Cloth Fiction #1: Lean Mean Thirteen

It's called Lean Mean Thirteen and it's the new Stephanie Plum novel by Janet Evanovich. We shelve them in Mystery/Thriller, and they're all got hideously garish covers and titles playing on the number the book is in the series (beginning with One for the Money). This week it knocked A Thousand Splendid Suns off the number 1 spot. I guess folks like numbers.

So, Anime Expo has come to the Long Beach convention center. This means that, along with the normal crazies (haha) of downtown LB, along with the normal weekend rush, we now are also flooded with hyperactive teens in their cosplay outfits raiding the manga section and lounging in the walkways throughout the store.

It's not that I hate them, per se. I get it. I really do. I'm not going to get down on someone for being a nerd. I like math, I like to read, and I've been in choir since fourth grade. And I love comics. Not just the high-brow literary stuff either. I love seeing guys in capes dodging blasts from ray guns, I love watching epic spandex v. spandex rooftop battles. No, anime kids, I don't hate you for being nerds. I hate you because you suck. You really, really suck, and that makes me sad.

A girl that I work with asked over the walkie today: "Are half-naked men allowed in the store?" It's cosplay, I know... but if your favorite character is Man in Speedo, can't you bring a bathrobe so you can at least pretend to be a decent human being when you're walking through my store, rubbing your who knows whats on everything and everyone in sight?

Or, wait. No, I'm sorry. This is the weekend where all of your fantasies come to life, right? Man in Speedo, if your fantasy is 13 year old girls in short skirts and knee-highs, then welcome to heaven. They come in groups of three or more, and they're all super giggly to be away from their parents for the weekend. Tee hee!

It's not that I hate them. Not exactly. I hate how they descend upon the store like some sort of locust swarm, where the locusts think they're Japanese and think we're smiling at their elaborate hats because we're bummed we didn't think of them first and we're staring at their nerdy locust boobs because they are so damned provocative. You are wrong, locusts. No one thinks your sunburned locust boobs are provocative.

If I sound bitter it's only because they smell bad.

$27.95

Cloth Fiction #1: A Thousand Splendid Suns

The book is A Thousand Splendid Suns, the highly anticipated second novel by Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner. The story is of two Afghani women, elder and younger wives of an abusive husband, who become family to one another in a hopelessly war-torn country.

in stories, things tend to work out. even if there's no neat, happy ending, you can pretty much bet that problems that are brought up are going to be addressed, if not solved. if you learn a character's name, chances are he's going to be a cog in the machine leading towards the climax, the denouement, and the end of the book. the phrase "she finds [love, help, danger, etc] in the most unexpected place" is thrown about a lot on dust jackets, but, in reality, if there are details in a book that don't turn out to be some sort of foreshadowing, the prose often seems a bit messy.

maybe it's the curse of an avid and early reader, but it sometimes gives me pause to realize that that's not even remotely true in life. if daily life were a series of short plays, each one would have a huge dramatis personae, and it's often hard to predict when a character is exeunt-ing for the day to return several years later or tomorrow or never. at any point a complete stranger can be the Big Difference.

the other day, a girl i hadn't really thought about since middle school came into my Borders and changed my mindset for the rest of the day with our short interaction. the weird thing is that it wasn't that weird... this is Long Beach, after all. who knows how many lives i've changes by interactions i didn't even know were happening? and how different my own life would have been if i hadn't, senior year of high school, accepted a ride home a then-auxiliary player, a friend-of-a-friend who, in two months, will be my husband?


in a cliché sort of way, it's chaos theory. it's also a staple of buddhist philosophy: everything's interconnected, and the course of that system of "cause and effect" can only be predicted by very naive junior monks who are then to be whapped on the back of the neck into enlightenment. handing a mud pie to a man who will, lifetimes later, be the Buddha changes the course of history. and those things that seem so ever so important can just as easily fall by the wayside. who can tell?

and my point? i dunno, i guess it's that, no matter how much you hate them, you shouldn't wish for the eradication of all bees in the world. Mike.

$25.95

something i think i may start doing!

since graduating from ucla and moving back to Long Beach, the question i get asked most often is "so, what are you doing now?" i guess i should kinda take it as a compliment. people characterize me as the Type Of Person Who Does Things, and are thus curious as to What I Am Up To Now. well, the truth is, i'm not really up to much. there's planning for the wedding, of course, and that's taking a lot of time and energy and is generally rather exciting. and there's trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my life... yeah, we'll get to that later. what's really taking up my waking hours (and many hours that should rightly be spent sleeping) is working at Borders down at the Pike.

it's not the best job in the world. there's lots of crazies, there's the general lameness that comes anytime one is required to spend 8 hours a day doing something. but, at the end of the day, i'm working with pretty neat people and i'm always surrounded by books. so that's rad. one of the cool things that comes with the territory is thinking constantly about books i've read, books i'd like to read, and completely unrelated things that leap into my head prompted by some word or image on the cover of a book i'm shelving.

here's what i'm thinking: every day i stare the Borders Bestsellers display, which faces the registers where i stand uncomfortably and wait for a customer to deposit their manga or self help dribble uponst my scanner. i'm gonna start writing based on what's staring back at me. if it amuses me, i may keep it up for a while. if it fails to amuse me? let's be honest. i've got a shorter attention span than you. i'll think of something else.

further thoughts on that which is important

a few weeks ago, i sang for Frank Manaka's 100th birthday party. i called him a few days before to go over last-minute details and, not surprisingly, the conversation wasn't the smoothest. i was driving in traffic and he didn't have his hearing aid in. it took me a good minute of shouting into the phone for him to realize who i was. he told me that, what he really wanted, was a sing-along. he wanted me to lead his friends and family in singing songs that meant something to him. and he especially wanted me to learn "Let Me Call You Sweetheart," which had been the song he and his wife used to sing to one another. when we sang it at the party, he was smiling behind his harmonica, with tears in his eyes.

here's a story i wrote:

He left the funeral quietly. Her friends were huddled in clumps, chatting darkly and laughing brightly. A widow caught his eye and smiled sadly, sweetly. He nodded and slipped away. His right side was cold as he stepped out of the church and, as the street zipped by the little parking lot, as good folks with important things to take care of marched past in loud pairs and trios, he missed her. He walked to his deep blue sedan and sank into the driver's seat, struck with the sudden desire to go somewhere, to do anything but live the life he'd lived for the past forty years, only with a little coldness on his right side. But then he was pulling into his driveway and walking up the front steps. He was turning the key in the door and walking in to his living-room. He saw two chairs at the table and an extra phone handset for when their grandson called. There were unopened videos stacked next to the television console and a CD leaning against the stereo: gifts from family who remembered the things they had enjoyed over the decades and had forgotten that what they really loved to do now, now that they had time and before they lost the energy, was sit on the couch and chat mindlessly with one another. He went into his bedroom and took out his hearing aid.

wherein shar concludes that, while some things are important only relatively, some things are objectively Pretty Noteworthy.

so i've had this domain name and this blog-shell up for a while now (a week at least, maybe more) but i haven't been able to think of exactly what to fill it with. mike over at astoriedyear has this rad project going where he's putting up a new short (sometimes short short) story every day for a year. i've got nothing as creative in mind, and, if i did, i prolly wouldn't be able to birth it uponst the world quite so eloquently.

so this blog-shell has been sitting here, empty. gosh, i don't ever think anything that's worth being the first post, with all of the historical importance that title carries with it.

and then, there's this: for the past month-or-so mike and i have played host to a rad gentleman of a cat known affectionately as Stumps the Cat, on accounta his half-a-tail. pretty immediately after he demanded to be let into our apartment one 2 am in early May, we fell in love with him. we spent the following weeks alternating pretty much daily between wanting to get rid of him and wanting to make him a permanent addition to our little family. on the one side, he was loud and annoying and made us both sneeze and the bathroom floor a sandpit of misplaced litter. on the other hand, he liked to curl up on our toes and would sometimes bite our chins gently when he was really really happy with a petting he was getting. so we continued to grumbly grow more and more attached to him.

tonight, i let Stumps in when i came home from L.A. he lept up into my lap as i tried to type on my computer and wouldn't shut up till he was scratched to his content. then he sat in a shoe box. then i let him back out. shortly after mike came home, we heard him meowing alarmingly outside, like he was scared or being hurt. and i heard voices outside on the sidewalk. i ran out the door and approached the people, two girls and a guy. "have you seen our cat?" "actually... he's our cat. we lost him about a month ago. we've had him since he was a kitten."

goodbye, Stumps the almost-was-our Cat! we were happy to have you and glad to have been a safe place for you while you explored the world beyond your own apartment complex. the apartment that was just a little too small for the three of us will now be a little too spacious without you underfoot.

a buddhist lesson about non-attachment here would be trite. i'm glad i loved that cat, even though it hurts that he couldn't stay forever. when i started writing this blog, i had something entirely different in mind for it. something about how something doesn't need to be really important to be noteworthy. it's all a matter of perspective, after all. but, Stumps, you are truly a cat to be remembered. so this first post is for you. and especially for your half-a-tail with the seahorse hook on the end. i love you still.