Eucalyptus Way

Wild Turkey

2011-11-20T03:58:00.001-08:00

I can only think of two reasons a person would decide not to live in the Oakland Hills. If you have children, the first is a biggie – the school system. Budgets have been eviscerated and teachers laid off, and there's no silver lining. The other reason is as sensible as it is theoretical. The peaceful, eminently walkable Oakland Hills, with their Eucalyptus Groves, backyard redwood trees, forest fauna and breathtaking views of San Francisco Bay, sit right atop the dreaded Hayward Fault. Personally, I realize parking my butt here is seismically unwise but I love it – the cool, moist air, the 6-point buck preening on the patio, the occasional, environmentally incorrect whiff of woodsmoke from a neighbor's fireplace, the dense fog giving way to sharp blue skies. Since we moved here from Orinda last Summer, I've been getting my exercise climbing the steep, meandering streets, staking out my new territory.

I was on one of these exploratory ventures, walking briskly, mindful of the waning day, when I came upon a flock of wild turkeys. It wasn't my first turkey encounter. A few weeks earlier, I had stopped to observe two adult birds and a couple of chicken-sized young'uns pecking around someone's front yard. When I pulled out my cell to photograph them, it spooked one of the youngsters. He darted under a car and immediately got stuck. For five long minutes, I could hear him flapping his wings and peeping hysterically. I was just looking around for a stick to try and nudge him to freedom when he managed to extricate himself from the undercarriage.

This time, there were at least a dozen birds milling about, mostly hens. (Immature male turkeys are known as jakes, and adult males are called toms or gobblers).They had taken over the backyard and carport of a small home along the road and were puttering around like they owned the place. Their muted black and brown plumage blended into the mulch and fallen leaves, but their fuschia faces screamed dinosaur. It's a family resemblance: turkeys descend from carnivorous dinosaurs called theropods. Over hundreds of thousands of years, theropods got smaller, developed feathers and evolved into the first birds.

So what are those strange growths on the turkeys' faces? Or rather, on the male turkey's faces. The female,or hen, has a more discrete, pointy profile and a bluish head. The long, flabby red thing that hangs from a Tom turkey's forehead is a snood. The fleshy crimson blob that covers his neck is a wattle, and the bumpy, wart-like growths that give the wattle its texture are caruncles. Snoods and wattles function a bit like mood rings. When the Tom is hot to trot, his facial nasty bits get engorged with blood and becomes bright red. But if he catches sight of a coyote, or maybe a rifle-toting human, his snood and wattle go blue with fear. And if the Tom isn't feeling well because, maybe, somebody told him his brother was on the menu for Thanksgiving, that jiggly face and neck fade to a pale pinky beige.

This is also a snood. They were big in the forties so they're way overdue for a comeback. This could be your chance to be a trend-setter.

This is also a wattle. On humans, it is not considered sexy.

This is not a waddle. I think it's a case of testicular migration.

Turkeys are sexually dimorphic, meaning the genders are two different sizes. The male can be formidable – larger and brighter in color than the female, and weighing as much as 38 pounds (The biggest wild turkey ever recorded). Turkey hens are daintier, maxing out at around 12 pounds. While turkeys all have 3-toed feet, the toms have an extra "toe", really more of a sharp spur behind each of their lower legs, which they use for fighting. Male turkeys also have a "beard", a tuft of hair-like feathers that grows from the center of their breast. 10-20% of females have a much smaller version of this same feature. Whether the bearded ladies are feistier, I do not know. Both hens and toms have the amazing ability to rotate their heads 360 degrees, like in The Exorcist, minus the projectile vomiting.

After my turkey encounter, I don't need to do research to tell you that they have a wide vocabulary. They cluck, yelp, coo, purr, cackle and tweet. The Toms can also make drumming and spitting sounds using organs in their chests called air sacs. (Air sacs supplement the lungs and all birds have them, because flight requires a high metabolic rate and extra oxygen). The one thing I didn't hear any of my neighborhood turkeys do was gobble. As it turns out, only the males gobble, and only when they are in the mood for love.

Male turkeys are polygamous and mate with as many females as they can. Don't tell the kiddies, but the classic turkey silhouette that's a mainstay of elementary school art projects is actually a turkey come-on. They fan out their tail feathers and puff out their chests to show off their beards and impress the hens. Toms are total bros and like to do their strutting in pairs, usually a dominant bird and a more passive one. The top tom gets the hot hen, and his sidekick gets her girlfriend with the beard. After mating, the females make nests in shallow holes in the ground, which they cover with vegetation. They lay one egg a day over the course of 10-14 days. Once the "poults" hatch, they leave the nest within 24 hours, never to return.

Like their number one predator, man, turkeys are omnivorous. They eat all kinds of plant parts, from tree bark to grasses, seeds, nuts and berries. They have a fondness for insects, and will occasionally consume amphibians and small reptiles. The wild turkey population of the United States is estimated at around 7 million, and as their natural territory shrinks, they are moving to the suburbs. A backyard bird feeder is like a candy store to a turkey, and once he starts pecking round your yard, he will quickly take over and invite all his friends. They'll poop where they please, snack on your flowers and vegetables, scratch up your car and patio furniture and maybe even go after your dog. If turkeys get over their fear of humans, they can get nasty and have been known to attack people – not unreasonable behavior considering our annual November ritual. But now that they're starting to organize, they just might put Thanksgiving out of business. I hear the National Wild Turkey Federation has thousands of members.

Pix from my turkey encounter

Side Dishes

Yes, they really do descend from dinosaurs

Take pride in your wattle

This claims to be the National Wild Turkey Federation, but the members are all human.

Reporter gets attacked by wild turkey

Shake, Rattle, Rock and Roll

2011-10-31T14:27:00.000-07:00

Every region has its disasters. Tornadoes in the Midwest. Hurricanes in the South. Firestorms in the Southwest and the Republican congress in Washington DC. Since I live in the Bay Area, I'm supposed to be worried about earthquakes, which I confess, I am not. We are among the 90% of local idiots who are totally unprepared for The Big One. We don’t have an emergency water supply. Our stash of canned goods consists of smoked oysters, water chestnuts and anchovies. I’m sure there’s a flash light in the house somewhere, but I’m equally certain it’s out of batteries.

It’s easy to live in denial when you’re married to a native who thinks the best thing to do when a quake hits is jump into bed and get busy “so you can really feel the earth move.” In truth, we haven't had a single seismic event since we moved out to NorCal four years ago. When the Virginia quake hit last month, I was almost jealous. Gargoyles were tumbling off the National Cathedral while the ground here in the nation's earthquake capital remained calm as a meditating monk. You'd never know our place in the Oakland Hills was barely a mile from the Hayward fault.

With the Hayward to the west and the San Andreas Fault to the east, San Francisco Bay is the meat in a seismic sandwich. The San Andreas is a locked fault, which means the pressure between two opposed tectonic plates is equalized. If one of them suddenly gives, the consequences could be catastrophic. The Hayward fault, on the other hand, is a strike-slip fault, where two plates move past each other at a rate of a quarter of an inch a year, in a phenomenon known as fault creep. You can see evidence of this geological migration all over the East Bay.

Having lulled myself into a false state of seismic security, I was typing away in my home office. It was a glorious, sunny afternoon and I bitterly resented having to stay indoors and work. I was tweaking a hospital brochure when a sound like a distant door slamming jolted me out of my seat. Then, the shaking began. My heart upped its pumping. I felt a throbbing in my eardrums as the blood rushed to my head. A decorative tin toppled off an end table. Windows rattled and the dishes clattered in the cupboards. The whole thing lasted about 20 seconds. If it's true that animals can predict earthquakes, then my dog is either an idiot or one cool customer. He was at my feet, gnawing on a rib bone when the quake hit. He never even looked up.

Within seconds, everyone was on Facebook. (OK, everybody over 40. Everybody else was on Twitter). "Did you feel it?" " We sure did." "That was a good one." "4.0, I looked it up."

No damages, no new cracks in the wall. Just Mother Nature reminding everyone one who's boss. But I had a decision to make because that night, we had tickets to see Paul Simon at UC Berkeley's Greek Theater. The campus literally straddles the fault line and there was a good chance we would be experiencing aftershocks, or worse, another quake.

Built in 1903 with a donation from William Randolph Hearst, the Greek Theater is an outdoor venue with 8,500 uncomfortable cement seats. If you're smart and thrifty, you sit on the steep hill facing the theater. Get there early and you have a decent view from the lawn seats closest to the stage. Plus, you can enjoy a picnic along with the concert. Do your best to ignore the fact that the Greek sits just east of the Hayward Fault and has an official seismic rating of "very poor". (One block over, the Cal Memorial Stadium, where the Golden Bears play football, is literally bisected by the fault, which runs goalpost to goalpost. I think their seismic rating is "abysmal." Or maybe "horrendous.")

In the end, we took our chances. My husband would never have let me chicken out anyway. Paul Simon had a solid opening act, a very young folk singing duo called the Secret Sisters. They were a little too hillbilly for my spouse, but I enjoyed them. We were finishing our steak and gorgonzola salads when the Sisters left the stage. We sprawled out on the grass and got comfortable as we waited for the main attraction.

At precisely 8:16 pm,right before Paul and his band came out, the ground beneath our bottoms heaved again. We felt like fleas being shaken off by a giant dog. The aftershock, as we later found out, was a 3.9 on the Richter scale. The crowd roared and applauded, and five minutes later, Paul Simon arrived on stage. With a little help from Mother Nature, he rocked the house.

Find Berkeley on the map and travel down the red fault line towards Oakland. The area with a little yellow circle is about where we are - we have a head-on view of the Bay Bridge. I have no idea why the map maker created that circle, and I'm not sure I want to know.

Examples of "fault creep"

Extra Credit Reading:

•More about fault creep

•Bay Area Quake 101 I learned from my hair dresser that the entire U C Berkeley Geology Department lives in a section of the Berkeley Hills near Indian Rock Park. That's where the bedrock is, which means when the big one hits, the ground will not liquefy under your home.

Work in Progress

2011-10-25T20:27:00.001-07:00

Artwork by Junior

If my son's adolescence had a theme song, it would be this. I only speak, of course, from my perspective. From his vantage point, that theme song would probably be a track from a subgenre of one of the 100+ varieties of metal music.* Or a meandering modal jazz meditation by John Zorn. Or maybe one of the Tuvan throat singing ditties he so enjoys practicing at the dinner table no matter how many times we beg him to stop. But I digress.

Suffice to say that it's been quite a ride, but he seems to be getting it out of his system, whatever "it" may be. The kid is serious about music and art and has enrolled in community college. In addition to the evening classes scheduled for working people and night owls (guess which one he is?) the boy actually signed up for a 10 a.m. class. Better yet, he manages to get himself out of bed for it, although he's as irascible as a grizzly coming out of hibernation and has to brush his teeth in the car.

In the immortal words of Bob, "Baby steps, baby steps." Thus it was that my son and I recently spent an afternoon together without a single skirmish. Less a baby step than a huge leap forward, since this is something we have not managed, or even attempted to do, in at least six years.

Since the boy is studying cubism in art class, I suggested we go see the Picasso exhibit at the De Young in Golden Gate Park. To my surprise, he agreed. We had a nice lunch in the museum cafeteria and then hit the exhibit. The young Artiste's comments were insightful, visually sophisticated and funny. At one point, he stopped to point out the fact that one of the Picasso drawings looked a lot like George W. Bush. The woman behind us chortled – it was true.

We followed our foray into high culture with a pop culture festival in Little Japan. The event consisted of numerous tchotchke booths selling manga, assorted pokeman-like objects and wigs in purple, pink and teal. Chubby young women wandered around in stylized sailor suits and Little Bo Peep outfits. Their boyfriends were in costume too, but I'm too Japanese Pop Culture challenged to understand what they were wearing or why.

The kid and I concurred that we couldn't relate to people who dress like anime characters when it's neither Tokyo nor Halloween. Since he normally makes a point of arguing the opposite of everything I say, this was a definite breakthrough. We even agreed on a CD to listen to on the ride home, David Bowie's Hunky Dory, which he had bought me that week as a gift, just because.

Maybe none of this sounds at all remarkable to you. And maybe you haven't spent the past six years attempting to raise a "troubled teen." Maybe you've never sat around helplessly waiting for the other shoe to drop. Believe me, there's always another shoe. It's as though you'd given birth to a centipede.

My husband and I have been through enough drama for three separate movies on the Life Time channel. Except actual life doesn't come with a remote control, and our trial-by-teen has left me looking a hell of a lot more shopworn than Debra Messing. My current appearance is more akin to Weeping Woman, Picasso's famous portrait of Dora Maar.

Like my son, I'm developing a newfound appreciation for cubism.

*A sampling of metal genres and sub-genres: Heavy/Traditional, Speed/Thrash, Death, Black, Orchestrated/Symphonic, Power, Doom, Progressive, Gothic, Electronic, Folk/Viking, Blackened Death Metal (not to be confused with blackened redfish), Symphonic Power Metal, Melodic Death Metal (Melodic? Really?), Grindcore, Technical Death Metal, American Hardcore and many, many, more. All loud, ugly, testosterone-driven and beloved of adolescent boys and homicidal Scandinavians.

Holding my breath

2011-09-19T11:31:00.000-07:00

Some things are inevitable. For example, when I ordered a dinner-sized Mediterranean salad with teeny tiny olives lurking under the lettuce, it was inevitable that I would crack a tooth. And when we lived under an enormous hundred-year oak that tilted protectively toward our house, it was inevitable that hurricane winds would blow it down on the roof. It was also inevitable that the insurance would find a way to screw us (actually two ways). Now that I live in the stunning, best-kept-secret Oakland Hills, it is inevitable that my dog will get royally skunked.

I first became aware of the danger while walking Winston before bed. It gets really dark up here - streetlights are about as rare as Republicans in Berkeley. If there's no moon out, you just stumble through the night until some motion detector flashes its disapproval at you. My dog and I were making our way toward a lamppost 100 yards away when a long black shadow undulated across the illuminated section of road. It moved with the fluidity of an animated ink blot being painted by some unseen hand. Too small to be a cat or a racoon, too big to be a possum, or a rat. Winston barked and lunged and pulled on his leash but I held on tight. The shadowy creature paused, stuck its tail up into the air like an exclamation point and trotted off. A skunk for sure.

Fair game as far as my yorkie is concerned. Rodents are his calling. His ancestors were bred to control the rat population in the Yorkshire coal mines. Small mammals to Yorkshire terriers are like catnip to cats. And Winston is no Paris Hilton purse pet. He's big boned and well fed and perfectly capable of taking on a skunk. Or so he thinks.

Until I moved to the Oakland Hills, I had only had one experience with skunk proliferation, on a hike in Point Reyes. It was a foggy, monochromatic day, but the skunks were in high spirits. Maybe it was mating season. They were leaping vertically out of the brush all around me, their little black and white coats a stark contrast to the drab, dry grasses. I was reminded of one of those kiddy arcade games, where you have to smack down a plastic critter before he retreats into the console and another one pops out. I don't know if the skunk-folk around here wish they were back in the wild, but they seem pretty well-adapted to me. I have yet to walk Winston without running into them. Darting out from under my car, conferring in pairs in the middle of the road, sashaying across the street like they own the neighborhood. Even when they're keeping a low profile, I get olfactory reminders of their presence, a whiff of angry skunk or a blast of dead skunk in the middle of the road.

Anyway, I want to be prepared, so I went down to the local pet supply and asked for emergency deskunking supplies. They were sold out – the entire shelf was empty. The girl at the register told me it's hard to keep up with the demand. At least three skunked dogs are brought in for a bath every week.

Like I said, it's inevitable – Winston is overdue.

My Electronic Lover

2011-09-15T21:58:00.000-07:00

Advertising, which, by the way, is my trade, first violated my privacy when I was in my early forties. I had had a miscarriage and I took it really hard. Exactly a month before what would have been my due date, a FREE carton of Similac was delivered to my door. It was a mind fuck I did not need as I was just getting over the initial event when the mail man dropped off my FREE formula.

Target marketing, of course, is not exactly news. I remember when I first started out in advertising, back in the late 80s, I learned, to my horror, that I was a" Volvo-White-Wine-And-Brie." That was an early inkling that I wasn't nearly as special as I'd like to think.

Fast forward to the golden age of electronic marketing. Now, the targeting isn't just more precise, it's instantaneous. Recently, I googled a mental illness because I was worried about a loved one (who thankfully is fine). For the next month, every time I went online, I was greeted with adds for brain drugs to treat the condition.

I work at home and am on Facebook and Linked In quite a bit. Since I am naturally gregarious, I must take my mind out for the occasional walk. As a result, the entire web knows my business. Lets say I recommend a book on Linked In. The next time I go on Amazon, that book is in my face, along with others featuring similar subject matter, or by the same author. "Buy me, buy me!" they scream. But I am so creeped out, I'm not buying any of it. (And like most people waiting for the other economic Doc Martin to fall, I'm not buying much of anything).

Sometimes, the targeting doesn't work because it equates curiosity with sustained interest. Like when I went to Sarah Palin's Facebook page, out of sheer voyeurism. I got my comeuppance. For days, I was bombarded with mega churches and right wing political stuff. It was as though my computer were possessed by demons. Finally, I got smart and started clicking offensive.

Most of the time, the spiders do their job with graceful diligence. I sign every lefty-environmento-human-rights'ish petition that comes across my mailbox. And I admit, I have been lured into buying a concert ticket or two – my enthusiasm for music trumps the creep out factor. But damned if those bloody algorithms don't know me better than my husband does. The roots folk music, the spas I'll never frequent but like to read about. Never in a million years would the dear man send me a link to that dramatic Canadian Inn on a forlorn spit of rock overlooking the Pacific. You can almost hear the crash of the surf. " I am so there," I call out to my nameless, faceless electronic lover.

But whether it's through intrusive advertising, or whether we are willful participants in helping Pandora suss out our exact musical tastes, having one's mind mined on a regular basis, and being fed so many spot-on bits of bait, does bring up questions of identity. Certainly, it's disturbing to think that one's personal take on life could be reduced to an algorithm.Our tastes and opinions are why we dress and look the way we do, have the friends, romantic partners and careers we have. They are one of the filters through which we view the world.

My husband always says I'm so predictable. My electronic lover thinks so too.

Om Out of Range

2011-07-06T07:11:00.001-07:00

Meet Baba Orum. Not his real name. In fact, I have no clue who this guy is, but I've taken enough yoga clases to tell you that he is floating on a lotus blossom. India's version of the waterlily, the lotus is a swamp flower and a symbol of purity and transcendence. Note that Baba is draped in orange, the color of enlightenment. Why Baba has racing stripes on his forehead, I do not know. What I do know is if I am to ever start meditating, it can't be under the tutelage of someone who would photoshop himself onto a flower, like a big old bearded bumble bee.

I need to start meditating. I have an unquiet mind, a truckload of guilt and an unlimited capacity for worrying. A person like me should meditate or she will drive herself and others insane. But I am a die-hard Western rationalist and I require the right class. I ruled out doing the David Lynch Transcendental thing because the franchise aspect creeps me out (as does David Lynch). I also decided against the "immersions" held at several of the yoga studios I frequent because they were too steeped in Hinduism and I am not about to start worshiping the elephant god. Finally, I lucked into the perfect teacher for me. One of my yoga instructors, a gentleman with a doctorate in psychology from an Ivy League School, who studied under Jonathan Kabat-Zinn. In addition to the impeccable credentials, he has a calm voice and a pleasant yogic demeanor. And while I'm not in the market and he's not on my team, he is easy on the eyes.

Class is every Wednesday evening. There are a dozen other students. Two are seekers, building on a yogic or Buddhist base. One woman is clinically depressed. Two more are stay-at-home moms for whom a candle-lit bubble bath is no longer sufficient sanctuary. Others are looking for a mind-over-matter approach to chronic physical pain, or simply a way to deal with life's constant barrage of tsuris*. We do an hour of meditation and or yoga and then we have a 15 minute break with thoughtfully provided snacks and water, followed by another hour of discussion.

Now here I will reveal how far I am from achieving enlightenment. Or even equanimity, which may be the same thing.

There is a lady in the class who consistently interferes with my mindfulness. She suffers from depression and likes to talk about it, in rushed, anxious sentences that trail off because she's already off on another tangent that will fizzle out the same way. She is also, poor thing, a relentless Debbie Downer. At break time, she found out another student was from New York and went straight to "Where were you on 911?" Turns out the other lady was a block away and had to run for her life, a story she may not have wanted to revisit in meditation class. But as 911 Lady gamely started telling her story, and we all respectfully turned to listen, Annoying Woman interrupted to tell us how SHE was on 45th street watching it on TV and everything felt so distant it was like it wasn't happening. (Apparently she's both depressed and a narcissist – if it's not happening to HER, it's just not happening). End of break, Thank God.

The second half of class, our teacher started to get all scientific and neurological. The subject was stress, and he was explaining how the stress hormone cortisol destroys the brain five ways. (As a boomer, I am finding it really hard not to make a Wonder Bread joke here.) I was silently calculating who, between me and my husband, has more stress-induced holes in their grey matter when Annoying Woman jumped in with both feet. She had a thought about the cerebral cortex she simply must share. Her own cerebral cortex took more twists and turns than a roller coaster as she shared for the duration of the class. The teacher demonstrated compassion and yogic tolerance and let her ramble while I tried really, really hard to get my loving kindness on.

I emailed our guru a few days later:

I am really enjoying your class, and am ambivalent about writing this email. However, I was frustrated by the way the lady with depression took over the second half of class last week. Stress is THE reason I am in your class, and I was enjoying your presentation - especially since I am one of those nerdy Western types you mentioned who appreciate scientific explanations. It felt like she hijacked the class, and frankly, I know she means well and is a vulnerable person, but half the time I have no idea what she is talking about, and I'm not sure she does either. Ironically, I was finding myself getting stressed out by the fact that she wouldn't stop talking, and I wanted to get back to what YOU had to say.

I realize some of this is me. I am a fast-talking, high strung, impatient, cut-to-the-chase East Coast person and I am working on that. And I know complaining about this lady is not a manifestation of tolerance and empathy. I also understand that some student participation is nurturing and productive in the context of your class. But I wonder if there is a way you might reign her in gently next time she goes off on one of her tangents.

Looking forward to your next class.

Here is his response:

Thank you for sharing your feedback. It can be stressful to feel things not going as we anticipate or desire them to go. (Duh). The main message of the class is to practice acceptance. This is just how things are going right now. Can I release my need for them to be other than they are. Can I detach my happiness wagon from them being somehow different, and be content and at peace with how they are. (OK, I get that. I'm working on it. I just have to FIND my happiness wagon first. I'm not sure where I parked it). Hearing people speak more than you'd prefer or on topics that seem out of context is a great opportunity for you to apply to the mindfulness tool of acceptance. (True, but I would rather hear the person I paid $450 to for meditation classes). I'm glad you are enjoying the class and finding benefit in the neuroscience studies described. (No, dude, because I didn't get to hear you describe them). Hope your home practice is going well. As a way of extending the topic of this email, notice this week other places where you are feeling stressed out by people talking out of turn or generally things not going as you expect or want. (Actually, I'd be more likely to notice if the stress suddenly stopped). Practice playing your acceptance card in those situations. (My new mantra: it is what it is). And notice if it helps alleviate the stress you are experiencing. It's a practice. Old habits die hard. Be patient, and just practice with it. It gets easier over time.

He is right, of course. My bitching goes against the purpose of the class, and my lack of tolerance is borderline intolerable. Ultimately, it worked out. There were three sessions left - Annoying Woman missed the next one and was uncharacteristically subdued during the final class. I was looking forward to the grand finale, a full-day silent retreat including meditation, yoga and a walk in the woods. Alas, it was not to be. I had a heinous cold and couldn't stop coughing. Down dog and shivasana are potentially plegm-producing activities that would have kept me hacking all day, which would have meant no silent retreat for anyone. So of course, I did not go. I get to make it up at the end of our teacher's next series.

In the meantime, I have been practicing mindfulness, the beginner's way, lying on my back and focusing on my body and breath. I think it must be helping because my husband now reminds me, on a daily basis, that it's time to go meditate.

I'm trying not to take it personally.

*Tsuris - yiddish for problems great and small.

In a flash

2011-06-10T01:19:00.000-07:00

The first time I saw a streak of light in my peripheral vision, I thought it was the arc of a falling meteor. Before I could focus on it, the light was gone. And then it came again, and again, always on the far left side of my visual field. Over the next few days, I realized that I was experiencing some kind of occular phenomenon. The flashes were most visible in the dark and they increased in frequency and intensity and began to look more like lightning than shooting stars. Even during the day, I would occasionally blink and glimpse a burst of light and a negative image of a blood vessel under my eyelid. I also felt some irritation in the affected corner of my eye, as though something were stuck under the lid. Sometimes I would wake up in the morning with a bright red eyeball.

Naturally, I called my fabulous eye doctor. She didn't like the sound of what I was describing and told me to seet a retina specialist without delay. Being a reasonably smart cookie, I went to the Internet and looked up my symptoms. It could be retinal detachment, which is not a good thing. However, blindness usually occurs within 24 hours or so of the retina detaching, and I had been having symptoms for several weeks. More likely, my symptoms were due to posterior vitreous detachment. This happens with, ahem, age. The vitreous gel that fills up your eye ball starts to thicken or shrink, form little clumps, and pull away from the retina. While posterior vitreous detachment can lead to retinal detachment, it usually is just another annoying sign of physical deterioration they forgot to mention in the annual health issue of Parade magazine.

I have a PPO and pay through the proverbial nose for catastrophic coverage, with a $5,000 deductible. (Actually, since the passage of the healthcare bill, I have had four rate increases to my husband's five. The insurance industry is making up for having to cover people with preexisting conditions by gouging the self-insured.). So I selected a group practice of retina specialists and was given an appointment with the aptly named Dr. Light.* (Dr. Light the retina expert. Almost as good as Dr. Bottoms the gyne, Dr. Head the Shrink, and of course, the renowned proctologist, Dr. Seymour Butz).

After his charming assistant dilated my pupil, Dr. Light breezed in and examined me. He was a young man of few words. Very few words. Look left, look right, look up, look down. He gave me an abbreviated explanation of the abbreviated explanation I just gave you: " You have posterior vitreous detachment. It puts you at risk for retinal detachment, so if your vision becomes blurred or you start to see a rain of floaters, come in immediately. I expect you may start seeing flashes in your other eye but you don't have to come in if that happens. Nice meeting you. Bye bye."

I asked about the redness and gritty sensation. It was nothing, he saw nothing, there was nothing to worry about. To mark a definitive end to our visit, he put out his hand and shook mine and then marched swiftly out the door before I could ask any more questions. After all, it was just a routine diagnosis. For him.

For me, it meant resigning myself to random flashes in my left eye, the visual equivalent of tinnitus. And now, I was being told that the lights would eventually spread to my right eye. Oh yeah, and if my vision ever suddenly goes south while I am climbing Mt. Everest, hiking the wilds of Patagonia, or driving the Paris-Dakar race, I won't be able to make it to the emergency room in time. Which means I'll have to learn to accessorize with eye patches. So thanks, doc, for your compassion and understanding.

Meanwhile, the gritty sensation of having something stuck in my eye didn't go away, and I kept waking up with that scarifying red eyeball. Since Dr. Light had nothing illuminating to say about this, I decided to see a different ophthalmologist - a generalist. Now, I could have, and probably should have gone to my fabulous eye doctor, but she is a fifty minute drive away, and I had a lot of work. Instead, I tried somebody new near home. In order to get back to my desk as quickly as possible, I made the first appointment of the day: 8:50.

The new eye guy's lobby was huge - never a good sign - and despite having the day's "first appointment" time, I waited a good half hour. Then, off to an examining room where I parked my butt for another 15 minutes before a technician came in to administer the requisite dilating drops and vision tests. After that, I got moved to a cramped little seating area outside the examination rooms where I waited for an additional hour. Two elderly French ladies were already sitting there, a mother and daughter. The mother looked to be well into her nineties. They told me they had been sitting here in the wait-some-more room for over thirty minutes, which probably amounted to a fiftieth of the older lady's remaining life span.

It was 11:00 before I finally got to see the doctor. (As far as I know, the two French ladies are still there. I hope someone is feeding them). Two hours and ten minutes had elapsed. Exactly the amount of time it would have taken to drive to my regular doc's, be seen immediately and drive home. I wanted to give Dr. Wait-In-My-Lobby-'Til -You-Grow-Cataracts** the benefit of the doubt. Surely something unusual had caused the delay - car crash, food poisoning, pink eye epidemic? "So," I said, "Guess you must be understaffed today?" Nope. Just another busy day at the office.

It turned out my irritated eye had nothing to do with the posterior vitreous detachment. Still, the famed retinologist Dr. Light had missed something rather basic. Although I had complained about the discomfort and redness in my left eye, he never bothered to look for the cause. A blocked pore at the base of one of my eyelashes had formed a little bump, like a grain of sand under my eyelid. Sounds simple, but eye doctors, like all other medical specialists, have now become so vertical in their expertise that a retina guy can't diagnose a clogged eyelash.

Dr. Overbook'em-And-Let'em-Rot*** prescribed a daily lash and lid scrub with Cetaphil, eyes shut tight, followed by five minutes of a hot towel on my face to loosen up the blocked eyelash root. He never apologized for the two hour wait, but he did try to talk me into coming back in three months for an eye exam.

I'm afraid he's going to have to wait.

*not his real name, but close.

** Also not his real name.

*** Should be his real name.

Parking While Black in Orinda, Part Deux

2011-06-02T16:41:00.000-07:00

If you have not read Parking While Black in Orinda, please read that first so I don't have to recap the whole ugly story. Suffice to say that the African American cleaning people we hired were humiliated by the Orinda police, for no ostensible reason, right in front of our house and our neighbors. Now, we had been stewing over this for days and my husband decided to go to the police station and talk to them about it. At the very least, we hoped to find out which neighbor had called the police and why.

Calmly and politely, my husband recapped the entire story to the friendly station clerk. In the course of the conversation, he managed to learn that there was no record of a call or complaint pertaining to the cleaners (We had suspected an unfriendly, suspicious neighbor across the street). Of course, the only conclusion we could draw was that the police noticed two people driving while black, followed them to our house and harassed them, just because.

The police chief was unavailable to talk, but after about twelve minutes a sergeant came out. The kind of big mean SOB who thrives on having authority over people. My husband started to recount what had happened. Unfortunately, having just told the story to the clerk, he had gotten himself worked up all over again. He is sixty one, and had witnessed two people his age, plus or minus two years, falling apart in our kitchen. He still gets emotional every time he talks about it. So when asked to describe the officer who came to the door, he took an unnecessary tangent and replied "I see him all the time outside Starbucks, drinking lattes. He likes to ogle my daughter." That was all it took to set the Sergeant off. "I don't need you. " the officer bellowed. "Who needs you? Get the hell out of my station."

Shocked at the way he was being addressed, my husband sprang from his chair with such vigor that he knocked it over. "Pick it up! You pick that up." the policeman roared. "And get the hell out of here." But my husband had worked himself up and wouldn't back down. "You're just like them - You're all the same. I just want to know, do you have a policy of stopping people for parking while black, for driving while black?"

At that, the enraged cop ordered my husband to leave, escorted him out of the police station and followed him to the parking lot, badgering him the entire time. And then the guy did something truly astounding: he threatened us. "Don't bother calling us if anything happens. If you have a burglary or something. Because we're not coming out."

"Don't worry," my old man shot back. "Someone could be killing me, and I still wouldn't want you to come out."

Now that is what I call a positive police presence. You treat visitors like criminals and residents like crap. Did my husband lose his cool? A little. Who wouldn't? That was a disgusting thing to witness and it happened right in front of our house. Not only was it racial profiling, it was STOOPID racial profiling: they harassed two people in their sixties with buckets and mops and wouldn't drop it after we vouched for them. And now, to top it all off, Orinda's finest, who technically work for us and whose salaries we help pay, have abdicated their responsibility to protect us.

Cross-pollination

2011-05-21T10:02:00.000-07:00

If you like this blog, you might like my other blog too. If I haven't posted here in a while, chances are I've posted there instead.

Parking While Black in Orinda, California

2011-05-13T13:32:00.000-07:00

You know the rant. I've written about our exile in the wonder-bread-white suburban enclave of Orinda before. We didn't want to move here. We hate the suburbs, we don't play golf, we're not the country club type and we just don't fit in. We moved here out of desperation to get our wayward son away from the disaster that is Berkeley High, a school that makes it absurdly simple for a troubled teen to add another helping of trouble to his plate. Orinda was easy - just over the hill, and with some of the state's highest-rated schools. Suffice to say that the school thing didn't work out. The young ball-and-chain lasted three days before ending up in an alternative school and we were stuck with a two-year lease on a too-big house in Stepford.

It's a quiet neighborhood. Sepulchrally quiet. There are elderly people across the street with caregivers who come and go. Our neighbors on one side are a wholesome looking young couple with two children. The kids are blonde and around 6 and 8 years old. As for the parents, they are so elusive that I wouldn't be able to identify them in a police lineup, not that that would ever happen. The house on the other side is a dump that's taken two years to sell. Lately I hear signs of life from behind the fence so I am guessing someone moved in while we were in Hawaii. Across the street one door down is a constipated bitch whose gated yard is always locked. When we first moved in, some neighbors left us a plate of cupcakes while we were out. I had no idea where to return the plate, so I put a little note in all the mailboxes closest to our house. The bee-yatch was no doubt peering out the window, and saw me violating her mail box. She stepped outside her front door (walking across the yard to introduce herself and acknowledge my humanity was out of the question) and asked what I was doing. I explained. Was she the nice neighbor who had left the cupcakes...? She gave me a curt no and went back inside without another word.

The fact is, Orinda is a great place to be a cop. As far as I can tell, all they do is sit outside the local Starbucks, chugging lattes and ogling high school girls. That and hide along Camino Pablo, where there's no traffic and the speed limit randomly goes from 45 to 35 to 30, so they can hand out speeding tickets (2) to nice middle aged ladies.

Anyway, our daughter was about to come out for the summer, having just finished her first year of law school and snagged an internship with the San Francisco ACLU, and the house needed a good cleaning. Usually, my husband does it. We're both self-employed, and that's our division of labor. I shop and cook, he cleans. Both my better half and I were raised by meticulous cleaning freaks. He learned from his mother, I rebelled against mine. So he's in charge of the vacuum and I handle food, and since he breaks out in hives if he has to spend more that five minutes at the Safeway, it works out for both of us. But this time, we needed a really deep end-of-Spring cleaning and we decided to splurge and get a cleaning crew.

The cleaning people, a sixtyish African American gentleman and his sister, showed up on the dot. The guy called to notify us that they were parked out front, and we let them in. They gave us a quick estimate and went back to their old van to get their supplies. The brother was a talkative fellow with a rich baritone voice that would have served him well in radio. The sister was a reserved, big-boned lady who looked like she might have acromegaly and was likely never diagnosed for lack of insurance. ( I know these things - my dad's an endocrinologist and my aunt actually developed the condition due to a pituitary tumor).They commenced cleaning and my husband went back to his office to work. I jumped in the shower to get ready for a business meeting.

Meanwhile, someone on the block noticed an old, beat-up car with two black people inside parked in front of our house and called the police. (In case you haven't picked up on my subtle hints above, my prime suspect is the bitch with the locked gate). Three squad cars pulled up in front of the house and parked so as to close off the street, just in case the cleaning crew decided to make a run for it. When the poor cleaner went back to his car, they moved in on him. Who are you, what are you doing here, can we see some ID. So the cleaner knocked at our door (again) and my husband came out. Of course, he told the police we had hired these folks to clean our house, but that was not enough. The officer slowly stared my husband up and down. Between the old black guy holding a mop, the old black lady with the bucket and the old, bald white guy in shorts and a Lands End T shirt, it was hard to determine who looked more suspicious. "Are you sure you live here?" the cop asked my husband. At least he didn't ask to see a copy of the lease.

Despite our assurances that we had hired the cleaning crew, Orinda's Finest proceeded to stage fifteen minutes of outdoor theater. This gave my husband an opportunity to finally see some of our neighbors, as three housewives came out of their homes to gawk. The cops ran checks on both the cleaners' IDs. Then, they found out the brother's registration had expired and threatened to impound his car. They kept the street blocked off the entire time. It was all a big show to demonstrate to the neighborhood that our police force is on the job. The fact that two nice innocent people were publicly humiliated in front of our home was besides the point. After all, none of this would have happened had they had the sense to bleach their faces and drive a beamer.

I came out of the bathroom, ready to leave and oblivious to what had just occurred. The cops were gone, but my husband filled me in. The cleaners were justifiably upset. The sister kept saying how embarrassed she was. I told her it was the neighbor who had called the police, and of course the cops themselves, who should be embarrassed, but I was embarrassed too. I apologized to her and her husband and left for my meeting. Two women were still out on the street, watching our house. They scowled as I drove past.

The brother got increasingly riled up after I left. "I beat Sugar Ray Leonard in an exhibition match before he went to the Olympics," he told my husband. "I'm sixty years old and I have to clean houses for a living. I don't deserve this." No argument here. None what-so-fucking-ever. The fellow did a slow burn over the next hour. Every time he took out some trash or went to his car for some supplies, he felt like he was being observed. He was sweating heavily and his movements became increasingly abrupt as he grew more distraught. The sister was visibly devastated. My husband could plainly see that both were experiencing profound emotional pain, and a powerful case of deja vu.

You don't get to be a sixty year old working class African American without having experienced racism. Repeatedly. And, black man in the White House notwithstanding, it was happening again. Finally, they got so mad, they just had to leave.
"I'm sorry, but we have to go. It's obvious we're not wanted here."
They hadn't quite finished cleaning, but my husband understood.
"Nice neighbors you have," the man added. "Bet you don't like them any more than we do."
"No," my husband replied, "We don't. We're moving back to Berkeley when our lease is up in July."
"If you need cleaning, we'll come work for you there," the cleaner promised, "But we're never coming back to Orinda."

Archipelago

2011-04-28T20:46:00.000-07:00

Aloha!

Sorry to resort to the default opener, but my husband and I just took a week's vacation at our president's birth place, and I don't mean Kenya. It was a syncopated vacation. We started with a couple of days in Oahu in order to see Pearl Harbor. Then, we moved on to the Big Island, to swim in the ocean and chase my lava dreams. We drove too much and chilled too little, but of course we're glad we went. I am too pressed for time to craft a chronological chronicle here, so I've thrown together an archipelago of impressions instead.

Thinking about making a trip to the Aloha state? Don't buy the Frommer guide. We usually like that series, but this time, the writer phoned it in. I suspect he sat on a beach chair on Waikiki beach with a lap top and cribbed from a pile of rival guides. Thanks to this book, we drove half way around Oahu to see some "spectacular" surfing beach that turned out to be border-line ugly, and frequented by tweekers and shiftless young men with really loud car radios. Frommer's surrogate also induced us to eat in a couple of lousy Waikiki restaurants and book rooms at a lodge with three weeks worth of dirt on the floor and a major mildew problem. Meanwhile, the guide doesn't even mention the dramatic rocky surfer beaches, with natural hot springs, that we discovered on the Eastern Puna region of the big Island.

If there's one thing I despise, it's a beach full of high rises. The degraded environment in Waikiki gives me the same sad feeling I get from watching neurotic, incarcerated animals at the zoo. My husband knows this and felt compelled to point out, before, during and after our Waikiki stay, that he had only brought me here so I could see Pearl Harbor. Waikiki was sunny but shabby. Like Miami Beach, it has definitely seen better days, but whereas Miami has a certain dangerous edge, all Waikiki can muster is a faint melancholia. We strolled down the artificial beach (that's right, all that velvety sand is imported), stopped for the requisite umbrella drink, and walked back. There were as many locals on the beach as there were tourists. Lots of big bellies, bad sunburns, blurry tattoos and bikinis on broads who had no business wearing them.

Waikiki is a party town, and a group of party animals were camped in the room directly above us. We waited until 2 am before finally calling security to shut them up. The following morning, when I went to shower, I noticed a faint cigarette smell. I wondered whether our upstairs neighbors had been smoking in the bathroom and briefly considered narking on them so we wouldn't be tagged as the couple who violated hotel policy. I should have tattled. When we returned that evening, we were greeted by a stern form letter informing us that "Evidence of Smoking" had been found in our room, and we would be subject to a $200 fine. My irritation index instantly went from zero to a hundred. Letter in hand, I marched downstairs to talk to the manager, who was too busy talking to the cops. There were six police cars parked out front, and they hadn't come to take us away for evidence of smoking. A psychotic street person had wandered into the hotel unnoticed, taken the elevator to the fourth floor and commandeered the tiny swimming pool. He was now standing in the water fully clothed, with a wet towel on his head, howling at the moon. I don't know how many men in blue it took to get the poor guy out of the water, but I'm pretty sure someone got wet.

Every American should make a pilgrimage to Pearl Harbor once in their lives, preferably after a brief review of the historical context. It helped that my husband had made me sit through Tora Tora Tora last year, although at the time my daughter and I were debating whether to rechristen it Bora Bora Bora or Snora Snora Snora. (What can I say, we don't like war movies). Still, it's impossible not to be moved by the Pearl Harbor exhibits, staffed with friendly vets from the Korean and Viet Nam wars. Seventy years after she was shot down with 1177 men on board, the submerged USS Arizona still weeps oil. You can tour the battleship USS Missouri and visit a Bowfin submarine, both marvels of old school mechanical engineering. One thing I learned from the various exhibits was that Dr. Seuss started out as a political cartoonist, and by today's standards, his drawings of the Japanese are about as racist as Nazi propaganda depictions of Jews. As for the Japanese, there were quite a few of them touring the site and I had to wonder what they were thinking. After all, they did pull off the biggest surprise attack in history.

With its ukeleles, mellow song stylings and gentle rhythms reminiscent of ocean breezes, Hawaiian music has its charms. But there is something terribly wrong about an island arrangement of John Denver's "Country Road". I think it's the part about the West Virginia Mountain Highways...

The Kohala coast is a lot less costly when you stay in Waimea: You can access the beach in twenty minutes, without shelling out for a luxury resort. Just beyond the outskirts of town is the main entrance to the 160 year old Parker Ranch, one of the nation's largest ranches. 35,000 head of cattle graze the vast Parker lands. The ranch's last individual owner, one Richard Smart, lived up to his surname by leaving his holdings, including an extensive art collection, in trust to support healthcare, education and charitable giving for the region. Cattle ranching is not the ranch's only source of income. Visitors can book a 3-hour horseback tour of the hilly lands at the base of Mauna Kea. Or they can go on a big game hunt. $3,500 buys you the Grand Slam, a two-day hunt for wild boar, "meat pig" (as opposed to the meatless kind?), feral goat and something called "wild cattle" - probably the same breed as that crazy laughing cow. Since we're more used to hunting for things like car keys, cell phones and reading glasses, we did not answer the call of the wild.

The cow town of Waimea has a unique charm, like the old TV series Northern Exposure only with better weather. Waimea appears to be home to an eccentric or three. The town tranny, a dead ringer for Renee Richards, likes to have coffee at the restaurant next to the lodge where we stayed. We noticed her two mornings in a row, lingering over the local paper as she twisted a synthetic auburn curl around her manicured index finger. In the evening, we ate at the Pakini Grill, which the sign outside described as the "Best Restaurant in the world, according to our mother." Mom, or maybe grandma, greeted us at the door. She was a tiny little white haired Island lady in a floor length brown print mumu and a ridiculous pair of glasses with a giant 2011 jutting from the top of the frames. When I asked about the eyewear, the old girl explained that she's trying to set a world record by wearing a different pair of outrageous specs each day. (Like most crazy things people do to get into the Guiness book, there is no previous record to break here). With tourists and regulars providing a steady supply of preposterous eyewear, Mom-or-Grammy is approaching 1000 uninterrupted days of new spectacles.

Mostly, we ate on the cheap, but we did manage to get in a couple of polar opposite fancy meals. The first dinner was at Merriman's in Waimea. The chef was a militant locavore, a concept I can embrace, and the menu detailed the source of all the ingredients. Unfortunately, green beans were not only local and in season, they were apparently the only available vegetable. We had an appetizer and a main dish each, and all four came with large quantities of barely cooked haricots verts. Beans with eel. Beans with scallops. Beans with lamb shank. Beans with Mahi Mahi. By the end of the meal, we had a bad case of bean there, ate that. We didn't order dessert - the words vanilla bean killed what was left of our appetites. The other fancy meal, we enjoyed on our last day, at the Kilauea Lodge in the town of Volcano. The lodge was founded by Albert Jeyte, the German former makeup artist from the 80s TV show, Magnum PI. Like many cast and crew members from that Hawaii-based series, Herr Jeyte couldn't bring himself to return to the mainland after the network pulled the plug on the program. So he married a local girl, bought an abandoned Y.M.C.A. summer camp and turned it into a delightful bed and breakfast. Mr. Jeyte then put himself through a Parisian cooking school and now serves up continental food with a Teutonic flair, and decidedly un-locavore ingredients. As in South African Lobster (who traveled 3 times as long as we did to reach Hawaii) and antelope schnitzel (I swear, I kid you not).

I am married to a gentleman of Irish descent with an aspirin-white complexion. He doesn't tan: he broils. That means we can only go to the beach for so long - maybe ten minutes – before seeking shade. So instead of plopping our butts on one patch of sand, we spent a day driving around Oahu, marveling at the variety of beaches. Lanikai and Kailua beaches on Oahu, where the Obamas vacation, had beautiful white sand and calm, swimmable waters. On the Big Island, we loved the beach near the Marriot on the Kohala coast, shaded by palm trees and featuring two ancient fish ponds where the native Hawaiian people practiced aquaculture centuries ago. But the best part about the Kohala beach was that it was sea turtle nesting season. The eggs were buried in the sand, and the parents were playing right off shore - no snorkeliing equipment necessary. I plan on blogging about these serene creatures in greater detail soon.

Remember Rush Limbaugh's hawaiian heart attack scare? He praised the excellent care he received, and was embarrassed to learn that the island system is somewhat, er, socialized! As far as the mind-body connection goes, I'd say many Hawaiians have a permanent case of the Aloha spirit. The locals call everybody "my dear," smile a lot and often sing to themselves. Other than the melanoma risk, all that sunshine seems to have a positive effect on people's health - unless they have fallen prey to the ongoing meth epidemic. Talk about trouble in paradise! We saw several large, frightening anti-meth posters outside of bars, restaurants and gas stations. We also noticed a good deal of public awareness communication about type 2 Diabetes, not surprising in light of the dangerous native diet. Shrimp trucks, barbecue wagons, shaved ice mobiles – there is fantastic street food everywhere, all of it heavy on the sugar, hot sauce and animal fat. We enjoyed sweet short ribs, plump shrimp sauteed in excessive amounts of garlic butter, creamy cold slaw drenched in mayonnaise, buckwheat macadamia pancakes with coconut syrup...it's a wonder we didn't end up in the ER with Rush.

I wish I didn't have to diss a sensible, green technology, but the cistern system at the Kilauea Lodge had noise issues. It rains every day in the town of Volcano, so outfitting the inn with cisterns must have seemed like a good idea. Unfortunately, the metal pipes collecting rainwater on the roof of our room magnified the drip drip dripping of the rain – not all that soothing at 3 a.m. Being half way to Japan, we also couldn't help but worry about radioactive precipitation. Fortunately, our bathroom was equipped with a water cooler. Besides my politically incorrect quibbling about the water system, I loved the Kilauea Lodge - just ask for a room away from the cisterns.

Call me naive, but here's what Fromer, or his slacker ghostwriter, would have us believe: "Since Kilauea's ongoing eruption began in 1983, lava has been bubbling and oozing in a mild mannered way that lets you walk right up to the creeping flow for an up close encounter." Now, if you read this, wouldn't you think you were going to see some fireworks? I am a volcano freak, and witnessing volcanic activity, preferably including lava, is at the top of my bucket list. The first time we were on the Big Island, nearly 18 years ago, we couldn't do too much exploring. Our son was an infant and my husband was hobbled by a torn anterior cruciate ligament. This time, I was convinced we were going to see rivers of molten rock hitting the sea in a giant cloud of steam. We did not. Volcanoes National Park, with its coal black lava fields, steam vents, craters and lava tubes, is worth the trip regardless. We drove all the way to the bottom of the chain of craters road, which ends abruptly where it was cut off by the latest lava flow. Sunset was imminent, and we took a lonesome, mystical hike across the lava beds to a sacred site, marked by petroglyphs, where the ancient Hawaiians ritually buried the umbilical cords of their newborns. (This tradition, still practiced by a few indigenous folk, is intended to keep the baby from harm and promote longevity). Night had fallen by the time we got back to the park entrance, but I was not ready to leave. The manager at the Kilauea Lodge had told us that one could see Hale Mau Mau, the smaller crater within Kilauea's summit caldera, glow in the dark at night. My hungry husband was less than enthusiastic when I begged him to take me back to the park's Jagger museum, on the giant caldera's edge.
- There won't be any glow.
- Oh please, oh please. I just have to see.
- I'm telling you, there won't be any glow.
- Can't we just SEE? If there’s no glow, you can say I told you so.
- Alright, I'll take you, just so you can see that there isn't any glow.
He took me, bless his heart and there WAS a glow! The gas cloud that hovers over the crater reflects light from the lake of fire below, and after dark, you can see a pink cloud hovering over Hale Mau Mau. That little detour turned out to be a big sacrifice on my husband's part. In the tiny town of Volcano, restaurants stop serving when they feel like it. The door may say nine, but the chef says no. We ended up driving 30 miles round trip to find a McDonalds. But McFood poisoning was a fair trade off to see the evening glow over Hale Mau Mau. Just enough of a tease to make me want to come back the next time Kilauea acts up.

I am woman, hear me vent.

2011-01-28T17:33:00.000-08:00

Yes, Vagina, that is you, in satin effigy. And that pillow is precisely the sort of new age wierdness I feared I would encounter when I ventured forth to participate in my very first women's circle. I had never heard of such gatherings until I got an email from the women's business network I belong to, notifying us of a new circle starting up in Oakland. When I contacted the circle lady and asked for details, she suggested I just show up and see for myself.

So what prompted me to attend a women's circle?

1.) I have a deficit of homegirls out here and thought perhaps I'd meet some nice ladies.

2.) I could use some therapy but it's not in the family budget.

3.) My husband and I have been catching up on three years of In Treatment and we just watched the last DVD.

4.) I figured even if I didn't experience sisterhood, catharsis, or enlightenment, I could at least get a blog post out of it.

I did not know what to expect. In an effort to meet people in my relatively new stomping grounds, I have joined maybe twenty meetup groups and attended all of 3 gatherings in nearly 3 years. The knitting group proved that I can't talk and count stitches at the same time. The Berkeley social club was fun but oriented towards younger, unmarried people. The culture group was peopled with dull, ossified fogies, the sort of folk who engage in cultural activities because they think it's good for them and non-commitally pronounce everything they see "interesting". The art, hiking and book clubs, I kept up with voyeuristically by reading their email updates. I tried to go on a group hike once, but it decided to rain. I never felt like reading any of the book club's books. After a year or so of inactivity, I got booted off their distribution lists.

As long as there have been females, there has been female bonding. Clusters of women sitting together, making meals, pots, lace, baskets, quilts and, of course, conversation. Still, I was a little apprehensive about this circle business.Would I be getting in touch with my prehistoric roots, when the mitochondrial mother sat around the fire with her homegirls, cooking and nursing babies while the men folk hunted mammoth? Was I setting myself up for some sort of new age freak show involving chanting, incense, crystals and yoni- inspired knick knacks like the vagina pillow? I hoped to Goddess I wouldn't have to hug any strangers. I wondered whether the circle would be more like group therapy, which could at least have some entertainment value. Perhaps it might even tide me over until Gabriel Byrne came back from hiatus. I decided to give this circle thing a shot.

It was an evening meeting in a small, run-down commercial building. Our group leader Calista (not her real name) had talked the owner into letting her use an empty office. The space was arranged like a makeshift living room - two mismatched, scratchy couches and a half dozen uncomfortable chairs. A plug-in tea kettle sat atop a thrift shop end table, along with an assortment of teas. On the floor in the middle of the room was a piece of colorful fabric on top of which Calista had arranged an array of objects. Candles, shells, a supermarket bouquet, a green ceramic heart. It was a sad assortment. It reminded me of Sarah in The Little Princess trying to make her garret look homey.

Calista is a charismatic middle aged woman with an intelligent face framed by a leonine, shoulder length mass of grey curls. She took stock of the attendees. There were six of us, ranging from 30 to 60, sipping tea as we waited for her to take the lead. Right away, Calista informed us that she was not a therapist. Heck, the woman isn't even a clinical social worker. She specializes in conflict resolution and non violent communication.(I'm not completely clear what that is but I'm pretty sure it doesn't involve calling your husband an idiot or wacking him upside the head with a blunt object.) Calista explained the rules, probably for my benefit as I was the only newbie:

1. We were here to "share our truth," and anything that gets shared must not leave the room. East Coast smart aleck that I am, I had to make a funny."It's like Vegas!" I cried. The ladies looked confused, as often happens out here when I crack a joke. I tried to explain." You know, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas...". Calista wisely pressed on.

2. Everyone gets the same amount of time to talk. Calista would be watching the clock. The green ceramic heart I had noticed on her makeshift altar would get passed around from one woman to the next. Whoever held it had the floor until she had said her piece, or her turn was up, whichever came first. We were not allowed to interrupt each other but as long as we were supportive and nurturing, we could comment on what other people had said once it was our turn to speak.

3. Any and all displays of emotion were welcome. Feel free to cry, swear, raise your voice.

4. We were each expected to leave a $10-$20 donation at the end of the session. Compared to therapy, that's a bargain.

(At this point, I'd like to reassure you that I will not, repeat, will not break rule number one. I won't divulge anything that might jeopardize anyone's privacy, even though, trust me, it would make this post waaaaaay more entertaining.)

Calista passed the ceramic heart to the woman on her left, and so the venting began. It was a mishmash of serious life issues and serious navel-gazing. Insensitive husbands. Fruitless job searches. Narcissistic mothers. Ungrateful spawn. Ageist interviewers. Troubled teens. Depressed mates. Demanding children. Abusive fathers. Career burn out. Money problems. Sexual confusion. Old wounds. New wounds. Excess scar tissue. Protocol seems to be to just let people weep without intervening, and there was a fair amount of crying. The hardest part was staying neutral. Some women, you wanted to hug. Others, shake. One was a circle junky - this was her third circle in two days. It didn't seem to be helping. Like Calista, I'm not a mental health professional, but I do know wackadoodle when I see it.

As it turns out, the circle process is not like therapy at all. When you talk to a shrink, it's a given that your perspective needs altering. That's why you're there. You speak your truth, but you and your therapist both know how relative that notion is. Growth comes from understanding that your experience is subjective, and not necessarily accurate. A woman's circle is quite the opposite. Nothing you say is parsed, analyzed, questioned or refuted. You unload your story like a fishmonger tossing a sixty pound salmon onto a pile of grey ice. And there it sits, all stinky, slippery and just a little fishy, waiting for someone to buy it.

In her excellent book, You just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, Georgetown University linguistics professor Deborah Tannen describes a woman who comes home from work and starts telling her husband what a horrendous day she had. The husband, in typical male fashion, immediately goes into Mr. Fix-It mode. She should have a come-to-Jesus with her assistant. Ask her boss for a raise. Do something about her workload. He thinks his wife is asking for suggestions and solutions, but she feels patronized. All she really wanted was a sympathetic ear. This female need to vent is the basis for Women's Circles. But a women's circle is no replacement for an actual girl's night out, and not just because there's no wine involved. Your real homegirls will listen to you and support you. But they'll also call you on your bullshit. A good friend will tell you if you're overreacting, or stuck in a destructive pattern, or being too hard on your spouse. Most importantly, your buddies will make you laugh, maybe even at yourself. Compared to an actual circle of friends, an ersatz women's circle is more like the Post Secret project, in which people unburden themselves by anonymously writing their secrets on a postcard.

When my turn came to hold the green ceramic heart, I didn't hold back. I bitched, I moaned, I spewed. It felt awkward: vaguely cathartic but also slightly disloyal. I didn't experience any epiphanies, although the entertainment value of listening to everyone else's problems beat the heck out of the Lifetime Chanel. Still, based on the immediate results of my circle experience, I don't think I'll be going back.

I went home and yelled at my husband.

Distance Vision

2011-01-25T07:33:00.001-08:00

Well, there is no more wandering this earth without glasses for me. I am at the threshold of must-wear-glasses-to-drive. And I have been camped in must-wear-glasses-to-read for well over a decade. Now, I have to get around with two pairs of glasses, at least one of which is usually sitting on my head.

I've never studied optics, or even thought about the subject. And I have an idiot streak. For years, I wondered why restaurants would pile the chairs on the tables at the end of the day. Seemed like a lot of choreography just to signify that the restaurant was closed. I think I was in my mid twenties when I finally figured out the purpose of this Sisyphean task. I was out to dinner with some chatty people and we closed the joint. The owner turned up the overhead lights and the bus boy put some chairs up and started sweeping. Which is when I had my epiphany. So THAT's why they pile those chairs up. (OK, so I have an idiot streak AND, as my poor husband will attest, I suck at cleaning).

All this to say that I have been under the mistaken belief that distance glasses are somehow different from reading glasses and must be hand-crafted to one's exact prescription. I've had multiple pairs of $16 rainbow-colored readers stashed all over the house for years. But the distance glasses were another story. I spent a lot of money on fragile Italian frames so funky, they should have come with an expiration date – the optical version of those idiotic boob-warmer sweaters all the young things were rocking back in 2006.

However passé those frames were starting to look, I was damn well getting my money's worth. Over the course of 6 years, I had the lenses replaced three times, until the delicate frames finally broke. I then spent six months squinting at road signs and complaining about the blurred TV set.

Finally, I stopped procrastinating and went in for an eye exam with a new ophthalmologist – an honest one. "Look," she admitted, "I'd love to make money off of you, but the fact is, all you need to see far is a 1.25 reader." It took a while for my sluggish brain to wrap itself around the concept of over-the-counter distance glasses. "Are you sure?" I asked the doctor. She was sure. Incredibly, no vision professional, opthalmologist or optometrist, had ever explained to me that over-the-counter glasses could also boost my distance vision, and I didn't have to shell out for those stupid designer frames.

The eye doctor did half-heartedly try to sell me on a few other options. Bifocals, contacts, prescription sun glasses, light-sensitive-prescription-sun-glasses-that-turn-clear-indoors and of course, eye surgery. I wasn't buying any of it, which was OK with her. She doesn't need the income: she's a renowned specialist in focusing issues. Patients come from all over the country to work with her. There's an autographed picture of Christopher from The Sopranos on her wall, thanking her for helping him read like a normal person. Full disclosure: my daughter went to this doctor for vision training. In addition to their sessions together, she had to buy special software to practice at home. Daily, diligently, she sat in front of the computer, wearing old timey 3-D glasses with a red lens and a green one, exercising her eyeballs. No doubt the training has made her a more efficient reader, but I could have bought a pair of designer distance specs for every day of the week with what she spent on her vision workouts.

So now I have added two pairs of distance glasses to my collection. Theoretically, one lives in the car, although it has a tendency to plant itself on my cranium and hitch a ride into the house. The other pair hangs out on my night stand, so I can watch TV. I do my best to remember to take them off before I get up and walk around. I'm trying not to notice the dust bunnies.

Wanderlust

2010-12-25T17:48:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time, when we were resentfully living in Cleveland, my husband and I took a ten-year anniversary trip to Paris. As we strolled through the left bank, we fantasized about relocating to France, as my sister had recently done. I came up with the notion of opening an American style cookie store. Yes, I know, France Land of Pastry, but cookies, plain old easy to bake chocolate chip cookies, not to mention snickerdoodles, were unknown in the City of Lights. (This was years ago and I have no doubt that today you can find a cookie on every coin de rue).

By the time we got back to our hotel, we had already franchised our cookie business and were poised to expand into Italy. Would we ever have really done it? Probably not. My husband is hopeless at languages and I would have been condemned to life as an interpreter. But mental and, occasionally, actual relocation has been a leitmotif in our relationship since we first met. I had just moved to Los Angeles and he had been pondering spending a few years in Saudi Arabia, where there was an overabundance of overpaid contract work. Due to my lack of enthusiasm for gender apartheid, we didn't riff on that notion for very long.

There were other near-moves and actual relocations. We moved from LA to Cleveland for my husband's job and spent five years fantasizing about getting the bleep outa'there, which we finally did, settling on my home town of Washington DC so my parents could be near their grandchildren. We lived there for a good long while, but my husband hated the climate and pined for Los Angeles. As far as I was concerned, that was not an option. Too much asphalt, too much sprawl, too much time gone by. Still, the wanderlust never fully dissipated. We took a family trip to Costa Rica and marveled at the lush scenery, tropical climate and enticingly low cost of living, but couldn't quite see ourselves as gringo neocolonials. After an Alaska vacation, we seriously contemplated a move to Seattle. We pictured ourselves boating in Puget Sound and salmon fishing in the Inside Passage. We'd get a large freezer to store our catch after it was flash-frozen and shipped. I even looked into a Winter dogsledding trip in Denali, which my husband informed me I'd have to take, and pay for, by myself. The wilderness beckoned - the Olympic mountain range, the Cascade volcanos, the alpine lakes of British Columbia.

Three years ago we did move West, but adjusted our destination to the Bay Area. We thought it would be a better advertising market. The HR person in my old job told me I was so talented, I'd have no problem finding a job. (She lied). Our son was (is) having a difficult adolescence, and the therapist recommended boarding school and a change of scene. I was mad at my parents, who didn't believe in ADHD and blamed all of our son's issues on our lousy parenting.

The first year was a romantic empty nest experience. We lived an unfettered adult life, went out when we felt like it, read lots of books, took walks and worried slightly less about our kid, mostly because we hadn't yet realized that the the artsy Ojai school we had chosen for him was a holding pen for spoiled Hollywood brats. My old boss kept feeding me freelance work. Our daughter graduated from college, moved to San Francisco and quickly found a job. Everything was falling into place like level 2 tetris.

And then it all went to hell. The kid, the economy, our daughter's career and grad school plans and my poor husband's joints. The long nature walks I'd envisaged as our bonding activity became solo meditations on hubris and loss. Our son got into all kinds of trouble. Our daughter left her boyfriend and moved back East. The lucrative freelance dried up when my old boss got down-sized. And my guilt at having moved away from my parents came crashing down on me like a cartoon anvil.

I eventually found a part time job telecommuting, ironically, for a Seattle agency and I get regular assignments from freelance contacts in DC, Philadelphia and New York. I work at home, in my pajamas, with only the dog for company. After checking off every possible transgression on the teen age hellion to-do list, our son is slowly turning himself around. I miss my women friends terribly. My daughter is a first year law student on the other side of the continent. My husband and I have no social life: It's hard to meet people when you both work at home and no longer have young children.

Why am I telling you all this? Because Joni was right. You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone. A home of your own, where you have a history. Parents who are predictably, charmingly annoying and turn out to be right about things like the dangers of uprooting yourself when you're not so young anymore. Comrades who know you and your life story, who get your jokes, who are actually willing to provide a sympathetic ear even if your story bums them out, because it's understood that sooner or later, you'll do the same for them.

You want someone to tell you to make your move and follow your dream? Go watch Oprah. Of course, if you have a job to move for, or you're young and unencumbered by family responsibilities, relocation can be an exciting possibility. But beware of wanderlust. It could be naive romanticism in disguise. An adult ADD impulse. A desperate need to believe that you're still young and daring. A subconscious desire to escape things that will hitch a ride on the moving van and resume tormenting you after you unpack. My advice to you is bloom where you're planted - as long as it's not Cleveland.

Old Times

2010-11-02T23:14:00.000-07:00

It was lunchtime at Bellini's, a Harry's Bar wannabe in Cleveland, Ohio. I don't recall whether it was business or pleasure or who I was meeting, but I remember having to wait, always a good excuse for alcohol. I'm normally a sapphire-gin-and-tonic-two-limes person, but this time, I'd gone for the girly drink: one of Bellini's eponymous slushy peach cocktails. I glanced above the bar at the TV, on mute and tuned to an ancient rerun of Mayberry RFD. And then my head exploded.

No, it was not brain freeze from the frozen bellini. It was the stunning revelation that I looked older than Andy Griffith.

We all have our Andy Griffith moments, those holy-shit-am-I-really-that-old awareness flashes. Anything can trigger one, from catching an unexpected glimpse of your reflection to dealing with some horrendous, life altering problem and wondering how did I get here? (Cue Talking Heads). Any way, your age is your age. You can let it trip you out or you can shrug it off. Or, I suppose, you can lie.

I recently saw the profile of a childhood acquaintance on a social media site. She lists her age as ten years younger than my sister. Who, in turn, is four years younger than me. Which would make this lady (yes, math face, this was a test) fourteen years younger than yours truly. I'd be jealous but for the fact that, back when we were in school together, our age difference was only three months. I don't get this. Fourteen years is hard to pull off. People from your past know your real age. And personally, I would rather have people say I look "good for my age" than exclaim "Oh my God what happened to HER?"

Now, money is the great equalizer and Madonna has plenty of it. She is throwing massive amounts of cash at preserving her hotness. She has incredible hulk veins from excessive working out. Her forehead is smooth and shiny as Olympic ice. Bony spurs have sprouted beneath her eyes. I think they are supposed to be cheekbones. The poor thing has to work so hard to work it, you almost feel sorry for her. Madonna, here's a little creative direction for you. Take a step back and stop art directing yourself. Get back in touch with your original spontaneous, brash Italian self. Wear elegant cocktail dresses. Tone down the makeup. Eat some pasta and gain twenty pounds. Be real. Be entertaining. Have ideas and opinions or you will fast become an immaterial girl. As a performer, you are at an age where you either have substance or you start to come off like the drag version of your former self.

Yes, folks, we're all on the same subway – some of us got on early and some just two stops back. Fading isn't fun. No woman likes to look in the mirror and see her mother staring back. No man enjoys throwing his back out performing some heretofore routine task. And whatever your gender, having to wear reading glasses really sucks. So yeah, you can throw money at plastic surgeons and personal trainers and colorists and aestheticians and that may work for a while. Just try to maintain some perspective. Think about charitable things your money could do. Remember your bucket list. Wouldn't you rather cross off Tibet than have a tummy tuck? Take a long hard look at Joan Rivers and see if you don't get a little queasy. (Which isn't to say it doesn't suck to age out of, say, your staple clothing stores. I remember thinking The Limited and Express would get me through the rest of my natural life. Now, I don't even go in those stores: I rely on J. Jill and Chicos and hope to God I don't look like Michael Phelps' mother.)

Life, unless you're very lucky, gives you perspective on the vanity thing. A father with a troubled teen isn't too preoccupied with his own bald pate. A middle-aged mom doesn't tend to focused on the size of her butt when her own mother starts to show signs of Alzheimer's. Cliches like "Count your blessings" and "As long as you have your health" start to sound like the wisdom of the ages (or maybe the aged). The latest wrinkle on your face may be annoying, but rarely more so than the latest wrinkle in your life.

For the record, I meant THIS Andy Griffith...

Not THIS one. And no, I won't tell you my age, but I ain't lying about it either.

Talking Up Serpents

2010-10-24T00:48:00.000-07:00

I was speed-walking distractedly down a ridgetop in Briones Park, pumping my arms and kicking up dirt. The light was long past golden, and I was determined to get back to my car before sundown, when the bobcats, coyotes and mountain lions come out. My mini-back pack was starting to dig into my shoulders, and as I stopped to adjust the straps, I noticed something long and white flapping in the brush. I crouched down to get a closer look. Draped over a shrub was a discarded snake skin, paper thin and rustling in the wind. It had obviously been shed by a rattler of impressive proportions. The head and tail end were missing, but the skin was still over a foot long and maybe one and half inches wide. I picked it up for a closer look. I could see the fishnet pattern of the snake's back scales, and the parallel ridges that had once girded its belly.

I tucked what appeared to be the least fragile end of my find into the back pocket of my daypack and resumed walking, the snakeskin flapping behind me like a banner. A couple of hikers were coming down the dip in the path ahead, towards me. Of course, I had to ask if they would like to see my snakeskin - an invitation that, were I a man, could have made me sound like what my daughter calls "a huge perv". But I am a eccentric middle aged lady, and if they thought I was insane, they did a good job of hiding it. They paused for a quick look - I think they were impressed.

I had seen rattlesnakes at Briones a couple of times before. Now, I watch my step. Especially since I broke my distance glasses about six months ago and have a tendency to confuse cow pies with coiled serpents. (One smells, the other hisses). But I made it safely back to my car. Despite its fragile appearance, the skin held up quite well and currently adorns my office bulletin board.

Once I had done a little research, I was less impressed with myself for finding that snakeskin. It seems rattlers molt three or four times a year, depending on how well-fed they are (strictly a function of the size of the rodent population). Out of 16 varieties of rattlesnake indigenous to the United States, a grand total of ten can be found in California. It is likely that my souvenir was shed by the redundantly named Crotalus oreganus oreganus, or Northern Pacific Rattlesnake. And now, a few fast facts about rattlesnakes:

• They are easily identifiable. That signature tail is just one of the rattlesnake's distinguishing characteristics. Rattlers have thicker bodies than most snakes and triangular-shaped heads with a distinct “neck”. Their lidless eyes are hooded, with elliptical pupils. Don't get close enough look into them or you might discover that rattlesnakes strike at a speed faster than the human eye can process! While rattlers have much better night vision than we do, they are profoundly deaf. However, they are exquisitely sensitive to vibrations, such as those caused by your approaching footsteps.

• They give birth to live young. Yes, I realize the photo is about as gross as the extra-terrestrial hatchery uncovered by Sigourney Weaver in Alien 2. No, I did not take this picture: I would have dropped my camera and run screaming from the room. Rattlers are ovoviparous, which means that their eggs hatch inside the mother's body and the young are born live. The 10-inch long snakelets are already venomous at birth, living proof that not all baby animals are cute. These babies won't get their first rattle until their first molt, roughly ten days after they are born. They compensate by being more aggressive than their elders. Fortunately for us hikers, many rattlesnake young are gobbled up by hawks, eagles, badgers, or coyotes.

• They add on a rattle every time they shed. However, the rattles eventually break off, and it's rare to see more than ten of them on a single snake. The notion that you can tell a snake's age by the number of rattles on its tail is simply not true – rattlers can live for as long as thirty years, but you never see one with thirty rattles. The rattles consist of keratin "beads" of hardened skin around the snake's tail. When the serpent shakes its rear, the beads bump against each other and make that signature warning sound.

If you see this florid organ on a rattlesnake, it means he's glad to see you.

• They have strange body parts. Rattlesnakes are pit vipers. This term refers to a pair of openings, called loreal pits, located on the sides of their heads. Loreal pits are an infrared sensing device, enabling the snake to sense the temperature difference between the cool night air and a nice, fat chipmunk. (Remember the alien's heat-seeking vision in Predator with Arnold Schwarzeneger? Same concept). Snakes, including rattlers, don't smell with their snouts. They flick their tongues in and out to sample odors in the atmosphere. Inside their mouths is the "Jabobsen's organ", which relays smell information from the tongue to the brain. The forked tongue is a directional aid that lets the snake know whether those tempting field mouse pheromones are wafting from the left or the right. The lucky male rattlesnake has two penises (or is that penii?), called hemipenes. (The bad news is he's hung like a sea anemone - see photo above). He only uses one hemipene at a time, and both remain inverted inside his body until it's time to get busy.

• They have retractable teeth. If a rattler is busy sunning itself while digesting some hapless quail, its fangs lie flat inside its mouth. But when it gets ready to strike, they rotate about downward 90 degrees, into stabbing position. Like little hypodermic needles, the snake's hollow fangs inject venom into its prey. Designed to fall out and grow back several times a year, the fangs break off easily, sometimes getting swallowed right along with dinner. The snake's hinged jaw can literally drop out of its socket, enabling it to swallow prey as large as a cottontail rabbit.

Slumber party!

• They take the winter off. Rattlesnakes hibernate from November to April, usually in large groups. They like rocks or rodent burrows but have been known to camp out in the basements of buildings. In the summer, they spend their days chilling under rocks and shrubs. Hunting happens at night, with the help of those heat-seaking Jacobsen's organs.

• Their bite rarely kills a healthy adult human. Rattlesnakes can actually regulate the amount of venom they release. They may bite "dry" in self-defense - why waste perfectly good venom on something that's too big to eat? If you do get a shot of venom, you could be in big trouble. The poison disrupts blood clotting and destroys tissue. Even with prompt treatment, scarring is inevitable. Read about 13 year old Justin's snake bite and look at the hideous photos of his surgery, if you dare. (I'm actually sorry I looked - the poor kid's arm looks like a detail from an anatomical drawing of a flayed man.)

• Which brings us back to shedding. Rattlesnakes slip out of their outgrown epidermis as soon as they emerge from hibernation, and they shed two or three additional times each year. The snake rubs its nose against a rock or branch until it creates a big enough tear to start slipping out of his skin, which turns inside out in the process. It would be nice if people could do the same - simply shed our exterior when it starts to cramp our style. Wriggle out of our past. Grow a new skin. Of course, any human who can pull this off is probably already a snake.

More fun with Northern California fauna:

elephant seals
Berkeley-ites
Ravens
cougars
newts
goats
clown perverts

P.S. Happy Halloween!

No words.

2010-08-06T10:11:00.000-07:00

I'm sorry, I can't talk now. It's August. I have been working like a dog for the past three months, including weekends. I have been writing non stop about things like hip replacements, multiple sclerosis and gynecological surgery. I'm about to devote my entire weekend to a website for a PR firm. Am I grateful for the income? Very. Am I having interesting, potentially blog-worthy experiences? Nope. That would require leaving the house.

Now, my daughter is here visiting for a month before she starts law school. Or doesn't start law school. She is getting cold feet because she's having such a great time as a freelance writer and would rather become a journalist. I alternate between the you-will-never-make-a-living-in-that-dying-industry speech and the follow-your-heart-and-do-what-you-love speech. Truth is, I know she will have regrets no matter what she chooses. She is a glass half-empty kind of gal. That is not my daughter in the photo, by the way. I was looking for gag visuals to illustrate the concept of "no words." I picked that girl because she wasn't trussed and leather clad. Don't do a visual google on "gag" or you just might.

Anyway, since I have had no life recently, I have nothing to say. I need a break, and I need to spend some time with my kids and my husband. So I am officially going on hiatus for the rest of the Summer. See ya' in September.

Namastoe

2010-07-31T21:36:00.000-07:00

It had to happen sooner or later. My inevitable yoga accident. Did I dislocate my shoulder in the three limbed backbend known as Wild Thing? Nope. Did I strain my neck looking around at my neighbors while in shoulder stand? Not this time. Did I hit my head against the wall, falling in an aborted handstand? No, at least, not recently.

Here's how it went down. I was in three-legged dog with my leg pointing toward Nirvana. Using way too much momentum, I swung my leg in to transition to a lunge, but my foot was angled wrong and I slammed my pinky toe on the hardwood floor. It hurt like a son-of-a-you-know-what. What's more, the instructor was focusing on me because I was new to his class. Gritting my teeth and planting my good foot solidly into the floor, I held my breath (huge yogic nono) while he adjusted me in Ardeshandrasana. Mercifully, I was on my good foot – my other leg was extended, foot flexed, broken piggy delicately throbbing.

I did not cry wee, wee, wee all the way home: I stuck out the class. I am macho that way. I was able to slip on my loose sandal and drive home but by bed time, my foot was swollen and mauve. The next morning, the little toe and its cleavage were the color of a grape popsicle.

I skipped the x-ray and doctor visit. I have it on very good authority that all they do is tape your toe and send you home. So I stayed home, and taped my toe. My spouse keeps shaking his head and giving me pitying looks. Years ago, I tripped over a vacuum cleaner cord and snapped my big toe in half. On the X-ray, the severed phalange floated above the rest of my toe like a little cloud of bone. But my husband doesn't remember the vacuum cleaner, or the cord. He says I just started doing some random spaz dance and fell over, which, given my modest degree of natural coordination, is entirely possible.

Goat World

2010-07-01T10:56:00.000-07:00

I was walking down Berkeley's Wild Cat Canyon road, to my left the grassy hills of Tilden Park and to my right, a series of rustic modern homes perched on the sloping terrain. As I approached a blind curve, I heard a plaintive moan. It was a nasal, insistent, baritone in a pitch not uncommon for a male voice. The sound, however, was not human. And while there are several herds of cows in Tilden park, it wasn't bovine either. The mystery resolved itself when I rounded the bend: Before me was a vast, standing-room-only herd of goats, in the throes of a feeding frenzy. Never mind that the menu consisted of thorns, thistles and knee-high, dry, dead grass. It was an all you can eat buffet.

Fire season is serious business in California. One carelessly tossed cigarette and a brush-covered hillside can burst into flame like a fourth of July sparkler. A sizeable chunk of Oakland, Piedmont and Berkeley was virtually vaporized in the Oakland Fire Storm of 1991. 2,800 homes and all the surrounding old growth vegetation went up in smoke. The neighborhoods have been rebuilt, but they can also be re-burnt if the surrounding hills aren't groomed on a regular basis. Ergo, the goats.

As a fire hazard reduction system, the eco-friendly goat method has really caught on. The tactic is both green and efficient: Four hundred hungry goats can level an acre of vegetation in one day! The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission rents the four-footed mowers to help chew away potentially hazardous vegetation growing too close to their water pipelines. Google uses a herd to trim the open spaces around their headquarters. Even private citizens are going goat. A lady in my business women's networking group recently posted an inquiry for a herd to come chomp on the daunting thistle patches that were encroaching on her property from the hillside behind her house. (Goats don't really eat tin cans, but they are partial to weeds - a belly full of poison oak or poison ivy only leaves them itching for more). She got multiple responses, including a link to Goats R Us, a family business located right here in Orinda.

I don't know exactly where the Goats R Us folks have their farm, but I have seen their herd in action at Briones Regional Park. They employ a goatherd who stays on site, in a shabby old trailer. He works with a pair of energetic and ostensibly Spanish-speaking border collies. If the goats begin to stray, he grunts something en espanol, and the dogs spring into action. When the hillside has been thoroughly cut back, the goats are carted off to do their baaaaaaaad thing somewhere else.

Goats live about as long as dogs do, and when they get to be a decade or so old, they're not so keen on boarding a truck to go grazing. Goats R Us pampers their old nannies and billies, whom they affectionately refer to as retirees, and puts them out to pasture close to home. This is kinder than what is happening in a lot of Bay area restaurants,where ( sorry, vegans) goat meat is all the rage. I had goat meat once in Mexico and it was not an experience I am anxious to duplicate. Goat cheese is another story. As proud as I am of my French heritage, I have to admit that Californians make some damn fine goat cheese. Humboldt Fog by Cypress Grove Chevre, has plenty of character. Redwood Hill Farms makes a great French style "crottin" and their website is fun to visit, although the use of Vivaldi for their video tour is slightly, if appropriately, cheesy.

So next time you find yourself at a petting zoo, give that little goat an extra handful of pellets to say thank you. For its meat and milk. For mohair, alpaca and pashima. And for helping the State of California keep the annual fire season under control.

I once dated a guy who looked like this.

Say cheese.

Goats in the Smithsonian
Goats-a-gogo

My cup is half empty.

2010-06-15T09:30:00.000-07:00

Dispatch from Planet Yoga. Today,I showed up for a crowded class taught by the Strawberry Man. As I lay my mat down in the front row, I noticed the receptionist, one of a half dozen boho babes who work at the studio in exchange for free yoga classes, setting up three people down from me. I turned my attention back to my own mat as the Strawberry Man began recounting the legend of Shiva and Shakti, which he saw as a parable of male/female relations. The Strawberry Man seems to think about the man/woman thing quite a lot.

But back to the receptionist. It's not that I was staring – like a good yogi, I do my best to turn inward and focus on my own practice. But as I contorted my spine to try to achieve a perfect revolved triangle, I caught sight of her doing the same. My soft yogic gaze suddenly sharpened and fixed itself on four giant ringworms on her back. Bright red, like Target logos. Except for the one on her neck which looked like an out of control hicky.

So much for turning inward. Ringworm is contagious. Highly contagious. Almost as contagious as Ebola, Pink Eye or the Macarena. I spent the whole rest of the class obsessing over whether the poor girl was using a communal mat. I always bring my own, but while I wasn't personally at risk, the thought of the entire kula breaking out in circular fungus blooms was just too nasty. Especially when, at the end of class, the receptionist rolled up her mat and slipped it back on the shelf for the next unsuspecting yogi.

What should I do, I wondered? Talk to her? How rude. She might get mad and she's bigger than me and why would I want to make the poor girl feel bad? She probably had no idea about the ringworm. How often does one look at one's back anyway? (The only time I ever check out mine is after a carbohydrate binge, when I feel compelled to do a butt-check, and I'm invariably sorry I looked.) And yet, I couldn't just stand idly by while Molly Ringworm infected the entire studio.

In the row behind me, I had noticed the Strawberry Man's sister, also attending class. She is a fantastic yoga teacher in her own right, and an empathetic person. Perhaps I could quietly alert her to Molly's fungus situation and the studio would stage a dermatological intervention. But by the time I thought of this, class was letting out and the Strawberry Man's entourage had dispersed. There was no one else at the studio whom I felt comfortable narcing to. So I took the coward's way out; I went back to my car and left a voicemail.

The next morning, I got a voicemail back. The receptionist was not contagious, she had been cupped. This is a form of alternative medicine in which heated glass cups are applied to places on the back that may or may not correspond to acupuncture points. As the cup cools and contracts, it forms a vacuum, sucking up the skin. The oldest mention of cupping is in a 1,550 year old Egyptian medical textbook called the Ebers Papyrus, but it seems some version of the practice exists in every culture, from China to Europe to the Middle East. My mother remembers cupping from her French girlhood, albeit none too fondly. The procedure may be tonic, or therapeutic, or simply have a placebo effect – I have no idea. But it does leave unsightly red burn marks that look a lot like ringworm.

Anyway, now I don't have to feel bad about embarrassing the receptionist at the yoga studio. It seems I've embarrassed myself instead.

Ringworm? Cupping? Tattoos by Target? You be the judge.

Zorba and Bouboulina share an intimate moment.

Links:

Gwyneth Paltrow loves cupping.

The cupping runneth over.

A cup, a cup, a cup, a cup, a cup.

Meet my other blog.

2010-05-26T10:21:00.000-07:00

Like Eucalyptus Way? Check out my other blog. Generally shorter, snottier and less sentimental.
http://snideties.blogspot.com/

Safe and Secure?

2010-05-24T22:53:00.000-07:00

My eighty year old father-in-law is in no way chipper. He has limited mobility and uses a wheel chair. And yet, he feels compelled to prove his old-manhood and fly south to Florida every Winter so he can look out at a golf course he's too infirm to play on and maintain a pool in which he's never even dipped a toe. The yearly migration is all the more of an ordeal because someone on the No Fly List shares his common Irish name and surname. The poor guy has to have his wife wheel him up to whoever's in charge and proactively explain that he is not a member of the Irish Republican Army.

No doubt my father-in-law is the victim of overzealousness on the part of airport security. But my own recent experience exposed incompetence of a different sort. I was on my way to see my family on the East Coast. By the time I realized I had left my California driver's license in my back pack the last time I went hiking, my husband had dropped me off curbside and driven away. I called him in a panic, but there was no time for him to get the license and come back: I was going to miss my plane. Get on the BART and come home, my husband sighed. You'll never get through security.

Instead, I threw caution to the wind. I still had my old, expired DC license in my wallet. The California DMV had punched a hole where the expiration date used to be. Don't know why I kept it. Probably as a marker to evaluate how much I've aged in the past three years. (A lot). I put on my best poker face and handed my invalid, perforated license to the Baggage Checker. He stared intently at my photo. Then at me. Then at my photo.

The Baggage Checker gave me back my i.d., took my suitcase and waved me through.

On to security. I took off my shoes and my jacket, piled my stuff into a bin, sent it down the ramp and headed for the Security Chick's podium, briefly contemplating whether I should cover the hole in my i.d. with my thumb as I handed it to her. The Security Chick snatched my card and aimed her little flash light. She stared intently at my photo. Then at me. Then at my photo.

Did I mention that I was returning from a different city and therefore had a one-way ticket? Danger, Will Robinson! Homeland security red flag!

The Security Chick handed me back my bum license and waved me through.

Having pulled off my subterfuge,I felt strangely guilty. Guilty and nervous. So nervous that when I stopped at the ladies' room, I left my boarding pass on top of the toilet paper dispenser. Fortunately, the nice lady who went in right after me noticed and handed me the pass before shutting the stall door. I went to wash my hands and plopped my carry-on down on the ground. Next thing I knew, a young woman was standing right behind me. "Is this your bag?" she asked.

Irrational thoughts flooded my brain. Is she undercover FBI? Does she think I'm a terrorist? Is flying with an expired license a federal offense?Are they going to call the bomb squad and try to detonate my carry-on? No, no, I don't think so, and no. She was a just a young mother and her own mom was right behind her, brandishing a poopy toddler. My bag was blocking their access to the fold-out changing table.

The rest of my trip was uneventful. My husband Fed-Exed the valid license to my parents' home, just in case the DC airport security staff was more competent.

Somehow, I doubt it.

Remembering Mimi

2010-04-18T11:22:00.001-07:00

It's been exactly a year since my maternal grandmother, Marguerite Mezbourian, died of congestive heart failure at the age of 99. Her nickname was Mimi, but my sister and I called her Mamy, the most common French version of Grandma. I flew to Paris for her funeral. I was worried that I wouldn't cry, and I didn't. What's more, my sister's kids took great pleasure in discussing my inadequate weeping on the way back from the funeral, with my poor mother in the car.

When my grandfather Robert Mezbourian passed away three years earlier, I was overwhelmed with grief. I took one look at him, lying in his coffin in the drab, depressing little room in the basement of the old age home, and I lost it. I cried for him, for all his dreams and disappointments, for the best parts of my childhood in which he played a leading role, for the loss of a tender-hearted, gruffly charming man who was truly our family patriarch. It was a profound, existential sorrow and there was no composing myself. I was standing behind my grandmother, who sat in a little chair by his side, her tears falling onto the white satin upholstery of his coffin. I could feel her frail body shaking as I held her shoulders. My heart was breaking, and not a day has gone by since that I have not thought of our dear "Papapa".

But back to my grandmother, for whom I monstrously could not cry. She had been a looker in her day. Mimi's mother was a lovely blue eyed blonde Alsatian, and her father, a sad-faced Armenian refugee with a huge walrus moustache. He died of tuberculosis when my grandmother and her older brother and sister were children. My grandfather Robert was also half Armenian - His father ran the family diamond business and employed a slew of cousins and nephews. Robert and Mimi shared a disdain for their immigrant roots and a taste for the Parisian life. They were both small, attractive, ambitious and afflicted with exotic surnames that flagged them as insufficiently French. They wed when they were 21 and had my mother six months later.

My grandparents' lifelong devotion to one another was admirable. Robert brought Mimi breakfast in bed every morning, until he finally grew too frail to carry the big silver tray of hot black coffee, butter and half a fresh baguette. Mimi adopted all of Robert's politics and opinions, read any book he recommended, nagged him about reducing his wine consumption, and never bought so much as a pair of socks without his approval. (Papapa just might have been the only man on the planet who actually enjoyed sitting outside the fitting room and watching his wife try on clothes). When my grandparents got into their eighties, Mimi started following Robert around with a bright red sweater to keep him from getting a chill. After rebuffing her with a dismissive "merde" or two, he would eventually surrender and don the cardigan.

Schooled in the feminine arts by nuns, Mimi was well-trained for the old time domestic life. My Alsatian great-grandmother Alice, a story-book wonderful old lady who just radiated love and kindness, once showed me my grandmother's grade school sampler. It was a masterpiece. Flawless stitching, darning, knitting, crochet. (The manual dexterity gene was sadly not passed on to me or my progeny). As a young woman, Mimi would attend the designer collections, analyze the patterns and go home and make her own knock offs, in the finest quality fabric she could find. All the drapes in my mother's home were made in Paris by my grandmother, expertly packed into large suitcases and brought in to the US as part of my grandparents' luggage. Time has begun to yellow the weighty pearl grey satin, but those curtains still hang perfectly.

When when my sister and I were maybe five and nine years old, Papapa and Mamy came to the States for Christmas. In Mamy's suitcase, impeccably wrapped in white tissue paper, were two hand-made pink and metallic silver rajah costumes in our exact sizes. Bouffant pantaloons with matching puffy-sleeved tops, and turbans adorned with rhinestones and bouquets of exotic of feathers. As a finishing touch, my grandmother had sewn sashes of three long strips of fuschia, emerald and purple muslim. The outfits were intended for playing dress up, but we could have worn them to a soiree at the Ottoman court.

My grandmother cooked classic French food impeccably, the downside of her culinary skills being that one was expected to discuss ad-nauseum the quality of the beef/fish/artichokes as one consumed them. (As a girl, I'd get irritated when my grandparents went on about two of their favorite topics, food and the weather. I have since realized that a fondness for these subjects is a universal characteristic of old people everywhere.) Anyway, now I have given Mimi her due as an astounding and highly tasteful craftswoman so I can also tell you that in many ways, she was not a nice person.

Passive-aggressive digs were my grandmother's specialty. One time we were visiting in Paris and some friends of my parents' were in town. My grandparents invited them for lunch. The wife had on an old navy and white polka dot pajama-like pants suit with a huge discoloration on the top. Of course, my grandmother immediately began complimenting the lady on her "charming little outfit". (Subtext: "Hey females of the family! Can you believe this getup?") Visiting a friend's country home, Mimi disingenuously remarked that the scene was so bucolic, all they needed was a cow in the front yard. To her grandchildren, my grandmother was never anything but generous and affectionate, but even I was not spared the occasional barb. When I was 15 and finally developing, she turned to me and said "Your breasts are huge. Are you on the pill?" I was years from losing my virginity and shocked that she would ask such a thing.

My grandparents socialized with other couples, usually business acquaintances of my grandfather's and their wives. If a marriage came apart, my grandparents would continue to see the man, and the woman would cease to exist - probably a common practice in those days, but one that Mimi never questioned. She had no close friends and dismissed women in general as "les bonnes femmes" a disparaging term that literally means "the good women" but implies gossipy and small-minded. She felt a rivalry with other females, especially those who were richer, smarter, more educated, or better looking. This perspective infected her relationship with her own daughter. When I was a girl, my mother would tell me horror stories - the hair brush beatings, the name calling, the standing on the low fourth floor balcony, threatening to jump – my grandmother was a drama queen, alright. On my mother's wedding day, Mimi had a hissy because she wasn't happy with her hair. She yanked the combs from my mother's hair, snarling "Ha! HER hair will look good,"

As my sister and I grew to be teenagers and then adults, my grandmother always asked us if we knew anybody "interesting" which to her meant rich and socially prominent. We didn't, much to her chagrin, and our crowd did not pass muster. I once invited two friends up to stay with us at my family's summer cottage. When my buddies were out of earshot, my grandmother referred to them by special nicknames she had coined: the girl, who was about a size 12, was dubbed "La Gravos" - the fat one. The guy fared worse: he was African American and gay and Mimi's special name for him was Bamboula, the French equivalent of Sambo. Somehow, it never occurred to my grandmother that this might not go over well with me.

My grandmother was both a hypochondriac and a food neurotic. She had almost died of typhoid fever when she was four, and was deemed "fragile" her whole life. She milked this alleged fragility for all it was worth. The world was supposed to stop turning when Mimi stopped eating. For days, she would do nothing but pick at her food, complaining of "fermentations", a ladylike euphemism for gas. My grandfather and mother would despair because there would be no peace until my grandmother's hunger strike had ended. As I got older, I'd occasionally suggest to my mother that perhaps they should just let the old girl stay on bread and water and not react, but everyone was too concerned about Her Frailness to call her bluff. "Eat a little fish," my mother would beg. "Try the soup - I made it just the way you like it." This dramedy would continue over the course of several days, with Mimi's daughter and husband in an increasing tizzy over her lack of appetite. I could never understand what they were so concerned about. And I've occasionally speculated that this was her way of keeping her weight down and entertaining herself at the same time. Sooner or later, when she got bored with torturing everyone, Mimi would start eating again.

In truth, until her heart started to go in her 10th decade, Mimi was remarkably healthy and fit. Well into her nineties, she puttered around her Paris neighborhood in her low-heeled Chanel pumps, running errands and window shopping. One time, three young yahoos mugged my grandmother and knocked her unconscious. She was back strolling the sidewalks in a matter of days. I can still see her at maybe 93, dropping down on all fours and crawling under the antique table in her vestibule to show me a hidden repair.

My mother, an only child, felt duty bound to personally care for her aging parents. She left my father to his own devices in the states and moved back in to the Paris apartment her parents had lived in since just before World War II. My grandfather suffered several mini strokes and became increasingly incontinent and incommunicative until my mother could no longer handle the physical demands of caring for him. Meanwhile, my grandmother's angina progressed. At one point, the two of them were in the hospital together. Eventually, my grandfather had to be moved to a home on the other end of Paris. He had stopped speaking and could no longer walk. Every afternoon, my mother and grandmother took a taxi to the rest home to spend time with him and feed him his dinner. I visited him on two occasions and he had no idea who I was, but he recognized his wife to the end. Sometimes, he'd grab her hands and kiss them.

The day after my grandfather's funeral, my mother was stunned to hear my grandmother ask when they were leaving for the old age home to visit him. Mimi's short term memory had been fuzzy for a while, and she refused to believe that her Robert had died. Every day, she would ask my mother when she should get ready to go visit him. My mother would show her the obituary in the Figaro newspaper and my grandmother would start crying as though hearing the news for the very first time. This tragic loop replayed itself daily until Mimi's heart finally gave out.

And so I found myself flying from San Francisco to Paris to attend Mimi's funeral. My conscience was not clear: I hadn't visited since my grandfather's death three years earlier. I had continued to call, but my grandmother grew so deaf she couldn't come to the phone. I got updates from my mother.

I could have written, I could have sent photos. I told myself I would but I didn't. I rationalized that Mimi would forget I had called five minutes after I hung up, which was true. Then again, with her lack of short term memory a single letter could have gone a long way, seeming like fresh news with every reading. But I was on the other side of the world, with problems of my own. The recession hit. I wasn't finding work, our son was in full blown troubled teen mode and our daughter declared she was an East Coast girl and prepared to move back. There was no good news to share, no photos to send, nothing cheerful to put in a chipper little note card. I assuaged my guilt by telling myself I'd take my son to Paris that summer to see Mimi, my sister and his cousins, despite the challenges of keeping the kid in line.

As it turned out, I made the Paris trip earlier than that, with my daughter, to attend my grandmother's funeral. Only a handful of people came, mostly to support my mother – Mimi's contemporaries were long gone. Three years earlier, my mother had asked me to say a few words at my grandfather's memorial, and I had spent hours writing a heartfelt reminiscence. This time, I was in the bad daughter dog house and my mother pointedly did not ask me to speak. I felt ambivalent about that; hurt that I wasn't asked, shamed – as my mother intended, guilty about my emotional detachment, and relieved that I didn't have to scramble to write a eulogy. My sister said exactly what I would have said, briefly praising Mimi's dedication to Robert, her husband of 78 years. My mother offered up an end-of-an-era speech about Mimi being the last of her generation in our family. There were no sentimental stories, no amusing anecdotes, no fond memories. Mimi was laid to rest in a deep grave, right above "l'homme de sa vie", the love of her life, my grandfather.

Calla Lillies

2010-04-08T15:37:00.000-07:00

After several days of non-stop rain, I knew a hike in one of the regional parks would be a mud-fest. Instead of coming home, showering and having a nice cup of tea, I'd have to take my boots and pants off in the garage, hose down the boots, stick the pants in washer and bathe the mud-encrusted dog. So much for the benefits of a walking meditation. So I decided to take the wimpy way out and walk Winston in the paved streets of the Berkeley hills. I did cut through a small park along the way where I came upon this impromptu flower arrangement tucked into a hole in a gnarly old tree. A romantic signal between two lovers, perhaps. Or a tribute to a departed friend. Or maybe just a random act of poetry to delight the passersby.

Metaphorically Speaking

2010-03-05T21:21:00.001-08:00

Fifteen, I was. Maybe sixteen. My parents had decided we would get dinner at a pizza joint by Georgetown University, which is walking distance from my childhood home. They loved the Ivy League atmosphere and have always enjoyed people-watching. Of course, I thought basking in the campus vibe for entertainment purposes was dorky as hell. Like most teenagers, I was largely preoccupied with myself – I don't even remember whether my younger sister was with us – and the prospect of sitting at a table with my mother and father at a pizza and beer hole where the average customer was just a few years older than me was absolutely mortifying. So when my parents gave me a quarter for the jukebox, thereby enabling me to get physically away from them for five minutes and fantasize that we did not know each other, I took a long time making my selection. Finally, I punched in the number for I Am a Rock by Simon and Garfunkle. The lyrics symbolized my distance from those embarrassing primogenitors. I returned to our table, grimly chewing my pizza as I sang along in my head, "I am a rock, I am an island..."

As I get older, I find myself increasingly thinking in images. Perhaps it's the brain's way of compensating for the maddening verbal memory glitches we experience in middle age - those pesky attacks of what's it called and what's his name and what the hell's my phone number. I have long since outgrown that Simon and Garfunkle tune and I'd wager Paul Simon hasn't sung it in years. It was already a little adolescent for him when he first performed it. But that tired rock metaphor has a whole different meaning to me now. I no longer see being a rock as a desirable condition. Hard headed toughness doesn't protect you: it shuts you off, limits you, keeps you from growing. Life brings change, and you need the flexibility to adapt. Which is why it deeply pains me to conclude that my son is a rock.

My-son-the-rock is especially challenging for me as a parent, because I am a fountain. Of information. Criticism. Stories. Humor. Nagging. Commentary. Guilt. Affirmation. Advice. Sarcasm. Praise. Blame. Encouragement. I runneth continuously over. I see every experience as a treasure trove of teachable moments. This was the ideal parenting style for my daughter, because she is a sponge, ready to soak up everything you throw at her. Water me, pour it on, tell me something new. I've been describing and explaining the world to her since she first learned how to talk. Now that my daughter is a well-educated and inquisitive adult, I often learn from her. And getting information from a sponge is not hard: all it takes is a little squeeze.The rock, meanwhile, remains immobile, impassive, impervious to the water flowing over him. Who knows? Perhaps in a hundred thousand years, he'll display some hint of erosion.

The problem with trying to raise both of your kids exactly the same way is that they are not the same person. Worse, by the time you realize what worked so well with the first one is tanking with number two, you're dealing with a surly, unmotivated, oppositional and unhappy teenager. The rock called for a different parenting technique, if not different parents. Teaching him to respect authority, whether ours or his teachers', is next to impossible. Explaining the value of education and hard work to him is about as effective as talking to a slab of granite. Convincing him to open up is like squeezing blood from, well... a stone. "For a rock feels no pain. And an island never cries." And if anyone ever manages to get through to that boy, or he matures enough to understand what he's done to his life, I fear he just might shatter.

Let's talk dirty.

2010-02-17T23:41:00.000-08:00

I missed the height of the hippy era - I was a kid – but I remember hearing older conservative types venting about "dirty hippies". I always assumed they were using "dirty" as an epithet rather than literally. I didn't see what having long hair and colorful clothes had to do with personal cleanliness. I thought the old folks were a bunch of bigots, which they probably were. But even bigots get to be right from time to time, and when it comes to hippy hygiene, it turns out they had a point.

Here in the Bay Area, there are still a lot of hippies, ages twenty to seventy-something, and they really do have an aversion to soap and water. In yoga class, I have been in down dog next to a couple of fellows who had probably been marinating in their own juices for a good 3 or 4 days. When class gets really crowded, I've hovered above the floor in chaturanga six inches from a pair of feet stinky enough to shame a limburger. One of the instructors appears to never wash her hair - either that or she's doing some kind of conditioning treatment that has to stay on for six months.

My son claims cutting down on the hair washing is a good thing – something about the natural oils. For a while, he had the same theory about brushing teeth, minus the natural oil part. He gets these ideas from some of his more malodorous friends. (There's one boy - Rocky - whose presence I can detect 30 minutes after his departure, due to the pungent cloud he leaves in his wake. Remember Pig Pen from Peanuts? That's Rocky, minus the big giant head). Fortunately, my own kid actually does maintain basic cleanliness and mostly talks like this to get my goat, although he is way behind on his laundry.

What I find most disconcerting is that this benign neglect of one's person appears to often be a conscious life choice rather than a gradual slacking off – not that there's any excuse for that either. A pilates teacher I know was complaining that her friend had ripened past the point of social acceptability since deciding to "go hippy". The woman cut drastically back on her ablutions, stopped shaving her underarms and edited deodorant out of her beauty regime because "it's just not natural". Well now, let's get real here, neither is a back full of tats. And what, exactly, is the philosophical point of forgoing personal cleanliness? If it's saving water you're concerned about, take a damn sponge bath.

So I'm riding on the BART and these two twenty year olds, a guy and a girl, get on with their bicycles. They settle in across from each other by the subway doors and start talking about a guy they know.

"Yeah," he says." You're right, Pete really smells."

"No." she replies, in a you-don't-get-it tone of voice, " I mean he REALLY smells."

"Oh, that whole crew, they all smell. They don't wash much."

"Yeah," she insists,"Well, Pete doesn't wash, ever."

That girl was kind of cute. And if she can help it, Pete will never get within ten feet of her. Oh well, maybe Pete and the Pilates teacher's friend will find each other. Probably by the smell.

That Vision Thing

2010-02-15T11:50:00.000-08:00

This post is a rerun from my other blog, Snideties. I am recycling it because I am swamped this month, which is a good thing since it translates to paying bills. Also, this post is a better fit for Eucalyptus Way. Hope you enjoy it.

As far as I'm concerned, the nature/nurture debate is over. All you have to do is reproduce and try your best to raise your kids. Just as you come to the realization that your children have inherited all your worst traits, you're hit with another epiphany: you're turning into your parents.

My father is quite nearsighted and has always worn glasses. Without them, he has that telltale soft, myopic gaze and is, if not helpless, definitely challenged. He is a physician and health-conscious, with just a touch of hypochondria, so he wears sunglasses – over his glasses. But because he fears that's still not protection enough against those pesky, cataract-inducing UV rays, he adds on little clip-on shades. Every day is a gray day in the land of Dr. Dad.

Then, there's my grandmother. As a girl, I found her spectacles truly annoying. No, not the frames themselves - the daily drama of finding the right specs when she needed them. She would start by asking my grandfather in their native French if he had seen her "glasses to see far" or her "glasses to see close" , depending on which pair had gone missing. Pretty soon, the entire family would be searching the house, the car, the beach or the restaurant for my grandmother's glasses, which somehow always turned out to be in the first place she'd looked, her purse. My mother does not yet need distance glasses (wish I'd gotten that gene). She only wears readers, but she makes up for it by losing them twice as often as her mother did.

Growing up, I found my father's redundant eye wear and my grandmother's daily vision quest incredibly embarrassing. Surely everyone was staring at my eccentric family, thinking "That poor girl. She's related to these people." Of course, I had 20/20 vision, and I wasn't about to hide my best feature behind a pair of shades. Five presidents and a digital revolution away from middle aged lucidity, I didn't know that with maturity comes a blissful lack of concern about looking goofy.

Fast-forward a few decades.

Don't know if it's from staring at a computer screen for a living, but my eyes went south surprisingly fast. Right around my fortieth birthday, the type on paperbacks began to blur. Menus in dimly lit restaurants became illegible unless I squinted like Renee Zellweger and dislocated my arm. I got a pair of cute little red 1.0 reading glasses which quickly became inadequate. Soon, I needed glasses to look at the thermostat, the dosage on the cold medicine, the needle I couldn't thread. Too vain to go full-grandma and get an eyeglass chain, I started wearing my readers like a utilitarian headband.

I had graduated to 2.0 lenses when I noticed an annoying development at the movies: The projectionists were all too lazy to properly focus the image. Tired of reading fuzzy credits, I'd duck out of the theater and bitch to the nearest theater employee. Eventually, I realized it wasn't the projectionist who had the focusing problem. I got my eyes tested and officially graduated to bifocals, which I have never gotten used to. When it came time to change the prescription, I had the optometrist give me regular distance lenses. Now, I switch back and forth, just like grandma did. Sometimes, I too can't find my glasses, which usually turn out to be on my head.

It's when I go on my nature walks that things get really complicated. I need reading glasses for the trail map, sunglasses to protect my peepers and distance glasses to make sure whatever is causing that rustling in the brush isn't a mountain lion. The distance glasses give my vision a tantalizing clarity. I can see every leaf dancing in the breeze. But the glare can be intense, so I've resorted to wearing sunglasses over my distance glasses.

Just like my Poppa does.

East Bay Ethnography

2010-02-10T18:30:00.001-08:00

The jungle shivers with sound as your canoe floats down the Amazon. Monkeys grunt and howl. Exotic birds whistle and squawk. Unseen creatures rustle in the ground cover. You glide around a bend in the river and come upon a cluster of indigenous people sitting by the shore. Adorned in feathers and flowers, the men and women sit together in a circle around a fire, smoking herbs from a long pipe, eating fruit, laughing and talking. They notice you sailing by on your canoe and run to the shore, waving excitedly, beckoning for you to join them.

Instead, you paddle on down the serpentine river, negotiating a couple more curves before you come upon a very different tribe. Covered in war paint and ready for battle, the men dance around a fire, screaming, waving spears and calling for enemy blood. Their women sit back and watch, clapping, ululating, urging the men into a ferocious frenzy. You duck just in time to miss the first spear whizzing by your head. You paddle faster, dodging a few more spears before your canoe slips behind another turn in the snaky river, out of sight and out of reach.

How, your inner ethnographer wonders, can two cultures but a few miles apart be so drastically different?

Anyone who's ever moved from Berkeley to Orinda would have to wonder the same thing. With just a couple of hills between them, the two communities are as culturally different from one another as our fictitious Amazon tribes. Berkeley is edgy, dark and offbeat. Its vast flats range from upscale boho to drab, cold and even dangerous as you near the Oakland border. Its lush hills look straight across the middle of San Francisco Bay. Folks lucky enough to have views can watch the sun go to bed behind the Golden Gate bridge every evening. When the sunset isn't on, they watch the fog roll in.

The class war is alive and well in Berkeley. UC Berkeley students look down on the towny skateboard kids that grew up in the flats and pepper every sentence with "hella", as in "I'm hella tired". People in the flats despise "the rich" that live in the hills. In truth, there are plenty of middle class people up there, such as my hair dresser who's lived in the hills for twenty years, with her four boys and fireman husband. There's money in the hills too, but it's considered bad form to flaunt it.

Downtown Berkeley is haunted by every manner of street person, some sad, some scary, some with skin conditions you didn't know existed. The city has a classic art deco library, a newly renovated art house multiplex, a nationally renowned repertory theater and the University's Zellerbach Hall, where you can see everyone from Hillary Hahn to Laurie Anderson. Berkeley is home to Michael Polan of The Omnivore's Dilemna and John Yoo of the Justice Department torture memos. The town has understated wealth and serious crime. A world-famous university and a nightmare of a high school. Chez Panisse and soup kitchens. Upscale boutiques and vintage clothing stores where your purchase comes with a free case of scabies.

A trip to either of the huge Berkeley Bowl grocery co-ops is like a game of humanity bingo. Here, a pair of professioral European intellectuals in moth-eaten sweaters. There, a price-conscious Chinese dad with his wife and kids. To your left, a dignified Indian grandmother in a purple and gold sari. To your right, a neo-primitive couple in their twenties, tatooed, gauged, pierced, dyed and about as far removed from their baby pictures as humanly possible. Right behind you, a pair of hippy grandparents, the tips of their long hair still sandy, the roots gone white. Bingo, middle eastern mother and daughter, inspecting the zucchini. Bingo, butch lesbian couple giving each other good-natured grief by the seafood counter. Bingo, two brown grandmas in their Sunday-go-to-church hats. Bingo, Bingo, Bingo. Snooty college prof! Smiley yoga teacher! Microscopic, much-mascara'd Japanese babe! Bingo! Glitter-bedecked madwoman! College kid on a beer run! Dread-locked, wire-rimmed, vegan Afro-nerd!

Four miles from Berkeley and just six subway stops from San Francisco, Orinda is more like a supply station for the tony suburbs surrounding it than an actual town. The merchants are clustered around two small shopping strips, Orinda and Orinda Village. There are a couple of gas stations, a handful of restaurants, two pharmacies and some sociologically telling businesses, like the riding store that caters to the horsey set, and the two overpriced resale boutiques (clothes and furniture) where the well-to-do can unload their gently-used possessions.

There's no class war in Orinda - other than a few small pockets of modest housing and apartments, everyone's upper-middle class. If you're going to play humanity bingo at the Orinda Safeway, you'll have to sift through subtle variations of white people. Little ladies with headbands. Old guys who don't need a pitchfork to look like American Gothic. Suburban moms smug in their conviction that they're living the perfect life. Drivers of BMW SUVs. Eaters of processed food. Wearers of perfectly matched golf and tennis clothes. Orinda is so white that when we see an African American person at the grocery store, my husband always says "There's the Orinda Black person! Let's go introduce ourselves." Even the store merchandise is different. The Berkeley Bowls overflow with a cornucopia of exotic greens, organic produce and unusual fruits that look like they could grow on James Cameron's Pandora. You can find Indian bread, grass fed beef, local sand dabs and all manner of exotic food supplements that don't do a damn thing for you. The Orinda Safeway is a throwback to the days of better living through chemistry, featuring oversized hormonal chickens, a variety of cheese logs and a dizzying array of processed foods.

Sometimes I wonder if all those people at the Orinda Safeway are plants. I have no clue where they are coming from, or where they go after they've paid for their groceries. I have never seen a human being on our circular street and it is entirely possible that the people next door aren't people at all. For all I know, they have grey skin and slits for ears and six long fingers with an extra knuckle. The other day, I was on the phone with my mother. She was telling me about my sister's mother-in-law, a dignified lady who is sinking into dementia. My mother thinks the poor woman's increasingly vegetative ennui is exacerbated by living on a street "where nobody ever walks." Oh, I thought to myself, like MY street.

Anyway, I have a couple of theories about the Orinda Stepford vibe. One is geography. The valley is relatively narrow. You are cradled by the horizon-less landscape. To me, that is claustrophobic, but it's quite possible that people who grew up in that environment are lulled by the hilly embrace and feel insecure without it: When we were looking for an Orinda rental, everyone we spoke to had lived here their entire life. My other theory revolves around the giant electrical towers that criss-cross the landscape. Humming, looming metal monsters. You see homes with manicured gardens and a massive tower or three in the back and you wonder what living next to all that electromagnetic radiation can do to you.

Years ago,some friends invited us to Thanksgiving dinner. The other guests were an Israeli couple, both physicians. Over dinner, the male doctor described the three other doctors in his practice: a Jew, a half-Jew and a non-Jew. He explained that he related the best to the Jew, second, to the half-Jew, and lastly, to the gentile. He said he couldn't help it – he felt most at home with his own tribe. As a half Jewish mutt, I had to speak up. I pointed out that my diverse group of friends looked beyond this tribe stuff at everyone's common humanity. The good doctor nodded. "And that," he replied, "is your tribe."

We are not born burb-dwellers: We moved to Orinda for the school system. Yet another desperate, ultimately unsuccessful attempt at a fresh start for our problem child. The weather's lovely and the home we are renting is a huge improvement on the crazy Japanese house we were living in in Berkeley. But as pleasant as Orinda may be, there's no one around from my tribe.

Amphibian Encounter

2010-01-29T23:35:00.000-08:00

Mt. Diablo looms above the clouds.

Unusual "champignons".

You know you're getting a little new-agey when you accidentally step on a cow pie during your nature walk and feel a flash of pleasure at its squishiness. This happened to me today. It's Winter in Briones Regional Park, and that means it's been raining for days. The hills, which I had gotten to know in their yellow, dried-out summer incarnation, have turned emerald green. Erin go Briones – I wouldn't be surprised if a Leprechaun tapped me on the calf.

Finally, the forecast says we just might get through a day without downpour. My butt's getting numb from sitting at my computer and I'm determined to go hiking. I've stashed a waterproof poncho in my backpack just in case the rain returns. It's in the upper fifties and the mist is everywhere. I'm walking through it, breathing it, feeling its coolness on my face. The fog-filtered hills roll out in ever paler greens until you're not sure if you're looking at a distant crest or a fully saturated cloud. Quiet reigns. The only people out today are humidity freaks, and we are a rare breed. One passes by me on his way back to the staging area. "Perfect weather for a walk", he remarks. I nod and we look at each other like a couple of fetishists acknowledging our common perversion.

As the trail starts to climb, things get a little challenging because the land is unstable.The shifting Briones landscape is defined by mud flows, sink holes, vernal pools and large cracks in the ground. Although we are in earthquake territory, these fissures are not fault lines: they are places where the water-saturated earth is starting to slip down the hill. I trudge up trenches of slick mud, doing my best to avoid puddles and nascent streams. Had I worn my sneakers instead of hiking boots, I would have a hard time staying vertical. I have my eyes locked on the ground, trying not to slip, when I notice a slimy, merlot-colored amphibian - the unimaginatively named California newt, known to scientists as Taricha Torosa.

Shitty shot off yours truly's cell phone

Beauty shot off the web

Don't let the lizard body fool you. Newts are not reptiles, but amphibians, and members of the salamander family. This particular specimen was likely out looking for love: mating season runs from December to early May. Prior to the annual booty call, the newt is technically an "eft", living on land and hiding under logs or fallen trees. When the Winter rains begin, the eft becomes nostalgic for its watery origins and heads back to the pond of its birth to make new newts. This involves an aquatic mating dance which culminates in the male mounting the female and rubbing his chin on her nose. She releases a thick mass of seven to thirty eggs, all stuck together in a hard, toxic gel which attaches to some hard surface in the pond – roots, rocks, debris – whatever sticks.

Winston, my super-sized Yorkie, appeared completely disinterested in the newt, so I figured I could safely take a picture. I fully expected the creature to skitter away once I started hovering over it with my cell phone, but it kept crawling along at the same leisurely pace, as unconcerned with me as the dog was with it. Perhaps the sluggish newt was sick or injured? Later, I learned why Taricha Torosa was so laid back, and it had nothing to do with being from California.

Glands in the skin of this species secrete a toxin hundreds of times more deadly than cyanide: tetrodotoxin. This is the very same poison found in fugu, the puffer fish that, when improperly prepared, kills between seventy and a hundred thrill-seeking Japanese gourmands each year. Tetrodotoxin works by blocking the transmission of nerve signals from the brain to the muscles - including those signals from the autonomous nervous system that remind your heart and lungs to keep going. The California newt is so lethal that it has no natural predators, at least until someone introduces it to a sushi chef.

It's not a good idea to pick up Taricha Torosa. The creatures are fragile, and although the toxin has to be ingested to be lethal, you could be exposed through a cut in your skin. Still, you really have to go out of your way to experience death by poisonous newt. But it happens. One drunken young man in Coos Bay Oregon swallowed a California newt on a dare. Despite emergency hospitalization, he died the next day of heart failure. A victim of tetrodotoxin, alcohol and a form of stupidity unique to the male of the human species. (Yes, I know women who are stupid. I know women who are drunks. But I'd be hard-pressed to find a female who would swallow a live amphibian just to prove her moxie).

So there you have it, my latest Briones adventure. I did finally have to break out the rain poncho, about 20 minutes before making it back to my car. Poor Winston got completely drenched and left perfect muddy paw prints all over the front seat. Next time, I am going to veer off the trail a little and go check out some of those ponds up close. Maybe I'll even take a real camera and see if I can get pictures of some live newt dancing.

This diagram shows limb regeneration in a newt. Not only can these amphibians grow new limbs or a tail, they can also regenerate damaged parts of the heart or liver!

Links
http://www.californiaherps.com/salamanders/pages/t.t.torosa.html

http://www.caudata.org/cc/articles/toxin2.shtml

Do not disturb!

Female Trouble.

2010-01-15T23:35:00.000-08:00

Men, what more can I do to dissuade you from reading further? What I am about to relate will make you squirm and alter your image of the eternal feminine. I bid you go watch football and we'll catch up later.

Ladies, now that we are alone, let me say that I have endured much biological unpleasantness of late. I had been having breakthrough bleeding since Christmas, for going on three weeks. This happened to me once before, a year ago. Back then, my doctor prescribed a progestin to right my waning cycle, and it jolted me back into another year of normal, relatively regular menstruation. This time around, my doctor was off when I called and I was rerouted to a nurse practitioner whose training apparently empowers her to prescribe medication. I know all about these nurse practitioner types from writing pharmaceutical advertising. Several of my clients won't let me use the word "doctor" in their marketing materials because so many people don't end up seeing one when they come in for a check up. Instead, they see a "healthcare practitioner." Could be a doctor, yes, but could also be a specialized nurse, or, who knows, a shaman. Thus the catch all phrase, "Just ask your healthcare practitioner if (INSERT DRUG NAME HERE) could be right for you."

As it turned out, this healthcare practitioner had no bloody clue - OK, poor choice of words - what was right for me. I described my situation over the phone and she agreed to phone in a prescription for a once-a-day progestin. "Wait a minute," I said. "The last time, the doctor (as in the person who actually went to medical school) put me on something that I had to titrate." "Oh no," the "healthcare practitioner" replied with chipper confidence. "I'm looking at your chart now. This is what we gave you last time."

Well, what do I know? I'm perimenopausal. My brain's getting fuzzy. Sometimes, I call my son by the dog's name. Sometimes, I tell the dog he can't have the car keys. Recently, I lost the car keys. Permanently. So I figured my recollection was faulty and started taking the medicine. Within a matter of hours, I began bleeding to a terrifying degree. After day two of hellacious blood loss, I called my doctor. She thought it was weird but suggested I give the progestin another day to work. I gave it three because I was too busy. I couldn't really leave the house, for fear I'd find myself too far from a bathroom, and I was working on three radio spots I had just written for– are you ready for this?– a gynecologic surgery group. So I holed up in my home office, bleeding and looking at estimates, bleeding and rewriting, bleeding and casting, bleeding and making music selects.

By the day of my recording session, my hands and feet were a little tingly and my energy level was way low. I took the BART to San Francisco, but rather than attempt to walk the ten blocks to the recording studio, I sprang for a cab. Once the session was underway, I managed to remain totally focused on producing the spots, coaching the voice talent on the proper way to say "laparoscopic hysterectomy", patching takes together and wringing my hands at the difficulty of finding the right music, all the while hemorrhaging non-stop.

I went to the bathroom and called the doctor's office, leaving a message that I was bleeding to death but please not to call back 'til after two so as not to interrupt my recording session. (The doctor later told me that when she got the message, she thought "This woman is crazy." But hey, we had a media buy and a budget and you gotta do what you gotta do.)

My i-phone, which has crap reception indoors, never rang, but I eventually noticed that my doctor had called back and left me a voicemail stating, essentially, "Get thee to a hospital."

I resolved to go to the emergency room as soon as I finished my spots. My session was going over - over an hour over. I had originally asked for five hours of studio time, but I had also pressed for a reasonable quote. The studio rep had probably cut the time back to four hours to get the quote down, assuring me that four hours would be plenty. Against my better judgement, I had agreed. Ultimately, the poor engineer had to finish the mix on his own time, after completing the session that followed mine. Two lessons to learn from this: 1. Don't let anyone else tell you you can do the job in less time than you are comfortable allocating. And, 2. Don't skimp on the charm. A few choice comments like "If there's one thing I've learned, it's trust the sound engineer" and you have bought yourself a reservoir of good will. But I digress.

At 3 pm, they kicked me out of the studio - the next client had arrived and they needed the room. I took another taxi, dragged my increasingly anemic carcass onto the subway and eventually made it home. My husband and I went immediately to the hospital, where I spent five hours getting examined, IV'd, catheterized and ultra-sounded. Eventually, the ER doc called my doc to confer, and they decided to try a different progestin rather than do a D&C. I took the first dose before I left the hospital, with instructions to see my doctor the next day. My husband and I stopped to pick up a takeout burger, medium-rare, e-coli be damned, to boost my dwindling iron levels. I got home in time to listen to my spots and email the sound engineer instructions for some last minute tweaks. (The guy, bless his heart, actually came in an hour early the next day and made adjustments on his own time without billing me).

By the time I got to my doctor's office at 4:50 the next day, my radio spots were safely trafficked in time for airing, and the bleeding had subsided to a trickle. As we formulated a plan, the doctor assured me that she had made a note not to put me on that other progestin ever again. Turns out synthetic hormones are like anti-depressants: How you respond depends on your body chemistry. "Strange," I said,"That drug worked so well the first time around". At which the doctor, who was adding my recent travails to my electronic health records during our conversation, suddenly exclaimed,"No wonder. Looks like the last time, I prescribed the same thing we put you on at the hospital."

Which brings me to that darn healthcare practitioner/nurse/witch doctor/slacker/cow. Obviously, she never looked at my chart. Worse, she lied to me over the phone when she claimed she was looking at it as we spoke. I realize there are corner cutters and competent folk in every field. I apologize in advance to all the healthcare practitioners out there who would have actually read the chart. But the moral of the story, ladies, is get your prescription from a doctor. Period, no pun intended.

Diss-morphia

2010-01-05T23:50:00.001-08:00

You've heard of dysmorphic individuals. People who pursue an impossible body aesthetic which they can never attain. I have a dysmorphic family. But their dysmorphia is not self-directed. It manifests itself in deconstructing the appearance, and more importantly the weight of everyone they encounter.

I am French, Jewish and Armenian. As far as the Jews and Armenians are concerned, a cushy little reserve of body fat might be a good thing. When a raping, pillaging hoard of saber-wielding Cossacks or pitch-fork bearing Turks descends upon your village, there's only one thing to do. Disappear. Hole up in a cave. Head for the hills. Melt into the woods. Be thankful for that bit of extra padding - it's survival of the fattest.

The French have less tolerance for body fat, although that is changing with the influence of immigrant populations and the spread of fast food. My Parisian grandmother, who passed away in March of 2009, was a lithe little thing and my grandfather liked his women slim. Occasionally, he would comment humorously on some chubby lady's girth, a part of their marital ritual that my chic grandmother visibly enjoyed. The fact that she was a size two and therefore superior to those weak-willed, corpulent Amazons, was a given.

My mother, like her mother, is a petite, fine-boned woman. She monitored our eating habits with laboratory precision. When I was five, I was invited for a play date that included lunch. Upon returning home, I made the mistake of telling my mother we'd had PB&J and ice cream. She called the other mom and lectured her on what a fatty dessert ice cream was, and how an apple would better balance out the meal. Never mind that my mother was right: that little girl never invited me over again. After that, when asked what I'd been fed at another child's house, I edited out the taboo foods and substituted apples.

I had a tendency to overeat and my mother was on me all the time. One summer when I was 12, we were in Paris visiting family. My great aunt had a tea for the children of some of her friends. While the adults were chatting, the kids sat around the dining room table enjoying soda, juice and pastries. I quickly gulped down four mini fruit tarts while my mother's back was turned. Unfortunately, the tarts came nestled in cute little paper linings. I steeled myself when my mother saw – and counted – the telltale evidence on my plate. She let loose and shamed me in front of the other children, pointing out that the other girl my age had eaten only one fruit tart. That girl grew up to be a model - no joke.

My childhood summers alternated between going to France with my mother and my grandparents visiting us in the states. Over the years, we made several family road trips in a rented van, criss-crossing America at various latitudes and looping into Mexico and Canada. Inevitably, we would encounter obese people. Sometimes morbidly obese people. This would fire up my family like a smoldering cigarette in the tall, parched weeds. "Oh my God, it's not possible. Look at that fat thing." "Monstrous. Monstrous." "No, I think we've seen worse." "Are you kidding? She's by far the fattest yet." If I my adolescent attitude was up, I'd occasionally point out that they had seen overweight people before and should know by now that the hinterlands are full of corn-fed folk. Invariably, I was told that the current discussion was justified due to the exceptional heft of the chunky person in question. As long as some imaginary fatness record was being broken,commenting was perfectly kosher.

There was much motivational weight talk as I progressed into adolescence. I remember we were on a family vacation in Rome, dining at the terrace of some Trattoria. Standing in the front of the cafe across the street were two stunning young Italian women, in tight white pants and pastel summer tops, waiting for their beaus. As I stared at them in awe, my mother murmured conspiratorially "If you lost ten pounds, you'd look just as good." Now that was a high order compliment. My father, who is not French at all, also liked to hit me with the occasional inspirational spiel. When some comely but zaftig girl would walk by, he'd point her out and murmur "Too bad. If she lost...(hesitation as mental calculation is made) ...twelve, maybe fifteen pounds, she'd be quite good looking."

The message was clear. No one will call you baby 'til you shed your baby fat. I worked at it, briefly flirting with bulimia until I found out all that puking could rot your teeth. Even without kneeling before the porcelain throne, I got pretty small for a while. 5'5, 120 pounds – 114 at my teeniest. I took up aerobics and found a man who loved me despite my fleshy thighs. Eventually, I had two kids, which, as my parents still like to remind me, is no excuse for weight gain. I moved to Cleveland, stopped working out and put on about twenty pounds. In the Summer, I would take my kids to see my family at my parents' Cape Cod cottage. The first family beach outing was always mildly traumatic - I wasn't trim enough, I could never be trim enough. And I knew the scrutiny would never cease. I remember passing on blueberry pie at dinner, telling my beloved grandfather I was watching my figure. He shook his head sadly and replied "It's a little late for that." It was kind of late: I was forty years old.

My children had their own pre-pubertal weight issues, especially my son, who was exceptionally unathletic with couch potato tendencies. His sweet tooth was insatiable. At 13, he was thirty pounds overweight and wearing extra-large men's T shirts. I regularly searched his room for contraband candy and once chased him halfway around the block to retrieve a movie theater-sized package of skittles. 780 calories according to the nutritional label, not that there's anything nutritional about skittles. I purged the house of all sweets. I asked restaurants for calorie counts on their menu items just so I could prove to junior that he was about to devour an entire day's calorie allotment in one sitting. I had sworn not to micromanage my children's eating habits but I found myself getting increasingly frustrated, angry and bitchy as the kid kept shoving sugar into his face. Eventually, puberty hit, vanity kicked in and the boy started working out. Of course now he delights in reminding me how evil I was to him and claims to be scarred for life. As he says to his sister, "It's mom's fault I go to the gym all the time." Let me hasten to say that he has never taken my advice on any other subject.

As for my daughter, she outgrew her baby fat. She is healthy and lean and doing yoga. She lives in the same city as my parents and has dinner with them at least once a week. Her grandparents' preoccupation with her weight is a source of great amusement to her. One week they tell the girl she's underweight and her thinness emphasizes her wide hips. The next week they protest that she's eating too much. She reports back to me with the latest fat forecast. It is but a section of a more detailed critique involving my daughter's hair, eyebrows, lipstick application technique, clothing, speech patterns, excessive avocado consumption and hobby of going out at night with her girlfriends.

Once the checklist has been covered, they converse.

SEASON'S BLEATINGS.

2009-12-15T23:23:00.000-08:00

Bah.

Bah. Bah.

Baaaaaah.

Baaaaaaaaaaaaah.

Bah. Bah.

Bah. Bah. Baaah.

Bah. Baaaaah.

Humbug!

My animal nature

2009-12-02T23:40:00.000-08:00

When my son told me I didn't look like a cougar, I didn't know whether to be sad or relieved. I asked him to explain what a cougar was, because I don't like the way he spews pop culture like it's reality on earth. The kid informed me that a cougar was a predatory, highly sexed older woman who goes after younger men, including the underaged kind. Then, he gave me a physical and wardrobe description of the typical cougar that sounded like the stylist notes from Desperate Housewives. And I got to hear about his seventeen year old friend who got propositioned by a Cougar! That's right, they're real! They're out there! They're preying on our innocent boys! They even have their own convention which appears to be mating grounds for older women and younger men.

It seems middle aged women are in. (Perhaps someone should tell prospective employers.) The entertainment world is largely responsible. Aging babes like Demi Moore and Madonna (whose ropy limbs increasingly resemble beef jerky) are refusing to hang up their G-strings. Courtney Cox is starring in Cougar Town, which writer producer Bill Lawrence readily admits has a "zeitgeisty topic". They're making another Sex in The City movie. I confess I've never watched any of the Real Housewives series on Bravo, but the shows are multiplying like Tiger Woods' mistresses. How sad that this trend is hitting at the same time as high def television, which shows every wrinkle and dimple.

I suspect this cougar business is just another popular culture trope. Certainly, there's a demographic basis for it: The Xers are now in their forties, and the boomers have a distorted image of their own youthfulness. (This is something you learn in advertising - it's the reason we show forty year olds in campaigns targeting folks in their fifties.) These days, women with a certain degree of affluence take good care of themselves. Thanks to dermatologists, personal trainers, hair colorists and plastic surgeons, they have access to an arsenal of rejuvenation techniques. While there are legions of ladies who wish the old ball-and-chain would just flush the damn viagra and get back to snoring, there are, and always have been, women of a certain age with a strong sex drive. Does that make them a cultural phenomenon? Is the fact that a gal is well-kept and not dead from the waist down enough to classify her as a cougar? Or does she also have to lust after younger guys?

I don't do Botox, although I've often thought the resulting poker face would help me in business. I can't afford the requisite face lift, boob job or tummy tuck of the TV cougars, and I'd hate to to spend that much time on my hair and make up. I don't like animal prints or own a push up bra. I've never maxed out my credit card on impractical Italian shoes. And, putting aside the legalities of cradle robbing and the fact that I'm happily married, I really, really am not into teen age boys. They're zitty and dense. They reek of Axe. They don't wash their feet unless their mothers (who are probably not cougars) make them. I'd wager they don't know what they're doing in bed and if they do, they'll give you chlamydia. Come to think of it, judging by my daughter's dispatches from the twenty-something dating scene, I don't think I like young adult men too much either. Give me George Clooney. Pierce Brosnan. Sting. Gabriel Byrne. Bono. Viggo Mortensen. Sebastian Junger. Guys who look like they actually have hair on their chests. You can keep that anemic, fine-featured lad from Twilight.

My son's right. I'm no cougar: I've always been more of a bitch than a feline. But I bet I could teach an old dog a trick or two.

Death be not public.

2009-11-28T15:42:00.000-08:00

A few months back, Katie Couric did a story on stalkers. The narrative quickly honed in on a particularly tragic incident. A young woman was being harassed, followed and spied upon for months by a man she barely knew. He ultimately tracked her to her apartment. The poor girl managed to get away and was running down the street, screaming into her cell phone for the 911 operator to send help, when the stalker chased her down and shot her dead.

A horrible incident, made all the more grizzly by CBS' decision to play the 911 tape. You could hear the panic in the poor girl's voice, and then a shriek, and the sound of gunfire. The senseless, violent death of a private citizen, forever frozen on tape and made public for our evening's entertainment. I felt my stomach contract against my spine. The tape was shocking and literally made me nauseous. It didn't take me long to conclude that the network's decision to air that 911 call was sickening as well.

Prominent in the news these days is the Toyota recall. The issue is a floor mat, prosaic but deadly. It can get wedged under the accelerator, which then jams in the floored position. The car hurtles ahead at high speed and the brake can't override it (an additional problem, this one apparently electronic - way to go, Toyota). Several people lost their lives in separate incidents, including an entire family. As their car hurtled down the highway, they too called 911. On the tape, you can hear the dad yell that he can't stop the car. His wife and child wail in terror as he shouts for them to pray – they're coming to an intersection. And then you hear the family cry out and moan as they crash, and presumably, die. I know this, of course, because CBS played it for us.

I'm all for freedom of the press. Sometimes, graphic evidence is necessary to get a story across. Sometimes, the evidence is the story, as in the cell phone-captured footage of the last moments of Neda Agha-Soltan, the young Iranian woman killed by government thugs in Tehran. The video exposes the criminal excesses of a regime interested primarily in perpetuating itself, at the expense of whomever. The Neda video is gut-wrenching, but it's news, as is the fact that Neda has become a symbol and martyr for the Iranian political opposition.

In the case of both the stalker victim and Toyota accelerator tragedy, the graphic audio is not essential to getting the story across. The stalker story is a feature, conceived, compiled and edited at the network's discretion. There was no competing news outlet waiting to scoop CBS and play that 911 call first. The network made a supremely tacky choice to treat the public to a little snuff audio. The Toyota recall is a major story that affects Toyota and Lexus owners all over the country (including yours truly - I am yanking that lethal floor mat out of my Prius, pronto). The fact that there were fatalities is relevant to the news story. The graphic final moments of the ill-fated family are not. What if you were a friend or relative of one of the victims? Would you want to hear your loved one's final moments on the national news?

People should be informed that their car could potentially kill them. Women need to learn how to protect themselves against stalkers. But I fail to see what the airing of these tragic 911 tapes contributes to the public's infamous "right to know". And I am sorry that the stalker victim, the desperate father and his family have had their right to privacy violated from beyond the grave.

Experienced Blues

2009-11-22T00:37:00.000-08:00

In my nomadic advertising career, I've toiled in countless categories. I have sold airplane wheels and brakes to airlines, car insurance to the military, facial hair remover to African American men, pots, pans and vacuum cleaners to the lady of the house, paint to do-it-your-selfers, fruit-scented shower gels to women under 25, hospitals to women over 55, bipolar meds and antidepressants to legions of unhappy people of all ages and sexes...the list goes on and on. I've engaged in consumer, B to B and relationship marketing. I have changed markets and changed focus and changed clients and changed the way I think and write. I maintain this is all valuable and good. The truth is, people get stale working on the same account. Especially advertising people, who tend to be on the ADD side of the attention spectrum.

But since I've been back on the freelance beat, I have learned that what used to be called experience is now considered baggage. The market today praises verticality above all else. You must be a Yahoo maven, a supermarket specialist, an expert in make up and skin care products. Don't even bother calling unless you've spent at least five years toiling on packaging for canned fruit, preferably pineapple. OK, so you've worked on websites for a dozen different small businesses, but have you written one for an HR outsourcing service? I didn't think so. Next!

There are a lot of unemployed copywriters out there, and if advertisers wait long enough, they can get someone with exactly the experience they think they need. But guess what? That doesn't guarantee a thing. You want someone smart and strategic. Someone who will ask you about your target and your competition. Someone who can distill your information down to its essence and give it a little kick. Someone who is down to earth and makes your insane deadlines every time. Category experience is gravy. Yes, there are a few categories, such as tech and pharma, that take a while to absorb, but good writers get up to speed pretty fast, at least where writing for the consumer is concerned. (If you're writing to the trade in tech or pharma, then you DO need a special skill set. These gigs call for technical writers.)

I think we writers have fed into this mindset, because we try to market ourselves vertically. Maybe it gets you a gig or two, maybe it doesn't. Pretty soon, you are pigeonholed. Clients categorize you and so do agencies. If an agency gets a new piece of business and can't afford to hire, they'll reassign someone from another group and upload them on the category, no problem. But if they're hiring a new writer, candidates are required to have done plenty of time in that exact category. The question is, should that be enough to clinch the deal? And how many better candidates are left floating in cyberspace, their resumes filtered out of contention?

Social Media Me

2009-10-22T01:23:00.000-07:00

Every morning they beg to be freed from their prison in my closet. Purses. Pumps. Presentation suits. My business clothes. Put us on, they whisper. You'll feel good. You'll look good. You'll sound good. Shave your legs. Spray on some French cologne. How about a little lipstick? You remember lipstick, don't you?

I read an article once about the huge market for American used clothing in Africa. It would take a village to wear my closet: I've been the same size for about fifteen years, which is how long I've had some of my clothes. Now that I work at home, I'm rarely out of my pajamas before noon. Let's face it: my well-appointed wardrobe is going to remain as closeted as Kevin Spacey. I'm north of forty, I moved to what just might be the most insular advertising market on the planet and the real unemployment rate, once you factor in the underemployed and the folks who've stopped looking, is around 18%.

These days, I work part-time and freelance, or rather, "consult", which is supposed to sound more glamorous. Once in a while, I land something conceptual and maybe even fun. Mostly, I write table tents, emails about prostate cancer and brochures on electro-convulsive therapy (Yes, McMurphy, that's the politically correct term for electroshock). I can't really mourn my salad days, because many of my friends' situations are way more dire. Besides, I'm the moron who walked away from a VP/ACD title when she was on track for a promotion to Creative Director. (If I had kept that job, I'd probably be unemployed by now, like many of my homies).

Bottom line, I have a business to build. I'm doing as much old school networking as I can but in these lean times, the classic "your friend so and so gave me your name" tactic is ineffective. People tell you to call back in two weeks when they're done with their focus groups, huge pitch, vacation, company retreat, hernia operation... you get the picture. You write yourself a note, wait the requisite two weeks, call and leave a message, and after unreturned phone call#3, scratch another name off your call list. Not that I blame these people. They're probably getting ten of these calls a day and they'd rather help a friend than a friend of a friend.

What do you do in an anti-social business climate? Make like everybody else and turn to social media. I started with the most logical choice for business purposes, linked in. It's turned out to be an invaluable forum. You pick up interesting information, communicate with people from all over the world, discover kindred spirits, read interesting links about trends in your industry. The etiquette is simple and the discussion groups are a great place to get feedback or advice from peers. I've even gotten work off of linked in, from people who read my profile or snarky wall posts.

Twitter, I have not had much use for. I'm sure I would, were I an oppressed Iranian, tweeting about the street protests and subsequent government crackdowns. But I'm just an underemployed yankee ad wench. I get annoyed looking at Twitter's too-cute retro design and ugly colors. I don't feel like checking in with the tweetosphere multiple times a day to see who's being pithy now. I am not going to follow the Mexi-Korean fusion food truck around town. I don't care when the krispy kreme donuts are coming out of the oven and I have no desire to cyber-stalk Ashton Kutcher. Once or twice a month, I get a notice that somebody I've never heard of is following me on Twitter. Good luck with that. Following me on Twitter is like chasing a parked car.

Facebook is the SM I resisted the longest. I just couldn't see how to walk that line between the personal and the professional. Even if stay resolutely away from topics like God and country, how is the fact that I like pilates and putrid French cheeses relevant to a potential client? But FB has become a terrific 5 minute diversion when I'm in the middle of some particularly dreary assignment. Not only can I stay in touch with old friends, I've gotten to know many of my acquaintances a lot better. The fun facts you pick up! Who knew that October 24th was Zambia's 45th birthday. Or that Thai people punctuate everything they say with "na". I just found out Richard Thompson's 1952 Vincent Black Lightening totally rocks, and that an African American congregation in Georgia is learning the meaning of namaste. I even got introduced to the axolotl, a Mexican salamander that looks like it crawled off one of my son's old pokey man cards.

So here I am, sitting in my home office. The business clothes remain incarcerated: It's 3:00 p.m. and I'm still in my pajamas, blogging and cranking out radio spots. I'm afraid I haven't provided much insight into social media, but if you want a free, detailed upload, take a peek at this art director's blog. He's a nice guy, and judging by his facebook page, he cooks a mean Irish breakfast.

Yesterday's happy ending

2009-10-08T08:23:00.000-07:00

Full disclosure - I'm not a huge musical fan. I know many are timeless entertainments, with classic, catchy songs beloved around the world. Maybe I'm a narrative junky, but I always want more information on the characters than musicals tend to provide. All those singing interruptions too often take time away from character and plot development. Whenever the conversation starts to get interesting, someone breaks into song. But my husband wanted to go see the Broadway revival of South Pacific and so, we went. Which is as it should be since I've made him sit through Greg Brown (on a particularly folky night), Manhattan Transfer, and an excruciatingly minimalist modern dance in which the choreographer sat in a chair, facing away from the audience, and made agonizingly subtle motions with her back muscles.

It was my turn to do something outside of my aesthetic comfort zone.

On with the show. First, the classic songs. Bali Hai is an icon of musical kitsch - the melody itself remains resolutely so, no matter how you orchestrate it. There is Nothing Like a Dame? Silly, corny and sexist. Yes, there is nothing like a person of the female sex. Except, if you are generalizing to this absurd degree, all other persons of the female sex. And then there's Wash that Man Right Out of my Hair which is always fun, no matter who sings it, because the lyrics are so charming. As for Some Enchanted Evening, the song has a deep, romantic emotional truth - anyone who has ever loved remembers that first time your eyes met, that feeling that anything could happen.

Based on a compilation of several short stories from James Michener's Pulitzer Prize-winning first book Tales of the South Pacific the musical is set on a Polynesian island during World War II. The American sailors stationed there are going stir-crazy, waiting for their orders. Our heroine is Nelly Forbush, a Navy Nurse who has fallen in love with a dashing French plantation owner named Emil Debeque. Widower Emil has two half-Polynesian, toffee-hued children whose existence he has not yet divulged to Nelly.

Being half French, I appreciated the Debeque character, an honorable, decent guy and not a racist (if you forgive the fact that indigenous servants are tending to his life of white privilege on their island). I kept waiting for Emil to put on a beret, surrender to his poodle and dissolve into a pool of cliche slime. Fortunately, for once, the French character didn't turn out to be a scumbag, drug dealer, sleaze ball, coward, womanizer or cheat. Thank you, James Michener. As for Nellie, she's a tirelessly spunky little Southern broad with attitude and a down-home naivete.

Anyway, Emile DeBeque throws a party for Nellie, at the end of which she meets his children. At first, thinking the kids belong to Emile's manservant, she drawls that they are the "Keee-you-test thahngs" she has ever seen. But when she learns that Emile is their father, Nellie recoils in shock. The realization that her paramour has brown children and has ostensibly had sex with a brown woman - horrors - more than once, is just too much. Nelly has a hissy fit and storms off, we later find out, to request a transfer.

Meanwhile, Joe Cable, a dashing young Princeton-educated Marine on a secret mission to turn the tide of the war in the Pacific, is having his own Island fantasy with a Tonkinese girl named Liat. The actress playing Liat in this production is maybe 5 feet tall and very young, and her Joe towers over her at about 6'4. Their seduction scene comes off as child molestation, or at least the exploitation of a barely adult woman. It makes you so uncomfortable, you have to wonder whether the casting was intentional. Especially as Joe is smarmily singing "younger than Spring time". Of course, later he mournfully admits he can't possibly bring some Gauguin babe home to Mother Dear and chalks it all up to his upbringing. Now if you can have that degree of insight, why not keep thinking? Why? Because Joseph must go home and take his rightful place in the Wasp ruling class. He abandons Liat, leaving her his grandfather's watch as a souvenir. Or payment for services received.

Joe Cable ultimately recruits Emile De Beque as his civilian partner on the Spy mission: to sneak onto an island occupied by the Japanese and observe their maneuvers, reporting back to the US military by radio. Debeque knows the island and has contacts there who can help. The mission is a success but poor Joe never makes it back to the states live out his life as a member of the Yankee elite. News of Joe's demise reaches base camp and Nurse Nelly fears Emile, too, has gone to meet his maker. She suddenly realizes WHAT'S IMPORTANT. And so the play ends with Nelly ensconced in Emile's plantation, where she has apparently decided to take over mothering his kids. When the Frenchman turns up alive and unannounced, he quietly observes the nurturing way Nelly feeds his children soup and is so touched by her maternal behavior that he takes up where they left off.

If you're living in the Obama era, (and an vituperatively vocal minority of Americans are not) it's hard to relate to the plot of South Pacific. You don't WANT elegant Emile to end up with small-minded Nellie. Yes, I know, some individuals genuinely and profoundly change. I also know lots of people revert to their bigoted upbringing as soon as they get mad at their spouse. How often does a stone racist like Nelly do a 180 and become an enlightened humanist? For God's sake, it's 1950. And the woman is from Little Rock Arkansas, not known for its Civil Rights street cred. Wouldn't it be a healthier reaction for Emile to not want Nelly near his children, whom she may deep down consider the products of miscegenation?

So that is the problem with South Pacific. When it came out in 1950, many needed to hear its message. Today, it's hard to feel warm and fuzzy about that nice Emil Debeque, with his romantic aura and Enchanted Evening baritone, walking off into the sunset with narrow minded little Nell Forbush. According to modern mores, her behavior should be a deal breaker. If she has something to be mad about, it's the fact that the guy let things get this far romantically before springing two kids on her. That's a contemporary and justifiable beef. But no, she's too busy tripping out over a dead brown woman to whom Emile was legally married. And while the death of any young man in combat is always tragic, when we learned of Joe's, I found myself thinking oh well, one less frat boy. Joe's dalliance with Liat was never intended to be more than an exotic interlude. He used her because he could, and he convinced himself he loved her just long enough to justify his own behavior.

You have to suspend your contemporary attitudes about race, and racists, to enjoy South Pacific for what it is, an entertaining artifact of the past. The set designer certainly understood that - you can't go understated on this one. It's gotta be realistic, it's gotta be technicolor and if you don't throw in the ocean and at least one palm tree, you're fired.

Rattled

2009-09-11T02:38:00.000-07:00

Now that we have moved from Berkeley to Orinda, I am taking my hill walks in the park instead of the street. Our new rental house is a short drive away from three Regional Preserves: Tilden, Redwood and Briones.

Our new address is on other side of Wild Cat Peak, the hill overlooking North Berkeley. At the top of that hill is Tilden Park, with its Eucalyptus and Pine groves, stables, a petting zoo, a little lake for swimming, steam trains, post-card views of the bay and Nimitz Way, a wide, relatively flat asphalt trail favored by bicyclists, old folks and dog owners.

Twenty minutes away from the Orinda house, Redwood Park lives up to its name, boasting several groves of the huge trees. Redwoods seem to always grow in groups, like conversational clusters at some somber, druidic gathering. Originally, the forest at Red Wood was tall, vast and dense. Back in the days of clipper ships, sailors entering San Francisco Bay avoided submerged rock by lining the tip of their vessel between Yerba Buena Island and two redwood trees 16 miles off, trees so outsized, they could be seen from the mouth of the bay. These historic giants would still be part of Redwood Park had the logging industry not destroyed the original forest in the mid 1800s.

Briones Park consists of a series of low hills with mammalian contours. Here and there, patches of scrubby woods shade the trails. There are mini canyons and shallow gorges and ridge trails with views of hills, hills and more green hills. Briones is pretty in a low-key way, but almost creepily generic. The landscape is uncannily quiet and feels like it's outside of place and time. You could be in Ireland or Tuscany, Russia or New Zealand. As the path ahead of you curves around the hillside, practically anything could be coming your way - a rusty depression-era jalopy, a knight on a muscular steed, a Gypsy peddler dragging his overloaded donkey, a happy-go-lucky group of hobbits. You will certainly see hawks swirling on the almost constant wind, and you may encounter a mother raccoon and her unruly pups. Unlike the Berkeley deer, calm and complacent as cows, the Briones deer are truly wild. They burst out of the woods, bound across the trail and disappear, unnerved by the presence of a human on their turf.

Walking through the understated Briones terrain has a meditative quality. Even with a dog in tow, it's easy to get lost in your thoughts when there's nothing but blue sky and bald hills to distract you. This is the state I was in on my most recent hike, worrying, reassessing, reevaluating, planning, pondering, flogging myself for past mistakes and personal inadequacies. In short, not paying any attention to the here and now. I was yanked back into the present by a sudden, assertive hiss directly on my right.

I spun around to face an angry rattlesnake, as startled by my presence as I was by his. The serpent's upper body rose straight up from a pile of concentric coils, his alien, triangular head pointing straight at me as he sounded his rattle. It was surprisingly loud, but then, he was only about four feet away. I can't have looked for more than a second, yet the picture is seared on my brain, like an image on a piece of film.

Forget fight, it was flight all the way. I tore down the trail, dragging my bewildered yorki behind me. When I stopped to look back, the snake was frozen in strike position, still facing the exact place where I had stood just moments earlier. Dangerous but dumb as the dirt beneath him, he didn't seem to realize I had moved on. I am hardly the fearless type, but it all happened so fast, I didn't even have time to get an adrenaline rush.

That night I told my husband about the rattlesnake encounter. As a result of a steady diet of cowboy shows as a child, he has the worst case of ophidiophobia (fear of snakes) I have ever seen. I learned this years ago, during Raiders of the Lost Ark, one of our very first movie dates. The man kept his eyes squeezed shut for the entire snake pit scene. I had been trying to talk him into joining me on my nature walks, but Briones is now out of the question. We've renamed it Rattlesnake Park.

Bay view from Tilden Park

A young grove at Redwood Regional Park.

Briones. Stole all of these off Flicker.

Say hello to my little friend.

Vagrants

2009-08-31T21:27:00.001-07:00

Aztec Angel, by Jesse Reno

I spotted him as I was driving to the grocery store in the early afternoon. The boy was lying on the edge of the strip mall parking lot, barely out of the way of incoming cars, his body straddling the curb between the asphalt and a mangy patch of straw-colored lawn.

I pulled into the parking lot to investigate. As it turned out, the child I thought might need assistance was actually a slender schizophrenic woman in her early twenties. She was on her back, waving her delicate hands above her face and cooing at them like a baby. Her limbs and clothes were dirty, but her youth and relatively short hair indicated that she had not been on the street that long. She had an ethereally beautiful face, resembling a young Mia Farrow. I felt sick thinking how vulnerable she was, frail, lovely and mentally ill - a girl my daughter's age. How many times, I wondered, had she already been raped or sexually assaulted?

At the grocery store, I picked up a sandwich and a water for the schizophrenic girl. I returned to the parking lot with my offerings, which she accepted lucidly enough to thank me. I was about to get back into my car when a middle aged woman came up to me. "Did you just buy her food?" She asked. I nodded. The lady told me her office had been feeding the poor girl for over a week. They had called around to various shelters, but none had room. When they called the police, a sympathetic policeman suggested the lady call the late Governor Reagan."He's the one that closed the mental hospitals. Now there's no place for these people to go."

The day after the election, I went to an evening yoga class. Bush was on his way out, McCain wouldn't be succeeding him, and Sarah Palin would never get within a mile of the red telephone. Everyone was in celebration mode. Instead of having us end the class with "shivasana", or relaxation pose, the teacher cranked up some Aretha and the whole class did a happy dance. I am a bit of a spaz and while I've been known to boogy around the house, shaking my boo-tay in front of fifty yogis is another story. I wiggled around awkwardly, and headed out the door as soon as class was over, well ahead of anyone else.

At the bottom of the stairs to the studio parking lot, a scruffy, bearded and obviously deranged young man was ranting at the world. Nothing was going to change. We were all pawns. Victims of a vast conspiracy. Controlled through our cell phones. I switched into urban survival mode, pretending not to notice him. As I reached the bottom of the steps, I raised my hand to brush the hair from my eyes. Instantly, the guy was in my face. "What?" He snarled " You gonna hit me? You wanna fuck with me, bitch?" He took two steps forward and threw his arm up in the air. He was at least a foot taller than me. Out of my mouth came my best angry mom voice, "Chill out! I'm not even talking to you." I kept walking. Fast. I could hear more yoga people coming down the stairs. There had been plenty of men in the class. I hoped one of them would intervene if the mad man chased me down. My post-election yoga mellow had curdled like overcooked hollandaise.

The homeless people among us are no more homogenous than we who have roofs over our heads. Some are recently out of work, luck and rent money, perhaps living in their cars, like the old lady I saw parked around the corner from the Monterey Market in Berkeley. Others are self-destructive alcoholics chasing oblivion, or sociopathic young men dealing drugs and drifting. Professional beggars retiring to a cheap room every night to count their coins, withdrawn, worn-out women fading into doorways, lost children running as far away from their childhoods as they possibly can. And then there are the crazy people. Scribblers of word salads, prophets of the apocalypse, confidants of God. People who are mentally ill and vulnerable, or deranged, and possibly dangerous.

The homeless problem is not singular: it's plural. There are people who need rehab or medication, people who should be behind bars and people who just need a break. We don't have the will, or the wherewithal, to sort them all out. We are a nation that can't even agree on the moral imperative of caring for the physical health of our working people, let alone the mental health of our street folk.

Quoth the raven, "lookin' good!"

2009-08-19T21:44:00.000-07:00

I have weird bird karma. I've discovered a drowned starling in a bucket in my yard, been pecked in the head by an angry magpie defending her nest, and had a kamikaze robin hit my kitchen window full blast. A few months ago, on a walk in the Berkeley Hills with my daughter, we were in the middle of our 59th conversation about whether she should dump her dullard boyfriend when we were interrupted by a loud tap-tap-tapping coming from a sixties-modern wood house just above us.

The house had a huge picture window of mirrored glass, to take advantage of the choice Bay view while protecting the owners' privacy. Perched on the ledge of that window was an enormous raven, locked in spellbound interaction with her reflection. She pecked repeatedly on the glass and then suddenly stopped – as did the bird in the mirror. When the raven abruptly cocked her head to the left, her reflection followed in perfect synchrony. Mesmerized, the raven kept coming up with more tricks as she watched her doppelganger imitate her every move. I claim no scientific expertise. I realize I am anthropomorphizing and an ornithologist might say I was full of malarkey. Yet it seemed, to my untrained and undisciplined eye, as though the raven understood that the big, black, shiny-feathered bird in the window was indeed herself.

I thought no more about this rather wonderful animal encounter until recently, when I came upon a crazed ... swallow, perhaps? (Sorry, I am not a birder, but I can learn). Caught in a dance of death with the side mirror of a car, he kept charging the glass and smashing his little beak against his reflection. Then he would swoop around and rest on top of the mirror for two seconds before attacking again, over and over, like some Avian Sisyphus. I waved my arms and made noise to try and distract him, but the poor bird was intent on destroying his nemesis in the mirror. I gave it up to nature - it would have taken a butterfly net to catch him and break the spell. But I had to conclude that the raven had it all over this little birdbrain (Yes, I'm going there, it's my damn blog).

I knew some birds were highly intelligent. A woman I used to work with had a pet conure. A rain forest native, he liked to shower with his mistress. Whenever she got in the way of his "rain", he signaled for her to move by gently pecking her foot. I read Alex and Me, Irene Pepperberg's book about her amazing experiments with Alex, the parrot genius. To briefly summarize his exploits, this brilliant bird could form 3-word, intentional sentences, such as "Alex want corn". He sorted blue and green blocks by shape and color. He could count up to seven, and unlike the circus horse who'll keep tapping his hoof 'til his trainer gives him the signal to stop, Alex understood the concept of counting.

I looked up ravens. Turns out, ravens, crows, jays, and magpies are all corvids and they are the brainiacs of the bird world, not including parrots who may be as or more intelligent depending on your school of thought. There are definitely some who think ravens have figured out that the bird in the mirror is them. This is very advanced animal thinking - even dogs don't understand this. Elephants do.

I was fortunate enough, on both of my walks, to stumble upon two live demonstrations of what animal behaviorists call the Mirror Test: Observing what a given species does when confronted with its reflection. Can a creature even "read" the image in the mirror or does it just see a play of light and shape? Does the animal think it is looking at a fellow member of its species, like that single-minded swallow so determined to destroy his rival in the car mirror? Is there evidence of a higher level of thinking, as with the raven, where the test subject realizes "that's me"? And is it really the pinnacle of awareness to peer into that mirror and think, "That's me, and these love handles have got to go"?

Links

http://www.all-birds.com/brain.htm

http://pages.cthome.net/rwinkler/crowintel.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_(parrot)

http://www.gardengrapevine.com/TerritorialBirds.html

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14552-mirror-test-shows-magpies-arent-so-birdbrained.html

Films to rent

Winged Migration

The Parrots of Telegraph Hill

Whitewash

2009-08-06T21:45:00.001-07:00

Ask people about Berkeley High and they all say the same thing: " It's either very good or very bad." Meaning, if your kid is motivated, there's sports, art, drama, music (with a renowned jazz ensemble), swim team (including a huge pool), international baccalaureate and AP classes up the wazoo. You've got all the resources you need to get junior into an Ivy or UC Berkeley. But if your kid is an underachiever whose only goal is to "do what I have to to make it through the system and accommodate my parents' values", you're in for it. Our son's first and last period teachers couldn't be bothered to take attendance, so those were the two periods he skipped most often. He also managed to come to class stoned more than once, but that, apparently, is why they call it Berkeley High. Don't even get me started on his friends. Suffice to say, they are not in the International Baccalaureate program.

So it was time, once again, for a school change. The short term goal was to get the little albatross in an environment where the teachers take attendance, parents get notified about drug or alcohol abuse and kids are suspended for bad behavior. If he makes new friends, so much the better. As for the long-term goal – well, we stopped having those a while back.

We ruled out private school because 1. He can't get in anywhere, 2. We can't shell out right now and 3. It won't make a damn bit of difference unless he makes up his mind to do the work. We toyed with moving back to the East Coast where we might have more of a support system, but there's no job for me to go back to. In fact, every single one of my friends at my former place of employment has been laid off.

You worry about your children until you die, but you only raise them for a brief period of time - especially when you have a kid who's intent, however misguidedly, on raising himself. In a couple of years, the boy will be attending community college, learning a trade, riding the rails or beginning his career as a night club bouncer. Eventually, we hope he realizes there's more to life than having a good time. Meanwhile, we have to think about where we would like to live once he is off doing his thing or figuring out what his thing might be.

Strolling through the Berkeley Hills on a glorious June day, I had an epiphany: I no longer want to move back East. We don't have the stomach for any more upheaval and none of the major decisions we've made have helped straighten out our son. Not the wilderness program, not the boarding school or the private school or the cross country move (which to be fair was partly motivated by my husband's chronic California dreaming). Besides, I love it here. I want to live where a beach, a mountain or a redwood grove are all less than an hour away. I want to watch the fog creep over the hill tops. I want to look out the window and see a teeny-tiny, lime green humming bird hovering by a tree full of teeny-tiny, lime green limes. Maybe this is an aesthete's version of hedonism and maybe it's more profound. Some people do church: I do nature.

We settled on moving to Orinda, a quiet suburban community just on the other side of the Berkeley Hills. The high school is small and secluded. It's a closed campus. They take attendance, and there's nowhere to go if you cut class. If the boy messes up, he'll get suspended or maybe expelled, which is as it should be.

Having decided to make a local move, we faced a complicated schedule: We needed to be out on the 21st but couldn't move in to our new rental place until the first. I had to work three days a week, for both weeks of the transition, and since I don't own a lap top, that meant shlepping my regular macintosh. We put the kid on a plane to Minneapolis to go see his friend from last year's boarding school, after which we hit the road for Yosemite and the Eastern Sierras.

After a too-brief mountain interlude, we had to head back so I could return to work. My husband, my mac and I spent our last three transitional days – thank you Mileage Plus – at Berkeley's fabulous old Claremont Hotel. Just 7 years shy of its 100th birthday (2016) the Claremont is elegant and honking-huge, with a classic, subdued decor and quiet, comfortable rooms. There's a very nice gym, tennis and pool club on the grounds. The landscaping features plenty of healthy, hearty, two-toned roses in romantic hues. The lobby, with its well polished dark wood counter and striking period chandeliers, evokes the ghosts of visitors past. And alas, the Claremont too looks like a ghost, as it has been painted, from foundation to roof, a hideous, unrelenting, blinding white.

At first, I accepted this strange uni-whiteness as an unfortunate fact of life. Perhaps painting it white was a green thing to do. But then, by the elevator I noticed a reproduction of an old, framed photo of the Claremont as it was meant to be. Not Casper-the-friendly-hotel, but a neo-Tudor castle.The building faces several directions at once yet somehow the whole thing works. Every outer wall is buttressed (or probably merely adorned) with precisely cut, meticulously installed beams. It's a prodigious amount of beautifully executed labor. I did a quick internet search but all I learned is that the paint job isn't new. By the mid-forties, the hotel already looked like a white, plastic toy building, abandoned at the base of the hillside by some giant, puckish toddler.

So now I am settled in Orinda, and I need to find my way out of this yarn, but I can't really tie the big white hotel back to anything. I could compare that paint job to the tough exterior my kid affects, but that would be pushing it. I could muse wistfully about a few days' limbo free from parental responsibilities towards someone who doesn't believe such a thing should exist. Nothing like hotel life for taking you out of your reality. But the true metaphor here is that I don't know the ending. For this post, and for that handsome, obstinate, rebellious boy, my son.

On hiatus.

2009-08-02T23:28:00.000-07:00

I have temporarily lost my mind due to a difficult move. We had to move out on the 21st but couldn't get into the new place before the first. I had to schlep my non-laptop computer around and set it up in hotels so I could work. Now, I am in a new place, surrounded by boxes. My husband is grouchy because his internet's not working. My kid is nasty because he didn't want to move and is choking on his own testosterone. My daughter is having her 25 year life crisis a couple of years early and has decamped for the East coast. My supply of St. John's Wort has run out. The only sane person around here right now is the dog. Consequently, please bear with me while I unpack, clean cabinets, write hospital brochures and howl at the moon.

Hope and Dread

2009-07-14T22:12:00.000-07:00

When my friend Rob is faced with a difficult choice, or when life is simply being hormonal, he likes to slap himself, in an hommage to Faye Dunaway in Chinatown. "My sister. My daughter. My sister. My daughter," he cries. This is a pretty close approximation of how I feel after two years on the West Coast.

There is a corner in front of a Friends' Meeting House in North Berkeley, where vagrants, eccentrics and the occasional mangy professorial type congregate to smoke, argue and promote world peace. Last month as I walked by, I noticed a fellow with a single, remarkably wide grey dread sticking out of the back of his head.

East Coast me went crazy over the thing. It looked like a beaver tail. No, it didn't. It looked like tribble road kill. No, it didn't. It looked like a petrified hair ball retrieved from the gut of a fossilized saber-toothed tiger. Yes. It. Did.

I was musing over the eerie similarities between the dreadlock and a big wad of dryer lint when West Coast me commandeered my brain. Wait a minute. This guy is clean, harmless, being himself. He washes that dread. Perhaps he even irons it. How intolerant, how small, how judgmental of me to entertain myself by mocking the man's choice of hairstyle.

I am wracked by this kind of ambivalence. Just this week,waiting my turn at the CVS register, I froze in fascination at the sight of an elderly lady - a Goya hag with Lautrec coloring. Eighty if she was a day, with brutally ground-in rouge and long, thin cotton-candy hair dyed a faded peach color. She wore a short skirt and leggings and was entirely bedecked in rhinestone jewelry - necklaces, earrings, bracelets. She sashayed proudly past me with her old (and I do mean old) man at her side. East Coast me was appalled. I felt awful for her. I wondered how can one not see the mirror, lose perspective to that extent, be that delusional?

But West Coast me was amused. You had to give her credit for trying. The old girl had spunk. She was having a good time. Why be mortified for her when she would never in a million years feel that way?

My sister, my daughter, my sister, my daughter.

In these lean economic times, it's hard to find the right tone in which to talk, the right frame of mind from which to function. When all your friends are unemployed, you don't want to hear some bleeping Pollyanna's delusional thinking. You feel like you should look reality right in the eyeballs. And yet too much hand wringing isn't constructive either because we must all persevere. If you are fortunate enough to be making some money – even if it can't compare to your salad days – if you are paying your bills, then this is no time to feel sorry for yourself. Everyday, I see people suck in their guts, smile gamely and push on as best they can. So yeah, you can indulge in the gallows humor, in the right context, with the right folks. But you have to remain positive. No matter what coast you're on, it's the right thing to do.

Algo-rhythms

2009-06-26T18:48:00.000-07:00

My kid blew his Socratic English oral. He was downgraded for his style of discourse - oppositional and defiant – but not for his argument, that machines could never be truly human. This is a popular science fiction theme whose romantic expression is the story of the sensitive android with genuine emotions. A darker take on this concept has machines less concerned with experiencing love than running the show - in these stories, robots and computers take over human situations, or maybe even entire planets.

I'm a sucker for such yarns. I feel for the soulful replicant and fear the all-knowing power-mad machines. Still, it's hard not to take comfort in the fact that while my computer is no doubt smarter than me, I still have to call upon a human to save the day if my hard drive crashes.

It took true genius to puncture my smug human superiority. Itunes genius, the application that, based on a single song, puts together spot-on mixes from your music collection. Genius knows your every musical quirk. The bluegrass banjo riff that gives you St Vitus dance. The alt country lament you've harmonized with for so long, you forget your part isn't on the record. The obscure rock chick with the big, bad voice. The best folk singer no one's ever heard of. The sexy French electronica bon bon that always mellows you out. Your favorite U2 ballad, lesser-known Dylan song or Marvin Gaye makeout tune.

Genius has you down. It free-associates based on a modal harmony, a breathy singing style, a jazzy vibe. It can tell if your mood is randy, upbeat or introspective. Sometimes, it knows you better than your spouse. So while I appreciate the ability to make an instant playlist that perfectly matches my mental state, I'm still a little creeped out. My musical taste, which I thought was so eclectic, is apparently just another algorithm.

The strawberry's a raspberry

2009-06-07T22:50:00.000-07:00

The yoga studio I attend follows the Anusara school. Classes are steeped in tantric philosophy, and the core concept is "opening to grace". We start class with a chant, but first, the teachers are expected to enlighten us with a story that sets the theme for the day. This might relate to the physical practice - such as maintaining the balance between muscular energy and flexibility, or the mental practice - say, letting go of poisonous thoughts.

As a skeptical, non-religious person, it took me a while to adjust to Anusara's emphasis on Hindu spirituality. I'm not much of a monotheist as it is, and adding on gods just multiplies my doubts. But it's a terrific workout, and I do believe yoga has emotional benefits as well. It has helped me face day-to-day challenges with greater equanimity, fixate less on my problems, control my anger and tolerate fools just a wee bit more gladly. I suspect my many hours in down dog have kept me from strangling my incredibly challenging 16 year old son. Plus, I can now do a handstand against the wall, which is quite an achievement for a woman in her middle years who couldn't even manage a cartwheel as a kid.

Recently, I showed up and the studio was packed. A popular teacher was in town, subbing for his sister. It turned out to be a great class: He really kicked our butts.

If only he hadn't treated us to the parable of the strawberry.

Way back in time, there was just the first man and the first woman - and the gods, for whom watching the first couple was like ancient reality tv. So one day, First Woman asks First Man "Am I the most beautiful woman in the world?" To which the dimwit answers "Well, honey, you're the ONLY woman in the world". First Woman marches off in a fit of pique, leaving First Man looking sheepish and wondering what he did wrong.

In an attempt to get First Woman to chill, the gods go on a charm initiative. Flowers bloom in time-lapse and exhale their perfumes as she walks by. Trees lob perfectly ripe apricots at her. Butterflies encircle her with flashes of nacreous color. But First Woman's got her sulk on and she's sticking to it. Just as she's worked herself into a full-blown hissy fit, she comes upon a patch of strawberries, plump and jamming sweet. Overcome by rage, First Woman starts stomping on the berries like a frustrated toddler, releasing a pink cloud of fruity fragrance. The scent proves irresistible and she suddenly finds herself scarfing down berries by the handful.

In the middle of this feeding frenzy comes First Man, contrite and ready to grovel. But First Woman smiles up at him with juice running down her face and croons, "Hi, honey!" She has forgotten all about their big conflict. As the yoga teacher explains, "She's been touched by grace."

Or maybe bulimia.

I guess if you have a non-problem like your husband not being willing to stroke your ego often enough, strawberries might do it. But if your kid is on drugs, or your spouse is leaving you for a same-sex partner, or the bank's about to foreclose on your house, even strawberry Haagen Dazs won't make it better. The parable of the strawberry is not enlightening – it's 1960s sitcom. The woman in the story is a narcissistic twit. Her behavior is a waste of time and energy and has diminishing returns, and this story revolves around outdated, sexist, stereotypes of the irrational woman fishing for compliments and the bone-headed guy wondering what do women want? But it's not the actual parable of the strawberry that disturbs me the most. It's the fact that the intelligent, educated, professional women around me were eating it up.

I am fine with the basic idea of feeling connected to nature and the life cycle. It resonates more with me than the notion of a big bearded man in the sky. But like many contemporary people, I don't need symbols and metaphors to illuminate abstract ideas. If my yoga teachers must wax philosophical, I prefer they dispense with the fables.

My friend and favorite yoga instructor is a naturalist with a masters in the study of jelly fish. She worked on the Monterey Aquarium at its inception. Her classes have themes based on nature and sometimes science. And she never tells stories about Kali, Lord Ganesh or the first man and woman. Tantric philosophy resonates with my friend's deep connection to nature, respect for the planet and general world view, but like any true scientist, she doesn't buy into mythologies.

No, I don't need a hug.

2009-06-03T07:57:00.001-07:00

A lady in my women's networking group recently forwarded a link about the Global Hug Tour. Here's the jist of it, lifted, not plagiarized, straight off the site:

"What we're doing
Inspire Me Today Founder Gail Lynne Goodwin and her husband Darryl will take off in a small prop plane from Colorado to circumnavigate the globe and literally hug the world. The tour will stop in 45 locations over a period of five months.
On a personal mission to make a difference, they will be:
Delivering an estimated $1,000,000 to important causes throughout the tour raised through grassroots contributions from people like you
Giving at least 2,000 hugs in each location to literally wrap the world in 100,000 hugs
Gathering great wisdom, inspiration and brilliance from leaders and luminaries in the far reaches of the globe to bring back and share on InspireMeToday.com"

If you want to take part in the hugathon, all you have to do is donate $10. Multiple charities are involved and Gail and Darryl will personally deliver your donation, to the city and cause of your choice, with a big squeeze for an individual recipient. You will become an official hug ambassador and find out exactly who got embraced in your name. If the recession has left you with any discretionary income and you feel inspired, here is the link.

http://www.inspiremetoday.com/globalhugtour/

Now that I've demonstrated that I am basically well-intended and have given you the opportunity to make a donation, I'd like to speak for hug-averse people everywhere.

Our culture has gone hug-wild. A recent New York Times article described the affectionate behavior of today's High School students. Every day, students are hugging each other hello. Repeatedly. We're excited - let's hug! We're bummed - let's hug! We're dissaffected, jaded and bored - let's hug! No wonder nobody gets to class on time. Meanwhile, in the adult world, more and more of my clients and colleagues feel compelled to greet me with a squeeze and sometimes even a kiss. The first time this happens, I inevitably stiffen. Occasionally, they notice and apologize, and then we're both embarrassed.

I'm all for warmth, affection and human contact but I happen to need a large amount of personal space. It's cultural and probably genetic - we're all like this, on both sides of the family. I am a demonstrative person and truly love my friends, but I save my hugs for my husband, children and dog. I'm not heartless: if a friend is in despair and I get that please hug me vibe, I understand, and I am happy to oblige. My best friend on the planet lives in the Midwest. We stay in constant touch, but I'm lucky if I see her every other year. When we see each other, we hug. Gingerly, like a couple of porcupines. She's not a hugger either, which is probably one of the reasons we get along so well.

Regardless of one's personal space issues, hugging has its draw backs. Some are olfactory: a whiff of mothballs, a hint of body odor, a sniff of stale smoke - triple yuck. Some are self-imposed: Is my breath OK? Did I forget the deodorant? Can she tell I'm uncomfortable? Some are contagious: lice, swine flu, antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis. And then there's the occasional pervy hug, usually inflicted on a woman by a man, ostensibly in the name of camaraderie but with the ulterior motive of full body contact.

Which brings me back to that affectionate couple, the Goodwins. Have they considered that other cultures may not be so huggable? Social mores are very different in Islamic Morocco than secular France. In Thailand, it's considered extremely rude to touch someone's head. The charitable aspect of the Global Hug Tour is admirable. The Goodwins are having themselves a damn fine adventure while living up to their positive surname. But let's not forget that it is possible to touch people without using your hands.

Garden Party

2009-05-25T15:08:00.000-07:00

No doubt the hardest thing to be in Berkeley is a Republican, but I'd say lawn gnomes are a close second. How could a mass-produced, garden variety lawn gnome not feel upstaged by Buldan Seka's hand-crafted, exuberant, outsized ceramics? Ms. Seka, an artist-in-residence at the California College of Arts and Crafts, lives in a large, rose-colored home on Spruce Street. That's number 707, should you decide to walk by, which I highly recommend you do.

A perpetual party spills out of that big, pink house. Fantastical figurative sculptures gather around the ground floor, perch on the second story terrace, and gaze out at the vast bay view from a third floor balcony. Busty queens, muscular macho men, giant terra cotta lingams, toddler-friendly zoo animals and strange creatures from the artist's personal mythology all vie for the passerby's attention. They're fun, loud, wildly decorative, strangely alive and just a wee bit creepy. I suspect the only way they'd tolerate a lawn gnome is at the end of a leash.

To read about Ms. Seka, click here.

http://buldanseka.com/

Or here.

http://www.serfed.com/content_files/dergi/28/90-95_sanat_soylesisi.pdf

Wanna see some more Berkeley garden ornaments?
Come take a walk with me.

http://eucalyptusway.blogspot.com/2008/10/lilliputian-sculpture-garden.html

http://eucalyptusway.blogspot.com/2008/10/art-lovers.html

Pencils and Tassels

2009-05-13T22:30:00.000-07:00

Unless you're a workaholic, or battle chronic depression, you can probably think of an activity that pushes your reset button. Perhaps you play golf - or the violin. Or you put on the glitz and go ballroom dancing. You might be a daredevil with a skydiving habit. You surf, ride horses, practice yoga or bake a cake for every occasion. Maybe you just sit in your yard and see what the trees are up to.

Obviously, I like to write. But for me, one of the most centering, rewarding activities is life drawing. As corny as it sounds, I feel an existential, humanist bond with the people I sketch. If they are young and comely, I think of the promising life before them. If they are older, I try to read their laugh lines. The more you stare at your models, and this is true for both portraits and nudes, the more vulnerable they become, the more real, the more they matter. The act of drawing becomes an act of compassion. You may never learn the models' names, or anything about them, but somehow, they are no longer strangers to you.

Since I moved out to the Bay Area, I have been preoccupied with generating income, getting my teenage son straightened out and counseling my daughter about her future. I did attempt to locate a life drawing venue but found nothing convenient. Eventually, I joined The San Francisco Life Drawing Group on meetup.com and waited in vain for notice of a sketch-in. Six or eight months went by, and then today, an email:

"Come out on Tuesday, May 26th 2009 for the sexiest workshop in town! HAPPY HOUR drink specials! Why stop the Memorial Day fun on Monday? Come out on Tuesday to sketch the amazingly talented Burlesque superstar, Dottie Lux! The Burlesque Times just voted her The Best Burlesque Performer of the Month of May! This month we are inviting everyone who participates in the workshop to put their favorite drawings on display for the evening with the option to sell them if you want. We will be putting display walls up for everyone to see, so please invite your non-sketcher friends to come and check out the art and hang at the bar! As always our sponsor Baby Tattoo Books is providing beautifully printed books which we will give away as prizes for each month's drawing contest."

Apparently, this is a great opportunity to hang out with a bunch of people my daughter's age, drink mojitos and draw some heavily made-up chick in tassels, a G-string and a come-hither expression. San Francisco strikes again. I think I'm going to pass.

There's a place, and a market for erotica, and there always will be. It's just never interested me. Even Rodin's most erotic works are about more than sex. Love, youth, desire, fragility. Time stopping and time slipping away. Life emerging from paper and stone. The human condition, for God sakes. Nudity has a dignity and an eloquence that no tassel can touch.

I haven't drawn in nearly five years, but I remember all my favorite models. The lovely, flaming-haired dancer, nicknamed "the burning bush" by the younger art students. Her toes were gnarly and twisted from years of dancing en-pointe, and her coloring was made for chalk pastels. The handsome gay man with the chiseled German face and flawless male physique. The wiry Peruvian engineering student with the pre-columbian profile, whose dark skin I turned a vivid red when I sketched him in oil pastels on brown wrapping paper. The dreadlocked African American teacher who was a dead ringer for Forrest Whitaker, right down to the lazy eye. The earthy Russian girl with the face of a Slavic angel and the body of a paleolithic fertility goddess.

Only the dancer could have pulled off burlesque, but they were all beautiful to me.

Go Market Yourself!

2009-04-29T21:15:00.000-07:00

I got a blog, you got a blog, all God's children got a blog. It's a must, along with your facebook page, your linked in page and of course, your twitter presence. The social media craze has taken hold and marketing and advertising people everywhere are inundating the internet with their personal marketing theories, insights, observations and platitudes. It's as though you were compelled to be a guru just because you're good at your job. Problem is, lots of jobs don't deserve gurufication. And lots of very competent people can't write. It is agony for them to bullshit endlessly about their jobs and philosophize about marketing. Yet in this hideous economy we keep getting told, by consultants galore, you must have a blog to be in play.

The proliferation of blogs is partly due to the the fact that a lot of us are un- or under- employed. Some people are trying to get noticed by HR people, head hunters and potential employers. Others have given up on finding a full time job and are trying to build a consulting business (from a marketing standpoint, this is the group for whom blogging about the work you do makes the most sense). But should business blogging really be for everyone?

There are two types of productive workers: The type that lives and breathes the job and becomes possessed 24/7 by its demands, and the type that works heroically, like a dog, let's say... a rescue dog. Pretty heroic. And then that person wants to go home, chill out, enjoy friends and family and compartmentalize their job away in some drawer somewhere deep in the back of their brain. This type needs to replenish or loses productivity. Compartmentalizers should enjoy their time off and not feel obligated to blog, or get ripped off by a ghost writer they have to supervise. You can be a fabulous asset to a company and not want to spend your downtime working on your personal branding.

And here's the big question I keep asking myself: If someone has no notoriety and we don't know them personally, why should we want to read their marketing verites?

OK, I know you're composing snappy retorts in your head. What exactly makes me so special? Am I some sort of Machiavellian elitist hypocrite trying to talk the competition out of blogging while I refine my online presence? Nope. I am a talkative person with few friends in a strange town. I am also a writer. This is an outlet for me. If I had to pontificate about copy writing and creative direction all the time, I would bore myself to death. I rant about whatever I please. I don't do daily updates, because life gets in the way, and sometimes I have nothing to say. And I don't try to con people on linked in into reading me by starting discussions with teaser links to my blog. Besides, for every person I might charm or amuse, there will probably be two that think I'm deeply wierd, snarky, or worst of all, dull.

Now, if you like to write and have something to say that you're passionate about, write on. About politics, cooking, travel, yoga, marketing - whatever floats your boat. But if blogging for you is like downing your morning serving of plain unsweetened oatmeal with skim milk because, gosh darn it, it's good for you, it's time you let yourself off the hook.

Stop and smell the cherry blossoms ?

2009-03-17T19:04:00.000-07:00

Ok, I know cherry blossoms don't smell. Or if they do, you'd have to be a bee to notice. The reason they're on my mind is not because they're in bloom right now (which they are) but because of a Japanese saying I read about recently, to "watch the cherry blossoms".

In Japan, cherry blossoms – sakura - are celebrated around peak bloom time through a low-key social ritual known as hanami. You meet up with friends under the flowering trees and have a picnic and maybe a little sake with your sakura. The subtext of "watching the cherry blossoms" goes beyond admiring nature's beauty. As you take in the delicate display of blooms, you're honoring the transiency of life. Watch the blossoms now, while they're in bloom and you have eyes to see. Appreciate the evanescent even as it disappears.

I can't remember where or even in what context I picked up this random tidbit of information, but I recall that the writer commented on the lack of an equivalent expression in English. I was skeptical. I knew I'd think of something. I racked my brains for the anglo version of watching the cherry blossoms. "Seize the day", perhaps? Nope. Too industrious. Too aggressive. You don't seize the day to take advantage of the nice weather and go fishing. You grab the poor day by the throat at 5 a.m. so you can jog eight miles, remodel the basement and start that online business you've always dreamed about - all before noon.

How about "Stop and smell the roses"? Flower reference: check. Time-out aspect: check. Profound meditation on the poignancy of mortality? Not happening. The meaning of this phrase is strictly surface, like quickly sniffing a flower. It's basically a more colorful way of telling people to slow down and relax.

So now, I'm SOC (shit out of cliches) and it's a beautiful day. I think I'll take Winston out for a walk. Maybe I'll run into some cherry trees along the way and meditate on my own mortality. And maybe I won't.

Such is the life of a klutz.

2009-03-13T01:05:00.000-07:00

Finally, I understand why I never loved Lucy.

Every family has its own drama, and its own cast of characters. Primadonna. Martyr. Instigator. Patriarch. Enabler. Control freak. Mediator. Victim. Headcase. Drama queen. Nurturer. Peace maker. Black sheep. Saint. These familial action figures don't come in a complete set, but every family has at least one. One individual you can always count on to behave a certain way, causing everyone else to react as they invariably do, thereby triggering the comfortable dysfunctional pattern that, for better or for worse, feels like family time.

In my family, I have always been the klutz. I suspect I had gross motor delays as a child. (In those days, these things weren't diagnosed or labeled). I remember cut and paste assignments in kindergarten and first grade as messy, humiliating torture. Your hands got sticky and gross and you could never cut along the lines and your work looked lousy and... and... how DID those other little girls cut and paste so neatly anyway? I'd try to wash all the paste off my hands and run home – once again, without my sweater. I have forgotten countless sweaters in my day - probably enough to fill your nearest Benetton.

As I grew, the flake-fest continued. There was the time I got cast as Max in Where the Wild Things Are by my modern dance teacher and forgot to show up at the church where we were supposed to perform. The Wild Things gyrated gamely without me, and the audience was told to pretend I was there.

One New Year's Eve, my parents had a party, and my mother asked me to pass around the caviar canapes. I managed to unload a few of them before I tripped and plopped the whole platter upside down on the floor. Eventually, my mother declared me incompetent and would only ask my younger sister for help. The fact that this hurt my feelings never came up. I was relegated to tasks that couldn't possibly jeopardize the carpet. But I got back at the stupid carpet, the time I stepped in dog doo and tracked it all the way up the stairs.

My clumsiness became family folklore. Whenever we got together with my grandparents, someone would bring up one of my special moments. It was always good for a laugh. By then, I had learned that the best way to keep people from making fun of you is to beat them to it. So when the family would all get together at my parents' summer cottage, I'd trot out my greatest hits.

The Accidental Cleaning: I let the dishes pile up in the sink way too long. Out of dishwasher soap, I put laundry soap in the dishwasher. Five minutes later, the kitchen is knee-deep in bubbles, leaving me no choice but to clean the kitchen. Since it takes every towel in the linen closet to dry the linoleum, I decide to do the laundry. Thirsty from all the effort, I reach into the fridge for a pitcher of tomato juice and miss, spilling TJ everywhere. Which is how I finally get around to cleaning the refrigerator.

The Amateur Plumber: My husband and I are on the road and by the time we find a motel, it's very late. The toilet won't stop making noise, but we really aren't up to changing rooms. Drawing upon mechanical skills I never knew I had, I rip a plastic bag into strips, which I tie together to make a rope. I then loop my makeshift rope around the little metal arm inside the toilet tank and secure it to a towel rack, thereby generating the sweet sound of silence. When the toilet breaks a few minutes later, we still don't hear it: I'm too busy bragging about my newfound aptitude for engineering. We're just noticing the soggy carpet when the front desk calls: Is everything OK? Because it's raining in the room below us.

Baptism by Caffeine: I'm on the top deck of a ferry, drinking coffee with with my better half. The air is bracing, the coffee's warm, and I'm getting so animated, I start talking with my hands. Suddenly, there's an indignant mewling sound from the deck below. A young couple stands directly beneath us, a tiny baby wailing in the woman's arms. He's dripping wet from the coffee I just spilled on his sweet little head. A boatload of complete strangers stares up at me with concentrated loathing.

Bread Alert: Over a lovely, romantic dinner in a Maine country Inn, my husband asks me to pass the bread. Which I do, dipping the straw basket just a little too close to the lovely, romantic candle and setting the basket on fire. In the interest of public safety, I douse the flames with my water glass.

Somehow, I've made it to middle age. Along the way, I've had countless fender benders, pulled out of the grocery store parking lot with the grocery bags on top of the car, gotten appointments wrong by a week, a day, an hour or a street address, worn clothing inside-out, forgotten my purse at airport security and left a yellow diamond pendant as an unintended tip for an excellent massage. I've actually developed some coping mechanisms. I obsessively check my belongings when I travel. I have a sixth sense about when I'm going to be distracted behind the wheel, and make a point of concentrating on my driving. I'm partial to very large key chains jangling with keys I no longer use. This makes my keys cumbersome, noisy and harder to lose. I wish I could impart some of these tricks to my children, but they prefer to learn from experience.

I have a son who once took our yorkie for a walk, tied the little guy up outside so he and his friend could go to Starbucks and then walked home without the dog. Fortunately, the poor creature was still there when the boys went back for him. As for my daughter, lets just say she's a lot like me, minus the mechanical aptitude. I am deeply sorry that I have passed on my unfortunate je ne sais quoi to both of my kids. At least their mother doesn't think it's funny.

P.S. Last night, I prepared a recession dinner of noodles, salad and a big bowl of turkey chile for four, which I heated in the microwave. Halfway between the counter and the microwave, I dropped the bowl. You'd have to do a scientific experiment to determine which splatters farther - pyrex or turkey chile. Both were EVERYWHERE. I was reminded of a guy I once met whose job was analyzing the debris pattern from plane crashes to help determine what went wrong. Anyway, I dashed into town to get us some takeout, while my long-suffering husband cleaned up most of the mess without me. By the time it occurred to him that a photograph of the chili debacle would be the perfect companion to this blog entry, it was too late: the floor was spotless. You'll just have to make do with another shot of Lucille.

A pain in the neck

2009-02-08T07:08:00.000-08:00

It was a Tuesday evening when our son began complaining that he felt achy and feverish. He was sniffling a little and picked at his dinner. Wednesday, he had a fever and a headache and we kept him home from school. Thursday, his head hurt so much, he couldn't sit upright. His temperature was 102.7. His face was visibly swollen. His neck hurt. It looked thicker than normal and was hard for him to move. When you're dealing with fever and a stiff neck, you don't mess around. I made a doctor's appointment for that very afternoon.

The pediatrician was not reassuring. She said the boy needed blood tests immediately and we didn't have the option to send them out to a lab and wait several days. We had to get to the hospital, pronto. My son begged: Can we wait 'til tomorrow? Not a good idea. The doctor didn't think it was meningitis because our son was lucid and not nauseous, but the fact that he couldn't touch his chin to his chest was worrisome. And there were other serious possibilities which she didn't go into. We went home and walked the dog, grabbed the kid's tooth brush and some reading material, and headed for Oakland Children's Hospital.

Children's is an urban hospital. The families are poor, their lives are hard and no doubt, getting harder. A lot of the kids are brought in with minor ailments because they don't have a pediatrician and rely on medicaid. We checked in at 7pm, but by the time we were ushered into a room it was almost midnight. The young doctor on call wanted to do multiple blood tests and a spinal tap, and went to his supervisor for permission. She nixed the spinal tap: Meningitis presents with nausea and vomiting, and those symptoms were absent. One less thing to worry about.

At 1 pm, they took our son upstairs for a catscan. Then, in the absence of available rooms, they dumped him back into the examining room, where he'd have to spend the night. Yet another doctor came in to convey the results of the catscan. According to the radiologist on call, the kid had something called a retropharyngeal abscess, a rogue sore throat that develops behind the pharynx (voice box). He would have to immediately cease all eating and drinking in case he needed surgery to drain the abcess. In the mean time, they started him on an IV antibiotic. Had I not been bone tired by the time we got home, I would have googled the boy's condition, thereby preempting the possibility of getting any sleep whatsoever. It seems this infection, due to its location, can wreck ungodly havoc. Blood clots in the jugular vein. Pneumonia. Respiratory blockage. Sepsis. In short, an early appointment with one's maker.

My husband and I slept for a few hours and were back at the hospital at 10:30, only to find the poor kid still curled up on a gurney in the same examining room. The good news was, they had just asked the A team to take a second look at the cat scan films, and whoever had been on the graveyard shift had misread them. The alleged retropharyngeal abscess was just a shadow on the film. Our son had good old-fashioned blood poisoning, probably from popping his zits with dirty fingernails. He still needed two days of intravenous antibiotics before they would discharge him. On the upside, I now had a plenty of ammunition to tell him to wash his hair and stop picking his pimples.

Like all hospital experiences, this one was unpleasant. The waiting room periodically got too crowded to seat everyone. The floors and bathrooms were filthy, and there were no foot pedals for the sink, so you got to re-contaminate your newly washed hands when you turned off the faucet. And of course, it's always tough to see so many sick little ones and worried parents. My husband kept complaining that we should have gone to a nice suburban hospital, but the pediatrician had warned that our son would likely be moved and end up at Children's anyway. Besides, Children's Hospital proved to be a consciousness raising experience about American society, as illustrated by the following examples:

• We were admitted right after an African American teen whose mom wheeled him in on a gurney. He had the vacant look and curled hands that come with years of living in a vegetative state. I don't know what he was brought in for, but his mother explained to the admissions clerk that he had been like this since getting shot at age two.

• My daughter and I rode the elevator with a burly white guy and his three year old son, whose nickname appeared to be "Stud". After the man got off, we wondered whether Stud had a little sister, and what her nickname might be. We hoped it wasn't Hot Lips.

• We shared the examining room with an Asian immigrant woman and her newborn, who couldn't stop spitting up. The baby had been sick for a week, so her mom fed her a crushed adult motrin mixed in with breast milk. The vomiting was the poor child's reaction to motrin poisoning. We listened in disbelief as the doctor explained that you don't give adult medicine to infants.

• When my son finally got a room, his roommate was a 4 year old Hispanic boy on a respirator. The child had apparently been in a car accident, and hadn't been wearing a car seat. His arm was in traction, he couldn't stop crying and he was completely alone for the entire day. The nurse explained that nobody in his family could get time off work to sit with him. His mother and brother finally arrived around 6 pm.

The presidential election stimulated a lot of talk about race in America, and that's a fine thing. But while few would argue that racism in America is over, it seems to me that the overarching problem here isn't race: it's class. It's lack of opportunity that forces people to live in neighborhoods where young men work out their differences with guns, and toddlers catch the stray bullets. It's lack of education that keeps people from understanding that it's not appropriate to sexualize one's children. It's lack of medical care that forces people to improvise and give babies adult medications because they don't have insurance or a regular pediatrician. It's lack of resources that causes people to skimp on essentials like car seats for infants. And it's lack of compassion that allows employers to tell parents they can't take the day off to sit with a traumatized, injured four year old who's all alone in the hospital.

Former Presidential candidate John Edwards turned out to be a world class creep. But when it comes to his campaign theme of "The Two Americas", the guy had a point.

Give me an inch, revisited.

2009-02-04T14:04:00.000-08:00

According to my pilates teacher, I haven't been 5'5 my whole life after all. I was 5'4 until I started doing pilates. There is anecdotical evidence that all that vertebrae-by-vertebrae spine elongation translates to added height. (That's height, not heighth, as so many manglers of the English language, perhaps confused by length and width, like to say).

Cirque Du Salacious

2009-02-02T12:50:00.000-08:00

Why is this clown smoking? Trust me, you don't want to know.

For years, my son and daughter have been using insults to express their mutual affection. In more innocent days, they coined naughty compound words like poo poo head. But they grow up. Now, my son calls my daughter "Bee-atch" and she responds with "clown penis", a pet name she got off of an old Saturday Night Live skit about a guy who finds that the only remaining available web address at aol is clownpenis.com. As a result, I never really thought about clown penii, except as a reason to leave the room when my children go into insult mode. Then again, that was before I moved to the famously libertine Bay Area, where consenting adults will consent to just about anything.

So my daughter signed up for a digital drawing class at an art school in San Francisco. The first day of class, the teacher, a portly fellow in his middle years, jovially announced that he had given every computer in the class its own individual desk top. On my daughter's screen was a picture of a fat male clown upon whom a female clown was performing what we will euphemistically call a circus act. Way too intimate, but nothing personal: every computer screen in the room was devoted to some kind of erotic clowning around.

As the teacher explained, the performers were from a group called the Filthy Dirty Clowns,* merry wanksters who, for a fee, will enliven your next cocktail party with their nasty numbers. Apparently, these activities have deep, existential meaning, sort of like being intimate with someone you love, minus the love and intimacy part, but plus an egg beater (don't ask). And it seems that once you go clown, you don't turn around. In fact, the instructor was convinced Heath Ledger's death had to be a suicide: How do you top playing the joker, the ultimate in perverted clowning? Having experienced that big top career high, why would Ledger want to stick around for the sad slide back to male romantic lead? One can only hope this Bozo never has a chance to share his insights with the Ledger family.

My daughter began noticing distressing similarities between the body type of the male clown on her screen and that of her teacher. She found herself visualizing him in whiteface and rednose and tried really, really hard not to go there. The arrival of that day's model - a lovely young woman who looked like she'd be fun to draw - was a welcome relief. Unfortunately, after the model disrobed and got into one of her poses, the drawing instructor pulled out a rubber clown mask and slipped it over her head.

In the corporate world, exposing people to clown porn, or even garden variety cheesecake, would qualify as sexual harassment. I remember when a female art director I worked with used a shirtless beefcake photo of Brad Pitt as her computer desk top. The uptight IT guy, whom nobody would EVER want to see without his shirt, complained to HR and my colleague was ordered to take Brad off her computer. Just think what could have happened had Brad been wearing pom poms and no pants.

But this is San Francisco, and art students apparently march to a different drum. No wonder my daughter's thinking about law school.

*Name changed to protect the, uh, innocent.

You know what they say about men with a large shoe size...

Thoughts on the Inaugural Redress

2009-01-21T09:38:00.000-08:00

It was a heckuva show. Obama, doing his best to keep up with Justice Roberts' botched oath. Michelle, regal, if a tad over dressed in gold (loved the olive gloves). The two impossibly well-behaved little girls in their vibrant violet and orange coats. Dubya, steeling himself for the inaugural redress - the inevitable rejection of everything he's done or didn't do. Cheney in a wheel chair, looking like some long-lost member of the Adams family. The Reverend Purpose-Driven Homophobe pronouncing Sasha and Malia's names like some overzealous NPR reporter gargling with a foreign word. Joe Biden's irrepressibly good-natured chicklet grin. The ancient Tuskegee Airmen, proud to have lived to see the day. Aretha Franklin, in less than full voice, and more than full hat. The incredibly dense and diverse crowd covering every speck of the mall. The Rhymin' Reverend Lowery,whose immortal verse "So the Red man can get ahead, man," can not be topped, which is probably why he didn't include Asian Pacific Islanders in his benediction. The pomp, the pageantry, the parade, the people, the pride! Yes, I did go through a couple of tissues. Then again, I cry at movies, classical music concerts, transcendent Olympic performances and national anthems. Anybody's national anthem. As I sniffled over the inauguration of our Nation's first African American President, I couldn't help asking myself, how much of the euphoria was due to the man and the moment and how much was just plain relief that the insane clown posse has finally vacated the People's House. I think it's about 50/50.

The inaugural address was sober, somewhat generic and low on sound bites for the ages, which may have been what was called for in these anxious times. We heard the anticipated calls for patience, sacrifice and cooperation, and a clear but classy rejection of the Bush administration's more misguided policies.

Here are my personal highlights:

"As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expediency's sake." Subtext: No more lying to the nation. No more Gitmo, Abu Graib, water-boarding, extraordinary renditions, and spying on American citizens. Cut to Dubya, parsing the put down with an uncomfortable look on his face.

"We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its cost. "No more stem cell research bans or global warming denials. No more bribery, hookers, booze and cocaine at the Department of the Interior. No more cutting funds to foreign aid organizations that provide poor third world women with birth control. No more willfull ignorance and stupidity, at least not the governmentally sanctioned kind.

"To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist." Woo hoo! Diplomacy! What a concept! The stick remains an option but the carrot is back on the table.

And finally, "We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and nonbelievers." Thank you, President Obama, for acknowledging the existence of atheists and agnostics as people, rather than as some sort of scourge destroying our nation's moral fiber. As evidenced by the 2007 gallop poll displayed below, this milestone of the first African-American President was not so unexpected. But Hell may freeze over before we get our first atheist president. (And of course, as a secular person, I don't believe in Hell, so that's even longer than it sounds). Which is too bad, because a commander in chief who believes this life is all there is just might have second thoughts about starting an unnecessary war. Meanwhile, I just sat patiently through the prayers bookending the inaugural ceremony – the fatuous white Reverend and the cuddly old black one. I'm just grateful Obama was mindful of the fact that he needs the progressive vote in 2012 and acknowledged us secular folk. Besides, if I had any rational reason to believe in the power of prayer, I too would be down on my knees. Obama is going to need all the help he can get.

Crossing the street

2009-01-08T12:22:00.000-08:00

Two houses and several lifetimes ago, I lived in Northwest Washington DC, in a nice family neighborhood of brick colonials and giant oak trees. The main drag, upper Connecticut Avenue, is lined with little shops and businesses which people often walk to, provided they can make it across the street alive. Getting across is definitely not for chickens. There are only two lights for a six block shopping area, and the concept of pedestrian right of way is completely foreign to type A DC drivers. A few months before we moved, an elderly lady was struck and killed in the crosswalk. After the accident, city workers equipped each side of the fatal intersection with bright orange safety flags, intended to make pedestrians easier for distracted drivers to notice. You grab a flag, wave it over your head, and step bravely out into the street, hoping the driver bearing down on you isn't colorblind. Sometimes the car stops, and sometimes the driver honks and swerves around you. Occasionally, some belligerent yahoo rolls down the window and chews you out for having the temerity to step off the sidewalk.

It's different here in Berkeley. Pedestrians rule. Even as you step out into the street, oncoming traffic starts slowing down a block away. Cars idle patiently until you're all the way across. At first, this is refreshing, especially when you're in pedestrian mode. But once you get behind the wheel, you realize the courtesy is not reciprocal. Berkeleyites don't walk across the street, they mosey. They stroll languidly arm in arm, talk on the phone, pause in the intersection to pull up their socks. And they jaywalk. Not the run-like-hell-so-you-dodge-the-car technique you see in big cities, which has an element of sport and demonstrates an implicit respect for the driver. This is slow, deliberate, in-your-face jaywalking, striding recklessly in front of an oncoming car, walking, not running, against the light with nary a thought to the ensuing Prius pile up. It's understood that walkers and bicyclists are more evolved beings, their carbon footprints light as angel wings. Better slam on the brakes, petroleum junky. Let the virtuous pass.

Berkeley's driving etiquette, like its foreign policy, is strictly local. My friend's brother, who is from Oakland, gave me fair warning. "Once you leave the Berkeley city limits, don't expect the cars to stop so you can cross the street. They'll mow you down."

Give me an inch

2009-01-01T12:31:00.001-08:00

Forget all that crap about wisdom and serenity and comparisons to fine wine. There are plenty of downsides to being " a certain age" , and not much to be certain about. Anything can go south at any time - your job, your marriage, your friends, your friends' marriages, your home equity, your investments, your face, the fleshier parts of your anatomy and of course, your health.

I recently had a health scare which was causing me some concern and keeping me awake at night. (A good night's sleep. Another thing one can no longer count on in middle age). The day I was scheduled to go see my doctor, I awoke at 4 am. For me, the only thing to do in these cases is to get up and read, write or get some work done, so I rolled out of bed, slipped on my brand new, forest green Christmas mocassins, and shuffled off to my computer.

I had been typing away for about an hour when I was startled by a sudden, loud, unidentifiable sound. Since the window above my desk is covered by a sheet to keep the glare off my computer screen, I had to go outside to determine the source of the noise. Cautiously, I opened the back door and looked around. In the middle of the patio lay a bird, on his back with his legs up in the air, convulsing like an upturned windup toy. He was a west coast robin, with a fuzzy orange belly and a long, pointed beak. I noticed a crack in the window where he'd crashed into it. Having gleaned too much information about my symptoms from the internet, I had worked myself into an acute neurotic state, the kind where suicidal birds take on a sinister meaning. I couldn't help but fear the little kamikaze was some kind of bad omen regarding my pending doctor's appointment.

When it comes to animal control, my husband and I adhere to traditional sex roles: I don't kill living things and I don't dispose of dead ones. (Besides, it's challenging to do these things while you're screaming and hopping on one foot with your eyes squeezed shut). I waited for my knight in shining armor to get up and grab some coffee and then I led him outside to take care of the robin. But there would be no need for a bird funeral: the little guy turned out to be remarkably hard-headed. We caught him just as he was regaining consciousness. He struggled to his feet, shaking his head a few times as if waking from a bad dream before flying off into the garden.

Later, at the doctor's office, I was led into an examining room by a chatty nurse who had recently moved from Lousiana. In between sharing her disgust at the lack of response to hurricane Katrina and describing the positive effects of Southern humidity on curly hair, she proceeded to weigh me, and then insisted on checking my height. It's OK, I said. I'm 5'4. But the nurse was as thorough as she was friendly and she measured me, something which had not been done since I was in my late teens or early twenties. Which is how I learned, to my utter shock and bewilderment, that I am actually 5'5. Apparently, I grew another inch since the last time my father marked my height on the door frame back in, maybe, 1978?

The nurse left a couple of minutes later, and the doctor came in. She listened to my complaints, wrote a prescription and told me I'd live. This reassuring news seemed almost beside the point, as I was now in the throes of of a full-blown height-entity crisis. My whole life, I've been 5'4. A really big petite. A jumbo shrimp. A woman, according to the anthropology section of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, of exactly average height when you factor in supermodels and malnourished North Koreans.

When I got home, I just had to double check. I made my daughter measure me again. Yes, I am proudly, unimistakably 5'5 and the weather up here is fine. All these years I've been statuesque, and I never even knew it. So to hell with the grey hair. Too bad about the back fat. And gobble be damned. At least you can't say I'm getting shorter with age.

Hope for the Holidays

2008-12-30T04:56:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time, the comedy show In Living Color featured a skit lampooning Jesse Jackson's 1988 presidential campaign. Jackson's campaign slogan "Keep hope alive" morphed into a sketch in which Jim Carey, the show's token white guy, played an ancient, wheelchair-bound Bob Hope. "Hope" was clad in a hospital gown and connected to an IV while the rest of the cast, dressed as doctors, nurses and orderlies, fussed over him and vowed to "Keep Hope alive".

Jackson wasn't the first politician to spin hope into a slogan, and he won't be the last. Bill Clinton's biography is "A Town Called Hope". Barack Obama titled his autobiographic tome "The Audacity of Hope". Artist Shepard Fairey used the word all by its lonesome under his bold, Warholesque portrait of Obama to create what is probably the most famous American political poster since Uncle Sam Wants YOU!

The Obama victory, and the impending departure of Bush and Cheney are a great relief to most of us (67% of the population, according to Bush's latest approval rating) but these days, it's hard not to feel like hope is on life support. The global economy is globally lousy. Unemployment goes up every week. The stock market keeps dropping, like the sea level right before a tsunami, exposing a variety of invertebrates, parasites and bottom feeders. Our infrastructure is crumbling. Healthcare is broken. The polar ice caps are dissolving while Tennessee drowns in toxic sludge. Our kids are ignorant and proud of it and the cost of educating them has never been higher. Iraq may or may not hold together if and when we finally pull out, and Afghanistan ain't looking too good. The environment remains on the global back burner, with the temperature on high. Israel and Hamas are at it again, apparently mutually incapable of learning from experience.

Even as I write this, I have to keep reminding myself that 'tis the season for hope. For Christians, Christmas is a yearly reminder of the hope Jesus gave mankind. For Jews, Chanukah represents the hope of religious freedom. And for anyone who's had a lousy year, this is your time to hope next year will be better - especially encouraging when next year starts tomorrow.

If you're suffering from H.A.D. (Holiday Affective Disorder) try remember that hope isn't just seasonal: it's eternal. A uniquely human expression of the survival instinct, woven into our DNA. And it's contagious. Hope inspires, connects and motivates. It's overthrown dictators, cured diseases, signed peace treaties and cleaned up toxic waste sites. And it starts with you and me. So here's to the hope in our hearts. May it grow, and thrive and spread to everyone around us. May we all look forward to a healthy, healing, peaceful and productive new year. And above all, may we keep hope alive.

The Thing about Yoga People.

2008-12-20T23:35:00.001-08:00

Here's the thing about Yoga people. Most of them are lovely human beings, mellow, peaceful, honest and kind. They enjoy every little bit of beauty life affords them, be it as simple as a dandelion growing from a crack in the sidewalk. They make you ashamed of your drama and navel-gazing over banal human problems you should regard as just another opportunity for personal growth. Yogis and yoginis have mastered the art of taking life, not just one day, but one moment at a time. Their existential goal is to live completely in the present, free of regret over yesterday or worry about tomorrow.

Living fully in the moment has its drawbacks. It makes it hard to be on time for anything - even yoga class. I hadn't been in Berkeley very long before I heard someone described as being "on Berkeley time", a polite euphemism for chronically late. People who use this term tend to be transplants who feel a certain nostalgia for punctuality, which they quaintly perceive as a form of courtesy.

Existing in the present is also problematic when it comes to making plans. I recently attended a birthday party for a delightful yoga instructor who was turning fifty. A week before the party, I received an email, addressed to the entire guest list, about what, if anything, to get for the profoundly non-materialistic birthday girl, and whether anyone would go in on a group gift. I immediately responded that I had already bought some earrings, but would happily reserve them for a different friend if they needed my contribution. The emailer had to send out two subsequent communications on the same subject. By the third one, she was grumbling about herding cats. The day of the party, the group still couldn't decide whether to go in on a massage or donate to protect an acre of Costa Rican wilderness. And that was only half of the people on the guest list, the rest having not gotten around to checking their email.

Even conversation with the yoga folk can be challenging. Those of us who are not on the path to enlightenment spend a lot less time in the present. We like to speak of the past - anecdotes, memories, regrets - or the future - fears, plans, hopes, aspirations. When we do discuss the present, we often turn to politics and current events. This doesn't get you anywhere with hardcore yogis: most of them will tell you they don't read or watch the news because it affects their world view in a negative way and makes it hard to see the divine in people like Dick Cheney, Robert Mugabe or Bernard Madoff.

So you default to what's going on around you and talk about your trick knee, or the weather, or that cute dog over there. You feel a little frustrated, and lets face it, bored. It's not that you're unaware, or immune to the charms of the here-and-now, the humming bird resting on a power line - how exquisite and magical he is and how his little wings must need a break from all that stroboscopic beating. But that's just the background, an occasional respite from conversation. You're enjoying the walk, or the sunshine, or the vegan nutmilk smoothie with agave syrup, but you still need to shoot the shit. Sometimes, the present isn't so interesting. It just is. And for you, is is not enough. You need conjecture. Theory. Gossip. Sarcasm. Wit. Debate. Heck, you may even occasionally have to get a little bitchy. You can't do this with yoga people. Bitchiness is an unfortunate condition. It's a bit indecent. How sad that you revealed it.

Meanwhile, the yoga person is probably thinking he or she can't talk to you about finding your real self, seeing the light in all beings, or striving for spiritual enlightenment. Which is probably true.

Diversité in the Université

2008-12-15T14:16:00.000-08:00

Mt. Ararat, Armenia

"Please describe any aspects of your personal background, accomplishments, or achievements that will allow the department to evaluate your contributions to the University's diversity mission..."

This is THE essay question to apply for a graduate degree at a prestigious California university. Not a degree in teaching, political science, or social work, mind you. ANY graduate degree. In other words, if you're white, middle class and grew up in a homogenous suburb, you're going to have to punt.

Oh, boo hoo, get over it, you bourgeois Caucasian troll. Yes, I know, except for the fact that the applicant in question is my daughter. As I write this, she is in serious brain-racking mode, trying to put some kind of ethnically compelling spin on her lily-whiteness. Having a Jewish grandfather is pretty mainstream nowadays. Nor can she expect any props for her French grandmother: There's gotta be at least one francophobe on the admissions committee. The Mormon grandma? Better keep that quiet in the wake of prop 8's passing. Besides, my mother-in-law converted to Catholicism at a very young age.

A few days ago, my daughter thought she'd found an angle - along with a potential scholarship for young women of Armenian descent. I had to point out that having two great-great-grandfathers from Armenia is not a great-great qualification. I'd hate to see her rob some deserving, doe-eyed young woman named Siranouche Katchaturian of a chance to be honored for her roots and her hard work. And while I've always suspected there was a genetic component to my disproportionate fondness for eggplant, I honestly can't remember anyone in my mother's family pining for the slopes of Mt. Ararat.

Diversity is a beautiful thing. It's what I love about America. Certainly more than the Flag, or the National Anthem, or even apple pie and ice cream. I wept at Obama's acceptance speech. I can't imagine San Francisco without gays and lesbians, or Asians, or people of color. Bo-ring. And for sure, we all have a moral obligation to practice diversity in our lives. To speak out against injustice. To be openminded and colorblind and intellectually curious when it comes to our travels, our cultural experiences, our choice of friends, who we hire, or how we raise our children. But I have to draw the line at diversity as some sort of litmus test in the admissions process at a major university. My daughter wants to make art - serious, thoughtful art with a message. Right now, her paintings are about modern man's alienation from the disappearing natural world - I'm paraphrasing, but that's the gist of it. It's a message that paints all humans as passengers on the same sinking ship. It's us vs. the planet, which, unless you want to get on your high horse about the evils of Western civilization and blame the Europeans for the Industrial Revolution, is about unity, not diversity.

In 1996, California passed proposition 209, which states: SEC. 31. (a) The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting. You can argue 209's fairness 'til the cows get PHDs. No doubt affirmative action has been a fine thing for many deserving students and workers, and for society as a whole. And from an historical perspective, affirmative action was probably more necessary in 1996 than it is in late 2008, as our nation's first black president is busy putting together a cabinet that is clearly ethnically diverse (if politically pretty darn homogenous). But the fact remains, 209 is the law, and the diversity essay question on my daughter's grad school application is a blatant workaround.

They want diversity? They should weigh her art work against what their current students are doing. Is anybody else working in heavy impasto? Do the performance or installation types outnumber the traditional painters? Do they have a glut of lesbian feminist neo-realists? Frieda Kahlo's work is inseparable from her Mexican ethnicity, but Rothko's is about paint and it doesn't make him a lesser artist. By demanding that a prospective student display his or her diversity credentials, the University appears to be requiring an artistic emphasis on this issue, a history of diversity-related activism, or both. In short, they are acting like the thought police. If you think I'm full of malarkey, look at the question again:

"Please describe any aspects of your personal background, accomplishments, or achievements that will allow the department to evaluate your contributions to the University's diversity mission..."

Now, substitute "American values" for "diversity mission." And let me know when your skin starts to crawl.

Alternate Reality

2008-12-03T20:46:00.000-08:00

I come from a family of doubters. Whatever you have to say, they challenge. If you repeat something you've seen on the news, you're being brainwashed by the mass media. When you share a story someone told you, you're reminded that the teller could have been exaggerating or messing with you. Had your feelings hurt? Don't expect solace or sympathy. You're overreacting. Misinterpreting. Being melodramatic. Besides, whatever happened, it's probably your fault. You get no credit for emotional intelligence because you can't possibly have any. Even your personal anecdotes are questionable – your perspective is tainted by your subjectivity.

This phenomenon is partly due to a belief that the majority opinion is the result of group-think, and disagreement makes you look smart. But it turns out that being a contrarian, like everything else, is genetic. I know this because I am the mother of a 15 year old conspiracy theorist.

We got an indication of this when our son was ten and started questioning whether George Washington ever really existed. Just because they put some funny looking guy on the dollar bill and call him George doesn't mean he was ever flesh and blood, right?

As the boy matured, the theories got a little more sophisticated. We never really landed on the moon. How could they have done it with those huge computers and tin can technology? And why is the American flag flapping in the lunar wind when the moon has no atmosphere? Proof positive that those photos of Neal Armstrong were the product of some primitive, pre-photoshop trickery.

Now, we've graduated to the big time. The kind of conspiracy theory paranoid geeks make into "documentaries" for other paranoid geeks to watch on their computers. The "9/11 was carried out by the Pentagon " conspiracy theory. Or the "AIDS is actually a polio vaccine gone wrong" conspiracy theory.

If there's a down side, or a dark side, my son will find it. The police, politicians and basically all forms of authority are evil and corrupt, and the only valid system of governance is anarchy. Last year, an older friend entertained himself by telling the boy Ben and Jerry were members of the KKK. It took me at least fifteen minutes to convince my son that the two ice cream magnates were actually die-hard liberals.

A fifteen year old anarchist is challenging to raise. But that's OK, because, as said anarchist explained to me last week, "Mom, teenage boys like to raise themselves."

Good luck with that, kid. I hope you do a good job.

Namasteak

2008-11-19T21:41:00.000-08:00

Today, I tried a new Yoga class, taught by a scarecrow of a guy who looked like Edvard Munch's screamer if he'd only stop screaming and realize he was one with the universe. The teacher's gaunt face was accented by bizarre, C-shaped sideburns so thin and precise, he probably needs a French curve to shave. A black, horn-shaped plug had distended one of his earlobes almost to his chin. He was just the type of guy that makes me nostalgic for the days when all a man had to do to look cool was let his hair and beard grow long like Jesus.

When our class entered the studio, the instructor had been practicing alone for over an hour and the room reeked of stale sweat. Stinky did, however, turn out to be quite good at his job, and as my nose got used to the funk, I started enjoying the workout. He paid me lots of special attention, coming by repeatedly to pull on my arms, push on my thighs, adjust the position of my feet.

I began to wonder why I was getting twice as much hands-on correcting as everybody else. It wasn't that I lack skill - I was actually more advanced than a lot of the people in the room. It could've been my newbie status, but yoga instructors usually leave you alone once they determine you know what you are doing. Nor do I harbor any illusions that he found me attractive. Although I've lost ten pounds and am quite taken with myself at the moment, I'm still an old broad. Maybe ten or twelve years older, alas, than anyone else in the class.

After fifteen minutes or so of sun salutations, I started to smell grilled meat. I looked around in puzzlement. No nearby restaurants as far as I knew. I refocused and got in the next pose as the instructor came around to adjust me yet again. Then, it was time to hit the ground and do some supine poses, which is when I got a whiff of my mat. Having spent the previous night in the kitchen, it had absorbed the smoky, appetizing smell of yesterday's flank steak.

Now I understood all the special attention: Like all yoga instructors, our teacher was undoubtedly a vegan. But once upon a time, before seitan and Himalayan goji berries, dinner was mom's pot roast or dad's cheeseburgers, and my meat-mat must have triggered some kind of Proustian sense memory. No wonder he kept coming back around to adjust the lady whose mat smelled like dinner, long ago.

Welcome to my dark side.

2008-11-04T12:43:00.000-08:00

Greetings, Ladies and Germs.

I have a new blog in which I intend to express my most pithy, nasty thoughts. Posts will be short and most definitely not sweet.
You can check it out by clicking below:

http://snideties.blogspot.com/

The Lilliputian Sculpture Garden

2008-10-22T20:10:00.000-07:00

Hello, elves. Greetings, goblins. Welcome faeries, leprechauns and pixies, to the Lilliputian sculpture garden.

High up in the Berkeley Hills, in the front yard of an unassuming ranch house, some Sunday sculptor has planted a knee-high assortment of shrubs and flowers to complement his small clay statues. Heads peek at you from behind bushes. Hands rise out of the mulch. Female nudes hide behind veils of flowers. The effect is mysterious and a bit disorienting. The first time I stumbled upon this garden, I felt like the fifty foot woman.

It's not like you've discovered the visionary oeuvre of some suburban Howard Finster: the sculptures lack the naivete and insular confidence of outsider art. Despite their classical aspirations, the pieces feel a tad amateurish. They're lacking in detail, and the proportions are off. It's the kind of work a talented high school student might bring home to mom.

Displayed on a coffee table or bookcase instead of their landscape setting, these works would lose some of their charm. But the sculptures manage to communicate the artist's love of the process, and of people. The figures may be awkward and anatomically off, but they've got soul. And their artful placement in an otherwise ordinary front yard is an invitation to take a little detour through a small, quiet world.

Art Lovers

2008-10-12T22:59:00.001-07:00

I'm doing as much yoga as my body will allow, yet inner peace continues to elude me. I get emotionally involved in current events, and the ignoble behavior at the McCain rallies has me tearing up, ranting and obsessively checking my yahoo landing page for news. I am becoming an expert in right wing hate groups and the Alaska secessionist party (whose founder was a right wing hater in his own right). As they say in yoga speak, I need to get centered. I can't spend my days wringing my hands over the fate of our nation and the character of a goodly number of her citizens. The only antidote to this vast, existential big-picture worrying is focusing on something really small and deliciously petty. So I am going to tell you about something I encounter regularly on my hill walks.

The thing in question is a sculpture that recently landed in someone's front yard at a very prominent bend in the road. I think it's made of white sandstone (I'd have to trespass to get close enough to tell) and, counting the pedestal, the statue stands about eight feet tall. A stylized representation of a man and a woman locked in an embrace, it merges the couple into one sihouette, like giant conjoined twins. You can identify the male twin by his broad shoulders. The female half of this unholy fusion has a huge, paleolithic fertility goddess rump. The effect is Henry Moore-wanabe meets Baby-got-back. Tackier yet is the stylization of the two heads, coming together in the unmistakable shape of a heart.

Every time I pass this monstrosity, I cringe. Its size and artistic intentions elevate it beyond the status of your garden variety lawn gnome or pink flamingo. And yet it's every bit as kitsch. So bad, it's good. It's simple. It's corny. It has just enough subtext for the artistically naive - you may need a few seconds to pick up on that giant heart head. If Hallmark saw it, they'd pay off the artist, trademark the piece and mass produce it as a white porcelain music box that plays "I'll stop the world and melt with you" while the mutant paramours slowly revolve in an endless circle of love. Just picture the possibilities. Giant ice sculptures for celebrity weddings. Hand-carved wood copies made in the Philippines, perfectly sized for the mantelpiece. Vanilla-scented soaps - watch the lovers literally dissolve into your bath water - and each other. Hell, you could do a chocolate version - available in white, milk or dark to mirror your ethnicity. What a classy way to say "Will you be my valentine"!

If the world gets wind of this thing, it could be as ubiquitous as Durer's praying hands. I'm starting to think I should never have told you about it.

Off By Two Grand

2008-10-05T09:29:00.000-07:00

Just a brief Needlefoot update. Our son finally had the needle removed from his heel. The kid was very macho, allowing himself to be I.V.'d and injected without complaining, and entertaining the nurses with his dead pan humor. The surgery took an hour and a half because the needle, weakened from the weight of a 5'10, 170 lb teen, had broken into four pieces. Three stitches later, our son's foot is swaddled in cloth bandages and protected by an orthopedic boot. We were discharged with a $200 pair of crutches which the kid refuses to use as they don't fit his image. He's walking on that foot far more than he's supposed to, and we are hoping his heel doesn't burst open like an overripe fig. The boy has, however, happily heeded the warning about not getting his bandages wet and managed to avoid showering for three days. Last night, he wrapped his foot in two plastic bags and decided to get clean. I think he was starting to smell himself.

I underestimated the cost of the surgery by $2000 - we are now up to $7000, with two follow up visits to go.

Needlefoot

2008-09-19T23:23:00.001-07:00

Somewhere between neopunk, rockabilly, death metal and folk art, spins the pecular planet of my son's fashion sense. Never mind the T shirts for bands with gross graphics and offensive names - that's not exactly atypical for males this age. His choice of pants can be a little eclectic - there's a bright red pair with "bondage straps" and a pair with one black leg and one white leg - again, these are items you can buy at clothing stores in Haight Ashbury. But you won't find a lot of 15 year old boys painting the toes of their combat boots (one teal, one copper). Or deconstructing a perfectly good jacket by covering the sleeves in clashing animal prints. (I can't even bring myself to describe what he's done to his classic navy sport coat. Suffice to say it's not classic anymore). My son also likes to experiment with his hair, draw on his pants, adorn his baseball cap with safety pins, staple studs on everything but his boxers and accessorize the look with a necklace or two. The essence of his signature style, though, is the patch. He is constantly acquiring patches and sewing them all over his clothing. Sometimes, it all comes together with flair, and sometimes it reminds you of grandma's overly adorned Christmas tree. Like that tree, our son occasionally loses a needle or two, but unlike grandma, he doesn't vacuum.

When the boy came back from boarding school this past June, his foot was hurting. He was convinced he had stepped on a bee, and the school nurse had even taken him to a clinic to have his foot looked at. The area around the sting looked infected. I took the kid to a podiatrist, who suggested there might be some glass in the foot and asked if he could "poke around". My son refused. It had to be an insect bite. He distinctively remembered the burning jab of a stinger. Over my better judgement, we decided to adopt a wait-and-see attitude. I paid my hundred bucks and left.

The foot got better, and then worse. Last month, Mike took our son to a new podiatrist. A smart one: She took an X-ray. There, gleaming white and perfectly parallel to the bottom of the heel, was a sewing needle. Mike made an appointment to get the needle out the following week. We got to keep a copy of the X-ray, a cool visual aid which I am sadly too technologically challenged to upload here.

When time came to operate, the podiatrist rolled up her sleeves and went to work, jabbing the poor kid in the foot every ten minutes or so to keep it anesthetized. The needle had been in my son's body for three months and was tightly encapsulated in a protective sheath of scar tissue. Coming in from the back of the heel, the podiatrist got a grip on the needle several times but was unable to dislodge it. After nearly two hours of trying, she gave up. The surgery would have to take place in a medical facility with access to constant visual imaging so she could see what she was doing. This failed surgery cost $900.

When I told my father the doctor all this over the phone, he was very concerned. If the needle were to move too close to the bone, it could cause a dangerous infection. What we needed was an orthopedic surgeon, not a podiatrist, and sooner rather than later. Doctor Dad suggested taking the boy to the emergency room at Stanford. They'd know what to do, and they probably would remove the needle on the spot. Having been raised with a boundless faith in the medical profession, I took this advice.

We made a family outing out of our two-and-a-half-hour round trip to Stanford, enlisting our daughter to come along and provide her brother with sympathy and comic relief.

As you might expect, the famous university's ER is pristine and state-of-the-art. The candy stripers bring you coffee and snacks and there's even a special waiting room for minors with Winnie the Pooh picture books and colorful sorting toys. It's all very fancy, but Stanford keeps you waiting just as long (seven hours) as everybody else and they don't do needle removal surgery. That's a podiatrist's job. Orthopedic surgeons have bigger limbs to butcher. Of course, they took more X-rays, even though we brought ours, which added up to another $1,800 to confirm the fact that junior has a needle in his foot.

So now we've had a post-op check up, ($200), stitch removal, ($200) plus an unscheduled visit due to foot pain and concern over possible infection ($200). Because Mike and I are self-employed and like to choose our own doctors, we have an insurance policy with a very high deductible. Since we haven't met it yet, we look forward to spending more money on the outpatient surgery and ensuing stitch removal. By the time we're done with needle-related procedures, we'll be out five grand. I guess my son is lucky he's not one of the nation's ten million uninsured children, for whom the only option would be to just live with the needle and hope it doesn't migrate and cause a bone infection.

So how's Needlefoot holding up through all of this? With dignity, grace and (sigh) his usual style. The other day he came upstairs to show us his latest creation: a 10' by 10' square patch that he had sewn onto the rear bottom of his jacket. It hung down like a loin cloth, or like one of those mud flaps they put over the wheels of semis. If tails ever make a comeback, he'll be all set. In the meantime, I'm going to sneak down to the kid's room when he's not home and inspect the floor for needles - that is, if I can see the floor.

Dumb Like Me

2008-09-18T15:21:00.000-07:00

I have completely lost my sense of humor over the McCain campaign. I can't take another corny joke about lipstick, moose, or barnyard animals. Instead of cracking wise, I'm obsessively trying to comprehend the mindset that wants a leader "just like me".

Looking back on Republicans I have known (not a large inventory, I'm afraid), I flashed on Clark, a former pharmaceutical client. Clark worked on a medication that helps critically ill premature babies. We were calling on Clark to discuss making an educational video using existing footage of doctors, nurses and preemie moms, all speaking from experience. I was arguing for using footage of a young Black mom with a particularly heartbreaking story. Clark didn't want to use the clip: he couldn't get past her accent and colloquialisms. He got so into making his case, he started imitating the young mother in a falsetto voice. "He don't have any letbacks?...Who talks like that?" It never occurred to Clark that he was offending the other people in the room, including an African American woman with an urban lilt of her own.

I thought about my friend Janine, a copywriter I used to work with when I lived in Cleveland. I can still see her bounding into my office to share an idea for a TV spot she was working on. “ There’s three old guys sitting on a park bench,” she began. "A black guy, a jewish guy and an American guy.” “Janine,” I pointed out, before she could go any further, “The black guy and the jewish guy are American too.”

I remembered Otto, a co-worker who had a little boy about the time I had my son. Otto brought his baby into work one day, and I was on the floor handing the kid Little Tykes figures to play with. When the baby showed no interest in the little brown plastic character I was waving at him, Otto jumped in with an explanation: “ He only wants to play with the WHITE dolls”. Otto thought this was hysterical. Almost as funny as the joke he liked to tell about the jew, the pizza and the oven.

We Democrats get excited about diversity precisely because we see and appreciate our common humanity. Sarah Palin Republicans are suspicious of people who are unlike them. This tends to make them a little clueless, like Janine, who got it when I called her on her language, or less empathetic, like Clark who couldn't relate to a young Black mother from the inner city, even though he had a child the same age as the one she lost. And then there are the nazi shits like Otto, who are probably beyond redemption. All of these folks want leaders who are "just like them", a regular guy or gal who can dumb it down to glib sound bites delivered with just a touch of flair and hometown charisma. The irony of this is that politicians of either party are not just like us. They are more driven, ambitious, eloquent, opportunistic and manipulative. That's how they get elected in the first place.

At the heart of this yearning for down home leadership lurks a disturbing tribalism. And in the global village, tribalism is devolution. We have huge economic, energy, security and environmental challenges ahead that we must face collectively and internationally. So what do the Palin drones list as their priority issues? Abortion and gay marriage. Behind all the ranting at "liberal elites" and "the liberal media" is fear and resentment of any thinking that might shake up their world view. The myth of Mr. Smith goes to Washington lives on. But Mr. Smith didn't have to contend with two wars, global warming, world terrorism, an unstable and scary economy, a belligerent Soviet Union, a mortgage crisis, a broken health care system, rising unemployment and, oh hell, I'm sure I'm leaving out something critical but you get the point.

So I keep pondering and trying to understand, and in the interest of equal time, I'd like to give my Republican fellow-citizens a few questions to ask themselves:

• Is putting an underqualified person a heartbeat away from the presidency really putting "country first"?

• Do you think Sarah Palin would EVER have gotten considered, based on her skimpy resume, if she were a man? If not, doesn't that make her a token? What kind of real advancement is that for womankind?

•How would having 5 kids, including a Down's syndrome baby, a six year old, a pregnant teen, a not-yet pregnant teen and a son shipping off to Iraq impact your current job performance?

• How can John McCain still be "a Washington outsider" after 26 years in the House and Senate? If he hasn't learned the ropes by now, what's that say about his learning curve?

• McCain followed the family tradition and went to the naval academy like his 4 star admiral father and grandfather. His wife is worth millions and they own nine homes, thirteen cars and a plane. How is he not part of an elite?

• Is it really more important for your president to fit in at your neighborhood potluck than on the world stage? Have you ever considered that McCain might actually be more comfortable having a beer with Joe Biden than with you?

• If you're okay with your doctor, lawyer or CPA being smarter and better educated than you, why hold your leaders to a lower standard?

• If your child got a scholarship to an Ivy League school, would you hang your head in shame that she's joined an elite? What if she went on to Harvard Law? Would that make her less qualified to be president than before?

• What if you, regular Joe or Jane, woke up in the White House tomorrow morning? Would you know what to do?

It's official: Obama loves America more.

2008-08-30T10:24:00.000-07:00

One of the things that makes Obama so refreshing is his calling out of political tactics and rhetorical games. When the McCain people try to depict him as somehow foreign, alien or elitist, when the discourse devolves into a game of gotcha', Obama calls attention to the game - just as John Stuart exposes lazy media tropes and Bush administration doublespeak. And true to form, Obama denounced these tactics again in his acceptance speech for the democratic nomination. He asked that the goofy non-issue of who's more patriotic be shelved so the candidates can focus on more important matters like health care, the war or the recession. He proclaimed "I've got news for you, John McCain. We all put our country first."

Would that it were true. But McCain does not put his country first. Mr. Three Melanomas' contingency plan in the event of his croaking is to leave us in the capable hands of Sarah Pallin. Who will try her darnedest, cute little overachiever that she is, but has way too much catching up to do. This is grotesquely irresponsible.

What else have we learned about John McCain as a result of this left field VP pick? That he is one of those densoid old white guys who has NEVER been able to relate to a woman as an equal, or outside the prism of sex. I worked with an office full of them in Cleveland. They can't believe you have a political opinion and their manual states that they must compliment you on some item of your attire every time they want you to work late. Obviously, McCain doesn't intend to work with this woman. He thinks she's going to help him get elected and that's it. And to the degree that this choice may have been a trawl for embittered Hillary supporters, Dude, do you know WHY a lot of these women support Hillary? Because her position on the issues is the antithesis of yours. Do you really think women are going to come together in some sort of girl power epiphany and support Sarah? Would you vote for Dennis Kucinich just because the two of you can go into the same public restroom?

Surely, we come away from this with a better idea of Mr. McCain's judgement, and his evident respect for both the offices of President and Vice President. El Maverick's judgement is so good, he made his pick after a single meeting. Reassuring that we can have such rapid fire decision making in an office that presides over matters of war and peace.

Now lets talk about that Maverick thing, which I suspect is somehow entwined with John McCain's mojo. Apparently, in the Bizzaro World known as Red State America, Sarah Pallen is famous and beloved. It seems this VP selection is a huge pander to the religious right. Not the Maverick choice Lieberman really would have been, but a woman the base considers a heroine for not aborting her Down's Syndrome child. So I would say the Maverick is back in church.

As for Obama, he went on to say that we ALL love America, and we all put America first. Which was rather big of him.

It's my blog and I'll whine if I want to.

2008-08-23T17:32:00.000-07:00

The economy sucks. The job market sucks. Headhunters, online job sites, HR people; they all suck. Like a fifteen year old giving his girlfriend a hicky. Like a remora on a great white. Like medicinal leeches on Henry the VII's hindquarters. If you're getting the idea that my job search is turning into a giant suck-athon, I'd say you're pretty perceptive. In fact, I am about at the point where I'm starting to believe I suck too.

I have been jobless in a new market before. I trolled LA agencies with a spec book and eventually found freelance. I got jobs in Cleveland and Washington DC through old fashioned networking. I've never used a headhunter in my life. Now, I'm in San Francisco, and I can't get arrested. (Then again, it is hard to get arrested in San Francisco. I could run down Market Street starkers yelling "Dick Cheney ate my bubby", in a flawless Australian accent and the cops wouldn't even blink).

So, headhunters. Far's I can tell there are two types: the ones who can't wait to meet you in person, present themselves as your new best friend, promise you the moon and deliver nothing and the ones who communicate over the phone through a flunky, vet you as carefully as a prospective vice presidential candidate, claim they're sending out your resume and disappear without ever giving you feedback. My favorite was the jerk who sent me a whole page of questions before finally submitting me for a job for which I am actually overqualified. This is the question that put me over the edge: "What year did you graduate from college?" Why don't you just come out and ask me how old I am and I'll tell you where to stash your blackberry?

Online job sites make the process a lot more convenient - for the headhunters. Most of the job postings just take you right back to some recruiter. Sometimes, you can't apply on line unless you take a little quiz which determines whether you should even be considered for the position. If you're rejected, you have no way of finding out why, much less applying for the G D job. This is especially perplexing when, based on the job description, it's stuff you can do in your sleep.

I recently met a freelance art director who came to this market 4 years ago and also had a helluva time breaking in. His analysis is that people have become too lazy to do their own vetting. Nobody wants to meet you in person. There is no way to convey how well-spoken, charming, funny and fast on your feet you are. When they determine there's not enough interactive in your portfolio, you're not there to tell them the two extensive, complex websites you wrote are no longer online and provide a link to an archive. When they see that you're low on financial experience, you can't point out that you basically learned pharma overnight and have worked with some of the most uptight regulatory teams on the planet. You're held up against the checklist and found wanting.

Now here's the irony. Based on what I've seen in over 20 years in the workforce, I have become the ideal employee, a middle aged woman. Think about it: we came up right after the first wave of feminism. We don't feel entitled to our jobs - we're grateful for them. We're used to working harder than the men we've been competing with, and resigned to getting paid less for the privilege. Those of us who've raised teenagers know better than anyone how to negotiate, debate, placate or motivate. We're not going to get pregnant, or screw our way up the ladder. We basically invented multitasking. It doesn't make a lot of sense to put the work horse out to pasture.

Memo to an Obama supporter

2008-08-20T10:52:00.001-07:00

Re: Your bumper stickers

It's time to do a little editing. Obama '08 cannot coexist on your bumper with "Goddess Bless" and "I love trees".

I'm rather partial to trees myself, and I think the Deity should be whatever gender works for you. But once you drive past the Berkeley city limits, you enter the land of the electorally undecided. Obama needs their votes and your bumper stickers associate him with what they perceive as the loony left. So keep supporting Obama, and keep your other passions private, please. And next time you pray to the Goddess, put in a good word for Barack.

Our new neighbors

2008-08-16T18:26:00.000-07:00

Above our rental house is a steep, narrow untended triangle of land covered with tall, dry weeds. It is there, hidden and secure in the overgrowth, that a doe recently gave birth to twin fawns. When we first met them, they were dainty, spotted, awkward little wonders and looked to be just a few days old. They're almost as big as their mom now, and their spots are fading. Whoever owns that neglected strip of land hired someone to come cut down the brush, but the lack of ground cover has not kept the twins and their mother from coming back. Sometimes, they are joined by a young buck with a stubby, two-pronged rack. The whole family sleeps there at night when they're not right outside the house, making an evening meal of our landlord's bushes.

We do our best to be good neighbors to the deer next door. (I tried to feed them once but the carrots I put out remained untouched). We drive slowly up and down the street for fear one of the bamblets should leap out from behind the bushes. If we park in front of their turf, they maintain their serene insouciance as we drive in and out, slam car doors, unload groceries and catch up on the day. I haven't tried honking, which wouldn't be very nice, but I suspect no one in the deer family would flinch. Once in a while, our yorkie Winston remembers he's supposed to bark at deer, which doesn't phase them anymore than we do.

When you live in close proximity to a walking smorgasbord of venison, it's hard not to give an occasional paranoid thought to mountain lions. Just last week, one was sighted in someone's yard ten blocks from us. I flash on that when I'm walking Winston on a moonless night. Sometimes I hear rustling in the bushes or catch a glimpse of a dark silhouette. I keep telling myself it's only our deer friends.

PS I took the deer pix but the mountain lion is from google images. If I ran into this fellow on one of my walks, I wouldn't stop for a photo op and ask him to smile and say "Bambi".