GTD

They keep coming. Here's one from 619***6903:

Kaiya's tests came back normal!!! Thanks for the prayers! Love you all!

Prayer

I haven't checked my blogger email in nearly a year, but this morning I read an article about Leonard Cohen's new tour. Some of you may remember that I had a brief Cohen encounter back in October of 07, and so I logged into my email to read what he'd said again and get that small thrill that comes from seeing a celebrity's name in your inbox.

Scrolling through my unread email, most of which was junk, I noticed a few notes from strangers who had stumbled on my blog, all of whom were incredibly supportive (even if they all didn't necessarily agree with my strong opinions on Charles Baxter). Shay, Josephine, Kathryn, Ryan, Elle, Matt, and Bill - thank you for reading and taking the time to write. It's incredibly moving to know that in some small way we are connected.

I also received emails from four women who lost their brothers, too. Sarah, Lisa, Kelly, Julia. I'm so sorry for your loss. Your emails reminded me that even as my raw wound knots into a scar, that there are people living through their own July 5ths everyday. There are people, right now, in tremendous pain. I am thinking about you.

Lastly, I'd like to catch you up on one of the most suprising changes I've noticed in myself over the past year and a half. I have, somehow, become a spiritual person. This may seem unremarkable to most, but I have been a staunch athiest for most of my 27 years - the kind who gesuhdneit's instead of blesses you when you sneeze. It's only since Kyle's death that I've felt an increasingly strengthening need to pray. Not to God, whom I still can't convince myself of, but to something. To connectedness. To internal peace. To compassion. I haven't really figured this out yet. I am a spiritual baby. I've haven't gotten much farther than Sanskrit chanting in yoga class and a growing obsession with Krista Tippett. But I understand now that there are broken parts of me that will not be fixed by new boots or a new job or even a new family. Just give me the blood, Eli. I need help in this life.

Dancing

Remember my mother's obsession with Snowball? Well, I've developed an obsession of my own. Maybe you've seen this video - it's got 5.5 million hits on Youtube and a million since yesterday (at least a dozen from me) - but I'm posting it here because its the perfect antidote to a depressing anniversary.



How cute is Madagascar??

One Year Down

The first anniversary of Kyle's death was sometime last weekend. Depending on your definition of "death," he passed on the 5th or the 7th, but when I think about it I start on the 4th, Independence Day, red and white and smelling like grill smoke. Kyle and his friends took a train to the beach for what I think was a concert and stayed overnight. It was the next day, the 5th, around 7 pm, when he fell. I'm not clear on the details. They've been explained to me many times, but in my mind the moving train, the ascending ladder, the platform, the pool of blood, and my brother are a sickly blur. He hit his head, his brain died, and if you believe that life has to do with personality and consciousness, then that's when he died.

They brought his body to the hospital and put it on life support. By the time I arrived midday on the 6th, I was told that he still looked alive, like he was in a coma. Like there might be some hope, when of course there wasn't.

At first, I didn't want to see him. He had hit his head. What if I didn't recognize him? Or couldn't look at him? Or got sick? Or fainted? But by the time I got to him he'd been cleaned up. One side of his face was bandaged, and the other looked just like it always had. His eye was open a bit and it was like if I stared in hard enough, I could get a message through. His hands were warm and a little swollen. His skin was so soft - like mine and my mom's - and he had beautiful wrists. He was all beautiful, even banged up. Dead.

They harvested his organs shortly after midnight on the morning of the 7th. If you believe life has to do with the body - blood and breathing and a beating heart - then that's when he died.

A few nights ago, I watched a new reality show called Hopkins. It follows the staff of John Hopkins Hospital around while they perform miracles and fight with their spouses. It's a good show, but on this particular episode a donor body was being harvested and teams of surgeons and nurses with flashing tools and disturbingly mundane coolers were swarming the hospital bed. I closed my eyes, but in the breathless second before I realized that that's what they did to Kyle. They swarmed him - shouting, messy, efficient - sliced his parts, and sewed him up lighter than before.

So those are the dates. Melancholy fireworks on through the 7th. There's also the 13th - the day we buried him and the day he was born. Plenty to pick from if you're looking for an anniversary. His last trip, his last train ride, his last thought, his last breath, his last moments above ground.


I miss you. Rest in peace.

Bad Blogger

Hello.

I owe you an apology. I just disappeared, with no warning or goodbye. I haven't responded to your emails. I left important milestones - Ky's birthday (April 13), my graduation (I have a Masters now, albeit in fiction) and the selection of the first black man as the Democratic nominee (!) - unaddressed. How rude.

And I don't even have a good excuse. I got busy with school and teaching, I began using my free time to write fiction again, I had family in and out of town, but most of all I was avoiding. I think avoidance might've been a new step for me in this whole grief thing. As time has went on, Kyle's death actually became harder, not easier, to think about. I didn't want to talk about it. I didn't want to blog about it. I didn't want to read my mother's blog about it. My mom sent me two beautifully framed pictures of Ky, and they sat wrapped in plastic on my couch for weeks before I even looked at them. The whole thing was just too much to deal with on a daily basis if I also wanted to get my papers graded or my manuscript ready for class. So I didn't.

But recently, I forced myself to hang up one of Ky's pictures. I almost took it right down - I could barely look at it for the first week without tearing up - but it seemed right to leave it there. And today, I forced myself to login to Blogger for the first time in months. So maybe I'm past avoidance. Maybe I'm on to something new.

I Heart Derrick

J's dad sent this. It's called Interviewer Picks the Wrong Obama Supporter to Try to Railroad, and it's absolutely amazing.

Viva Obama! Viva!

Making Our Thirty-Year-Old Dreams Come True

I've been ridiculously busy. Between writing, teaching, school, and watching campaign coverage, I haven't had time to blog in weeks. But I just couldn't let this Hillary video go. It's about as inspiring (and timely) as she is.



"Start immediately on challenges!"

It Is a Better Thing

I Heart New York 4

Look at this:I took this picture yesterday from my apartment. I was working on my computer, sitting on my bed (which also serves as my office), when J's eyes got really big and he told me to turn around. Slowly. A hawk had landed on our fire escape, not two feet from where I sat. A hawk.

I've seen hawks in the city before, usually in the park from a distance, but this time the thing landed just a pane of glass away. And in its talons was a freshly-killed pigeon. As we watched, the hawk eyed us up and down, repositioned himself on top of his dinner, and began to tear its feathers out.

J, Justin, the two cats and I sat by the window for a full hour, both gleeful and horrified, as the hawk ate first the pigeon's head, then its heart, guts, and even choked down one whole leg - foot and all. I've never seen anything like it.

The thing was gorgeous, and huge, though its hard to tell from the photo. But if you look closely you'll see it's standing on a pigeon - not a small bird - and you can get a sense of how massive the thing was.

Once it was done, the hawk flew away, leaving our fire escape covered in feathers, bird shit, and the carcass:


It was the most intimate National Geographic moment I've ever had, and in New York City, of all places.

To top it all off, we may have solved the mystery of the demon bird...

GTD from 760***0487:
mir Come to the bathrooms

Updates

Yesterday was my mom's birthday. Historically, my mom kind of gets shafted on her birthday. Before the divorce, there were brunches and flowers and expensive bottles of Coco Chanel, but after the divorce, it was homemade cards and hastily wrapped books. And even though my dad spent years reminding us not to forget our mother, once we left for college, gifts were sent back late, or sometimes not at all. There was even a year when I forgot her birthday entirely, and didn't remember to call until weeks later. Luckily, my mom is a rare and awesome women lacking both resentment and materialism, and never once has she guilted Kyle or I for our lackluster celebration of her birth. So head on over to her page and wish her a happy belated.

Yesterday was also the first day of school. I don't start my graduate workshop until next week, but I did start teaching my undergraduate intermediate fiction class at NYU. And, as someone who's Googled teachers for years, I'm now wondering at the wisdom of have a public but very personal blog out there. Is it okay for your students to know the date when you last cried? Or that you have a virulent disrespect for Charles Baxter? Or what you look like sitting six feet above your buried brother? Oh well. I'm sure the veneer of authority would've slipped soon enough. Writing gets me excited, and in the last class I taught I blew my cover the first day by breaking into a clapping, beaming, barely-seated book cheer. Goooooo fiction!

In other news, I'm reading for the first time this Friday at NYU's Emerging Writers' Reading Series. Darin Strauss is headlining, which is exciting, so email me if you're in town and want details.

And last, but hardly least, the scaffolding that's been up in front of my building for six months finally came down. It's like God lifted the roof off of the sky.

GTD from 760***0487:
mir goddd. i wish you werent in texas travis is having a huge party tonight i think. uughhh. but i needa talk to ya girliee.

Oh. My. God.

I had a bad day today. I cried over Kyle for the first time in a while. And then, just now, I got this on my phone:

From 217.549.6743@VTEXT.COM:
Hey its ok nvm
$KYLE$
Jan 16th, 9:35 pm

Literally, a ghost text.

"Savage Thoughts" or "How Everything, Even the Oscars, Has Something To Do With Me"

I saw The Savages. Have you? Stop reading if you plan to, because this post has SPOILERS.

It's a movie about a dying family. Mom is gone, dad has dementia, and their two grown kids are midlife and mateless. Wendy Savage (Laura Linney) is a late-thirties MFA grad and "autobiographical playwright" with a sex life limited to an occassional visit from her married neighbor. She lives alone in New York City with a cat, works a sad and unrelated day job, and applies endlessly for grants she won't receive. She is, essentially, the future version of me I'm most terrified of becoming, with one significant difference:

Wendy has a brother.

Jon Savage (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) is a more successful but more depressed upstate philosophy professor, and he meets his sister in Arizona to try and figure out what to do with their non-functioning father, their meager resources, the realization that soon they'll be all that's left of their family.

Let's stop here for a moment. At this point in the movie, about twenty minutes in, I'm a little overwhelmed. I didn't know anything about The Savages - it was just one of those Oscar-list movies I feel obligated to see - and from the title I assumed it was going to be a documentary about the Bush Administration or some snarky comedy about brilliant and narcissistic English academics locked in a death match for tenure.

But it doesn't take me long to realize, no. I was wrong. The Savages isn't nearly so easy. Instead, it's about the person I am most afraid of becoming facing the thing I most fear armed only with the income I fear will be mine.

I felt like I was watching a well-produced nightmare, a futuristic horror show where between the ticket booth and my seat they somehow uploaded my most well-repressed fears, strung them together into a coherant narrative, and got incredibly talented actors to play out every nuance.

All in all, even if you're not me, it's still a pretty despressing film. Wendy and Jon have to warehouse their dad in an east coast nursing home just in time for the holidays, and they fight and bicker and bend under the guilt of not being able to provide for their father. Luckily (unluckily?), the nursing home stay proves to be fleeting. After just a few weeks there, dad dies.

The Savages return to their respective homes. Jon has allowed the deportation of his Polish girlfriend, Wendy has broken it off with her neighbor, and both are banished to the Desert of the Sexless.

Here, thankfully, the movie takes pity on its abused viewer and allows for one of those "light-hearted" tragic-comic endings:

The last scene is a rehersal of Wendy's autobiographical play. In it, an actor playing her father slaps a boy playing her brother again and again, until the boy rises up, angel-like, over stage. Cut to Jon crying in the audience. Cut to Wendy walking him to a cab. He's on his way to Poland, her play was really, really good, and he will be back opening night. They have one of those tender film moments, one of those shared small smiles, in which the audience realizes that they will be ok, that will not kill themlseves, that while life is hard and their parents are dead, at the very least they have each other.

And this is where I started to cry. The happy ending. Because even worse than seeing my failed dreams and dying parents in Technicolor was being reminded that when I get the call, when I go to Arizona, when I research "assisted living facilities" out of my price range, I will be alone. I will be A McLeod. I will have lost my "s," my plurality, the one thing that kept The Savages from being the most depressing movie made since Schindler's List.

GTD from 724***6601:
FWD:FWD:FWD:FWD:FWD: u send fwds u better send this one if u dont u will never get a fwd again and 2008 will suck send to 15 people in the next 10 min HURRY UP!

Obama Looks Like God

I woke up late this morning. It was freezing outside and warm in bed, I didn't have to work, so I just lay there and thought about Barack Obama.

I was so excited. There was a fuzziness in my belly like there used to be Christmas morning, and I pulled the covers up and fantasized about a sparkling, environmentally-sensitive utopia of postgraduate health care, student loan forgiveness, and generous, renewable, minority-friendly artists' grants.

I know I'm being naive, but I can't help it. I really do think he might be a biracial superhero come to save the world. I mean, just look at him.

Doesn't he look a little like God? Or at least like Morgan Freeman playing God?

So Happy New Year, America! Considering that I'm guaranteed not to lose another sibling, 2008 is already going to kick 2007's ass in my book. But with Obama barreling his black self towards the White House, we all may be about to watch the making of history, and 2008 could be one of those years we talk about for the rest of our lives.

A Good Cause

After Kyle died, I sort of opted out of any familial logistical decisions. At the hospital, as they prepared my brother for organ donation, my parents asked me simple questions about burial, funeral, and memorial arrangements, and the only thing I knew for sure was that I wanted a grave to visit. But everything else - death certificates and headstones and slideshows and biographies - I stayed out of. It just all felt so exhausting.

So maybe that's why it didn't occur to me until now to post something about the scholarship fund my parents established in Kyle's name. It's called the San Francisco State University Kyle Campbell Whitham McLeod Scholarship in Latin American History, and it was set up to provide some relief to “students experiencing financial hardship and enable them to continue on their path towards graduation.” Kyle talked a lot about the growing cost of state education in California, about how friends of his were being priced out of what is supposed to be affordable public education, so I know he would be proud that an annual scholarship in his name will help other students in his major get through school.

Thanks to the generosity of friends and family (and my parents' unions), we've already received the minimum amount needed to establish an endowment. The more contributions we get, though, the larger the annual scholarship amount, and the more help a needy kid gets each year.

SO, if you haven't already, please consider donating.

Make checks payable to the SF State Foundation, and make sure to designate that it is a donation to the Kyle McLeod Scholarship Fund. Mail donations to:

San Francisco State University
Office of Development – ADM 153
1600 Holloway Avenue
San Francisco, California
94132

Past and future donors, thank you!

GTD from 818***7818:
Ur mom hates you

The Taiwanese Are Nothing Like Us

Christmas is over. Thank God. Let's move on.

In this era of global warming, global villages, and global economies, it's easy to get caught up in all the We Are One hype. But I'm here to remind you that we are not one. We are separate and distinct, we are nothing like our neighbors. Unspeakable customs, incomprehensible people, and absolutely disgusting dishware can be found all over this wide, wide world.

Take Taiwan, for instance. In Kaohsiung, Taiwan, there's an eatery called the Marton Theme Restaurant. Marton is a derivative of the Chinese word matong. Can you guess what that means? That's right, toilet. Matong means "toilet."

I have no explanation, but Eric Wang does. He's the 26-year-old founder of Marton Theme Restaurant.

"Most customers think the more disgusting and exaggerated, the funnier the dining experience is.”

And while I would be quick to point out that he is wrong, that disgusting is not funny and funny does not make for fine dining, that eating mock shit out of a mock toilet is only slightly less horrible than eating real shit out of a real toilet, it seems the residents of Taiwan would disagree with me.

Due to its popularity, Mr. Wang was able to open a second Marton restaurant just seven months after the first.

I don't know about you, but for me, suddenly the gulf between the Israelis and Palestinians, the Sunnis and Shia, the Democrats and Republicans seems not just understandable, but inevitable.

What a world.

Blue Santa

They found this in Ohio a few years ago. Leave it up to the Germans to come up with a mascot for the sadder side of Christmas.

Froehliche Weihnachten everybody!

Blue Christmas

I just got home from Christmas with my dad. We went ice skating in Central Park, trailed Leann's well-bundled grandkids through an amazing throng of foreigners to see the Big Tree, and had coco and pizza and presents under a decorated palm in the hotel suite.

It was a really lovely evening.

Now I'm home in pj's, The Godfather's on, and my Google searches show a number of permutations of "dead" and "Christmas." So I thought I'd post this. Not because I'm miserable, but because in the back of my mind even on my best days there's a soft blue whisper, a reminder that the hardest time to be sad is when you are expected to be happy.

Firsts

1. I just got a new cell phone. My old one was this overpriced piece of crap and when you called me it sounded like I was in the middle of a tornado. So I went to Verizon and, in exchange for promising to pay them an exorbitant monthly fee well into my thirties, they gave me a new phone for free.

Get excited.

The woman at Verizon was really nice, but she couldn't change transfer my contacts from my old phone to my new phone - I guess she was missing a cord? - so when I got home I went through my old phone manually. I just transfered the necessities. Mom, Dad, friends, etc. It was kind of fun, my new phone has a QWERTY keyboard that I just love, but then I got to the K's.

Kyle's number.

What should I do with Kyle's number? Transferring it seemed weird, but not transferring it, just throwing my phone away without recording it, that felt like a loss. An unnecessary loss. And we've had enough of those.

So here:

310.422.5644





310.422.5644


310.422.5644

310.422.5644

310.422.5644
310.422.5644
310.422.5644

2. This will be my first Christmas without a stocking, my first Christmas in New York, the first Christmas I won't have to give my brother a present. The last, I have to say, is a relief.

Kyle was impossible to shop for. He was a semi-socialist who sneered at baubles and only wanted really expensive electronic equipment or music that I could never be cool enough to have heard of.

I bought him novels he wasn't interested in. I bought him art supplies and alcohol.

Now, I won't have to guess at what he'll like. Now, he won't have to assure me that it was fine, really. That he appreciated it.

3. I heard an organ donor story on This American Life last week. A girl who's heart came from a murdered boy finally met his family. I cried louder than I thought I would. I so, so, so very much want to meet the recipients of Kyle's organs.

Someone is walking around with my brother's eyes.

I'm Feeling Ambivalent About New York - Part II

I avoid Midtown.

Not completely - no one can avoid Midtown completely - but I do my best. Sure, I've been to a few plays there, I had a couple friends who lived unsettlingly close to Times Square and once, for reasons not quite clear to me, I ended up doing yoga under the Cup O'Noodles billboard, but mostly I've managed to stay away from that particular part of the city.

But last week my boss asked me to take a huge stack of papers up to 53rd and Park for signatures and what could I say? "Midtown's a little busy for me" is not a valid excuse at work.

So off I went. Here's what I was wearing: work boots, unfashionable jeans, a hoodie with cuffs so worn they look like lace, fingerless gloves left over from my smoking days, and a puffy, maroon Rocawear jacket that might be styling in Harlem, but is definitely not up to the rest of Manhattan's hipster code.

I got off the subway, climbed the stairs, and found myself headed east on a crosstown street that resembled nothing if not an Armani runway. Tailored suits, splashy ties, colored purses matched - but not too matched - with leather pumps. Pinstripes, lipstick, jewelry sets. Edgy buns, salads in plastic, shapeshifting cell phones. Diamonds and pearls and gold. And me dodging briefcases in my torn MFA chic, crooked glasses and all.

This alone wouldn't have phased me. I've spent years being underdressed around rich people. Besides, writers are allowed a certain nerdy carelessness, like we've just got too much going on to check a mirror on the way out the door. What got to me, what made me feel suddenly and strongly ambivalent about New York, even after all my gushing and my Metrocard miracle, was that those perfectly dressed people were just like me - twenty-somethings on $25-an-hour errands, everyone stern and eager, walking really, really fast, in desperate need of rent money.

And in that moment, I hated this place.

Young people here have to work so hard. Our rent is more than our parents' mortgage. We spend more on food than most families of four. Why else would we go to such ridiculous lengths? Matching pearls? Dry cleaning bills? Humanitarian dreams reduced to zeros? In our twenties? Even those of us wandering the creative path are only plunging further into graduate debt, grasping laughably at the slim Lotto shot of paying it back in less than forty years. We were all so desperate that Midtown afternoon, pounding down 53rd, jostling at lights for a position out front, determined to show our bosses, each other, how worth it we were.

As I neared Park Ave, a girl came towards me in a a fitted gray suit, hair and heels high, cell phone squeezed between her shoulder and cheek. She was carrying four Starbucks coffees, three shopping bags, a five-inch three-ring binder, and her purse. Which matched her shoes. "Of course," she was saying into her phone. "Whole grain, dijon, chicken breast." She looked like she was about to cry.

I almost stopped her.

"Hey," I wanted to say. "It's okay. I don't know how I'm going to make it to Friday, either. And even though my feet hurt less than yours, and your bank account is less terrifying than mine, at the end of the day we're all just getting coffee for some rich guy.

"We can live here, we can swing rent, we might even manage health insurance, but God forbid we mistake this city for a place that wants us. New York doesn't want us. If it wanted us, you wouldn't be dressed like your mother, I wouldn't be dressed like a bum, and living here amidst the millionaires wouldn't feel so much like begging."