BERKELEY KITE FESTIVAL

Took the grandbabies to the Berkeley Kite Festival at the Marina. Walked for miles but it was fun. We had no bottle for five-month old Evan, but I bought a plain pretzel and he sucked on that until he went to sleep.

Lots of people, kids, dogs, cops, and KITES!

FOG IS BACK IN BERKELEY

Thank God. I learned on Monday and Tuesday that there wasn't a fan left for sale in all of the East Bay. I tried 10 more stores, from Richmond to Oakland, and they were all sold out of fans, coolers and air conditioners.

I have one good fan but when the grandkids sleep over, I need a second one for the bedroom.
Today it's cool. Cool enough for me to wear my favorite garment, a lavender down vest.

WHAT GLOBAL WARMING?

Saturday night was at least 100 degrees in Oakland, CA and my two grandbabies were miserable. As was myself and my grown son. We sat in front of my oscillating fan and drank water and juice by the quart. On Sunday I went to stores in Oakland, Alameda and Emeryville and all the local stores were completely sold out of fans.

A friend who is leaving for London this weekend is concerned because the asphalt on London roads has been melting. Another friend is off on an Alaskan cruise, but I wonder if he will even see any ice or glaciers.

Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth is under attack by the Right Wing and its Poodle Press, which is a pretty good indication of how accurate it is. And we all are inundated by automobile ads and consumerism philosophies.

Reduce, reuse and recycle. Add to this: mend things (which many of us have forgotten how to do); keep things that we can use next year; make things for your own use, cook things instead of eating out; wash things instead of throwing them away and buying new ones.

PRIDE AND JOY

Here are Los Bebes. Nima, at 4 months is almost as large as his three-year old sister Munai.

After taking care of legal matters this morning, I went to our neighborhood second-hand store for kids' clothes. Spent $47 on 4-5 summer outfits for Los Bebes for when they stay with us.

Some of our legal woes have been laid to rest, but there are more to tackle. All it takes is time and money.

My friend Barbara Rose tells me, "We choose our parents." When I think of my own parents, I wonder why. I look at my grandkids and also wonder why. They have genetic and cultural influences from Scotland to South America to the Middle East.

Then a quote from Terry Pratchett keeps coming into my mind when I think of people going OTT (over the top). "You never know you've gone too far until you've gone too far." And we all have gone too far at one time or another. Can we forgive?

Thomas Hardy's "We are too many," in Jude the Obscure. How careful we must be about what we tell our children, especially when they are small. How much we must love and protect them.

SOMETIMES YOU JUST WANT TO SCREAM

One of those days.....

My first caller at work called me a g** d*** f***ing white bitch (next time I'll answer, "How do you know I'm white?"), and the last caller had a nervous breakdown on the phone.

And I'm shaving off minutes here and there from a 10-11 hour workday to take care of frivolities like paying bills and other paperwork.

But it could be worse, so much worse.

And there are magic moments: when Oakland is beautiful in spite of itself. Driving from Alameda to Berkeley, I stop at a red light and see a flock of fat Canadian Geese stopping for a snack on the grassy shores of Lake Merritt.

THE SADDEST MOVIE EVER MADE

Last weekend I watched the film Turtles Can Fly, an Iranian-Iraqi coproduction. The story tells of Kurdish orphans and how they make a subsistance living digging up mines from minefields--because they have no choice. One teenager has had both arms blown off by a mine, but he continues to disarm them--with his teeth.

I didn't think I could stand to watch it until the end, but I did. I don't recommend if for anyone but adults and adults with a very high tolerance for tragedy. It is a film you will never forget.

It also puts our little American problems in perspective.

THE BEST OF TIMES, THE WORST OF TIMES

Cry baby cry
Make your mother sigh
She's old enough to know better
So cry baby cry

Would you want this little girl to be mad at you?

So families change and grow and learn, sometimes the hard way.

For people who have never been through a married couple's breakup, they think the initial split is the end of it. They don't realize it is only the beginning of what could be 18 years of emotional and legal difficulties.

My 3-year old granddaughter knows something is very, very wrong but she doesn't know what. Her mom has told her nothing. Last week I told the girl that her daddy was staying at my house to help me. She was skeptical. This week I told her Daddy is staying at Gaga's house so Mommy and Daddy won't fight. This, she understood. And it's the truth. She seemed relieved to be told.

Why do adults think children don't understand things? When I ask my four-month old grandson where his sister is, his eyes immediately go to her.

So. If my granddaughter follows the pattern of her mom's family history, she will grow up and eventually be furious with her mother once she understands things from an adult's perspective. If she follows their patterns, melodrama and soap opera will ensue and some unbelievably bizarre behavior will result.

I respect their family for coming from a Third World country to America and working hard to make a better life for themselves and their kids. But when families like this continue to behave in the worst Old World ways, the kids will suffer.

My son's job is to stay close to his kids and help and support them so they know he is there for them. My job is to take care of them when I can, help my granddaughter to not think she is to blame for any of this, and to teach her the highest self-esteem possible. My job is also not to blame anyone in front of her. I might feel anger, but I encourage her to love and respect her Mommy and that side of the family. I will also encourage her when she is older to think and come to her own conclusions.

RUPTURE

My psuedo-happy family life has been ruptured. If I want to be generous, I can say it's due to the near-sightedness, vindictiveness and selfishness of my daughter-in-law.

Now that you know how I really feel, I'll move on.

My son is back living with me, paying off debts, continuing grad school and we are working to hammer out legal visitation with my grandchildren.

Of course I want to throttle the kids' mother for making certain decisions, and her large family who played a huge part in this breakup. But I do believe that what we do comes back to us in time. And the most important thing now is to stay close with my three-year old granddaughter who has been shattered by this situation. I will bite my tongue, smile when I don't want to, and spend as much time with the child as possible, even among mine enemies.

And hopefully in time, enemies we will be no more. We can always hope.

I was just getting my Ebay house clearance up and running, just starting to write again, and as usual with the in-laws, something exploded.

But this explosion is final, hopefully or will be soon. And then my contingent can have a routine that allows my son and myself (and the girl) some stability and peace.

Trust, like glass, doesn't break on its own. It takes an act of will for it to be broken and once shattered, it cannot be repaired, only replaced.

EBAY WOMAN

After 9 hours at work, I go home and enter the Ebay universe. My house is a forest of boxes and I am determined to clear all of it, one way or another. And once it's gone, it will really be gone.

Luckily the weather is good. Here's the view from my "computer window". Since our office has no windows (!) [we call it "the Prison"] I keep on my computer screen a live webcam from LBL on the hill overlooking Berkeley.



The weblink is http://sv.berkeley.edu/view/


Sunshine at last.

I think I might add to my "window" a North Pole webcam:

http://psc.apl.washington.edu/northpole/LatestPhoto.html

EBAY ZOMBIE

Oh my god. I have been moving all my STUFF from my storage space, sorting it, and re-storing in a new, improved storage "room" that I've rented with my grown son.

I need storage space and he needs a study space. So we have rented a room and I'm trying to get rid of everything I don't need. Tossing it or selling it on Ebay.

I used to sell on Ebay a lot. I forgot how much work it is. My ex-possesions will go to good homes, to people who want them and even pay money for them.

It's 2 a.m. and I'm half-asleep. Time for bed.

A FOOT STORY

I spent Thursday afternoon with my new Kaiser doctor asking about three things: a lump on my foot, red patches on my neck and possible hearing loss.

The red patches, she said, are probably my old friend Rosacia coming back to haunt me. The lump? Probably a cyst. She sent me for an x-ray. The hearing loss? She sent me to the hearing center.

This was magic to me. Why? For years, I was enrolled in HealthNet, which has become stricter and cheaper over the last three years. At age 56 and with a family history of osteoperosis, HealthNet wouldn't authorize a bone density test. When I got a bad rash and a scaly patch on my face, I had to wait three months for an appointment with a HealthNet dermatologist who diagnosed the Rosacia (by then pretty yucky) and said the scaly patch was nothing.

An uncle of mine died of skin cancer. Knowing the patch didn't look like "nothing", I paid out-of-pocket for a local dermatologist who told me, "Oh that's pre-cancerous." And she burned it off with liquid nitrogen immediately.

Two of my co-workers have also switched to Kaiser. One has lifetime diabetes and was getting nickled and dimed on every monthly Rx he requested. After 35 years, he knew what he needed. And HealthNet wouldn't cover syringes.

The other co-worker's daughter has serious asthma and HealthNet was cutting back on her doctor's visits as well as her medication. The mom got sick of seeing her daughter's hands turn blue during attacks and switched to Kaiser. Her daughter is now in school in Southern Cal, but she can get her meds by mail--ahead of time. There's a concept.

So to get an x-ray immediately and get a reference to a hearing center without a struggle or wait was terrific for me. People complain about Kaiser, but I see it as a model for the National Health Care we should all have.

Almost 20 years ago, I moved to Japan where I was immediately signed up for National Health Care, citizen or not. Japanese people assumed we had this in prosperous America. They were shocked to learn that if an American doesn't have health insurance, s/he is out of luck. Twenty years later we still don't have it and the only time the government discusses it is before elections. After elections, no one mentions it.

SPRING IS HERE

And I'm searching for cotton and linen yarns to knit. It's growing too hot to work with wool.

Mother's Day was a big deal for mi grande familia and it was HOT. The babies were stripped down to diapers and the older kids ran in the sprinklers. Menfolk supplied barbeque.

Rented "A New World" which is now out on DVD. It's a very poetic film. Not rushed, no sex (the actress playing Pocahontas was only 14 yrs old); although there's plenty of violence.

If you don't mind slow, long films, I recommend it along with "Wings of Desire"-the Wim Wenders version, not the L.A. remake. It's also a long, slow love story, with imaginative twists.

News from the Wandering Scribe, the British blogger who is supposedly homeless and living in her car. Here's the last entry:

My news was a book deal. I AM HAVING A BOOK PUBLISHED - hooray! I'm celebrating a bit prematurely because haven't got the thing written yet, but after what I've been through with all this, feels like that might be the easy bit. Sitting at a table after a warm bath, Beethoven on in the background, a glass of something in one hand, my pen in the other, hovering over all those pristine, blank sheets of paper. Writing a book can't be that difficult
;-)

And anyway, all those sheets of paper won't really be blank. Because for months, being here among all these trees, staring up and through them night after night, watching their leaves fall and new ones grow back, their branches snap off in high winds, and stripped clean of bark in rainstorms, laying like bones on the ground around them. Night after night I told bits of my story to them, sometimes talking aloud, sometimes staring it into them - all the things I couldn't tell anyone else, all the things my hunched-up spirit was tired of. Trees absorb pain, and some of these will one day be felled and made into paper, and I have this feeling that if I look really hard into them I'd probably see my story already there, like a watermark on their blank surfaces.

It's that little ";-)" that makes me suspect this has been a hoax all along, a route for entree into the publishing world. The second paragraph reads like a trained, experienced poet's work.

We shall see. If it has been a hoax, I say more power to her/him. It took guts, imagination and talent.

MOTHER'S DAY

I've often thought how unfair it is that when a mother might have several children, each child should have more than one mother. At least a grandmother, an aunt or next-door neighbor who gives mom a break once in a while.

Having raised a son alone with no grandparents to help, I try hard to help my son's family with childcare whenever I can. I agree it "takes a village" but when there is no village, we have to do the best we can. I am thanked constantly for the help I give my family and the closeness among all of us with child-sharing is immeasurable.

In Japan, there is a Children's Day but no Mother or Father's Day. Everything in that culture is for the children.

According to Jim Hightower, Mother's Day was begun during the Civil War as a war protest by mothers who were sick of their sons and husbands getting slaughtered. As Hightower put it, the best way to celebrate Mother's Day would be to enjoy breakfast in bed and then go off to participate in an anti-war rally.

WHAT DEGREE OF RIDICULOUSNESS ARE YOU?

In a fit of passion, rage, fatigue, grief, hunger, and spite, the person closest to me called me "a ridiculous person." Because of who I am, how I live, what I do and don't do.

Well, yes, but we are all ridiculous in some way or other, some more than others. I don't mind that. I am happy to learn from the Internet that there are plenty, if not millions, of people just as ridiculous as I, doing the same silly things.

Nothing brings home the ridiculous nature of one as much as watching a video of oneself; one's gestures, weight, hairstyle, wardrobe, speech. Clive Owen said in an interview that it was very humbling to realize how he walks, talks and looks by watching a 20-foot high image of himself.

Maybe instead of going to church every Sunday, we should all watch videos of ourselves over Sunday brunch interacting with other people to see our true selves more objectively. Not staged film, but impromptu stuff.

This could really help us keep a sense of proportion and humor--and humility.

A WEEKEND IN HELL...

...is a weekend in the pediatric ward of my local hospital, watching saline drip into the veins of a beloved three-year old child.

But the good news is she is better and home again and laughing. And I am so grateful to be living in a place with health insurance and hospitals and good doctors and kind pediatric nurses.

K.T. TUNSTALL...

...is huge over the water in Scotland, Ireland and the U.K. and is now seeping into the U.S.A.'s music world. I heard some of her music being used as background for U.S. TV's "Desperate Housewives". (How big can you get?) So I suppose her music isn't a secret anymore.

I awoke one Saturday morning to a Scott Simon interview with her that made me run out and buy her collection of songs ("Eye to the Telescope"); the first music I've bought in I don't know how many years.

Her radio performance knocked me out, but also her presence, background, musical techniques, all of it; the whole package.

I've just been watching some of her videos on the internet and have to say I'm sorry so many music videos have been homogenized into pap. When MTV first started, the videos were exciting and creative and fabulous. Now: pap or soft porn. Or maybe I'm talking out of my (ahem) hat--I haven't watched MTV for years.

BUT I do recommend watching her "Under the Weather" and "Suddenly I See" videos. They are fun.

Like in films, books, and everything else, I guess we have to hunt for the good stuff.

http://www.kttunstall.com/


I need to be patient
And I need to be brave

I need to discover how I need to behave
And I'll find out the questions when I know what to ask.

But I speak a different language
And everybody's talking too fast.

(From "Miniature Disasters; Minor Catastrophes")

THE JOB

I guess I like jobs where you see it all: like the hotel employees in Dirty, Pretty Things. I used to work for the police department and loved all the stories about human behavior that I couldn't even dream up if I tried, as nasty as it can be.

Now I have a mid-level civil service job where I deal with regular folks as well as crackheads, drunks, three- and four-party conversations, screamers, stutterers--all on the phone, thank God. It's a living, a wage with benefits. But when I told my tax lady what I do for a living she looked at me and said, "They don't pay you enough."

Some days, like today, it's really a hard job to do. I try to compartmentalize and dream up creative thoughts. Surf the net and find 14th century woodcuts or yarn made from soybeans. Anything to keep myself sane.

Started reading the Wandering Scribe blog.

http://wanderingscribe.blogspot.com/

At first, I wanted to log on to PayPal and send this poor woman some cash. But then doubts crept in.

This text is remarkably well-written for someone who is going through a "breakdown". (I've been there myself and I don't think I was especially coherent at the time.) Of course, everyone is so very different, and she'd have nothing to lose--the ultimate freedom.

And I've been to the UK and can't see the local police (or neighbors, certainly) allowing someone to live in a car on the outskirts of a city. Is this blog a scam? It seems almost sacrireligious to question what may be a poor homeless woman at the end of her tether. But it might be a clever young writer creating a new character-based artform. How can one know? Have the Scribe cut and paste her PayPal account onto her blog to show s/he isn't collecting lots of money from sympathetic readers? What other course do young writers have?

Heard on the radio last night of a big book publishing deal (half a million dollars) given to a 17-year old Harvard student who hadn't even written a book yet, but had a good idea for one. Yeah, right. If only life were so simple.

After her book was published, it was noted that whole passages were lifted from another writer's works and a plagiarism suit was pursued.

More details:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/26/books/26cnd-book.html?hp&ex=1146110400&en=4e2286108c6b1392&ei=5094&partner=homepage

BAD MOVIES, GOOD MOVIE

Part of my post-weekend malaise was seeing two crap movies: Vanity Fair and Pride and Prejudice. Something is so "off" with these Hollywood type productions. Even when the acting is excellent, as in P & P, the direction or editing or something kills the story and you feel dissatisfied after watching.

On a whim I rented Dirty Pretty Things and watched it last night.

Wow.

That's the kind of story I love. A real city story, where you feel like you are in London, a real London, not a film set. Actors who are the characters, not actors playing characters. And a terrific story. A believable thriller/romance with not one kiss between the two lovers.

It lifted my spirits. There is hope after all.

HOW IS THE WORLD TREATING YOU?

Although my ddil doesn't want photos of the kids on the blog, I figure this one of newborn Nema is okay because he has changed so completely since it was taken almost 2 months ago. He is smiling more now, especially when his belly is full. He has always reminded me of a miniature balding little old man.

There is always this struggle: if you work enough to make enough money to get ahead financially, there's no time to enjoy your home and family. If you take the time to enjoy home and family, you're stressed out about not having enough money.

I discussed this a bit with my son and ddil who are both burning the candle at both ends. I watch the economy tighten until it almost cracks, our money doesn't go as far as it did. I feel for younger folks. They've grown up with the tsunami of consumerism that tells them buy, buy, buy more and you'll be happy.

I just discovered on the BBC a serendipitous article about a homeless woman, living in her car, but keeping a blog called

http://wanderingscribe.blogspot.com/

The fear of homelessness is behind a lot of us who work jobs we dislike but tolerate. When my son was young and complained about us not having enough money to buy him fancy basketball shoes, I'd take him down to Mission and Fifth Street and tell him if he wanted to live in that neighborhood, we would have more free cash. He understood.

CONUNDRUM

If I don't post photos of my little grand-angels, I'm kinda at a loss here... Oh my God, I'll have to be creative!

The eldest granddaughter-in-law is four-year old Papaya, one-quarter Nigerian, half Peruvian and one-quarter African American. She is expressive, explosive and full of life, a Force of Nature. Tall, lanky and long-legged with a head full of wild curls.

Next is my blood granddaughter Munai, three years old in May of this year. Her genetic background is one-quarter Persian, half-Peruvian and one-quarter Scots-Irish (me). She inherited my blue eyes and is short, petite and can walk on her toes . She's my child in that she hates crowds and noise, loves books and crafts, spends hours playing by herself, and has mood swings from giddy to silent.

Eight-month old grandbaby-in-law Matthew already weighs 24 lbs and is half-Cuban, half-Peruvian. He loves his food and is a Watcher. If he isn't where the action is and watching it, he isn't happy. Everyone thinks he is at least one year old.

The newest grandson is Nema, my other blood-grandchild, only six weeks old. Born with almost no hair (?) unlike his sister and daddy. His eyes are deep brown and he eats like...well, like a boy. He weighed nine lbs. at birth. Temper, yes. And he is a grunter. All night long, he grunts in his sleep.

I'll try to "Monet" them w/Photoshop and see if that gives me any luck...

It's pretty sad when you're so afraid of pedophiles targeting your babies that you can't even put them up on your blog. But what IS it with these pedophile people anyway? Recently a veteran Berkeley firefighter was caught viewing kiddie porn with himself doing the deeds AT WORK!!! Trust me, I work for Berkeley. They go through very thorough vetting and background checks of their employees. What is going on in our world?

But then during the Crusades, good Christian Knights and soldiers skewered, roasted and ate infidel children (source: Terry Jones of Monty Python's THE CRUSDADES DVD). I don't know what is worse: killing, killing and eating, or raping? Another conundrum.