Vintage Bree: The Communal House orWhat's on Your Bookshelf?

When I first moved to San Francisco in September of 2000, or "Y2K" as some were known to refer to it, I was paying next to nothin' to live in an anarcho-syndicalist communal household in the lovely and rapidly gentrifying neighborhood once known as the Fillmore, now known as Duboce Triangle, and fondly referred to by many of my friends as TriBeSa, the Triangle Behind Safeway. Well, it wasn't really anarcho-sydnicalist, but a watered-down communal post-punk socialist sort of arrangement. Décor included a taxidermied white long haired cat on the mantel and decaying linoleum in the kitchen and dining room. There were four of us in the house, including myself, cute lil gay Spencer, and Émile & Jaqui, a nonmonogamous straight/bi couple who were the longest running denizens in the house. I was paying like $300 a month for a pretty sweet situation, save for the aggravation of living with Jaqui, who was the only housemate I've ever had who I didn't get along with. At one point, late in the game when I'd long since decided to find another living situation, Jaqui derided me in one of our house meetings by suggesting that I must have grown up in a "flophouse" because I put my feet up on the living room ottoman with my shoes on.

But here's why I am compelled to write about this experience: when I first moved in, before the petty battles with Jaqui (because I wasn't clever enough or stylish enough or whatever it was that doomed me never to make the grade with her) the four of us had amused ourselves with an exercise. When I moved in, and set up all my stuff and unpacked my boxes and stocked my bookshelves, we walked around the apartment scoping each others' libraries to see what books we had in common. This was evidently a long-standing tradition when new housemates moved in. It turned out that the only two books each of the four of us owned at that time were The Marx-Engels Reader and Switch Hitters, a book of erotic stories in which gay male authors write dyke fiction and lesbian authors write gay male fiction. So at least we had liberal arts degrees and smut in common. This leads me to wonder what books my readers might have in common with their housemates. If you're interested in investigating your mutual bookshelves and care to leave a comment, please do. In this age of Shelfari and other virtual bookshelves, I challenge you to do the physical work of perusing the real-world library of your housemates or live-in significants and let me know what odd combinations of shared literary enthusiasm you've got.

Doing this exercize now, I see that Astrid and I both own the following books:

Valencia by Michelle Tea
Choir Boy by Charlie Anders
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera (although Astrid says her copy might actually belong to DJ).
and, yes, The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert Tucker.

*Edit: 1/18/09: I just discovered that both Astrid and I also own copies of Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich.

Stranded at the Drive-In

Well, actually stranded at Oakland International Airport. Our flight to Southern California is delayed by an hour and change, and Astrid and I are biding time by keeping the economy going with unnecessary purchases of $3.00 soft pretzels and $2.00 bottles of water. They've got free wifi here, clearly, since I'm blogging, but in order to use it, I had to click my agreement in the form of viewing a 30-second commercial for little Ronnie Howard's new movie. I would have linked Frost/Nixon for you here, but the annoying condition of using Oakland Airport's wifi seems to extend to disallowing one to capture the URL of sites visited. Surf without the turf, I guess.

Astrid is currently sitting by my side, reading the new "episode" (as she endearingly calls each issue) of Bitch Magazine which I also would have linked for you here [[wrings hands at Oakland Airport]]. She just drew the mag closer to her widened eyes as she read news that Abercrombie & Fitch evidently has been making thongs (the undergarment, not the plastic sandal) for the 8 to 10 year old set. We shared a moment of appropriate shock before each of us sank back into our jaded time-killing slumber.

I'm looking forward to spending xmas with Astrid's family again. I have to say, even though I'm not into that Jesus guy, well at least not into the institutionalized religion claiming him as the son of god, I really do enjoy celebrating the holiday. The smell of pine needles, buttery sugar cookies, hot toddies, family, cheer, whatnot. For the first time in maybe ever, I've missed my family's Chanukah party, which happened this evening in San Jose. I'm a little sad about it, and I miss them, but I'll be able to see them at our annual retreat and hootenanny (which I most certainly would have linked for you here) down in Pacific Grove next weekend. Preparations on the family songbook are going very well, and my fingers are becoming properly conditioned (read: calloused).

Well, it seems like the plane is finally starting to board, so I'll bid you all a merry xmas/chanukah/kwanzaa and to all a good night.

xo

Chilling...no really...at home

Astrid and I are having a nice evening at home, but this apartment is so fucking ridiculously cold. It's supposed to get down to 39 degrees tonight, and this drafty old plaster-walled house with old wood framed single pane windows lacks a certain wind-breaking quality that I'd like to rely on in times like these. The heating unit does a good job, if warming up a five-foot semi-circle around it is considered "good." The retention of heat in the living area has greatly improved, though, with the addition of a sheet hanging in the doorway between the dining room and the hallway. But still, too much heat is escaping through these rickety windows. We decided that this weekend, we're going to bubble-wrap them for insulation, as demonstrated here. I'll letcha know how it goes.

Working diligently on the 2008 Wrap, and am in some disbelief that the year is almost over.

Ah, our pizza has arrived. If my extremities can't be warm right now, at least my belly'll be. And on that note, I'll stop subjecting you to this, perhaps my most mundane entry ever.

xo

The 12 Poly Days of Christmas

I came across this video several months ago, and pledged to myself to spread it around this holiday season. It's adorable. If you don't catch all the lyrics, they are located here. My favorite verse is Seven. If anyone finds a poly song to the tune of Dreidel let me know! :)



Lots of love and snogs to you this holiday season!

xo
Bree

Procrastination Station

Working on a case presentation for my supervision group, and alternating this with glimpses of Facebook, long tangenting click-sessions on Wikipedia, and the writing of this and future blog entries. This pattern is reminding me of my angst-laden thesis days of the year-passed. Case presentations are way too much like homework assignments, informative to write and report with therapy peers, but such a drudgery to produce, if one is not in the mood, which clearly I am not. Give me shiny distractions, please! I pity the clients of mine who struggle with procrastination and think that I can actually help them.

A good thing came of today, though, which definitely portends breaking through some of the stagnation: I finally marched down to the post office and obtained my P.O. Box, a key step in filing my application for my therapy intern status with the Board of Behavioral Sciences. Many of my former classmates have already gotten their intern numbers, and I haven't even filed yet. What's worse is that the longer I wait, the more my already-clocked therapy hours will cease to count toward my license. I've gotten myself into this, and I'll get m'self out, eventually. I'm not too worried.

Thanksgiving

It's 5:00 AM and I've got nervous energy. I think it's 'cause I volunteered Astrid and I to make the stuffing for the holiday feast, which will commence in about 11 hours. I'm sure it will turn out okay, but as a friend called it yesterday, "You're making THE side dish!" The pressure is on!

Before looking at any recipes, I decided that these ingredients would be essential, and I went and bought them in mass quantities:

whole chestnuts
celery
onions and shallots
mushrooms
fresh parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme (which I failed to write in that order on the grocery list.)
veggie broth

Then, on scoping a few recipes for making stuffing from scratch, we went and got three huge loaves of sourdough which we'll toast in the oven to begin the process. We'll roast the chestnuts, sautée the veggies, combine everything, then bake the stuffing. It seems pretty straightforward and easy.

Another friend yesterday assured me that only three things could possibly go wrong:

1. The stuffing is too bland.
2. The stuffing is too dry.
3. The stuffing is too soggy.

The first two will be remedied automatically by dousing the stuff in gravy, so really aren't problems at all. The third means we're shit outta luck. I think I can handle this.

Another anxiety about the day ahead, though this is not what's keeping me up, is the probability that I will eat way too much food. I've been doing pretty well lately with "portion control," as the diet gurus might say, but Thanksgiving is a notorious rule-breaking event, and the entirety of the meal, aside from the turkey, is carbs, glorious carbs. I'm really glad I never went in for the Atkins diet. Not to malign it, because there are some sound scientific grounds for why it works, but I just don't think substantially reducing carbs and sugar over my lifetime is a sustainable strategy for me. I'm not much for sugar, anyway (it's really the easiest thing for me to control) but definitely decreasing highly refined carbs and increasing complex carbs like whole grains and veggies is something I've been focused on and continue to tackle. Anyway, today won't be a whole grain kinda day, but still, eating til I'm done and not keeling over from a gorged gut will be my modest health-conscious goal. That, and Astrid and I are planning to start the day, even before preparing the stuffing, by going to the gym and doing some cardio. She checked, and 24-hour is indeed open for business today. It'll be really interesting to see how many other people will be at the gym on a major eating-oriented holiday.

Gonna try to go back to bed now.

Happy Thanksgiving, y'all.

Vintage Bree: Nagel and Me

My fascination with the gaudy and über-'80s lithographs of Patrick Nagel started in about 1990 when I was known to frequent, frequently, a now-bygone coffee house in San Jose called The Phoenix. I've wanted to write about the Phoenix for years, and I may yet get around to an installment of Vintage Bree about the history of cafés-past in my life, but the thing that is germane to this story is that the upstairs of the Phoenix was lined with dozens of framed Nagel prints. The aesthetic of the café was generally more palatable than that, with minimal décor and ample seating, but for some reason, the upstairs was crowded with Nagels. This prompted B. and I to write a song about them called "Women on the Walls," in which we extolled the eerie omnipresence of Nagel's women in the café and imagined the highly dramatic stories of their lives. The song, earnest only in its minor chords, a total product of our collective early-twenties angst, became a camp classic among our friends for many years. It even utilized Berkeleyan principles (ripped naïvely from the Western philosophy class I was taking at the junior college at the time) in a refrain presenting the Women and then flippantly erasing them from consciousness with the bat of a heavily mascara'd eye. While the song remained a party trick for a number of years, it faded into obscurity just like other songs I'd written with friends from that era, many penned at the Phoenix, until B. and I had a rare opportunity to showcase it in public.

It was November of 1997, and Mag & Ana had organized Nagel Night at Trannyshack, the local irreverent underground drag club. The ode included many fabulous performers lip-synching to Eighties songs, arty send-ups of Nagel's portraits, and even a (very tasteful!) dramatic reenactment (lovingly rendered by our friend Dingo Chan) of Patrick Nagel's tragically ironic death scene (he had died in 1984 of a heart attack after doing 15 minutes of cardiovascular exercise in a charity event for the American Heart Association). Take a moment to absorb that last sentence, please.

B. and I, not in drag, nor Eighties pancake makeup, nor lip-synching, were a bit oddball in this clamour of oddness. It was the two of us on stage, with my acoustic guitar, singing this sort of hippy dirge in our very untrained voices. And now, at long last, for the first time ever at Toothpick Labeling, I present to you the original song, newly recorded in crystal clear digital!



It was quite a happening. But, dear readers, there is so much more to the story, if it can be believed! The very next day, a foggy November day it was, found me canvassing (I worked for the Peace Organization back then) in a modest neighborhood in Pacific Grove, a quaint seaside town just south of Monterey. It was my charge to find new supporters and renew the members of the Org that lived in the neighborhood. I was excited to speak with a gentleman that evening who had given $100 to the canvasser last year, and knocked fervidly at the door of his tiny bungalow apartment. The man of the house answered the door, a pale, gaunt, bespectacled guy, pleasant to talk to. As we discussed the current campaigns of the Organization from his doorway, I caught glimpses of the tiny apartment in the background. Every surface in the place was piled with papers and used dishes and scattered pieces of electronic equipment and half empty bottles of Zima and I'm sure lots of other stuff I can't remember or even fabricate for you now. The one thing that I remember with absolute clarity was perched on the coffee table among all this clutter: a white ceramic Nagel coffee mug.

I said, "Is that a Nagel coffee mug?" He replied with interest that it was, and asked me about my knowledge of Nagel. Right away I could tell that I had to keep my snooty "so bad it's good" attitude about Nagel in check. He regaled me with stories of his avid collecting and his admiration for the artwork of this master lithographer. I relayed to him the story of "Women On The Walls," and my experience of performing it in San Francisco the night before, and he was enthralled. Then, he showed me his Pride and Joy. Rolling up his shirt sleeve, he revealed one of Nagel's Women tattooed on his left bicep.

Full of awe at the synchronicity of the cosmos, I renewed his membership at $250.00 and walked off into the Monterey mist.

Today is Patrick Nagel's birthday. He would have been 63.

___________________________
Women On The Walls ©1990/2008 astrobarry & bree (with many thanks to Cisco for his engineering prowess and to B. for being there. For all of it.)

I love my straight friends.

I have to plug my pal James' recent column at SFgate, Rocchi's Retro Rental. Not only is the review about one of my very favorite films, Todd Haynes' gorgeous and gripping Far From Heaven, it's also a poignant, deeply heartfelt response to the appalling passage of Prop 8. I guess I've outed James as straight here, but he's also bravely outed himself in his column as an atheist and a lover of justice.

Thank you James.
xo
Bree

What's in a name?

I've been asked a bunch of times why this blog is called "Toothpick Labeling." I should really give credit where it's due finally and explain that it comes from a scene in the influential Richard Linklater film Slacker, in which a man ("Happy-Go-Lucky Guy") wanders into a diner and encounters an emotionally disturbed woman ("Traumatized Yacht Owner") muttering to herself:

TRAUMATIZED YACHT OWNER
...you should, you should, you, you should never traumatize a woman sexually--I should know, I'm a medical doctor. You should never, traumatize, you should never name things in order...

CRANKY COOK
Hey, cool it down over here.

The Happy-Go-Lucky Guy is perplexed by this all but just sits there. He quietly leans over to observe the lady until she once again focuses her attention on him.

TRAUMATIZED YACHT OWNER
...Toothpicks, toothpicks, toothpick labeling...

It's a bit of dialogue that has long captured my imagination, though admittedly, I'd always sort of glossed over the psychological import of this woman's damaged disposition. I'd rather been drawn by the obsessive quality of the concept of the labeling of toothpicks. How does one label a toothpick, anyway? It seems a brain-breaking exercise destined for failure. The idea of it reflects the myopic detail-orientation of a personal blog, at least one that I would author, and when it came time for me to begin my writings at Blogger after making my online journaling home at Diaryland for three years, it rose somehow from the deep reaches of my neocortex as a suitable name for the new venture. I think it's turned out to be rather apt.

Since the Election

...I've mourned the passage of Prop 8.
...I've started to feel hopeful that we'll overturn the motherfucker.
...I've kissed two women other than my girlfriend. *Swoon!*
...I've broken a pint glass with my bare hand and lived to tell about it.
...I've connected with old friends on facebook and in person.
...I've enjoyed an evening at home with Astrid and roasted pumpkin soup.
...I've been writing down my dreams.
...I've been working on a blog entry about Patrick Nagel.
...I've been enjoying the minutiae.

Sorrow Trumps Elation

It's weirdly alienating to be a queer progressive in California today. I want to be happy about Obama's victory, about the American electorate sending a clear mandate to separate ourselves from the last eight years of endless and causeless warfare and the stripping away of civil rights and human needs programs that has gone along with it. And while I voted not for Obama, but for Green candidate Cynthia McKinney from my safe 24% margin state of California, I was still thrilled that Obama trounced McCain, and that the Democrats, for whom I harbor quite a lot of criticism, swept into an easy majority in the House and Senate.

But my momentary (if ambivalent) euphoria quickly dissolved into grief as I watched the returns come in from my Golden State and began to grapple with the passage of Proposition 8.

Over 5 million of my fellow Californians just told me that my relationship isn't as valid as theirs. That I am a second-class citizen. Even for a person like me, an out queer woman who is loved and supported by her family, who is proud to be part of the vital, brilliant LGBT subculture, who feels secure with herself and her sexuality, even for me, I feel shame. What is perhaps most profound for me as I try to understand my own reaction to this vote is that, even as someone who is critical of marriage as an institution, who has no interest in getting married, the passage of Prop 8 feels incredibly personal: I am wrong, my love is wrong, I am less than. And if this is impacting me so strongly, how is this decision affecting LBGT folks out there who already live with the daily fears and shame of being in the closet, of feeling unsafe in their communities, who have been turned out by their families? To illustrate this indignity further, while Californians voted to take my civil rights away on Tuesday, they handily expanded the rights of chickens. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy for the chickens, I really am.

But I'm feeling on the outside of things: outside as a queer mourning the loss of my civil rights. Robbed of my excitement about the changing of the guard in the White House and in Congress. I'm sorry I can't join everyone out there in your joy and celebration about Obama. The bitter is winning out over the sweet.

For the Occasion of Astrid's Birthday...

I am planning the following luxurious meal for this evening:

Salad with arugula and hand-chosen lettuce mix with lemon vinaigrette dressing * Swiss chard and herb tart with two cheeses, fresh thyme and oregano * Greek gigantes white beans in a tomato/garlic/olive oil sauce * Tzatziki made with Greek yogurt, cucumber, garlic, and fresh mint *

My stomach just flipped from thinking about it. Maybe this meal will be a little too rich? And then the drinking will commence. It might be a Tums night. Maybe I'll save the tzatziki for another time.

Halloween Highlights

* Coming home from work to see Astrid dressed in tight black tights, a Batman (or Girl) t-shirt, tiny yellow shorts, and thigh-high black boots.

* Buying treats at the local health food store and offering one to a kid dressed as Spiderman as we were walking home. (He recoiled - don't you know you're not supposed to take candy from strangers?)

* Making out with Astrid in her tiny yellow shorts and tight black tights on the couch, waiting for guests to arrive.

* Eating chocolate and drinking whiskey at the same time.

* Seeing Dave dressed as his own Facebook page.

* Talking to Calisto about the racist, classist, and basically totally fucked up doctrine of a certain Russian-turned-Texan physics professor...

* ...And then getting a text message from Spider in Seattle who was, at that moment, witnessing what she described as a "straight man dressed as a leather daddy," performing the song All my Exes Live in Texas at a karaoke bar.

Happy Halloween, y'all!

Good Eats

Been eating pretty healthy the last couple weeks. Lots of veggies, no fried food ('cept tortilla chips, which are mandatory when eating at a taqueria!) and the most important thing: I've been stopping when satisfied instead of busting my gut. If I can just get this one thing down and stick to it: I never have to overeat. Just because food is there doesn't mean I've gotta eat it. It's like listening to really bad lesbian folk music: just because they're dykes doesn't mean I need to support 'em. It's a nasty habit, indeed. So, I dunno how I got up to 224 - maybe it was water weight - but I'm back at 220. Already my pants feel less constricting.

Shameless Self-Promotion

I really had some momentum for a while with updating, but it's been several days since my last post, and I've lacked inspiration. I've been working on the blog in the background, though, doing some promo and working on entries to be posted at key times in the near-future.

Has anyone seen my Toothpick Labels around San Francisco yet? I've been sheepishly sticking these 1x4" promos all over sign posts, bike racks, and Muni stops in the Mission, TriBeSa, and the Lower Haight.

I imagine it's a hilarious sight to see me engaged in the petty defacement of public property: I pull a label from the backing, looking around to case the situation, and stick it on as quickly as I can, walking away as nonchalantly as possible. A tiny little adrenaline rush occurs which I attribute to paranoia and the thrill of doing something naughty. I don't know whether this will improve my readership, but it's fun! Definitely let me know if you spot one! I'll be expanding into the upper Haight, Castro, and various other neighborhoods as my schedule allows.

A totally legit way to help me promote my blog, if you're also on Blogger, is to become a public Follower of Toothpick Labeling. Quick and painless, and that way you get updates on my posts directly in your Blogger dashboard, and I get to know who the hell's reading this thing.

And lastly, I'll take this opportunity to remind my loyal readers that, oh yes, the 2008 Wrap is in heavy production mode, and will be posted as soon as possible after the turn of the year. That's a scant couple months away, so do be titillated, by all means! If you're new to Tlab and don't know what this "Wrap" is of which I speak, click onto the 2007 Wrap in the Faves section on the right and get yourself acquainted!

Thanks for being out there, youz.

xo
Bree

Vintage Bree: Where were you during the Loma Prieta earthquake?

October 17, 1989, San Jose, California, early evening. I am sitting at the desk in my bedroom, my senior year of high school, and my mom is in the room next to mine, playing Boggle on our now ancient Mac. I am working on a homework assignment (I don't quite recall which) when the house begins to shake, and shake. My mom and I both yell, "Oh Shit!" in unison, and then I scream, "Get into the doorway!" and we stand there, in the doorways of the rooms side by side, waiting for it to be over. The quake kills 63 people, injures more than 3,000 and leaves even more homeless. The Bay Bridge and the Cypress structure collapse.

Ten years later. I work at a natural foods deli in Santa Cruz, and I'm fetching some items from the case for a customer who looks familiar to me, a friendly middle aged woman, all smiles and silky grey hair. I figure she's a regular. My co-worker and I are having a conversation on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the Loma Prieta temblor. "Where were you during the quake?" I ask from behind the counter, including the shopper in on our chat. The customer thinks on it, and then offers in good cheer, "I was giving a pelvic exam at the Women's Health Center!" We all laugh, and then she and I beam at each other in embarrassed recognition.

Tuesday Evenin' at Home

Astrid and I had tender conversation over fresh rice paper rolls tonight. Now we're buying tickets to travel to the Mojave to visit her family for xmas, my second year with Astrid's folks on the holiday, and my third celebrating it with her. Even though I'm a secular atheist-leaning Jew, I've really come to love celebrating xmas in the desert with Astrid's once-fundamentalist and still conservative parents: not the exorbitant gift-buying, or the huge heaps of sugar, really, but just the being with them, the warm exchanges, the awkward exchanges, all the relating through chit chat, and playing dominoes, and long silences, and the buzz of Astrid's rowdy toddler nephews, and the love.

Progress Report # 3ish

So, not surprisingly, with outbursts like last weekend's fried food extravaganza, and owing to my slacking off from gym and bike alike (my brand new bike is broken at the moment), I've gained more weight in the last couple months. I'm now 224, four pounds more of me since I started this here blog. All in all, up 9 pounds from where I was about a year ago, which is roughly about 20 to 30 pounds more than I'd ultimately like to weigh. I'm telling you, the goal here is not to be thin, the goal is to feel physically and emotionally better about my relationship with food and excercize, take some weight off my bad knee, and eat more healthfully (and ecologically-friendly).

So how have I not been accomplishing these goals? I'm overeating, per yooszh, dining out too frequently, and not exercizing nearly enough. I was getting really consistent with the gym for about three months there, but as school wound down and my brief summer break and subsequent two-month job search began, I lost focus. Then, sometime in August, I got a new bike and I think getting back on it distracted me further from the additional exercize regimen of gymming. So I'm looking forward to building in a routine where I'm both biking and gymming, as well as getting more of a handle on the food situation. It's a lifelong process. I'm hoping at the very least to get back down to 215 and then see what happens from there.

Sigh.

Preach Beyond the Choir: NO on Prop 8

The following is an email I sent to a conservative person in my life who is very dear to me. Please consider writing your own message, or cutting and pasting this message into an email and sharing it with your conservative or religious friends, family, and colleagues--especially those you think might vote in favor of Prop 8. We need the message to reach beyond the converted.

Hi ____________,

The reason I'm emailing you is because I want us to have a conversation about marriage rights for same-gender couples. As you probably know, the California Supreme Court recently made same-gender marriage legal. But now, there is a State Constitutional amendment on the ballot called Proposition 8, which will write into the California Constitution that marriage can only be for a man and a woman. If it passes, it will permanently ban marriage rights for same-gender couples. Most people I know are already committed to voting NO on Prop 8 to protect marriage equality. But I suspect that many people you know will be voting for the proposition.

I'm asking you a favor: will you watch the video below and consider voting NO on Prop 8? And will you pass this message along to your friends and family so that they can hear a humane message from the "other side" as well? The video is a message on same-gender marriage from clergy and faith leaders. I just watched it this evening, and it was so powerful, it made me cry!



A link to the video is here:
http://noonprop8.com/multimedia/video?id=0001

You don't have to tell me how you're voting - I respect your privacy. But I can't in good conscience not make an effort to reach people beyond the little bubble of San Francisco I live in.

Okay, that's enough for now. I really appreciate you taking the time to read this message and watch the video. Please let me know what you think and if you have any questions. I like talking with you! And above all, please know that I love you and respect your decision to vote however you like.

Wishing you the best,

--Bree

Opening Up*

L's visit from Germany is now a few weeks passed, and both Astrid and I are in a good place about all, but it was somewhat of an emotional blender while she was here. The blender contained the following: major portions of sexiness, excitement, love, and wonderful communication, one part confusion, a generous dose of longing and disappointment, dash(ed) expectations, and a pinch of loneliness. And I'm not just describing my feelings being in the spectator role of Astrid's renewed connection with L., but the collective feelings of Astrid and I as they mingled together in the rich concoction we created together with her.

It had been a long time since Astrid or I had had other lovers. My last significant involvement was with Dax, which ended about 2½ years ago when she entered into a more or less polyfidelitous relationship with a couple, and then wound up in a monogamous relationship later on with her current sweetie. I had had a make-out and one awkward date sometime after that, but nothing noteworthy. I think it had been about three years since Astrid was with another lover. And since then, we have developed and deepened our relationship, and we have been discussing our feelings and dreams about polyamory and nonmonogamy quite consistently, the identity and style of loving being at the core for both of us. "Opening up" as a theme is very apt: the opening up of possibilities between Astrid and I; the opening of our hearts to new loves; the opening of our bodies to a new vibrancy and new experiences of pleasure; the opening of our spirits to loving each other in an even more intimate and honest way.

The week didn't progress in the way either Astrid or I had hoped it would, based on the excitement of Astrid's interaction with L. the first couple days. When L. arrived in town, she and Astrid got to reestablishing their rapport and becoming lovers again very quickly. The energy between them was high on the night of Astrid's poetry reading, and after we all got home, they stayed together on the couch while I went to sleep in my bed. When I woke up at about five a.m. to pee, I heard wonderful moans coming from the living room and felt this amazing mixture of vicarious arousal and joy for Astrid, as well as a subtle anxiety that I knew I wouldn't be able to process in such a sleepy and excitable state. When Astrid joined me back in bed not long after that, it felt warm and sexy and connected between us as we snuggled and talked a little about everything that was happening. I was thrilled for her, and so turned on, and felt very grounded about giving them space to be together. And then the next day, L. and I had dinner and talked for a long time about the situation, and I made it very clear to her that everything was cool with me, and that she should feel free to be affectionate with Astrid around me and essentially entitled to take up more space (in fact, in the interest of full disclosure, I told L. it'd be my pleasure if she were affectionate with Astrid in my presence. I got a chuckle out of her on that one--I'm an unrepentant voyeur, it's true.) She said the situation was very unusual for her, and she felt a lot of discomfort with it, having no exposure to open relationships, but said she was really impressed with how Astrid and I were handling it, and that she was learning from it. I assured her we were learning too.

But then, sadly, for the rest of the week, L. was distant from Astrid, and I found myself there in Astrid's disappointment, feeling it with her, and feeling the years of my own start-and-stop polyamorous leanings being dashed. It is not wise to put all eggs in a basket, as the cliché goes, and so wisdom knows that L. was no wicker for our whims. When Astrid came to bed the next night, curling into herself and feeling rejected by L., I felt disconnected from her and alone, knowing it wasn't me she wanted that night. We slept lightly and proceeded awkwardly through the next day, and then Astrid and I took a walk together up to Dolores Park late in the evening, and had a radically honest talk about everything we were both feeling. How glorious it was to share my intimate joy and pleasure and sadness and fear with her, and to be fully open to hearing Astrid's specific pleasures and pangs, even as they were about another woman.

But radical honesty is more multifaceted than glorious: it's tiring. It's exposing. It's relentless, and once you start, you can never stop, because anything less feels inauthentic and flat. This is the precious and frightening underside of opening up.

________________________________
*This entry is named after the new book of the same title on nonmonogamous relationships by Tristan Taormino, out now on Cleis Press.

Biting the Hand, Part One

Friday was my first day at CompuTrap*, the new company of my employ (yes, I got a job, after two months of looking.) It is helmed by Doug Muñoz*, a Type-A overworked middle-aged golf enthusiast who seems very chill as a boss excepting his ease in letting me know his business philosophy up front: I am to be his right-hand man, as it were, reporting everything I hear from the rank-and-file and encouraging a workplace culture of secrecy around issues such as compensation and employment status. He says our salaries are no one's business, and as the bookkeeper-slash-office wonk (he is generously calling me the Office Manager) I will be privy to all that top-secret information, so I need to keep a lid on it (which I will), and let him know of any rumblings (which, if I can help it, I won't.) It sets the teeth of my inner union agitator on edge. I don't think this is a big feature of the job; mainly, Doug hired me to do the accounts payable, stay on top of billing and collecting payments from clients, and to take all the busy work off his desk so he can focus on finding new clients and growing the business. I'm perfectly willing to do this, especially since it's in a casual environment, a fifteen minute bike ride from my apartment, and he's giving me the hours and pay I need to eek out a living in the next year while I continue working at the clinic.

As Morrissey once said, "I was looking for a job and then I found a job, and heaven knows I'm miserable now." I get no end of pleasure in this quote. I'm so grateful to be learning to do the therapy work that allows me to find so much personal growth and meaning, and gives me a future to look forward to beyond the crunching of numbers. But, goddamnit, I was really ready to kiss bookkeeping good bye. If nothing else, I feel this year is the home-stretch.

________________________
*Name of company changed so's I don't get fired.
*Name of boss changed so's I don't get sued.

Fried Food Frenzy

Forgive me, father, for I have sinned. Except that I'm not Catholic, and my father is dead, so I don't think he would mind that I've had chicken strips, french fries, and breaded, fried cauliflower today (eating this last delicacy as I type before you now.) Yes, all in one day. Maybe this has to do with my vegetarian girlfriend being out of town, thus I'm eating to alleviate my missing her, and eating decadent meaty things 'cause, really, I just can. It feels wonderful momentarily and then feels awful, physically, not long after such binges. I should really be asleep now, but this cauliflower is fucking tasty.

Does it exonerate me when you know that I breaded the cauliflower in matzo meal?

Back in the Swing?

For those of you who missed the 13-episode run of Swingtown, a racy and stylish homage to partner swapping and finding yourself in suburban Chicago in the '70s, now's the chance for you and everyone you know to throw your keys in the bowl and join the action. The CBS summer replacement series that couldn't pull enough viewers to stay on the air passed its first season arc is going to be rebroacast on Bravo this month. Please watch it and if you dig it, tell CBS and Bravo that you want the series to continue. Though I think the CBS run suffered from uneven writing, the premise--a conventionally stifled couple moves on up to a nicer suburb and across the street from a pair of swingers who school them not only in free love but also in how to honor their deeper desires for authenticity--is a winning one. Likewise, the characters, the excellent acting, and the amazing sets and costumes are exactly what this series needs to see new life on a cable network that can take the provocative material and make it juicier. Check out the Save Swingtown site to get involved in the fan-driven effort to keep the show in production and keep positive portrayals of open relationships and unconventional lifestyle politics on the air!

Peace & Love,
Bree

You Will Submit to 80's Music

Working on a longer entry at the moment, but thought you might like a real-time update of the sometimes fantastic and sometimes awful 80's playlist at the café where I'm currently writing. Look for updates over the next hour or two!

So. Central Rain by R.E.M. (when this wonderful old R.E.M. song was playing in the café, I thought it a good sign. Little did I know I'd have to be assaulted by infuriatingly catchy Billy Joel and Hall and Oates tunes for the remainder of my stay.)
Jeopardy by Greg Kihn
It's a Mistake by Men At Work
Family Man by Hall and Oates
People Are People by Depeche Mode
some godawful George Thoroughgood song
Pulling Mussels (From the Shell) by Squeeze! (pretty obscure, right?)
Don't Be Cruel, as peformed by Cheap Trick
King of Pain by the Police
Our House by Madness
Tell Her About it by Billy Joel (ugh!)
Manic Monday by...um...the Bangles (did I get it right?)
A Million Miles Away by the Plimsouls (sounding very Replacementsy)
Come Dancing by the Kinks (was this released in the 80's? maybe...)
Saved By Zero by The Fixx
I Know Tonight by the Cars
Let's Go Crazy by Prince
Mayor of Simpleton by XTC (nice to hear this one! Been a long time.)
Show Me by the Pretenders (Yay!! I have to say, I think the Pretenders and Chrissie Hynde are really underrated by retro-appropriating hipsters everywhere. They quite rock, IMHO)
Express Yourself by Madonna
Don't Dream It's Over by Crowded House
Freedom by Wham! (not to be confused with "Freedom 90" by George Michael, solo, songs of the same title and quite different in theme. Very self-aware, George.)

Dispatch from the Cruz

Hello one and all,

I'm spending the weekend with my pals Exene and Oliver here in my erstwhile hometown of Santa Cruz. Once E & O's friend S. gets here, we will sup downtown at a new Pakistani restaurant, new since I last lived in this town some eight years ago. Astrid is on a teaching gig in Oklahoma, and I miss her. There's so much to tell, and I'm working on an epic blog entry about some of the thrilling updates in our lives. Mainly, I'm referring to the whole polyamory thing, blown wide open since L.'s visit from Germany. Suddenly I have tangible glimmers of life as I've ideally wanted to live it my entire adult existence: to be very committed and still head-over-ass in love with Astrid, and to experience the incredible joy and titillation, and also the struggle of owning all my own authentic fears about sharing the woman I love with other people who she might grow to love as well. There is something both altruistic and keenly selfish about cultivating my polyness: I get to support Astrid in her loving adventures with other people, and of course, I get to have some of m'own.

Goddamn, I'm hungry. Pakistani food sounds just right.

xo
Bree

Vagina Dentata!

Had to re-post this from the dspot - thanks for keeping your finger on the pulse, Dax. Oh my god, Tina Fey is fucking spot-on!

The Germans!

Four lovely German dykes are staying with the us this week - a friend and former make-outy person of Astrid's, L., and her three traveling pals. We had a grand night out on the town with them last night which consisted of Indian food at Pakwan and much alcohol at the local dyke watering hole. Then I walked back to the apartment with some of the ladies and Astrid and L. continued to catch up at the bar, and it seems that L. is quickly becoming a current make-outy pal of Astrid's, too! This is really hot and fun for me to hear about and I'm definitely experiencing some nice compersion, picturing Astrid and L. getting down and wondering about how the group dynamics around it will unfold during the week.

Today, the girls are off exploring the Golden Gate Bridge, and Astrid and I are lunching and taking a bike ride. And then later, we'll all convene to watch Astrid perform some smutty poetry at her very first public literary reading! Yay sex! Yay creativity! Yay Germans!

September 11 - how many dead?

It's the seventh anniversary of the terrorist attacks that leveled the World Trade Center and hit the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. Bush, Rumsfeld and crew held a "somber" ceremony at Ground Zero this morning, lamenting the 3,000 American deaths from the attacks. And these deaths surely should be remembered, but no national tragedy can justify the violence we have returned in kind.

Why aren't our elected officials, and the presidential candidates, and the mainstream media mentioning the more than 20,000 Afghan deaths and the more than 1.2 million Iraqi deaths in the wake of the comparatively minor suffering we've endured on U.S. soil?

Where Fat Meets Butch

I've always hated shopping for clothes. Even now that I really enjoy dressing up and looking all hot and shit, finding clothes that fit me, particularly button-down shirts, the staple for all my biz casual and dressy wardrobe needs, is elusive and irksome. The experience of finding a great shirt at a vintage store, a western style collar shirt, in worn cotton with mother-of-pearl buttons, say, is more often than not completely demoralizing, as I slide into the sleeves, noticing that the fit of the shoulders and collar and tits are perfect, but the lower two buttons, the ones situated over my distended belly, will not, no matter how I strain, fasten or stay closed. This happens over and over and over again.

My hatred of shopping is perhaps more deeply rooted in my gender nonconformity than it is in my fatness. When my mom and I went to the department store together, I loathed every moment of getting into the changing room with her to try on blouses and dresses and cute little girly shorts with matching flowery tank tops. "Butch" is a shorthand, and not a label I strongly identify with, but it gives you an idea. I've always been a tomboy, ever since before I can remember. I rode bikes on the creek path, played with Star Wars action figures, dug in the dirt, eschewed Barbie and make up and all things pink and purple. My favorite article of clothing when I was a kid was my precious Zoom shirt. A handsomely androgynous striped rugby, I wore it practically every day of my fourth and fifth years. At right, I am receiving the Zoom shirt on my fourth birthday. The eyes in the photo say it all: "I can't wait to get outta this cutsie sundress and into that shirt!"

My mom had a theory about why I didn't like to wear pretty clothes, which she didn't hesitate to share with me during my adolescence. She said she thought I would like wearing dresses if I lost weight. I told her to shove it, but politely. The theory doesn't wash, considering I was a tomboy before I became fat, but it fits nicely into my mom's ideas about my sexuality, and into her self-hating narrative about her own fatness. So much precious life could be lived if fat women could love their bodies instead of being eaten alive by self-hatred.

But being fat certainly contributes to my dread about shopping, my anger that "plus-sized" clothing for women is usually feminine, and often so fucking ugly besides. And the problem with shopping in the men's department is that the cuts are not tailored for womanly curves, not to mention the big ol' belly. There is a fucking gold mine awaiting the clothing designer who will create an inexpensive butch clothing line, with ample size options, and there are rumblings about this online, but scarce proof of anything out there yet. The cutest plus-sized clothes I've seen online are from Torrid, but the products are still overwhelmingly girlie. I have no problem shopping in the men's department, and feel pretty safe and unharassed about it since I live in the Bay Area. But the belly conspires to keep me wearing stretchy polyester for the long haul.

Vintage Bree: Who Killed Roy Orbison?

It is early December, 1988. I am in my high school chemistry class, junior year, chatting with my lab partners as we mix some concoction of stuff in order to make a polymer or some shit that I didn't understand then and certainly don't understand now. We are chatting about this new supergroup called the Traveling Wilburys, and all of us agree we really dig their single Handle With Care, which has been ubiquitous on the radio lately.



Then I chime in that although I really like the song, I can't stand Roy Orbison's vocals and wished he wasn't in the band. Most of us are in agreement about this as well.

The next day we all come running into class, shocked at the news of Orbison's death. All eyes are on me as the group collectively charges "You killed Roy Orbison!" And while the news was unfortunate, indeed, given the '60s crooner's renewed fame with the Wilburys, this becomes a running joke for the rest of my high school days.

Jump to the year 2000, my ten-year high school reunion. I'm having pre-reunion cocktails at my good friend Gabe's apartment in San Jose with a few other high school pals that Gabe has kept in touch with. Of these friends is one of my former chem lab partners, Tom, who somewhere between high school and adulthood has grown to a towering 6'4 from his 1988 height of about 5'6. Tom was one of the truly sweet guys in high school in a field of obnoxious rich jocks and stoner wasteoids that made up the major portion of the dudes I went to high school with. So as we get to reminiscing, Tom and I both start telling the story about that fateful conversation in chemistry class. We take turns telling pieces of the narrative, and then Tom claims that he is the one who had wished Roy Orbison's departure from the band: by his own account, Tom was the one who killed Roy Orbison!

I sit there blinking as everyone laughs at the story. Over the course of the last dozen years, Tom and I, and our selective memories, have taken credit for the uncanny wish that coincided with Roy Orbison's fatal heart attack on December 6, 1988. I decide not to correct Tom's version of events, and take another sip of gin and tonic. Wouldn't want to be Petty about it.

The Grind

The job search has been kinda depressing. Usually, I'm able to get a bookkeeping gig within a week or two of looking, but it's pretty competative out there right now. Got a very humane rejection email from a nonprofit that got over 200 applications! And this is just for a tiny 10 hour/week gig. So I might have to adjust my rates to get more responses on my résumés.

It looks like I did land a short-term job with a small home-based company starting tomorrow. It's not what I ultimately want, but I'm grateful to have some money potentially coming in during the next couple weeks. I'm actually at the point of not being able to come up with rent if I don't start earning something, so this is a life saver. As much as she'd like, Astrid just can't be my sugar mamma for long. Sigh.

Seattle bound!

Despite the blahs, which have abated somewhat for the moment, and being too broke for travel, Astrid and I are off to the great Northwest today. We'll be visiting friends in Seattle and attending the wedding of my dear erstwhile lover, Callie, who lives with her six year old daughter and partner in a tiny town on the Olympic Peninsula. Some of you read about my last visit with Callie way back when in the old blog days. I'm excited to meet her love, whose thoughtfully powerful musings can be found here. Funny that jacket uses "Callie's" real name, so there goes the mystery of my fool-proof pseudononymous system! Anyway, yay!

Blahs

Feeling inexplicably morose right now. The first couple weeks after graduation were relaxing and wonderful, and now I'm settling into a bit of a malaise, probably owing mostly to being unemployed and having only shitty bookkeeping work to look forward to as I continue on at the clinic two days a week. I will get a lot out of working at the clinic for another year, but this decision to stay on was a really stupid thing to do in terms of finances. It leaves me with bookkeeping as the only way to make enough money part-time to live on. If I had found a full-time mental health internship, I could have been accumulating clinical hours while getting paid, but I just didn't have my shit together enough, amid the massive chaos of my school tanking, to procure myself a full-time gig. Now I'm kind of stuck having made this committment to be at the clinic for a whole second year. The good thing about it is that I love working with my clients there, and I get excellent supervision, so ultimately it's not all bad. I just wish I could be doing full-time work in my field this year instead of waiting to really start cranking in the hours and getting paid.

Vintage Bree: The Cult Meeting

This is not a timely post, but the anecdote came up a while ago, and I realized I really needed to blog it. This prompts me to think about other classic Bree Lore that may be included in the blog over time. So let's call this the first installment of Vintage Bree.

So in the summer of 1994, AstroB, Lola, and I were trying to amuse ourselves in downtown Santa Cruz. We were walking around on a beautiful sunny day, some of us stoned, when we passed by the local library branch. A flyer posted on the bulletin board outside the library caught our attention. It said:
It was advertising a community meeting in which we would find out the fate of the human race! How could we not go?

We entered the meeting room at the library. It was packed with students and townies, maybe fifty or so, and at the front of the room was a panel of men and women, all around middle age, all white, all with shorn hair, most wearing fleece sweatshirts. They said they were the "Away Team" sent by their leaders, Ti and Do (pronounced "Doe," like "Doe, a deer") to educate us about how we could leave our "Earthly shells" and move on to the "Next Evolutionary Level Above Human."

I've given something away in that last link, but for those of you still scratching your heads, yes, we had stumbled upon a Heaven's Gate cult meeting three years before they would make headlines as the largest group suicide on U.S. soil. The shit they were talking about was weird, but it didn't occur to us, or apparently to anyone else in the meeting, that this was a suicide cult. There were definitely people there for the same reasons we were: to gawk, to be amused. And there were people who were dead serious and listened to the Away Team like they were speaking the direct word of God.

There was unfortunately at least one woman at that meeting who would go on to join Heaven's Gate and kill herself along with her fellow cult members at Rancho Santa Fe on March 26, 1997. Her name was Gail Maeder, a woman in her late twenties from Sag Harbor, New York. One of my friends in Santa Cruz had grown up with her.

One of the men we saw at the recruitment meeting in Santa Cruz who later took his own life in the group suicide.

So, back at the meeting at the Santa Cruz library, you can imagine the kinds of rumblings that were going on in the audience. The Away Team likened their leader, Marshall Applewhite to Moses and Jesus (though not to Mohammed). Not only that, they insisted that these religious prophets were direct representatives from the Next Level, sent to Earth to recruit humans in their time, just like Do was. I scrawled a note to B. – "Did 'the next level' send any representatives to Earth before the Judeo-Christian era? Or to Africa, the Far East, S. America, etc.?" We snickered. Apparently most of the world's population, the poorest people, incidentally, were not ready to evolve.

They kept going on about how when the comet Hale-Bopp arrived, we would know it's the time to depart our earthly existence aboard a great spaceship. They talked about what we would encounter when we got to the Level Above Human: there would be no war and no suffering. It was a realm beyond temporal and spatial reality as we knew it. It was beyond the realm of the sexual, and when we joined the Next Level, we would no longer need our bodies (a.k.a. our "earthly shells") or feel sexual desire (and, no, they didn't happen to mention that many of the male cult members had elected to castrate themselves, possibly an elaborate and ugly manifestation of Marshall Applewhite's shame about his own homosexuality.)

At this point in the talk, a woman stood up from the audience. She was someone I had encountered in town many times before, a local eccentric-with-a-capital-E named Elana Smith who went by the moniker "Clitora Cummings." Anyone who's lived in Santa Cruz in the last thirty years probably has a story about Clitora (you can meet her for yourself in this video interview). She stood up at the repetition of the mantra about the Next Level being a "non-sexual realm" and shouted to all who could hear, "Fuck this shit! I'm gonna go get LAID!" and, most appropriately, she stormed out of the room.

Maybe she saved some lives that day.

Graduation Day

Fuck yeah!

Bree by the Numbers, Redux

Okay, this is where it's at:

Thesis - done!
Psychopharm assignment: done!
Family Therapy paper: 5 pages to go
Psych Testing - 8 more reflection comments

One of each class to go. Classes are done on Thursday; graduation on Saturday.

Trying to hold a sense of accomplishment and freedom before freaking out about what's next. Deep breath. This is hard.

Hooray for Me!

I turned in the final draft on Friday, and what a feeling of relief and joy it was to read my professor's email today:

"Thesis complete! I’m attaching a copy of the certification page. Excellent work! It’s something to be proud of!"

Exhale.

Overheard at the gym

Two thin women were talking at the gym about how they need to lose weight, and one of them was lamenting that she can't buy ice cream anymore, because she'll eat the whole carton if it's there. I was doing stretches nearby and trying to focus on my routine; I couldn't help but listen and muse about their conversation a bit.

It made me tap into the pain of being a fat woman at the gym, the incarnation of the "unsightly" fat body these women are avoiding like the Plague. And while I'm sure they're working out because they want to be "healthy," on another level, they're working out because they don't want to look like me. Hell, I'm working out 'cause I don't wanna look like me, if we're in the business of being honest here. My goal is not to be skinny - that's just not my body type. But I do want to lose some weight, and it's for health reasons, sure, and it's so I can continue to be more effective and physically active, yes, but it's also so that I can squeeze my tummy into cute shirts I wanna wear, so that it doesn't droop downward so very much, so that I may be able to possess one chin instead of the multitude I've lived with for years. I, too, am a product of a fatphobic culture. And even though I love my body at times, and have lovers who love my body, and wouldn't change who I am internally, I do want to weigh less.

It is so fucked up that almost every day, I hear people casually bemoaning their weight, making derisive comments about fat people, and equating fatness with poor health and ugliness. My asshole psychopharmacology professor once said in class that extra weight around the stomach was both unhealthy and "unattractive." The assumption that fat people aren't healthy, and aren't sexy, and conversely, that a thin person is naturally in better health and obviously better looking, is just plain unfounded and subjective. Thin people get heart disease and diabetes too. Thin people can be ugly motherfuckers. I've got normal blood pressure, I've never smoked cigarettes, and I exercise regularly. How many fucking thin people do you know who've got three strikes on those counts?

Fuck you and your fucking carton of ice cream. You don't know what it's like to have entire You Tube channels devoted to making fun of you for being fat.

Crazy Spam

This one made me laugh out loud: Angelina Jolie set to destroy own vagina!

In other spam-related news, I keep getting these horrible ones that say, That's an ugly face you have there, Bree! Do advertizers really think I'm gonna click on a message that's insulting me?

A-l-l-l-most Done

Why does writing this thesis feel like straining to take the most humongous, painful shit I've ever taken?

Banning Fast Food in LA?

In L.A., a town where you're just as likely to catch someone eating a small salad with a lemon wedge as you are a Big Mac and Super Sized fries, city council members are looking to put a moratorium on fast food chain construction. This issue cuts to the juicy center of the controversy that conflates personal responsibility and choice with governmental paternalism and corporate domination over our lives. Where does responsibility lie in the obesitization (my word!) of these United States of Consumption? There is some wisdom in this sort of legislative ban. In urban areas across the country, healthy food options are limited, and there is a widely-acknowledged "grocery gap" in many cities where shopping for raw, healthy, and less processed foods has become a hardship. In South L.A., where the ban is being considered, 30% of adults are obese compared to 21% in the rest of the city, and in addition to being an area already dense with fast food chains, it's also a grocery store impoverished area.

It's really easy for privileged folks to decry that the government should stay out of the way of free enterprise, and that we have no business regulating what corporations do. After all, there is clearly a huge demand for fast food, so much so that South L.A. is already sustaining the highest concentration of fast food outlets in all of L.A. county. But really, don't we need to start somewhere in order to create demand for healthy food? Maybe the government should start subsidizing organic and natural food outlets so that the prices at stores like Whole Foods can come into the range where poor and working class people can actually afford to buy it. That's an intervention I'd like to see.

AIDS Walk

Instead of working on my paper today (which was due on Thursday and still isn't done, though it's nearly done) I'm joining 25,000 other folks for a little walk in Golden Gate Park. It's actually the first time I'm doing the AIDS Walk. Makes me think back to the very first time I did a charity event where I got sponsored for something - I was five or six years old, and ice skated at Vallco Mall for the Muscular Dystrophy Association. Those were the days.

Progress - or not.

Hi. Not much forward momentum on the thesis, though I've been sitting with it, and have managed to write a few more sentences. This is one of the most nerve-wracking things I've ever done, and though I'm pleased with my thinking on the subject, I feel like all the angst and carrying on and trouble has been pretty pointless. It's really just a paper. It has a lot of symbolic meaning tied to it, and the content has a lot of emotional meaning, but at the end of the day, it's just words on paper. I know I can do this, and yet I've given myself pretty much no time to produce the bulk of it I need to by Thursday. I've been sitting with it all day so far, and I'll have to get going to meet my carpool for class in about an hour. Then there's small blocks of time tonight, tomorrow morning, and Thursday morning til early afternoon before it needs to be done, as in done. ((Big breath!))

There are so many other things I want to write about, and I'm so relieved that it's almost over. I've been jotting down ideas for both blogs, and I've been stealing time to fill in pieces of my 2008 Wrap, which will be in full production before ya know it (the year's half-over already, people!) And then there's the semblance of summer before I've got to gear up for the dreaded job search (more on why I'm dreading it another time.)

Sigh.

Bree by the Numbers

8 to 10 more pages of my thesis
5 more psych testing assignments
4 more family therapy classes
4 more psych testing classes
3 more psychopharm classes
2 more psychopharm assignments
2 more fam therapy assignments
a bunch of paperwork
some graduation organizing

And the best number of the lot:
24 days til I have my master's degree!

Playing with (the idea of) Death

I'm so moved to continue redesigning the blog - not near satisfied with the template I chose, and I'm realizing now it's way too similar to the template I picked for my other blog. But I clearly don't have time to fiddle with it. Here I am, holed up at a café in the neighborhood, working on my final thesis draft. Or trying to work on it, and continuing to get pulled into tinkering with the blog design. What's nice is that I am finally getting into some free styling philosophical discourse in the paper, away from the ideas of the psychoanalytic canon and into my own obsessions about the dynamics of death inside intimacy. It's freeing to be here and begin to explore and articulate my ideas in tangible written words. In some way, I'm sure I hoped to master my own death anxiety by writing this paper, and I know I won't accomplish that (I think it's pretty impossible.) But the more I force myself to confront it, and in fact to become playful with the ideas, even, the less it's triggering my intense anxiety. I'm inspired by something Irvin Yalom (one of my current heroes) said about dealing with death anxiety. He said that while actual, physical death ultimately destroys us, confronting the concept of death is our salvation. And on that note, it's back to the drawing board with me.

Update

Maybe I haven't been blogging because I haven't been making any "progress," and by progress, I mean I haven't been eating more healthfully overall and haven't lost any weight. Generally, I've been less down on myself about these things, so that is a mark of progress I can be reasonably happy about. I've also been going to the gym: not as much as I ultimately want to, but I have gotten there several times. I'm up to ten minutes on the elliptical and another 30 minutes on the recumbent bike, so that's a decent aerobic workout, compared to my first couple times.

I'm doing crunches on this really fun thing where you climb up on a tall doohickey, rest against a back rest while holding onto these handles, legs swinging free off the ground, and then do leg lifts to work out the lower abdominal muscles. I can do about ten of these at present. I like the idea of getting stronger in my core - I want to be able to move more gracefully, have better stamina, be able to get up from sitting on the floor without grunting and straining, for god's sake. My out-of-shapeness makes me feel older than I am, and that's just silly. I've got lots of life to explore through movement, and I want to make it easier for myself not to automatically resist things like biking or hiking long distances, dancing with Ms. Astrid, and having long sessions of fantastic fucking. Core muscles help immensely with all that.

Tech Difficulties

All: bear with me as I tweak with the design of the blog. Thanks!

Lisa Lisa, Redux

My dear friend, astro-b, left a comment on the previous blog entry regarding the song Head to Toe, by Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam. I thought the comment deserved some particular attention, so I find myself now writing not one but two entries on the subject. He writes:

I'm impressed you know who Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam are. Perhaps the last time you heard them all those years ago was in my car...?

B. actually caught me in an illusion of "finished product," as I didn't immediately remember that the song was Lisa Lisa's, and so fetched the info online in writing the blog entry. I vividly remembered the song and, for brevity's sake, left out the part of the story which involved my reverie about who it was performed by.

As I listened to the boom box, I thought that the voice was Madonna-esque, but knew it wasn't Madge, and wondered whether it was someone like Samantha Fox or, shit, I dunno, Paula Abdul. B's surprise that I could've pulled Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam out of my ass was right on the mark, as he's known me since the '80s (in fact, since June of 1987, which makes our 21st anniversary as friends coincide with the chart-topping anniversary of Head to Toe!) and is quite familiar with this particular blind spot in my popcultural knowledge: I often can't distinguish one '80s pop songstress or girl group from another, with some exceptions, based on areas of personal interest. As an example, I still can't differentiate Bananarama from the Bangles, even though I know they sound totally different.

I never remember which one did Hazy Shade of Winter, which one did Walk Like an Egyptian, and which one did Cruel Summer (Bangles, Bangles, and Bananarama, I'm told by the magical internets. And now that I'm hearing the difference, I will admit I much prefer the Bangles.)
I'm also utterly lost trying to pick out Debbie Gibson from Kylie Minogue from Taylor Dane and so on. To B., this has always been blasphemous, because he has been obsessed with the pop divas since well before he started sucking cock. I think there must be some sort of gender component here between the fag-to-be and dyke-to-be sets, 'cause while B. was car-dancing to the chick singers of the '80s, I was scandalized by how girly they were, and opted to listen mainly to classic rock dude bands at that time in my life.

But let's get back to Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam. During the '80s, while I couldn't have told you what songs were theirs, I was certainly aware of LL & CJ. But in an amalgam of my ignorance of both pop divas and hip hop, I always thought that LL & CJ had something to do with LL Cool J, given their initials lined up so nicely. I also remember thinking at the time that Lisa Lisa was the same Lisa of Wendy and Lisa, Prince's sexpot sidekicks, which, again owing to the wonder of the world wide web, I now know to be patently false.

So, yes, all this was swimming in my head yesterday at 4:30am, while I was trying to determine who sang Head to Toe and why it should serve as my personal alarm clock. I guess it was just another manic Wednesday.

Why I Love Living in the City

This morning at about four-thirty I awoke to the tuning of a very loud radio outside my window. As my waking consciousness became clearer, I could perceive the switching of stations intermixed with screeching static, and the noise was getting louder as the radio, which I suspected emanated from a moving car, approached the apartment. Finally, the operator of the radio settled on a song, and though the volume waned slightly, it still played loud and true. I laughed in bed listening to the song for a moment, then I got up and peered out the window to see what the hell was going on.

It was a guy with an enormous boom box walking down the street, who apparently thought the end of our block was the spot he would settle. He just stood there, in the middle of the street, blasting Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam's 1987 hit Head to Toe. I probably hadn't thought about that song in at least fifteen years. I understand from the internets that the song hit number 1 on the Hot 100 21 years ago last month.

Sleep: I get that every night, more or less.
Lisa Lisa on a boom box outside my window: priceless.

::Big Sigh of Relief::

Draft Number Two is in my professor's hands. Thank fucking god. It's not as complete as I'd hoped it would be, but I feel like, just in the last couple days, I finally broke through the crushing weight of anxiety and got my writing groove back. After days and days of sitting at my computer, not producing anything at all, just editing and moving paragraphs around and feeling overwhelmed, I finally pushed through, finished my lit review, and began working on the actual thesis concepts. I have a fair amount more work to do to get to the final draft (due in about 4 weeks) but I'm not nearly as freaked out now. I've tasted what it's like to put forward my own ideas, and it's not as scary as I thought it was gonna be.

A very heartfelt thank you to a few people who lent support and inspiration in the final hours of the draft. First and foremost thanks to Ms. Astrid, who has loved me unwaveringly even though I've been a fucking wreck for weeks. Thank you to astro-b, DJ, and my family for letting me vent. And a very special nod to Mag, Dax, Ms. Crankypants, and The Undertoad for the last minute words of advice on the thesis writing process. Totally invaluable inspiration: thank you.

Mawwage, Part Two

Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin became the first legally married lesbian couple in San Francisco just about an hour ago. Huzzah! Not only have they been some of the most important activists for LGBT rights in history, these broads have been together for 56 years! Can you imagine being a lesbian in the '50s, with that most complete cultural denial and repression aiming to destroy you and deny your existence, and at the same time, sustaining a relationship for over fifty years? Unbelievable.

Mazel tov to Del and Phyllis!

This is also good: the first gay couple to legally marry in Santa Clara County was
David and Rich Speakman of San Jose.

"The couple is using President Bush's economic stimulus check to pay for their wedding."

"'It paid for everything,' David Speakman said, 'so we should probably send him a thank you note.'"

(quoted from the Merc.)

LMAO!

Thesis Anxiety Rant #19

I've been nursing functional anxiety about this paper for months, but I've been fucking freaking out the last two weeks. The complete draft is due in six days. This weekend is the last clear chunk of time I have to produce pages.

I'm a good writer; I know I can do this. That's not the thing. The thing is, I chose to write about my most core emotionally triggering issue: death anxiety as it manifests in intimate relationships. And so whenever I sit down to write, on some deeply unconscious but visceral level, I think of loved ones dying. When Astrid leaves the apartment to go to work, my eyes well up with tears thinking she might get into a car accident. When a sentence finally emerges from my fingertips, I imagine my sister calling me with the news that my mother is dead. That's what the anxiety is about. It's the core of the procrastination, the stop-starts, the binge eating, the grasping at every possible distraction: if I write this paper, I will kill everyone I've ever truly loved.

Okay, that's off my chest. Now I guess I need to write.

Getting Strong Now

Alright, so after a bit of research and much inner-struggle, I decided on the mega-corporate gym down the street, 'cause it was the cheapest membership fee I found (after haggling), and it's the closest gym to my house, which ostensibly provides less of a barrier to my getting there. On taking the tour of the place, I saw a good mix of men and women, a few other fat people, and numerous people of various ages and body shapes that would not be commonly viewed as "gym-bunny"-types. So I felt as comfortable as I possibly could being in such an environment. I've gone twice this week so far, and have actually enjoyed it. And after exercising each day, my body has felt much more relaxed and serene than it usually does when I'm just sitting around.

So far, I really like the recumbent bike. It's a good way to get the heart rate up and work up a good sweat while staying pretty comfortable. No stress on the back, and very little stress on the knees. I also like clocking the miles that I'm biking. It's less intense and less calorie-burning than the elliptical, but I'm finding it's a good starter machine for me. I tried the elliptical for the first time today, and I'm a bit baffled by it right now. I know the swooping leg motions and corresponding arm swinging will make more sense after I get more familiar with it, but it was a bit overwhelming on first try. I also started feeling a great deal of stress in my left calf muscle after only about five minutes on it, so I quit at that point and went back to the recumbent. Then I did some crunches and a bit of weight lifting. I also made sure to do some stretching both before and after the exercise.

My lovely friend G. showed me around the gym today, and introduced me to various workout equipment. That was pretty cool of him to do. It is so intimidating being a fat girl at the gym, and then on top of that, not having any idea how all these machines work. So tip of the hat to G. - thank you for being so supportive!

Just by way of logging what I'm doing at the gym, right now, it's just about 20 minutes of cardio and then as many crunches as I can do (maybe 10) and then 10 reps of very light weight lifting to tone each different arm muscle group. I expect I'll increase all these numbers as I progress, but I'm starting off very easy.

So I'm no longer a gym virgin. Woo-ha!

Journey To The Bank

This is really old news by blogospheric standards, but does anyone know about Journey's new lead singer, Arnel Pineda?* Founding member and songwriter/guitarist Neal Schon found Pineda singing Journey songs on YouTube with his band in the Philippines, and then after meeting with him and playing a gig with him in Chile, announced the Steve Perry sound-alike as their new frontman. Check out Journey's performance on Ellen from last week:



And that, my friends, is how once-great pop bands of the 70's and 80's strike 21st Century gold.

Now, at my most lenient, I can understand why Journey would be ecstatic about getting a great singer again, a great singer who happens to sound exactly like Steve Perry. They can relive their glory days, play huge venues filled with excited paying guests, and generally feel like big boys again. Yes, and the money. If they'd hired a singer with his own distinctive voice they'd a crashed and burned - who gives a shit about Journey without SP?

Beyond all that, I have to wonder what it's like for Arnel Pineda, who would ne'er have achieved international fame without sounding exactly like SP. I'm famous 'cause I sound like Steve Perry will be running in his internal monologue for the rest of his life. But again, cha-ching. For his part, he seems to be taking it all with a grain of salt, judging by his press statements. I would love to see what Perry has to say about it, but haven't found anything. Though if anybody's interested, there's a great, long interview with Perry and a follow up interview with Neal Schon on GQ which is pretty in depth, as far as popculture reporting goes. Sadly no dish on Pineda by Perry, though. And while I won't buy their new album of 11 "classic" Journey tunes and 11 new tunes recorded with Pineda (really, who gives a shit?) I can't say that hearing the new formation of the band hasn't given me chills. Why would I blog about it otherwise?

____________

*Thanks to ch for the tip.

The Week in Food: The good, the not so good, the awful

After re-committing to the Regimen, I had an excellent week. I ate steel-cut oats and flaxmeal most mornings, ate lots of fresh fruit and veggies, big healthy salads, didn't overeat at all clear through Friday. I walked a lot during the week, too, and felt my gait pick up pace.

Then the family dinner for my birthday in San Jose happened. And I'm a sucker for corned beef, as we all know. But even though I piled on too much of the fatty, ridiculously tender meat on Friday night, I didn't eat myself to the point of belly-aching overkill. I ate til I was satisfied, and then had one more piece of corned beef beyond that. Dear readers: a year or two ago, I'd have eaten three or four pieces beyond that, so we're making progress here, okay?

But unfortunately, Friday night's dinner turned into the gateway drug for a major backslide on the Regimen. When Saturday rolled around, I intended to eat sensibly again, but I had class all day in Alameda starting at 9:00am, and couldn't pry myself out of bed early enough to prepare for the day before meeting my carpool at 8:30. So instead of the oatmeal I would've normally made for breakfast, I ended up eating a chocolate croissant supplied by a well-meaning classmate. Then for lunch, I did okay, ordering a grilled chicken and rice salad bowl from a nearby burrito/wraps kinda strip mall food outlet.

But then happy hour arrived. When the carpool got back into the City, I got the mischievous yen for bloody marys, dragging E-dog and EDG to have cocktails with me at the Orbit Room (scroll way down to the March, 2008, reviews, and see my very own), and getting Astrid to meet up with us. The evening devolved from there into a gluttonous adventure of too many drinks of too many varieties of alcohol, and ordering in Chinese food, which is always pretty much the death knell on reasonable portions for me.

Which led me right into Sunday, a day supposed to be devoted to my thesis, which started on the doubly-wrong foot of leftover chou mein and pancakes made by the lovely Astrid (they were multi-grain, at least), followed by leftover hot and sour soup, then a thesis-related stress craving for a chocolate milkshake, fulfilled down the street at Burgermeister (mmmm...Mitchell's ice cream!), then DJ came over for Bad Movie Night and we ordered in from a pizza place that, god bless/damn them, also makes chicken strips. Sigh.

This morning: oats and flax. Yum.