Giant Corn Dog

Today is the fourth day in a row of state fairs (Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Iowa) and I'm starting to think the Midwest is fucking with me. Like the whole on-a-stick thing.

Besides the obvious, corn dogs, which are so institutionally ON STICKS that you don't have to bring it up, it is implied by the fact that someone somewhere decided to deep fry a hot dog in cornmeal batter and it's now just common sense.


But a deep fried Pepsi ball on a stick?

I want to say, "Universe. Dude. What is your deal?"

We had been making jokes about soup on a stick but I've now seen a beer on a stick sign so that concept seems suddenly attainable, if not incredibly attractive.

Here's a guy making corn dog batter with a drill. Yum!


But not as delicious as this.

Because I will not TOUCH poopcorn if it has any trans fat in it.

Black History Odyssey: Atlanta and Boise

I didn't intend to embark on a Black History Odyssey this summer but, unexpectedly, I have. It began on the first Idol tour day off in Atlanta. The previous night, I'd wandered into the office of our promoters John and Andrew who are devoted to creating spectacular days off. When everyone else is drooling over the side of the hotel bed and going to the mall, Andrew and John will be on their way to see the local interest, be it history (ex: of Aviation, of Spam), pretty places (ex: nature) or oddities (ex: Cockroach Hall of Fame).

One of them suggested the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site to me when I said I wanted to have a memorable day off. Run by the National Park Service, the site is in the Atlanta neighborhood where MLK, Jr. grew up and includes the church where he and his father preached, ranger-led tours of his birth home, a visitor center with a museum-quality exhibit, video theater, and an international world peace rose garden.

I went there after catching up on sleep and arrived too late in the afternoon to get on a tour of MLK, Jr's birth home but ended up spending the afternoon in his church. And it was good. The amount of energy and money that went into this tribute to Dr. King was evident and I left feeling chock-full of peace, love, and big hugs.

The fact that our tour started in the South and stayed there a week before heading to Texas and California contributed to my accidental Black History Odyssey. The morning of our show in Little Rock, Arkansas, I planned to visit Central High School, the site of where, 50 years ago, the Arkansas National Guard escorted nine black students to their classes through a mob of angry segregationists.
Unfortunately a downpour of rain started RIGHT when I stepped outside the hotel and I immediately turned into a big baby and went straight back to my bedroom to crawl under the covers. Perhaps not one of my shiningest moments. Anyway.

After we made it out west, our buses crept up the coast and took a right. The day that I walked around Boise in search of a two-headed calf and found so much more (a hippie festival and a LIBRARY!) took me through Julia Davis park, home of the Idaho Black History Museum, where I performed an extravagant double take.

Idaho? Black History?

I went closer to the little building to make sure I was reading the sign correctly. I'd been walking around Boise for several hours and had seen maybe two people of color. It was Sunday and there were people everywhere and they all looked like me. I mentioned the museum to Neil and we checked out its website. We learned that the Idaho Black History Museum is the only African-American history museum in the Pacific Northwest. It's open five hours a week, on Saturday. The current exhibit is called "The Invisible Idahoan: 200 Years of Blacks in Idaho."

Here Neil offered that the only other Black people he'd seen in Boise were the four stagehands out by the loading dock. We asked the local runner about that and he said that those four were about ten percent of Boise's Black population. I'm sure he exaggerated for our benefit since we were by then fairly wound up on the subject but invisible, indeed.

The museum is in the former St. Paul Baptist Church and exists largely because of Dr. Mamie Oliver, a woman who became Boise State University's first African-American professor in 1972 and whose research and teaching is the foundation for Black History awareness in Idaho.

Thanks, Mamie Oliver.

Next stop on the Black History Odyssey: Omaha, Nebraska.

Jamecia doesn't mince words

It's funny when you haven't seen someone in a year and the first thing they say to you is, "What's going on with your hair?"

And then later, when you're thinking about that comment and giggling and you go find them to ask them what the hell kind of question that is,  they take it one step further and say, "Well, it's just that you USUALLY get it right."

I didn't know Casey even had shoulders

I was psyched to discover in Chicago that I still had an unexpired CTA public transit card in my wallet. I asked the hotel concierge for directions to the closest blue train and walked three blocks to Clark and Lake, feeling majorly crushed out on Chicago. On the subway platform, my crush intensified.

I loved the punk rock girl with the bullet belt. And the people with suitcases who made their way to O'Hare airport. I liked the thug who stared at the third rail, nodding to the beats in his earphones. Most of all, I felt something special for the guy I overheard talking about the barbeque he was headed to.

Because CHICAGOANS KNOW A BARBEQUE. It's not even seasonal, either. I personally saw Shane throw sausages on the grill during an especially unholy stretch of winter. After shoveling two flights of steps on the back deck in his puffy coat. Shane, being from Chicago, is committed enough to do what it takes to barbeque, whatever that might be: crampons, ice shelter, etc. So now? In the thick heat of August? You know it's out of control.

I got off the train and walked down Damen Avenue to Casey's house. And the entire walk, I felt just as I did in third grade when I got glasses and suddenly saw all this stuff in the world that I hadn't before:

The trees! So green! So blue the sky! Outdoor tables! Full of people smiling, laughing, and wearing sunglasses! All that skin! So tan! Chicago summer, finally! At Casey's apartment building, I rang her doorbell and she buzzed me in.

"Do you like my sandals?" She asked me before I'd fully rounded the corner from the steps to her doorway.

"Wow," I said. "WOW. Where'd you get those? Payless?" Which, looking back, is a pretty bitchy question.

Luckily Casey thought it was funny since the whole reason she'd said anything is because she thinks they are terrible to look at. But comfortable. And she won't wear them outside, even though I told her I think they are totally appropriate for the pool. If you are my grandma.

"Casey," I said. "You look different. It's not just the elderly sandals that you bought online."

The last time I saw her was in Chicago, right before I left for LA. It was March, so she was still wearing the knee-length down jacket that she had on every single other time I saw her last winter. Now she's sporting this Panamanian skin everywhere, on her shoulders and arms and legs. I hardly recognized her.

What I did recognize was the HOMIES collection displayed around Casey's apartment. Here you see not only Homies but the Caucasian types in capes who are representing, I don't know, the Middle Ages of Europe? Maybe they're wizards. I seriously have no idea. Lisa, my former boss at the Feminist Press, gave them to me. They used to sit atop the computer in her office. Now they are holding up the weight of homeboy who appears to be wearing a robe. I passed them on to Casey as a going away present when I left Chicago.

save it for your therapist

Earlier today, my boss Geoff gave me a button that says SAVE IT FOR YOUR THERAPIST, ASSHOLE and I was all, 'Ha ha that's funny. That sounds like something I'd say even though I'd have to be super pissed off and provoked to go there but if I did go there I'd be real deadpan and mean like that about it, ha ha.'

But now I'm wondering if Geoff was actually saying that to ME.

Matt's striped shirt

I can't decide who Matt looks like most when he wears his striped shirt.

1. The hamburglar

2. Elvis in Jailhouse Rock

3. A turn-of-the-century French child

Jimmy "it could happen" Acevedo

Surprises of Idaho

Hi! I am looking serious for no particular reason. I was happy to be in Idaho, glad to be walking along the Boise River greenbelt, and pleased as hell to just be outside. Plus I'd just seen a two-headed calf.

The calf AKA the eighth wonder of Idaho was born in 1950, lived for 5 days and was donated a year later to the Idaho Historical Society, where it now stands in the center of a saloon. Because calves  and saloons, obviously.

I walked to the Historical Society from the hotel and fished around in my bag for the $2 entry fee. "I like your head scarf," said the lady behind the desk.

"Oh, thank you," I replied.

"Did you get it at GODDESS FEST?"

"Um, nooo, I didn't," I said. "What is that?"

"Oh, it's over there in the park," she replied, "Just a bunch of hippies."

At which point I considered going, "DAMN HIPPIES," just for fun but instead said, "I'll have to check that out." Which I did, and on the way I couldn't help but notice the enthusiastic Boise Library. I'm not typically a fan of exclamation points but this one? No problem. Over at Goddess Fest I found the usuals: jam bands, lots of Native American-themed tattoos, merchants selling flowy Nepalese garments, and enough patchouli and incense to drive a perfectly well-adjusted individual com-plete-ly over the edge.

sh*t temple

I don't know when I started flushing public toilets with my feet and worrying about my toothbrush getting blasted with shitspecks in the bathroom but I do both of these things now. I plunge the toilet when necessary but don't enjoy it and I sort of want to shower afterwards (shitspecks). I don't think I'm a germaphobe because I ride the subway and fly in planes without surgical masks and gloves though I feel a little bio-hazardous until I wash my hands.

Don't get me started on people who let their cats climb on the kitchen counter and hop in bed with cat shit hanging off their bottomholes. Just, no. So it's pretty unlikely that someone was able to talk me into getting a colonic AKA colon hydrotherapy AKA colonic irrigation. I GOT MY ASS IRRIGATED. I don't even like passing gas around friends; how was I to make that transition to hopping up half naked on a table to stick a tube up my butt and let a stranger fill me up with water so that she could massage my belly and push my shit out? An make little comments how how it looked? Hm?

Yeah. Here's the thing. I imagined that someone would tell me, or at worst show me, how to place the tube in my booty and then leave me alone. I would be in a room by myself, privately emptying my bowels to some sort of soothing and ambient background noise, something aquatic involving waves or burbling rivers or dolphins. I really didn't expect that I would be simultaneously trying to hold up my end of chit chat while also concentrating very hard on not taking a big dump all over this person I just met. I know that's not supposed to happen but they put a square of paper padding under your rear end so, whatever, you know there's potential there.

I played along but at some point I was like, "ALRIGHT, enough of this get to know you routine, you've seen my butthole like three times now."This may have been when my hydrotherapist noticed I was staring very intently and silently at the digestive system poster on the wall.

"Does the machine bother you?" she asked, pointing to the clear tube where a turd of mine was floating past.

"No," I lied.

"Most people can't take their eyes off it," she shared.

Which I thought was just another example of how Seattle can be so lovely, yet get on my last nerve so easily. But something happened by the end of my session. I'd experienced a bunch of stages: nervous sleeplessness the night before, apprehension that I wasn't hydrated enough and I shouldn't have drank 6 pints of Manny's Pale Ale and sullen pouting over waking up at 7am to go do THIS. Right before my appointment, in the Tummy Temple lobby, amongst the Buddha statues and Tibetan prayer flags and "quiet zone" signs, I shared a crazed, uncontrollable, snorting fit of laughter with the person I'd gone there with, another first timer. He actually laughed so hard, he cried, and forbade me from looking at him.

In perhaps the last ten minutes of my colonic, however, I started feeling less horrified by the situation. Maybe it helped that there was less pressure in my shitless belly. I felt nice and empty, if a little overexposed, and I was getting used to the idea that the girl sitting next to me, the one who seemed so happy for me, was just doing her job and is really used to this shit.

Here's what another person thought.

exhibits A-F of why we've been friends for almost 20 years

There's lots of things I've appreciated on sticks before - juicy flanks of steak (Thanks, Ecuador) and corn dogs (Thanks, every state fair I've ever been to) - and generally speaking, I believe that the greasier and more unwieldy something is, the more it belongs on a stick. By that reasoning, funnel cake on a stick would be the apex of what I'm going for.

Whereas the image of my own head wasn't even a close second. Unwieldy? Hell yes. Greasy? Hm. What exactly were Jane and Seema trying to say when they made faces on a stick of me, Cathy, and Frank while staying at my house this past weekend?

I think they just really miss us.



And did they realize that Erik Estrada is my favorite celebrity? Why?

1. The obvious, CHiPS

2. His psychic network commercial in the early 90s

3. The fact that we share the same birthday?

Or just happy coincidence?

face on a stick

When I saw this, I knew it was going to be bad.

But really I had no idea.

Pop Tart drop kick

Last summer, around week nine of the tour, Geoff started ordering miso soup for the bus because he couldn't take another cold onion ring at midnight. This year it's taken a whopping fourteen days for Geoff to break up with fried food. It happened in Birmingham after he got on the bus and saw the big pile of soggy Chick-fil-A sandwiches littering the table.

He left a note on the food request list pleading for miso soup and has since been shunning carbohydrates unless it involves english muffins, Marmite, or beer. I, on the other hand, am hanging in there with the fried carbs. I did, however, walk across the street this morning in 112 degree Phoenix heat to buy a Pilates DVD. I did Pilates for an hour once and it seemed alright. Definitely better than yoga since the only part of yoga that doesn't bore me is when I fall asleep or get to admire the tattoos of whoever has their mat is in front of mine.

Tonight I thought it would be funny, considering his new diet, to put a Pop Tart on Geoff's computer and then run out of the room. I had made it only a couple of steps when I heard a strangling noise coming from the office behind me and a THWACK of something hitting the cinder block wall next to my head. I turned around, impressed.

"Did you just DROP KICK A POP TART?"

should have been my bday cake in high school

Because sometimes you just don't need a reason.

Frenchy's Chicken

Frenchy's Chicken, Houston TX.

Walk-up window, no call-in orders after 6pm, no bills larger than $20.

I sent Mario, our show runner, to Frenchy's for three buses worth of food orders at the end of the night because I didn't know about the $20 rule. He returned with only one order because Frenchy's wouldn't accept my hundred dollar bill. This is crazy to me: a business that will take a little money from you but not a lot. 

With hungry people waiting on the other two buses, I sent him back armed with 1's, 5's, 10's and a sign in his car window letting venue security and local cops know they should let him through the throngs of fans crowding the building. Mario had a job to do and that job was bringing chicken to the American Idols.

An hour and a half later I called Mario to check in. "They're almost done with your order!" He yelled above the background clamor.

"ALMOST done?" I whimpered.

I'd hoped he was making his way back. Frenchy's was only three miles away but the crowds were bad, our bus drivers were ready to get on the road, and people were grumpy.

"Yeah, this place is slammin'!" Mario screeched into the phone.

When Mario pulled in at midnight, I grabbed the boxes of chicken and started flinging them on the buses. Then I basically shoved Mario down the loading dock incline towards the offices backstage and told him to find the promoter who'd give him a check for his work. I later regretted not thanking Mario properly because he'd been very sweet and kind of awesome all day long.

I'm sorry, Mario. I can be an asshole when I'm in a rush.

I got on the bus, drunk on fried chicken stress and several bottles of Sierra Nevada, and accepted a piece of Frenchy's. It was so good that when a sliver of chicken skin slid off the piece in my left hand and into the styrofoam container of collard greens juice in my right hand, I considered drinking it.

"Oh my GOD, this is delicious," I said. I might have licked the chicken. Just for a second. "It's like a fried chicken popsicle," I said. At this point people stepped in.

"You need to stop," Neil said.

Ebenezer Baptist church

Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, GA

Martin Luther King, Jr. and his father were both pastors at Ebenezer Baptist Church.

Martin Jr. was baptized at this church and it's also the site of his funeral. It is now the site of where a needlepointing lady in a ranger uniform invited me to feel free to sit down in a pew and listen to the recording of Martin Jr's voice for a nice long time.

hey y'all from Tennessee

plus special hey y'all from hollywood

Paul Potts tears it UP

Yes, reality television is rotting our brains, reversing evolution, and destroying our individual and collective imagination, but can it be all bad if it can bring us this? I've watched this clip three times and it keeps making me blubber happily.

Transience v. presence

In one week I leave home - you know, the one I just got back to - for three months.

I guess I'm easing slowly into this first real stab at having a home in a couple of years. Two years ago I left the Bronx, put my clothes and books in storage and followed up with five tours and time spent in Cincinnati, Columbus, and Chicago. I made a big racket about Chicago being my new permanent home but others evidently knew me better than I knew myself.

"Bullshit," said Nick DiNardo. "Blog me in six months."

I hate when Nick is right

So about this idea of transience versus presence: I say I don't want to be on the road more than I'm off and that this whole roadie thing is a happy accident and possibly temporary. Then I notice that last year I was on the road more than I was off. I'm now starting my third year in this work and getting job offers and it's easier to justify taking them than turn them down.

People tell me that they or their husband or friend always said they didn't want to be a roadie for life but twenty years later there they are, all jacked up on whatever particular buzz it is that keeps them moving.

What I want to know is how to balance imbalance? Feel present when so many days are just about moving forward and going elsewhere? How to have time to make routines and spaces and relationships comfortable?

"How do you balance it?" I once asked a tour manager.

"You don't," he answered without pause.

I'm glad I'm back for another year of the American Idol tour but there are plenty of moments I've thought with regret, "Yeah, I'd be doing/planning/signing up for/getting into/checking out whatever except I'll be gone all summer, so that will have to wait."

But if everything is always waiting, what am I left with? I'm left returning in September to great yawing voids of places that still doesn't feel homey, despite my incredibly fluid ability to feel at home anywhere. My lack lies in STICKING AROUND. Home for a day or a month isn't the same as home for the long haul, whatever that is.

I'm so glad you're not dead

A guy at Jane's party saw the Ronckytonk shirt and thought it was a MEMORIAL FOR A CHILD WHO HAD PASSED AWAY. Someone eventually told him it was my photo and when we met later in the kitchen, he greeted me, "I'm so glad you're not dead!"

Yeah, me too...what?

The next day, a shirt was draped over a chair in the living room and Jamie, without paying attention, sat squarely on top of it. I squirmed around for a minute, until I had to say something:

"You're sitting on my face and that makes me feel weird."

He pulled the shirt out from under him and we all looked at it. The wrinkle in the fabric made my face look not only awkward but now a little deformed, too, with one eye bulging and mouth gaping.

Someone said, "Damn, you LOOKED like that."


And that's when we really couldn't stop laughing.

My face on a shirt

A few weeks ago, I got a big cardboard box in the mail. I didn't recognize the name on the return address.

Inside the box were THIRTY T-SHIRTS WITH MY FACE ON THEM. And my name. And this web address. The photo of me, which can also be seen here, was taken in 1983, the year after I got glasses and braces.

I knew that the barrettes I wore, the ones I decorated with long multicolored ribbons, were beautiful. I knew I looked good. I did not know that my face just barely got away with having my gigantic mouth plunked on the front of it and, at the time, I didn't understand why my friend's little brother asked me if my lips were on steroids.

Let's just say that the Dawn Weiner character from Welcome to the Dollhouse makes me more than a little uncomfortable.

I pawed through the box, seeing the reproduction of that happy, oblivious smile plastered on more t-shirts more times than I ever thought I would, which is to say more than zero times, but there was no note.

"WHAT? THE? FUCK?" I said, pacing, "WHATTHEFUCK!"

I looked at the return address again (Seattle) and made a phone call.

"Hi. Carl? Are you answering your phone by laughing uncontrollably because you sent me a box of t-shirts of my face?" Carl could have just said yes at this point but he was too busy convulsing.

He thought it would be funny if, when I visited Seattle, people were wearing this shirt. Specifically, if everyone in his bar had this shirt on when I walked in. But he got tired of this idea and decided to instead send me all the shirts anonymously. And you know what? That's more disturbing than than the bar prank would have been. Now it's up to me to inflict this face on the world. Which I should be good at by now.



Please meet Mark, who won a "door prize" at Jane's Tupac birthday party last weekend. Doesn't Mark look thrilled?










What about now? So pleased!

And please do not fail to notice the SUV / brass knuckle design of the shirt I'm wearing. I'd like to thank Brownsville, Brooklyn for having a store that sells this and Cathy for actually buying it.

And last but absolutely not least: Carl, thank you.

cream, sugar, and cowgirl boots

Sometimes my boots piss me off because they CLICK more than they THUD and I have to take them off my feet and leave them at the coffee bar for someone who's into that.

A sky like barfed cornflakes

I'm not always ecstatic to be in a place where patches of the sky resemble the color of barfed cornflakes. And while the patch over my neighborhood seems more blue and less smoggy than some, I'm reminded of the letter that Taryn sent from Colorado when I moved to Los Angeles:

"By the way, how is the air down there? You know that it only takes 8 minutes to ingest the recommended amount of pollution for a lifetime in parts of LA."

Bwahaha! I had to laugh because I imagined her writing that and then taking deep breaths of her fresh Colorado breeze as if she hadn't just diagnosed me with black lung. No big deal, Taryn! I try not to brood over the fact that whoever's job it is to recommended pollution levels knows that I'm already f'ed nine THOUSAND times over. I have better things to do. Like forget to put on suntan lotion and ride my bike without wearing a helmet.



This offer from the CEO of Metro for a week of free bus rides arrived in my mailbox today and it reminded me what hilarious interracial fun public transit can be in big smoggy cities like Los Angeles. Judging by the festive reactions of the ladies in this photo, that guy's story is AWESOME. What are they talking about? They're having such a seriously good time. If the LA Metro bus service is truly the nation's largest clean-burning compressed natural gas bus fleet like the pamphlet says, then I am impressed. It almost makes me want to stop cracking such snipey jokes about the city.

Of course, to escape the city I can always just run off to places like Big Sur to stare at trees and the paintings that hang from them, outrageously blue water, and elephant seals. This works well as a city antidote. And San Francisco! Jane's party for Tupac's would-be 36th birthday if he hadn't been gunned down in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas 11 years ago is this weekend. I need a plane ticket to San Francisco.

Seeking emptiness

Some might say LA is the perfect place for someone seeking emptiness.

Henry Miller Library

Henry Miller Library, Big Sur

Caracas, Venezuela rooftops

Our side of the street and the other side

coffee Jello

My favorite thing about Monterrey, Mexico is coffee Jello.

Where are you, inventor of coffee Jello? I want to hug.

It doesn't have the restorative qualities of a strong americano or the sleepy effect of a sugary rich dessert but conceptually I'm on coffee Jello's side.

These cigarettes are killing you.

If, by chance, you didn't get the message from the side of the box that says in capital letters to be careful because these cigarettes are killing you, turn it over and let Chile introduce you to Don Miguel and his tracheotomy hole. Alright, Chile. I GET IT.

Dear hoo hoo

What should one send your friend when she has part of her cervix removed?

Pussywillows.

With the following card:

Dear hoo hoo,
Heal up real soon.
We will miss you.

Thanks for the inspiration (you know who you are).
xx

Wicked case of meat spurs

After eating anywhere between two and ten pounds of Buenos Aires steak plus bread, antipasto, flan, and two liters of Quilmes beer, we decided to WALK THE MEAT OFF back to the hotel. We hadn't yet realized that the meat would develop a personality of its own, complete with likes and dislikes, and that the meat did not like to be walked. Moreover, we would exhibit symptoms of those who are, if not possessed, at the very least INHABITED by something out of the ordinary.

"I'm high on meat," I said in the restaurant. "I haven't felt like this since that Seattle brunch with Jane's family made me weep."

Frank announced that his feet felt funny.

"Do you think it's the meat?" I asked.

"I have meat feet," he replied.

"Like it's sunk all the way down into your heels?"

"I think that would be meat spurs."

Outside a disco:

"Do you think the meat wants to dance?" 

"The meat definitely wants to feel the rhythm."

When I tried drinking a glass of water:

"Okay, don't do that. The meat doesn't like the water."

Tango tourist

Twenty hours, three flights, and one long nap after leaving Los Angeles, Frank and I hit the sidewalks of Buenos Aires. We had a day before I had to go to River Plate stadium to see the stage and figure out where to plug in and set up the teleprompter equipment that I barely know how to use but will totally pretend to in front of FORTY-FOUR THOUSAND High School Musical fans.

And it's not like I had insomnia last night and woke up every twenty minutes to the thought of USB ports malfunctioning or anything. That happens all the time. I'm sure it's not at all related to teleprompter anxiety. Forty-four thousand people? Great.

My agenda for Saturday was tango and meat. I would have been pleased to see someone else tango or do anything else peripheral like ogle tango shoes. After asking directions and walking in many circles, we found tango row AKA Suipacha street and I, who has never danced a step of tango unless you count the dramatic impersonations I did backstage on the Benise tour, bought an outrageously smoking pair of black and red heels.



Meat time! We asked our cab driver for a Argentinian grill parrillada recommendation, preferably a neighborhood full of locals and not just tourists, but when we pulled up to the corner there may as well have been crickets chirping and tumbleweed rolling down the street.

"Where are all the people?" I asked.

"It's early," the driver said.

"Ooooh yeah," we said, looking at our watches. 7 pm. None of the restaurants open until 8pm because no one even considers eating until MAYBE 9 pm. Unless you are us with our tango shoe bags slung over our shoulders, peering up and down the deserted intersection.

I'm not afraid to talk about your cervix

I'm not a person to run from a conversation about cervixes, although I used to be better about it. Or worse.

Ten years ago, at Evergreen, I stood in front of fifty classmates and lectured them on the glory and the power of menstruation. I was studying women's health and public health and while I never went so far as to wear purple and call myself a goddess, I might have participated in a girls-only drum circle or two. Afterwards I probably back to my dorm room to weave some macrame jewelry and patch my overalls; I don't really remember.

Once Jocardo asked me what a cervix looked like and I held up my worn-down-to-the-nub tube of Chapstick and flashed him the waxy donut end.

"THAT," I told him. "That's what it looks like."

Jocardo nodded and vowed to start buying Carmex.

Now I'm not as impassioned about enjoying PMS and the messages from the universe that it delivers and I honestly don't care if tampons are patriarchal because pads are a pain in the motherf'ing ass but I AM diligent about going to Planned Parenthood every year to check out my business.

Recently one of my friends had her own yearly pap smear and was told that she had pre-cancerous cells on her cervix. This freaked us out because the c word is inherently scary but she also found out that calling a cell pre-c doesn't necessarily mean anything.

Turned out, however, that her cervix had some severe cell growth, so a few days ago they knocked her out to scrape the cells and cut away a little part of her waxy donut.

I can barely sit still when writing the words "scrape" and "cut" in this context and when I spoke to her on the phone about it, I was walking down the street, shaking the words off with my wrists and legs between steps like they were body tics.

I also learned that all this scraping and cutting is due to a STD called Human Papillomavirus which makes the cells grow in the first place. And that HPV is FAR more common - 20 million people have it right now - than we realize. There are 100 types of HPV and most types are low-risk and without symptoms, so unless we get a genital wart or an abnormal pap, our body fights the infection off and we stay happily ignorant that we are one of half of all people having sex who get HPV at some point. The high-risk strains of HPV can lead to cancer.

After I got off the phone with my friend and shook off the last few tics, I pulled this Tell Someone postcard out of the folder where I'd kept it for a few months. I'd kept it because I like the drawing but never really looked at the back. Now I looked at it more closely and saw that, golly, it's about cervical cancer!

Thanks universe! Sorry I haven't paid as much attention to you since graduating from Evergreen.

If on school bus, don't panic

I watched Griffith Park burn yesterday from the parking lot at work, seven miles away, and heard that ash was falling in Atwater Village. I got home at 1 am and the fire was still only thirty percent contained. Part of the neighborhood to the west, Los Feliz, had been evacuated. A volcano appeared to be erupting at the end of the street.

I thought about worrying but decided I was too sleep-deprived to bother and also decided that the river and interstate between us and the oversized orange flames would keep the fire on that side of the highway.

Everything about California brushfires - tearing across mountains, jumping ridges, straddling canyons – is new to me. What I gather, though, is that besides the high temperatures, lack of rain, zero humidity, kids playing with fireworks, and smokers flicking lit cigarettes around the forest, it’s about wind blowing the flames and embers around and igniting the fire in different directions. Maybe even over interstates.

I'm no longer terrified of every single possible threat from the outside world, so last night I simply hoped for the best and fell asleep without even consulting the list of instructions that I made in 1982 for exactly this kind of situation, "Rules for fire + fire + fire + fire". If I had, I would have gotten the following tips:



#5 Always help your little brother or sister + if he is retarded like my brother

#7 Do not ever trampel people

#10 If a fire happens to be in your house the first thing to do is get out and stay out at your meeting place and you better have one!



#14 Always be careful of pink panthers

(I think my mom accidentally slipped me my brother's medication the day I made this list)

#15 If on school bus, don't panic

#16 And never panic

My Liberal Arts degree comes in handy again

My favorite part of doing work that I'm unqualified for is the moment when I suddenly start understanding sentences that five minutes before sounded like the person was speaking in Icelandic. Until recently, my brain seized when the High School Musical crew said anything to me more technical than "extension cord". Now I'm questioning my liberal arts background because I totally could have been an engineering major.

I was setting up my teleprompter station on stage left when the cameraman came over to say hello and get down to business. He told me what I'll be responsible for during load out and I listened and nodded along.

Unplug the power? Got it.

Pack the three monitors in my road case? Check.

Make sure I put the prompter software away carefully and store it far far away from anything giving off a magnetic charge so that I don't irreparably damage it like I did yesterday and we have to get a new version flown in? NO PROBLEM.

Then I started asking questions.

"Is this DVI to video piece connected properly to the DA Box? And what exactly does this DA Box do again? Distribute signal? Right. Now for adapting the video to the Edison box, do I need any more female BNC to male RCA connectors?"

Living on transvestite hooker block

I'm having a who am I and what the hell is going on around here day. My discomfort may be due to the fact that I tried to get fancy and waxed my girl mustache instead of bleaching it. I had a reaction so I'm now walking around with a disfiguring ZITSTACHE and the product I bought at Sephora to supposedly help has dried out everything so whatever patch of skin isn't erupting is instead peeling.

In trying to make the best of the situation happening on my face, I told Jane who was bummed on the phone, "If it makes you feel any better, I have a zit mustache."

And it did help Jane. So Jane feels better about her life but I somehow took 25 minutes to try on fourteen t-shirts in the morning before going with the one I picked out in the first place. And I was just dressing for was the High School Musical show rehearsal. Do I need a perfect t-shirt to sit in a room putting Spanish lines into a script that I'll later feed to the cast on stage as the new TELEPROMPTER OPERATOR for the South American tour? Hell naw! And don't even get me started on how random my job is. The point is that learning to use a teleprompter does not require the right t-shirt.

Earlier this morning I called Miguel, who is in town from Seattle for a coffee conference.

"Miguel," I said, "I'm sorry I didn't make it to the party last night."

"Oh, no, it's okay," he said, "I'm sorry, too, for..." before unsuccessfully wracking his brain to find something to be sorry about just out of habit. He's a very polite overapologizer.

"Where are you?" I asked.

"Hollywood Boulevard and Vine," he said.

"What! I'm riding my bike over to say hi before I go to work."

When I got myself and my zit mustache to Hollywood Blvd, I called him again, "Hey, I'm here."

"I'm in an oxygen bar with tubes stuck up my nose. I'll be done in five minutes," he said.

"Wow. Okay." Who am I to judge? But that is funny.

We threaded our way through the tourists on the sidewalk who were posing for photos with fake Gene Simmons and fake Michael Jackson and then crossed the street to sit outside a coffeeshop. Miguel asked me about living in Southern California and I automatically distanced myself from our immediate surroundings, "Look, this street is nuts. I've never even been over here before."

Right then, a man dressed as either Moses or Anakin Skywalker walked past our table.

"But my neighborhood, Atwater Village, is a regular place to live. Totally nice."

Later, after cursing my entire collection of t-shirts and typing way too many exclamation points into the teleprompter (MUCHAS, MUCHAS GRACIAS, BUENOS AIRES!!!!!), and after walking past Fergie in the hallway of the rehearsal space and mistaking her for just another gal with long extensions, super big sunglasses, and a miniature dog, I came home, sank into a chair, and decided not to go anywhere for the rest of the night because I can't even take it anymore, not today.

Frank left to see some music with his nephew, Josh, but called me right away to tell me about the transvestite who lifted her skirt to show some leg as he drove past.

"Oh, that's nice," I said.

"Yeah, and he or she is working our block exactly, right between our house and the light."

"Really?" I said.

But I didn't need convincing because that is this kind of day.

Anti-Hipster Hipster

Yesterday I paid someone to rub hot lava stones on my legs and back.

After the massage therapist balanced the stones on my muscles and drove his body weight into the knots in my back through his TINY POINTY elbow, he wrapped my feet in steamy towels and placed what felt like beanbags on the backs of my knees.

At this point, I thought two things. 1) Is he balancing beanbags on my knees? 2) If I feel better afterwards, he can shoot particle beam lasers into my muscles for all I care. Turns out the "beanbags" were a robe and once I wiped the drool off my face and made eye contact, he told me I really need to stretch and be more conscious of how I carry weight on my back.

Hm. I wonder if he's talking about last week's four-hour bike ride that I did wearing a backpack stuffed with my computer, several books, my journal, my ipod, my camera, and some extra clothes. I'm really glad I took all that stuff with me, especially since THE ONLY THING I USED WAS THE CAMERA, which weighs 5 ounces.

It was worth it, though, because I got to make fun of Matt for taking a water break outside the Brady Brunch house and for being an AHH: Anti-Hipster Hipster.

"What's that mean?" Matt asked in a tone that indicated he was considering getting defensive.

"It means that you're nice and genuine and you're kind of turned off by the scene but you wear OBEY t-shirts and grandpa shorts and white grommet belts on bike rides."

Matt did what was the ultimate proof that he's not a true hipster: he laughed at himself.