The strawberry's a raspberry

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.

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

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

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!

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 ?

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...