colors

Dusk in LA today was pastel, blurry. A bright afternoon—a little humid, said my Mom, very warm—faded into a night through a fuzzy grey peach. I drove downtown for a dinner with old friends—at least a decade each of knowing—and crested the 2 freeway right at sunset. If it could even be called that, less a sun setting than thin sheets of tracing paper accumulating on top of the day’s colors, one by one. White tracing paper on top of grey cement and blue skies, another sheet, three sheets a thick haze; then a sheer sheet of black tracing paper slid carefully on the scene, another one, omitting details and fading foliage into two dimensions, and another sheet until only the sharp circles of electric lights pierced the paper.

The cover of Writer’s Market 2010 is spruce green. Or maybe mint green. In any case, it’s a nice organic, subdue green, offset by a fat brown stripe that highlights the white letters of the title and subhead. I just spent $32.91—and yes, I did just dig through my wallet to find what 29.99 plus 9.75% sales tax equaled, a number I should have calculated in my head in the spirit of the GRE. But I digress—I just spent $32.91 on the green Writer’s Market 2010 and I’m very excited.

I contemplated purchasing the 1200-page beast on Amazon, hopeful for a discount, but there was just something about standing in line with other book buyers, beaming like a new mother as I clutched my fat book to my chest, that paid for itself. 3,500 listings of places to publish your writing—imagine the possibilities! I’m not the first to discover Writer’s Market (if I believe the cover, I’m the five millionth). Is is, after-all, nicknamed the writer’s bible. It was the sole textbook for my magazine writing class in college. It is the book anyone selling their writing should have. And I knew about it all along. So yes, I did stop to wonder, in all the green excitement: why oh why have I waited this long to buy this book?

I’m all fired up, as I so periodically get, from a conversation I had this week with an established freelance writer, who offered such sage words of wisdom as only someone with such an impressive portfolio can. He generously sent me a copy of his book—located at www.writewherethemoneyis.com—and I now have a productive list of things to tackle.

This list was a nice thing to hold on to this week, the week of waiting that folds into a weekend and now, it seems, another week. I’m anxiously waiting for news on a writing job that I’m perfect for, that I would rock, and that would rock my career—a really great job that I didn’t even apply for but was contacted about. I have now made it to the final three vying for one spot. And so I wait, and so I check my email between eighteen and eighty times daily.

Appropriately enough, just now I was browsing in the same department that this job would put me in and saw that Lonely Planet had finally released their new, updated Nicaragua book. Previously, LP had lumped El Salvador and Nicaragua into one book, but now they have a whole book dedicated to the lovely country, and rightfully so.

One rainy Saturday in early December of last year, I was at Brio in Playa Gigante, enjoying my weekend off from English classes. Rob and I were tinkering with the espresso machine when who should appear but a LP writer, working on the new, updated Nicaragua book. He was responsible for updating and expanding the information on the Pacific side of Nicaragua in only six weeks. He seemed… on the cranky side of stressed. Granted, he had recently survived a long trip in the back of a truck (remember it’s raining)… and I had been pestering him with questions about his line of work since he had arrived; so he perhaps deserved a little crankiness (I pestered to the point that he said in a chipper British accent: yes, I do get asked this stuff a lot. I’m thinking of just making a laminate with all your questions and answers and handing it out.)

Rob made our well-traveled friend an espresso and told him about the goings on of Hotel Brio. Rob told him about the English classes he had invited me to Gigante to begin and I briefly told him the specifics about my classes and my students. Rob showed him through a few rooms and offered him lunch while I meandered in to town to visit with friends at a surf camp. Not fifteen minutes later, he stopped in for a hello, a look around yet another surf camp, and then continued on his way. Nine months later, it says this in LP Nicaragua:

“The glorious white crescent of sand snuggled into the wildly forested mountains is almost worth the 7 km hike from the bus stop.” (Although, it’s actually 4 km from the bus stop, and I should know since I ran it thrice weekly. Honest mistake.)

Of Hotel Brio: “You can get Spanish classes here as well as hire boards or bikes and get surfing lessons. You can also volunteer (two month minimum, basic Spanish preferred) in exchange for room and board if you’re willing to work teaching English or doing trail maintenance, light construction work, or landscape in the Reserva Ecologica Zacatan.”

Ha! Teaching English! That was me! All me. I was the first, and because I was there, because he met me and I told him why I was there and what I was trying to do, because he heard about the English classes, he put them into a book, and maybe, someone might read this book and say, hey I want to go there and I want to teach English. And maybe they will go, pick up where I left off, and little Leana and Martha and lanky Evelio the fisherman and jumpy, enthusiastic Ernesto will have an English teacher yet again.

That’s a bright blue feeling of triumph.

If my Writer’s Market is organic green, and LA at dusk today was pale yellow grits, then this waiting to find out which way my future turns is the red of a traffic light. It is waiting at the corner of Hollywood and Highland, red brake lights lined in a column in front of a red traffic light, neon lights flashing across billboards and store signs, anxious and artificial. It’s right and left arrows flipping to green while straight ahead stays red and you sit in gridlock.

dispatch from the library

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing. (Harper Lee)

It’s Banned Books Week. The PPL is decorated with posters: Celebrate Your Freedom to Read.

Indeed.

emphatically seven!

I’m in my virtual Kaplan classroom, deep into Chapter 4, Arithmetic and Number Properties; I’m flailing through multi-event probabilities, and I come across this gem:

You might see the following on your test: 7!

You should not read this to mean: emphatically seven!

Now, I wasn’t aware that anyone associated with the Graduate Record Examination had a sense of humor, but my oh my, that one sent me chuckling, alone in my virtual classroom, for several minutes. Perhaps I’ve been spending too much time in the land of Quantitative Comparisions, but the idea of a test writer so excited about the number seven that they felt the need to include a exclamation point after the number seven–and of a overpaid Kaplan employee who decided it was important to warn students against falling into the emphatic number trap (“Is a normal 8 larger than an emphatic 7?”)–well… it tickled me pink.

Speaking of things that tickle me pink, GRE vocabulary flashcards and Twitter top the list this week. I am a writer, darn-it, and I love words with all my being; and so, because I will not let a standardized test diminish this joy (and because Twitter seems to be all the rage) I’ve decided to write a Twitter short story using the top 200 GRE words recommended by Kaplan. I’m hoping it will help me conquer the nasty verbal section that seems to give me so much more trouble than the math, and also perhaps provide personality in this very sterile study process. All this learning of factorials and words like opprobrium is not just for my idle amusement, however much it may seem so. No no: the GRE and I will meet on November 5 at 11 a.m. When I shall need said test is uncertain (as is this whole ‘applying for and going to graduate school’ thing).

In the meantime, as I warble on my ‘being a writer’ trajectory, I’m doing some other stuff to, well, make money. In addition to tutoring anyone and everyone who wants to learn Spanish (or sort of thought that they might want to try it), I’m also substitute teaching at my former high school. After six years of shuffling into a desk, it’s downright outlandish to walk into a classroom, stand in the front, and command the class’s attention.

There’s a random women’s bathroom hiding next to some lockers at this former high school of mine. It’s an afterthought, it seems, a truncated twin, as there is no men’s bathroom that corresponds to it. It was always my favorite in middle school; no one ever uses it, so it’s always nice and empty and cool. It has a distinctive smell–it’s not a bathroom smell, but rather a smell of tile or grout or something. On Monday, 10 years post-middle school, I pulled the door open to find that it still has exactly the same smell. So that must be it, teaching at a high school: some thing don’t change, just like buildings don’t really change, or cement sidewalks. But, you get older, slowly, as your students are engulfed in the very intense experience of high school, and then suddenly they too get older, they mature, and they become adults; and the bathrooms still smell the same.

Speaking of blasts from the past, I was smacked in the head with one today when I walked into the Rio Hondo Prep Gymnasium and was promptly hit on the head by a whizzing volleyball. We were at Rio Hondo for our volleyball game (where I once also played volleyball as a wee-ish one). Yes, indeed: in addition to Ms. Kimble who substitute teaches, thirty-three 7th and 8th grade girls now call me Coach Kimble. Earlier this week, when I was subbing for seventh grade composition (and by substitute teaching I mean watching 17 well behaved 12-year-olds make pretty posters) one of the volleyball girls came up and said, rushed, “Coach Kimble can I–oops,” she said with a giggle. “I mean, Miss Kimble, can I go to the bathroom?” And I smiled, bemused, and said certainly.

I have noted the irony in that I’m banging my head against the wall trying to remember the math I learned in middle school whilst teaching/coaching middle schoolers. It’s alternatively funny or fun, and either way, I’m enjoying myself. I find myself constantly bemused. Emphatically bemused!, in fact.

[peace] is a process

Peace is not something you reach or don’t reach. Peace is a process. It’s an outlook, a way to live. You can never say that peace is lost, or that hopes for peace are lost. Peace is always waiting for us.

–Costa Rican President Oscar Arias, of Nicaragua’s momentous peace accords, signed by the Sandanistas and Contras in March of 1988, which he won the Noble Peace Prize for initiating and leading.

I just re-found this quote. It still resonates, two decades later.

Peace seems like an infinitely replaceable word here.

happy independence day, nicaragua

I’ve been researching Nicaragua and found this documentary recommended in the back of my old Moon guidebook. I couldn’t find it in any Los Angeles public library (obviously my first go-to source), so I Googled it, and lo and behold, some kind and wonderful soul has put all 82 minutes of it on YouTube. Isn’t the internet great?

The World Stopped Watching is a sequel to the 1980’s documentary, The World is Watching. The first was made when the world was watching Nicaragua, to Nicaragua’s ultimate peril, when the fate of the Cold War seemed hinged on a triangular shaped country in Central America. The sequel is an example of journalism at it’s finest: two of the Contra war’s very involved U.S. correspondents returned to Nicaragua in 2003 to find out what had happened since the world had stopped watching. Life had gone on, they find. They tracked down the very same campesinos they interviewed nearly two decades before, showed them pictures of their younger selves, and asked, simply, how they were, how life had changed, before and after. After a jubilant and hopeful revolution and then a senseless Contra war, everyone had left; had stopped paying attention. How had the country changed? How life had gone on.

Not to simplify this thorough and complex piece of reporting, but, a quote: “We came back to see the price they paid for the revolution. Is life getting better for them and I think obviously its not. I think their situation is worse than it was 15 years ago.”

This journalist interviews a group of Nicaraguan men. One of the men fought for the Contras; the other for the Sandanistas. “Now, we are like brothers. For me, there were no winners. There are no winners for me, because we were killing our brothers.”

I just finished watching the documentary and was about to dive back, for a refresher, into Blood of Brothers, my favorite book that I read sweating in a hammock exactly a year ago, when I realized, coincidentally, or maybe not: today is Nicaragua’s 188th Independence Day.

people I encounter

I’m at Starbucks sitting next to a well-dressed elderly woman who is pushing five feet. She’s teeny tiny. She paid and then claimed her table next to me. She clonked down her giant old lady purse in a chair and pulled out a hardcover library book, which she placed gently on the table. She went back to the drink counter and claimed a venti caramel frappuccino, piled up with whipped cream, and carried it over with two hands. And then she sat and read her book while eating her venti caramel frappuccino with a spoon. She’s now getting down to the bottom, so she switches to a straw and slurps up the rest. She turns her cup and I can read the handwritten name on the clear plastic: Arlene. Arlene is adorable. She finishes her drink, marks her place in her book with a floral bookmark, closes it, pats her mouth delicately with a napkin, gets up and throws away her messy cup. What a precious encounter.

There are characters all around. I’m starting to pay attention. I decided to take a three-day weekend from the Pasadena Public Library to celebrate a great national holiday, so I’m still trying to get back in the swing of things after a fun-filled weekend. Incidentally, the Pasadena Public Library has provided it’s fair share of characters in the sometimes-boring narrative called, just like Bill Clinton’s memoir, My Life.

I will first say I love the Pasadena Public Library. It’s on Walnut and Garfield, just north of City Hall and east of the gothic-style Episcopal Church. A stone fountain in a leafy courtyard welcomes you to the modern-looking, white washed library. Inside, though, the library is all wood and history and high ceilings. I sit at large lamp-lit tables next to walls full of encyclopedias and they actually kick you out if you try to talk on your cell phone in the quiet area (as I found out last week while I was whispering fire updates with my mother). To be fair, this is coming from someone who loved the University of Denver library, in all it’s hideous orange glory and round study carrels with stains from the 1970’s. I’m just a library person.

Due to the Pasadena Public Library’s hushed magic, I am a regular there, so much that I’ve made friends with a man working at the circulation desk who waves at me every time I pass to and fro from the bathroom, and also another fellow who works in social work and tends to read giant old books and take lots of notes on legal pads. He’s there every day, and sits right by the bathroom, and he also waves at me every time I pass. I appreciate the friendliness, I really do, but it gets to be a lot of waving. The bathroom, incidentally, is where some of the magic of the library started to wear off and was in turn replaced with the eccentric personality of a 200-pound African American homeless woman. I met her last week post-large coffee when I walked into the three-stall bathroom and found her leaned over an open suitcase brimming with what looked like costumes. I shimmed past—it’s really a small bathroom for such a large library—and entered one of the stalls.

“How tall you, girl?” she asked. I was otherwise occupied in said stall, which made this conversation rather inopportune. “Do you play basketball?”

“Oh, well, I used to,” I sort of yelled through the stall. (To add insult to injury I was actually wearing the blue t-shirt I own that says, “No. I don’t play basketball.” Okay, fine, I wasn’t actually wearing it. But I do own one.)

“Yeah? You tall. Tall and white and youngin’ that’s bad. I just heard ‘bout these people who snatch you on the street. They human traffickers. They kidnap you and steal yo’ identity and then they ship you off to Eastern Europe and they made yo’ a whore.”

“Oh dear,” I said. I reluctantly left the safety of my stall.

“Yeah. I know that ‘cause I hang out with all the rappers down in Hollywood. I hang with them, but I don’t no more. Them’s why I’m homeless, the rappers, ‘cause I was snitchin’ on ‘em.”

“Oh dear.” I quickly darted around her and washed my hands.

“Snitchin’ on them rappers who do all that shit. I’d do it again. You be careful,” she said.

Perhaps because I had my rose-colored glasses on for the first weeks I was working at the library, but I’ve just started to notice all the homeless people there. They are alternatively hilarious and heartbreaking.

Several days later, I was at outside at the patio coffee cart ordering myself another large coffee (you now might see why I make friends as I shuttle back and forth to the bathroom). Anyway, as I stirred in my milk, I noticed a motly group of six sitting around one of the cast-iron patio tables. They were all African-American, varying ages. In the middle of the table lay an assortment of hodge-podge wrapped packages and a small birthday cake with a single candle. An adult wearing stripped red tights, a tu tu, and a tiara—obviously dressed to the nines—was talking and smiling. It was a little birthday celebration and I could only assume it’s participants were homeless. It was precious and it was heartbreaking.

Both snitchin’ lady and the birthday party illuminate a side of Pasadena I don’t much see in my well-treaded path. So I pay attention. I’ve realized that rather than curse, again and again, why it’s always me who meets the weirdos, I’ve decided to relish the fact that I get to meet all sorts of interesting people. And then I get to write about all the weirdos in the world, who are in fact probably not weird, just… homeless. Or maybe have an awesome story if you just took the time to ask which rappers they snitched on rather than slipping out the door.

(But also when you pay attention you get to notice little old ladies named Arlene who eat whipped cream and caramel with a spoon, and that’s nice.)

house keys

: a letter from my grandmother,

: happy birthday, you’re so old now, I’m so proud of you

: a note from my Argentinean grandma named Argentina,

: megan tu comida está en la heladeria del comedor, chau (megan your food is in the kitchen fridge, bye)

: Clarion November 8, 2005 article: “‘Saw’ will frighten you to pieces” by Megan Kimble

: a portfolio containing all subsequent “by Megan Kimble”s

: worn, used, battered clothes—in a soft pile

: A faded navy t-shirt with a white rooster on the front, on the back, gallo pinto, sprinkled spots of bleach

: new, stylish, colorful clothes

: Never-worn designer jeans (original tags—price 200 marked down to 60—still attached)

: a Western Digital external hard drive made in Thailand, 500 GB

: iTunes, iPhoto, and a thousand and one Microsoft word documents

: 2007 planner (used) (a year in the life)

: Flintridge Prep Logbook 2004

: Flintridge Prep Girls Basketball 2002-2003 Season Back-to-Back League Champions scrapbook

: a thank you note from a high school teacher inside a black and white greeting card,

: words of praise

: mini multi-colored Christmas tree ornaments

: a two peso paper note, paper-clipped to a bus ticket

: an unopened spool of printer paper

: a cheap and nicked bronze ring bought from a persuading peddler

: a family gold braclet or a silver chain

: Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Norton Critical 2^nd Edition

: Salman Rushie’s The Jaguar Smile, property of Pasadena Public Library, due date stamped on inside cover 8/31/09

: twenty-six dollars, cash

: a phone cradled in a long neck

: a wedding picture, 1979

: a photograph of a family, 2006

:: house keys

:stuff that makes up a person or stuff I brought with me

Approaching and digging for keys                                                       and entering

that fit and turn with a click in the lock of a home

evacuation

My parents and I stood in 101-degree heat and gazed up at flames raging through the familiar mountains—our mountains—that rise behind our house. Mandatory evacuations moved closer and closer to our neighborhood, streets three, two, one block away. My mom and I went for a nighttime drive and ended up three streets away watching the familiar mountains light up the sky. Two days of smokey waiting, tense and sleepless in a sweltering house, and we had just about sighed with relief and then we got it. The reverse-911 call: Gather your things and leave. We had prepared, packed a few things, and we frantically threw them in the car. We stood on our street and saw flames leaping up on our mountains, the mountains we hike in, walk to in mere minutes. We packed the really important things—house deeds, tax returns, insurance papers, etc. Baby pictures, family albums, paintings off the walls. And then I found myself staring into the bottom of an empty carry-on luggage bag. Now what? What do you bring? So I packed a hodge-podge back of my own irreplaceables, or what I imagined they might be if my life were stripped to its bare minimum.

The flames flickered above us, and a breeze picked up, a breeze created by the low pressure forming around the fire that was close enough to create a breeze we could feel. After our initial adrenaline slowed, we realized we still had time and lots of room in the car. And so we sat down and ate a hasty lunch and then packed a few more things, duffel bags of our clothes and boots and random inconsequentials that seemed important. And the adrenaline subdued even more and my parents went off to a swanky hotel, the blond doggie and I went to stay at a friends house, and we returned the next day in an anti-climatic, smokey homecoming and unpacked all the stuff we thought was important.

dance walking

There’s a woman who dance walks around the Rose Bowl, and she really dances more than she walks. She usually wears sweats, a hoodie, and running shoes, and she listens to a walkman with over-the-head earphones. She’s middle aged, attractive, and does not pay the slightest bit of attention to all the walkers, runners (myself included) and bikers who check her out as she boogies her way around the 3.3 mile loop. Compared to her, I feel so contained, so straight-lined as I run in, well, a straight-line, my arms contained neatly against my sides, my breathing steady, posture upright. She’s all sideways and frontways and backways, butt shaking and shoulders rolling and arms bumping. Makes you wonder how she exists in the real world (that is, the world of having a job or grocery shopping; although, maybe this is just how she gets around, everywhere. Wouldn’t that be something.) Anyway, I love this woman. I have no idea who she is but she’s so damn into it. Whatever it is.

That is neither here nor there, which is sort of how I feel. I’m trying to settle into life here, in this place I grew up. It’s peculiar, being here yet trying to exist in the placeless places of online writing, nebulous and ill-defined, where there are so many applications I could submit or articles I could write. I spent an hour perfecting an application for an online writing job: cover letter, essay questions, writing samples, resume, the whole gamut. I pushed submit with an anti-climatic click and got an email response in exactly 39 minutes–as if a human could have feasibly read it in that amount of time–which read, “Thank you for applying. Your application has been rejected for one of the following reasons:” after which it listed ten reasons ranging from poor grammar and/or spelling, to insufficient experience, to, I kid you not, a criminal record that is incompatible with our mission and/or hiring procedures.

In my dejected state, I went to the La Canada Starbucks for a coffee and asked, in a rather mopey tone, if they were hiring, and then, because I suppose I’m entirely overqualified to be working at Starbucks, I got offered a job. So. We shall see. I do find it ironic that the very newspapers I’m scouring to find freelance/job opportunities are reporting on their front pages that California’s unemployment rate has reached 11.9% (which also certainly makes one consider turning one’s nose up at a Starbucks job). And so I try to channel the dance walking lady, whose just in it, and happy to be there.

family vacation

1. Seattle with Katie and Tyler.

Seattle sells five-star baked goods, including very large and wonderful chocolate chip cookies, but also has disturbingly short bathroom stalls in the public restrooms.

If you didn’t know, Seattle is also the home of the original Starbucks, which we visited. It also–apparently, so I’ve heard–has a lot of very good coffee places. Katie and I managed to find all the mediocre non-chain coffee shops in Seattle. And then we went to the Chocolate Box, which is simply put, where I will live when I’ve done all that I want to do in my life, and where I shall spend my life’s savings on $4 hot chocolates (and then I’ll probably toddle on over for some more giant chocolate chip cookies and then try to fit–I shall be at this point a giant woman after countless hot chocolates, fat and happy in my retirement–into the short and tiny bathroom stalls of Seattle’s public restrooms.)

Anyway. I liked Seattle, but, again, I don’t know if you’ve heard, it’s very cloudy and rather chilly.

2. Katie and Tyler put me in the back of Katie’s Honda Civic with all of their possessions and enough food to feed a family of five for a week.

And then we departed for a lovely drive south along Highway 101, along Oregon’s stunning coast. Well, they both said it was stunning. Unfortunately for me, when they packed the car the evening before (a fun-filled activity I had ducked out of to go visit a college friend) they had loaded the backseat full and put me on the left side of the car. As it were, the ocean rolled by the right side of the car (as you may guess on a southerly drive on a western coast). So, thus I spent the 10 hour drive staring at a box of lettuce and various canvas bags while Katie cheerfully pointed out outlet malls and meandering rivers and rock formations, all of which I could not, alas, see.

3. House on the beach: windswept (if there ever is a time for that silly word, it is now), grass and sand and pastels. A beach campfire; apparently, my tolerance for burnt marshmallows has gone way down since the girl scout days, as due to my enthusiasm at the s’more buffet (which I artfully made on a log), I spent the following day with a sugar hangover. We drove to Jebediah National Park and traipsed through the Redwoods, which are very tall trees. My kind of trees. Scrabble, Monopoly; I read three books; we tried to fly a kite but it was beaten by the wind. Lovely trip, lovely family.