The Bauer Confidential

On the suggestion of a light-hearted read for June’s book club choice, the members of the book club to which I belong chose Becoming Latina in 10 Easty Steps by Lara Rios over a more somber novel. The premise sounds promising, a late-twenties woman from a Mexican family (which has been in the states several generations) finds out that her father is actually a mysterious white man and she starts to question her dedication to her culture and even her connections to her family. To remedy this, the protagonist, Marcela, decides she will rededicate herself to her roots. So she makes a list of 10 things to make her self more Latina; this includes getting involved in causes, mentoring a Latina youth, learning to cook Mexican food and visiting Mexico, as well as more dubious aims such as finding a Mexican guy to date and eventually marry. Marcela makes all these plans without really giving much thought to them and what they will require of her. Mostly she approaches the aims by breaking out her check-book, shelling out for private cooking lessons, making donations to charities, but when she really becomes personally involved in the steps on her list, all hell breaks loose and Marcela’s relationship issues, not her ethnic identity, become the driving force. The ending is predictable, with Marcela coming to huge revelations about herself and how she views being Latina and her family.

The story is set up diary style, a la Bridge Jones’ Diary but not as clever or well done. Like Bridget Jones, Marcela makes some amazingly stupid decisions, some of which are ridiculously dangerous that serve as poor plot devices. Going on a date with a gang member, really, when does this ever sound like a good idea? The book is easy to read, completely conversational in style. In my opinion, too conversational. Some times the prose gets hard to read because it’s so bland. There’s no excitement in word choice, no descriptions that make you feel like you’re in the story. One thing I didn’t know when we agreed on this book was that it really is a romance novel. I generally avoid romance novels because I don’t find them very interesting, this was definitely better than most romance novels (though I don’t have much basis for comparison). This is unfortunately not a G-rated book and therefore probably not appropriate for the younger teenage girls that could benefit most from its attempted message. For more mature ladies, the more intimate passages are more annoying than enthralling, a distraction from the story. Though it hits on racism as experienced by Latinos in America, it unapologetically embraces the racism those same Latinos frequently exhibit. I think the author missed a really good chance to make an important point about racism among different people, but excused or embraced it instead. But in the end, it’s not that kind of book, and doesn’t pretend to be. If you enjoy romance novels, this might be an enjoyable beach read, if you’re not a romance novel fan, I say skip it and save yourself some disappointment.

Alternate Title: “He said tenders!”

So Matthew usually writes the movie reviews, partially because lately there has not been much at the movies that has interested me.  For the past several months, every movie we’ve seen in the theater has been because Matthew really wanted to see it.  Don’t get me wrong, they’ve been enjoyable movies.  It’s just that special effects and a cursory story aren’t enough to make me wanna drop serious change on a two hour flick.  I will often give in to a weekend matinee, however, to keep the man happy.

This past weekend Northern California experienced a gratuitous heat wave.  Since we don’t have air-conditioning at home, and didn’t want to spend all day Saturday in lab, we decided to stay cool Saturday afternoon by catching a film.  Since all the new movies for the weekend looked horrid, we chose Kung Fu Panda.  I felt a little silly, going to see a kids movie on a weekend afternoon.  I figured the theater would be full of kids, running up and down the aisles screaming.  I could not have been more wrong.  There was a grand total of one child in the entire theater (it was a small theater, but still).  She was a cute little girl, I’m guessing around five, and she provided some of the most entertaining moments of the movie.  As the movie began, the little girl told her father, in a very grown up voice, how she’d been wanting to see this movie “for a very long time.”  When the panda appeared on the screen she exclaimed “It’s a Panda!!!” with glee (this is probably funnier to Matthew and I because of this comic).  A bit later in the movie when the Panda was getting his fluffy butt kicked by his teacher, the panda shouted “Oh, my tenders!” when he received a swift blow to the groin, to which the little girl replied “He said tenders!”  The entire theater cracked up, not at the movie, but at the little girl.  That was pretty much all we heard out of her, which was far less than the bunch of doped-up college kids sitting across the aisle who laughed so hard at the non-funny parts that we couldn’t hear a lot of the movie.

I suppose I should get to the movie review part of this entry.  The truth is, there’s not a lot to say.  If you’ve seen the previews or commercials for this movie then you know exactly what it’s about and you won’t get any surprises.  Our unlikely hero Po is chosen to be the dragon warrior, which surprises everyone, including his begrudging new mentor and fellow fighters.  Po must find a way to defeat the evil warrior who is coming to steal the secrets of Kung Fu and destroy the village. It’s your typical DreamWorks movie, not as good as the original Shrek but better than Flushed Away.  The voices are done well; with the exception of  Jack Black, you might not even register any of the other famous voices filling out the cast, like Dustin Hofman, Jacky Chan, and Angelina Jolie.  Funny and up-lifting for the kiddies, Kung Fu Panda has just enough humor aimed at the adults to keep them laughing.

You’d think with nearly 20 grandkids running rampant around their place that grandparents could get pretty grouchy, but I can’t remember either of them ever seeming tired of us. They both seem to love kids, and not just the ones they’re related to. My grandmother seems to have a magical touch with babies; when her children were young, my mother’s sister would run into my grandma at the Eagle’s club and grandma would easily quiet the crying babes which quickly feel asleep in her arms. Grandpa is more the jolly type, the kind that makes little kids laugh and smile. I remember as a little girl crawling into his lap and feeling his scratchy face on my cheek when he’d give me hugs (I know the man shaves, but he seems to have a perpetual five o’clock shadow). He smiled and joked with me, smelling like Dawn dish soap and engine grease.

There aren’t many kids running around the place these days. Even the youngest grandchildren are well past the little stage. Now you’ll occasionally find one of the few great-grandchildren getting spoiled by grandma and grandpa. At least one thing hasn’t changed there, and it’s the cards. There is always at least one deck of cards on top of the fridge, and usually another couple tucked away in the candy cabinet (they cabinet we grandkids used to scale chairs and each others shoulders to raid the sweets). When you go to visit my grandparents, most of the time is spent sitting around the kitchen table, yapping and playing cards. Sometimes there were multi-player games like cribbage, but mostly we play solitaire. Generally only one person would play cards, the others would chat away about this and that, but miss a move or make a mistake with the cards, and grandpa is all over it. “What are you doing?!? Put that five on that six. Good. Good. Now the three on the four. Spade on a spade” grandpa will say in a voice so gruff you’d think he was angry if you didn’t know better.  But it’s always followed by a smile or a laugh, and back to the conversation at hand. When I was younger I used to find these interruptions irritating, but now I think it’s endearing, and I win a lot more with grandpa’s help (he’s a shark).

As I write about these facts and put down my memories, I realize there is so much I don’t know about my grandparents. How did they meet? Why did they move to town? I think that I’ve heard stories about these things, but I’ve either forgotten or wasn’t paying attention in the first place. My grandparents are great storytellers, especially grandpa. He calls all the women he’s related to “Sis.” Grandma is “Ma” or “Grandma” and occasionally “Dode” (short for grandma’s nickname, which is derived from Wynona). I know I don’t call my grandparents enough. My grandpa calls me occasionally, and I’m not keeping up my end of the deal. I have no good excuses. So this weekend I resolve to give them a call and ask them some questions, and really listen to their answers. Maybe next year, for their 60th anniversary, I’ll be able to write a better piece about them, but more importantly I’ll know them better.

Congrats Grandma and Grandpa. I love you guys tons!

Grandma and grandpa’s house didn’t have the conventional toys that I remember, no swings, though there were some bikes and trikes parked in the garage that we’d haul out and endlessly peddle up and down the sidewalk. As children, my cousins and I spent untold hours simply playing in the gravel of the driveway. I know this sounds boring, but it was endlessly fascinating at the time, filtering through the rocks, looking for the prettiest or the smoothest, chatting with the cousins who were, at that time, some of my closest friends. We would play hide-and-seek for hours, daring each other to hide in the “Red room”, one of the upstairs bedrooms that we were all convinced was haunted. The older cousins took pride in telling scary stories that would keep the younger ones up all night.

The house has changed quite a bit since I was little. There used to be a large front porch, with wooden railings on all sides. We would run from the yard to the porch, dash through sprinklers, build forts, sun burn our noses and splash in kiddie pools. One of my clearest memories comes from 1984, I was captivated by the summer Olympics, particularly the gymnastic events. Mary Lou Retton on the balance beam inspired me to walk up and down the porch railings for day, pretending it was my beam, turning and twisting, but never working up the guts to try anything really acrobatic (which is probably for the best). Many years ago the porch was converted into a family room, where most of us grandkids spent entire Christmas vacations, watching cartoons and eating grandma’s fudge.

In the summers when we were outside grandma would yell to us through the kitchen window, which was always open since there was no air-conditioning in the house then. She’d call us in for lunch, dinner, or bedtime, but the rest of the time we spent running around getting dirty, with occasional excursions to the city pool. Meals were, and still are, a highlight at grandma and grandpa’s. Grandma is a great cook, the proud purveyor of the world’s best fried chicken and apple pies. Every one of us grandkids had a favorite food, and if we were visiting her alone, grandma would try to make our favorite dishes (and she still does). For a while grandma and her oldest daughter ran a catering business in town, making tons of fresh rolls and refrigerator pickles for class reunions and weddings. There’s something you have to understand about my grandmother, she can fry up three chickens like it’s nothing. Coming from a large family and having a large one herself, I think it must be second nature for her to make prodigious quantities of food. I sometimes wonder if the transition to cooking for just the two of them was difficult.

Both of my grandparents have a tremendous work ethic, probably born out of the destitution of the great depression. Backbreaking work is embraced and done enthusiastically; free time is a luxury I think they both look on suspiciously. In addition to my grandfather’s grueling work in the fields, until he started having breathing problems a few years ago, when he wasn’t on a tractor he was usually in the garage, welding sickles, fixing who knows what, taking occasional breaks to go fishing. Grandma had a lot of tiring jobs herself. In addition to keeping a house that is eternally spotless, grandma has worked cleaning hotel rooms, catering, and running the now defunct Cafe downtown. I remember her behind the counter, taking orders and dishing up dinners. Whenever I would go there, whether I was with my Dad, or with my mother and step-father after my parents divorced, grandma would give me a cherry-chip cookie. Once, a few years back, I found cherry-chips at a grocery store and quickly bought a bag. I made cookies with them, but they lacked the magic of the cookies of my memory. Perhaps the recipe wasn’t quite the same, but I think it’s more likely that they weren’t flavored by the love of a grandma, it’s a powerful spice.

To be continued….

As you all have noticed, I haven’t been posting much.  One of the main reasons is that my damn computer isn’t working most of the time.  More precisely, my computer screen isn’t working most the time.  When I flip open my powerbook, the bottom two thirds or more of my screen is blank.  If I bang it with my hand, the screen will flicker back to life…eventually.  Most of the time, I shake it or lightly “nudge” it, and the screen flickers a bunch of incoherent lines of light in which, if I stare, I can see my wallpaper, some icons, and if I lightly tap it some more, the lines flash all around the screen.  Sometimes the lines cover my screen completely, its a huge mess.  If I really need to use my computer, this sort of negotiation can go on for up to twenty minutes.  Maybe longer, I don’t know.  By twenty minutes, and most of the time much less, I get all pissy, slam my computer shut, and threaten to toss it out the window.  Like threatening the computer’s going to work, they’re soulless bastards who don’t even care about themselves.  Sometimes, in my state of temporary insanity, I can feel the computer taunting me, giving me cheese Dirty Harry lines like “go ahead, make my day.”  That’s when I know it’s time to switch to decaff, and possibly meditate or seek professional help.

This isn’t apple’s fault.  I blame Jansport!  About three years or so ago, April bought me a Jansport backpack with a special spot for carrying a computer.   This bag had one major fault.  On each shoulder strap, there are two strap adjusters in which the bottom one doesn’t hold on to the strap well and the simple pull of gravity causes the strap to gradually slip out of the adjuster and the backpack goes falling off your back.  One bright and sunny morning, I threw my backpack on my right shoulder and as soon as I let go, the strap slipped though the adjuster causing my computer inside to hit the pavement.  At first, my computer seemed fine, but after a few months the symptom started to manifest.  First, I would open my computer and the bottom tenth of my screen will be black.  A few shakes of the screen, all back to normal.  It started creeping up my screen.  First it was the bottom tenth.  Then the bottom fourth.  Slowly marching up my screen where now almost my whole screen is affected.  I could try to get it fixed, but I’ve had this computer for about three or more years now, so maybe it’s time I upgrade (with the help of an economic stimulus check, just doing my bit to help the economy).

I don’t like this.  At what point in my life did a computer get attached to me so strong, that it became a sort of symbiont?  I got through high school fine without one, and even most of college.  It wasn’t until graduate school that my computer became my left arm.  I feel like I could probably get a hell of a lot more done at work if I didn’t have it.  In my down time when I should be reading science or thinking about why my cloning never works, I see it sitting there, like the old friends we used to be, telepathically reaching out telling me “come on, check your email again.  It’s been ten minutes, who knows who could have emailed you; your wife, long lost friends, parents, the Pope.”  I check my email and nothing.  I get a just a tiny bit down every time I check and I have no messages.  It only last a second, but this happens a fair bit because I check my email more often during the day than I’m willing to admit to.    I need to give myself some rules like; I can only check my email four times (or less) a day, or I can only mindlessly surf the web for thirty minutes (or less).  The only problem, who’s going to enforce them?

Alcatraz Island. June 2008.

Learn more about Wordless Wednesday.

June 25th is my grandparents’ wedding anniversary. This year they will celebrate 59 years together. I can’t think of them without smiling. They are quite the pair, very special people; loving and kind, warm and funny, the best kind of grandparents anyone could possibly have. Their story is fairly typical for their generation in many ways, but extraordinary for mine.

My grandmother was born during the dust bowl, my grandfather a bit before. They grew up in the rural Nebraska Sand Hills. The oldest daughter in a family of many children, my grandmother married my grandfather at the tender age of 15. Grandpa was a few years older; he graduated from high school, which was pretty rare for that time. He bought my grandmother’s wedding dress for her and a stove as a gift for her family. Their first child was born when my grandmother was just 16, and they went on to have five more; my father is the second oldest. Growing up my father and his siblings lived on a farm outside of town, they tell many amusing stories of the place, the animals, the joy of growing up with so much space to be free. For reasons I’m not privy to, the family moved into town and into the house my grandparents still occupy.

The children grew up, got married, had children of their own (16 of us, and 3 step-grandkids were also welcomed into the mix), and those children have had their own children as well. Though money was never plentiful, the family life was always rich. Grandpa bailed hay until only a few years ago, driving huge bailers and mowers all day in the hot Nebraska sun. I remember as a child the equipment they used, some of it was parked at my grandparents house. It probably wasn’t safe to climb over sickles and other pieces of large farm equipment, but at some point in time I think pretty much all of us grandkids old enough to have been around then did it anyway. A lot of family members worked with grandpa in the fields. My father, a teacher, used to spend the summers bailing hay with grandpa, several other aunts, uncles and cousins did as well. One hell of a family business.

To be continued….

Disclaimer: any factual errors are the result of my fuzzy memory and not an attempt to embellish or alter the truth.

The air-mattress is deflated. The extra pillows are all stacked in the guest room. The beer bottles have been sorted for recycling. The house is back to normal. As much as a I relish the quiet, I’m sad to see my family go. The visit reminded me how far we are from home, and of all the things I miss there. I guess it’s not really things I miss anyway, but people, friends and family. I’m not in any rush to leave the Bay Area, there are a lot of things I like here too. Someday though, I’d like to be closer to home.

And for you curious voyeurs out there, if you’d like to see the picture to which Matthew alluded in his last post, here it is.

If you look really closely (and squint and stand on one leg), behind that big stack of logs, there are two people. No telephoto lens, sorry!

It’s been a bit since I gave a proper update. The reason has been two fold. One, my computer is acting up, and half of the time, I can only see the top third of my screen. Do you know what time it is when the screen blacks out? Time for a new Mac!?

Second, April and I had a very busy weekend last week with the Orsborn clan in town. As a reminder, April’s Dad, Stepmom, two brothers, and the girlfriend of one of the brothers came in town for a visit. In an effort to be good host and hostess, April and I tried to take them and see some of the sites. I have to give many acknowledgments to April who worked really hard to get the house in order and planned most of the activities. And I tried really hard at being a good husband, i.e. I kept doing as I was told.

Here is the itinerary that we had:
Read more »

View of the Bay are from the East Bay Hills. June 2008.

More about Wordless Wednesday.