On marriage (or perhaps, more accurately, on equality)

This is what I think of when I think of marriage equality:

I remember when Ellen DeGeneres came out on her sitcom, and that it was the only episode of that show I ever watched, because the hype was so great, and the stakes seemed so high. Because this was 1997, one year before Matthew Shepard was killed, one year after the Defense of Marriage Act passed--the act that currently bans federal benefits for 130,000 legally married gay couples.​

​All I remember from that famous episode is the big climactic moment, the moment Ellen's character says the words, "I'm gay," and does so, quite by accident, into an airport microphone. I was 13 and terrified, as many teenagers are, not only of homosexuality but sexuality itself--it didn't matter who was attracted to whom, it was all scary. But the pure genius of Ellen's "big reveal" was its humor--the way the publicity of it all suddenly seemed so unwarranted. As in, oh, she's gay? Okay, great. Do we care? Probably not. This idea -- that in the end, our sexuality really only affects ourselves and our partners -- came as a huge relief to me.

​When I think of marriage equality I think about alliance. I think about my friends who have same-sex partners. I remember the gallantry of Gavin Newsom, and how in 2004 it felt like he rode into San Francisco and bestowed it with this great big wand of love, though of course it was much more complicated than that. And how wonderful it felt, one year into the second Iraq war,  to feel like that despite it, and despite so much, real human progress was being made. People were being "awarded" rights that should have been there in the first place.

I remember my favorite college professor driving upstate to marry her longtime partner in San Francisco. ​I remember my parents' friends, activists who had been together for decades, trekking to City Hall to pledge their love to each other. 

I remember living in San Francisco in 2008, and how all the houses on my block had No on Prop 8 signs except for one. That house kept its windows open and propped its big YES sign right opposite my bedroom window. The word had been misappropriated. It never makes sense to say YES to something that is, in its very essence, a big, ugly NO.​

I think about marriage equality and I focus on that second word. We can argue back and forth on the definition of "marriage," but when it comes down to it, equality is, and must be, universal. Civil rights are non-negotiable. Who you choose to spend your time with, who you love, who you own a house with, who you have children with, who you take care of, who takes care of you -- this is what makes up life. This is the good stuff. This is what we all fight to protect. This is not what defines commerce or religion. It seems arbitrary to decide that some couples are entitled to the legal and financial protection afforded by marriage, and some are not.

I think about marriage equality and I think, we should be there by now. ​

Or perhaps, maybe we're nearly there.​

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Donae's song

This is Donae James Johnican. Last month he won the Silicon Valley De-Bug Schoolin' the Schools Media Contest. He taught himself to play guitar and this is his song.​

Donae was a junior at Lincoln High School in San Jose. On Tuesday afternoon, he was struck and killed by Caltrain as he was crossing a platform. He was 16. ​

He was a student in Ryan's English class.​

I never met Donae but I can't stop thinking about him. ​It is hard to understand how and why these things happen; if the universe is random, if anything is possible, if everything is possible. And how, sometimes a person's essence is so unshakable, you can miss them, even if you've never met them.

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Grandma's hats

I've been dreaming of my grandmother lately.​ She would have been 87 last week. In my dreams she is on a bicycle, wearing one of her stylish hats from the 1950s.

When she died my grandfather invited me and my mother to go through her closet. I slipped on her shoes and tried hard to make my soles fit into the grooves her feet had created. We ran our fingers through the sweatshirts she had embroidered in flowers and hummingbirds. And then, at the very top: a big green hatbox. I pulled it down and it took me a moment to spring it open. Inside there were hats of many colors: purple hats, green hats, black hats, hats with lace, hats with curly bows. A singular white hat, its fabric delicate and neat. There was something about the careful way she had stored them, deeply embedded in that big green box, one for each decade she'd been alive, none of them crushed, all of them well-kept, well-loved.

​I tried trying them on, but only a few fit my head. Many of them were too small, or perhaps I wasn't tilting them at just the right rakish angle. When I put them on I half expected to hear her thoughts--to embody who she was the last time she was wearing them. I knew that she'd been married in one of them. Surely she'd worn some of them to church, others to social functions. Did the world look differently when she was wearing a hat? Did it mean something? Was she making a statement?

Grief is a funny thing. It has been well over a year since she died and still I have days when I have a sudden, desperate need for her. It's a specific and surprising panic. It isn't a fear of death, or what happens after. It's the mournful recognition that there are things in life that simply go uncommunicated, at least in ways that we understand. ​

On nights like this, when I find myself missing her, I like to take down her box of hats and try them on for size, to see if maybe this time, they'll fit.​

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For Mikey

A hate crime was committed in Davis this past week -- one that people should know about.

Mikey Partida was brutally beaten and called homophobic slurs on the streets of Davis after leaving a relative's home the other night. After spending a few nights in the hospital, he is now being moved to a rehab facility. News reports indicate that there might be long-lasting neurological and psychological effects of this vicious attack.

I don't know Mikey personally, but he went to my high school. He is a friend of my friends. I think of him and I see my older brother, the boys I grew up with, my friends at school. My heart goes out to him and his family.

How does one recover from something like this? ​How is it that things like this still happen?

​Mikey's family and friends have organized Mikey's Justice Fund to help raise awareness and money for his case. He has a Facebook page as well. I don't know who reads this but I ask you to take a moment and read about him and share his story. This isn't over.

Badmitten

This spring Ryan is coaching badminton. Incidentally, Ryan also teaches high school English. He posted this picture last night on his team's website and asked his students to "find the error."​

I love him.​

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lincoln.jpg

Ode to an anonymous dancer

Every week, Kurt Andersen asks the question "What work of art changed your life?" Andersen is the host of PRI's Studio 360, a weekly radio show and podcast that focuses on art, architecture, literature, design and culture. He is one of my many heroes.

This is a question I've been contemplating lately. Since settling into my job and new lifestyle post-grad school, I find myself missing what it means to be inspired. Productive, yes, and efficient, maybe, but inspired? I miss that.​

There are those moments of awe that one expects when encountering a famous work of art. I remember the hour I spent at the Prado in Madrid, standing opposite the gorgeous, caterwauling Guernica​. How I'd never survived anything so harrowing and yet was struck by an insane sense of familiarity, staring at all those mournful open mouths, those absurd horses. I still think of wandering into Neue Wache in Berlin, where Kathe Kollwitz's iconic sculpture Mother with Dead Son filled the entire room with an emptiness that only solid rock can create. I remember hearing Amy Goodman speak one winter at UCSB, in the depths of Bush's second administration, when all things independent and all things progressive seemed somehow at risk, and here she was, this small woman with the loudest, smartest, clearest voice.

These were all grand, immense moments of feeling; experiences that made me want to go home and write like mad, find the truth of it, whatever it was, and make it real. Make it raw. ​

And yet one moment somehow stands out, perhaps because of its irreverence. It was the summer of 2007 and I had just moved back to the States after a year abroad. I was working as a teaching assistant and camp counselor, the kind of job that requires you to be awake and on for 12-15 hours a day, seven days a week. I was a year out of college, lost in that schizophrenic gap between being a student and being a professional. My students were loud and outgoing and demanding of attention and time. I was worn out.

One of our last responsibilities during the three-week session was to host a camp talent show. There were skits and inside jokes, magic tricks and songs. I kept my eyes on my watch. And then a young woman came to the stage. She couldn't have been more than 15. She was wearing dance clothes but she didn't look like a ballerina, at least not the Balanchine kind. She danced to a long, slow song, a breathy song, a mournful song, a song that cast a pall over our teenage audience. The room grew quiet. I couldn't tell you what it was exactly that she was doing--they weren't pirouettes, but rather something more modern, more messy, yet controlled.​ It was a quiet, intense fury. It was adolescence; underrated, difficult, surprisingly articulate. She never broke a sweat. She had a self-possession that I, years older, had yet to learn. I had no idea what I was doing with my life but she expressed it all for me, without the crutch of words.

I never found out her name. As talented as she was, I almost didn't want to know. ​I've been lucky to witness a number of amazing performances since, but I've never forgotten the way she danced. The abandon, the forgiveness, the grace.

There's no comparing her performance to any other work of art that has left its impression. What makes art impressive to me is the narrative it creates for us--whether it's a story we all know, or a story we believe is being told to us, and us alone. And those are the stories I want to write.​

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This site was designed and developed by Heather Reed of Creative Fuel web design. ​Heather worked with me to create a unique style and aesthetic for this site. I want users to feel like they are cracking open a notebook full of stories and drawings. Stories and drawings that might be or could one day be featured in a book of their own.

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Thanks for stopping by! Stay tuned for more stories, drawings, and musings on Writings in the Raw.​

Still Life

Monday evening still life:

My aunt April gave me these wonderful sock puppet gloves with button eyes and blue noses. Occasionally they'll get separated, as they are now, one on the hassock, one on the sofa, its button eyes staring up at me, imploring.

A road map of the U.S. pinned to the wall with two different routes highlighted, one in orange, one in pink.

Blue and white lights curled around our standing light, making the corner glow.

A solitary orchid perched by the window. There's only one flower left.

The gift Ryan's grandmother gave us for Christmas: a small candle holder with four cookie cutter horses suspended above it, ready, as always, to spin once the wicks are lit.

The sound of light rail humming down the street: an urban murmur.

A paper chanukiah still taped to wall, three months later.

And, barely visible from my seat on the couch: Ryan pulling hot macaroni and cheese out of the oven.

In case you missed it...

...the wonderful, amazing A Practical Wedding reposted my "Miracle of the Latkes" piece on their blog yesterday. A Practical Wedding is a truly useful resource for anyone considering marriage -- everything from the intricate details of event planning to the bigger political and social questions that relationships imply. Reading APW has helped me own the excitement of getting engaged and offered a cajillion helpful ideas for honoring personal aesthetics, setting a budget, including family and friends, and acknowledging the marriage equality movement.

Thanks APW!

2.10.13

Yesterday was a beautiful, sparkly day, a cold day, the day before the Pope resigned, the Lunar New Year. Yesterday I ran 6 miles, programmed my first website, made lasagne with Ryan. I thought about the blood in my veins and how, after twelve years with diabetes, I still see it - every day. And how trivial that seems. And how funny it is to get used to adhesives on your stomach. And how, over time, you grow to really love those little sticky patches, because of what they do for you. And how tiresome this narrative must be, the preexisting-conditioners-speak-out-story, the let-me-show-you-how-tough-I-am story.*

I saw a new endocrinologist for the first time in several years. While reviewing my blood sugar charts he said something about a common trend toward hyperglycemia after meals, and completely without prompt, I burst into tears. He waited a beat and then said, "I certainly hope this isn't causing you psychological stress."

There are a lot of ways to interpret that. What this man doesn't know is that I am a master at interpreting things a thousand different ways. It is, at times, my job to do just that. I looked at him and said, "This shit is frustrating." Because the truth of it is, no matter how boring that narrative gets, it's there for you like any terrible reality tv show or late night drama. Yes, the last twelve years have been amazing. I have gotten to travel the world and study things I care about and work with really interesting people and live in beautiful places and spend time with my family and friends and fall in love and go on adventures. And on a good number of those days I've been downing Gatorade on my bike or waking up shaking in the middle of the night or taking an injection because my site doesn't work. I imagine other people's bodies as these machines that tick involuntarily; mine is a watch that must be wound, every two days, using a 7cm needle.

Know that this is not a call for sympathy. This is an acknowledgement that days can go by and years can pass and we can accomplish great things while still honoring, for one day, that nine or ten or eleven or twelve years ago our lives were unaffected in a way that they no longer are. That this is, for better or worse, a reality, one that occasionally causes stress, but one full of awe, and honesty, and true, real love.

So that was yesterday.






*I want to mention, too, that when other people living with, well, whatever it is we humans live with, share their stories about their own conditions, I feel a kinship and compassion so strong that I know this narrative will always have its place.

Dudebros and red pumps


I bought my first bridal magazine yesterday. I couldn't help myself; I had to editorialize a little. This is how the intro paragraph to my wedding would read:
The perfect dazzling white gown lacey vintage short dress, hair and make-up that make her feel every inch a princess an awesome badass woman, from the tip of her tiara crown of flowers to the toes of her bejeweled slippers red pumps, a fabulous grand ballrooman open night sky, and of course a handsome prince responsible yet spontaneous dudebro. It's a timeless dream for most women, as it should be.

I've never been one for fairy tales--it seems to me that a wedding is about celebrating the raw humanity that is real life, real love, and real people. That, and sexy dudebros, and an entire happy crew and family and friends, and red pumps.

The eternal flame


UC Santa Barbara has a monument on campus entitled the Eternal Flame. It is a small sculpture located on the lawn between buildings, and in its triangular center it burns, as they say, incessantly. Our final week living together in the dorms, my friend Graham convinced a group of us to sneak out to the Eternal Flame after dark and - well - roast marshmallows.

This was the kind of thing we did. This is the kind of thing I would still do.

The places we go

Some nights are for driving.

Tonight I drove I-280 south from San Francisco on my way back from a raucous afternoon at the Golden Gate Races. It was one of those winter days that I think only happen in California. There really is only one word for it, that light: nostalgic.

The drive tonight reminded me of a summer night in Davis last summer, the night before I moved to San Jose.

I had completed grad school a mere 48 hours earlier and spent that entire weekend fitting two years’ worth of work into the back of my 2002 Volvo. It was one of those summer days where the sun goes on forever. When I was a child, playing outside on nights like that, I'd imagine that on the other side of the Berryessa Hills, Paul Bunyan would be standing there with his ox and a hatchet, lifting the sun above the hills. I was always drawn to follow that horizon, if anything to find him standing there, keeping the night at bay.

When I don't know where to go on summer nights in Davis I go to Fairfield School. That hot night last summer was no different. I got in my car and drove out on the county roads west of town.

There was an unintentional poetry to it; returning, almost without thought, to the place where I first learned to learn, the very first school that meant anything to me, just hours after completing an advanced degree. When I go out there among the oak trees, I still think of Debbie Clark, the second grade teacher who let me be shy, the woman who agreed to be my pen pal, even though we lived only blocks from each other. She had two beautiful grown daughters but had room in her heart for a dorky shy seven-year-old; this was the same woman who, a few years later, was diagnosed with breast cancer. I was in seventh grade and I still remember her dying wish: to be surrounded in flowers. Someone, I don't know who, organized a group of Fairfield students and parents, and the group of us gathered to rototill her new backyard, and all that spring we trimmed rosebushes and watered her lawn. A few months later she succumbed to breast cancer at the young age of 45. The complete lack of reason for it all - the irrationality of it, seeing a good person get sick, left an impression that remains with me today.

I go out to Fairfield and I remember her still, swishing between the desks in those long elementary-school-teacher-dresses, the ones with the alphabet on them, or flowers, and I remember the art of wonder. How that little two-room brick schoolhouse is a place that fills me with wonder, even now. How nostalgia can be different from sentimentality; how you know when a place is meaningful when your feet -- or your wheels -- simply lead you there, on instinct.

There are no Fairfields on 280-South, but there are these luscious woods in every shade of green, and there is this quality of light that shivers in the afternoon. There is Half Moon Bay. Sometimes, if you are lucky, as I was today, there are great white egrets that straddle the freeway divider, standing on one leg without a care in the world, their oblong heads almost invisible if they stand at the right angle.

Sometimes, if you squint your eyes, you can make out Paul Bunyan standing just beyond those hills, propping them up with his hatchet.








one hundred words: Takeoff

She feels what her twin feels, on the other side of the globe. He goes to the fish market and she feels his fingers slip over scales. He goes to the mountains and she feels air whipping against her cheeks. He goes to work and her heart grows thick and heavy. It’s a weight she didn’t know he felt. She wishes, from the other side of the world, that she could lift it. But how? She goes to the market, to the mountains. She sits very still and concentrates on the warm texture of his heart. She feels him lift.

What happens when we bring the dog

He drove up Christmas Eve. He’d cut his hair, she noticed, and shaved his beard. Please, he said, let’s go on a walk. Only if we bring the dog, she said. It had recently rained. The hills were gray and calm. The lane was quiet and empty. He held her hand. The dog ran ahead. His face was pale and clean. His voice quivered. He was on one knee. All the sugar in her body fled to her fingers. You’re quite sure? she whispered. He nodded. The dog returned, a witness. Yes, she said. The sun returned. They held hands.

The miracle of the latkes, 20 years later


My mom has written before about Hannukkah miracles. The most famous one took place about 20 years ago, when, in the midst of one of her renowned block-wide latke parties, her food processor broke down halfway through a batch of her famous potato pancakes. My dad disappeared into the garage while she and some of her friends huddled around the machine, patting it as if it were a dead dog, murmuring faint praise. I couldn't have been more than seven or eight and I was absorbed in a game of dreidel, which in those days we always played on the linoleum floor, watching to be sure that the tops never stuck in the cracks between tile, and when I looked up again my dad had surprised us all by sneaking in amongst all the neighbors, cradling a half-wrapped, brand-new food processor still in its box.

"I was going to give you this for Christmas," he said, and before I could really understand what had happened, my mom had crumpled into him, hugging this most O. Henry of gifts. Before long the new machine was up and whirring, the kitchen buzzing with laughter and frying oil.

This is one of my mother's signature stories. I've since learned the subtlety of it; the careful way my parents have navigated their interfaith relationship. This weekend I was reminded, yet again, of how much those gestures mean.

Ryan and I decided early last week that we wanted to ring in Hannukkah somehow this year, and so we invited a few friends over for dinner and started planning recipes. My parents were out of town and I didn't feel right making latkes without my mom.

"But we can't have a Hannukkah party without latkes," Ryan said.

"It isn't the same without my mom's recipe," I said. "Besides, we don't have a food processor, so..."

The truth was, I was terrified of making latkes. Some part of me had always been terrified of all that hot oil, of laboring over a soaking tub of scrubbed potatoes, of straining the batter through towels, of getting stuck in the kitchen above the hot stove. Some part of Ryan still quietly persisted, bringing it up again when we went to the flea market to get ingredients. We bought fresh vegetables and spices and two pounds of potatoes...just in case. And then we passed a small stall selling kitchen equipment, where an entire row of used Cuisinart sat, their plugs trailing off the table.

"How much?" Ryan asked, picking each one up, spinning their blades with his thumb and forefinger. "Can you plug this in so we can see it work?"

Half an hour later, we walked back to the car with our arms laden, the new toy swinging in our farmer's market bag.

That night we bustled around our small kitchen, chopping vegetables, layering lasagne, grilling chicken, peeling potatoes. I'll never forget the feeling of slipping those first few potatoes into the machine, watching as the blade splintered carbohydrate into a fine batter. It awakened something in me that I'd left on my parents' tile floor. And when it came time to drop the first few pancakes onto the frying pan, something small and important shifted: here I was, making latkes, without my mother, for the first time. And when our guests came, and ate the first batch, I leapt up and prepared the second batch, enjoying the hustle of the hot hot kitchen, enjoying the company of my friend Tiffany as she leaned against the fridge, catching me up on her life while the pancakes lapped up oil. I was reminded of my mother in one of her famous aprons, her hair bunched around her face as the heat rose ever higher, one hand on her hip, one hand on the spatula as she stood by the pan, chatting with neighbors and friends.


What was it, that feeling? Was it pride? Was it love? Was it awe? The feeling stayed with me until long after the guests had left and the dishes were washed. It was the sensation that a tradition had been passed down and I was there to honor it. And the realization that I wouldn't have even tried if it hadn't been for this goyische boy with blue eyes, the one who an hour before the guests came drove to Lowe's and bought holiday lights for the patio--"blue and white," he'd said, "for Hannukkah."