Siamo arrivati a Roma! A protest is being staged outside my window, or a crowd of drunken people are singing on our street. Anyhow, local color.

We finally made it, if three hours late. Our plane spent over an hour taxi-ing around the Madrid runway, and then we were held up at baggage claim. It's just hard for fourteen musicians to get all their instruments and things, especially when there is a crowd of families waiting at the luggage belt like they're moshing - lots of elbows and shoulders to get through.

The Rome airport is nothing fancy, but did the job. A very effective barista made me an espresso in about eight seconds, and it was yum (is that not foodie language enough? i mean, it had a light head, and a fruitiness that didn't overwhelm the base). He made the guys at Oslo around the corner from me, whom i love, look like American amateurs.

Oh, it's my turn to shower! Allora, um momento.

"Flower power, but very well organized." -- the bandleader Vittorio, describing Festival Med, in Loule, Portugal

the madrid airport has the best pillars. In pantone hues, they stretch across the terminal like the ribs of an abstract dinosaur.

i don't know what this says about portugal, but this is the best thing I've seen so far on our trip! loule, a town an hour from lisbon, where mauro played his first show, was a little resort town. It has a Moorish influence and seemed interesting, but we stayed at a hilton resort that might as well have been in vegas. then, we went straight to festival med, the five day festival where just four nights before, buena vista social club had played.

The festival featured cobbled streets, winding alleys covered with flowered fabric, and hippie artisans selling handcrafts.

The music is as follows. Take an indigenous Italian musical tradition with origins in shamanic ritual. Then add two drum kits, a soprano sax, and an electric violin. Top it off with a bandleader who happens to be the drummer from The Police. Yup, that's it.


(M's watch blending, chameleon-like, into the Madrid Airport)

what do I, a world-weary book nerd with an asian face, have to do with a traveling Taranta ensemble? I've just started grappling with this question, as I'm celebrating the fourth of july by following an entourage of Italian gypsy musicians (and a Brazilian percussionist) through five european cities.

I hope things are not as grim as I fear. i've been telling myself that if all communication and interaction breaks down by day three, then I am allowed to be a horrible American, hide in my hotel room, and get my way by throwing currency at locals. Moreover, during performance days, I am allowed to sit in the green room drinking complimentary San Pellegrino, avoid eye contact with the musicians' whose food I'm eating, and spend the performance in a dark corner, napping.

Mauro won't care as long as I am pliant and offer sex after the shows. This, I can do. I LOVE hotel sex.

look what i got in my inbox this morning:

i love it, except i would never marry a "mario"! I would only marry a Mauro.

everything else is true.

(minutes by jonathan seneris)

voicemail i sent mauro this morning at 4:55 am Seattle time:

"Hey, it's me.
It's 7:55 in the morning
- mmm -
I wanted to wake you up.
and bother you.
even though i know you're sick...
- mmm -
okay...call me...
no, DON'T call me.
- mmm -
i think you're stupid.
...
(hang up)

note: M spent a fourteen hour overnight drive from Red Rock Colorado to Portland Oregon in his bunk not sleeping, but catching the bus driver's flu virus.

Yesterday felt like summer for a change. While standing on 13th street, I ran into a friend from college who was visiting from Boston. We walked over to the the Czech café on Perry St. and drank watermelon juice.

We talked about: Japanese and Korean love suicides, whether Haruki Murakami is a Japanese author or an international author, the appearance of the city of Boston in Banana Yoshimoto's second novel, the static nature of Japanese storytelling, and Noh theatre.

This reminded me of college.

I took an East Asian Lit class in my first semester. For a while, the professor was also my advisor. She was tiny, had a dove white bob, and had been trained at Yale. She also smoked, even though she must have been about over fifty. I hadn't handed in my final paper in the course; I was starting my protracted hike towards eventual academic probation several years down the road.

The woman had me in for an advisor meeting. Her eyes were tired but concerned. If I recall, she had her own troubles with her own children. I sat in the wood chair next to her desk and looked morose. She observed, "I think you are acting self-destructively."

This is the beginning of the final paper I eventually wrote for her:

My Korean mother says Chinese people are dirty and rude. She also says that the Japanese are opportunistic and shallow. She reflects the attitude of most Koreans: their neighbors to their left are uncouth, while their neighbors to the right are parasitic. “Those people are so different from me,” they think, and of course, different usually means inferior.

My mother is speaking from one culture, looking at two other cultures which, though they may seem similar from a Western standpoint, are completely dissimilar. These outer differences lead my mother to assume that the people are inherently different as well. In the same fashion, it is easy to be staggered by differences when reading works from different cultures.

The Story of the Stone and The Tale of Genji come from very different authors with very distinct agendas, who existed in completely different nations and time periods, and operated under unique value systems. As representatives of their culture, the one and the other are as different as night and day, or at least seem so. Yet were these two citizens of different lands to take a good look at each other, they would see a familiar face.

Do you guys remember the word “inherently”? Ha ha haaaa.

things i overheard at the coffee shop this morning:

"I feel like there are so many cupcake places nowadays!"

"But I can eat a cupcake. I don't have food issues or anything."

ugh, this is the kind of thing i overhear when I'm feeling lonely.

Yesterday, i told my friend's older sister that I'm traveling next week to see m while he's working, and she said, "Oh, you're totally a groupie."

It's kind of like how my dad feels about M too. He thinks he's totally wrong for me, because he's a musician, he's too old, etc. None of that stuff bothers me. I like that he's older, that he's a musician. Same facts, different point of view.

Family, though, isn't a game with winners and losers.

A few years ago, we tried to play a board game as a family. It was a game we didn't know how to play very well, that my dad was trying to teach us. But instead of teaching us, he just told us what strategy to play, and how many moves to make with our pieces. By the end of the the game, my father was just playing himself. My father was terrified that one of us would lose. That's how much he cares.

i felt sorry for a man in our writing workshop. he's someone I disliked from the beginning, for all the reasons that a youngish woman of color would dislike an over-friendly older white man who keeps hitting on her twenty-two year old friend who his daughter's age. but when we finally had a conversation about writing, I understood him better.

he's in his late fifties. He's an ER doctor. He said he always wanted to be a writer, and I think by "writer" he meant "great novelist." He actually went into ER medicine specifically so that he would have enough hours to work on his writing. But then he said, the money was tempting, to take an extra shift here, and there. He said, I think I made the wrong decision.

I mentioned that my fiance was a musician. He nodded his head knowingly. "As a musician, you're lucky to have a job," he said. ("Fuck you," I thought).

He read a few pages of his work at the student reading. It was not great.

My friends, my friends, if you love something, do it. Do not twiddle around with a career to make money just so you can give your daughters white bread educations. Do not become an old weird man who does not even notice when he is being weird and making people his daughter's age feel very uncomfortable, because he is so distracted by his being a literary failure.

sometimes I think I could be like that guy. someone who is so sure he has time to be an artist later that he ends up growing old and getting too tired. that's why I have to remember how sad he was, how wrong it would be to end up that way.

i just had a profound thought.

why don't we have nature shows, but instead of lions or meerkats, use babies?

baby behavior is just as weird and unpredictable.

and they move slowly, and it's really hypnotizing to watch.

arrrrrrg i CAN'T figure out how to upload this two minute video of baby walter exploring my kitchen like a little dinosaur.

this will have to do.

ah, joan acocella was wise when she told us writers, "don't drink at the desk."

it is just too easy this way.

i ran into my old friend woody on the subway tonight. he was wearing wonderful oversized hipster glasses. really, he looked great. he told me that he does video production. and then i wondered, should I get coffee with him, and do my due diligence "pre journalism school networking"?

but then i realized, woody is my friend. i don't fucking need to network him. i knew him when we were all in college, which, i realize more and more now, is golden cred. you can't make that shit up.

but the broader question is about video.

i mean, i know i have to learn about this shit. Video is the future of news. period. Ugh.

http://openvideoconference.org

so i think i might go to this and learn about it.

gotta grow up sometime.

come with me! it's friday thru sunday.

UPDATE: I went to two talks, and it was pretty neat. The people who brought us Mozilla Firefox gave a talk. Top 5 quotes:
5) "By 2013, 90% of all internet traffic will be video."
4) "Youtube is bigger than its sixty-four competitors combined."
3) The choice of video delivery format is "a clear decision we have to make a group, as a populace."
2) The Mozilla people REALLY BELIEVE that "we need to move the market to open video." Fuck MPEG, they say. "Take video out of the plug-in prism."
1) "Technology matters."

i feel bad right now.

it's the last day of my writer's colony, and i'm sad.

i really liked it, the whole thing, the whole process. it made me a better writer, and a better listener. it also taught me how to be a student, a happy one!

and now it's ending. i feel a little panicked.

there's a student reading in an hour, and i don't even want to go! i'm too sad.

but i'd be even sadder if it didn't go. i hope everyone from my class goes.

non-fiction represent!

UPDATE: The reading was great. Non-fiction killed. Man, every day the universe tells me more and more that fiction is a dead man walking.

For a few minutes on Friday it was sunny.

while eating lunch at a cafe, i found the Guardian and started reading it.  

I thought, English press uses very boring language, so polite that it's hard to understand.  

also, a cartoon called "Claire in the Community":

Jokes can often reveal more when they're not funny, eh?

also, there was a CV of the new ministry of health, who's only thirty-six years old. Under "hobbies" was listed "indie music."

aw, me too.

Today I saw Joan Acocella give a talk.  She's the first New Yorker writer I've ever met.  When she signed my book, she asked me if my name was Vietnamese.  When I corrected her, she shrugged philosophically and said, "Someday we'll know all these names."

Good for you, Joan.  

She's sixty-four.  The last great artist she profiled, Louise Bourgeois, was ninety at the time, and possibly at the height of her powers.   

Here's to female longevity, may it last and last.  

Today I sat in a room all day with writers and thought about writing.
It was wonderful and terrifying.

Someone said something that nearly broke my heart:

"I think everyone ought to write, but not everyone ought to publish."

Then, later, people tearing down a published writer just because they are intimidated by her erudition and her style!  No psychoanalyst needed to see what's going on.  

Also, I committed one grave sin I need to confess.

There is a sweet girl with a bob and neat part who asks long questions
in a singsong voice. I have a suspicion that my barely disguised
aggressive qualities make her uncomfortable.

On the way down in the elevator,she politely said hello to me, but she
called me by the wrong name.

I said, "I'm sorry but that's not my name. There's another Asian girl
in the class who's named Dana."

She looked bewildered. She's from the Midwest, ill-equipped to handle
the manipulation of liberal white guilt by opportunistic minorities.
Even minor minorities, like Asians.

Ah, now I feel better.

Do you still like me?

Good night and let us all pray for sunshine!

i'm suddenly starving, even though we ate two hours ago.  we're going a mexican restaurant.

right now m is giving directions to his brazilian friends who are meeting us there.  

i love hearing someone speaking in a foreign language to other people speaking in a foreign language.  It's my favorite kind of white noise.  

fancy makeup, fourteen hours later.

(make-up: Stephanie Mason, Nars) 

i like h o n e y. 

i put it on my toast, i put it in my tea, i put it in my heart.

thoughts i completely identified with from sarah manguso, beautiful writer and kind, kind soul:

"I write shy."

"I get very overwhelmed by content.  I can only focus on thiiis much at a time."

"I like to compress everything I know into as small a space as I can."

As opposed to being artistic and free feeling, "I'm more like an engineer."  

"My decisions are intuitive rather than intellectual."

"I didn't have to try to be funny in this book."  (interesting, because it was very funny)

procrastinating by considering: 

genius white boyz

dancehall killaz, and 

de-fi-ni-tion.

"Every word is a muscle."

-- describing the best parts of The Two Kinds of Decay, a memoir by Sarah Manguso, a poet who survived a deadly illness.

oh karla (real name), you inspire me so much. 

At my current favorite new york city shop, opening ceremony, I noticed these strange little bags that looked like backpacks for little northern european children. 

The bags are made by heritage Swedish company Fjällräven.  Originally manufactured fifty years ago for hikers, they have a strap design that can be adjusted for children.  In person, the waxed canvas bags have a lived-in, wrinkly sheen.  

I see these as a solution to a conundrum I've been noticing around town - the tyranny of the MANY BIG BAGS.  Lately, girls ride the subway looking like clean homeless people.  

Better just to wear a bookbag, and hold it all in there.  

UPDATE: I saw a girl in multi-colored sneakers holding a mini gray Fjallraven today.  It looked sober and sexy, especially compared to the Forever 21 she was standing outside of.  

cebollitas garrais especiale  

early saturday morning, i went to the museum of modern art.  I hung upside down, and saw the veiny undersides of young flowers.  

yes, it was kind of dreamy.  

(photo: Lucas Lai)