Canola oil works best

I spent today at my friends Mike and Erika’s apartment, along with Nina and Alina. We ate banana cake and Cuban food and watched Kung Fu Hustle (quite a funny movie). However relaxing, the idyllic afternoon was not without its drama.

Nina has a ring that her husband Dan bought her several years ago. It’s a reproduction of Galadrial’s ring from The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Quite a lovely piece, really, carved very intricately. Dan bought it during a time when he had to travel quite frequently for work, so in his absence, and as kind gesture, he purchased this ring out of the Sky Mall catalogue, which makes him, to my knowledge, the only person I know to have actually bought something from the Sky Mall.

But I digress. The last time Nina put the ring on was Friday evening, when her hands were cold and fingers a bit shrunken. Once her hands warmed up, her fingers swelled, and she found that she could no longer get the ring off. Removing it is a task she would normally assign to husband Dan, but he’s off in Costa Rica, fishing, with the nearest phone being a boat ride and a walk to the nearest village. He’s not exactly available.

So Nina’s been unable to de-ring herself since Friday, and it was just getting worse. What gets me is that I don’t think she was going to mention the stuck piece of jewelry, but someone else had noticed it -- and just in time, too.

A bowl of ice was produced and she soaked her hand for a good while, and once the swelling went down finally, Erika poured Canola oil over Nina’s hand and Mike was enlisted to coax the ring off. Nina let out a stream of muffled obscenities, the top of her finger turning purple, as Mike struggled to fit the ring over the top of her knuckle. With one last tug, the ring popped off, and Nina finally relaxed.

I’m sure if I thought about it long enough, there’d be an analogy to life somewhere in this story, but I’m not going to dig around this time. Anyone else wanna take a shot?

NO PARKING, say it emphatically now.

Usually when parking meters don’t work, they flash the word FAIL.

A couple of days ago, as I was walking home from work, I saw one flashing the word DEAD.

Hrm...

Addicted to Writing?

Roommate Christina came back from the Sundance Film Festival yesterday. While she was there she saw a film about a man who is literally addicted to writing.

As she spoke about it, I began to wonder what a writing addiction would look like, what it would feel like. Being addicted to the act of writing itself, to not be able to put the pen down, how the ink would smear over your fingers, running like blood, down you hands and into droplets on the floor. Mad tattoos from another world. Veins bulging down your arms as you write, write, write, scribbling until your hand is so cramped it turns into a claw. Page after page, whole forests of trees cut down in an insatiable attempt to document the entire world around you.

And what would you write about after awhile? What would you experience anymore? How it feels to sleep, to dream, the intersection of the two, a hazy half-light of consciousness and coma. Or maybe bowel moments, transcriptions of newspaper headlines, UPC codes on cereal boxes -- the mundane and the fantastic. Like how a blink feels, the quite whack of eyelash against eyelash -- even describing it in slow motion, like tiny curtains getting pulled back in the morning sun. Or how lighting a match sounds like a fraction of a raging fire, or the slow passion of a pair of dancers, held in each others arms, all tension and tremor, in the flare of a nostril and the thud of a heart.

As words come, would you think of them, or would they take you over? Would they come out as angry repetition or like a free-flowing slip stream, carrying with them the sparkle and glint of a high-noon sun, like rubies on the water? They would consume your senses -- like creation -- feeling and tasting and smelling things into being, the power of suggestion. And suddenly, you’ve disappeared into them, these words...

To me it sounds wonderful and frightening.

Phoning it in

I’m tired, physically tired. Weary I guess is a better term. My body’s adjusting to new things, to working again, to lifting heavy files, to waking up early, to responsibility. By extension, my mind is tired, too.

I’m working, temporarily, for a brokerage firm in Beverly Hills, helping organize their new office. I like it in that a) it allows my arranger-self to come out and get some air, and b) it’s breaking down my (preconceived) perception of men whose life work it is to push large sums of money around. A perception that I will readily admit is false and wonky.

But that’s an aside.

Last night, after class, it hit me that I’ve been phoning it in for the past couple of days -- life, that is. My new-found busy-ness has left those things that I normally enjoy doing and the people I normally communicate with neglected for the time being. I suppose this is how the vicious cycle of falling behind and getting exhausted trying to keep up starts.

But I won’t, not this time.

It was a tiny, quiet realization. I liken it to fishing in the self-inventory pool, catching the fish of deficiency, and deciding whether to let it back or fry it up on the hot pan of growth. Think I’ll reel this one in.

One more thing

Before I go to bed, I just wanted to report...

Our tickets to Estonia have been reserved for May 23rd to June 8th. My mother, brother and I are going -- in part to return my father's ashes, and his mother's ashes as well, to the county of their birth -- but also to return to our roots, the origins of our family. It also means another stamp in my passport, which I'll always gladly take.

For awhile there, I didn't know if this trip was going to happen. I'm very excited to be going -- more musings soon.

This is your new snapshot

I suppose I might now be able to add "headshot photographer" to my resume.

This weekend, I took some snaps for my friend Levon, who's trying to get his acting career off the ground. We spent the better part of Saturday at Occidental College, taking advantage of their similarly colored walls to use as flat backgrounds. I used my digital camera to get test shots of each location and wardrobe change. An additional seven roles of film were shot, the results of which are still pending.

I am so far pleased with the results. Levon and I have known each other since we were eleven, which doesn't make any difference regarding his headshots, but he's a dear friend, and it was fun to do something for him. If you know any wayward casting agents or film directors -- hire this man!

Unshaven

Yikes, writing is now homework. I thought I might post my assignments and exercises here. The following began as an in-class prompt of "I remember..." What ensued was a walk down memory lane of one of those moments that defined how I look at the world, and myself in it. This is a particularly negative moment, and why I chose to document this one, well, that's a question perhaps for my non-existent shrink. Feedback always welcome.

I remember that school bus ride when I was twelve or thirteen, that I can’t remember. The hot sun beamed in through the windows as that big orange ark rocked and jolted us back and forth. Sitting next to me was a boy named Mike, who, in my estimation was the most horrible kid in school. The kind I might look at now, all grown up, and feel for, having to live in such a hard way. The kind of kid who had to maybe deal with an alcoholic mother or a step father who beat him, who grew up unloved and spiky, like a junkyard dog. I wouldn't think of these possibilities as he’d trudge from the bus to his dilapidated house, mostly I just feared him, because when you're twelve, compassion doesn't occur to you, self preservation does. The mere sight of him or mention of his presence made my blood run cold. It was fight or flight and my mind would spin with a thousand excuses of how to get away. Mike was a bully, you see, and he carried a loaded arsenal of the most fearful weapons ever -- words.

For Mike, I carried a large bull's-eye. I was the bull's-eye, really, having spent much of my youth as an obese child, as the “fat kid.” Words were flung heavy from all sides, and for the most part they burned up in the atmosphere between the mouth of the hurler and my ears, leaving only a trace of red on my cheeks. But Mike’s words fell on me most often, like small bombs or seagull droppings, an ugly mess left in their wake.

Nobody else at school liked Mike either, but the hierarchy of middle school dictated that since he was poor and I was fat, there was no protection for me. Left to fend for myself, I tried wrapping protective layers around myself, yet they were paper-thin, ephemera that could be shot through with a mere whisper.

Mike could sense the vulnerability. Could smell it like a shark smells the blood of chum in swirling waters.

I was most exposed on the bus, which I would walk up to every afternoon, as it idled in the parking lot its rumble low and inexorable. A vice grip would tighten around my stomach as I climbed the stairs and through the door of the bus, as it waited to devour its passengers into its pit of invective. As the beast purred up from below, seat by seat -- kid by kid -- the bus would fill up, the space beside me remaining hollow.

Glorious and merciful were the days that seat stayed empty. But on this particular day, that neighboring space would be filled with a passenger who would leave a mark that cut deep. As Mike mounted the bus, he walked to the back, finding the bus inexplicably full. He retraced his steps up the aisle, reached my seat, and finding it the only seat left, he deigned himself to sit next to the fat girl. For him, it was social suicide, as he made notes to beat the shit out of the kid who caused him to be late. For me, suicide suddenly seemed like the better option, sensing the dark that was on the horizon.

I crammed myself as close to the aluminum-sided bus as I could. I clung to the wall. If I had been able to fit through the window, I would have slide out, escaped, walked home. I looked around the bus to see whether any of the other kids knew the fate that awaited me. I sought out a look of sympathy, one of concern. I got nothing, not even from the bus driver.

I started sweating, my legs stuck to the brown vinyl seat in the hot afternoon sun. I was unaccustomed to wearing shorts, as the shame I felt over my body kept in tightly covered most of the time. Yet that morning I had felt a burst of teenage liberation as I ate my cereal -- damn them, I will wear shorts -- a decision I was now regretting as the bus began to jostle out of the lot, roaring down 12th Street.

Mike gave me a sideways glance or two, and then cut through the awkward silence, blurting, “you don’t shave your legs?” It was more than a mere question, it was an indictment.

I sat, mortified. Shaving? At that age, I was still getting used to bras and periods, and shaving hadn’t entered my conscious realm of personal care. I looked down at my legs, a thin layer of prepubescent peach fuzz glinted in the sunlight. But to Mike, and to me, I may as well have been Sasquatch. I silently cursed my mother and my friends and anyone else who hadn’t pulled me aside to tell me how grotesque I was, leaving the house unshaven. I may as well have been burning down rainforest by the acre, pouring crude oil into ocean by the barrel, for all the unsightly pollution I was letting into the world with my unshaven legs.

I don’t remember what came next. I heard the word “gorilla,” amongst others, but I was gone -- escaped into my head as it filled with the wide open space of detachment. Mike dissipated, becoming blurry as my mind's eye racked focus. The words coming out of his mouth sounded muffled and tinny, like I was underwater. When the attack was over, shrapnel littered the landscape of my heart, the ground charred around the point of impact. There still lay a spot where the grass refuses grow over. And I still don’t wear shorts to this day.

hired, then unhired

So, since no one's paying me for writing anything just yet, I've been looking for work these past couple of weeks. I signed up for a temp agency on Monday, and registered at another branch of the same company today. Frankly, I'm not crazy about the idea of temping. I don't like office work (who does though, really?), and it's just silly to think of administrative skills as a talent -- I can answer phone and make photocopies, yee-haw! Not the most interesting aspect to a person, in my opinion.

On the other hand, I'd still exploit those skill for a paycheck, though I'm conflicted by it.

So, back to the temp agency. My appointment was at eleven, and was very brief. About five hours later, around four, my account executive (that's what her card says) calls me to say that she wants to put me on a front-desk job at an entertainment company. Only thing is, would I feel comfortable with having to man a 26-line phone board without getting frazzled? "Sure," I say, lying. Of course 26 lines would freak me out, but I tell her I pick things up fast, and that it shouldn't be a problem. She schedules me for the gig, a two-month stint with a chance of going permanent.

I get off the phone and my immediate reaction is thankfulness, yet as I continue down the road, something didn't feel quite right, and I started to imagine myself, octopus-like, trying to answer 23 calls at the exact same time. I know myself, I will be frazzled if this happens. I also start to think "why did I sign up for this? It sounds awful."

Not five minutes later, my lady calls back, explaining that this particular client has been unsuccessfully trying to hire someone, and they can't find anyone who hasn't had problems with the phone system. Huh, no wonder. The client's manager wanted to have a word with me. By the end of the conversation, it was decided that I was not the one for this job, and I was unhired as quickly as I was hired.

No great shakes, really. I can't say I'm terribly disappointed. It still leaves me jobless, but I'm again thankful, this time that I've been spared a truly awful experience.

Writing Class

Last night was the first session of my writing class. It was the first time I had set foot in a classroom since college, only four short years ago, but what feels like an age. Towards the end of the evening, I started to wonder about having to listen to someone talk for three hours at a time, to have to be held by someone's attention for so long. I'm not used to it.

As I arrived at Occidental College, I was running late. Just five or ten minutes, but it irked me, since I try to be punctual as often as possible, and I start to beat myself up if I take too long getting somewhere. Okay, truth be told I was nervous anyway, and the slow traffic snaking up Alvarado Blvd. was grating my nerves even more.

The class is called the Writer's Workout. It is designed to not only strengthen our writing, but to get us into the habit of writing, and often -- and just in the nick of time, too.

Our professor is a guy named Christopher Meeks, who just had his first volume of short stories published in December. He forced us to get over our initial hesitancy with each other right away, pairing us up with each other to interview and introduce our partner publicly. There will be no room for the shrinking violet in this class, no way.

All good, even though I am not comfortable having the spotlight pointed at me. It's further troubling, the idea of others critiquing my work. The act of creation is a personal one, and there's real pain when someone tears it up, or threatens to, even. It's a legitimate question, asking why I don't like the idea of letting others read my work -- after all, you're reading this in a blog, where the potential exists that hundreds upon thousands (give or take) of people could read it. Truth be told, it's somehow easier to think that I either know you well and feel quite comfortable with you, or I don't know you at all, and therefore do not care in the least what you think of my writing.

Having this class, this new group of people with whom I am now somewhat acquainted, feels like pressure. It's performance anxiety, to read my words and have to sit and stare into the face of the person giving a critique, or conversely, to not let the praise go to my head. I'm confident in my abilities however, or getting there, more and more. So I view this class as a step to developing that confidence even further.

My fellow classmates cover a wide and varied spectrum. There is a retired professor -- a very intellectual and verbose woman; one actor who reminds me of Peter Fonda; a couple of filmmakers, one of whom is trying to "get away" from screenwriting; a young British tea shop owner; and a whole variant of young-ish professional women. All imbued with the same love of story, of creating, of revealing hidden truth. A roomful of empathetic observers -- imagine!

These fellow writers are good, too, from what little I've read and heard. Yet the longer I sat there, the more I thought of these strangers as soon-to-be-comrades. We are all in the same boat -- laying ourselves prostrate and vulnerable in front of each other, emotionally naked. It was at this point, this realization, that the evening became fun -- full of the possibility of new people, new stories, new experiences.

Four Seasons In One Day

Christina’s birthday party was last night, and I'm in the post-party depression, content to sit around and do nothing today. A couple of friends of hers, who comprise half of a band called Mr. North, flew out from New York City to play songs for her in our living room. They did a couple of Crowded House covers, and now I’m listening to one of that band’s CDs as I write this. Neil Finn is a truly great songwriter.

But that’s an aside. My point is this...

In preparation for this party, I have spent a great deal of time with roommate Elizabeth. It’s given us an opportunity to bond, really, collaborating to accomplish the task of pulling this party together -- buying fabric, buying flowers, cleaning the apartment, decorating said apartment, etc., etc., and to also act out of love and service to our friend Christina.

On the way home from Joshua Tree last Tuesday, Eliz turned to me in the dark of the car and said something that later confirmed for me that words of affirmation touch just as deeply in the heart as the opposite kind: “I’ve never said this so directly, but I like hanging out with you and I’m glad we’re roommates.” At the time, I thanked her, but didn’t think much else of it.

Until it hit me a couple of days later, that I often imagine myself spending life with a figment of my own imagination I like to term Uber-Friend -- some supersonic individual with whom I will morph into an ultra-charismatic and vivacious person. Life with this person will be like a toothpaste commercial or a sitcom, a television show where everything is smooth and perfect and pretty.

The problem is that Uber-Friend is not real. The only thing Uber-Friend does is rob me of the opportunity of get to know the people whose lives are entwined around mine to a truly deep and meaningful depth -- to love them as the real uberfriends they are. I keep wanting to save myself, to keep my “friend virginity” for this non-existent person. I’ve done this for years, I know, and it’s horrible -- it keeps them from knowing who I really am, and it keeps me from revealing my true self to them -- it’s a loose/loose situation, you see? I realized that it was possible to live with others and not truly know them.

All this to say, and I think Crosby, Stills, Nash (and yes sometimes even Young) said it best -- “if you can’t be with the ones you love, love the ones you’re with.”

Yes, indeed.

This past week of coming together for this birthday party, no matter how much work had to be done for it, have been some of the most fulfilling days I’ve had in a long time. Not that mopping the kitchen floor is so exciting, per se, but I value the bonding time with these wonderful women with whom I get to spend time everyday.

As Emmett and Colin played “Four Seasons In A Day” last night, our house filled with candles and flowers and food and friends, I sat on the couch, feeling so happy to be exactly where I was at that moment. I felt surrounded by people who love me and who I love. These are the uberfriends I’ve been saving myself for. And not just these, there are others far and wide. But to you all, my dear ones, you are the bees’ knees, and I should say that way more often.

Back to the desert, this time with feeling.

Joshua Tree, land of spiky trees and course rock. I wondered if things were actually growing there or rather in the act of not dying. Could life thrive in such a parched environment? I’m pretty convinced the answer is yes.

My trusty sidekick, roommate and fellow photographer Elizabeth and I went back to the park on Tuesday for a picture-snapping, rock-climbing sojourn.

The whole idea sprung from a new camera lens I recently purchased. It had been a long time since I had picked up my 35mm, it having been infirmirous since that certain Forth of July weekend a couple of years ago when it had been hurled, camera bag and all, over a chainlink fence (but that’s an entirely different clandestine ops story).

Driving through the Mojave Desert, away from the congested interstate and gigantic wind turbines, it is quiet. The Joshua Trees grow in groves upon groves, standing like alien sentinels, awaiting the call from their mothership. Some have spikes like matted fur, almost woolly, like Wookies sweating in the heat of the afternoon.



I fell in love with this one tree (see below) in particular, whose arms reached up into the sky, limbs gnarled and twisted, as if wounded in war, yet still beautiful. They felt old and wise, these trees, as if you put your ear close to them they might tell you the most wonderful secrets.



As the afternoon shadows got longer, the colors of the land started to come out. In contrast to the sinewy trees, there are piles of smooth boulders strewn about the landscape. Some are smallish and look like oversized molars, others are larger, precariously arranged like the playthings of a gigantic toddler.



Climbing over the rounded rocks was made easier by their rough texture, the bottoms of our shoes sticking to the surfaces like Velcro. As we routed amongst a cluster of rocks, a claustrophobic thought or two came over me as I scrambled through the cracks and spaces between these monoliths, thinking, “if these things come down, I’m a goner.” Well, the rocks didn’t go anywhere -- they stayed perfectly still as the sun sunk lower in the sky, bringing out the glowing oranges and whites of the unpolished granite.



Joshua Tree is a geological muse. A strange moonscape, not entirely earthly.

The lens worked like a dream. It was good to feel the weight of that camera in my hands again, to have to consider aperture and shutter speed, to have the mystery put back into the medium, especially after growing so accustom to the instant gratification of my digital camera. I am excited to see the outcome.

For further photographic evidence of this trip, click here.

where there are no streets to have any names

Eliz and I treked to Joshua Tree today, resulting in the most fun I've had in many, many days. More details later, stay tuned.

Punky

I didn’t sleep well last night, and as I was laying in bed last night staring at the ceiling, I realized that it’s probably not wise to drink three cups of coffee with dinner. Seems reasonable enough, but at the time -- not.

I’ve been happy to be in Los Angeles since being in Oregon for the holidays. I applied to work at Borders the other day and my writing class starts two weeks from today. I’m excited but a bit nervous, since I haven’t stepped foot into a classroom in about four years. I was always nervous on the ride to school when I was young, like grade school age. I recall those hard, bright and frosty mornings when the heat in the car wouldn’t kick in until we were a mere block from school, still tired from waking up and just...anxious, all the time. Maybe it was the guff I was afraid I’d get from other kids, hoping that no one would call attention to me.

I used to take the bus home, but sometimes if a friend was coming home with me, we’d walk along the bridge at Mill Creek, though after the floods of 1995, the footbridge is gone and if you want to cross you have to walk all the way around on 10th Street. Which is kind of a shame that something so identifiable from my childhood is no longer there anymore.

My friend Amethyst found a dead bird once on the roadside by the cemetery. We used to roam around that cemetery for hours, trying to find the relatives of kids we went to school with. She had picked the raven up and started playing with it, tossing it into the air by its wings and pretending to make it talk. I remember thinking it was pretty disgusting, but mostly I remember being a little worried about Amethyst. She also used to pretend that she was a cat and she’d spend hours responding to any and all questions with meows and mews. The only way to get her to stop was to feed her lemon drops.

I bet you think I’m kidding about my crazy friend Amethyst, but I’m not, honest. Bless her, I hear she's back in The Dalles.

I’ve stuck to decaf today, too.

Christina, with sparkler

The Good Stuff

Life has recently come, within the past day or so, to an amazing point where I can see all these threads of the past and how they’ve bound together to create the cord of the present, the one that stretches out -- infinitely long, disappearing into the unfixed vanishing point of the future. I see more clearly the way past feelings, words, struggles, triumphs, choices and circumstances have culminated to bring me to where I am right now. In addition to all the good stuff, I’m thankful for the painful parts of life, as failures and regrets of the past have become the clarion calls of an ever-bright future, and I realize that all things really do work together for good. And it is good -- tremendously good.

The Party's Over

New Years Eve celebrations this year ended with something a little new -- apple schrapnel splattered on my car.

Ian and Clarice brought a potato cannon over to the house and we went to the back alley to shoot off some old apples. We also lit sparklers. It was the highlight of the evening, mischieveously launching fruit and watching it pulverize and dissolve into the night air, showering us with stickiness as they fell back to earth.

Photographic evidence to be provided later.

The whole night had a wonderful sense of togetherness. The morning and afternoon had been grey and cold, wet socks hitting the hardwood floor. The chilliness warmed as my roommates and I made a large dinner together early in the evening, the whole house hot with the heat of the stove. There is something about sharing a meal that ties bonds between friends.

Now the dishes are done and the food is put away. Garbage is taken out and it is time for bed.