Argh.

Take
your baby
outside.

I get it.
You paid for the movie
too.

However,
I did not pay
to listen to the movie
with your baby
as a soundtrack.

Take
your baby
outside.

I get it.
You like to eat out
too.

However,
I can't hear my friends
even if I sit on their laps
and I did not order screaming
as an appetizer.

Take
your baby
outside.

I get it.
You need to get your shopping done
too.

However,
perhaps you could come back
when your baby's face is less fuschia
and it doesn't feel like you're buying torture
as an item in your cart.

Take
your baby
outside.

I get it.
Babies cry.

But adults punch.

My Top 10 Favorite Foods that are Bad for You (aka, Why I Have to Run)

10.  M&M's pretzels.  I thought these were weird when they first came out.  I have now committed the (awesome) sin of eating an entire Target-sized bag by myself every time I buy it.  They are addictively delicious.

9.  Kettle corn.  Mrs. Silva and I bought a large bag at the EU game and demolished it.  Heaven.

8.  Chili's chicken enchilada soup.  I nicknamed it "crack."  'Nuff said.

7.  Grilled cheese sandwiches.  These might not be too bad, but they're just so much better with 18 slices of cheese and 4 pounds of butter.  I eat one every Saturday.  I have a salad on the side, so, you know, it's healthy.

6.  French fries with ranch dressing.  I mean, really, I could scarf down moldy butt with ranch dressing and it'd be delightful.  Ranch dressing makes the magic happen.

5.  Chocolate cake with chocolate frosting.  Especially when it's been chilled in the refrigerator.  The key is, eat right off the cake, then you can tell yourself you never had a slice.

4.  Chips and bean dip.  I ask for extra cheese.  And I eat a whole basket of chips by myself.  It's so weird that I'm never hungry by the time my real meal arrives...

3.  Sausage and olive pizza from Round Table.  They say you can stop at 2 pieces and be fine.  "They" are idiots.  I like to eat enough pizza to make myself throw up.  *Bonus* More room for more pizza!

2.  Carmelized apples with marshmallows.  This is a side dish at Thanksgiving, when, let's be honest, it should be a dessert.  However, I eat just this, maybe some turkey.  Apples are a fruit, so, sure, it's good for you.

1.  Chubby Hubby.  Come on.  Vanilla ice cream with a hot fudge and peanut butter swirl, dotted with chocolate-covered, peanut-butter-filled pretzels.  It's, like, everything thing on this list combined with angel dust and fairies.  Sprinkled with a rainbow.  And topped with Jake Gyllenhaal.

Coming clean

Yes.
It happened.

Lucky you,
to steal a piece of
who I was
when I was seven.

The girl in daddy's pigtails
who would skip
over to your house
and leave
with sagging shoulders
and unseen scratch marks
from your claws.

That little innocence
melted
with the burning flame
of your adult lust.

But I am the wick.

And though parts of me
drip away or
float wispy tentacles toward the sky--

I remain.


Yes,
it happened.
But I win.

So, let's get
This straight.  Thursday, vacation.  Friday, back to work?
Unbelievable.
People (aka, you, Miss-Calendar-Lady) need to get your
Idiotic head out of your
Douchy rear end and realize that your
Choice is severely affecting people (aka, me, Miss-Bitter) who really want to stay
Home, in my bed, curled up with kitties, until noon.
Obviously, logic
Is missing from this equation.
Come on, now.  Everyone has to see the stupidity in this.
Even you.

More from my book

They carried love letters, threatening letters, pencils, pens.  They carried bagged lunches, money for lunches, cards for free lunches, gum even though it was technically illegal at school, pictures of girlfriends, naked girlfriends, ex-girlfriends, journals, schoolbooks, steroids, drugs, numbers of drug dealers, numbers of colleges, a slip with an appointment for the career counselor, pamphlets for parties or scholarships or STD awareness.  They carried water bottles filled with water, some with vodka.  They carried Gatorade or Powerade.  They could only carry soda if they bought it off campus, since it had been determined too unhealthy to sell.  Joey Graziano carried Wu-Tang CDs.  Louisa Alvarez carried the results of her HIV test, which she hadn’t opened yet.  Alyshia LaFlamme carried around the wedding ring she’d bought herself on-line, which her boyfriend would give her at the end of May.   

Many things they had in common.  They carried the desire to fit in, to gain friends, to be well-liked, to be somebody.  They shared the stress of success, forced onto them by parents, peers, teachers.  Often they carried each other, the wounded, the weak, the beaten and bruised, the mentally-exhausted.  They carried Spanish-English dictionaries, guitars, yearbooks.  They carried diseases, herpes and Chlamydia.  They carried athlete’s foot, crabs, mono, staph infections.  They carried the school itself—Manteca High, the cement, the brick buildings—the red façade that had been erected nearly one hundred years earlier, when the town had been small and the school equipped to hold 1/10 the amount of students it now housed.  They carried the future.  The whole atmosphere was designed to send them off into the great blue abyss, and they carried the hopes and dreams and gravitas of those who would depend on them soon enough. 

They moved like sheep.  They would move from class to class, herding themselves down the long, skinny hallways, into stale classrooms, into seats that did not fit their bodies.  They moved like zombies.  In the morning, they would sit at their desks, dead, their achy, tired attitudes seeping out through the slits of their eyes.  After school, they would eat a second lunch, go drink with their friends, play football or baseball or soccer, start six hours of homework, baby-sit their younger siblings, work a six- or eight-hour shift.  Each day seemed the same—they got up, some at 5 a.m., some at 7:15 a.m., and rolled into school.  They went through the same seven periods.  They listened to the same jokes, the same lectures.  They saw the same people.  They wore the same clothes.  They drove the same cars.  They went to the same houses after school, hung out with the same friends.  It was a cycle, and they just plodded along, unthinking, watching their lives go by and waiting for them to finally get started.  They had no sense of accomplishment or purpose.  They sat in their desks, not knowing what to listen for, not knowing what to write down.  They read words they didn’t understand, and nodded mutely, dumbly at the teacher when asked if they understood.  They took tests on material they hadn’t learned, they filled in bubbles to determine their future.  The world was a big rush and a huge letdown, and the pressures were enormous and sometimes made it hard to breathe, made it hard to live, made it hard to be a teenager and find the time to enjoy the life they were waiting to start.  The teachers handed out worksheets and packets, the school received workbooks and pamphlets, and it just seemed like so much learning was happening and should happen, and they would look at the blank white pages and then turn around and throw them in the trash—for they certainly didn’t need anything extra to carry.

From my book

ENEMIES

            Jon Anaya and Miguel Salazar were born to hate each other.  Jon was a Sureno.  Miguel was a Norteno.  Their homeboys hated each other.  Their families dogged one another in the supermarket.  There had been vicious fights in local parks and empty streets.  Each of their friends had suffered a bruise or broken bone or stab wound or death.  I’d sat Jon and Miguel together in a group activity once and they had started angrily screaming at each other, letting everyone in the classroom, especially me, know that they couldn’t stand to be near the other, that they would never, ever, under any condition at all, share space.  I’d moved them apart quickly.  It was my first year of teaching and my heart would leap out of my chest whenever voices were raised.  All I  cared about was having a quiet classroom, an environment that appeared orderly, safe, where it appeared real learning could and would take place.  I thought learning could only take place in silence. 

            In any other classroom this eruption might have ended there.  But this was my classroom, and I discovered that I wasn’t comfortable with the idea that there could be two individuals who thought they hated each other so fiercely without knowing absolutely anything about the other.  Their hate was all in their heads, not in their veins.  They grew up accepting a certain reality that was grounded nowhere in my reality.   They couldn’t learn anything in my class if they thought they hated each other.  Instead of focusing on my work, their days were composed of glaring threateningly over at one another, throwing pen caps and wads of paper when they got a chance behind my back, tripping the other on his way to the pencil sharpener, knocking into each other as they left the class.  All that was on their minds was how to make the life of the other worse, which ironically was the most powerful thing they had in common.  No one else in my class could learn anything either while Jon and Miguel hated each other.  Instead of focusing on my work, their days were made up of shrinking in their desks as Jon made threats to bring a knife to school, or watching papers fly across the classroom behind my back, or laughing as one person got tripped.  And I couldn’t teach, because I couldn’t bring myself to believe that plot and characterization could help develop the future of a Norteno who was determined to be dead or in jail before he even left the 10^th grade. 

            I had to teach them that you had to learn to work with people you didn’t like.  I had to teach them that their hatred was grounded in the false beliefs of a group that would ruin them.  And I had to teach myself that I could.

            So I sat them together in another group activity.  They demanded separation.  I said their grade depended on them working together.  They both took the F.

            Days later, I sat them together again, warning that they would fail if they didn’t learn to work together.  They both took the F.

            I tried several more times with the same result, watching their grades tumble to the point where it would be almost impossible for them to have a chance at passing.  Frustrated at them and angry with myself, something must have snapped.  The next time I grouped them, and awaited the anticipated sounds of derision.  When it came, I shrugged and said, “Whatever.  You do the same as each other anyway, it’s surprising you don’t get along.”  They stopped short for a second and eyed me oddly before eyeing each other and finally sitting down on opposite sides of the group silently, arms crossed.  

            But they hadn’t moved.   

            The reading that day was about how prejudices were instilled through families, and the students needed to make a list of the beliefs that were handed down to them through their parents.  The other students came up with a considerable list as Jon and Miguel sat and stared at the clock. 

I sauntered up, touching Jon’s shoulder lightly, saying, “You haven’t added anything.” 

He swallowed and shook my hand off, simmering in his silence as I stood behind him for a few seconds before going off to check on another group.  When I came back, the word “Hatred” had been added.  I asked who had added it and Crystal nodded at Jon, whose eyes were carefully avoiding mine.  “Nice,” I concluded, and then looked at Miguel.  “What about you?” 

He sighed and shook his head, his knee bouncing up and down underneath the desk. 

“Come on, Miguel,” I prodded, “get yourself on that paper.  What can you add?” 

A moment of silence.  Another sigh.  Then, “He took mine.”

“What?”

“He took what I was gonna say,” Miguel scoffed, leaning back in his seat and jerking his head in Jon’s direction. 

I nodded.  “Interesting.”

They stared at me, arms crossed, as I slowly wandered away.

FRIENDS

            Jon and Miguel never became buddies or friends in my class.  But they learned to tolerate one another.  They learned how to listen to the other’s ideas and comments.  They learned how to share space.  There developed an agreement between them that they would never argue again in my class, and that soon developed into an understanding that they wouldn’t ever fight each other at school or on the streets.  It’s not like they smiled at each other in the hallways, but they didn’t mug each other either, saving their pissy frowns and ugly taunts for others who they didn’t know.  Then Jon’s cousin shot one of Miguel’s brothers, and the pressure was on for retaliation.  Not only did Norteno blood have to shed Sureno blood, but Salazar blood needed to shed Anaya blood.  Miguel felt the heat.  

            A fight broke out between the Nortenos and Surenos on a Saturday night in October, and Miguel and Jon spotted each other across the street.  Miguel felt one of his brothers handing him the gun, and he grasped the cold steel in his sweaty palm, feeling the weight of the gun, the weight of expectation resting on his back.  Jon stared back at him calmly, the fight seeming to occur around him, not involving him, allowing Miguel time to raise the gun, to take aim, to pull the trigger, to hear an empty click, to glance down at the gun, to fumble with the safety, to hear a resounding boom reverberate against the cars on the street, to look up and see Jon’s unmoving body on the bloody asphalt, to tuck the gun into his pants, to run and run and to ignore the lifting of a weight off his back as he joined his family in a victoriously empty yell. 

If

If I were in charge of you
I'd cancel the monthly crying sessions,
your painful feelings of inadequacy,
the lurking insomnia,
and your snarling frustration.

If I were in charge of you
there would be small blue plus signs
nine months of exciting anticipation
and soft hands to grasp your finger.

If I were in charge of you
you wouldn't have to suffer through this cycle
you wouldn't be forced to make decisions you shouldn't have to
you wouldn't have to pray that your dreams would come true
Because this wouldn't be a dream--it'd be reality

If I were in charge of you
a shoulder would be squeezed with congratulations
all frustration would float away like dandelion puffs
and a person who wanted nothing more
than to finally be a mother
would get all she desired.