On animals and fire



Rarely can you see the moment the sun breaks through. This morning we were out on my boyfriend's family ranch south San Jose for their annual cattle branding. Ryan's father and uncle lease raise 40 head of cattle. 40 head of cattle - that's a phrase I didn't know or hear until I met him. And those are just words. My visual vocabulary has since expanded to include immunization, branding (not particular to just marketing and social networking!), and, yes, castration. It's all healthy and it's all important. It just takes a year or two to get used to it.



Though I grew up in a relatively rural place, I'd never spent any personal time with cows, bulls or horses. My fear of horses stems from a childhood memory: my first day of horseback riding camp, 8 years old, and I was thrown from an Arabian that felt like it was six stories tall. Even before the fall, I was as spooked as those beautiful giants. I liked reading about them well enough, and there will always be that part of me that wished I had that extra sense that so many ranchers and farmers do - that special understanding of how to communicate with work animals. How many times I wished I could simply slip them a note through the fence, instead of perfecting that click-click through the teeth, or watching them flash their tails or ripple their manes. Some people know animals like they know the wind. I know border collies. I don't know horses or cows.

How do you describe that feeling, then, of walking into the bullpen? The soft crunch of old hay underfoot, the uneasy hustle of calves as they shimmy from one side of the fence to the other, anticipating, as they rightly should, some important and unwanted rite of passage. There is a change in temperature when you walk into the middle, and I'm not referring to the heat of the branding fire. You stand there and you are surrounded: by men and women on horseback, by calves and their brothers and sisters, some of them tied by the hooves and neck, others cornered and braying. It's like the heartbeat of all of those animals thump together, right there in the center. There are veterinarians and nurses and people who just know animals, deeply know them the way I know the Sacramento River or Sands Beach. This is another kind of knowledge, one you can't download or learn overnight.

And that's what makes it elegant: this is an earned trade, one that requires not only passion, but an ingrained respect for the land and the things that live on it. I respect it all too, enough to take pictures from across the fence. How else would I have been able to capture the sun breaking through the clouds?

Jesus may not be my magic

I saw Sarah Silverman perform last weekend at the UC Davis Mondavi Center. I admire her because she is a woman writer, a comic, a musician, a force of nature, and yet I realized something Sunday night: I don't really get her. It's not that I don't think she's funny, or that she's not talented. The woman sings songs about death and rape and incest and jokes about adopting terminally ill children with mental disabilities. She's a complete individual.

She spent the first half of the evening directing her attention to the front row, responding to obnoxious questions and bringing some fool's cell phone on stage to read his text messages aloud. She has the capacity to be funny, and when she tells jokes, they leave a twisted, ironic aftertaste, albeit a thoughtful, intentional one.

What I realized, though, was not so much that I find her offensive, but rather that her aesthetic doesn't work for me. I was first introduced to stand-up comedy in college, when my first boyfriend introduced me to Bill Hicks and Mitch Hedberg. My freshman roommate and I used to fall asleep every night to Eddie Izzard's Dress to Kill. My brother would give me mix tapes of Jim Gaffigan or Katt Williams. I never really respected or understood how much chutzpah it takes to get in front of a crowd and tell short, succinct little stories that provoke a visceral reaction. But I only recently realized that good comics are good writers, and to be good at either is a lot of invisible hard work.

Comedy can be emotional, political or satirical--what comic wasn't between the years of 2000-2008, when greats like Janeane Garafalo and Marc Maron tuned their funny to Air America in response to Bush cultural crisis. And more recently, I was introduced to a lot of comics through Jesse Thorn's interviews on The Sound of Young America. Maron himself hosts a fabulous podcast called What the Fuck, in which he simultaneously critiques and cross-examines prominent comics and public figures. It was his interview with Silverman that made me most excited to hear her speak; there was some shred of me that hoped she'd get onstage and not do stand-up, but that she'd tell stories about what it's like to be a woman writer and comic, about how she developed her funny and why she thinks it happened. But, as fans of hers rightfully guess, she had no intention of doing any such thing. She walked into a beautiful, 3000-seat auditorium and did her bit. That's what comedians are typically paid to do.

What's great about comedy in 2011 is that there are as many "bits" as there are audiences. Which is just another way of saying that although I wasn't crazy about Silverman's deadpan breakdown of rape and incest, other people are, and at the root of her jokes she is chiseling down American taboos, one by one. And you kind of have to admire that.

Skateboard nostalgia


Sunset Sliders!

Meet the Sunset Sliders: the self-described "funkiest skate crew this side of the solar system." Last weekend I was introduced to the world of downhill skateboarding, a sport I'd heard of only in passing at our friends Dave and Liz's house in the Sunset District of San Francisco. Dave is the amazing designer and creator of Somos Skates. Plus he knows a lot about reptiles and has a wicked record collection. He and his lovely lady Liz, a talented dancer and teacher, often let Ryan and me crash when we visit San Francisco. Last weekend, it finally dawned on me why he calls his skate crew the Sunset Sliders: there really isn't a more graceful way to take a 15% grade than to slide, in a way that appears effortless but is far too loud to be so.



I grew up around skateboarders. My brother and all of his friends spent hours every afternoon after school at the end of the block, the sounds of their boards scraping the street until dusk. When I was too young to stay home alone, Josh would "babysit" by sitting us both down to watch skateboarding videos. There was a nuanced drama to it all: the way the young guys (and sometimes girls) would spin the boards between their feet, through the air, seemingly unaware of the rawness of the asphalt underneath. There were always boys missing teeth. There was always an outtakes reel. But more than anything, there was an innate understanding of how gravity works, and how thrilling it was whenever anyone defied it. Though the sport itself scared me, when Josh and his friends graduated and went off to college, the afternoons felt hollowed somehow, deprived of the sounds of wheels bouncing off concrete. All the old surfaces that they used to climb - the curbs, the driveways, the planks and the makeshift jumps - seemed forlorn in their lack of use. Creative use anyway.

I had long forgotten my nostalgia for skateboards by the time Ryan and I were atop a steep park in the Sunset last weekend. Dave had organized about 30 different competitors, many of them teenagers, some of them girls, all of them in helmets and knee pads. We helped the best we could by brushing the sidewalks of twigs and dirt, sweeping the "tears" from the morning sprinklers (Dave's words) back to the grass. Dave and his crew started the day with a complementary tour of the park by shovel, picking up stray dog litter and gaining good park karma in return. And then, as soon as the course was ready and the requisite safety teams were set up at the top and bottom of the hill, the races began.

What a thrill, to perch above the course and watch the skaters as they shimmied their way around narrow curves and dodged small puddles. Here was a love not just for the sport, but for those fleeting moments when the force of the wind billowed their hair out, when the ground gleamed so ferociously back up at them with a menace that only the right kind of threat can offer. It is both a threat and an allure, one that doesn't beckon me the way that it does Dave, or my brother, but one that I can certainly hear and understand. It's the acknowledgment that there are things out in the world that we can harness and exercise, if only we have the desire and the skill.

Struck by lightning



artwork by Michael Capozzola

I'm reading tonight as part of Quiet Lightning, a literary reading series started by Evan Karp and Rajshree Chauhan in January 2010. This will be my fifth reading with them in the past year. See the April 2010 reading here , May 2010 here, September 2010 here, and special LitQuake edition (October 2010) here. Quiet Lightning publishes a magazine, sPARKLE n' bLINK, and has forged a real sense of literary community in the Bay Area. I know that it has pushed me to explore short works, and also challenged me to see what happens when I read aloud. I can't help it; I always get nervous. More than anything I am inspired by how generative the act of reading becomes. How by knowing there's a monthly deadline, and that somewhere out there people will show up to hear a few words spilled across a page, there's a reason to sit down and write.

Quiet Lightning, which has been linked to KQED's To Do List, FunCheapSF, San Francisco Magazine, SF Weekly, SFist, The Rumpus, and, the New York Times, is on its way to becoming a nonprofit organization. For more information on how to support QL, visit the website.

On patience

Maybe graduate school is a time for people to tell you a single universal truth, and maybe you only get that truth once, and maybe if you don’t listen hard enough, you miss it entirely. Maybe you spend years defining yourself as a writer, or a painter, or a scientist, or a doctor, but when it comes time to write, paint, experiment, or operate, you want it so bad that you kill it before it has a chance to breathe.

And maybe, on nights such as these, you learn that the single universal truth reveals exactly what you don’t want to hear.

I wonder, really, if in the end, it isn't a huge favor.

For Nippon



They say bad things happen in threes. I can't imagine what would be worse than an 8.8 earthquake, a tsunami, and a nuclear power plant explosion. The phrase "poor Japan" doesn't quite cut it, does it?

The images of tidal waves pushing debris through the streets of Japan are overwhelming, to say nothing of the reported 1,500+ dead. When I think of Japan, though, I think of Hidetaka, Itaru, Ayano, Atsushi, Ryuji, Tomohiro, Takeru, Megumi, Shota, Yuriko, Keiichiro, Tomomi: the Japanese exchange students who studied in San Francisco at the school where I used to work. The year I worked as an International Student Advisor, I started a soccer club for students of all nationalities and abilities. Once a week, we'd gather in Kaplan's fifth-floor office suite, walk to the Powell BART stop, and hop MUNI to Golden Gate Park.

Many of the students I met had never played soccer casually before - the die-hard players were on club teams back home. Every now and then I'd convince a girl to play, but usually I was the only one, and I was terrible at that. Terrible but persistent. We'd get students from all over the world: Turkey, Brazil, Spain, France, Germany, Korea, Russia, Colombia, Kazakhstan, China, Belgium, Italy. And we'd always, always, have at least one or two amazing players from Japan.

There was never really a "sports" budget at my job, and so when we did venture out to the city parks, it was with a borrowed ball and a set of orange cones that our Activities Manager had sprung for. One of our year-long students, Itaru, came nearly every week, even on the weeks when there were just three of us kicking the ball aimlessly around Washington Square Park. The week he left, he stopped by my desk and presented me with a brand new soccer ball.

I'll never forget that.

I try to think of countries in terms of the people who live there. So for my friends in Japan: I hope that you and your families are safe.

One Voice - many questions

A personal confession:

Sometime in the last ten years, amidst eight years of George W. Bush, natural and political disasters of all kinds, and my own selfish pursuits, I have pushed thoughts of Israel and Palestine to the far corners of my mind. It's a luxury, really, to live far enough away from Jerusalem or Ramallah to justify a lack of action or critical response to events happening on the other side of the globe.

Here's the thing about the Middle East, though: no matter who you are, no matter how you identify or what religious texts you read as child, there's something intensely personal about what these countries represent, and how their very being shapes the world. I was raised in an interfaith family but attended Jewish Sunday school for years, though I've never properly learned Hebrew (not for lack of opportunities; Spanish just caught my eye first). In many Jewish communities, my agnostic-at-best understanding of the world defies the religion's central tenet: that there is one god, and he/she/it is our god. I'm not even certain if I should capitalize the word.

I spent a summer in Israel in 2000, before Bush, before 9/11, before a lot of things happened. Those six weeks rewrote the way I saw the world, not so much in terms of the need for a Jewish state, but because for the first time, I saw the consequences of having one Jewish state that existed around and on top of a country that has never really been its own. I was torn between instincts. I loved and still love the idea of Israel, both because it was a haven for some of my relatives, and because the feeling of the place itself is magical, transformative. It is a place to love. All the same, it is hard to love a place so defined by contradictions, a place where Palestinian families end up to submitting to the rules and regulations of Israeli settlements. What boundaries are safe to cross? When will they be?

My feelings about Israel were further complicated as a freshman in college. The United States declared war on Iraq that year, and every weekend I'd attend huge peace rallies in downtown Santa Barbara. Every week the peace parades were interrupted by splinter pro-Palestine groups, not organizations as much as clumps of undergraduates clinging to a cause. I always felt a bit threatened, though at the end of the day, I had no more credentials to defend Israel than they had to attack it.

Last night I attended a presentation at Congregation Bet Haverim about the OneVoice Movement in Israel and Palestine. The organization was created in 2002, and its mission is to "amplify the voice of mainstream Israelis and Palestinians, empowering them to propel their elected representatives toward a two-state solution." Unlike other peace organizations in the Middle East, OneVoice has two parallel groups: one in Palestine and one in Israel. Both groups rely on a team of youth volunteers who devise creative campaigns and initiatives to involve community members.

The organization itself is impressive, but more than anything I was amazed by the presentations given by Bashar Shweiki and Tomer Avital. Shweiki is a Palestinian small business owner whose family business was co-opted by an Israeli settlement, and Avital is an Israeli journalist who seeks to mobilize his friends and neighbors in efforts toward peace. Both men are about my age, both were eloquent and compassionate, and were respectful of opposing opinions. I could tell that they were here because they wanted to be here, that they believed in the movement for peace because it is a vital and necessary part of their everyday lives.

Avital described a recent initiative he and his fellow OneVoice members employed in Israel: they created a series of "parking tickets" that they distributed on random cars that issued "fines" for apathy and failure to act. The tickets were cunning imitations of government-issue tickets. Listening to them speak, I felt a stirring I have not recognized in years: someone should issue me a ticket. There's something I should do. I don't know what it is yet, but maybe this is a step.

Maybe this right here - maybe this is the first step?

one hundred word story #18


Here's your job, she says mightily: you are my assistant. I'm here to assist, you say. You write down everything she says, often before she thinks to say it. You make to-do lists and start checking things off. You assign other people jobs. You give them chairs to sit in. In time, they quit. That's okay, you say, I'm here to assist. She asks you to rewrite the to-do list. And then, one night, you look around the office and realize no one else is there. She has left you a list. “To fix,” it says. “your life.” You quit.

Charlie Sheen on "Bi-Winning"

This interview excerpt with Charlie Sheen reminds me of an Eddie Izzard bit about Pol Pot, Cambodian dictator and orchestrator of mass genocide: "A guy kills one man and we lock him up. A man kills thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, and we're almost thinking, man, congratulations. You must get up very early in the morning."

I don't care for Charlie Sheen, his politics, his lackluster acting, his cavalier assholishness in the news and otherwise, but after seeing this clip of his interview this week, I kind of have to admire him. He appears to be absolutely, positively, completely bat-shit insane, but he's proud of that fact, and he's willing to spell it out for whoever asks. He dictates his own image; terrible though it is, it's his. As Eddie Izzard would say, he's a busy man: busy taking drugs, possibly abusing women and neglecting his children. Still - busy.

Further frog adventures


It is not over yet.

Tonight I came home after a long day - discovered poison oak on my underarm today, three weeks after a hiking expedition above Putah Creek, followed by a full day of class and meetings for work - and found the damned frog waiting for me on the front door. Really.

I tried to move it away with my keys, but again, he wouldn't budge. This must have be his new technique: had I opened the front door, he'd fall directly into the house, at which point I'd have to follow him around with a Tupperware until I could sweep him back outside again.

Needless to say, I chickened out and went in through the side door.

There is only one possible explanation for this: he must read this blog.

And if that's true, then I'll go ahead and state my case now:

Listen, Frog, you and me, we're cool. You do your thing, and I'll do mine. Just don't get slimy and come inside again, because you know you don't want to deal with me yipping around and clapping again. Let's skip past that and go straight to the part where you just hang out with your buddies outside.

You want to talk with me, just leave me a comment here, and I'll write back. Promise.

Frog learns to fly



I was minding my own business, doing my homework at the big table in the dining room, when I saw something hop out of the corner of my eye. Wait - hop? I turned to find a quarter-sized frog cornering himself where the two back walls meet. I started hearing the frogs a few weeks back, when the weather went from very cold to rainy, and once the sun sets, the chorus of their ribbits outside is like a powerful car alarm. But this little frog looked terribly lost. His legs were covered in lint.

This little frog taught me something about myself: I am squeamish and make high pitched sounds when small creatures enter the place where I live. I knew I wanted him out, and I had a hunch he was looking for the door. But I really didn't want to touch him. What else am I supposed to do? I tried stomping my feet and clapping hands, but every time I got near, he stopped moving and played dead. Exasperated, I took a recyclable container and tried to trap him inside, thinking he'd cling to the side of it and I could carry him over the threshold to meet his froggy friends. But I soon realized that his legs were too furry with lint to properly stick to anything. This just proved the importance of getting him outside!

In the end, I had to nudge him about six feet across the floor with the tupperware, edging him along and yipping aloud every time he actually hopped. It always took me off guard, although I expected him to hop. At last we got to the door. When I opened it, he just sat there, still several inches too short to clear the ledge.

"Come on!" I yelped. "You're so close!" But the darn frog wouldn't move. He just stared straight ahead. I considered walking away and leaving him be for a moment, but then it occurred to me that he might be tempted to turn around and hop into the laundry room, and I really, really didn't want that. And then I had a stroke of genius: in one swift move, I picked up the rug he was sitting on and flung him out through the door.

Problem solved, right? Well, maybe, if I hadn't decided then to grab my camera and follow him outside, shutting the door behind me. What I didn't realize is that the door was still locked. Yes, the nefarious little bugger had actually lured me right out of the house!

As it happens, I still had my keys in my pocket, so the frog did not win. I did.

one hundred word story #16


It's the impeccability of spring that wakes you up, shakes you from your knees to your fingertips. It's the green greenness of new lawn, the deep-throated ribbits of the pond frogs, the surprise frost on a shining morn. Before you thought the world was just one way or another. Now you see it as rainbow before the sun hits it: unrealized, crisp but not clear. That’s what makes you love: the imprecision, the halt stop halt between words. Without the unpredictability of spring there would be no stories, no characters, no conflict. Shed those layers, will you, and go outside.

one hundred word story #15

First he lost his wife. Then he lost his girlfriend. Then his mother. He gave himself time. He gave the world permission to do its worst, thinking it already had. Then, recovering amidst a sea of sympathy cards, the news came: heart surgery. "In another world," he thought, "the skies would open. The rain would fall on me. In this one, I breed rain." He bought a Lotto ticket on his way in. He kept his headphones on. The next morning, the sun focused its rays on his loudly thumping chest. Something he’d never felt before. It felt so good.