nudle: June 2006

To my twelve dear readers...

I'm off to the motherland, otherwise known as God's country, and I'm leaving my laptop at home. To be honest, this leave of absence began weeks ago. When I come back next week I promise I'll write every day, no matter what.

Farewell!
On activism: Nothing happens unless you make it happen because, though everything is happening all the time you don't really know it unless you're in it, involved in it, because it's only ever real for us if we're doing it. Right?

If you don't climb onto the roof when the light is shining just right on the trees you'll miss it. I'm not a live-in-the-moment-or-else fanatic. I'm just saying.

The abortion argument is tiring me out; we shouldn't be having it at all; is making a mistake; and a certain blonde conservative carny I hate to name because it will give her exposure to ten more people should shut UP already.
I'm going to wear a hat and SPF 30 for the rest of my life but I am the first to admit that a real suntan looks good.
Fathers are important (okay, I always knew this, but thought I might mention it for obvious reasons).

Thank you, Dad. And thank you too, Ewan.
It's very late and I'm watching a movie by Nicole Holofcener.

I'm eating cheese and oat cakes (oat cakes are a Scottish thing). Catherine Keener is getting rejected by a total loser (of course, he'll turn out to not be a loser or at least will have something redeeming about him so she is humbled even more than she is already as the underdog in this movie) but that would never happen, Catherine Keener being rejected by a video store attendant with big glasses, because she has great hair and coloring and a flat stomach even though she is wearing really horrible denim shorts and now you know how judgmental I am about horrible denim.
It's not that lucrative.

I have like a grand I've saved up.
(Mobile phone bleeps).
This is my best friend!

DOUG! BLAINE! Sarah, this is Sarah.

I'm sorry. Why did I just call you Doug?
I've got this job and I can't take time off.

I live with my parents and it's full time and I can't take time off.
How'd you meet ol' Danny here?
Through my friend Nick.

Nick I met because I met him on the train. Nick lives on the fucking south side now. I have their number.

Him and Mo live in St. Charles now..

.I'm in Elgin right now, and I'm telling my school I live in the city. It's a lot cheaper for me to lie about it.

How you doin' Man? Yeah I'm good.
I'm thinkin' maybe I'll go get my law degree.

Yeah, you could come to work for me if you wanna be my secretary.
It's a pretty big firm, it's got a USSL, Kid Rock is doing something something and something for us.
Well my birthday was late so I was held back.

I did sound for George Clinton.
Yeah, I get $500. But I only work once a week.

This is for filming music videos.
It's really hard to fold the clothes. Yeah.

Trailers? When they're doing car scenes. And Lenny Kravitz, and some girl who toured with Britney Spears.

Do you know Mister Blotto?
Dude, no. Who are they?

They've been a pretty big band in Chicago.
R Kelly bought two of Chicago's old studios.
I'm going to be project manager, however, there is no artistic freedom.

I would love to be somewhere else and I'd work my way up.
You should come over to my house, I have a studio.
Fuckin' heroin junkie.

He like robbed some ol lady. He's in jail last I heard.
Allison Rodez?

You ever know her?
Yeah, Lacie? She was a piece of shit too.

This is the kind of thing we hear outside our open window every Thursday, Friday and Saturday night in the summer. Most times it's a solo conversation between a party and their significant other on the phone, a fight. Or someone saying, What is this?

This place? It's kind of cool, with the ceiling tiles? Um hmm.

(We have a tin ceiling.) Some blessed someone has them smoking around the corner, far away from us, and not under our open window. That's unbelievably good.

Walking and Talking is a pretty terrific movie. Put it on your Netflix.
Ewan is flat out on the floor and he is snoring, something I usually do.

Not the flat-out part but the snoring.
Catherine Keener totally got her teeth fixed since this was filmed (doesn't that sound like someone outside the door said it?), or they just made them look normal for for this movie, which was made in 1996.

Guess what! Allison Janey is in this movie as a fellow cat-lover to Catherine Keener! And you know what?

Anne Heche? She isn't very good! Or maybe she is good at being a really awful character, one who is not very likable.

But Liev Schreiber is so believable and reminds me of my ex-fiance.
It is hot, sweaty weather, maybe 80 degrees and it's trickling down the sides of my face. The music in the movie right now is joyful and rambunctious and fun.

I think it's the Waterboys but I'm not sure. If it is, I get to jump up and down and yell, I win! I win!

But only the drunks standing outside my window will hear.
Damn. It's not the Waterboys.

It's Billy Bragg.
Also: the music coming out of the bar is rambunctious. And it's time to get Ewan off the sofa (where he moved from the floor ten minutes ago) and upstairs to bed.

Today I went to a meeting at Starbucks downtown. I'm teaching a class beginning in August called Intro to Design, and it's the second time I've taught it, and it has to be kick-ass (because last time, my first time, wasn't). So I'm starting early (which is why I haven't posted much this week, really).

I rushed to get to this meeting, running from the pay-lot even, and it turned out that my date, an Assistant Professor (whom I hired years ago when I was a working professional) forgot. Blew me off. Now he owes me.

Since I was in the neighborhood I ended up in my school library searching for books and, by some miracle, I found them. When I went to retrieve the car my battery was as dead as the bare midriff, as dead as reality TV, as dead as low-carb mania. As dead as.

..pleated slacks.

That dead.
I called the roadside assistance program we got as part of the package when we bought our used car a few years ago. It worked!

A truck drove up forty-five minutes later; it was AAA. The guy got out and I kid you not, his name was JESUS F. I was saved today by Jesus.

Only Jesus was sort of an extreme, tattooed, shaved-head Fu Manchu-moustachioed burlyman.
He was all business at first: Ma'am please step out of the car, and Could you step over to the truck please. I felt like he was about to give me a breathalyzer.

But once I asked about his tattoos he softened.
What is that? I've been trying to figure it out.

I pointed to the art on his forearm.
Yeah, that's a tribal mask with a heart woven in behind it, he answered. See?

Here's the mouth, it's sort of screaming? Here's the heart. See?

It was beautiful, all in black ink, with shadows along the edges that made it dimensional. How a tattoo artist makes something look smudged just using a needle on skin is beyond me.
Pointing to the two-inch script capital letters on the other side of his arm I asked, Is that your wife?

The name was Jocelyn.
Jesus hesitated. No, that's my daughter.

She would be five months now. She didn't make it. My girlfriend miscarried.

Yeah, Sunday is going to be really tough.
Yeah, I'm more mad than sad, he said. Because her ex-boyfriend did it to her.

I'm the kind of guy who usually goes after revenge, but I decided not to. I knew she would be all over my case, and it just wasn't worth it so I played it cool.
I wondered how the ex could do that to her and decided the prospect was too horrible to delve into.

I looked at Jesus. He had no neck. He seemed like someone who could cause harm if he wanted to.

I muttered, It's good you didn't pursue revenge, or something like that. Or maybe I just said Hm. But I couldn't just let things lie.

Are you still with her? I asked.
Nah, he shook his head.

She ended up being too possessive. Didn't like it when I went out. Didn't want me to talk to anyone but her.

She could talk to her friends, but I couldn't talk to anyone but her.
Yeah, I said. it's important to have your own life, isn't it?

I thought about how I'd found my own way out of the broken-down-car dilemma without any help. I thought about Sports Day, that most of the dads were there but Ewan wasn't. I thought about how it sometimes feels like parallel play when I'm with Ewan these days.

But mostly I felt damned lucky.
Hang in there, I said to Jesus. On Sunday.

Yeah, it'll be okay. Some good friends and a few beers. I'll get through it.

I was backing the car out of the garage to go get Iona at school and take her to camp and in our alley was the tiniest, wizened woman. She was going through the garbage can next to ours. I was shocked.

It's not like I haven't seen people going through our trash before; sadly, I have. But they've always been men, aged fifty or younger, not someone so elderly.
I was cutting it close on time to make it to school like I always do, and was probably going to be four to six minutes late to pick Iona up but there was no way I was going to let this woman's lunch be garbage.

In fact, I was just thinking how deluxe I make Iona's lunches, in hopes that she'll eat something. Today she had a cream cheese sandwich on wheat, cut up pineapple, cut up apple, yogurt, soy chips and milk. She didn't need half of what was in there.

I grabbed a yogurt out of her lunch bag and what was left of a box of cereal bars I always have in the car, jumped out of the car and took them over to the woman. She accepted them with dignified thanks. I felt like shouting, "Where do you live?

Where are the people who are supposed to be taking care of you? How does someone end up like this?" Instead I drove away and waited for the tears that didn't come.

How do we get so inured to these daily tragedies? I've created a thick, solid cocoon around my emotions in order to survive, but I don't like it.
I've got to do something about this bullshit.

People shouldn't be eating out of garbage cans, ever. Especially someone's grandmother, or great-grandmother. Maybe I could keep those frozen kids' sandwiches on hand, or just put food out in the alley every day.

Maybe I can find out where the nearest food bank or soup kitchen is and post it in the alley. I'm definitely going to watch for that woman. If I see her again I'm going to ask how I can help.

It was her idea to do the scuba diving lessons. She posed it as a choice for her fiancé, knowing what he'd choose. Dance lessons or diving lessons.

Somewhere along the way she had forgotten about her fear of water, of drowning in it. Not really forgotten her fear, but she thought maybe she had outgrown it, or that under the right gentle tutelage she would overcome it. If she were being honest, she would admit that a whiff of chlorine could transport her back in time to swimming lessons at the indoor community pool, a cavernous building that was dim inside, and clammy.

Once a week in the summer when she was eight she would stand at the edge of the pool consumed with dread, skinny limbs shaking while the burly female swimming instructor in navy Speedo, with a voice like a bullhorn shouted SWIM THE LENGTH OF THE POOL TWICE WITHOUT STOPPING. The other pupils, sleek porpoises, slid through the water. She hated the burning feeling of the blue water in her eyes and was blind without her glasses so she couldn't follow the black tile lines along the floor of the pool.

She weaved left and right as she floundered along the interminable Olympic length. When she finished all the other children would be bobbing in the water, one hand on the side, laughing, dunking, splashing each other. At the end of each lesson the burly instructor barked at her mother that she swam farther than anyone else.

It was meant to be a joke.
So now she sits in a new wetsuit, in a motorboat with her new husband and ten others. A familiar feeling is lodged in the pit of her stomach.

She recognizes it from her swimming lesson days: dread. She suddenly realizes that dread has been her gloomy companion through the wedding festivities in Scotland and all during the journey to the island paradise in the Seychelles. Chicken dread, scared of water.

Because he was quiet and pretty much minded his own business, she and dread had gotten along okay until this morning, when he perked up and cheerfully helped her remember that she had barely passed the scuba lessons in the indoor pool at home in Chicago. You're going to have to get in open water. It will be dark underneath you.

You're going to have to breathe under water even though people are not designed for it! Then dread imitated the booming voice of the childhood swimming instructor. OKAY, WE'RE DOWN THIRTY FEET!

IT'S TIME TO TAKE OFF YOUR MASK AND PUT IT BACK ON! OPEN YOUR EYES! REMEMBER, IF YOU TRY TO SURFACE QUICKLY, YOU'LL PERISH!

NOW, TWO LENGTHS!
Shut up, she mutters.
Her husband asks if she just said something.

For the hundredth time that morning she says, I'm scared.
For the hundredth time he assures her that he will be right there beside her the whole time. He is patient and steadfast and totally unafraid, which is why she married him.

He is like her father.
Still moored to the resort dock, the boat bobs. The other divers chatter excitedly in German, Jamaican and English about the various dives they've done.

They all look hip in their wetsuits. She wants to be one of them. She wants to be anyone else.

She thinks, if I just get through this dive I'll be okay. I can start my new life and have fun. There is a flurry of activity as the dive master and beautiful golden Seychellois crew finish checking and loading the equipment.

The dive master starts the motor. She looks over. He's speaking in agitated Creole to one of the crewmembers, a lovely boy who looks sixteen.

Master diver's voice booms. He is not calm. He is in charge of the dive.

She realizes she doesn't like him. The beautiful sixteen-year-old throws in the line and jumps in after it, the boat pulls away from the dock, and she begins to pray.
As the boat moves out into open water she notices how choppy it is.

Their island paradise moves away. She watches it get small and yearns for it, grieves for it. She wants to be reading a book on the patio of their hotel.

She smiles and tells the waiter who brings a mimosa, yes, I'm waiting for my husband. He is a diver. She enjoys the newness of saying my husband.

No. Here she is, unwilling to give up and show her new husband that she is a coward even though she is making their honeymoon miserable. Her new husband doesn't understand how she feels.

He is excited to dive. He is pointing things out to her. Look at those fluffy clouds.

I think that island is Felicite, and that one in the distance might be Praslin. Can you believe how blue the sky is. His voice sounds far away.

She is busy making deals with God. This time I really promise. If you get me through this, I'll stop saying Jesus Christ Almighty.

I'll finally find grace. I will not be petty. I will devote my free time to good works.

The breeze has picked up and her husband shouts over the motor: The waves are so loud I can't hear you, he yells. He is smiling. The boat is crashing continuously, colliding loudly with the waves.

She realizes her lips were moving and he thinks she was talking to him, not God. She thought she was praying silently, in her head.
Suddenly the boat slows and stops about a half mile from an island.

Waves throw themselves against the jagged rocks in suicide missions. An anchor drops, each clank reverberating. The chic divers ready themselves, efficiently unzipping dive bags, pulling out flippers, masks, snorkels.

The master diver is shouting: Snorkels regulators two at a time into the water!
The dive partners fall backward off the side. They are there and then, all at once, gone.

They go two by two until it is her turn, hers and her new husband's. She looks over the side at the carefree and snorkeled bobbing and waving to each other. The waves are large.

Her hands, arms and legs are numb and her new husband has to help her with everything. She observes this scene from a short distance. The person she sees is eight years old.

Her form is dwarfed by the tank strapped to her back and she looks small in her oversized flippers. Her head is light. The equipment is heavy.

At one point she falls, sprawling on the wet deck. The master diver shouts that they are next. He wears a frown.

He thinks she can't do it. He knows she is a coward.
Her voice is small when she says to her new husband, I don't think I can do this.

He tells her she will be fine once she gets under water. His words of reassurance make her feel more like an outsider. Why is this so terrifying when all these people are enjoying themselves?

Then it comes to her: They are crazy and she is sane. People are not meant to breathe underwater! She has married an insane man!

She falls backward off the boat, regulator in her mouth.
For a moment she is under. She is floating, flying.

She looks at the peaceful dark and sees fish. Lucky fish, they are good at this. She looks up and sees the surface and the light and it is beautiful.

She hears her breath begin to slow and this calms her. I am going to be okay. I can do this.

Then she surfaces and the first wave washes over her.

Get me out of here I have to get out I am getting on! The!

Boat! She is screaming. Dread is cavorting and laughing and he is pulling her down.

Her husband puts his hand on her arm. She flings it off, starts to swim toward the boat. How did it get so far away?

The master diver is shouting. His accent sounds French. He is swimming over.

She hates him and would like for him to drown. She is getting the fuck into the boat and staying there for the rest of her life.
Then she is full of joy because her hand is on the boat's ladder.

She tries to climb it and her flippers catch and trip her and she falls back in the water but she is calm now. She removes her flippers and turns to watch them float away. She won't be needing them.

She pulls herself up with superhuman strength and climbs up and into the boat. She sits and looks for dread but he is no longer with her. She is sorry because she wants to put her hands around his throat and squeeze the life out of him.

The beautiful boy gently helps her off with her tank and then sits on the bench beside her. The sun warms them. She turns to the boy and kisses him on the mouth and though it is only a moment, it feels like forever.

Nothing ever happens on my block.

I don't seem to be having too many fresh, coherent thoughts. Perhaps that's because just the same old obsessions about people who have left me without explanations or goodbyes, the same old musings about whether or not I have the same old inability to have a telephone conversation if Iona is around, the same feelings of awe toward and the same proud and completely amused embarrassment when she says things like My mom has bouncy breasts!

loudly to the naked woman next to us in the gym locker room, the same old detached sinking feeling looking at the face of a the same old thwarted desire to be earth mother, the same old thwarted desire to be a siren, the same old frustrated, guilty wonder at how hard Ewan works while I while away the hours, conferrin' with the flowers, consultin' with the rain, the same old inability to write fiction to save my life, the same old inability to really let people in, the same old desire to have a glass of wine on a Thursday night instead of giving something fresh to the twelve lovely readers of this blog.
Nothing ever happens on my block. When I grow up I think I'll move.

(That is, after the party on Saturday.)
What's new with you?
I feel the need to post something fictiony, but since I spent the past weekend in Boston watching some people get married and catching up with old friends, I haven't written.

So I resurrected something from last year called Happy.
Here's some backstory..

.
A little over a year ago I was contacted by a smart guy looking for a purpose who needed cheap labor (free, in my case) to help him realize his dream of publishing a series of Chicago-centered graphic novellas. He wanted to revolutionize the whole graphic novel genre, and had come up with a new word for his books: novix.

The carrot he dangled for me was that I'd get to write one of the stories, maybe, later on, if I proved myself.
I hadn't yet come to my current understanding, post-workaholism: That I don't really want to work except when I want to work. Plus whenever I break my A-number-1 rule that I don't work for free ever, there's always trouble, usually of the resentment variety.

Sure enough, we had to break up. I went off to Hawaii and never came back..

.at least, not to him and my working-for-free job. My lesson (again): Don't work for free.

His lesson: You get what you pay for.
The first thing I did for him was hack together some brand illustrations of what his enterprise could become. I kind of liked them.

The last thing I did for him was hack together, in about a day, a treatment for one of his graphic novellas. It was an interesting exercise because I had to work fast and I didn't have the slightest idea what I was doing and I learned that writing for comics is way more like writing a screenplay than a short story. The smart-but-aimless guy interoduced me to some good resources along the way, so our professional dating relationship wasn't a complete loss.

Two of my favorites: by Christopher Booker and a site by about writing screenplays put together by and
Anyway, back to the present, or very recent past. Sunday I was enjoying some rare truly relaxed time near Boston in the home of Toby and Rebecca, reading the NYT Sunday Book Review. I really dug by John Hodgman.

Early on in his piece he quotes the quoted cartoonist ...

[she] made a somewhat startling confession. I've often been really impatient with most comics, she told [editor of ] in an interview. The stories, in most cases, even if they're good, they're still not as good as most books, most novels are.

Bell's quote made me think about my short career in graphic noveldom. I always find writing my little fictions difficult, but writing this thing (summarizing, keeping it simple, evoking scenes quickly and compellingly and selling the story idea) included so many distractions I suddenly understood how complex it is to add something visual, to write for drawings or to write for film. In Hodgman's reviews he writes about cartoonist who took ten years to come out with first book and then another ten to finish her second.

So maybe Ms Bell is right, that most comics aren't as good as most books. But geez, it's got to be feckin' hard work to come up with a great story and then have to draw it all.
I think my attempt at outlining a graphic short story below is predictable and formulaic.

Still, I was proud of my story because it proved I could jump off a cliff onto the jagged rocks of trying something new, plus I ended up loving my two main characters. And I had fun. (Mister Smarty Guy rejected the story, or rather he made some suggestions that would have totally reformulated it, so maybe that's another reason I had to leave him behind.

)
So, click through, and Happy reading.
Hey! I found out what bra size I am.

If my mother is reading this, she is saying to herself "I'm not sure about this blogging thing. First all the talk about now she's giving away her measurements." My father-in-law in Scotland is shaking his head sadly.

The guy surfing in the Podlesie district of Katowice for things "very nudle" is chuckling and rubbing his hands together.
My sisters won't blink and they won't chuckle; they understand. They'll nod and think about the last time they spent three hours trying on bras while their daughters ran amok.

I thought I was a 36B, and I have thought that for years.
In case you don't know, bra sizes are combinations of chest size shown as numbers (for example, in the United States these are 32, 34, 36, etc.) and cup sizes (letters like AA, A, B, C, etc.

) If you wear the wrong number size, the band will be too tight and cut off the circulation to the upper part of your body causing you to lose your train of thought in the middle of a client presentation and fall down; or the band will be too loose and suddenly your bra is a necklace. If your cup size is too small your breasts tend to bulge out on the sides, causing armpit boobs, or over the tops of the cups, giving you four breasts instead of two. Cups that are too big either make you look strangely bulbous, or puckered and wrinkled so your breastly profile is not smooth, lifted and separated.

Horrific.
Bra shopping has always been weird for me. Every three years I sort of slink into the Intimate Apparel department, pretending I'm not really bra shopping, and after lurking for a while I grab some black and beige bras and rush off to the fitting room.

Over time I get progressively more daring, maybe even throwing in a blue bra, but never red. Trying on my choices, I discover that not one of the bras I have pulled off the racks fits. So I venture out and grab thirty or so more, in various sizes.

Pretty soon my fitting room is a roiling, seething mass of straps and cups and lace and I can't find anything and at last I emerge, sweaty and defeated with one black or beige bra that will soon have puckered cups. Then I go home and take a nap.
In spite of my ambivalence about bra shopping, the bra has always been interesting to me.

Perhaps it's because I was flat chested for so long and didn't wear a bra until I was thirteen, and then it was a hand-me-down from my sister. I did a presentation on the form and history of the bra in one of my graduate school classes and remember talking about the invention of Lycra and women tossing their bras away in the late sixties and seventies, and the Wonderbra. My classmates and professor loved it.

Then when I got married my dressmaker (whom I suspect is a witch) said to me, "I bet you've always thought you were flat chested, but actually you just have a big rib cage." Then she instructed me to go to Victoria's Secret and buy some "chicken boobs," or breast-shaped squishy silicone things that she wedged under my breasts in the corset that she sewed and yanked and adjusted until my dress looked like it was on someone else's body, someone with an actual waist and actual breasts. Yes, definitely a witch.

Recently, reading I came across a blog called which I think is a pretty cool spin on the whole expert blog thing.
So it's been three years since I went bra shopping and yesterday Iona and I walked into the enormous SEA OF FOUNDATIONS at Nordstrom and I began to rock and moan. Or I would have if I didn't have to put on a brave face for Iona.

There were bras in every imaginable color and pattern and brand, all to accomplish something different like push you up, smash you down, disappear, show under your clothes, seduce your date, husband and/or girlfriend and there were a million colors and patterns, including Iona's favorite, "cheetah," and there were turquoise blue with hot pink trim and lime green with brown, along with various skin tones, flower patterns, lace and no lace and then you had full cup, demi-cup, underwire and not underwire under the brand names Betsey Johnson, Calvin Klein, Elle Macpherson, Cosa Bella and huit. There's something called iBra from Wacoal which looks like it's made out of neoprene and claims to be the most comfortable bra ever, with "No stitches, no seams, no tags."
The room was spinning and I was clutching a La Perla rack for support when Dushaun, Assistant Manager and Certified Bra Fitter, showed up and asked if I needed help.

"I'm a 36B," I muttered.
Her tone was crisp. "No you're not.

You're a 34. Let's get you into a fitting room."
Dushaun taught me that bras should not be instruments of torture.

"I want to see every one of these on the loosest hook," she told me sternly, handing me eight new styles. She stayed in the room while I changed, and after a while I stopped cowering and felt almost casual when I took off the On Gossamer creation and put on the Natori. She adjusted my straps.

She shook her head and said, "No, I don't like that on you," or "That's cute." Under Dushaun's tutelage I realized that sometimes less padding is more. I conquered my fear of convertible bras.

I determined, definitively, that I will never buy another strapless bra.
Three hours later Dushaun looked at me and said gently, "I think you've tried on everything in black that we have. Do you think you might be ready to ring up now?

" During the three hours Iona had escaped several times, eaten a grilled cheese sandwich, stolen peppermints and Kleenex from the huge, totally cool prosthesis fitting room next door (three cheers for Nordstrom), laid down on the bench and sucked her thumb, peed in the men's room (the women's was closed for cleaning) and colored a picture of two bears.
I walked out of Nordstrom with eight black bras. Thanks, Dushaun.

See you in three years.