy them the week of Christmas. But these weren't carols; these were words sung in Latin under a beaded canopy of pine needles and rain. These words went beyond faith, and for me had less to do with a religious holiday, and more to do with a desire to express gratitude. Gratitude to be somewhere beautiful with people you love on the longest night of the year.
Muir Woods 12.21.09
Originally uploaded by Julia_h_j
Canned: the finer side of unemployment?
Franklin Schneider is unemployed, and determinedly so. His new book, Canned, offers a series of essays about the perks of unemployment in the United States, relative to the seemingly ceaseless purgatory of “work.” The collection, published this fall by Kensington Books, is caustic when it’s not ironic, macabre when it’s not darkly funny, and perhaps more than anything, a portrait of America that we should be used to by now. Schneider grew up in small town Iowa, studied writing at the University of Iowa, and went on to pursue a career in…well, a career in unemployment, and more specifically, writing about unemployment.
What perhaps is most interesting about Schneider’s journey is not the number of times he tries to emulate the alleged normalcy of gainful employment, but rather the fact that his intelligence and ability to adapt is given a back seat to an unabashed disrespect for authority. As a graduate student in creative writing, former employee in both the for-profit and nonprofit worlds myself, I sympathize with Schneider’s instinct for resisting work for work’s sake. And yet, if I ever were living on unemployment, I think I'd take advantage of that time to travel or volunteer. I don't think I have the constitution to support his bar habits, nor the patience to simply hang out for months at a time. Maybe Schneider would see this as my fatal flaw, proof that I have been fully indoctrinated into the psyche of the working world.
I am not interested in drawing a parallel between Schneider and me, mostly because he alludes to illegal activities that I am too cowardly to ever commit, but also because his acerbic wit is always two steps ahead of my own. It is courageous to publish a book detailing not one, not two, but ten unflattering personal situations. I admire his honesty, and his flourish for the absurd. This is the man whose first job involved detassling corn in fields of hog shit in rural Iowa; how’s that for an introduction to world of "work"?
In many ways, by detailing the darker, more disgusting, and least flattering aspects of his various jobs, Schneider is unknowingly painting himself out to be the martyr of the working class. Perhaps that is a heavy-handed way to put it. I’ll admit that I read this book after finishing a class on “progressive” literature, in which we were asked to compare Communist, socialist, and proletariat theories to novels written in the twentieth century. Maybe that explains part of my innate sympathy to Schneider and his professed love for a life of unemployment, free from bosses who prefer him to settle for mediocrity, or passive-aggressive telemarketers who bully their teams into making their numbers. This is the man who worked at a mall arcade, a pornographic video store, a failing internet startup, a D.C. consulting firm steeped waist-deep in red tape, and even a nonprofit devoted to AIDS research. That’s quite a trajectory. Whether or not Schneider is willing to acknowledge it, he clearly has the skills to succeed in the “working world.” And yet, that’s not where he finds fulfillment. So instead he finds ways to get fired, and then lives as much in the present tense as possible.
To put it bluntly: Schneider’s got balls. That, a finely tuned sense of dark humor, and perhaps a future in stand-up. If he decides it’s worth the effort.
Films and other drugs
I saw "Love and Other Drugs" last night and left the theater wondering who wrote it, not out of any particular reverence or even curiosity, but more as a question of their humanity. The film stars Anne Hathaway as a 26-year-old with early onset Parkinson's disease. She is pursued by a Pfizer drug rep, played by Jake Gyllenhall, who takes it upon himself to "cure" her.
Admittedly, I was taken by Hathaway and Gyllenhall's performance, and the way they both seemed to fully internalize the particulars of their relationship. But the film hedges on this fine line between the drama of emerging love and the melodrama of living with a frustrating and degenerative disease -- all thrust upon young, beautiful people. I don't doubt that these things happen; actually, I believe these circumstances arise more often than the film implies. And yes, sitting in a movie theater late at night with my boyfriend, having just escaped San Jose's Christmas in the Park, I was sold by moments of sappiness.
Perhaps more interesting than the question of romance, however, was this underlying exploration of a young woman and her body. There is a scene where she wanders conveniently into a convention for people with Parkinson's, and she listens as people of all ages relive the frustrations of their lives with humor and perspective--seeing an actual community for the first time. As a type 1 diabetic for nearly 10 years, I know that feeling all too well: the relief you feel when you realize that there are others out there whose daily lives mirror your own, whose secret conversations with their organs are ones you understand, whose arguments with their health insurance, doctors and employers are all too familiar. And perhaps more than anything, the desire to be more self-sufficient than perhaps might be possible.
It's worth noting that the film is an adaptation of the memoir "Hard to Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman" by Jamie Reidy, and the character played by Anne Hathaway is a fictional addition for the film.
I suppose I wanted to find some flaw in this film to prove something about the real truth about living with a chronic condition. And the movie does make many of the same mistakes that all holiday-era romantic comedies make. But I guess there's a part of me that wants to see the credentials of whoever it was that wrote this, to grant a sense of legitimacy to those of us who feel that our stories are ours to tell, and in their retelling they might not be so strange and sad.
Admittedly, I was taken by Hathaway and Gyllenhall's performance, and the way they both seemed to fully internalize the particulars of their relationship. But the film hedges on this fine line between the drama of emerging love and the melodrama of living with a frustrating and degenerative disease -- all thrust upon young, beautiful people. I don't doubt that these things happen; actually, I believe these circumstances arise more often than the film implies. And yes, sitting in a movie theater late at night with my boyfriend, having just escaped San Jose's Christmas in the Park, I was sold by moments of sappiness.
Perhaps more interesting than the question of romance, however, was this underlying exploration of a young woman and her body. There is a scene where she wanders conveniently into a convention for people with Parkinson's, and she listens as people of all ages relive the frustrations of their lives with humor and perspective--seeing an actual community for the first time. As a type 1 diabetic for nearly 10 years, I know that feeling all too well: the relief you feel when you realize that there are others out there whose daily lives mirror your own, whose secret conversations with their organs are ones you understand, whose arguments with their health insurance, doctors and employers are all too familiar. And perhaps more than anything, the desire to be more self-sufficient than perhaps might be possible.
It's worth noting that the film is an adaptation of the memoir "Hard to Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman" by Jamie Reidy, and the character played by Anne Hathaway is a fictional addition for the film.
I suppose I wanted to find some flaw in this film to prove something about the real truth about living with a chronic condition. And the movie does make many of the same mistakes that all holiday-era romantic comedies make. But I guess there's a part of me that wants to see the credentials of whoever it was that wrote this, to grant a sense of legitimacy to those of us who feel that our stories are ours to tell, and in their retelling they might not be so strange and sad.
Best. photo. ever.
Sanctuary
I saw this image while walking along the East Side Gallery in Berlin, a one kilometer walkway of the remaining wall along the river which is covered with more than 100 murals from international artists. These two men are meant to be prominent politicians of differing values.
Though this image is in itself powerful, what I find most striking is the word "sanctuary." I thought of this picture again today while listening to news reports on the latest Prop 8 hearings. I wonder when the United States will actually function as the sanctuary it claims so wholeheartedly to be.
Overheard at Checkpoint Charlie's, New Orleans
To be fair, he was quoting a burlesque dancer at a show in New Orleans.
Hannukkah, Chanukah, Januka
This year I am celebrating Hannukkah. Lighting candles in the chanukiah, playing dreidel, frying latkes. The last time I remember taking time out of my day to remember the holiday was four years ago, as an expat in Spain. I remember the day I told my Spanish housemate that I was Jewish, and that I'd never really been to Catholic mass, and she kept blinking as if I'd shined a flashlight in her eyes. "I've never met a Jew before," she said. I wrote home and a few weeks later had received a chanukiah, candles and dreidels in the mail. I lit the first candle using the flame from our stove. My boss at the school where I worked thought I sneezed the first time I asked him about "Januka."
In the years since my return to the United States, I have forgotten what it means to observe something real. Sometimes I wonder if religion is something that grows weaker in an individual over the years, as if we don't experience a miracle early enough, or if we are crammed so full of one-sided religious indoctrination, the opportunity to reach some kind of personal resolution slowly dies out. My own relationship with faith has always been closely tied to the need to explain my family history, and with it, my own personal politics.
Now, though, I prefer to simplify things and say I just like remembering ritual, and sharing it with others. There are a half dozen Hebrew prayers that I probably will never forget. The irony is although these are the only words in Hebrew that I know, and yet I couldn't translate their meaning for the life of me. All I know is the melody that was instilled in me at a young age, the memory of yarmulkes made out of crushed paper cups, of Manischewitz grape juice and handfuls of challah, of Sunday mornings sitting in front of a bimah that looked so modest and so important all at once. I remember our annual latke parties, and the way my mom would somehow fill our kitchen with neighbors and friends, all clustered around two pans filled with hot oil, and us kids spinning tops on the Oriental rug in the next room. And my dad signing little presents for us as "Hannukkah Harry," because when we were kids, Hannukkah always had to be presented with its Christian counterpart (Hannukkah Harry worked alongside Santa Claus).
Happy Hannukkah, internet.
Pingu!
Meet Pingu.
Laurel, Ryan and I discovered this a few weeks ago and I find this little penguin and his friends to be, in a word, captivating. Here are the things to consider: Pingu goes snowboarding with his seal friend, who only has one binding to tie in his big flipper. Pingu gets hurt a few times and is rescued by a ski patrol penguin who ties a cushion to his rear end, which seems to do the trick. And then, perhaps the greatest part of it all, is the fact that I have no idea what they are saying. It sounds like some great Scandinavian language, although they squeak so high and so fast that it could just be two heavily accent English speakers.
I don't really know why, but ever since I first saw that Pingu vignette, I find myself substituting "Pingu!" for words of surprise or joy. The word is just so fun to say. Try it, I dare you: wherever you are, sit up tall, clear your throat, and shout "Pingu!"
Isn't the world a slightly happier place now?
Married to...the television?
I spent eight hours today on a grant application and my eyeballs started to go in opposite directions. Winter comes smacking in the front door early these days, and so by the time I left campus, I skipped my regular run for a jaunt at the university gym. Davis has a pretty luxurious rec center for students. I believe I could bring a sleeping bag and find a nice corner to nap in somewhere, if it ever came to that. But instead I jumped on an elliptical machine and tuned out the world for a nice long while.
Except that there was something called "Married to Rock Star" on the television just a few feet from my face. I couldn't help it; I'm not much of a television person, and the fact that so much teased blonde hair and male eyeliner dangling within eyesight made it impossible to look away. Those women stole my time, whisked it right away from me with their explicit, recognized vapidity, and their desire for Hello Kitty weddings in castles. I found myself questioning more than just their clothing choices. After a while I started to challenge my own snap judgments--who am I to say what one millionaire lady should say to another? And is it really fair to insist that all the fake conflicts on the show are fabricated, that the plots of "reality television" are dismal inflations of non-problems?
I stayed on that machine a good 45 minutes, and by the time I finally extricated my feet from the elliptical, I had to remind myself where I was, who I was, and what on earth I was doing so far from an enchanted castle. It reminded me of when, as a child, I would watch my brother and his friends playing video games and have to shake myself awake after watching the same little animated figures jump on the same multicolored toadstools time and time again. Is it monotony, or is it hypnotism?
Regardless, by the time I left the gym, I had completely forgotten the stress of the workday. I'd like to attribute that to endorphins, to active, warm muscles, but in my heart I think I know what really happened.
Someday, in a field near you
Ostrich with an iPod.
Thanksgiving
happy graffiti on the Williamsburg Bridge
Originally uploaded by Julia_h_j
What I'm thankful for:
clear blue sky winter days
when (most of) my family fits in one room, and we're all trying to tell jokes at the same time
candied yams
insulin.
the Pacific, the Atlantic, and the Mediterranean
border collies
Fridays
tuition remission
friends who like to travel, cook, dance, doodle, adventure
laptops, cell phones, and iPods (oh my)
the entire month of June, and October also
National Public Radio
talking about writing with my mom and my aunt April
San Francisco
health insurance, when it's guaranteed
the best, longest, most satisfying runs, the ones where you come home feeling more hopeful about the world
my big brother and his big grin
postcards from other countries and cities
digital photography
my dad, and how he knows how to make everything better, but then shows me how to make things better too
my white flowered comforter for the bed
the First Amendment
being in love, really in love, and not thinking it's cheesy
Mavericks, renegades, and beards, oh my!
Sarah Palin and Jimmy McMillan (of "The Rent is Too Damn High" fame) exchange political opinions at a recent mixer in San Francisco.
Scary, right?
I can say with some confidence that going out in San Francisco on Halloween, dressed as Sarah Palin, complete with a button reading "Renegade: Palin for President 2012," was a bit like whispering the word "Voldemort" in a fifth grade classroom. On the bus home, people asked who I was, and when they saw me with the glasses and the button, trying to mimic that Alaskan charm, 9 out of 10 people turned away, saying, "Oh God."
Perhaps as scary as seeing a twentysomething white computer programmer glue a cotton beard to his face and pretend to be New York candidate for governor slash muse for aspiring deejays.
Weirder things could happen.
Didion doesn't slouch
Tonight I read Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Joan Didion is brilliant. She writes about all my favorite places: San Francisco, New York, Hawaii, Los Angeles, and yet she writes about them with a complete lack of sentimentality. She seems to possess this unbridled interest in the act of recording that which is truly interesting, truly human. Tragic and entertaining and thoughtful and never patronizing. Straightforward.
And then I read "Notes from a Native Daughter." Didion grew up in the Sacramento Valley, and she manages to articulate the nostalgia, boredom, listlessness and history of the place that I've never really been able to perfectly capture myself:
"...that is what I want to tell you about: what it is like to come from a place like Sacramento. If I could make you understand that, I could make you understand California and perhaps something else besides, for Sacramento is California, and California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent."
And it struck me, that here in this most fertile of valleys, the communities themselves have grown in a manner disproportionate to the crops that thrive. Maybe that's why it sometimes takes me a few days to fall into hometown habits; because in Davis, even more so than Sacramento, the town wants to grow as much as it wants to drop leaves, or blossom flowers; that is to say, it wants to grow when it is time to grow, and not before.
It makes me feel good to know that a writer like Didion came from a place and a family not too far removed from my own. That maybe, at some point, I'll be able to put into words my own version of that murmuring culture that she captures so beautifully.
Tommy's Tale
Most families have pet folklore. My dad recently recounted the epic story of how he acquired our first family dog, Tomasino Paisano de la Lucci, a black and white springer spaniel mix that he sprung from a pound when he was in his 20s. At the time, my dad was working in the Bay Area, and one day while driving to work, he found an injured puppy in the middle of the road. He gathered him up and took him to his office where he called the SPCA to see if they could save him. The SPCA collected the dog with the understanding that they were required to turn the dog over to the local shelter for three days for the owners to come claim him before making the dog available for adoption. Meanwhile, they agreed to treat the dog's wounds.
My dad went back to the pound a few times to see how the dog was doing. Each time, the technicians reminded him that if he wanted the dog, he'd have to wait til the end of the week, at which point he'd also have to pay the vet bill. Dad showed up just before closing time on Friday, but the technician turned him away, saying that they had to wait three full days, so Dad would have to come back Saturday. They refused to let him come take the dog on the day they told him to come; according to their rules, they had to wait a certain amount of time for owners to collect the dog, but neither could they afford to keep the dog any longer than a specific amount of time.
"If you want the dog, you’ll be here at 8:00 am sharp," they said, "or he’ll be put down on the first rounds tomorrow morning."
Dad was pissed. Why did they even bother treating the dog in the first place, if they wouldn't put him up for adoption, and would end up killing him anyway? He asked to speak to the supervisor, and was told the same thing. Come back Saturday morning, or forget the dog. They would not even take payment and hold the dog until Monday.
He didn't know what to do. He felt trapped. Here he had gone out of his way to follow the center's instructions, and was happy to pay the vet bill, would have arranged for someone else to pick up the dog for him, but they wouldn't allow that either. He went out into the parking lot and watched the dogs interacting in their cages. Tommy was sitting in a little pen surrounded by a chain link fence.
He approached the fence, stuck his hands through the holes and whistled for the dog. Once he was close enough, Dad reached out and took Tommy gently in his hands, slowly edging him up the length of the fence, first withdrawing one hand through the gaps, then the other. Miraculously, no one seemed to notice. He got the little dog him up the height of the fence, he pushed him through a small, puppy-sized opening. Dad says Tommy was a bit confused, but offered no resistance as he hopped across the parking lot and into his car, and eventually, our life.
Tommy lived to be 15 years old. He went where my dad went. I'll never forget the night he died. I was eight years old and it was a school night, so I was surprised when my mom woke me and Josh up in the middle of the night and took us out onto the lawn. Tommy usually slept in a little bed on my parents' floor, but my dad had carried him, wrapped tenderly in towels, down the stairs and outside. I think the moon was full. Tommy was old and frail, his eyes lost in flappy ears and withered fur. And my dad, my dad leaned low over him, as if whispering to him, and stayed that way for what seemed like hours. When it was over we had a little service and dug a little hole for him under the rosebush.
For years my dad referred to Tommy as "my fine dog." My parents have had dogs since, always rescue dogs, always black and white, always T names: Tipper (during the Clinton administration), Tam, and Taj. They were all wonderful dogs, but to be called "fine" -- that was a distinction my dad reserves for a rare few.
Forget cellar door. Open road is where it's at.
This summer, driving cross country, we passed many cars with decorative antennae. The cacti were often my favorite. Watching their little flapping plastic tendrils zip by on the I-10 made it look like all the passing cars were sticking out their hands for high fives. Parked cars with dangling antennae smirked at us when we stopped to refuel.
I miss watching the scenery change. The concept of settling anywhere is fundamentally mature, and while with every passing year it seems less final, less scary, the romance of the open road is often more attractive than the stability of staying put.
Open road. Can you think of two words more beautiful?