Where Have You Been?

 

Wow. It’s been a long time since my last post here and the truth is I don’t know if anyone is still stopping by to see if there’s anything here.  Why would I let the slim momentum we had going peter out?  Well, the answer is grad school.  Just about the time of my last post I got word that a new PhD program in my field (the first of it’s kind) was finally approved for this fall.  Exciting news, but it also meant that I had twelve days to study for the GRE, and another two weeks to write my essays, get my transcripts, and cross my fingers.  That was only the beginning.  Once I was accepted I had to figure out how to move my entire family to the east coast, find a place to live, rent my house, quit my job while keeping my health insurance, and pack.  This has left me no time for writing.  I promise as soon as I get settled in DC I’ll get back to bringing you more Berkeley related fun.

“But how can you leave Berkeley?”  I know this is on your mind.  Leaving Berkeley so soon after coming back is hard.  Leaving means missing my friends and family and losing out on all the great relationships I’ve started as a result of YMISB.  But the PhD is a long time dream of mine.  It’s also the best chance I have to further my career and my family’s well being, so off I go.  But, like Patton, I will return.  I know, Patton never did return, but I will.

With travel, specifically my upcoming cross country drive with my dogs on out mind we present this:

Alison Williams: My mom is so Berkeley that one time on a camping trip in the VW bus, the fan belt broke. My dad was clueless (my mom always fixed the bus herself) but my mom made a makeshift fan belt out of pantyhose. "Mom, why do you have pantyhose?", I asked in shock. "I don't know, but I'm glad I did..."

Your mom is so Berkeley…

… the only downer part of her trip to Europe in '68 was that the East German police confiscated her Cuba Revolution poster

…she named her travel agency in Walnut Square, Berkeley Unified Travel Service because it had a nice "come together" feel to it. Or maybe it was just because she had a good sense of humor and knew the acronym would be "BUTS".

… she left her car door unlocked "just in case a homeless person needed a place to sleep." Which actually eventually happened, and stunk the inside of the car up to holy hell.

…she drives around with artwork epoxied to her car.

… she taught you whenever you travel and you have to go to the bathroom, just find the nicest hotel in town and go right in.

Food II

What is your mom cooking?  What's in my food?  AAHHHH!! Photo courtesy of Chelise Stroud Hery

I know what you're thinking, "Dude, finally! Where have you been?" Well the last few weeks around YMISB HQ have been consumed by "Application Madness 2010." I've made the decision to go back to grad school and see what this whole PhD thing is all about. The "madness" part is that the program was just approved two weeks ago for fall enrollment so everything's been compressed and stressful. Thus, no time for posting.

But enough about me, let's talk about your mom. Food still rules the roost at YMISB your mom really scarred us all with her carob muffins and frankly we're not over it.

Your mom is so Berkeley…

…you thought 'Bragging' referred to seasoning your food.

…she puts tofutti on croissants

…she buys people food stamps ($1 for $1) so they will have cash to buy non-food items.

…when you were broke you got sent out to pick dandylions for soup.

…your special family dinner was putting a giant bowl of couscous on top of a sheet on the floor and having us sit around it, rolling it into balls and-always as the meal digressed-throwing the couscous balls at each other.

…she decided that a burnt Dominos pizza pie looked like art and so she nailed it right to the wall above the kitchen table, where it stayed for quite some time.

…Or framed two boxes of peeps and hung them on the wall for 15 years.

…you didn't know what refined sugar tasted like until you went to public school.

…you never went to McDonald's until Junior High with out of town friends.

…you just assumed everyone knew what an olallieberry was until I went to college and people had never heard of it before!

…you were shocked (at the age of 30) to find that mainstream families keep a snack drawer in the kitchen into which they place all kinds of junk food and which is apparently open access, even to the kids

…she still thinks rice cakes and grind-your-own peanut butter is the perfect breakfast.

…hemp continually replaced oregano as the main seasoning at dinner

… she still uses cheesecloth to strain store bought yogurt into thicker "homemade" yogurt

…she bought cheese in a driveway.

…she puts hemp seeds in her whole wheat banana pancakes.

Pop Culture I

Your mom definitely preferred books over TV and PBS over cleaning the house.  I remember you as the kid humming the “Mystery” theme song in 1^st grade.  Your brother was the one who almost hit a pole while walking down the street reading a book about giants.  But I know it’s not your fault, I blame your mom.

Your mom is so Berkeley…

... she taught you all the proper responses to "Rocky Horror Picture Show"

... that you never had a TV in the house until you were 9, and all of your friends parents knew that you were only allowed to watch channel 9 at their houses.

…all of her kids read while they walk

…she doesn't watch TV ( and I mean ever)

…she had me enthralled by Julia Child by the time I was five. No Brady Bunch for me, just Julia Child on the tv that barely worked

...my mom wrote an article about her for the East Bay Express.

…she's in that movie, "Berkeley in the 60's"

… she wouldn't let us watch the 6 Million Dollar man because the music was too scary.

… she swears the movie Pretty Woman is a subversive patriarchal plot against feminism

… she taught you Walt Disney was a fascist...and then took you to Disneyland anyway.

Sex I

Photo by Stephanie Johnson

Let’s just say you didn’t need to wait for “Social Living” in tenth grade to learn about the “birds and the bees.” Or as your mother called them “Sex. Often involving a penis and a vagina but also sometimes two penises or two vaginas.” Example:

My mom is so Berkeley that when I was 7 (in 1975) she told me, "it's okay if you're gay honey." To which I answered, "What's gay, mommy? Can I have my dollie?" Ironically, she was right!

The rest of you:

Your mom is so Berkeley…

...you were conceived at Woodstock and all you know about your father is he was the bus driver and his name was "Moonwalker"

…she left The Joy of Sex and, Our Bodies Ourselves laying around the house. Ok, so maybe the Joy of Sex was for her

… she slept with Mr. Panasenko (of Berkeley high) possibly while underage.

…you were only allowed to have dolls that were anatomically correct (with vaginas and penises) so that I wouldn't get the wrong idea about sex.

…she will keep your boyfriend up all night talking about poets she slept with and leftwing politics

…she bragged that her gay son got his first hicky from a lesbian

…that I used to be afraid that our parents "Women's Group", "Men's Group", "Couples Group", and "Therapy Group" would all get together and have an "Orgy Group".

…you have two of them, and a gay bio-dad.

Story Time

Tie dyed sheets.  Courtesy of Erin Duran

Hi All,

I know it's been a little while since our last post but things have been chaotic here at YMISB world headquarters.  Sick babies coupled with GRE study have conspired to keep us off teh interwebs.  So to make up for it here's an extra action packed post.

Every so often we get posts that aren’t really jokes and can’t be fit into the standard “Your mom is so…” format.  While this flies in the face of YMISB’s founding principles a lot of these stories are too good to discard.  They show the passion people have for Berkeley and for their moms.  You’ll notice, when we find one that fits, we often include these stories in the posts here as a lead in to the standard joke posts.  Today we present a whole post dedicated to people’s stories and introduce some of the categories they seem to fall in to.

Not Berkeley:

Susan Raymond: Well, my mom is not officially "Berkeley", but she did take me to see the original Los Angeles cast of "Hair" at the Aquarius Theater way the heck back when. She also met John and Yoko, and subsequently cut her hair super short, just like J & Y were stylin'. Mother is, however, a princess at heart, so the closest she... would get to Berkeley now is a nice stay in a luxury suite at the Claremont - oh, and dinner at the Chez Panisse. Upstairs or down.

I was so clueless:

Anna Moyles: So many of these rang true for me. I was also the college freshman who had to be taught how to use the dryer, the microwave, and the cable box. I went to Dairy Queen for the first time and asked where the frozen yogurt was.

SO Berkeley:

Kimberly Madigan-Ennis: My mom (love her!) doesn’t wear jewelry, makeup, a bra. She doesn’t watch TV. She is skeptical and slightly paranoid, she only shops at thrift stores, she cuts her own hair. My mom is awesome :)

Molly Moore Mccoy: My Mom is so Berkeley that...We hitchhiked to Altamont to see the Rolling Stones in concert,when I was 5. I hitch hiked to Bolinas by myself to see friends when I was 13.

Adi Benveniste: My mom is so Berkeley that she met her best friend (Elly Matsumura 's mom) in 1978 in the women's locker room at the Berkeley YMCA because they had matching Birkenstocks and accidentally went home in the other's pair of sandals and then had to meet to switch back.

Wandering Rants:

Wendy Rothenberg: My mom is so Berkeley, I can't tell what's Berkeley since it all seems so normal - memorization of co-op# 47289; first bra was a hand-me-down; bat mitzvah in our living room; ethnically diverse group around our Passover table; an annual New Year's 1-4a.m. alcohol-free pancake party for 200+. Seems normal and oh so wonderful to me.

Miwa Soto: My mom is so Berkeley that I was born at home on homemade tie-dyed sheets, I didn't have anything other than a birth name until I was 6 months (so she could get to know me), I took the public bus in first grade from Walden to the YMCA for swimming--by myself, she made and sold homemade bread out of our home, married my dad who was wearing overalls and had long hair and a full beard at the ceremony and then had the reception at her ex-husband's house, she *still* doesn't wear underwear or a bra (let alone make-up), we had a vegetable garden, chickens and bees, we didn't have a TV until 7th grade and I didn't eat fast food until I was in high school. Need I go on? My mom is so Berkeley; she is the best mom on Earth! There are so many more, but those are what I can remember right now. Oh, and I dressed myself out of the "freebox" down the block. We took the red wagon up to the Co-op to get old lettuce to feed the chickens--we lived walking distance away.

Misti Walty: Oh the memories, this group is fantastic! I totally remember the coop peanut butter, the carob chip cookies, sesame honey sticks were a 'treat'. I added jam to plain yogurt in desperation! I always went to my best friends house, because she had Barbies, and her parents gave her Happy Meals, or bologna & cheese sandwiches on white bread as an after school snack. I don't think I ate grapes until well into my teen years. I loved the Pickle Family Circus in Glen Park. And 'mom' was a title not a name, so I've always used her first name. Long before Burning Man became fashionable, we went to the Black Hills Survival Gathering, and everyone danced naked. I’ve been at demonstrations since I was an infant in a backpack. My mom is so Berkeley, and so is my other mother - that we still celebrate Christmas together even though they separated 17 years ago.  Oh and my sister's mom totally did that thing of 'correcting' pronouns in Dr. Seuss books!

Confusing:

Name Withheld: My mom is so Berkeley she still doesn't own any cloths that aren't brightly colored and don't come from desperate and underpaid starving people in third world countries. This however makes for great garage sales that I have when she doesn't want them anymore. I figure I deserve it, since being dropped of to school by a Jewish lady in a dashiki is fairly traumatizing.

Eds Note: See I don’t get it.  Your mom shops at Wal Mart and then you sell her clothes when she tires of them but it’s OK because she wore a dashiki?  Huh?

“Foreign” Berkeley Moms:

Nicole Moore: My mom was so Berkeley that she started the first city-wide recycling program in our town. My mom was so Berkeley that she read me Seth Speaks and my classmates at school told me I was going to hell. My mom was so Berkeley that instead of celebrating the bicentennial, we went to fight for passage of the ERA. Too bad I grew up in the bible belt and not Berkeley

More from Jane Stillwater

Instead of a normal post, today I bring you more from this weekend's guest poster Jane Stillwater.  Jane has her own blog where she has written her own riff on the "Your Mom is So Berkeley" theme.  So please click over and check it out.  It's good reading.

Jane Stillwater's YMISB inspired post.

Mothers Day Bonus

OK, so I know I said we don't post on the weekends but I just got this via email and it's too good to hold on to.

My daughter is so NOT Berkeley!

One of my daughters was raised playing under the table at the Med in the daytime and sleeping under the table at the old Freight & Salvage at night while I made the brownies, sold the coffee and flirted with band members.  And even despite all this wonderful upbringing, my freaking daughter rebelled and became a Yuppie when she grew up!  It broke my heart.

Thank goodness that the rest of my children turned out okay.