Coco and Bigote Discover America, Part Deux: Canadian Invasion



One year ago today, Ryan and I were in New York, the halfway mark in our first cross-country road trip. Today we are enjoying Canada Day in Canmore, Alberta, a beautiful little town just outside Banff National Park.

We departed California on June 19 and made our way east through Nevada to Idaho, where we saw the Craters of the Moon National Monument (lava tubes and craters in the middle of the greenest, lushest potato country imaginable), and bathed at Lava Hot Springs before trundling on to Wyoming. We camped at Jackson Lake in Grand Teton National Park, encountered a moose on the Jenny Lake trail, before moving on to Yellowstone. Ryan had never seen a geyser before, so we were extra lucky to catch Old Faithful sounding off twice during our afternoon at the park. We saw bison shedding their fur, black bears, elk, moose, marmots, squirrels, deer, and an uncountable number of fellow humans.



From Yellowstone we headed northwest through Montana's Big Sky country toward Glacier National Park. We spent one day on each side of the park, starting at Avalanche Creek on the west side, where we nearly hit a black bear as it scuttled across the road. The sunset was spectacular over Lake MacDonald, but we also loved camping at Rising Sun on the west side, near Many Glacier, where we spotted a Grizzly bear. From Glacier we drove the 35 miles across the border to Waterton National Park in Alberta, a scenic little village with perhaps a higher deer population than people. We enjoyed hot chocolates at the Prince of Wales Hotel, a historic hotel perched high above Waterton Lake.




We made it to Banff in time to celebrate Ryan's birthday by hiking Sulfur Mountain and taking the gondola back down to the hot springs. We had planned to camp tonight in Jasper, but campgrounds in all directions are booked for Canada Day.

Our journey is slowly approaching its halfway point. Tomorrow we plan to drive to the Columbia Icefields, and hopefully camp near Jasper, before turning our wheels westward toward Vancouver. We've been operating off the grid so far, making gourmet dinners on Ry's new camp stove, and averaging 3-5 mile hikes in the mornings.

Basically, we're becoming Canadian mountain goats, and from what we've seen, that's a good thing.

Libertad



IMGP1478
Originally uploaded by Julia_h_j



Last night, Wayne Coyne floated past my head in an oversize inflatable balloon. Nothing says summer like a Flaming Lips concert at the Harmony Festival in the middle of Northern California, on a day that hovered right around 80 degrees.

It is the best time of year--that time when cherries are plum and red, when the sun stays out so late that you can walk out into the fields long past dusk, when even on the shittiest of work days you know that by Friday you will have an adventure in your back pocket. Thursday was my last day of work as a graduate student researcher at UC Davis, and after spending about 30 hours that week on my final term paper, I walked off campus with that special kind of glee reserved for the last day of school. I don't care how old I get; this is still the best feeling in the world. That feeling that you have finished what you set out to finish, and hopefully you're smarter for it; and if not, well at least you've produced something that you probably wouldn't get to finish, if it weren't for deadlines and professors.


It helps that I got to spend the weekend with my best friend, boyfriend, and extended family; also that I spent the better part of a day driving along the California coast just one week after the rainiest, stormiest June 4 I've ever seen. This week I am supposed to get this pesky cast off my arm--decorated though it is, I am impatient to jump in the water. I have a short list of things to accomplish this week, and then Ryan and I are off to Discover America, Part Deux: Canadian Invasion. There is so much of this world left to see, and goshdarnit, we are off to see one more slice of it--while we both have vacation time and health insurance.

I keep thinking of this image that the Flaming Lips projected onstage last night: it was the silhouette of a naked woman pounding the drums. She started her set by pointing one drumstick straight outward, like a wand, walking in a circle as this beam of green light was beamed out across the audience. She stopped right before the band launched into its drum or guitar solos, at which point she'd throw all her weight into this one drumstick, slamming down on the drums with explosive force. The screen erupted into a series of rainbow pixels.

I want to be her, ringing in the summer with unabashed energy, force and rhythm. Who knows, maybe by the end of August, Ry and I will no longer be driving my little white Volvo, but rather rolling from state to state in a huge plastic ball. Hey, it could happen. The nights are long enough this time of year.

Things That Are Hard to Do Without One's Dominant Hand

I broke my first bone this week while biking across campus on my way home. It was weirdly strategic: I fell in the parking lot across the street from Urgent Care, which had conveniently just closed. Luckily my parents live in town and my dad acted as my personal ambulance driver. We spent four lucky hours in the ER before the X-rays revealed a fractured right radius, and I was sent home in a splint.

There exists in my mind an odd romance for broken bones. I was always a cautious child, and secretly envied the attention that the kids with casts got. That romance ended this week when I began composing an ongoing list in my head of Things That Are Hard to Do Without One's Dominant Hand:

1. Putting on and taking off clothes, especially long sleeved things and, yes, bras
2. Testing one's blood sugar
3. Cooking
4. Driving
5. Brushing one's hair (I desperately miss braiding)
6. Writing
7. Folding just about anything
8. Unscrewing childproof pill boxes, which is particularly cruel when one needs a Vicodin
9. Typing. Not looking forward to my 20-page seminar paper.
10. Hugging
11. At times, sleeping. My dad (who has some experience with broken bones) suggested I sleep with my hand perched atop its own pillow, which means that in the groggy moments after my alarm goes off, I awake in a panic, wondering what that stiff thing is in front of my face and why I can't feel my hand.


All said and done, it could have been a lot worse. My parents have been even more supportive than usual, which is saying something. I plan to get the most obnoxious color for my cast. Maybe if I'm lucky all my friends will sign it, so when the damn thing is off six weeks from now, I'll pull my arm out from its little plaster shell and have this monument to the one and only bone I hope to break. Now that would be romantic.

On summer

I read two novels by Virginia Woolf this weekend. The first, The Waves, is a dense little bugger - one I didn't think I could make my way through until at some moment her prose cracked and out shone a series of startling, vibrant soliloquies. About 30 pages in, one of her characters has a monologue about how exactly she plans to spend her first day of summer, and it reminds me of how, as a kid, I would keep a tally of the number of days until summer and write it on the class board every morning before first period. This says it even better:

"'I have torn off the whole of May and June,' said Susan, 'and twenty days of July. I have torn them off and screwed them up so they no longer exist, save as a weight in my side. They have been crippled days, like moths with shrivelled wings unable to fly. There are only eight days left. In eight days' time I shall get out of the train and stand on the platform at six twenty-five. Then my freedom will unfurl, and all these restrictions that wrinkle and shrivel--hours and order and discipline, and being here and there exactly at the right moment--will crack asunder. Out the day will spring, as I open the carriage-door and see my father in his old hat and gaiters. I shall tremble. I shall burst into tears. Then next morning I shall get up at dawn. I shall let myself out by the kitchen door. I shall walk on the moor. The great horses of phantom riders will thunder behind me and stop suddenly. I shall see the swallow skim the grass. I shall throw myself on a bank by the river and watch the fish slip in and out among the reeds. The palms of my hands will be printed with pine-needles. I shall there unfold and take out whatever it is I have made here; something hard. For something has grown in me here, through the winters and summers, on staircases, in bedrooms.'"

--The Waves, pg. 32-33

In related news: Four more weeks of work, one more paper, and then Ryan and I are embarking on our second cross-country trip. Destination: Calgary.

We shall let ourselves out into the summer air. We shall tremble. We shall burst into song...

One hundred word story #19



Danny never really tried at anything. He'd open his palms to the sky and let experiences rain down on him, wander through the streets following the whims of his stomach, take buses til the end of the line. One day on his travels he caught the tail of a paper airplane. “Follow me,” it read, and listed an address. It was further than he thought – beyond the city’s square, past the bus depot. Finally the numbers stopped. Danny waited. He got hungry. Buses passed. He closed his eyes, opened his palms. Nothing. He unfurled the airplane. “Gullible sonofabitch,” it read.

Sky dancers



These amazing dancers are members of Cielo Vertical Arts, a troop lead by Heather Baer of Oakland. I saw them perform off the top of the Natsoulas Gallery in Davis last Friday night in honor of the California Conference for the Advancement of Ceramic Art. I don't know what is more amazing: the fact that these men and women performed modern art while dangling off the side of a four-story building, or the fact that my friend Charlie Schneider, internationally renowned artist and sculptor, spent the better part of last week rigged up to the very same building. He painted the sides of the building with a clay slip in a bold rectangular design, one that will eventually fade in the rain. No biggie, right?

All of it -- the paint, the sculpture, the mid-air modern dance -- was exactly the kind of creative hub that carries heat. These are things that make people stop what they're doing and really look at the world around them.

And yes, Charlie, no matter how much you protest, I think "internationally renowned artist" has a bit of a ring to it.

A voice from Jerusalem

A few weeks ago, I met Tomer, a 28-year-old Israeli parliamentary journalist living in Jerusalem, at a OneVoice event at Congregation Bet Haverim in Davis. Tomer was presenting alongside Bashar, a businessman who lives in the Palestinian city Hebron. I was really taken by their parallel pursuits for peace, which in part have been fueled by a nonprofit peace organization called OneVoice. Tomer and Bashar were in the United States as cultural ambassadors, in part to spread a message of peace and advocacy, and also, I think, to give us a real, human understanding of what it means to live in Israel and Palestine in 2011.

Tomer has been an active member of OneVoice since being recruited as a freshmen in college. I introduced myself to him and Bashar after the presentation, and within seconds we discovered that we had both studied abroad in Spain. Tomer was kind enough to answer some questions I had about his experience with OneVoice, and agreed to let me post these answers on my blog. Why? Well, there was something about hearing him and Bashar talk that ignited something in me I had long buried: a desire to understand just what happens in places like Jerusalem and Ramallah, and a feeling that maybe, someday, things could be different.

What is your personal approach toward organizing youth in Israel in a movement for peace? What campaigns (OneVoice or otherwise) have you seen that didn't really seem to have an impact in Israel, and what campaigns do you think really work?

TA: Most of my friends are indifferent. They became used to living in ongoing conflict. The only Campaign that works, I believe, is a positive one that shows the benefits of peace. Other methods that try to frighten people with worrisome data (e.g that in 20 years we will be the minority, and Israel will become totally isolated) don't work.


Tomer and Bashar at a OneVoice event at San Francisco State University
Photo Credit: OneVoice

What, if any, role should Americans or other non-Israelis/non-Palestinians play in promoting peace in the Middle East? What is the best way for us to educate ourselves?

TA: Creating "Pro-peace" initiatives are very helpful. We are inspired when we see people outside the region sympathize with us, not by taking sides, but by calling to our leaders to negotiate. Now we mainly see events full of hatred that urge others to boycott Israel among other things. That only fuels our extremists.

What kind of responses have you gotten in your travels to promote OneVoice? Were there any discussions or reactions that surprised you?

TA: We met mainly confused people that wanted to learn more. That was good because Bashar and I could approach them to show several points of view. We also met other peace activists - we strengthen each other. We conversed with many other activists that were surprised to see that we could get along.

What would your ideal Israel look like?

TA: We should have a Middle East Union. Ideally, Israel and its neighbors could bond and build economic, touristic and cultural bridges. Israel itself can gain a lot from peace. Our children would not have to spend 3 years in the army, and we could use the security budget to improve our education, infrastructure and so forth. Besides that, I believe that the conflict damages us and dulls our morals. Israel today, I believe, lives half of its potential.

What do you like to do in your free time?

Indoors, I love to write fiction and watch "How I Met Your Mother" with my friends. Outside I enjoy hiking, and riding my bicycles. I live just across the street from the Knesset and I walk to my work place. That is a dream come true.

Many thanks to Tomer for taking the time to answer my questions. I hope to interview a OneVoice ambassador from Palestine in the coming weeks. Who knows, maybe someday these ambassadors can lead a unified action toward peace in the Middle East.

Next year in Jerusalem - or Ramallah - or, even better, both.

New Villager

Cool thing about the internet #1,783,067: stumbling across a music video you really like and then realizing that you once dated one of the musicians. Yes. Either the world is that small, or someone's getting older.



My new favorite song: Rich Doors, by New Villager. Apparently, not only are they great songwriters and performers, but they also direct and produce really brilliant, colorful music videos (see their song "Light House", which reminds me of the BBC production of Alice in Wonderland, the version with Ringo Starr).

Small, beautiful little world we've got.

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.