Goodbye for now, crickets.

She remembered, oh yes–––what a wonderful thing to recall after so many years–––a surprise he had given her for Christmas when she was eighteen, close to the end, two tickets to see La Boheme at Clowes Hall in Indianapolis. As soon as the lights went down and the play began Langston loved it so much, she felt from the very beginning that she could devote her life to opera. She lost herself. And then the lights went up for the intermission, and Taos turned to her, his eyes always unnaturally bright, his hair a curly mess, and asked Langston if she was enjoying herself.

"Oh yes, I simply adore it. I'm having a fabulous time."

Taos nodded. "Let's leave then, shall we?"

And Langston simply stood up and reached for her coat. She knew exactly what Taos meant; she knew he wasn't being perverse or clever or idiosyncratic. He was handing her the sweetest possibility this life offers: to leave in the middle, while everyone else stays behind and waits for the heroine to die in the cold.

¡Viva la evolucion!

I once drew my husband as a cartoon, the way he looks in my mind all the time. Remember this?



Ringin' any bells?...



Yes, that's a half a watermelon.

This is, I believe, an accurate cross-section of the various entertainment tastes of Justin Rusnak. Just to give you a better idea of who I'm married to.

Five books I see him read repeatedly
+ The Curse of Rocky Colavito, by Terry Pluto
+ Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze, by M.G. Sheftall
+ Iron Coffins: A Personal Account of the German U-Boat Battles of World War II, by Herbert A. Werner
+ If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor, by Bruce Campbell
+ The Best of Hal Lebowitz: Great Sportswriting from Six Decades in Cleveland

Five artists he can't get enough of
+ Dave Matthews Band
+ Eels
+ Modest Mouse
+ The Black Keys
+ Sigur Ros

Five flicks he could watch over and over
+ Das Boot
+ Army Of Darkness
+ Master and Commander
+ Unforgiven
+ V For Vendetta

Five shows he's sentimentally attached to
+ The Simpsons
+ Mystery Science Theater 3000
+ Firefly
+ M*A*S*H
+ Star Trek

Five things he really digs
+ baseball
+ archery
+ military history (especially Chinese and Japanese)
+ westerns
+ photography

Five random facts about J
+ He gets excited about opening baseball cards.
+ He likes to learn about the brewing processes of whatever he's drinking.
+ He's goofy for pad thai noodles.
+ He doesn't laugh really hard. Often, but not hard.
+ I think he actually likes shopping. Likes to take his time.

Welcome back, muthafuckaz!

( + on the menu + )

My friend Tomoko was hanging out with this guy who was apparently trying to make moves on her, which she deflected with her usual style. To get back at him, she stole this board and a bunch of his expensive Japanese paint markers and went to town. :) Now that's enterprising.

She passed the board onto me to work on, and I'm going to pass it back to her. The mural so far:

( + most awesome collaboration ever: in progress, plus more goodies + )


In otha news...

01. A girl named Biba from Brazil wrote to tell me she's getting my octopus drawing tattooed all down her arm. And I'm like... woah. That's pretty hardcore. And awesome.

02. I had a crabulous 24-hour cold. Incredible. Appeared out of thin air after work, escalated in crappiness until I fell asleep, gone when I woke up. Vive le chickie soup!

03. SO MUCH TREK. Hours upon hours of Brent Spiner effortlessly hamming it up in kabuki pancake makeup. Why can't all of life's great pleasures be this accessible? (Also: so much fun, spotting the plotlines parodied on Futurama. "Like putting too much air into a balloon!")

04. God DAMN, the weather is beautiful today! Overcast, breezy and warm. The plumeria's blooming again and it feels just like early summer in Ohio. I don't usually pity you suckers in the snow belt, but today, you can keep it. :)

05. OH HAY. It's Ella's birthday! :D Thought you could sneak past without incident, ay? Get crunk for your island bitches, Alley. ♥

When my father visited in February, he brought each of us–––my mom, my sister and I–––our own burned DVD copy of a small collection of home movies he'd found and which he had taken himself with his parents' handheld video camera in, I'm guessing roughly, 1989. Kit, still Katie then, was four or five years old, and I, then Susie, was seven or eight.

When I was little, I used to lie in my bed with the covers pulled up over my head to close the sound around my ears, and say my own name aloud, quietly. There was no way my name could be spoken that did not sound like ridicule or accusation. I would hear the voices of my dissatisfied teachers, bewildered babysitters and alien classmates. It was sibilant and cruelly mocking, and there was no escaping it. I hated the sound of Susie coming out of everyone's mouth but my mother's and father's.

"Susie? Look at me. What do you think of the Falls?"



My mother had breast cancer for the first time when I was, what, seven? I was largely unaware of the situation and totally blithe. When she lost her hair to chemotherapy, she unwrapped her scarf and let me stroke her egg-bald head and I kind of loved it. Her hair, a soft, wavy reddish-brown, grew back dark and curly. She looked terribly chic with her boy cut, magenta lipstick and matching blazer, which is what she is wearing on the Mother's Day that my father recorded. Katie and I have put on dress-up clothes, layers and layers of them, and Katie proudly describes her six petticoats, which are actually various old skirts that even the most shameless Asiatrash would not wear together.

Mom is tired because she has spent the last several months using all her energy to withstand chemotherapy, a malignant lump, her husband's blind fear and helplessness, loneliness, a strange recovery, a job and two talkative, scatterbrained little girls who have no concept of fatigue. She opens her presents dutifully, sweetly, and retires to the sofa.

Someone has constructed a cluster of multicolored balloons (lavender, gold, yellow–––where did these come from and who would choose to put these colors together?) tied together at the knots. A favorite family game of Bonk Balloon (as fun to pronounce as to play) is initiated and maintained for about nine seconds before I'm taken by a wave of brilliance and try to explain the rules of a brand new game involving this balloon cluster, a game we need to play right now, and I try to explain it, try to keep up with the ideas as they come barreling at me.

"Excuse me," she says. "Excuse me. Why do we have to play something different than Bonk Balloon? Why does it always have to be something different?"

I appear unfazed and resume Bonk Balloon with great enthusiasm, but as I'm watching this, watching myself, I know what my heart did. I saw my idea deflated, but not by her. It was voluntary, because maybe in my own way I understood what Mom needed.

Scenes that would never appear on film–––too special to be remembered exactly–––are ones like this: one night I dreamt about a monster called the Rackatat. It lived behind the heating grate in my preschool and reached out for me with horrible clawed hands. I woke up in terror and told my mother. In the middle of the night, both of us in our nightgowns, she sat me down at the kitchen table with a piece of paper and crayons, and told me to draw the Rackatat, and I did, to the best of my abilities. It was pretty horrifying.

"Now crumple up the Rackatat. Tear him up and stuff him in the trash, so he won't ever bother you again."

I did. And he never came back. Mom was experienced at slaying beasts.



I had always remembered my relationship with Kit to be antagonistic at best, up until junior high, at least, but in Dad's home movies we are close. All the seeds for our eventual soul inseparability were there, sprouting, unrealized. I demonstrate the patience of a saint, though sometimes I am a tad overwhelmed. She is a little banshee, a ballerina, too adorable to be human. Her eyes are black, liquid and inscrutable. Her hair is beautiful, straight and black, and her bangs reach from the very top of her head to just below her eyebrows, which are already glorious and darkly expressive, and they lend a certain seriousness to her usually comic expression. Watching these videos, neither she nor I could believe her little helium voice.

All the ideas are mine. Katie is totally compliant. I take her participation for granted. I am a benevolent dictator. She is always out of breath, grinning perfect tiny little white corn teeth, two steps behind me.

My hair is completely out of control in every single shot (and, actually, in every photograph ever taken before last year). My front teeth are slightly bucked from years of thumbsucking, and they dominate my face. My nose is still petite, and I'm blissfully unaware of how it will betray me and beak out ridiculously by the seventh grade.



While Mom visited relatives in Germany, Dad took Katie and I to see Niagara Falls. If it didn't involve animals, a train ride through open farmland or people in costume, a trip this grand was lost on the sisters, like casting pearls before swine. We weren't equipped to appreciate the majesty of the Falls in the winter, steaming and encrusted with ice.

Dad is filming this awesome sight, and then turns to us, zipped up in ridiculous crayon-hue coats made from parachutes or something, playing in the snow just feet from the overlook railing. Our comprehension of the beauty of the Falls can be summed up by the scene where Dad asks Katie what she thinks of it, and she falls on her rear in the snow.

It was beautiful, and I did remember it. I remembered the million-dollar view from our hotel room, the Falls lit up with colored lights like Vegas, and shivering at the top of the Skylon Tower. I remember Dad's enthusiasm. (I do not remember the infamous story Dad loves to tell, where I ate spaghetti in the hotel restaurant and managed to get it behind my ears.) On film, I give a short tour of our hotel room, and Katie presents the bathroom with great aplomb before dissolving into giggles.

I remember Dad doing his best to present to his girls the best of nature, the way he saw it. Hikes to hidden caves, through fire-colored forests, down miles of mossy plank stairs to frozen waterfalls. I went begrudgingly most of the time, I think. But just like my love for my sister and my understanding of my mother, the seeds for my appreciation of the glory of the world were planted, and nurtured, and they sprouted, and they are twenty-four years strong.



Watching myself made anxious birds come to life in my stomach. Doing the math, at seven years old, I am filmed either directly before or after a traumatic incident which I managed to completely repress until I was a teenager. I look happy, unaware of my awkwardness. I appear socially distracted and intently inwardly focused, like it would be hard to drag me out of my head, which is what I realize my parents were trying so hard to do so much of the time, to little effect, if any. Although it's always hard to identify with images of oneself as a child, I recognized everything that was happening in my head, what thoughts were streaming behind every expression. My thought processes are the same now as they were then. Tactical evasive maneuvers.

I'm sitting on the sofa in a salmon pink dress and a floppy straw hat, trying to fit a Mother's Day card into its envelope, muttering to myself.

"I can't get the damn letter in there."

"You can't get the what?" Dad says, a trace of shock.

"The letter won't go in the envelope. Could you get it in, pleeease?" The face of innocence. I don't miss a beat.



You ever wish you could go back, find yourself as a child and tell yourself the advice that will save you from various hard lessons and heartache? If I could go and reassure myself of one thing, it would be this.

You will learn, more quickly than either of your parents did, that you are worthy of the love you receive.

I was always lucky.