one hundred word story #14



"A day is just a day is just a day," she said over coffee. "Valentine's Day is for Hallmark and hypoglycemics." He made her pinky swear that it was true, that she was true, that she was his, and he was hers. "Oh, get off it," she said. "I hate pronouns,” dismissing him with the flick of a wrist.

That night over cocktails, he slipped her a card.

“To you and you,” the card read. “And to me and me. And if I’m lucky, to you and me.”

“Now we’re talking,” she said, lifting her pinky. “Bring on the candy.”

Spain Series #2: First grade


In 2007, Robbie Hart was a first-grader in a Spanish elementary school in southern Spain. A recent immigrant from England, Robbie's command of Spanish was -- on it's way, when he felt like speaking in it. Usually he felt like hiding under his desk or putting marbles in his ears. He was the straight man to his friend Connor's antics. One particular morning in Maria Angeles' class, she grew frustrated with Robbie's refusal to sit in his own desk and color in his own notebook, and so she sat down right in front of him and asked, quite seriously:

"Robbie, ¿por qué crees tú que ir al colegio es un derecho que todos los niños tienen?"

In other words, she wanted to know why he felt that it was every child's right to go to school. Robbie opened and closed his mouth like a guppy, letting his lips pop audibly. I turned to him and watered it down a bit: "Robbie, why should you go to school? What would happen if you didn't go?"

Robbie looked at Connor, who kept egging him on by "accidentally" falling out of his seat and squawking loudly. Robbie thought he was great and went on to extol the the various virtues of chickens. Maria Angeles was growing frustrated and so Connor sat up straight and leaned in to his friend's little face to stage-whisper: "If you don't go to school, you won't find work and YOU'LL BE DUMB."

Sometimes six-year-olds really know how to narrow it down. As Robbie and Connor hugged their sides with laughter, I wondered what Connor's parents said to him when they dropped him off at the Spanish public school to return to their work managing an English pub. It often surprised me how transparent the parents were with their children, or how much of their own parents' insecurities the children soaked up and regurgitated in class.

We learned soon after to hide Robbie's marbles.

one hundred word story #13

He loved her, she loved him, and there was no conflict in the world. The weather was always warm, not hot, and when it did rain, the water hit only the thirstiest plants. They worked hard. Their children were healthy and strong. But they didn’t know that Earth had begun to spin off its axis, and every day, their lives were altered in small, significant ways. It started with a drop of rain on his head and ended with their youngest sprouting wings and jumping off the roof. At least they were happy to see that the plants were unharmed.

2.10.11

There's this itchiness in the air that starts in February. It's a sneeze, it's a hiccup, it's that lull between holidays, it's that impatience for it to be spring already. But the itchiness I feel is different, it's a memory that grows faded with every passing year. It's that reminder that there was a time when my fingers were plump and perfect and my abdomen free of scars, that there were several years of my life that were different than they are now. It's a B.D. and an A.D. and my life is a perpetual switching of clocks. For years there was a solemnity that came with acknowledging the anniversary of my diagnosis as a diabetic. I've written about 2/10 every year since 2001, including twice on this blog.

There is something satisfying about saving up all of one's emotional brouhaha for one specific day of the year, and then having it out with the universe on an annual basis. What does that mean? Oh, in the early days it was a weird form of flashback, recalling days on the Sacramento River when rowing was much easier without three cans of pineapple juice rattling around beneath my seat, soaking up as much teenage ennui as I could and categorizing it all as a sort of post-traumatic stress. And then as the years went by there was an overwhelming nostalgia not for the before-diabetes days, but for the days when my blood sugar was still a relatively exciting and challenging new game. And now I've hit the first decade mark and I find myself feeling a whole lot of nothing. Maybe there comes a time when one has told the story enough times, fictionalized it and reproduced it on stage and repeated it to children and grandparents and in self-help books, that any semblance of what one's life could hypothetically be, or what might have happened or could have happened had things been different -- none of that is interesting anymore. Those are just the stories of other people's lives, and frankly those aren't the ones I tend to read.

This year February feels like a placeholder for a time when I should be feeling something different. There's a misdirection here. I'm happy. I'm in love. I'm in school. I'm working. I'm learning things I want to learn. Shit happens and sometimes it's not fun. The difference between the things I've actually learned as a diabetic, versus the things I've often said I've learned; that's the story that still needs writing. But this time I don't want it to be about me. Or even about diabetes. It's about a word or a place I don't know yet but I definitely want to go.

I won't lie, though: there is a small part of me that always secretly wished a little leprechaun would surprise me on my tenth anniversary with a pot of...insulin? No, that's not it. Maybe I just hoped that one day my pancreas would show up at my doorstep like a long-lost son, and we'd embrace.

Hey, it could happen.

Why Egypt Matters

What is happening in Egypt this week matters, and more than we think. After more than 30 years in office, President Hosni Mubarak has finally agreed not to run again this fall, in response to a quarter million Egyptians demonstrating across Cairo. Last Friday, the government suspended the internet. Read that again, and realize that what you are doing now, no one in Egypt can currently do. Text-messaging was somehow disabled nationally, and the government tried yet again to become its own god.

The anthropologist I work for has a satellite office in Cairo. When I asked her what she thought of the demonstrations, her voice got very quiet and her eyes got wide. "You know, the people created a human chain to protect the Egyptian Museum," she said. "It is one of the most magnificent places in the world."

Perhaps what is so remarkable about the demonstrations in Cairo is that this is one of the first times in history that a national army has backed the citizen protesters. Somehow that changes everything, doesn't it? And yet, when I watched the news tonight, the broadcasters zoomed in on the tanks rolling past the presidential quad as people began to throw rocks. Egyptians have been camping out since last Friday, chanting and singing and speaking out and organizing, with no plans to leave until Mubarak does. These are the moments when you become cognizant of where you are in terms of where the world is, or might be.

Journalists forecast violence if a peaceful transference of power doesn't come by the end of the week, and so now we sit on this precious space of time where a new precedent can be set, where people as a collective unit can rewrite government. I wonder at what point human nature will win over, and something terrible might happen. Against my better judgment I am rooting for something new, something surprising, and something hopeful to happen - and I know I'm not the only one.

Recipe for Punkara Rock: Spain Series #1

How to dress like a Spanish punkara rocker:

1. Take a low, loose or flimsily cut fabric.

2. Add a silkscreen of Che Guevara, Zapatistas or the Palestinian flag.

3. Emblazon cheery designs with skull and crossbones images of fire, shit, or sex, and work in a good cuss word and/or sexual innuendo. The blunter, the better.

4. Decorate wit ha jagged pattern of large, bulky safety pins. Rip large holes (preferably across the breasts) for a real Frankenstein effect.

5. Top with a paperboy hat (maybe in clashing stripes, polka dots or plaid), a discolored bandanna or otherwise ripped and faded fabric.

Shoes range from the classic multicolored low-top Converse to purple, thick-soled Doc Martens, gothic men's sneakers, hippie Birkenstock ripoffs, to, well, Frodo-style bare feet.

This series is taken verbatim from a series of journals I kept while living in Spain, 2006-2007.

one hundred word story #12

Janie stopped by the Career Fair hoping to pick up a career. It was easier than she thought. First there was the aptitude test, which narrowed her down to either flower-arranging or graveyard digging. Then she got to meet professional flower arrangers and gravediggers. There were some pirates, too, and badminton delegates from the United Kingdom. Don't worry, Janie, they all said, just work hard and the right opportunity will come to you. You might even end up arranging flowers above graves! She left with a packet of seeds and a shovel, thinking, America is indeed the land of opportunity.

Winter fog


Usually when the fog comes in, it is a timid guest. It burns off by midday, then pulls back to reveal the sun, a well-kept secret. But today was a tule day. Today, the air got progressively thicker, fuller, and wetter as the afternoon wore on. I stayed in my office later than normal, absorbed in an essay I am writing on Spain, and was completely unprepared when I emerged from Voorhies at 6 pm and wandered straight into the clouds. The air was mythic. Light from nearby lampposts cut through the fog in broad rays; inverse sunshine.

Within minutes, my coat and pants were streaked in dewdrops, little globules that glistened perversely in the evening light. It was difficult to see further than ten or twenty feet ahead; beyond that was gray emptiness. It made biking through Davis feel like jumping into a void, holding my breath as I trusted the path in front of me to stay a path. This is the kind of environment where stuff can happen. Mysterious stuff. Good stuff. Bad stuff. Surprising stuff. Stuff that can jump out at you.

As a child I associated tule fog with the endlessness of winter nights. It was inevitable; there would always be nights that felt too long or too strange or made it hard to see. I only recently learned that tule fog is particular to the Sacramento Valley, due to the fact that once the cold air enters the valley, it is shut inward by the Sierra Nevada mountains. It's turned in on itself, forced to confront itself in wet streaks from Sacramento clear to Redding, even as far as Bakersfield. Often the air above the low-lying fog is warmer and clearer. The sky cheats, I think. Maybe it does this to remind all of us how blind we actually are. To make us turn inwards as well.

Lemony Snicket: how to make things happen

Tonight Daniel Handler (also known as Lemony Snicket, of A Series of Misfortune Events fame) spoke on campus. This man is irreverent, brilliant, strange, and opinionated on the topics of story, plot, and honesty in literature. My understanding of him as a writer comes less from his popular children's books, and more from his novel Adverbs, which many argue is actually a collection of love stories. His prose is familiar both with itself and (it claims) with you as a reader. He often acknowledges his narrators, perhaps to beat us all to the punch, or to further the story in a way he finds interesting, or to add a finer, more textured experimental layer to the story.

I realized as he was speaking that he's exactly the inverse of the writer that often pops out of me, and maybe that's why I find him so easy to admire. He drew a diagram of the way he often imagines his characters intersecting, focusing less on their individual characteristics than the incidences that make them collide. His prose is often fast, funny, and furious; although it is clear that writing so clean can only be the product of laborious effort (he said that his first draft of Adverbs was 1000 pages long), he made it clear that developing full characters is only interesting when they operate in a plot- and problem-studded universe. Often when I try to write fiction, I get so absorbed in the very concept of a person, and his or her psychology, and the place in which he or she resides, that I have to weed out and around the outline of who they are in order to see the story at hand. There comes a time when being so conscious of character, and how he or she would react in any given situation, actually inhibits the writer from furthering an invented universe.

Handler quoted a fan letter that complimented him by saying, "I enjoy your books. I am always curious when things happen." He underscored the simplicity of that statement, and how the more interesting parts of our own lives, the parts worth retelling, are not morality tales or formulaic episodes, but rather the honest, bizarre and unexpected moments that arise when stuff happens.

When stuff happens. His great magic trick as a writer is knowing instinctively what "stuff" is worth happening, and what is worth leaving behind. I hope one day to understand that maneuver myself.

one hundred word story # 11

Whatever you do, he says, don't think about the cliff. So we're up there and all I can think about is the cliff. And then he's all, you can think about the cliff, but don't think about the fall. I've got the rope around me tight, he says too tight, but is there such a thing? From above the world looks so nicely constructed. The order is clear. He's singing and then suddenly he's not. The wind is strong. I mess up; I remember the fall. The rope loosens. That world looks mean. Hang on, he yells. I hang on.

White noise



Monterey, sunset. Plovers tuck in the sea. That rare quality of light when everything on this side of the world seems a bit longer, a bit wilier, than usual. The waves sound like the best white noise in the world, either letting all those loose little chirps and whirs in one huge respiration, or exhaling countless unnecessary evils as one, continuous crash against the sand.

Sometimes I worry about things that are important. Sometimes (many times) I worry about things that are important right now. Often I worry about things that are already worth less than the energy spent worrying. And then, there are nights like these, when it's all I can do to think, I'm the luckiest motherfucker in the world.

Jack Gilbert on my mind

I have been rereading The Great Fires by Jack Gilbert and reminding myself of what it means to write unselfconsciously. There is so much to say about Jack Gilbert, an award-winning yet underrated American poet who studied and taught at San Francisco State University, as well as in numerous universities abroad, and yet as always it's better to let a writer's words do the work.
Here's one of my favorite Gilbert poems:

TEAR IT DOWN

We find out the heart only by dismantling what
the heart knows. By redefining the morning,
we find a morning that comes just after darkness.
We can break through marriage into marriage.
By insisting on love we spoil it, get beyond
affection and wade mouth-deep into love.
We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.
But going back toward childhood will not help.
The village is not better than Pittsburgh.
Only Pittsburgh is more than Pittsburgh.
Rome is better than Rome in the same way the sound
of raccoon tongues licking the inside walls
of the garbage tub is more than the stir
of them in the muck of the garbage. Love is not
enough. We die and are put into this earth forever.
We should insist while there is still time. We must
eat through the wildness of her sweet body already
in our bed to reach the body within that body.

~



Off to unlearn the constellations.

one hundred word story #10


The fog is oppressive. Jill and Jack decide to hike up above it. As they climb, they feel the yellowness of sunlight touching first their special hats, then their shoulders, then their lower backs. Spring is close. By the time they make it to the ridge, everything they know about the world has changed. They see lives moving to and fro from above, dismiss the fog as it snarls beneath. And when the wind threatens to knock them loose, they hold tight to each other and their crowns. No one tumbles. Instead, the sky gives in and offers the sun.

a few words on faith

Tonight I was reminded that some people pray.

I ate dinner at the campus coffee house, where many of the tables are set high with clear partitions, so patrons have the option of tuning out their surroundings or communicating directly with those sitting opposite. I have developed the obnoxious habit of always plugging into my iPod. Today, however, it had run out of battery, and I found myself eavesdropping on the girls across from me.

It wasn't intentional. They did not speak loudly, but rather they enunciated very carefully. Their words sounded they were reciting lines from a nineteenth century novel. They both looked extremely troubled, their faces young and afraid. At first I thought maybe one was consoling the other on a particularly traumatic event, perhaps the loss of a family member or friend, or maybe the crisis was embedded more deeply within; a crisis of faith or loss of innocence. I tried very hard not to stare, and kept my eyes on the book I had in front of me. But I couldn't help but listen.

One of these girls was praying on behalf of her friend. Both of them closed their eyes, and one of them kept her eyes lowered. At this point I swore she was reading from some religious text, and when I peeked below the table I was surprised to see nothing there. She either knew the words by heart, or was improvising them on the fly. Words I hadn't heard or seen in a long time. and we will pray in the Lord's name, to give (and here she said her friend's name in such a quiet whisper I couldn't make it out) the strength within herself to shoulder her responsibilities...it was like hearing a foreign language. As she spoke, I saw tears form behind her friend's closed eyelids. Something was going on back there. I felt like a voyeur. How is it that these two young girls can do this for each other?

It was hard to hear them over the loud pop of the coffeehouse radio, not to mention the clamor of hungry students, the ringing of cash registers and the random shouts of passing friends. Watching them discuss God in the crowded cafeteria reminded me of overhearing philosophical conversations in the locker room; when it does happen, it seems out of place.

When she was done, her friend looked visibly shaken. She put one hand to her chest and seemed to take it all in, whatever that it might have been. They spoke quietly for a few more moments, and then they switched roles, and the second girl said a prayer for the first. I was transfixed. It was like watching a performance with method actors.

I finally tore myself away and walked to class, thinking of Emily Dickinson and how she refused to be baptized, and how that decision was so monumental in her community's eyes, although it seems so comparatively trivial today. I tried very hard to think of the last time I asked someone, anyone, to pray for me, or the last time someone, anyone, asked me to pray for them. Nothing came to mind.

I wonder, does the lack of intention indicate some sort of skewed moral compass? Do I rely too heavily on evidence-based reality, or worse, fictional, invented stories, to give me strength?

I couldn't bring myself to put my headphones back on when I left the building, and was amazed at how lovely and engaged the world was without the soundtrack.