Meet Wesley


This is my friend Wesley. He is in seventh grade and just joined the cross country team. He recently tested for his brown-black belt in karate. He has traveled the globe with his family.

He and I have a few things in common. We both play sports and have close-knit families. We also both live with type 1 insulin-dependent diabetes, which means that every day we get to test our blood sugar on our fingers and take insulin. As of last week, he now uses an insulin pump, a small device which attaches to his body via a canula and delivers insulin hourly.

I met Wesley shortly after he was diagnosed--a mere five months ago. When I told him and his family about the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation and our upcoming Walk to Cure Diabetes, he agreed to sit down with me for a few minutes to give those of you in the non-diabetes world an idea of what it is like to live with type 1. Over the next week or so I will upload another video or two of friends who have agreed to share their story. It is my goal that together we can produce an image of active, healthy, engaged individuals who live great lives, but would rather not have to deal with a chronic condition.

If this inspires any gift-giving action, feel free to wander over to www.jdrf.org and search for Team Malibu Pumpers to throw us a buck or two. I look forward to the day I can get my kids a diabetes vaccine. Until then, I'm honored to meet kids like Wesley, who not only work with their families to control their blood sugar, but do a whole hell of a lot more with their life as well.

On publication

In 1997, I submitted a short story to the Davis Enterprise and it was published as part of Bob Dunning's "Replace the Above-Mentioned Columnist" contest. I was 13 and the 700-word story was an imagining of a young girl who gets reincarnated as a dog. It could happen, right? Seeing the story in the paper was the first time I understood that writing might be a public act. This summer I submitted a piece that was originally written on this blog. For the Enterprise column, see here. Thanks, Bob, for getting this whole writing thing going.

You should know



There are a few things you should know about my grandma Alice. You should know that she and her sister once spent a summer working at Yosemite National Park in the the 1940s. You should know that she can ride a bicycle backwards--that is, with her body facing the back tire. You should know that she got up on waterskis the summer she turned 80. You should know that she routinely pulled in 140-pound halibut off the back of a fishing boat in Alaska. You should know that she completed a ropes course in Costa Rica in her 60s. You should know that she can play a mean game of pinochle, and that she has the purest poker face in the world. You should know that her pies are so good that my brother and his wife used her recipe for their wedding desserts.

You should know that, when I was a kid and terribly shy, she was one of the few adults in the world who really understood what that meant.

You should know that when I was little, she was the soft grandma, the quiet one with a knack for listening and an endless supply of stories. You should know that she and my grandfather came to nearly every Sacramento regatta I competed in. You should know that I still own the purple and white sweater she knitted for me when I was five years old. You should know that she and grandpa hosted Christmas every year until us grandkids grew too tall to all sleep before the fire, and while every subsequent Christmas has been lovely, they are different without my grandpa's shadow lurking in the kitchen, my grandma's various hidden cookie jars.

You should know that my grandma has dignity.

You should know that when I saw her today, recovering from a bad fall, tubes and machines whirring around her, I saw a person stronger than I have ever been, and who knows, might ever be.

You should know that with grandmas like her, that's a quality that never fades.

Summer reading

Every now and then, there's a book that keeps me up at night, the kind of story that made me invest in night lights and flashlights for the car. As a kid I was always hungry for words, and books were everywhere. It was unthinkable to go more than a few miles without a book in my bag. When we'd go on big camping trips, I'd trek out to the car with Safeway bags filled with library books.

Somewhere along the way, books became eclipsed by magazines, journals, Walkmen and Discman and iPods. These days my cell phone is as distracting as anything else. The focus of all these products is to entertain, but not necessarily to engage. I majored in literature in college, which meant that reading became an elevated act--one not only meant to pass time in cars, but something to be picked apart, studied, analyzed on a theoretical and historiographical level. I fell in love with a lot of writers in college (Frank O'Hara, Emily Dickinson, Federico Garcia Lorca, Jorge Luis Borges, Rohinton Mistry, Jack Gilbert, Adrienne Rich), but weirdly, in doing so I lost interest in reading itself. Reading equaled homework, which equaled deadlines, which equaled stress.

The older I got, the more important the books needed to seem. And yet, the books I truly remember are the ones I never expected to like. They impressed me with their nonchalance, their lack of pretension, and their lyricism.

This summer I fell in love again. First there was Maggie Nelson's Bluets, which I followed with Jonathan Dee's The Privileges and chased with Danzy Senna's Caucasia.

These books couldn't be more different--Nelson's tome is a carefully organized smattering of philosophical musings on the color blue, Dee's story follows a lofty hedge fund manager as he copes with an era of opulence, and Senna's novel shows a character struggling to find an identity as a biracial woman coming of age in the 1970s. Their aesthetics are different and their approaches unique, and they all kept me up late.


I always know a book has left an impression when I find myself missing the characters a day or so later, as if the writer had drawn them so clearly that I half expect to run into them at the farmer's market or the airport. I'll keep my eyes out for them, as if at some point they'll find me in a crowd, approach me and say, "I remember you--you were the one who paid attention." That's what Senna did with her protagonist Birdie Lee, and that's what Dee did with Andy and Cynthia Morey. These are people we know, innately, and they are characters that their creators have taught us to be on the lookout for.

These books are important because they remind us that stories are meaningful, no matter the content, no matter the characters. Yesterday I even turned off my iPod and silenced my cell phone in order to fully commit to Birdie Lee. How many times has that happened? It is now my goal that to one day be able to keep someone else up reading, lost in some other place, some other time, some other head.

one hundred word story #24: Survivor

Here's what you should know, she says. We like you, we really do, but you're just not pretty enough, you know? She spins me in a little circle. You've got that free spirit thing going on, which is great, but rein it in a bit. Maybe dye your hair. Wear thicker eyeliner, invest in stilettos. Change your major. Dump your boyfriend and kiss a girl while other boys watch. In my peripheral vision I can see the other girls nodding. The camera zooms in and she steps away for my confessional. Go on, says the producer. Give us our reality.

one hundred word story #23: sugar high


IMGP2625
Originally uploaded by Julia_h_j



Jorge has a problem: he is too ordinary. Average height, average looks, average intelligence. Boring job, bored girlfriend--hell, even the dog is over him. He tries pickup soccer, watercolor painting, French, but he still lacks a certain je ne sais quoi. Then he spots a multicolored candy bus, windows inspired by Hello Kitty. A girl with red dreadlocks beckons him inside, hands him jujubes and gummy bears. “In case you were wondering,” she points to a sign that reads “You Are Special.” He brews an above-average root beer float, sugar charging him home. Rover actually wags his tail. Voila.

one hundred word story #22: missed connections


She sat on her hands while she waited. It was impossible, the waiting. Men and women walked by, cable cars clanked, cyclists ducked through traffic. Somewhere amongst the Chinese food, the bus transfers and the countless pigeons, he was coming. She hoped he looked like his picture, hoped he liked rollerblading and science fiction. Her watch was loud with ticking. A man skidded before her on his rollerblades, looked her full in the face. “Finally,” she said.

At the dinner table several months later, she brings up the ad she answered.
“What ad?” he asks.
She decides not to answer.

Bathroom Stall Series #11



I spotted this in the bathroom of Vancouver's Our Town Cafe. Ry and I had just spent the afternoon exploring the beautiful Stanley Park, where we saw seagulls lunching on sea stars and found a beaver dam but no beavers. And then we tumbled into this coffee shop on East Broadway. The coffee and paninis were good, but the best by far was this bathroom and its not-so-subtle artistic messages. I especially like the way this octopus was born out of a broken hook.

Other great graffiti animals included the snail:






and Le Skunk, who hearts bikes. As if there weren't enough reasons to visit and/or move to Vancouver.

Maggie Nelson and the livable condition

"217. 'We're only given as much as the heart can endure,' 'What does not kill you makes you stronger,' 'Our sorrows provide us with the lessons we most need to learn': these are the kinds of phrases that enrage my injured friend. Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to come up with a spiritual lesson that demands becoming a quadri-paralytic. The tepid 'there must be a reason for it' notion sometimes floated by religious or quasi-religious acquaintances or bystanders, is, to her, another form of violence. She has no time for it. She is too busy asking, in this changed form, what makes a livable life, and how she can live it."

--from Maggie Nelson's

Bluets

, p.88

I love this.

I finally got my hands on a copy of Maggie Nelson's

Bluets

, a thin tome of numbered variations on the color blue.

I was recently talking with a good friend who lives with bipolar disorder about this very issue--how hard it is to respond when well-wishing strangers tell us that living with a chronic condition is some sign that we were marked at birth as people "strong enough" to handle them. It is perhaps the weirdest form of flattery. I understand this desire to explain away the bullshittedness of disease, that perhaps when we don't have a solid medical reason, or a clear cause and effect, we need to make up some reason why.

I tell myself these stories regularly--that I'm a bigger, stronger, tougher person because I'm diabetic. But there's a difference between growing stronger as a result of coping with something, well, unwanted, and the belief that those of us "lucky" enough to live with chronic conditions do so because we're the best for the job. That the sheer randomness of disease is best explained in terms of our more flattering qualities, or, better yet, that there's some cockamamie predestination to who gets to deal with what in life.

In Nelson's book, she references this quadri-paralytic friend and her body several times. In 109, they "examine parts of her body together, as if their paralysis had rendered them objects of inquiry independent of us both. But they are still hers. No matter what happens to our bodies in our lifetimes, no matter if they become like 'pebbles in water,' they remain ours; us, theirs." (pg. 42) This, I think, is what so many medical professionals don't understand: that even if our bodies are imperfect, especially if our bodies are imperfect, they are still very much our own. It has little to do with strength, or even luck. It's just a fact that we come to terms with on our own, as we go on figuring out a "livable life"--something that I imagine is much easier with four functional limbs. Nelson explores this fine line between acknowledging tragedy and leaving room for self-definition, which is perhaps one of the reasons

Bluets reads like a literary Bible, peppered with philosophical nuance and no-nonsense confession.

Thanks, Maggie, for capturing the livable condition. That's what I want to read about.

Eat this, Bourdain




Ryan gave me a camping cookbook for my birthday. That, coupled with his new camp stove, made for some tasty meals on the road this summer. One of our favorites: jambalaya in Yellowstone.

There was also the night we made peanut chicken at Avalanche Creek campground in Glacier National Park. The ranger walked by our site to remind us to keep the grounds "bear-friendly," and stopped mid-sentence to peek into our pots.

"Whatcha, like, gourmet or something?" he asked.

The irony is that I'm not the best cook when I'm at home. Usually I work late, or make the mistake of not thinking to cook until I'm already hungry. But that's the beauty of camping: if you're not out hiking and exploring, you probably need to be eating, or preparing food. Hence the Action Jackson.

On music and memory

I have a sonic memory. All the important days in my life are shelved as visual and auditory archives in my brain, little PowerPoint slideshows with accompanying soundtracks that change color slightly over time. My dreams often include a single song, played from start to finish on repeat until I wake up. Last summer's road trip to New York is best characterized by the Presidents of the United States of America's classic "Tiki God." My nine month stay in Fuengirola, Spain is equal parts Julieta Venegas' "Me Voy," Ojo de Brujo's "El Confort no Reconforta," and (weirdly) the Black Eyed Peas' "The Boogie That Be." Without question, my diagnosis of type 1 diabetes is paired with the Dave Matthews Band's "The Space Between." Incidentally, I no longer like that band.

This summer is marked by two songs, the first being MGMT's "Kids." I'd never heard their music until the dance party that marked the last night of the Tin House workshop. We were crowded into the student center on the Reed campus, and Ryan had just flown in after a week away. I was high on all the right things--new friends, travel plans, that superspecial excitement that means it is time to write, and time to read. The minute the song came on, I swore I'd heard it before, though not out loud. It was the pulse of something I couldn't quite put my finger on.



One month later, I requested this song at my brother's wedding. And then Dana the deejay put on LCD Soundsystem's Great Release, my second song for the summer. We were swirled deep within the belly of our neighborhood community center, a pulsing mass of bridesmaids and groomsmen, friends, family. The circle grew tight, with Josh and Shelby at its center, foreheads touching. The intensity of the music built just as the group edged in closer and closer, shoulder to shoulder, shuffling and jumping and clapping and shouting their names. And the sheer joy of it all defied sentimentality; this is no ordinary couple. What's happened there was something that is rare and refined, something we'd all be lucky to have ourselves someday. The song said all that, but the people said it too, looking back over the moonlit lawn, our eyes falling on all the trees we grew up climbing and all the people we grew up loving. There's that sense that men and women fall in love all the time, that sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn't, and the ones that do find themselves wound up in tight circles, cushioned by a living, breathing community.

One of my professors believes that all weddings are trite affairs, that in the end we cry for all the same reasons, and none of them original. But maybe that's okay. Maybe all it takes is one song to bring us back to that space, that night, those people, that moon. Maybe what makes it original is what we as listeners, as friends, as family, bring to the music. Maybe that's why, days later, the song still remains in my brain late at night, a reminder that all the important days have multiple dimensions.

For Sacramento art fans



Three of my 100-word short stories (originally written for and posted on this blog) are included in the Revel Sacramento Gay and Lesbian Center's Second Saturday art show this month. The art opening is this Saturday, August 13, at the SGLC gallery at 1927 L Street, at the corner of L and 20th.

I will be busy best-womaning at my brother's wedding, but I am excited to know that the stories ("The Cliff," "Permissions" and "Pet Store") will be printed as posters and displayed at the gallery all month. My classmate and friend David Semonchik is also exhibiting two pieces of flash fiction, and there are two other featured artists as well.

Spread the word!

one hundred word story #21: This one's true


This is the story of a smiley man and a surfer woman. He has a coconut that needs opening; she has a recipe for Hawaiian haupia. He goes Indonesia to chase waves but soon chases her back to California, back to Hawaii, then forward to Nicaragua, Spain, Italy, China, Tibet, Nepal. He becomes a teacher. She puts herself through graduate school. They both watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He becomes a brown belt in Hawaiian jujitsu; she a black belt in Los Angeles yoga. When they decide to marry, the smiles grow wider, the waves gnarlier, the coconuts sweeter. Ohana.


with love for my one and only brother, and his lovely wife-to-be

Mountain goats



We spotted this guy atop Banff's Sulfur Mountain, which we climbed a month ago today. I was surprised by how unperturbed he was. A few moments later he was joined by his lady and offspring, both of whom sauntered so casually that it seemed us humans were merely moving trees. Unimportant.



We ate our sandwiches on a picnic table at the scenic overlook, where we were dive-bombed by merciless snowbirds. The birds made the goats seem even more tame. It got so we had to eat one at a time, the other on the lookout for the beaky monsters as they swooped down, one after another, aching for a bite of our turkey-avocados. But the goats--the goats were chill.

It reminded me a bit of awkward holiday parties, where the loudest and most memorable guests are the ones who never stop talking, or worse, never stop drinking, stopping between sips to slip in a passive-aggressive comment about the uselessness of your degree, all the while the real interesting people in the room are lumbering off to heated discussions in quiet corners. These are the people whose environments we want to discover--those far-off, beautiful corners of the world where there are jobs with benefits and vacations around the world.

I wonder if these people, like the goats on the hill, shed their skins once a year, and when they do, if they've also got to fight off the birds.

Is writing itself creative nonfiction?



Adam Haslett at Napa Valley College, July 2011

This summer, I learned to read again.

It's amazing how long I tried to write without really trying to read. Though perhaps that's just it--I didn't want to feel like I had to try. I missed the pleasure of simply falling in, absorbing language and character and story without having to dissect any of it. What made the difference? Adam Haslett, Dorothy Allison, Michelle Huneven, Steve Almond, Aimee Bender, Maggie Nelson, Jim Shepard, Major Jackson--I got to see them read. Watching Almond describe hapless actors, listening to Allison bellow the most beautiful curses, sitting in the room while Jackson conveyed mood and tone and history in a series of careful phrases; it was electric. It reminded me of reading in my parents' cars, even after sunset, when I'd keep my finger on the page until we passed the next stoplight, because it was all so urgent. This was life, distilled in a way that made the world more real, thrilling, wonderful or tragic.

I've attended two conferences in the past month, studied writing on and off for years, worked at various institutions and stopped and started various projects. I needed a reminder that reading and writing are acts of pleasure, that maybe good stories and poems don't always beg deconstruction, that perhaps the best books are the ones that remind us of who we are. There are so many reasons not to write, and even more not to read--there's enough content floating through the universe that is digestible in visual and auditory form, what's the point of relying simply on words? And perhaps the scariest question of all: if our writing is not immediately marketable, or can't promise any financial gain, is it worth the time and energy?

I see this question in terms of its fiction and non-fiction: if the answer is yes, writing is always worth it, regardless of what we earn and what we spend, then we are telling one of the "writing market"'s greatest fictions--that if we believe in ourselves, eventually we'll be recognized. If the answer is no, that good writing reflects raw talent and there's a specific formula for achieving success, then we lose the opportunity to risk originality. I veer from one pole to the other, encouraged by the positive feedback of one teacher while reeling in the amount of work it will take to make any singular story passable or (maybe) publishable. This is all work that I enjoy doing, but I know that the minute I leave grad school, this is all work that I cannot afford to do full-time.

I present this not as a surprise, nor as a tragedy, but simply as an example of how we as writers tell ourselves stories in order to sit down and write our own. Some people (Allison, Haslett, Almond, etc.) do it so well, we tend to forget they were ever anyone else except those well-spoken professionals behind the microphone. I can't help wondering if at some point they had to distinguish between the fictions and nonfictions in their own lives from those they figured out how to depict on the page.


Either way, I'm so glad they reminded me that reading is fun--a truth that keeps us all writing.

one hundred word story #20




Doris the duck is butt-up in Reed Lake again. Margaret swims circles around her. “Damnit, D,” Margaret says, “this better be the last time you lose your motherfucking keys. I’m tired of you crashing in my nest. I’m so angry I could poop!” Doris doesn’t hear because she is underwater. But Doris didn’t lose her keys. Keys are not required to build nests—effort is. Doris doesn’t want to build nests when she could be underwater, where it’s crisp, dark, quiet. So quiet that she doesn’t hear Margaret’s final sigh, but sees her dreams drop like a small, dark mass.

Coco and Bigote Discover America, Again


We are in Portlandia.

Correction: I am in Portland, having just dropped Ryan off at the airport after an awesome night with our friend Jenn Chavez and her boyfriend Erin. Yesterday was a pretty unbelievable day: we awoke to deer tiptoeing through our foggy Cougar Campground on Mount Rainier, drove up to Paradise pass, which is still under 10 feet of snow, then embarked on a brisk 5-mile hike on the Wonderland trail before setting off for Portland. Once we made it off I-5 (oh, how I loathe thee), we met Jenn and Erin in Belmont for--get ready--an art show, a drive-by candy car, dinner at Sizzle Pie Pizza, and an awesome metal show by Avi Devi at Katy O'Brien's.

It's not often that I start the day on a mountain and end it on a pool table, surrounded by men with chin-length hair and women with surprisingly screamy voices. Oh, and after the show, Jenn and Erin took us to a pod--not of whales, but of mobile food carts, all strung up with bright lights. Ryan got poutine (Canadian fries with gravy and cheese), and I got a fried coconut chocolate pie.


We are now very much back on the grid, after spending the past ten days camping in western Canada (first in Glacier National Park in British Columbia, and later on Vancouver Island), wandering through Olympic National Park in Washington, where we visited the Hoh Rainforest and camped at Mora campground on the coast. We were so wrapped up in the intensity of hanging moss against the blue blue skies that we almost didn't notice the abundance of goth girls hanging around the Forks Thriftmart. That's when we started noticing the vampire signs--apparently Forks is where the Twilight books and films are set, and there are kitschy tours that teenage girls and their moms take. We even passed a sign that read "Vampire Threat: Low."


Ryan has returned to California this week to attend a wedding and take a class while I am staying at Reed College to participate in the Tin House Writer's Workshop. You could say that we are shifting gears--I'm focusing on writing (one year til my thesis defense!), he on teaching. He'll fly back next week and we will once again stock the car with carby snacks and mosey our way back home.

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.