Every Sunday morning the Lululemon store in Berkeley offers a complementary yoga class. After a long hiatus, this morning we found ourselves there bright and early.
We were so bright eyed and bushytailed in order to get a space. That's right, we were jockeying for position in yoga class. Pi Wen and I laughed at the irony afterwards. After all, yoga is about peace, mindfulness, and releasing the cares of the world. And here we were making sure to leave the house early enough to claim our turf.
But hey--my sense is that most people who attend Sunday morning yoga at Lululemon are Type A strivers of some sort. This behavior comes with the territory. It's not an easy thing to change oneself.
Not that we shouldn't try. As the instructor moved us through the various poses, she quoted Rumi: "Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself." I chuckled appreciatively. This is an insight that never goes stale, but which I am much more receptive to than I used to be.
That's the good thing about getting older. As Mark Twain said (in a quote not recited today): "When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years." Awesome! Still! I first heard this when I was 14 years old (seriously). Surely one thing the old man learned during those crucial seven years was that the best way to go about changing the world is deciding to change yourself.
Every time we visit Malaysia my conversations with Pi Wen's mother are perfunctory at best. She knows very little English, I know very little Chinese. There are lots of hand gestures and eye contact, but very little verbal communication.
For a year I listened to CDs, just 15 minutes a day, that gave me a basic foundation in Mandarin. This began last August, I was hoping to be able to converse when we went to Malaysia this January. But my confidence was low and I barely spoke except for a few small phrases. At that time I decided it was best to take a real class, which I'm now doing through the UC Berkeley Extension.
My goals are ambitious but attainable: to be able to read, write and speak fluently, and to learn characters so I do not always have to rely on pinyin (the romanized version of Chinese). I'm 35 years old now, figure this will be achieved around the age of 50. Since I've promised Pi Wen I'll live to be 100 that means I'll spend at least half my life fluent in Mandarin.
It's been a rough slog these first few weeks of class. We meet every Monday and Thursday from 6:30-9:00, and our excellent instructor Natasha Wild estimates that we should spend 10-12 hours of prep time outside of class. She's right--that's the only way to really get the tones, understand the sentence construction and vocabulary, and learn how to properly construct the characters. Thus far I have not even come close to alloting this much time, although during week three I grew more disciplined (we are three weeks into a nine week term.) I'm not taking the course for credit, so in the end I'm only accountable to myself.
When I was earning my MLIS, from 2000-2002, the hardest thing about the program was the commute. I lived in Evanston, IL and school was in River Forest. That meant commuting from the northern to western suburbs of Chicago without a car, a journey that required two trains and a bus (sometimes I walked 40 minutes rather than catching the bus). Class was from 7-10 PM, I had to leave work at 5 PM to barely make it. Sometimes I'd pack a light dinner that I ate while waiting for the second train, other times I ate fast food when I arrived in River Forest. I would arrive home close to midnight, except when a classmate who was going the same way gave me a ride. Without a ride on the way back I took commuter rail instead of the El, and always had to get to the rail station in time for that hour's train or have to wait a full hour more. I took classes in downtown Chicago, which vastly eased the commute, as much as I could.
Although the commute was hard the course content was manageable. It was taught in English, for one thing. The concepts were straightforward: here are resource types, this is how they are organized, and so forth. If I could do it over I'd focus more intently on knowledge management, a concept that seemed faddish and pretentious at the time. Oh well--I got the degree, and ten years later here I am.
Being back in school after ten years, and to learn Chinese, has been tougher than I thought. The commute is much easier even if parking near campus is a pain (I drive these days). The course material is very challenging, not surprisingly. But the big difference is that my job today is much more demanding than when I was in library school. Back then I managed the grant programs for the Massage Therapy Foundation, which was an enjoyable and not too taxing pursuit. I didn't think about work when not there, and the only busy times of our year were preparing for Board meetings. Today I have much more responsibility at Samuel Merritt, and to some extent the job is always with me.
Not that I'm complaining--as far back as my time as an Associate Fellow of the National Library of Medicine I told people I wanted to be a library director. Now it's happened, and I'd rather be in the hot seat than the background. But it turns out to leave less mental space for additional pursuits than I'd realized.
My initial estimate for when I'd be fully fluent in Mandarin was at 45 years old. I've pushed it back to 50 now that I see how slowly I'm learning and how much the rest of my life impinges on my focus.
Then again...slow and steady wins the race. Learning a language is unlike learning philosophy or figuring out how to become a better person. That work is never done and there is always more to learn. Mandarin--any language--is a fixed body of knowledge. New words come along but the structure remains. So every bit of knowledge gained counts toward mastery of the whole. This challenge is solveable even if it takes a long time.
David Carr's brilliant piece about how our digital devices have ushered in a new era of rudeness is worth a read. Carr describes a fascinating phenomenon at the recent South by Southwest conference, in which hardly anyone engaged in a flesh-and-blood, undivided-attention human conversation. This is despite the fact that conferences happen precisely to encourage such conversations. At South by Southwest everyone was too attached to their phones (or their tablets) to really listen to the people right in front of them.
Of course, it's not only conferences. Many group dinners now include frequent checks of the phone. Sometimes it's to answer a question that's arisen in conversation...but other times it's because work is beckoning and there is (seemingly) no way not to respond.
I love my iPhone and can't imagine life without it. But I've developed my own etiquette for dinners with friends...never have the phone on the table; only use it if someone (usually Pi Wen) requests it for a bit of fact-checking; return it to my pocket as soon as the task is complete. Once all phones are out and everyone is thumbing away, dinner as we know it is over. I didn't realize until today, after reading Carr, that I'd developed this etiquette; it's been subconscious. But now I feel vindicated.
Then again, maybe norms are shifting and this isn't so bad, as MG Siegler argued on TechCrunch. Fair enough--time will tell. But it's also fair to observe a "certain conformity" in all the phone checking, as William Powers noted to Carr. Powers wrote Hamlet's Blackberry, in an effort to help us distinguish useful from non-useful uses of digital technology. He sees conformity in the fact that everyone has to check their phones once just one person does.
It's middle school for adults; smart phone tending is the new way to be cool. But just like in middle school, we'll eventually figure out that being cool isn't so hot.
Thanks to Pamela Paul I know that Beverly Cleary turned 95 years old today. She was born in 1916, the same year as my grandmother. Which makes me happy--growing up, Cleary was my grandmother of the written word. I liked Judy Blume too, but Cleary was my favorite children's novelist.
Like anyone else I enjoyed reading about Ramona, Beezus, and Henry Huggins. But my favorite Cleary novel is Dear Mr. Henshaw, which won the Newbery Medal for best children's book of 1984.
I was seven then, the same age as main character Leigh Botts. Leigh is sad and confused by his parent's divorce; I was too, as my folks had divorced the year before. In this troubled state Leigh begins a correspondence with well-known children's author Boyd Henshaw, first as a class assignment and eventually because he wants to. Through his correspondence with Mr. Henshaw we learn about Leigh's feelings and anxieties. Most poignantly, Leigh must come to terms with the fact that his father is not as reliable as he should be although he means well. This is exactly what I was struggling with at the time.
Kids at that age have a hard time understanding that their parents are fallible. As a kid I knew what Leigh was going through; when I re-read the book 20 years later I realized that there were some things Leigh was just too young to understand.
Leigh is a sensitive boy, better on the page than in spoken speech. To this day I best express myself in writing, so there's a little bit of Leigh Botts in me yet.
Ever since the WSJ ran the excerpt from Amy Chua's new book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother a few weeks ago, the blogosphere has been abuzz. Is she serious? Is she nuts? etc. etc. The paper reported that almost 6,000 comments came in to WSJ.com (it's probably more now), a new record. The excerpt depicted a very grim mother who never gave her a children a moment's rest from music practice, and never thought they were good enough. Well, sort of...even in the excerpt you can feel that Chua is poking fun at herself, and not writing a how-to manual but a memoir.
Chua must have said this a thousand times by now--"this is a memoir, not a how-to manual." She said it many times the other night in Berkeley, where I was part of the packed house for her interview/reading at the Hillside Club. If people choose to read the book in full, as I have, they will see this is true.
If the book were a how-to manual, then why would Chua have had such a tough time raising her second daughter Lulu? Lulu wanted to be her own person from the get-go--not the stereotypical "Chinese" daughter--and she's gotten her wish; no more grueling violin lessons, tennis it is. And if Chua were so callous and cruel toward her daughters, why would she forever be leaving sweet notes on their pillows and in their lunchboxes? In what I thought was one of the most touching passages, Chua acknowledges that she has a hard time being verbally loving, and so she uses these notes as a proxy.
I'm not saying Chua is a perfect parent, and neither would she. But that's not the point of the book. Here we have an individual person's story, warts and all. And that's all we have.
But, of course, the world doesn't work that way. Once a piece of writing--or any piece of art--is packaged and framed, its reception is no longer in control of the artist. (This is what Roland Barthes and George Lakoff were talking about.) And so we have Asian-Americans furious that Chua has reinforced some of the most persistent stereotypes; we have non Asian-Americans worried that they are coddling their own children too much; and we have general cultural anxiety that we are losing educational ground to China. This last is the most absurd--Chua is an American, born in Illinois to immigrant parents. If we're going to continue discussing Chua's writing in these terms, we should at least acknowledge that we're not talking about the book she's actually written.
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All of this hub-bub has made me think back to my own childhood. Looking back, I had a great deal of autonomy for such a little pip-squeak. As long as my homework was finished it didn't matter when I did it (and thus, I often did it on the school bus the morning before it was due.) I could read whatever books I wanted, no matter how adult the themes. I could pursue my own interests without clearing them with my parents, a freedom that extended to college and my frequent change of major. My folks treated me as a little adult to the greatest extent possible, and I am very grateful for it.
On the other hand, the "Western" idea that "it's OK as long as you do your best" did seep a little too deeply into my bones. In tenth grade I studied geometry with a teacher whose honest-to-god name was Ms. Elvira Moscovici. I'd struggled when some basic geometric concepts were introduced in seventh grade (by Mr. Elwood Combs), so when tenth grade rolled around I convinced myself I just couldn't do it. And so the year rolled on--I ended up with a B and not an A, which was an unusual event.
At the end of the year I sat on the couch and looked back on what I had missed on tests throughout the year. I was trying to learn. In that frame of mind, I could tell instantly what the right answer should have been. It was obvious once I'd set my mind to it, and stopped psyching myself out.
If there is any wisdom in Chua's advice, it is to push your kids past the point where they would want to go naturally. Success in anything requires a combination of talent and persistence--and talent is usually easier to come by. You don't need to go as far as Chua, precipitating a full-throated rebellion once your child reaches 13. So yes, balance is the key. But that means that Chua's ways have some merit too.
Over the weekend I finally made it to the Mixing Bowl on Telegraph, in Oakland's Temescal neighborhood. It's right down the street from Bakesale Betty and Scream Sorbet. The Mixing Bowl offers a pleasant brunch, but I was especially excited by the fact that they served Roast coffee.
Why? Because I enjoy Roast--roasted in Emeryville--at least twice a week at the Commonwealth, my home away from home near Samuel Merritt. The Commonwealth has a flair for all things British (they celebrated new year's at 4 PM Dec. 31 because it was midnight in London), and tables made of handpicked wood from an Oakland lumberyard. They also serve Roast.
Not to mention Semifreddi's pastries, one of Berkeley's finest. Further down the lane from Commonwealth, at Farley's East on Grand, the latest news is that they too now serve Semifreddi's. I haven't yet indulged, although at Farley's I sometimes buy overly intellectual magazines that I barely read. Farley's is right down the street from Bakesale Betty's new downtown location. Both have the ironing boards as tables.
While I haven't yet had the Semifreddi's pastries, I have been to Semifreddi's itself. This is on a quiet pocket of Claremont in Berkeley, where I found myself on Dec. 31 a few hours before the Commonwealth celebrated new year's. (I was there because I decided not to drive home from Berkeley by the usual route, which involves a left turn onto 51st St right next to Bakesale Betty and very close to Scream Sorbet.) Even at the home base of Semifreddi's I declined a pastry, but this is only because I wanted a panini instead.
Next up on my itinerary, at some point soon, is Scream Sorbet.
You might be screaming yourself by this point. "How indulgent! How yuppie!" etc. etc. It's true, but I make no apology. If sales taxes are meant to prop up the services of our beleaguered towns, someone has to have the discretionary income to pay them.
I’m writing this post at the Pub, one of my very favorite haunts in Berkeley/Albany. In addition to a decent selection of beers on tap, there is an impressive offering of tobaccos that smell good even though I will never smoke them. Usually I only make it to the Pub with my good friends Adam and Allison, who introduced me to the place. It is only a few miles from my apartment, but that’s a sizeable distance when your main mode of transit is walking (AC Transit buses are OK but infrequent.)
Tonight was different. I drove.
---- I bought a 2010 Prius last Saturday, which is the first car I’ve ever bought. Captain Hornblower is its name, and driving is its game.
My first two cars in high school (one a stick shift, the next an automatic) were gifts from Mom and Bob. From 1993-1995, at the ages of 16-18, I cruised throughout central Ohio. Sometimes I’d just get in the car to drive; other times I would run my brother Jeremy around on various errands; still other times I’d give my friend Rex a lift to school. My friend Bill and I once drove the entire length of I-270, the outerbelt around Columbus. And one time I hopped on I-70 West to drive to Dayton, even thought I had no reason to go there. Somewhere midway I turned around because I decided this was stupid.
Then college came around. Freshmen at Northwestern were not allowed to park on campus, because there weren’t many spaces. And besides, we were supposed to be reveling in campus life anyway. Such logic didn’t appease me; I vividly recall my horror at the realization that I couldn’t bring my car to school. What??!! Who doesn’t have a car?
But then I actually began college. Now I was living in Chicagoland, a part of the country with credible and diversified mass transit (Columbus had the COTA bus system, but that was so-so at best.) Chicagoland had the El! the Pace bus! and even Metra! for more far-flung trips. (Once I rode Metra to Kenosha, Wisconsin, the end of the line. Sort of like that Dayton mission, there was no absolutely no reason to go. I made it to Kenosha with no cell phone or GPS device, and somehow managed to make it around town and get back home. Let this be a lesson to our youth.) Whenever I wasn’t availing myself of this transit cornucopia, I walked rapidly around campus or on meandering journeys across Evanston with my friend John. Turns out I did revel in campus life, becoming active in political causes, movie screenings with my friend Mike, and theater productions of various sorts.
College was truly wonderful. And a key reason was this liberating revelation that a happy life was possible without a car. Of course most people still drove, or at least people with reasonable income. Middle and upper-class people approached transit as something to take when parking would be too big a pain at the other end of the journey. Not student Marcus. I studied the stops on the El lines, and stood under the sort-of-warm-but-not-really heating lamps on bitter winter nights. By the end of the Chicago years I had become a bonafide public transit man. My library school commute from Evanston to River Forest involved two trains and a bus to get there, and a long Metra ride home (unless I got a ride, which happened when another student in my class also lived in Evanston.)
There’s a key secret to life without a car--you make friends with people who have them. In order not to impose, you make sure not to ask any one person for too many rides and try repay the kindness in other ways. And when making plans to go to an event, you MUST know in advance that you’ll be able to get home on your own. If it turns out that someone there can give you a ride back, that’s a bonus.
And so it went, from Chicago to Washington DC to New York City to the Bay Area. Everywhere I’ve lived has provided solid mass transit, which makes for far livelier cities than places in which the car is king. Mass transit brings density, which leads to vitality and a diversity of entertainment and recreational choices. Of course people drive in all these places. But the fact that this isn’t the only way to get around makes a huge difference to an area’s quality of life.
All along it was fun to be vehemently anti-car. Aside from the environmental props, the sheer fact of being counter-cultural had its rewards. (“What?! You don’t have a car?” “Nope.”) Over time this became part of my identity. I loved the challenge of getting to places without a car, and always figured I lived a more active life (plays, lectures, restaurants, movies) than many people who had easy access to wheels. Eventually I grew into a power-walker, ready and willing to stroll much more than almost anyone else. Not only was I being kind to the earth, I had great feet! And I knew certain blocks much better than people who were always whizzing by them. Once I walked the entire length of 88th St. in New York City, an unnecessary adventure documented right here on this blog.
But...I always knew the fun would end. And that once I got a car I’d never look back. The East Bay, where I live now, is wonderful in many ways. That said, many of its treasures are more easily accessible by car. In recent months I’ve become much more aware of all the constraints on the carless than ever before; it’s no coincidence that this happened just as I’ve decided that the Bay Area will be my long-term home. And besides that I’m running the SF 1/2 Marathon this Sunday, and need to be at the starting line at 6:30 AM. This is well before BART gets its weekend groove on. My first plan was to rent a car to get there, but I decided that was dumb because I’d soon buy a car anyway. And so I did.
As I expected, I haven’t looked back. Then again, it’s just been a few days. Maybe I’ll feel differently if I get a huge repair bill or the car is stolen, but I suspect that I’ll see this as just part of the package. I do have some residual environmental guilt--after all, I’ve let my man Al Gore down. Then again, the Prius is a hybrid that gets 50 miles to the gallon. So I’m still sleeping soundly and still feeling great.
This week I finally saw Being John Malcovich, one of many "must-see" "cult classic" films I've managed to avoid. As ever, I thank the United Artists Theater on Shattuck for their flashback flicks each Thursday.
Anyone who still hasn't seen it can easily find a way to do so, or at least read about the plot online. Suffice it to say that an amazing number of people are willing to pay $200 for the experience of 15 minutes within the head of John Malcovich. He brushes his teeth, you see it. He moves other parts of his anatomy, you see that too. Etc. Malcovich plays himself, and John Cusack plays a puppeteer who eventually invades Malcovich entirely. There's a lot more to it than this, but I'm being skimpy on plot so I don't spoil it.
BJM reminded me of both The Lord of the Ringsand Tuck Everlasting. I read Lord avidly as a kid, most often in the upstairs bedroom at my dad's house on the south side of Columbus (he was a fan of the series too.) As you'll recall, the Ring has the power to make its wearer invisible. So the ring-wearer has access to the world that nobody else has. This is intoxicating at first, but ultimately destructive because nobody should have the ability to violate the natural order like this. It is too much power to be managed well.
Tuck Everlastingis a great children's book. I read the entire thing in one day in seventh grade, pausing only to eat and get in the car when the family drove to see a movie. (I watched the movie, but only because it was too dark to keep on reading.) The Tuck family lives forever, which at first seems magical to ten year old Winnie Foster. But as she grows to know and love the Tucks, Winnie realizes that death (as painful as it is for those left behind) is a necessary part of the circle of life. It's the final part of that circle, and knowing that the end will come can serve as an impetus to live the kindest and best life we can today.
Once again, we shouldn't try to surmount the natural order.
Likewise with Malcovich--as much as we sometimes want to know what makes others "tick," we really shouldn't have direct access to another person's brain. And yet, it would be very hard to resist if the possibility presents itself...just like being invisible...and just like being immortal. All of that seems liberating but would ultimately be enslaving. And in the case of Malcovich's head, after people get their 15 minutes they are rudely dropped in the grass beside the New Jersey Turnpike anyway. That's no fun at all.
One of the pleasures of my long vacation has been the discovery, purchase, and rapid completion of Michael Chabon's essay collection Manhood for Amateurs. Chabon and his wife Ayelet Waldman are guests on West Coast Live this Saturday, and if I were home I'd definitely be there to see them.
Chabon is best known for his richly layered and genre-defying fiction. As well as a writer, he is a husband, father, son and brother. Considerations of gender infuse these essays, most of which first appeared in Details magazine. Like me, Chabon often finds himself annoyed with the limitations of maleness. But he also notes the constraints society places on the meaning and roles of manhood.
Here's Chabon on the limitations of maleness, as they affect fatherhood: "I admired the girls' work [his two daughter's artwork] vocally. But I knew that I didn't fully understand their reasons for wanting to draw what they were drawing and not what we boys [Chabon and his two sons] all wanted to draw." "At one time or other, if not on a daily basis, each one of us fathers is the biggest asshole in the world."
Chabon on the constraints society places on men: "This is an essential element of the business of being a man: to flood everyone around you in a great radiant arc of bullshit...To behave as if you have everything firmly under control even when you have just sailed your boat over the falls." In this essay Chabon relates a dangerous drive with his family through an Idaho blizzard, which he undertook without a moment's hesitation. Waldman later told him that she had misgivings about the trip, but didn't express them because she was comforted by the authoritative tone in Chabon's voice. "What manly power!" I thought, before thinking "Yikes, that's way too much power."
Women fairly lament that society expects them to fulfill many roles at once, and with style and grace--doting mother, loyal wife, fabulous friend. But men should protest more against the unreasonable expectation that they are not allowed to express any fears or hesitations.
One of Chabon's recurring themes is of the domestication of childhood. His own children aren't exempt; they shuffle between various organized activities, with nary a minute for the unstructured time that dominated his own childhood. When the family vacations in Maine, Chabon and Waldman want their children to rush outside and play freely. Instead the kids stand put in the doorway, not sure what to do. Chabon regrets that things have come to this pass, and feels complicit due to his own parenting decisions. But it's a vise that's hard to escape, since the modern way of parenting is rife with overprotection.
Chabon is a self-proclaimed sci-fi geek, the founder of a wildly unsuccessful comic book club as a child, and a boy who at 15 slept with a friend of his mother's. He's also someone who attended an MFA program as a young man, through which he gained respect for the insights and perspective of middle-aged women. Sometimes that young's man brashness still surfaces, in a turn of phrase that seems needlessly macho or crude. But for the most part, this 47 year old man writes so candidly and lyrically that I just wanted to keep on reading.
One of the small but mighty pleasures of living in Berkeley are the $5 "flashback flicks" that play at the United Artists Theater every Thursday. Tonight I made it to see Trainspottingfor the first time, merely 14 years after it was released. Danny Boyle--later of Slumdog Millionaire fame--directed the film.
It's about heroin addicts and con artists on the margins of Edinburgh society. Ewan McGregor plays Mark Renton, leader of a gang of misfit "mates." There is gallows humor aplenty, as well as true tragedy (a baby girl dies because all of her caretakers are so high they forget about her.) And one of the few friends in the circle who wasn't on heroin eventually succumbs to its lure.
Renton tries several times to put his past behind him, at one point even moving to London to work for a property management firm. But some of his mates follow, and he eventually gets sucked back into the madness.
This reminded me of my dad, who has battled his own drug of choice (alcohol) for many years. The hardest part seems to be leaving the old friends, even more than breaking the habit. But temptation lurks whenever those friends are around.
So when that evidence of his past comes knocking on Renton's London door, I had a sinking feeling(so did Renton.) Even though I'd never seen Trainspotting until tonight, I've seen this particular drama before.
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