Is it the big hair and sometime-Fu Manchu moustache that is at the roots of his on-screen romantic troubles? Perhaps it’s his characters’ propensity for wearing sunglasses inside the house (and in promotional images) that leads to being cast as the guy whom women feel they can live without. Or maybe this isn’t his usual role. I admit I’ve only seen him in about four or five movies.

But here’s the thing: arrogant rich guys who wear sunglasses and act like God’s gift to the world of women and otherwise don’t seem to have trouble attracting women IN REAL LIFE, so why in Bollywood?

The answer is obvious. Real women (at least some of them) will cut some corners to get a guy with money, but Bollywood is all about romance, fantasy, glamour, and the way things really ought to be. Jackie Kennedy fell for Aristotle Onasis, and we all know that that was wrong. In Bollywood, when Anil Kapoor’s oil and gas magnate type doesn’t get the girl, it’s like a righting of the wrongs in the universe.  When a young woman falls for the young penniless guy we feel better about the tragedies and wrongs of the world and about our own lives. And that, making us feel better,  is the goal of Bollywood.

Edgar “Shoboy” Sotelo is the morning DJ at La Mega Mezcla 107.5, a recently-redesigned Spanish language station which features music far from mariachi — mostly it sounds like stuff my kids would listen to, just the lyrics are in Espanol. Shakira is the biggest name I hear.   Apparently, I find now from a web search, this is a nationwide Spanish language broadcast. Shoboy himself is not here in Texas, but in California — and graduated from Cal Poly Pomona, where I also attended. Small world! No wonder I like his show, which I admit tends to the salacious — he buys his son a GI-Joe and it somehow has the middle finger sticking up; he interviews two women, a wife and mistress, who meet because the husband/lover has (not too brightly) brought them to the same hotel …

But this is nothing Howard Stern would balk at. Shoboy speaks with both a normal DJ voice and as a squeeky ventriloquist-like voice which sounds like a goat’s, a voice which seems to go by the name of “Chabelo”, which/who  plays in to adding a third character to the show along with a young woman whose name I can’t remember — perhaps because they don’t keep announcing it as they do his. Chabelo makes the most colorful jokes, acts like the wise fool, as they used to call it. From listening to this show, I have learned that Miss Mexico became Miss Universe, that William Levy, Mexican telenovela star, was accused of sexual misconduct with a minor but denies it, that Nationwide Insurance will give you a group policy on your home and auto, no matter how many aunts, cousins and other relations are living in your home with you.

I look forward to listening. It’s partly scandalous and partly educational — what could be better? What vocabulary have I picked up? Oh, enganar, which means to fool someone — celosa, which means jealous — the only problem is I never have a chance to speak or write Spanish since starting listening. I guess I could sing along with the songs.

The funniest thing about it all is that I feel like I am evesdropping in on an all-Spanish speaking world. Yes, I have even heard jokes made about gringos. And if I ever met Shoboy in person, I know I would not hear Spanish, because raised in California, he speaks the same dialect of English as I do, he is, as we say in the school, fully bilingual. You can hear it on the show, as he switches in English words and phrases. I wonder if he would want to be an English language DJ if he had the chance. Well, I hope not, I’m enjoying the show in Spanish. My only question at the end of all is: what does “Shoboy” actually mean?

Currently running: an Ansel Adams Exhibit   through November 7, 2010 at the Amon Carter – thanks to Frugal in Fort Worth for the heads up …  Fort Worth has the most oil and gas contributions of any zip code in the country, all centered at 76102, that’s downtown,according to KRLD … Brite Divinity School will be hosting a talk about how Old Gods Never Die … they don’t even fade away on September 11 … is one of those Gods money? Meanwhile, Belle Washington asks “Why are DFW people not buying real estate?” We don’t have enough money, is my simple answer, but maybe that begs the question …

Found New Food Blog, thanks to Francis at Food and Fort Worth. The new blogs’ name? Not Just Here for the Food … some just can’t get enough … food, that is … Bad news here: Fort Worth Puts Off Streetcar Vote: This from Fortworthology; combined with the closing of the pools this summer the whole deal seems like a good illustration of the diminishing level of concern our City Council has for working toward a positive future of any type … and finally, Richie Escovedo has an interesting spin on how to spin in the PR business … and a cute photo of his toddler son checking out Old Faithful included free.

Overall, it went well. I have 20 students. Already I have picked out a number that are unusally bright and the class as a whole were well behaved. Of course, I know on the first day of school the teacher doesn’t usually have discipline problems. As my youngest son put it, “Mom, I never get in trouble on the first day.”

Reflections? I’m glad, it looks like a better year than I expected. This evening, I was at the Kroger’s and I spotted a display of small Venus fly traps.

I knew just what to do. Buy one, and construct a science observation in the next two weeks. We are doing a unit on scientists. What does the young scientist do with a venus fly trap? Can we make up an experiment? Can we make a prediction about what will happen? What if we touch the inside of the jaws of the flytrap with a small stick? Will it shut?  Can I find a video to support the lesson? I don’t know, but the school year is off and running.

As a young adult I eventually decided that I preferred pizza to hamburgers, but I still enjoyed the latter with no health concerns until sometime or so the HB began to be brought up during disscussions of cholesterol and heart disease and clogged arteries. I looked askance at the hamburger now. How could I not have known that something so juicy and flavorful could actually be killing me while lulling my anxiety with its high fat content (a documented phenom — fatty foods calm you down).

This culminated in a story from the DFW Writer’s Workshop, in which a veteran member sat late into the night, eating hamburgers and other fatty foods at Denny’s, and then went home to sleep and died of a massive heart attack before he even had the chance to see another dawn or write another word. Two a.m., hamburger, six a.m., dead. It was as simple as that.

I really cut back on hamburgers after I heard that stories. But sometimes I make exceptions. Like today, when I spent the morning getting my classroom set up for the new school year, and after that reported to the old house to help clean out the garage. Now, that is a tough day, and what’s more I forgot to pack a lunch. A trip to Sonic was indicated. I invited Pia and my ten year old daughter to indulge with me. When they brought the food to the car, I held up the burger and said, “It’s not, I suppose, as bad as a cigarette, which they used to call a ‘coffin nail,’ but I have to tell you the truth, I believe that every hamburger you eat shortens your life a bit.”

“What, you mean that you eat a hamburger, you die five minutes sooner?”

“No, not at all. It’s way more than five minutes, especially if you’re over 40. By the time you’re 60, you daren’t touch one.”

I didn’t tell her then about the website my mother told me about, Live to 100.com. They ask you 40 questions and then tell you how long they think you’ll live. Last time I took it, I got 93 years. They didn’t ask about hamburgers, but they did ask how often I eat red meat.  ”Not often,” I clicked. “Not often anymore.”

These days I drive through the verdant countryside outside Denton and try to catch a glimpse of the beautiful cattle, their red fur shining in the sun, grazing on the green grass, and when I see them, I think “you are all going to be made into hamburgers.” It seems like a sacriledge, for such beautiful creatures to be killed and then suffer the additional indiginity of being ingested. But they will have their revenge, won’t they? Because if you eat too many hamburgers, you yourself will die sooner. I’m sorry, but I really believe this. Even if I’m laughing as I write it. Dr. Dean Ornish did a bunch of research and wrote a book about it. If you’re willing to eat dry, tasteless stuff, you’ll live longer. So make that hamburger last, chew each bite 100 times, and don’t eat one every day. That’s my advice, and that’s my practice, to deal with hamburger guilt.

It struck me right away that the roads were narrow and winding, speed limits posted as low at 20 mph, but the scenery was beautiful. It seemed hard to believe but I had to admit — the countryside looked very much like my old home stomping grounds in the Sacramento valley of Northern California, right down to the metal stock fences and oak trees. There were actual rolling hills out here. I passed Denton Country Club, and numerous hobby farms with horses and cattle in the pastures, and even a place that advertised “full service horse boarding.”

The road was bumpy and slow, but in only about six miles I made it to the freeway, and got on the 35W somewhere on the Denton side of the race track and Dale Ernhardt expressway. It’s hard to forget that driving is a dangerous thing. My father hammered that home to me that many years ago before I got my driver’s license. And seeing an exit named after the fallen stock car driver sends the point home. But despite the need to be always careful and vigilant about safety, driving a long way (about 42 miles) to work for an hour each morning and night isn’t entirely a bad thing. As I drive, I reflect, I listen to music, I make plans, I give thanks … I wonder a lot. I experience memories, that come flashing up from long long ago, like the memories of horses and trails that the countryside around our house draws up.

I don’t expect to go out and find out about the place that boards horses, but I don’t rule it out, in the long run if I every have time and money. I leave every morning now at 6 and get home at 5. It’s a long day, so long that before I agreed to do it I passed almost all my remaining household chores on to others in the family. Just today, Dean was enrolling the kids in school, something I used to take care of. They came back full of excited reports about the classes they planned to take and the characters they’ve met already.

Each night I eat dinner with family, read or watch a movie, get my things ready for work, and set the alarm for 5 a.m. And in the morning I journal, eat oatmeal, make coffee, pack lunch, push the button that opens the garage door, and then back the car out of the driveway and go south by southwest, a trip of many facets, through a landscape of meditation and memory. I say a prayer to be safe, and I think that overall, it’s okay, at least for today.

Making the decision and renting the Denton house was relatively easy. But after a week or so of packing, last Wednesday dawned: moving day. After almost five years, there was a lot of stuff in the family home, even after we gave a number of useful but unwanted items away using Freecycle. (Best moment? Seeing an excited seven year old boy pick up a shoebox full of old Pokemon cards.)

Despite engaging two young men to help – friends of Pia’s – by noon on moving day an atmosphere of despair prevailed. We had loaded what seemed like 100 book boxes before 10 a.m.  I had found a lot of small change under various pieces of furniture but it was nowhere near enough to compensate me for the feeling of malease – no, panic – that I was having at relocating, and at the slow process of getting stuff out of the house. There was still all the furniture and appliances, we were finding stuff we’d forgotten to pack, the mercury had hit about 110 and that was not adjusted for the factor you use if you are doing heavy lifting outside.  People’s shirts wore a wet shield of perspiration over the chest and a whole-back sweat slick. And then there was this: fraying tempers. People were not getting along. One of the young guys had a family emergency and had to leave. 

Just as I was beginning to envision what happens when your move crashes and burns, if you just don’t have the wherewithal, the sine qua non, of moving ability to actually get yourself OUT of your prior residence, fortune smiled.

First, people stopped carping at each other and just kept carrying stuff. “Just do not make eye contact,” I told my eldest son, 16, who had been at the center of one dispute. By two in the afternoon, things were looking a little better. Furniture fills up the truck faster than boxes and is lighter.  At three o’clock I told them I was leaving to go up to the rental office and get the keys to the new place. They loaded up the Explorer with electronics (the no-AC Suburban was needed for additional stuff carrying) and I left.

A small emergency between the rental office and the new house (not knowing where my ATM card was, seeing that the “fuel emergency” light was on and then having to buy $2.50 in gas with the quarters, nickels and dimes I found under the furniture) kept things exciting for me while I waited for the truck in Denton. We got into the new house and it looked good, carpets cleaned, freshly painted.  “But what will it look like once our junk is in here?” I worried, then put aside my doubts. Perhaps I could get some nicer used furniture from Craigslist once the heat of paying all the moving deposits and fees and repairs on the old house was up.

The family-crew and the moving truck arrived at about 6. “We got everything big in!” they told me, and I brushed aside the fact that “everything big” meant there was still enough little stuff to keep us busy with cars and SUVS for a couple days remaining at the old house.  Amazingly, some neighbors on a church service project showed up and helped us unload. Unloading is always easier than packing up, and in just over an hour, all the furniture (in pieces) and boxes (mostly labeled at least as to which room) were off the truck. 

Wow, was that it for the moving van? It appeared that it was. I got a pizza at the local shopping center and we ate it. I couldn’t believe we made it. One day, all the big stuff.  We live in Denton, in the middle of an anonymous subdivision flanked by beautiful pasturelands filled with cattle and horses. The new house is wonderfully laid out, new, in perfect repair. It’s paradise, really. Moving, on the other hand, is always going to be hell.

Politics and Urban Life

Probably the most important news is that there will be  a Modern Streetcar meeting on Monday, August 9^th – Kevin at FortWorthology calls out the troops to support our hopes of having Fort worth streetcars; “If you’re in favor of effective modern central city transit for Fort Worth, stop by and check out the progress … I’m a Soap Addict announced our monthly Fort Worth Market Day at the corner of Hulen and Camp Bowie …  Frugal  in Fort Worth writes what to do for free this weekend…

Arts and Letters

The Amon Carter shows off Audubon Prints  … while The Modern is showing an exhibit involving Attics, Religion, and Carl Jung in Anselm Kiefer’s “Quaternity” …

Personally and Professionally

Lauren at Brown Eye Blue Eye has decided to buy a vintage sewing machine and see if she can get it to run … Richie Escovedo writes a how-to about blogging for school districts    … and Todd Landry’s Blog gives us an Image of Trinity Railway Express at twilight.

Where the slip of paper with the directions and the address got to I don’t know, but by the time I reached 28th Street, it was gone, perhaps blown out the open window (no air conditioning, remember?) “That’s okay,” I thought. “I remember it said right on North Main, left on 38th, I’ll try that and if it doesn’t work, I’ll call Pia for more instructions.”

Okay, it didn’t work. I called Pia and she gave me more instructions but of course I didn’t pay enough attention and made wrong turns aplenty, was honked at more than once, made a possibly illegal u-turn back at the freeway onramp where it all started, and figured out that Commerce Street doesn’t go all the way through from 28th to 38th. I ended up circling the address three times before I finally pulled up 45 minutes later.

I expected something like an industrial warehouse. But this place was more like a huge junkyard, an entire city block with piles of metal at least two stories high, front loaders and 18 wheelers rolling all over the place, a drive-on scale, and no obvious place to park something as insignificant as a Suburban. It was so hot I was getting dizzy. It was so hot my normally straight hair was curly.  I am supposed to be a respectable senora but my clothes were sticking to my body and I knew no nice lady was going to be expected to show up at a place like this.

The scrap metal workers wore baseball caps with bandanas hanging down as if we were on the Sahara desert. There were no other women anywhere. There was just about no one who didn’t have a beer belly.  A huge metal gate stood tall enough for any fully loaded semi to pass through. Letters of rusted pipe spelled out the name of the yard. In the middle of everything was a small building with glass windows. That would be the office. I parked on the street and looked in. Huge trucks rolled past. “I can’t do it,” I thought. “Walk in there, some lady with two neatly coiled copper bundles? I can’t. What if they won’t buy the copper? What if they only give me $3.00 and a weird look? I mean, I clearly don’t know what I’m doing here.”

I sat in the truck for a moment. No, it wouldn’t do. I’d have to go in. After all that driving around, I had to see this thing through. I walked across the asphalt, dodging trucks large and small, and pulled open the door to the building. The office was full of people speaking Spanish. I stood at the counter waiting for someone to notice me. Very quickly, a young guy did.

“Is that all you’ve got?” he asked. I nodded. “Put it up here.” He checked it with some kind of magnet that, I assume, told him if it was solid copper. I guess it passed the test, because next he said  “Put it on the scale outside.” I walked out and there was a platform scale, about 4 feet by four. I put the coils on, looked in the window, and the guy motioned me in.

“Twenty-two pounds copper, fifty dollars and 60 cents,” he told me. “I’ll need a copy of your driver’s licence and your vehicle info.” And in about ten seconds, a young woman handed me the money, I signed the receipt, they carried off the copper, and that was it. I walked back through the blistering heat of the yard. Fifty bucks! I thought. Well, I guess it was worth it. And to think I had almost not gone in.

Just goes to show, you’ve got to try to follow through on what you start, even if you’re not completely presentable, even if you’re a stranger in a strange land, even if you’re not sure it will work. Even in the dog days of August.

And it will help if you have a “crew” like Pia at home for when you loose the directions, too.

Summer gets this sweltering and  you wish fall would come and cool it off,  even though fall means going back to work for everyone and it’s hard to wish for that.  But you know you can’t bear much more of this either. It’s too hot for tomatoes to set fruit, too hot to heat up the kitchen cooking normal foods, if you want to walk outside you’ve got to do it before 8 a.m., and you get tired of sandwiches and barbecued food. People honk at you for no apparent reason when you’re driving, and you don’t know if they’re short tempered or if the heat is making you so languid you’re forgetting how to drive properly.

I think of summer as my favorite time of year, really I do! But the fact is that it always seems to be summer when nagging fears, obsessions and various paranoias seem to come into the fore, perhaps because there’s so few regularly scheduled activities to distract me from them. If you don’t use your free time for something productive, your head may use the extra energy to begin thinking up stuff that’s downright destructive to your peace of mind.

So, yes, summertime and the living is easy, spending time sitting down by the pool, relaxing and cooling off, Yes. And yet. And yet. I read on Wikipedia that the name “dog days” comes from the Latin,  diēs caniculārēs, and refers to summer days from early July to mid August during which the Romans believed that the Dog Star, Sirius, somehow impeded things from getting done. I suppose it’s easy to claim this a ridiculous superstition, and yet the more things change, the more they stay the same. Whatever the reason, it’s hard to get things done during early August. A lof of the time, you just stay inside, crank up the air conditioner, and try not to think about the blistering rays of sun outside and that if the modern conveniences like AC were to fail we’d get fried like eggs before we knew it. I’m sure we’ll be fine. But it does make me a little nervous, thinking about it.