Saturday, November 05, 2005

 
Praise for dead birds? Absolutely! Of course, we're talking about the book by Gayle Brandeis, and not limp-feathered creatures. THE BOOK OF DEAD BIRDS has been praised by the likes of O Magazine (Oprah's stamp of approval never hurt anyone), Toni Morrison, and The San Francisco Chronicle. So, without further ado, here's a little about Gayle's wonderful book.

Ava Sing Lo has been accidentally killing her mother's birds since she was a little girl. Now in her twenties, Ava leaves her native San Diego for the Salton Sea, where she volunteers to help environmental activists save thousands of birds poisoned by agricultural runoff.

Helen, her mother, has been haunted by her past for decades. As a young girl in Korea, Helen was drawn into prostitution on a segregated American army base. Several brutal years passed before a young white American soldier married her and brought her to California. When she gave birth to a black baby, her new husband quickly abandoned her, and she was left to fend for herself and her daughter in a foreign country.

With great beauty and lyricism, The Book of Dead Birds captures a young woman's struggle to come to terms with her mother's terrible past while she searches for her own place in the world.

Friday, November 04, 2005

 
Someone who read my blog about the Eskimo on the tail of Alaska Airlines planes looking like Johnny Cash sent me this. I loved it!! See, don't they look eerily alike? Posted by Picasa

Monday, October 31, 2005

 
Of all the things I could have inherited from my mom (her green thumb, her fabulous meatballs, her sense of interior design), I had to inherit her inability to weild a curling iorn without scarring her face. My mother is known for the red marks that sporadically appear on her neck and the side of her face thanks to the hot wand of a Clairol curling iron. And, even though I religiously weilded my own curling iron in hopes of obtaining Farrah Fawcett-like wings back in sixth grade, I always managed to do so without any permanent scars. Until now. Until I was lured into buying the mother of all curling irons. The uber-iron. The gold-plated triple barrel of a Revlon hair tool that had me seeing blonde waves cascading down my shoulders like some Raphaelite model.

But, while the triple barrel may create enviable waves, it also creates enough heat to remove about six layers of skin and leave a very noticeable scab. Which tends to fade to a red mark, and eventually settles into a grayish/tan scar. Lovely. The first time I used my Revlon iron I heated it up to high and started curling. But this was no ordinary curling iron, and as someone only accustomed to the smaller single barrel versions, I was an accident waiting to happen.

It took less than five minutes for me to brand the right side of my face. A nice two-inch long red patch that I thought would go away. Only the next day it had crusted over, and no matter how much cream and ointment I applied, it stayed. Now, six months later, it's nearly faded away. So, I guess it was only poetic justice that I decided to give that Revlon baby another try. And this time my left cheek got the brunt of the scalding hot rod. In a much more conspicuous spot. I think it's time to retire my triple barrel curling iron until I've either taken the appropriate course on how to use it without branding my skin like a cattle's ass, or have devised a method by which I can somehow protect my exposed skin, perhaps with a face mask of some sort. Those Raphaelite curls will have to wait. There's only so much skin I can remove before a skin graft starts to sound like an attractive option.

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