books & books

1. is a great bookstore here in Miami

2. today at lunch i chatted with Lori who is a Public Ally (Americorps program run through HSC).  We ended up talking about books and writing, because Lori writes (but she says she only does it for herself unless shes writing speeches which she likes to do. i’ve never considered writing a speech before.  really the only speech i’ve written was my graduation speech which i remember having a lot of trouble with because i just wanted it to be perfect, and I think I got a lot of help/editing/inspiration from my parents and Andy).  Turns out Lori recently saw Sue Monk Kidd do a reading at a church, which is funny because I just saw Anita Diamant read at a temple.  It sounds like she’s read almost all of Kidd’s books, including  The Secret Life of Bees which is the only one that I have read.  She recommended The Mermaid Chair. But this reading apparently was Kidd and her daughter, Ann Kidd Taylor, who co-wrote the new book Traveling With Pomegranates.  Lori got a signed copy, just as I did for Diamant’s Day After Night.

3. Lori recommended that I read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

4. Last night I finished Day After Night. It was good, not as good as I remember The Red Tent being, but still good.  And the first book of my choosing I’ve finished since The History of Love by Nicole Krauss in February. Now I’m going to start The Writing Life by Annie Dillard, which I’ve read parts of and been meaning to read in its entirety probably since I went to OA in 2005.

walkin on, walkin on, broken glaaaaass

And by that I mean walking on sand, which is basically broken glass, right? And by that I mean going to the beach.  Which I did today for the first time.  Isn’t that ridiculous?  It took me two weeks in Miami to set foot on a beach.  After today, I’m not sure why it took me that long.

My intention was to go to a yoga class that would start at 6PM on third street in South Beach.  I drove down third, parked, paid the meter (I have learned to always carry change) and walked across a park onto the sand.  I was on the phone and when I first looked up and saw the ocean, it took all my resolve not to immediately hang up and run into the water.  People say that California beaches are to die for, but where I live in California, beaches are the polar opposite of what I saw in Miami.  As much as Half Moon Bay is about surfing with your wetsuit on, wading through kelp, trying not to smash into rocky cliffs, and maybe seeing a sea otter, Miami Beach is about shallow water, clean sand, warm enough to swim naked, clear blue, flat flat flat (but there were lifeguards all the same), and populated with swimmers, joggers, tanners, splashers, and people cruising around on these cool surfboard things that you stand up on and paddle in flat water.

It took me less than ten minutes of half-heartedly searching for the yoga class before I decided to get in the water.  Luckily I had my yoga clothes with me so I was able to plunge right in and still have a dry change of clothes in my bag.

The temperature was so perfect that I didn’t even notice it; instead, my first observation was how salty the water was.  I had been swimming in the Atlantic recently in Ogunquit, Maine, and I don’t remember the water being so salty there.  My only guess is that since it was so warm the flavor of the salt wasn’t masked by the cold.  But who knows.  After I got over the taste, all I could do was float and swim and handstand and float some more.  It was beautiful.

It’s a strange feeling to look across a body of water and know what you’d hit if you swam in a straight line.  In California, I know that Hawaii and Asia and various other islands are out there, but the Pacific is so big that it seems desperately far away.  Maybe just knowing that people had crossed from Cuba to Miami on rafts made the distance seem all the shorter.  Of course, Cuba was probably more south of where I was, but it was a strange feeling nonetheless to look out at the water and think that there was something else not so far away.

On my way back to the car, a man on rollerblades stopped me.

“You’re not from here,” he said.

Of course this made me uncomfortable– did I really look that much like a tourist?

“No I’m not, why?”

He grinned. “Me neither. I am from Italy.  Where are you from?”

“California” I replied.

The man went on to say that I looked European, he wasn’t sure why, just something about me.  He told me to go to Italy; they would love my freckles.  As if I hadn’t heard the line about the freckles before.  Then he said I looked like I was from Switzerland, which I’m hoping was a good thing.  He guessed that I’m 20, which will be true on Monday, and said that I was “so Californian” as I started to walk towards Daniella’s Prius, the stereotypical energy-conscious Californian car.  He said he hoped I enjoyed my swim, I must have been one of the few who were swimming at nearly 7pm, and we shook hands and he rollerbladed away.  As I was about to drive away, I noticed him speeding back down the sidewalk.

“Hey.  My transportation is more fuel efficient than yours,” he said.

“Oh yeah?  What, you mean your rollerblades?”

“No.” He grinned.  “At home I have a donkey.”

yet another blog

This is ridiculous considering the fact that I am new to blogging and resisted the idea until very recently.

I have made a recipe/food/cooking blog.  Click the link and read the explanation on the blog itself.  I decided to do it on blogspot, not wordpress, because I know it’s the other popular blogging site, perhaps even more popular than wordpress, and I want to compare and see what’s better, or worse, about it.

blogging for HSC

First of all, in case I haven’t yet included it yet, here’s the website for the Human Services Coalition, the nonprofit I’m working for this semester:

www.hscdade.org

I recently attended the Miami-Dade county budget hearing.  To learn more about that, and read one of my first ever pieces of journalistic writing, click below.

You can read it on facebook, or on Ning, a blogging network for nonprofits.

Let me know what you think!

discipline

Tonight I went to Temple Israel where Anita Diamant was reading from her new book, Day After Night (which I now have a beautiful, smooth, signed hardcover copy of).  She talked and read and answered questions.  The “Oprah assistants” as she called them passed around microphones, and I asked her about her writing practices.  She said they are centered around discipline, the morning, walking her dog, and caffeine.  These are things I knew already (not about her specifically, but about writing) but it’s always nice to hear some verbal confirmation.  It’s also nice to see writers as human beings, not some sort of artistic gods.  Makes it seem more doable.

And check it, she has a blog too:

http://www.anitadiamant.blogspot.com/

But then again, who doesn’t these days?

She closed by reading a new Billy Collins poem from his 08 book Ballistics.  I can’t remember what the poem was, but I remember liking it, and I also vaguely recall Rick (my poetry teacher for Poetry in Service to Schools and the Community) strongly disliking Billy Collins.

The other thing she said that struck me were:

1. That she doesn’t read other fiction while she’s writing fiction, as she’s afraid of unconsciously borrowing from it.  She said her writer friends feel the same way.

2. That she began as a journalist and that’s where she learned her discipline, as she had to constantly write to a deadline in order to get paid and eat.  Seems simple enough. But she also said she has a hard time planting herself in a chair, and wastes a lot of time, as we all seem to do.  But checking in with friends seems to help.

I guess what was the best was that there was absolutely nothing extraordinary about her.  She was just a regular looking woman, talking about writing practices I was familiar with, and explaining her Jewish heritage and background.  She was no diety, she was no crazed artist, she was neither heartless hermit not passionate idealist.  She was just a woman named Anita who happened to have had enough discipline to commit to what she really wanted to accomplish.

sex on the beach, facing the cross

The title of this post is a direct quotation.  Allow me to explain.

I’ve been in Miami for 6 days and have been trying to explore the area.  This past weekend, I looked in the paper at the calendar section to see if there was anything interesting going on, and came across a dance class being held at a church Monday nights.  The ad said the class would be featuring the music of DJ Victor and all levels were welcome.  Naturally, reading such a thing as “DJ Victor,” I pictured hip hop, maybe jazz, anything funky.  Wrong.

I met Victor as he was sweeping the room before the class began.  He was about 82 years old and drooling a little bit out of the right side of his mouth.  As he explained that most people arrived late to the class, it quickly became apparent to me that he was hard of hearing, as he was really shouting at me rather than talking to me.

Enter Trudy, who I spent about half an hour arranging ice cubes, cookies, and Cheeto puffs with on little trays and in buckets.  She covered each tray with a bowl so that no men could sneak into the kitchen and eat before they were done dancing.

At this point, I have to admit, I almost left.  Actually, I almost left before the class even started, as I had arrived early and according to Victor the rest of the people wouldn’t be there for at least half an hour.  As with most things, I’m glad I stuck it out.

People filtered in and as I introduced myself and attempted to make small talk while ignoring the fact that I was the youngest in the room by at least 35 years.  I recieved multiple warnings that the teacher was a drill sergeant, that she would yell if I made a mistake, but that she was really a very good teacher.  Whatever, I thought.  I’ve had my share of being yelled at by dance teachers.

Turns out the teacher wasn’t too bad and I ended up having little to do with her as a nice guy named Bob quickly took me under his wing and taught me swing, then fox trot, and then a little bit of rumba and tango.  Who’d have ever thought I’d learn to fox trot?  Both Bob and I agreed it’s a little boring.  He said he and his dancing partner usually prefer tango, then swing, then waltz.  He was pretty excited when, after 15 years, his teacher had taught him how to pull his partner between his legs, a classic swing move.  I thought back to my days in my high school Dance Ensemble, learning ridiculous partner lifts on the fly and being paired with big football players who scared the crap out of me as a freshman.

Then we broke for snacks (Trudy begrudgingly uncovered the trays) and it was time for line dancing.  The electric slide was easy for me, although I can tell you that we do it with a little more pizzaz at camp than these people could muster.  Next was: sex on the beach!  Which is a line dance, apparently, and was actually pretty fun.  The moment of hilarity came when Trudy was calling out the name of the dance as she had been doing for all of the line dances, and which wall to face (face the wall with the clock, or face the wall with the cross), which came out, as you already know, as “sex on the beach, facing the cross.”  The women found this hilarious. I recognised one woman who was guffawing particularly loudly as the woman who had been earlier described as “the heavyset woman” by one of the older ladies.  I can’t remember the last time I heard a person describe somebody as “heavyset,” and I almost choked on my flat Diet Coke when she said it.

So that was one adventure in my Miami saga.  More to come (I hope).  Maybe tomorrow I’ll backtrack and write about everything that’s happened between camp and now… but that would be a lot to tell.