This Is It

It is so tragic that This Is It was It. I was in Korea during the funeral of Michael Jackson and didn’t really register the loss until I saw the film today.

I have been feeling particularly lonely this past week. Perhaps it is because Day of the Dead is approaching. Perhaps it is because my dead gay best friend’s birthday is approaching. Perhaps it is because grief is a vortex that never stops spinning, no matter how much time passes.

When Thriller came out, my sister and I videotaped it off of Friday Night Videos. We watched it over and over again. I talked about it at show and tell in third grade, acting out the part where he chopped down the tree with his hand. Michael Jackson inspired me in that moment to become a performer, entertaining my peers, making them laugh.

My sister bought a vinyl red jacket from K-Mart and used electrical tape to trim it so that she would have the Thriller jacket. When his death was announced, I thought about that jacket for the first time in years, just like I thought about the video, how we watched it together. I thought about his family losing their brother, their son, their father.

The concert would have been amazing. The clips are artistic genius. The dancers popping up like toast out of the stage, the ghouls flying through the audience, the songs that have been part of our history growing up.

I am just one of the masses pissing in the ocean trying to put down words for something that has no words. He was different. He made being different okay in a small town in Michigan.

He made a vinyl jacket from K-Mart cool and a memory dear to my heart just by having a good heart.

Test Taking Strategies!

I thought I would give the students a treat today by showing them a Princeton Review Test Taking Strategy dvd—they told me they would rather read silently. They were not nearly as excited to crack the state assessments as I was.

Meanwhile, there was the strong aroma of marijuana outside my door this morning. Apparently, the high of learning isn’t enough for them.

We were told at a meeting that there were twenty percent of our ninth graders that were failing their classes. Considering most of the students are testing below basic in the state scores, this seemed quite low to me. But in education, is the rally cry of “No Child Left Behind!” Yet, statistics show that only twenty percent of students attend college, six percent grad school. As we looked at the data, the question, “Does our teaching even matter?” occurred to us.

On the other hand, I am a terrible test taker. If my intelligence was measure by standardized tests, my education would be doomed. Yet, I tested gifted as a child after my kindergarten teacher didn’t recommend me for the gifted program and my mother went down to the school, insisting I be tested. Where would I be today without my parent advocate?

In order to succeed at a system such as the model we have for testing and education, one has to buy into the system. A major systemic problem is that the students don’t buy into these tests, the teachers don’t buy into these tests, and the politicians have interests other than society’s well-being invested in such testing.

Bush had stock in Open Court, the system of books he mandated for elementary schools. In the name of education, some people became rich while others are still in need of light bulbs and toilet tissue.

Angels' Night

Detroit Public Schools are asking people to donate light bulbs and toilet paper because they are bankrupt.

There is an entire section dedicated to Devil’s Night arson in Detroit on Wikipedia. I had no idea. I’m from Michigan. In fact, I was living in Ann Arbor, MI during the height of the arson 44 miles away. I guess that makes me part of the University bubble. As part of my studies, I was going into prisons and working with at risk youth. I learned about the Bloods and the Crips, but no one was talking about the arson.

My mother is from Detroit. Her father was a tool and dye maker. He had an eighth grade education and came from a family of fifteen children. He was able to do well for himself. But that was many years ago.

In my hometown, Habitat for Humanity is actually tearing homes down.

I feel like an old fart, but what is happening here?

Never fear, Angels’ Night is here! Detroit organized and now crime is down around town.

Now if they can just get their public schools together. If we could all just get our public schools together. If people cared that students didn’t have light bulbs and toilet paper here in the United States. So much for Brown Vs. Board of Education and progress…

Put in another Tape

I viewed the trailer for The Road, knew it wasn’t going to be a film I would enjoy, but sat through it anyway because I was already at the DGA and it was the next film showing after A Serious Man.

There was one scene that was so disturbing. SPOILER! But you shouldn’t see this movie anyway, so keep reading. He opens the cellar of a stranger’s house that is locked, and all these half bloodied missing limbs of tortured bodies start coming toward him and his child. The fact that I am even writing about this is giving the scene too much energy when, to begin with, it never even should have been in my subconscious.

Someone once said to me, if you are thinking of something negative, it’s like watching a bad movie. Why don’t you take out the tape and just put in another tape? Whoever said that must have had more control over their subconscious than I do.

When I was living in NYC, a guy walked out of Hannibal at the part where he eats a brain. He said he just didn’t need to see that. Ten years later, I now understand that.

Life is just too short for bad movies and quasi friends. I had dinner with a sort of friend. Let me just say, if it is not a good friend, your food doesn’t taste as good. I sat there thinking it would have been better if I had eaten alone.

Artist=Crazy

When I was in New York City living the life of a performing artist, my father said to me, “Well, if it doesn’t work out, you can always be an ordinary person.” These were sage, wise words. It sort of lifted the burden.

My healer used to say to me that I needed to learn to just “be.” I said I didn’t want to “be,” I wanted to “be somebody.” He assured me that I already was somebody and I just needed to be.

So I was always torn between enjoying my time lounging in my bed versus my scramble to be productive and change the world. Lounging in my bed won out. Changing the world just seemed like an overwhelming task.

I was always looking for the point, the deeper meaning in things. I am constantly asking the question, “What am I doing with my life?”

My tenth grade English teacher told me that adolescents that tried drugs and then decided not to do them were more well-adjusted than those that never had. I had always viewed drugs as an escape. While discussing what I was doing with my life with my sister in college, I asked if smoking pot would help to alleviate the looming larger questions of life. She advised me that the questions would still be there. So again, I figured what’s the point then.

I didn’t want to be the crazy artist. I wanted the well-balanced life. My friend said that should be my gimmick. The kooky girl trying to fit in. I just ended that sentence with a preposition. But fuck it. I’m an artistic rebel.

Setting Lassie Free

There was a dog trapped in the wire cage fencing surrounding the inner machinations of the electrical system in our underground parking lot at school the other day.

I kept hearing wailing and whining while I was in my parked car. I thought someone left their dog in their car. I went to investigate. The dog actually stopped wailing every time I was close. It is dark in our underground parking lot. But finally, I saw the scraggly thing, face in the corner of the cage with its muzzle to the ground. I was horrified.

It is one thing to see a child in the inner city without breakfast or clean clothes, but it is another thing to see a dog caged in the underground parking lot. One just doesn’t see stray dogs on campus, let alone trapped.

I didn’t understand how the dog got into the cage. Images of serial killers and their abusive ways with animals raced through my head.

Then I did what any sane person would do. I looked to see how to open the gate. It wasn’t locked. So I let Lassie free.

Word had it that someone had called animal control.

Maybe it would have been better to have animal control deal with it. But I couldn’t bear to hear the howling for one second more.

Painting Toenails

When I was sixteen, a woman told me to do my nails on a Sunday to relax, pamper myself. I was a bit horrified at this. It was just so trite, so against being a feminist. But a part of me has come to realize it is the little things that keep me from coming undone.

Like trimming my nails, painting my toenails, having my eyebrows tweezed, shaving my legs—these are the maintenance details that keep the car running. It’s ridiculous really. Because it is not like eating, sleeping, exercising. No, these things are the details. The waxing of the car—and I never wax my car. I’m lucky if I wash my car. But I’ve noticed I feel better when my car is washed.

Just like I know I’d feel better if my apartment were clean. But on my day off, I’d so much rather lie in bed and watch a documentary than dust or wash around the edge of my sink. Even though I know when I do, I feel refreshed. I don’t know how people lived before running water and electricity. I would have never made it on the plantation.

I always picture myself as the one that runs into the electrical barbed wire at the concentration camps. But maybe we never know what we are made of until we are tested. I hope I am never tested like that. Which is why I am grateful that I can paint my toenails on a Sunday while watching Desperate Housewives.

Roaches

Years ago, when we first started our affair, I used to write these angry rants and make him listen to them. I wanted him to know exactly how I felt when he pissed me off and I wanted to make him hear me out. He used to tell me he was just sitting through it to get to the sex.

I was living in Koreatown. He would come over and see the roaches scamper across the counter. He used to say, “When you gonna get out of the ghetto livin' with roaches?” Then one day after I had read a piece to him, he stopped, looked at me, and said, “You know, maybe you will have a book one day…maybe all these diaries someone will want to read…you may make money from it.”

I stopped by to see him and he had just given himself a shot in the stomach. He told me how the woman at the front desk had messed up his chemo appointments and they wanted to hospitalize him for three days. He had to argue with the doctor that he had his chemo two weeks ago and he had his calendar to prove it.

I told him I was doing a reading in his neighborhood next week. He smiled and said I better have changed his name. He said he wasn’t going out in crowds because he didn’t want to get H1N1.

I asked him why he wouldn’t let me take him to chemo. He said he didn’t want to string me in anymore than I already was. I told him I was afraid he was dying. He said that they told him that he would look back on this with fond memories after it was all over and he had to get back to the daily grind.

He said he wanted half of my book sales. I told him it was my story. I was selling it as fiction.

He said, “What, you gonna make him Puerto Rican instead of Dominican? It’s too similar. I’ll see you with my attorney in court.”

I said, “You are a roach that is gonna live forever.”

Is Cutting Hair Having An Affair?

My friend just asked me to cut his hair. He was painting today and hit his head on the ceiling and now he looks like he’s eighty-five with the white paint all over his head.

We were on our way to dinner, both of us bargaining for what we wanted. I wanted to go to Cheesecake Factory. He wanted his hair cut, but I was too hungry to argue. I said, “Throw a hat on, we can deal with it after dinner.”

He said the paint was poisoning him, seeping into his brain with each moment we sat there. He wanted me to cut his hair in my bathroom. I said, “Not my place, yours.”

He said, “What, you don’t want all that nigga hair in your bathroom?” He laughed, but I could hardly believe he said that.

I said, “Cutting hair is an intimate act. Maybe you should ask your girlfriend.”

He joked, “What, we can watch lesbian porn documentaries, but we have to draw the line at a hair cut?”

“I ain’t your woman.” I used his line back at him and we laughed.

I hate finding someone new to cut my hair. Because it is like having sex with someone—there’s this whole process of getting to know the person and trusting them with your hair.

The Fight for Night

An interesting phenomenon happened today at school.

I had given the students options to read about the Montgomery boycotts, Vietnam, Farewell to Manzanar, Night, or an immigration story from the Dominican Republic. Most of the students in the class read Night. When it came time to choose which one they wanted to be in groups for literature circles, there was fighting as to who was to report out on Night. Everyone was yelling out how they wanted to cover the concentration camps!

When a colleague first told me she was teaching Night, I commented, “Don’t you get depressed rereading, living through that book again?” She commented how the students kind of really got into the morbid, dark side of the suffering.

I am too haunted by the suffering. I pulled an image from the camps, but have decided not to post it because it is too horrifying to constantly look at on here. The night I posted the sounding the shofar image, I had a dream that I was taken off to the camps.

I always talk to people about how we cannot be ostriches, hiding our heads in the sand. I think everyone should read Night, know about Darfur, and experience life in the inner-city.

Yet, I realize, there is part of me that also is drawn to the depressed side of suffering. Perhaps it is shared suffering that relieves it. Or perhaps it is a masochistic side that enjoys it. I wonder what it would be like to just be diluted with bliss.

The Elephant in the Room

40,000 to 100,000 muscles in an elephant’s trunk—sensitive enough to pick up a blade of grass, and strong enough to rip the branch right off the tree. Now that’s my kind of animal.

I’ve been thinking about the elephant. How it is known for its intelligence, how Dumbo didn’t fit in and then used his ears to fly.

I have been working on overcoming obstacles and manifesting abundance. My healer in New York told me about Ganesh one session, showed me him from his altar, and then gave it to me. It had to be one of the most abundant moments in my life, with the water works and everything. I was so moved.

The Banksy exhibit in Los Angeles stayed with me for years. There was a live elephant painted to the wallpaper to represent poverty, the elephant in the room that nobody talks about or sees.

I like how the elephant can shake hands with its trunk, smell with its trunk, drink with its trunk, swing with its trunk—it’s this multi-purpose appendage depending on the occasion.

What about the woman from the circus balancing on the trunk of an elephant? So strangely beautiful, yet strangely disturbing.

My Bed is My Beach

When I first started meditating in high school, they used to suggest some place calm to go—like the beach. But I used to always picture my bed. There was no place that I’d rather be. I had inherited my great grandmother’s bed with a slump in the middle of the mattress, but it was still my bed and I longed for its comfort.

When I moved to Venice beach, I was even more grateful for my bed because of all the homeless people at the beach that didn’t have a bed. Sure, it’s ideal to live at the beach…unless the beach is your bed. The sun is great for a certain period of time, but if there is no place to take refuge, then the sun is the flaming devil, the sizzling cloud waiting to strike....sssszzzzzzzzzzzz!! Burn! My futon was fifteen years old, but it was my sanctuary, the first purchase my boyfriend made for us when we lived together one summer in college.

When my beau and I stayed at the W Hotel, however, it was as if I had an affair on that futon and could never go back. I had tasted a good night’s sleep like never before. I invested in the W bed, and have never looked back. The plush top, the 825 coil count, the Primaloft Duvet—they don’t call it the Heavenly bed for nothing.

I bought new sheets for my bed at Target. I had to cut cost corners somewhere. The lime green, teal, and brown polka dots make me happy. My luxury bed is my lover every night of the week. I am always satisfied in the morning.

When I stayed in Korea, on their hard box spring beds, I counted the days until I would be back in my own bed. I realize my bed is the SUV of beds. I see myself as living simply, but the bed is my downfall of consumer capitalism. I make no apologies for this lush landscape.

Gazelle's Drawer

The Rolling Stone cover of John Lennon and Yoko Ono was the last picture taken of him because the day of the shoot he was shot. Yoko said, “Why wasn’t I told that John will be taken away from me soon after, without even a chance for me to say goodbye?” I love the naked vulnerability of the male prototype curled into the strength of his woman. I love how strong she has been throughout all the years and the pain.

He commented on my picture of my sister—he must have just known it was her because I don’t remember introducing him to her in photos. He said he used to keep a picture of Angel who died in a drawer, but threw it out because every time he looked at it he got depressed.

I was shocked that he threw out the picture. I was holding onto every little thing when my sister died and couldn’t imagine throwing out a picture of her.

I started thinking about him and his drawer. A guy in high school used to say that his ex-girlfriend would always have a closet in his heart because she was there when his dad shot himself.

We have all our defenses heightened after we fuck. He says I’m his booty call and I tell him I’m just using him to get over my last dating disaster. It’s like our drawers are down and we’re naked and then we realize we’re walking down the street without any clothes on, so we shut the drawer really fast, smashing the others fingers to feel just enough pain so we don’t get too comfortable.

But sometimes I want to crawl into his drawer. Kind of like I wanted to crawl into the satin casket with my sister. It’s dangerous and sad and comforting and temporary and eternal and not mine but sometimes it feels like mine too and I just want to curl up next to them and go to sleep.

I was thinking about his story about when he told the kid on the PE field not to kick the basketball. It made me think of Castaway and Wilson. Maybe he saw his heart in the ball because he cared and didn’t want it kicked around. He said something about the ball getting welts. Maybe our hearts have been kicked around and they have these warped welts.

And I think about how I don’t want the game to end with him. How I really like the drawer slamming and the kicking of the ball. How I can hear the buzzer telling me the time is running, but how I want to find that moment in the game where slow motion occurs as you throw the ball to the basket, and it circles around the hoop, and for that split second, you don’t know if it is going to make it or not.

We have never taken a picture together. He says, “Out of sight, out of mind.” I wonder if I opened his drawer wide enough, if I could put my picture in there so that even if he threw it out, it would still have made that eternal print in his drawer.

Gazelle's Curse

The Saiga antelope horns are ground for their medicinal power as an aphrodisiac, and have been hunted to nearly extinction. Horns are thought to confine spirits. Or to be spiritual weapons. I wish I could out run these ghosts behind my horns. The sounding the shofar-who will blow these horns?

The Millionaire Myth

When I was seven, I saw Annie. Today, I realized that we feed children this myth that even orphans can be adopted by millionaires, hang from roofs, and live happily ever after.

Then I went to see Capitalism. I grew up right near Flint, Michigan, so Michael Moore’s truths ring very true for me. Who can forget “Rabbits—Pets or Meat” from Roger and Me? A few years ago, I thought I could be productive in my obsessing, and try to become a millionaire! Just like all the Robert Allan advertisements promise. But I found it was a lot of work. Plus, Michael Moore pointed out in his book that maybe if Americans weren’t led by the millionaire myth, then maybe we would all be content being comfortable and middle class.

The Fall of the Virgin Bed

“I’m having surgery on Friday. I have a mass in my chest. They need to biopsy it.” He finally returned my calls. After months of not speaking, he had been coming up in my mind over and over again. I had been calling him and texting him with no response. He left a voicemail while I was teaching right before Memorial Day Weekend. This was how I found out.

I had left a mean message on his voicemail on Valentine’s day, after he wouldn’t pick up the phone. I said, “We were never friends—friends return calls!” I was so mad that I wanted his heart to explode in his chest. Actually, the last time we were together, I was afraid he was going to have a heart attack on top of me. Freaked me out. I put my hand on his chest, felt his shortness of breath.

He made a joke as he was telling me they didn’t know what it was. “I kept wondering, why am I so tired after fuckin’ you?” I was stunned, but it all made sense. I had felt he was sick. I felt hung over the day after we were together, an energetic, empathetic symptom I had dismissed.

“Do you want to rendezvous before Friday?” I was afraid there’d be complications with the surgery, that he’d be out of commission for good, that I may never see him again.

“My place or yours?” He asked.

“You’re the one having surgery—whatever’s best for you.” I was trying to be accommodating.

“I’ll come over after traffic dies down around eight,” he said before he hung up.

I had never had sex in my new bed. It was my virgin bed. I had kept it that way for nine months. We had even had sex on the floor because I didn’t want to have sex in my bed unless it was my boyfriend who spent the night and went to breakfast with me the next morning. He had made the comment, “What, the bed is just for special people?”

But tonight was special. He played the cancer card.

He said he needed people to make him laugh, to stay strong. But when he came in and hugged me, there was no usual little pat of distance, we just sort of sunk into each other, like we were sinking into the news. Usually when we made love, there was a potpourri of porn talk. But things were different that night. At one point, my denial and defenses crumbled and I started crying. He said, "What's wrong?"

I covered it with, “I’m doing my tantric breathing.” He always made jokes about my tantric breath during sex.

But as we continued, I said, “Don’t leave me.” As if fucking me and fighting for his life were actually intertwined.

There is a comfort when we fight. Neither of us is getting too close for comfort. When he says something particularly mean or hurtful, I can rationalize he’s an asshole and be mad at him all over again.

But when there is silence, I worry. It is the silence that scares me.

Grading Essays

When I was growing up, I spent the night at my girlfriend’s house and we played Barbies, watched Nightmare on Elm Street, and looked at the penises in her father’s Hustler magazines. I thought we were living on the edge. Alas, by the standards of my students, my Middle of America upbringing is very tame.

I just asked my students to write an essay about violence. When I was young, we had the comedy, Throw Mama From The Train. You remember, Billy Crystal? My student wrote about how robbers took over the bus that his Grandmother was on in Mexico City, took her purse and jewelry, and threw her off it at 60 miles an hour.

A ninth grade girl was transferred in my class after she went off and started swearing at another teacher. I started to read her essay about spending the night at a friend’s house. The friend’s father comes home, drunk and starts beating the mother. Apparently, he does this every Friday night. Her and her friend are told to lock themselves in the bathroom. The mother grabs a black box, runs up the stairs with a bloody, broken nose, and shoots the father in the legs. The girl writes, “I’ve seen dead bodies before, but there was blood all over.” She goes on to say, “I learned you can only push someone so far until they explode.”

I’m realizing I should have given them the funny story assignment—you know, where they tell me all the warm, fuzzy things about growing up in South Central Los Angeles.

A Christmas Story

So before he was diagnosed with cancer, we were having sex on Christmas and he called me, "White Bitch." Yes, I'm dreaming of a white Christmas.

I said, "What did you say?"

He started back peddling with, "I was just talking dirty...I didn't mean to ruin the mood."

But I think I said something like, "Tell me how much you love this white bitch.” Then I told the story all over town because it is FUNNY once you get over the shock and offense of it all. I think we broke through a barrier because I had been reading him part of the short story about him and how his mother doesn't want him to be with a white woman—how white people eat baked beans, like I did growing up at my Grandma's, how we are trying to figure out why we keep fucking after all these years. Is it jungle fever?

We had this moment where he was complaining about how it's always tit for tat with me. I said, “I'm not good at relationships.”

He said, “Me either.” He gave me a bottle of champagne that he took from catering a party. He asked, "What did you get me for Christmas?"

I said, "Nothing, what did you want?"

He said, “Something from the heart.”

I feel like I've given him my heart, so why does he want something from my heart?

Then we had this conversation about socks, how he needed socks or something…I can’t even remember the context. I said, “I’ll get you some socks from the beach.”

He complained, “They're cheap. No, I’ll get my own socks from Target, they're better.”

When my sister’s husband died, I got boxes of stuff. In one, was a necklace of a naked man and a woman entwined in an embrace.

So the next time him and I were together, I told him this story about socks, my heart, and how I was lying in bed one night when I realized I wanted to give him the necklace because he was the best sex I’ve ever had. He said, “Thanks for the story. I’ve heard it. It’s from the heart. Keep the necklace, because I’ll lose it.”

So when my healer gave me these “KAMA FOOTRA, the socks you won’t want to take off in bed!” that she was gifted from someone because they weren’t her style, I thought it was like God giving me the perfect gift for him.

Maybe after he puts on his underwear in case he has to run out, he can put on his socks too.

Filling My Gills

We used to swim in the rain as children. It was magical really—the drops as they fell on the water, the thunder, the lightning. It doesn’t sound like a good idea, as I write it, but I had my heart on swimming today even though it rained.

My friend who has her Masters in public health from UCLA advised me to get the swine flu shot. Almost in horror she gasped, “You work around all those kids…you are bound to get it…we are all bound to get it.”

A counselor at a meeting today was talking about the student’s attendance. She said, “Those kids that were standing out in the rain today are going to be sick tomorrow.”

So I agonized. I did use a lot of Kleenexes today—maybe I shouldn’t go swimming, my hair wet for class walking through the rain. Is there even a connection about rain making you sick? Or is it an LA thing, where the world stops when it rains!

When I found out my gay best friend died it was pouring that night I went for my walk. I listened to Diana Ross and Sheriff’s “When I’m With You” for the entire hour or more I walked in the rain. It didn’t even bother me that my tennis shoes were skwishing water with each step. It seemed fitting that I should be drenched. I was between worlds, my legs moving, my heart half in bardo.

As I dove into the water this afternoon, I was escaping the animal world for a moment, filling my gills. Steam was coming off the surface of the water. The pool is always warmer than the air when it rains—a big, hot bath. I am between worlds, the water world beneath me, the clouded sky above me. Moving in the amniotic fluid of the womb, swimming with my sister in the rain again, breathing out the day under water, popping my head up for breath, continuing my day as I walk with my wet hair in the rain.

Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle

When I first saw the bicycles unlocked around the campus at USC, I was very confused. I thought, are these University bikes that everyone can ride and that’s why they aren’t locked? I mean, we are in the inner-city of Los Angeles. In New York City, the man at the bike shop sold me this twenty pound thick chain to wear around my waist because the U lock wasn’t strong enough.

I asked a man walking through campus what the deal was. He said, “These are rich kids. They have their bike stolen, they just buy another. What’s a hundred bucks to them? Nothing.”

When my sister was in high school, she purchased a ten-speed from K-Mart on sale with money from her paper route. She painted it red and bought yellow foamy pad for the handle bars. Someone made fun of it, that it was a Ronald McDonald bike. She was so very hurt. The irony is, one summer night, she and her best friend rode their bikes to McDonalds for ice cream. She leaned hers against the glass window with the painted golden arch so she could sit at a table against the window and see her bike. She saw a man ride off with it.

She was traumatized. My parents yelled at her, that it was her fault for not locking it up, even though it was her money that bought it. I just remember shame. Her heavy shame, sorrow, and beating herself up over the lost bike.

My car window was smashed on the street in Venice by my apartment. My hat, school bag with student anthologies, and Thomas guide were stolen. I guess the criminal wanted to know where to drive to next? I went in to teach that day, grieving my hat. My favorite hat! Who steals a person’s hat? My inner-city student said to me, “At least you have a hat to steal.”

When I was living in NYC, I had a wool hat, with a round rim, that everyone referred to as a condom ready to roll down. I LOST that hat. Tragic. I just wrote a boy from junior high on facebook that took my friend's flower in eighth grade. He asked her if she had a "hat." I didn't know about those kinds of hats.

I was too busy pondering, "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle."

Memo to My Dead Gay Friend

Remember that time in high school when we were lying on the floor in the den—I straddled you with my legs and did the move from Basic Instinct? We laughed so hard it hurt. I thought about that the other day and laughed out loud. You said you never saw me as being sexual until that moment. The ironic thing being, I was totally making fun of that over-the-top Hollywood scene in my over-the-top comedic way with a gay man.

When I called to tell you about my sister, I said, “Well, you won’t have to get the Frappuccino mix, she’s dead.” Today, I wondered if maybe you two are drinking Frappuccinos together and laughing.

I was feeling like there’s no way out of class structure and poverty. So I went to church. The youth group performed “He Lives In You.” I felt God was giving me a gift, a sign, because you put “He Lives In You” by Diana Ross on my mix CD. It was like we were in high school at an assembly. The youth group raised $10,000 selling their CDs for money for education in Ethiopia. It made me cry. I bought their CD. I left with a little more hope and inspiration.

I miss laughing with you.

Letter to My Lymphoma Latin Lover

Remember when I said I loved you and you said that’s the problem? Maybe the problem would be if you loved me back.

I love your back. Sometimes I feel like I’ve got your back. I wrote about pressing my body against your back and never heard back. And I know you want me to get off your back. But what if I won’t back down like the Tom Petty song. What if I stand my ground?

I wanted to sleep over when I got back.

But you fought me off to get off your back and even though I won’t back down, you say you have to cut me loose. Oh, here we go back…

With my back up against the wall, I am barking back.

Write back.

SOMA Festival

Going to a black box theatre is like going home for me. It is my church. It is where I have prayed for many years of my life. It takes me back to college, to New York City, to LA…it reminds me I am an artist even if I became a teacher.

Somatic movement is fascinating to me. So few people are even familiar with the term. Somatic education is the study of the body using modalities such as Alexander technique, The Feldenkrais Method, Rolfing, and/or Continuum Movement. Different practitioners will define it differently, I’m sure. But it has changed my life.

I was watching a performance tonight at the SOMA Festival. To feel the resonance of another’s movement in your own body is so powerful. It is the power of empathy washing through your tissues in micro-movements. When I would read the brochures and see the pictures of Continuum, I didn’t get it. One night, I woke up in the middle of the night. It was almost like my dead sister, who was a dancer, led me to the brochure and told me to attend the workshop. The founder of the work was a professional dancer. The work brings me back to me. Witnessing the performances brings me back to my sister.

Tonight, I saw a dancer who was in Paul Taylor's Dance Company for ten years. As she did a duet, it was so incredible to witness wave motion between two people coupling like DNA. Words fall short. Videos don’t do it justice. Some things, you just have to be there.

Eating a Lamb Chop

I was never raised eating lamb. Silence of the Lambs was my favorite film in sixth grade. I was so moved by the theme of the film—how she just wanted to save one screaming lamb from the slaughter. I was vegetarian from age sixteen to twenty-four. While I was catering in New York City, I saw a sheet of filet mignon being thrown in the trash and I thought, “Who am I saving?” It was then and there I started eating lamb.

I had thrown a lamb chop in the oven this morning to eat at lunch. I went to the school cafeteria where my teacher’s assistant was sitting. I asked if I could join her. She said how fancy a lamb chop seemed. I thought to myself—the ironic thing is, a plastic knife and fork isn’t going to cut it to eat this lamb chop. I am going to have to eat it like a turkey leg. Very barbaric and primitive when you are sitting with your teacher’s assistant for the first time for a meal.

As I tore into the flesh of my chop, I daintily tried to ask her how the tutoring went with our special ed students. One of the young men lost both of his parents this past year and takes care of his younger brother. He is a conscientious student, a football player, and yet, a bit of a lost lamb.

There is still that part of me that wants to save one lamb. There is now a part of me that has a taste for the finer cut. But my teeth tear into it without the proper knife and fork, creating my own etiquette for how to eat a lamb chop.

Sex is like therapy for cancer!

My best friend’s mother is having heart surgery tomorrow morning. Twenty years ago, she was misdiagnosed for cervical cancer, it had spread, she had to have most of her intestines removed, and she has been fighting for her life ever since. Lymphedema, broken hips, wheelchairs, complications, she has more than nine lives. She inspires me with her will to live. I used to joke to her that if she were caught in 9-11, she would be one of the ones crawling out of the rubble.

When she was young, she used to climb through the window into the bedroom of my best friend’s father. She even kept a stool out underneath the window. She broke all the rules. Whenever they fight, he always retaliates with, “Hey, you chased me.”

She understands my dark humor. She even has some of her own. When giving me relationship advice, she once said, “Well, when you’re sick or in a fight, the last thing you really want is his dick in your mouth.”

She wanted me to pass along how ginger works for nausea brought on by chemo. She sent me a card and wrote, “Sex is like therapy for cancer! (very intensely healing!)”

In the card, she also quoted Nietzsche, “Amor fati—the Love of your fate, which is in fact your life.” She continues to write, “As he says, if you say no to a single factor in your life you have unraveled the whole thing. Furthermore, the more challenging or threatening the situation or context to be assimulated and affirmed the greater the stature of the person who can achieve it. The demon that you can swallow gives you its power, and the greater life’s pain the greater life’s reply.”

She was one of the strongest influences on me in high school with her belief in fate. I used to go over to their house and she would tell me stories of her life, how she felt her husband was her fate, how she was so pulled to him, how her children and everything in her life was meant to be. When I saw The Business of Being Born, she told me about her own home birth with my best friend, how she would make people view the slide show when they would come visit and they must have thought her crazy. I was so moved by her free spirit, the normalcy of sharing your home birth on a slide show. I assured her she is not crazy, that that is something I would do—but then we both realized that that is the reason we love each other—so we can feel normal around each other! I thank her all the time for having my best friend.

She taught me to send a card when he pulled away when he was diagnosed with Hodgkin's Lymphoma. She said to send him one every day for a week just saying you make my life better knowing you. Or I'm thinking of you. Just something simple she said to let him know he is in my thoughts, that I care.

I am better for knowing all of them.

Her affirmation is, "Every day in every way I'm getting better."

She is making me better by getting better.

Jacked Jacuzzi Jet

I walked out of the women’s locker room today wet from my shower into the brisk October LA air, and the Jacuzzi had no water in it! It was drained with yellow police tape around it.

You know, it’s the little things in life—like looking forward to sitting in front of a Jacuzzi jet after a long day at work, a little jet stream of love on your spine, massaging the tension away. So bourgeois. People around the world don’t have drinking water and my day is dampered by the Jacuzzi being closed for maintenance.

A woman once told me she got off on the jets. When I was young, I heard a story about a woman getting pregnant in a Jacuzzi, even though they never “did it.” My ex once came down with a skin rash from all the bacteria floating around in the hot cess pool.

As my students would say, I was “jacked” of my Jacuzzi jet.

My Attempt to Hijack Pre-Chemo Sperm

He said I freaked him out.

I was just trying to preserve his sperm.

The whole scene was sit-com material, and I was laughing as it was happening, but I’m not the one with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.

He told me the reason he wouldn’t take me to his doctor’s appointment was because he wanted to be the one making the jokes—it wasn’t my place to upstage him.

The morning after his fundraiser, he called me. I had texted him because I was afraid he wasn’t going to make it home in one piece. He was inebriated that night, his friends telling him they were driving him to his car, taking his keys, and then hijacking him home. He had a cardboard box of cash, thousands of dollars, walking through downtown. I looked at his friend, “Make sure he gets home alright.”

I was headed to his neighborhood anyway that morning after for my dermatology appointment to burn off the skin tags on my neckline and zap my annual foot wart.

I brought him the chirping chick my mother had given to me one Easter. He was the one that had taught me regifting from years of giving me gifts he had lifted from catering parties. He could never get the stuffed chick to chirp in my apartment. I would show him how to just gently touch the metal prongs on the bottom of the feet so that the chick would let out little electronic chirps. My mother thought the chick was cute. I thought it was cute watching a guy from Washington Heights trying to make a stuffed bird chirp.

As usual, we were naked within minutes and he went to grab the condom.

I said, “Just get in me and see what happens.”

That is when he freaked.

He starts in, panicked, “We always use condoms.”

I said, “Well you didn’t always have cancer and what if you can’t have babies after chemo?”

He jerks away, “Have you lost your mind?”

I pause, “What? You don’t have HIV or anything, do you?

“Yes, I do. I have HIV!” He is totally freaking, and curling up in a ball away from me on the bed.

I’m laughing, “You liar! You do not.” I start to pin him down, straddling him with my legs.

“You’re freakin’ me out! You’re ruining the mood!” He says as he wrestles away from my grip.

“Did you ask your doctor about freezing your sperm?” I had offered to pay.

“He said they fixed that.”

“What do you mean?”

“The chemo doesn’t cause infertility.”

“Well why didn’t you say so?” I acquiesced.

His biding of time worked. I am hoping his biding of time keeps working.

Self-flushing Toilets

I have always been grateful to live in a time with flushing toilets. I have, though, asked myself if self-flushing toilets are a step forward in technology. I might add, I am not the first to write about this controversial subject.

We have such toilets at work. Our commodes are unisex. Now I am a feminist. However, I do not want to share a facility with men. They drip. They leave the seat up. They don’t flush—even the self-flushing toilets!!! How is that even possible? Those things flush numerous times when I use them, when I don’t even want them to flush, whish, whirl and away!

I was waiting for the restroom as a male colleague was leaving. There he left the seat up, with those spats of urine glaring at me, leaving me to touch the public seat to put it down for my use. I used toilet paper to actually bring it down because no one actually touches those seats. (I won’t even go for the squatters, because those women are just as bad with their aim and clean up strategies—where is the decorum for public restroom use, anyway? Can we rely on neither sex to be respectful of the spray factor?) I struggled with my own sexism in that moment—is it unfair to ask him to put the seat down?

I did ask him. But then I wondered…if he is so lazy as to put the seat down, perhaps it will back fire and he will no longer put the seat up. I might have just made my fate worse.

There is a scene in the film The Assassination of Jesse James where they have sex in the outhouse. Now, in the Hollywood love addiction world, this is considered hot. But if you really think about it, what woman in her right mind would want to have sex in an outhouse? The smell. The lurking residue. The flinging of clothes and where they may land. Did no one leave the film and think about these things afterward? Is it just me? Really? What do you people think about?

I Fucked A Man On Chemo

We hadn’t seen each other for three months. He told me to stop calling and texting all the time. I had been in Korea and hadn’t called or texted him for weeks—but who was I to argue with someone who had just started chemotherapy.

My French friend had said, “He’s depressed. Just go over there and see him.” But I couldn’t just drop by. I didn’t want to be the crazy woman knocking at the door unannounced.

I hadn’t planned on stopping by. But I had three hours to kill in his neighborhood before a reading. So like I was in trance, I drove to his street, parked, walked toward his door and had someone in the apartment building let me in.

I knocked. No answer. I said his name. He opened the door and said, “Come in, come in.”

He was playing internet poker. It was his new hobby he had taken up ever since he was diagnosed. It kept his mind off things.

He invited me to sit on his new striped couch. “Fundraising money,” he said. So there I sat, as he finished up his virtual poker game. One hand on the computer mouse, he started his ramblings about the past few months, the trips to the hospital, how he wasn’t going to go on Fridays anymore because it ruined his day. He said, “You’re looking at my bald head, aren’t you?”

I retorted, “That’s your projection. I think it looks gangsta! I dyed my roots, just for you.” He was always pointing out my roots when they grew back in, the white trash contrast to the blonde ambition.

My iphone rang. I took the call, told my friend Katie I wasn’t around the West side for her visit. I finished my call and he finished his game.

Then he told me about the nausea, the throwing up, how there were days when he couldn’t get out of bed. A wash of sadness went through the room, through me.

I stood up, walked over to where he was sitting, and hugged him. His head to my belly, my hand on his bald head with the tufts of remaining hair at the nape of his neck.

Everything after that, a familiar blur—his mouth on my breasts and before you know it, we’re naked in bed. In the seven years we’ve known each other, there have been times we’ve been alone together in a room with our clothes on, but I guess this wasn’t going to be one of them.

I asked, “Is this going to kill you?”

He replied, “I’m afraid you’re going to kill me.”

Everything was so normal. The two rounds, him scrambling in his dresser drawer for his eye drops, putting on his underwear afterward because his mother always said, “Always have your underwear on because you never know when you might have to run out.” He joked about me having to run out naked and him pretending not to know me in the street—channel 7 filming, my students recognizing me on the news. I laughed.

I asked why he wanted me to stop calling and texting.

His defenses kicked in, “Is this a test? Multiple choice? Essay?”

I said, “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.” Lying next to him, I knew enough.

I was glad the attorney I had started to see never called me back. I was so grateful to God for the moment with his head to my belly, my hand to his bare head.

Welcome to Gazelle's Tracks

Where you may start to psychically track...

You may be asking yourself, “Why am I reading this?” To which my reply would be, “Why am I writing this?” To be brutally honest, both of us should probably be doing something better with our time, but my motto is life is wasting time before you die. After getting a BFA in Theatre Performance, I thought why not get another senseless degree to top it off? If you are a classmate, you are possibly offended by this comment, but you are reading this out of obligation anyway, so fuck you. I’m laughing as I write that, but maybe you are not. After years of teaching in the inner-city, I think a fuck you a day keeps the doctor away. I was turning the corner tonight to have dinner at Govinda’s, the Hare Krishna temple—this woman puts out her hand as she is crossing in front of my car, halting me to stop. Now right there, it was the perfect fuck you moment. But I was going into the spiritual temple to eat my vegetarian food, so I abstained from the urge to use profanity. The irony? She was in line next to me at the dinner buffet!

If you are not a classmate, why are you reading this??? Perhaps your sexual partner is not available at the moment, or your latest idea to become a millionaire isn’t panning out as planned, allow me to take you into my world for a moment. My world. The ironic thing is, I’d like to escape my world. But heroin is expensive and the thought of injecting needles into my nervous system conjures up dirty needles between the webbing of toes. I already have a fungus in my toenail I’ve been trying to get rid of for years. I thought no one noticed until my students mentioned I had a crusty toe! So humiliating. But, when you are old anyway, you might as well just own it and have a crusty toe to go along with it. Did you see the man that has the HPV virus and it has grown all over his body like a tree?

So sometimes I just sit and write and get lost in the prison of my thoughts like a Poe short story, minus the impressive vocabulary. How did Poe learn his vocabulary, anyway? I bet he would have done well on the GRE. I wonder what it would be like to sit and have tea with Edgar--to really get the story about if he died in a ditch from drinking and how it all came about with marrying his niece…I’d be interested. The real reason I’m writing this blog is I can’t find a decent therapist. A boy once said, "therapist is The Rapist." Once I found out that legally, if the therapist thinks you are suicidal, they can commit you, I seriously reconsidered the honesty of therapy. I mean, I’ve written plays laced with dark humor and death—those get in the wrong hands and are misinterpreted, I am the star of my own Changeling film minus the Angelina Jolie good looks. But you know they always think you’re crazy when it’s inconvenient for you. When it works in your favor, suddenly you’re the sane one. I tried to tell the call in lady for jury duty that I was not mentally stable and she said, “Well you sound mentally stable.” I pleaded, “But I’m not!!!” Ozzy bites the head off of a bat and he gets his own TV show.

I am writing this blog to change the world!!! One of my students said that I am “a gladiator ready to take on the world.” By the end of the day, I am just ready for a nap.