say that again, that's good.

one of my students in class: "Crackheads are like cockroaches: they don't die!"

Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses: "The charm of language is that, though it's human-made, it can on rare occasions capture emotions and sensations which aren't."

Thank you, Joe Brainerd.

I remember that when I was a young girl Dots were my favorite candy.

I remember the last meal of meat I ever had. It was a McDonald's Chicken Snack Wrap. If I'd known that would be the last time I ate meat, I would have made it a better meal.

I remember my mother used to prepare liver with bacon and onions for my father.

I remember it made me sick to watch her dredge that gelatinous blood red meat in flour and then fry it in dripping.

I remember she only tried to make me eat it once and I wouldn't. After that, whenever she made liver, I had a bowl of Corn Flakes for dinner.

I remember the orange lights on the highway when my parents and I moved from Warren, Ohio to Cincinnati.

I remember how small and gray and fragile my mother looked after she came out of her hysterectomy surgery.

I remember the corners of my father that used to poke into me when he would hug me when he dropped me off or picked me up from summer camp. I remember his pocket protector would bite into my legs and chest, and somehow whenever I remember my father I think of the plastic corners of him that poked at me.

I remember how angry I was at my parents for not telling me right away when my father fell asleep at the wheel and totaled his car.

I remember when I came home from college and discovered that my mother had left my father and taken all the furniture with her. The house was empty: all of the pieces I'd climbed on and lounged on and slept on were gone. My room was still the same, but nothing else was.

I remember the cavernous silence around that time.

I remember the smell of an aerated football field on a Friday night before a high school game.

I remember jumping up and down and screaming with CP when Ohio State scored their first touchdown at the 2010 Rose Bowl.

I remember Tang.

I remember Alpha-Bits.

I remember Candyland and Checkers and Chutes and Ladders.

I remember watching thunderstorms blow in on the flat land of southwest Florida.

I remember the slick feeling in my mouth after I got my braces off.

I remember the best sleep of my life in a bed in a hotel room in Champery, Switzerland.

I remember the sick feeling in my stomach when my friend Eric Hartman went into Diabetic shock and had to be rushed out in the middle of a band performance. His face was so red and he could barely hold up his bassoon before he collapsed.

I remember years later, after we were both out of high school, I let him go down on me. It was amazing.

I remember when I asked an older girl who was in a church fashion show with me, why her slip was black--because the only slips I'd ever seen were white--she yelled at me, "None of your business!" and I didn't know why she'd gotten so angry.

I remember being a Brownie, and going on camp outs.

I remember watching Wheel of Fortune, and not knowing what the phrase, "Your mother wears army boots" meant.

I remember Emily Everheart and Brooke Burns.

I remember wool school uniforms.

I remember imitation patent leather Mary Janes.

I remember jellies.

I remember going to see The Nutcracker. At intermission I went down to the front of the stage and peeked into the pit orchestra. One of the musicians was standing up for a stretch, and he winked at me.

collapse.

I'm feeling rather discombobulated today. Ungrounded, Ellen would say. Powdery snow is falling from the sky this morning, "perfect packing snow" my sweetheart calls it as he stomps it off his boots, after coming back from a coffee run. Reminds me of the sweet wintery thing I love about February, but also reinforces the crappy night's sleep I had, and the anxieties that wouldn't let me rest easy. My sleep's been disturbed since planning the wedding has moved into the next gear, and although I'm not waking up screaming about showing up naked or anything quite like that, well, there's enough anxiety to keep me up.

Point one: I love February. I love it because it means that January has come and gone, and while in Chicago that fact has absolutely nothing to do with warmer weather on its way, I love that February is the shortest calendar month. I love the idea of the promise of March only a few weeks away, and if I keep my head down and tunnel through I'll be there soon. Spring might not meet me there, but still. I love that it's spelled weird, and has a ton of different pronunciations, and I love that when it feels like it, capriciously but still with some regularity, February adds an extra day, because sometimes a girl just needs a 29. Most of all, I love St. Valentine's Day. Scoff if you will, and yes, I know that it is just a minor holiday that the Catholic church co-opted from the Romans' Lupercalia, a kind of pagan spring cleaning. So what, I don't care. I love the legend of Valentine, I love the red roses (although not so in love with the seasonal price tag), I love the Snoopy bearing lacy greetings of affection, I love chocolate wrapped in red foil (even though I can't eat it), and I love Romance. St. Valentine's Day may be as co-opted and commercial as Christmas, but it makes me warm and fuzzy on the inside, whether I'm single or attached, and I just love it.

Point two: Getting married soon is making me feel a bit... mortgaged. I'm not feeling over committed, just given away. I'm so discouraged by the need to please other people. I've read a lot of wedding lit (there's a phrase I never thought in my whole life, that I'd use) that says that the wedding day is not about bride and groom, it's about family and friends and loved ones you collect around you. And I get it, I really do. But for pleasers like myself who kinda suck at setting boundaries and will give away the farm just to get the jacked up, hollow expression of affection we're thirsting for, maybe it's alright if this one day is in fact about me and him, and everybody else is gonna have to stretch a little outside their comfort zone, or else stay home. What I'm saying is lately I'm feeling how profoundly absent any parental figures are in my life, with a genuine expression of love and pride, and that absence makes me just want to fall. I am weary, weary weary, of doing things because they would be nice to do and they sound like nice ideas, because it means I have to fake my way through them, and pretend I'm having a good time, when in fact I just want the whole thing to be over so I can go home, put on sweatpants and watch a dvd of Two and a Half Men.

I am both blessed and fortunate to have a remarkable coven of women around me in the midst of all this. (I'm reclaiming the word coven, much like the word nigga.) They are capable and excited and all so amazingly supportive of the life I'm making with my sweetheart. They can't replace the thing I wish I had, but I'm glad I have them in my life.

All that to say that perhaps I'm in the heavy grip of winter doldrums. Working out, eating well, missing the sun, sick of the snow. A good day is a day when I can hold my head up on my own.

O Lord, Come by here.

where the hell have you been?

Well, if I had the energy I'd write some ragingly witty telling of the wedding monster that took a chunk out of my ass shortly after the new year, and has been battling me ever since. But the truth is, I'm distracted by the class I'm teaching, the class I'm taking, and the writing I have to get done for other people and other things.

And I really do feel like I fell underneath a giant, tulled and be-ribboned thing, a thing of registries and rehearsal dinners and formalware and invitations that just made me forget I was a person with a life outside having a wedding.

There is some normalcy to my life now: I am back to teaching, and sitting in on a class is going to force my writing in a way that I haven't felt in years. There simply are more important things for me to do than obsess about crafts and parties. This week I gave a reading at a bar on Chicago's north side about the woman that I accidentally became through a series of missteps in my early 20s. Here's a taste.

You ever heard of that frog in the pot of water that slowly boils to death because it can’t feel the water temperature getting hotter? I was that frog: the CEO of my job puts up a racially offensive poster, and when I complain about the message it sends to our kids, he refuses to take it down; temperature goes up three degrees. A kid at one of my schools blatantly ignore my instructions, picks a fight with another kid, and gets expelled, temp goes up two degrees. When I ask my boss for guidance, she tells me that if I“affect a blacker attitude” my kids will listen to me, four degrees. One of my students suffers from heat stroke, and instead of calling 9-1-1, my superiors slap wet paper towels on her and force her to drink water until she’s responsive, five degrees. I was confused, insecure and desperately unhappy. But somehow I just couldn’t harvest enough initiative to do something about it. Devon and Natasha did
whatever they could to take my mind off how unhappy I was, which generally involved pot and booze. There was always something to drink or smoke in the
house, and they were willing to share.

Day Laborer Theatre Without Borders

A dear friend of mine has been at work using theatre to make the world a better place. This past Sunday, the LA Times decided to write about it.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-actors10-2010jan10,0,2370702.story

When I graduated from undergrad, I remember thinking that as powerful a medium theatre is, as evocative and moving, that somehow I just didn't have the thing, the thing that an actor or a director needed, to make it what it could be. I lacked the vision to project it out of the box, or the patience to listen to the story under the story, or something. I consider myself lucky to have people in my life, no matter their distance, who can use this elemental and timeless art to reach everyone.

Art is magic, my friends. It is a power and a gift, and we should put as much of it into our lives as we can hold.

it never rains in southern california.

things I saw while in san diego/los angeles for the 2010 new year:

• a woman walking down the concourse hallway with a curling iron in her hand. She had a full face of makeup and freshly flipped ends, and looked not like her bag had just been searched, but like she's just gotten made up in order to get on a plane.
• a light-skinned African-American woman pacing various gate areas working security. She had small eyes behind coke-bottle glasses. She was big: at least 6'2'', broad shouldered and hipped, the kind of girl who got called Sasquatch in middle school by her "friends", who now feels like the odd one out when she goes out to the club with her girlfriends.
• sign for a hotel: "Kelly's Stake House & Sing Along Piano Bar"
  

• The Ohio State University Buckeyes stomp on the Oregon Ducks in the 2010 Rose Bowl.
• Brutus the Buckeye spell out O-H-I-O with his legs while in a headstand (that mascot's god skills).
• dozens of people--no exaggeration, the minute we stepped off the plane, for four and a half days--giving my fiance and me the stink eye. The look that says, "he's asian, and she's black... wait, what's going on here?" When you look back at them, they either smile, so you know they're friendly, or they look away because you caught them staring at you in all your mulit-culti glory. Evidently, interracial dating still a pretty significant anomaly in southern cali.
• a discarded crab claw in the parking lot outside the Newport Seafood Restaurant. Inside, teeming with Asian Americans of various generations, tables brimming with turntables, and more annihilated lobsters, stir-fried with ginger and scallions, than I'd ever seen in my life. Tasty, but a little difficult for me to eat just the same.

• farmers' market: featuring olive trees (which thrive in climate), rosemary (which can grow wild), and a booth that sold gluten-free, sugar free cookies. I bought two.
• Satsuma, at $3 a pound. I asked the guy if I could buy one, and he just gave it to me. It's like having a ball of sunshine in your hand, and then eating it, juicy sweet piece by piece.
  
  

• The Lakers absolutely shellac the Dallas Mavericks, 131-96. It's either a testament to how little I care about the Lakers, how quiet the fans are during play, or how poorly I slept the night before to say that I fell asleep during the first half, and some of the second half, too. My sweetheart, however, was fairly coming out of his seat with joy at having attended his first pro game of his favorite team. I wish our seats had been better, or that it would have been a closer game, but in between cat naps, I could tell how much he was enjoying himself; the delight on his face was totally worth it.
• (FYI, there were more black people at this basketball game, than I saw everywhere else I was: san diego, pasadena, the Rose Bowl, alhambra, hiking in la jolla. Nobody can accuse southern california of not having a diverse population: incredibly international, huge asian american and latino populations, as well as citizens from other parts of the world. And yet, there were just so few black people around. They must all really be in that localised part of LA that everyone says they are.)
• a domestic disturbance between an interracial couple on the street. While walking from the Staples Center to our hotel, a leggy blond in heels and jeans stalked after her date, a black man in pointy-toed shoes and a nice sweater, and reamed him out for evidently abandoning her on the street. "Excuse me! Excuse me! What the fuck is wrong with you, when you're just gonna walk away from your woman on the street! You're the only guy on the street without a girl here, and you're just gonna leave me back there? How about having some fucking manners? And being a fucking man?" His volume was considerably softer than hers, but not soft enough for her not to hear him answer back, and respond, "What the fuck did you just say to me?" The two of them disappeared through a side door of a high-rise, on to what I can only hope was a less violent interaction than the display we witnessed.

Traveling is always so full of information for me; I feel like I return home with a brain brimming with ideas and material, and this trip is no exception. My body feels like shit, because despite our host's best efforts, the food I ate wasn't really great for keeping me healthy, so I see a detox in my immediate future, just so I can behave like the healthy individual I know I am. I really need to get back in the gym, and I've probably eaten enough fish to last me all of January. But I got a chance to get to know my future brother-in-law better, and I've learned about my fiance based on seeing the two of them together, and maybe all this time and energy will pay off relationally. I know it'll show up in my work.

Happy New Year.

The Velvet Bag

I drew this word in a Scrabble game last night. I came this close to finally, finally winning and beating my verbally superior but incredibly graceful fiance. His defense always thwarts me.

It came out of the bag like this, people. A word worth 25 points, not including the double word score I had my eye on. I wouldn't have gotten the 50-point Bonus for using all my letters, (there was already an "N" on the board) but still.

We purchased a Peanuts Monopoly game over Christmas, and called the first game due to fatigue. But believe you me, I'm coming for his ass. It's cute and all, but I'm takin' it down...