> tapioca world tour

“I’m getting really tired of this,” I sighed, Doc’s latex’d hands in my mouth again, pulling on things.
“Yknow, I have feelings too,” he joked, which actually did make me feel a bit bad for him.

And so I sang. Through the hardest part — ripping off the old metal thing on the impacted tooth, forcing my mouth open wide with that plastic mouth opener thing, cementing a new ceramic bracket onto the impacted tooth (now fully exposed like a great white yacht, but still floating above the gumline), then attaching invisible ties between certain teeth, including the impacted one — all through this I hummed the tune of Mrs. Robinson, since it was wafting from the speakers above us.

The dreaded rubber band is back. Doc actually thought I would approve of his ridiculous scheme to attach a (latex) band to a molar, then up to the impacted tooth, then back down to a bottom canine, THEN BACK UP to the imacted tooth again, creating a weird arrowhead shape in the front of my mouth, and, most importantly, not allowing me to actually open my mouth at all, or speak, or breathe, as the case may be.

“Oh no,” I mumbled. “Absolutely not. Take it off right now.”
“You know, I’m trying to make this treatment advance as fast as possible, and you’re almost there. I just want you to make the most progress quickly, but if you won’t wear the band….”

And here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson, Jesus loves you more than you will know. Wo-wo-wo…

We settled on the band attached to just one bottom tooth, reaching up to the impacted canine to pull it down into place. It looks ridiculous — at least with the crossbite debacle, you couldn’t really see the band — this time, it’s in the front right of my mouth. It looks like someone swapped my linguine for latex loops, which promptly got caught in my teeth. Like my sadistic orthodontist designed a white chastity belt for my top and bottom jaw to stay joined together in holy…um…

God bless you please, Mrs. Robinson, heaven holds a place for those who pray. Hey hey hey…

“Am I only allowed to take this off when I eat?” I asked.
“Yep,” he said, “Unless socially or professionally or personally you find yourself in situations where you can’t handle it. At the very least, keep it on at night.”

What’s that you say, Mrs. Robinson? Joltin’ Joe has left and gone away. Hey hey hey…hey hey hey

There’s not much pain this time. Every third or fourth appointment has me in agony, lying helpless in bed for the rest of the day, but not this time.

“Can you see the finish line?” Doc asked.
“Yeah,” I admitted, seeing as my teeth are actually all straight now, minus the one that hasn’t grown in yet. “I can see it.”

Apparently I am a super patient, making progress faster than most patients. Super-patient! That’s wonderful, but I still can’t wait til this is over.

Seeing my father, every four years or so, is roughly the equivalent of screaming your last breath down a cavernous steam vent in the basement of a church while the service is going on upstairs — you have to be quiet, but you’re still trying to scream, and you attempt maintaining the silence and the scream at the same time, until they actually become one and the same, and what comes out is neither sound nor stillness, but a painful wind that promptly expels all your guts, leaving you to die an anticlimactic and unnoticed death while everyone above you is praying. That’s what seeing my father is like.

I remain physically and emotionally incapable of communicating effectively with my father — or communicating at all — mostly because I’m a carbon copy of him and he lacks the ability to communicate effectively with pavement. Instead, we talk weather, politics, real estate, and he checks up on the two things he feels are still within his realm of jurisdiction — my career and my love life — the former engendering a long and complicated explanation of higher degrees, international travel and the definition of new media, and the latter ending as quickly as it begun, since there’s really nothing to talk about…and concluding with my father’s perpetual advice: “Don’t get married yet. It’s better not to have anyone in the way of your career. Take your time. You’re still young.”

I’m not all that young actually, but thanks, mon père. Then I tried bringing up The Issue of My Brother, but in an extremely ineffective and sarcastic way, to which, naturally perhaps, my father threw his hands in the air and rolled his eyes, indicating this was not the right road to go down with our friendly banter, but rather the Trail of Tears from which we all still suffer. So I changed the subject, and now another four years will pass before I reflect on the situation and consider raising hell again. Ah, family! Think about how functional and boring our lives would be without family! Thank God for all these weirdos; they remind me to believe less and less in any part of human existence.

My mother just got her favorite album by the Mamas and the Papas in the mail…she’s downstairs now, dancing around the living room, happy as any Philadelphia clam.

Yesterday we went to Gettysburg to visit my immortal great aunt Mary, who’s the cutest thing to ever set foot in Pennsylvania, and some of my second cousins. My cousin Erin wants to set me up with her Buddhist guy friend. She also wants me to hurry up and buy that flat I always talk about buying in Philly, so she can visit whenever she wants. By the time I left, I was promising everyone I would move back within the next few years (5 years, actually, but they don’t need to know the specifics). Now I feel like I made a pact with God or something, like if I don’t live up to these shallow promises, they’ll be just that — shallow.

But life is long, and there’s time for Boston, Berlin, South America, and lots of places in between. The troubling thing is how family grows old while you run away to various new places, and they may or may not excuse your absence, so I’ll always feel bad regardless. These are the things we contemplate at the holidays. With records from the 70s blaring on the floor below.

Then you should buy my friend Kate’s book, “A year in Japan”, which includes illustrations. She also has a Hello Kitty book, which you can buy for all your little people.

Shameless promotion. That’s right. I will gleefully promote everyone I know to everyone else. Because networking is just about the most gratifying thing I can think of, especially when all these talented people I know meet other talented people and all the talent melts together into one big gob of super-talent…also: independent artists need to support eachother. Don’t forget it, people.

It’s warm in Phila. My mother’s house smells like dust, turkey, old perfume, old photos. At church this morning they gave out bags of Christmas cookies after the service, and our friends ate Philly scrapple at brunch.

Last night my mom and I were forced to sing a duet of Joy to the World at a party. It’s the first time I’ve sung a cappella in front of anyone in, I dunno, years. I hesitate to admit it was actually really fun…because that’s almost the same as admitting I can’t wait to sing karaoke in front of people I don’t know as soon as I get back to Boston. Which may or may not be true.

It doesn’t feel like the holidays, but at least we’ve got a week off work. Blessings to all my peeps, and to everyone else. Gracias a Dios para todo, especialmente para amigos y familia y helado! Ay!!!

The other night we watched Dil Chahta Hai, my favorite Bollywood movie from the early days of the millenium when I lived with Indian friends. I remembered all the music and the general plotline, the incredibly sappy song lyrics, the dance numbers that had been transformed into something akin to modern music videos, and the moral of the whole tale: you cannot be happy if you don’t find true love. Grippingly insightful, eh?

and then

Last night I put new bulbs in dirt and thought of the time
we repotted the Kalanchoe plant together but it still died.

Now I’m on the back porch shoveling earth
into a cold pot with a soup ladel. This time I’ll try

harder, with less urgency and more precision, with an offering
up of all my best intentions to the snow:

if it lives, let it live well;
if it doesn’t, let it go.

What a great day. N. picked me up early to go stained glass shopping on the South Shore. The store itself was like something out of 1885. I seriously don’t think anything about the store had changed since then. Every sign in the store was sarcastic, all the glass was shelved by color, with a light film of dust on top. The cash register, tape dispenser and invoice machine were something out of a Rockwell painting.

And then we went back to Cambridge and I fell asleep on the floor as N. more or less did the entire glass-cutting/soldering process for me. Well, I tried to cut glass, but wasn’t very good at it (cutting glass is difficult!) though I did manage to wrap copper tape on things. And so she made the beautiful framed thing at right to hold one of my Hawaii photos. I’ve had a queue of photos waiting for months to get framed in handmade soldered glass. Just hope we can finish this week.

And then I went to a wonderful Christmas party at my old teacher’s house, and it was so cool, and great food, and nice people. Everyone brought something to share — songs, poems, testimonies, articles, memories, you name it. It was such an inspiring evening, I feel like Christmas is over now, that we had it tonight. I love people, and green glass, and everything.

everything is so much more
siginificant than we think it is.

food fills, the heat goes down,
out the window a neighbor

hurts her ankle and i pray my prayer
from earlier again.

december brings a singing, a sighing,
a lack of turtles.

the dust mites revolted, the bosses have won:
it’s almost christmas now and we’ve been run
down so low, here we are, licking the fuzzed floor

and yelling at eachother over artificial walls.
my dreams are like a marathon i cough through
with strangers; when i wake i feel so tired.

and that odd unconsciousness keeps my restlessness
seeping through the down.
when the day rolls into evening now,

i leave you without a word, without a gesture.
this is cruel, and at night i grieve the cruelty,
as if i have allowed an innocent thing to stay injured

though i can’t say what between us has been broken
other than the static luminance that shines
a hale pale fire between your space and mine.

Chad is desert and
Muslim women gathering
firewood in fear.

When their strong faces
burn through photos with bright teeth
spread wide like clean bones

I think of domed skies,
trees, dust, mortar, the promise
of love and water.

My CEO went to Chad recently on a human rights trip to visit Sudanese refugees in camps along the border. Hearing about the trip makes me feel incredibly selfish for bitching about my utilities bill or my student loan payments. I mean, seriously. Here’s where Chad is in Africa, if you don’t already know.

Sad but true. I reviewed my bills, and D. reviewed our winter utilities, and we concluded that, aside from packing up and moving back to Roxbury or Dorchester, we can’t get through the season without subletting our extra room. Which is poopy, because I’m really enjoying just having one roommate — someone I’ve known for years. I don’t want a stranger in my house. But oh! How much more affordable it will be if we have a third person!

Therefore, if any of you know anyone else who’s looking to sublet a room for a little while, and you think they’re a decent person (read: not completely psychotic), please refer. The room doesn’t have its own closet, but there’s a smaller broom closet they can use. Anyway, the apartment’s really big. And we’re not too far from Harvard. $550 for room, including utilities. Pass it on. Danke.

“Your sweater smells like the subway.”
“Well, I had leant it to a friend. But it’s clean.”
“Well your friend smells like the subway.”

When I was six, the subway was a mystical place that represented my future urban existence; I loved it, but still recognized its smell as a fetid combination of must, metal, rat poop and stale urine, the delicious fragrance of a city. But I think my sweater smells fine. You can’t let six-year-olds get you down.

Tonight we saw a moth outside the kitchen window. It beat its wings imploringly against the glass, begging to enter. Nine-year-old I. started lamenting its fate. “Why can’t we let it in?” she asked me. “It’s cold and it’s going to die.”

“True,” I answered, “but if we let it in, it’ll eat all our sweaters.” (Though I guess it doesn’t matter much, since they apparently smell like the subway.) It was a Darwinist moment, though. Survival of the biggest? Survival of those who own sweaters? I felt genuinely terrible about leaving this moth outside to die. The worst part was how we watched it — beating, collapsing, beating, collapsing — and even took photos until we could no longer see its heart-shaped body through the glass.

This is not how life is, I wanted to explain. When life gets hard and we need help, there will be people who will help us. I truly believe this.

Instead I said nothing, and we ate ice cream and wrote stories about blue chocolate. The moth was dismissed, but not forgotten. I really have to stop interpreting every phenomenon of nature as a philosophical metaphor.

The way S. describes them makes me want to run back to Hawaii and spend my daylight hours painting flowers made of sea shells, or dig deeper into this Cambridge cavern for a hybernation I don’t know if we’ll ever come out of:

The color inside them is a deep, wet yellow, almost orange, like globules of honey or plasma. Their smell is thick and excessive and intimate.

I totally love “Pieces of Me” by Ashlee Simpson.
That is at once the most embarassing bubble gum culture confession I have made to date. And only BB can appreciate it.

tonight you were a samurai and i was a villain.
cut off her head! (so you cut off my head),
and then i was still, and then i was dead.
i think we should practise living instead.

when i get either extremely angry or incredibly empty sometimes there are
excesses of intense heat or cold that emerge from under my skin, down
from where the guts and bones and blood socialize, that deep recess
where you have never reached.

and either i can’t breathe or i breathe too much;
and either i sweat small oceans or my teeth collide
into each other as if a bodyless thing
were pushing them together, and apart, and together
again, which is how i felt tonight, though you probably didn’t notice.

in the car they played a song i remember from high school.
back then i ran circles round the town graveyard at midnight
in winter just to feel the ice in my lungs. that chill calmed
all the wild screams that want to come
when you’re seventeen and you go running in the dark.

so now i’m grown and i go driving in the dark
with the same anthem playing and the same feeling that athletes get
in the hard pit of their belly the moment the opponent’s
knocked them over and they know that
all they have to do to win is run.

much like pidgeons dash off hot tracks when the trains come.

The kids made snow angels on the empty basketball court. This is the fourth winter I have spent with them. E.’s front teeth have all fallen out. His new teeth, almost all grown in, are huge and have a big gap in the center, like his sister. Sometimes I’m shocked at how quickly time passes.

TALLAHASSEE, FLA. -
In a harangue about how a suspected anti-Cuba terrorist entered the United States, Fidel Castro singled out Gov. Jeb Bush — and went straight for the gut.

Castro called the governor “the fat little brother in Florida” and wondered if Bush had helped Luis Posada Carriles into the country, according to a transcript released Monday of the Nov. 17 address to University of Havana students, who erupted in laughter.

The Cuban leader didn’t stop there.

“Forgive me for using the term ‘fat little brother’ ” Castro said. “It is not a criticism, rather a suggestion that he do some exercises and go on a diet, don’t you think? I’m doing this for the gentleman’s health.”

The governor’s office wouldn’t “dignify this with a response,” a spokesman said.

(More…)

she calls to tell me she’s booked me a flight;
and we will do this and this and this,
and we will eat soft pretzels and promise not to fight,
and go to the art museum and strange churches and
listen to little boys sing about christmas as if
their hearts were bells in their throats on a string;

there’s something about all these beautiful things.
i could weep oceans at midnight when the catholic choir
collectively sighs; i could die
quietly, knowing that what’s good survived.

My father wrote. The man who has seen me once in the past eight years has announced he’ll definitely see me this year. Hmm… Time to bust out the fingerless gloves and hip-hop hat. Sometimes I fantasize about wearing outragious outfits when I see my father — motorcycle boots with short pants; a sweater-vest, a tie; or formal: high-heels, proper blazer, straight skirt, square academic spectacles — just to remind him he has no idea who I am.

This time, I’ll be sporting the shiny bomber parka I just ordered on credit from Triple Five Soul and my negative-heel orthopedic Earth shoes. I swear, sometimes I wonder how old I am. I could be 16 or 60, depending on the day. My brother is 16 now and, according to my father, has sprouted into a strong tree, a full 6′2, and he’s still growing. I imagine him like one would imagine the main character of a fiction novel. Part of me is scared that, when I actually meet him, it’ll be like seeing the movie version of the book — that he won’t match with the image in my mind, that the imagined and the real worlds will collide and the whole story will collapse.

But there is no story. There’s never been one.

(I am in a cold study, giving my roommate the privacy he needs for his large union meeting in the other room. It’s this chill in the air which is making me wistful, combined with my saturated intolerance for Men Who Don’t Care.)

Happy birthday, Mama.