Stop and smell the cherry blossoms ?

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.

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, "maman" 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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.