Estrellita

Little Star has the best pizza in San Francisco, but you usually have to wait at least 45 minutes. You might get really hungry, but with the right company, you'll never get bored.

I miss this place

Not everyone knows this, but I spent last summer living on a writer/artist/activist colony in upsate New York. I met so many amazing people, I was writing, I was the projectionist at the local theater, I was working for a cool non-profit, the place was BEAUTIFUL, but I was super depressed, and I left. I feel a lot of regret over this sometimes, and it's taken a lot for me to realize that sometimes the way you're feeling has absolutely nothing to do with your surroundings or your present. Sometimes it's memories that are too strong, or you're just not ready to be as great as the great things that are happening around you. Sometimes I think that trauma and violence can sit inside you, physically. It stays in your muscles, in your bones, and sometimes it sneaks out when you think you're at your happiest. This place was a perfect place for me but not perfect for who i was this summer. I hope to return someday with more readiness, with a better fit.

(someone help me with the html so that you don't have to click on the pictures in order to see the whole thing!)


hiking with shorty, blue mountain lake in the background


Ellen and Elizabeth. Two lovely ladies that taught me so much.


hotel, scout and lazarus


vegetable garden on an ugly day



the adirondack museum, home of many amazing dioramas.


taxidermy :(

Re-Reading Maggie Nelson

From, The Light of the Mind

She had been shot once in the front and once in the back of the head. She was wandering, trying to find someone to remove the slugs from her skull. She was not dead yet, but she feared she was dying. The holes in her head were perfectly round and bloodless, with burnt-flared edges, two eclipses. The passage of air through the holes felt peculiar, just dimly painful, like chewing hot or cold food on a cavity, the sensation of space where it had once been dense and full.
Sunlight shot around the circumference of each black rind, so that a long shaft of pale light cast out from the center of her forehead, and another shaft streamed behind her.
Is this the light of the mind? Is this the light of my mind?
So I was a genius after all! The thought made her smile, but then she wondered, Why had the light always been invisible? I must have been squandering it, I must have felt only its vaguest rotations. Now what can I do with it? If I could find a lampshade, someone could read by it. I might illuminate entire rooms, entire dungeons, I shine so bright.
But in fact she was losing the light; it leaked everywhere, unstoppable.

-Maggie Nelson


When my mom was in the hospital, she received regular visits from a Unitarian champlain named Michael. One day, only weeks before her death, Michael couldn't come, and a rabbinical student named Deborah showed up in my mom's room asking if she would like to talk. "No thanks," my mom said, "I'm an atheist." They got to talking anyway, just making small talk, and eventually about spirituality. I showed up later that day, surprised to see this stranger when I walked in. My mom introduced us, exclaiming, "This is my new friend Deborah!"

The morning that she fell into the coma that would lead to her death, Deborah took me for a walk in the garden next to UCLA. She told me that my mom was one of the most spiritual people she had ever met, and she was so impressed with this balance of being so strongly in touch with her spiritual side and being so logical and inquisitive about everything at the same time. She not only actively asked the practical questions of why she got sick (in terms of her health or what was going on in the environment), but she sought the spiritual answers too. Deborah told me, "Your mom never asked 'Why?' in the vague, panicked and frustrated tone most people do. She would ask specific questions, squint her eyes and talk through it. And she never denied the emotions that came along with the curiosity. She just managed a balance, emotional, but with grace, somehow. I strive for this grace.

I first read Maggie Nelson's books about a year ago. Micah Perks recommended them to me when I was trying to write about my mom at the end of 2007. I love her work because of this balance. "The Red Parts," is about the brutal murder of Nelson's aunt which took place years before she was born. The book is like a true crime novel for the literary feminist. Nelson makes the distinction between how we deal with death in private, versus how some are forced to do it in public. Nelson grew up often being mistaken to be her deceased aunt by her grandfather and she explores how this act of violence trickled down over the years affect to her and her sister. The books are all about GRIEF and WOMEN and how weird and hard it is to WRITE about that stuff...you know, all of those things that I can't stop thinking about these days.

Sorry about the disjointed feel to this. I started writing this post weeks ago, and I'm only finishing now because I'm having a rough night, and I think that finishing something will make me feel better. Going to go knit now.

Like Sex and Lists

Tonight in my writing class I tried to write a story about a woman who gives birth to a bicycle. I took BART home, and while walking up the steps to where I'd locked my bike I thought, "Tonight, of all nights, please, PLEASE do not be stolen."


ps. while exploring all things mothers these days, i can't avoid the subject of angelina jolie. for better or for worse.

Hi, I Moved Here

Amy Hempel

I stumbled up the steps tonight, and I said "Stumble Home" because I was thinking of the Amy Hempel story, and the words just sound pretty. But then my housemate corrected me. The story is called "Tumble Home." Less like my night, more like the internet thing.

Eye Like It

Dream about standing outside in the rain, and crying, and being embarrassed about my red eyes, and looking into the window of a cafe at someone who's a big deal to me. The inside of the window was covered in eyes, though, and he couldn't tell which were mine. So there was nothing to worry about.