film & lit crit

went to see mail order wife this rainy sunday after brunch in dogpatch. thumbs up, from this movie reviewer who sees about two flicks a year in the theatre. i think this one was well-suited to the fake documentary format, seeing as it sometimes makes you forget you're watching a fiction. i liked it. am still thinking about it because it surprised me due to its realism (as i perceived it), viewed differently in the beginning than at the end. i felt sympathetic to most of the characters. it's playing at the lumiere in SF until tomorrow (thursday), then i guess it's going to kansas city?

in other bland and mediocre movie review news, i wrote a fluffy, navel-gazing blurb for the latest issue of kitchen sink. but the articles are superb, ranging from the intersex movement (have you read middlesex? you should), to an examination of costa rica's politics and environmental preservation, to a handy guide matching prescription drugs with the appropriate cinematic complement. plus there are drawerings and paintings and fiction and essays.

and speaking of essays and intersexuality (man, how this all ties together)... my roommate V has his father visiting this week. dad is a retired english professor in his late 80s who is widely read; he's spent his time here in studio four poring over the pink pages for concerts and plays to attend, then spending most evenings taking in the theatre, etc. at first i seemed to be an insignificant blip on his radar, and in fact he intimidated me with his vast knowledge and loud, stern voice – he's pretty blunt. but sharp at the same time, a ha! when we got to talking over coffee one of those first mornings, he was telling me about this famous travel writer, possibly the most famous of this century. lives in wales. paul theroux? i asked doubtfully. he couldn't live someplace as boring as wales. not pico iyer, who's not the most famous, and anyway who splits his time between SB and japan and how come no one i know has his phone number?

the dad couldn't remember the name of this famous writer, so we moved on to some other topic (actually he moved on and i nodded and learned). the identifying characteristic of this writer was that she'd started out as a man and is now a woman. she had lifetime gender identity issues, always thinking she'd been born into the wrong body, but she grew up and lived as a man and married. eventually she made the decision to begin hormone therapy and live as a woman and have the sexual reassignment surgery somewhere mid-career.

this story, chronicling a visit to morocco for the surgery, is four pages long in a book spanning fifty years of illustrious travel-writing essays she wrote, from 1950 to 2000, for major newspapers (the times of london and the guardian) and magazines. the book is called the world by jan morris (formerly james), and i was presented with this book as a surprise gift from the dad the next day. how sweet is that? in return i am treating him with homemade 8-grain muffins.

ow. that's my nose hitting the grindstone.

boys give me food

because he is so big and mean-looking, dos equis sometimes works the door at a certain bar in the lower haight. because he is so sweet (and not really mean-looking), he brought me lunch today before going to work: toasted pita bread with homemade hummus, tzatziki, and a tomatoey kinda sauce, plus a bottle of not-homemade cabernet. and he carried it up here in a picnic basket! after driving over the bay in the dumping rain and howling wind, even! (OK, he didn't have to drive in it, but it was out there before and during.)

after giving me powerful garlic breath and a red wine buzz in the middle of the afternoon when i am supposed to be stringing coherent words together for publication, he kissed me goodbye and i climbed the stairs to my loft and noticed this little treat that's been sitting on the corner of my desk since i unpacked from vietnam.

two days before i left VN, i flew back to saigon from the north. since i'd allowed myself to spend 'frivolously' on material evils this trip, i'd acquired enough stuff to warrant two daypacks in addition to my big pack; ie, more than i could fit on the back of a motorbike for the 45-minute trip from the airport to phuong & francois' house. so i took a minivan-taxi. we merged into midday traffic and wound up on phan dang luu, a major thoroughfare. so there we sat, inching painfully slowly down this major, congested boulevard, and my driver offered me some candy.

in a typically quick, unsmiling, businesslike way, he pressed a couple of plastic-wrapped pieces into my palm.
'mang cau. very good,' he said. 'you know?'
'yes, i know it. i love mang cau,' i said, unwrapping a piece though with an impending migraine i didn't particularly want to eat it.
'special for tet,' he said.

i popped the sticky candy into my mouth. mang cau is one of my favorite tropical fruits – my first taste of it was after a wedding in a village in the very rural long an province, in the mekong delta. after the wedding ceremony, the friends i had come with decided to go wandering around the market, for lack of entertainment. i was happily operating in tourist mode with my point-and-shoot, snapping narrow boats on the water, a kid climbing up a tree to knock down some longan fruit, wooden houses. but they brought me along a-marketing and one of them asked if i'd ever tried the scaly green fruit i'd often seen in markets. no, i hadn't, i told her, and she promptly bought half a kilo.

she took one out of the bag, rubbing her thumb against the powdery skin, which took off a couple of the green scales. see? she said, showing me how to get the skin off and handing it to me to try it myself. when i'd gotten half of it off, she told me to take a bite of the white, juicy flesh. just like that? i asked, a little hesitant. i sniffed it and took a bite. there's a reason it's called a custard apple in english – not so very appley in any way, but definitely custardy in texture, and mildly sweet. my friends laughed, pleased, like watching a baby try a new fruit and like it the first time.

the driver glanced over at me with something of the same look.
'it's so sweet!' i said, juggling the two smooth seeds in my mouth.
'no sugar,'* he said emphatically.

a woman who runs a guesthouse in nha trang, where i've stayed a few times, taught me how to make mango leather, and the mang cau candy tasted like it was made the same way. cooked with water, boiled down, dried in the sun. no sugar, but super-sweet.

in the taxi, i dropped the big black seeds into my palm and the driver briskly swiped them out of my hand to throw away for me. he grabbed a few more candies out of his stash and insisted i take them. he was serving me the way i'd be treated as a guest in his home, urging me to sample the treats brought out for guests, but doing it in a sort of gruff, male manner. when he dropped me off at the house, i thanked him profusely and wished him a happy new year as he hauled my huge bags out of the back, giving me the slightest smile and nod and driving away.




* pronounced 'SOO-guh' – i love that.

the writer in her garrett

i have only one pair of old clogs in which a toe has worn through, and it's not mid-winter in a drafty, bone-chilling attic in london, and no one is forcing me to live on watery gruel, and i am not dying of consumption, but feel sorry for me anyway! here i am working in my loft, surrounded by piles of scraps of paper on a beautiful, sunny sunday when people are supposed to be out hiking and having brunch and lying in the sun. also, i have a sty and am holding a soggy teabag to my eye because the internet has told me this is a good irish home remedy. see how caffeine fixes everything?

remedy

for some reason, when flying to asia i don't get serious jetlag. i'm sort of tired for a few days, but my circadian rhythms don't go all 'error number 011-.' flying back to north america is a different story. usually it takes a couple of weeks to get adjusted, and involves several days of groggily sleepwalking through daylight and several nights of lying wide awake in bed staring at the ceiling for hours, yearning for sleep to conk me on the consciousness with its sweet anvil.

whenever i go home to my parents' house, i devour all the issues of national geographic that've been published since i last visited. over the last holidays, i pored through one of their recent issues which had in it an article about the human love of caffeine. because i, too, love caffeine - o how i love it. for lots and lots of reasons it was an absorbing read, but the most practical bit of data i saved to my memory bank was this caffeine-assisted, jetlag-reducing strategy. WHY DIDN'T I THINK OF THAT?

it's my second day in california and i am ambulating around in the daytime and sleeping at nighttime already. i think the strategy is working (knock on blue desk), so i share it now with you: what you do, see, a few days before you board that transpacific flight, is quit drinking so much vietnamese coffee already! this is the hard part, because you love coffee so much, and the coffee there is the black viscosity of motor oil and tastes so bitterly delicious, and sometimes you just need to crouch on a tiny plastic sidewalk stool to recover from insane traffic and drink a 15-cent cup of the stuff. but you can quit anytime, right? then, after you've survived a few days caffeine-free and traveled through your time zones and arrived at your destination, you're supposed to dose yourself with small amounts of caffeine throughout the day. hooray!

yesterday i got to SF at 8:30am after four days without caffeine and three days of involuntary (but probably helpful) sleep deprivation. had a cup of coffee in the late morning and a soy mocha in the evening, and then went out to hear some music and drink some stella at the hotel utah (and get a parking ticket! welcome back to SF!), and then went to sleep at 2am and woke at the shockingly reasonable hour of 9:30am.

i'll keep you posted, but i think this might change my life.