Guesting on the Uncle Nacho Podcast

Me, Uncle Nacho and Grandma Yo

There are potential big moves going on here at IDL headquarters and I haven't been free to write much here lately. I'll be excited to reveal all that's been happening as it closes in on being released, but for now I'm excited to share my recent appearance on the Uncle Nacho podcast.

Full disclosure, Jiro Ignacio Palmieri aka "Uncle Nacho" is my younger brother. He's been involved audio, media, and radio for a few years now. He had a radio show in the San Francisco bay area on KPOO radio. Now he hosts the Uncle Nacho podcast, which "examines the intersections between sports, politics, art, and culture." The interview is a great overview of how I came to lead An Interdisciplinary Life and what that's meant for me. It's sort of this whole site here compressed into an hour of story telling. So if you've enjoyed reading IDL think of this as IDL on the go, a chance to get your Berto time and also do dishes.

This is part one of our interview. In this episode I talk about going to elementary school as a vagabond in Europe for a year and comparing it to American public schools. We discuss racial identity, how flipping over a white water raft full of Deaf kids led me to a career as an interpreter, my dad teaching me how to make a zip gun, and the creation of "Your Mom is So Berkeley." We also touch on alternative educational paths, growing up with a single mother, and a Berkeley High School legacy I had totally forgotten about. Within all of that we do indeed intertwine sports, arts, and culture.

If you scroll down past the embedded podcast there's some expanded info on things we didn't have answers to during the podcast.
 

There was a question that came up about how my family ended up in Chicago. I asked the branch of the family that stayed in Chicago and got a great response relating to Japanese American history. From my cousins Midori, Vince, and Rea who are all amazing artists and writers. The block below is edited together from their responses to my question.

Because jobs and housing weren't available to Japanese Americans post WWII on the west coast a Japanese community developed in Chicago around that time probably to support each other. Vince and his wife were in Hattiesburg Mississippi and they heard there was more work in Chicago for JAs (editor’s note: Vince is my grandma Yoshiko’s brother). Also, the American government had already taken our family’s home and real estate. They came up and settled in Hyde Park/South Side along with many other friends from camp and Hattiesburg. Hattiesburg was the home of the 442^nd all Japanese Battalion. I'm not sure what Vince's first job was in Chicago before he became photo editor at Playboy. He only moved back to California once his job made that available to him. Yoshiko must have joined them at some point.

The folks who ran the camps were mostly liberal, though their good intentions generally did as much harm as good. They had an idea that you could solve racism by sending JAs out of camps into areas away from the West Coast, a few at a time and that they'd be accepted and assimilated if they kept apart from other JAs. This was obviously a terrible idea because (1) segregation wasn't a choice and (2) you try living among people who hate you without allies. So, there were serious programs to resettle folks out of camp, but the ones who left had to create new communities. The largest migration was to Chicago, which was possibly the most important JA city for a couple of years after the war, before everyone who hadn't made a stake there pretty much decided to go back to the West Coast. I think Larry's (another of Yoshiko’s brothers) JACL ties also meant a lot--there were some serious divisions among JAs about how to respond to incarceration and I suspect going to Chicago probably said something about you/your family.

Thanks for reading and listening. If you have any other unresolved questions from the interview let me know in the comments. I'll post the second part of the interview when it becomes available.

Chasing Your DreamS

I'm not really sure how I got here. Seriously, it's weird.


OK, I know how I physically got to where I am. It's not hard, I'm sitting in my "office." (OK, it's a TV tray and a folding chair in a corner of my bedroom, but it's what I've got.) What I mean is, when I look back to who I was twenty years ago, or even twelve months ago, I don't know how I got to this point in my life.


This past weekend I headed off to my first Dad 2.0 Summit. It's a conference for dad bloggers. At this time last year the site you're reading had been around for twelve years and had thirty posts since 2013. On Saturday I read to an audience of guys who get more views in a day than my most popular piece has had in two months. It's was certain to be a packed house, mostly because I went on five minutes before Michael Strahan of NFL fame and now the co-host of Live! With Kelly and Michael.


I have business cards for my blog. I headed to a DC hotel to talk to other bloggers and sponsors about "the changing voice and perception of modern fatherhood." 
This is not where I expected to be. How did I get here?


It's sort of the big question of my life.


There are people who say you should pursue your dream no matter what. They say that you should never give up. They imply that if you quit on your dream you have some kind of moral deficiency. I disagree. I think there's a lot of value in giving up on a goal. 
  

When I was three-years-old I was going to be a fireman. 
At age six I wanted to be a stay at home dad. From five to eighteen I was definitely going to be an actor.  That was the dream. I didn't get into my first choice theater schools, and I realized the odds I was facing chasing a life on stage. I went for a back up. I became a sign language interpreter, a field  I'd become aware of by accident when I joined Inner City Outings (now called, Inspiring Connections Outdoors), a Sierra Club group that took disadvantaged kids on wilderness trips. When I volunteered to be a white water rafting guide for ICO I had no idea that half of their members were Deaf. It took two years on the Dean's List to convince my family that interpreting was a real major. It took seven years to complete my B.A., working full time and taking community college courses for the first few years. Then I signed up for two more years and got a master's. 



The truth is, I was such a lousy student in high school that no one should have expected me to go to college. My guidance counselor refused to meet with me. My mom told me that, "butlers make good money." As if I'd ever have the poise or patience for being a butler. No one had any faith in the idea that I'd do anything productive. I didn't give them any reason to. I had gone from being considered gifted and talented through 8th grade, to being a near drop out who managed to fail PE. Yet somehow I've made it this far. 


I loved acting because I never wanted one job. I wanted every job. I wanted to do everything. I chose interpreting because it gave me something similar to acting. I still get to become other people every time I go to work. As an interpreter I've worked for almost every department in the Federal government. I've worked for a Major League Baseball team. I stood in front of 900,000 people at my hometown team's championship parade. I've been to China. I've worked in health care, education, law, tech, and even theater. That's the dream.


I was re-watching The Office series finale recently on Netflix. At the end, Jim talks about his journey being at the company and how he never expected it to lead to anything. He ends up saying, "Everything I have I owe to this job." Like Jim, I also met my wife at work. (Thanks Obama Interpreting). Everything else that I've done has grown from there.

 T has been everything you could want in a supportive partner. 

I was climbing the ladder at the company where we met when my mom died. T was one hundred percent behind the idea of ditching everything and moving home to be close to my brother, who was still in high school. Three years later, when I had a chance to pursue a PhD she was one hundred percent behind abandoning the life we'd built in California to come back to the east coast with a one-year-old and one on the way. The strength of our lives and the foundation of our relationship has been our flexibility. Our willingness to change our lives on the fly to pursue opportunities has always led to better opportunities. Everything I have accomplished I owe to her willingness to help make it all happen. It's a trait I try to repay when she pitches an idea for something she wants to do. 



Now I'm here at this conference where I have been selected to read a post to a room full of bloggers. I'm here because T shared my dream of having one of us stay home. I'm here because T agreed that I should be the one to do it. I'm literally living the life I'd dreamed of as a kid. 



I'm here because a member of another side project, Your Mom is so Berkeley (a joke between co-workers attracted 5,000 strangers who wanted make fun of my hometown), suggested I join a group of dad bloggers on Facebook. So I joined the group, got inspired, and wrote. Then something happened that hadn't happened for me before. If you look at the right hand column you'll see that this blog dates back to 2003, but it wasn't until last year that most of you started reading it. I never expected this. I can't figure out if it's weirder that I was there at this conference, or that some people actually recognized me.





OK, if you made it this far, thanks because it's basically been a weird list of how cool my life is. I do have a larger point.



My life has been very cool. I've played rugby in England because I met a guy at Kinkos who was printing recruiting flyers for a rugby team. I refereed a televised rugby game because I got hurt and couldn't leave the game behind so I picked up a whistle and a former teammate was able to assign me to a televised game.

 

My life has been this way because I've allowed myself to have multiple dreams. Though I've wanted to be different things at different times I've always been ready to seize the next opportunity. As I think more about it I realize that all I've really wanted in my life is to do cool things. It's meant giving up on some dreams. It's meant making sacrifices. But the thing that's carried me through, the thing that's made my life the amazing experience it's been, is that I've been willing to find happiness along many paths. I didn't get stuck on having one goal.

 I don't know where I'd be if I'd stuck with acting. I doubt I'd be making a living at it. I know that I would never have met T, my kids would be different kids.

It's OK to give up and shift gears. Don't limit yourself. It's OK to decide you want to do something else. Giving up is great. I encourage it. It's made me everything I am. 






PS: As I was writing this post about how great my life is here and how much I love doing exactly what I'm doing T sent me a job posting for just about the only job that could get me to leave being a stay at home dad. It's back home in California. It would mean pulling the kids out of school and moving them across the country. It would mean T leaving a very good career. It would mean leaving the house we just bought this summer.

I'm on it.

Your Mom Has Taken Over My Life

Photo by Tenysa Santiago

Sorry. That should read "Your Mom" has taken over my life. "What's that Sir Rantalot? What do you mean?"

Well as you may have heard (but probably not, I do have illusions about my reach in the world) I'm getting my fifteen minutes of fame. Back in July I decided to poke fun at a coworker by making up some "Yo momma" jokes. Specifically jokes that started with, "Your mom is so Berkeley..." We thought it was all pretty funny so I posted some of the good ones as a note on my facebook page. In the note I encouraged my friends to add their own "Your mom is so Berkeley" jokes.

After a while, as the note was shared around, I created a facebook group so we could reach a wider group of people. I figured this would be something we'd giggle about for a week or so and then it would fade away. But a funny thing happened. People I didn't even know started joining the group and posting jokes. When the group got to 50 members I was astounded. When it got to 300 members I sent out a message to the members thanking them for making the group "the most successful thing I've ever done on the internet." After that I didn't look at it for a long time because I figured that was that.

Then we got mentioned on what I thought of as "some guy's blog." It turns out it was on Berkeleyside which is a Berkeley news blog founded by some pretty serious journalists. This marked the first time someone mentioned a potential book from the material on the group. Since I didn't know who Berkeleyside was at the time I thanked them, posted a link on the group and again pretty much forgot about it. I checked in now and then to read the new posts, a couple more people suggested a book, but I really didn't think much of it.

Until about three weeks ago. That's when I went back to check it out and found that we had over 950 members. I watched it like a hawk for the next few days waiting for it to hit 1,000. When we hit that nice round number I sent out another facebook message thanking the members for their contributions. That message led to our second appearance on Berkeleyide.

What I said in the 1,000 members message is true. I really do see the concept as a way of honoring my mom through humor and community connection. I can't believe something I thought of as a way to kill time at work has touched so many people. There's something there that helps us Berkeley kids see our common bonds after growing up looking at the rest of the country and feeling like freaks.

Anyway, two Fridays back I received a facebook message from a reporter for the New York Times asking if I wouldn't mind being interviewed about the group. Sure, why not? The article came out in the Bay Area section of the New York Times on Friday, March 18th, 2010. I have to say, it was a pretty cool thing to see. When the interview was done the reporter mentioned that a lot more people might see the group after the article was published. Just as before I thought, "Sure, how many people read the NYT online?" Well it turns out it's a lot. But the article didn't just show up there. It was in the print edition (which I didn't expect). The other thing I didn't know was that when something appears in the NYT online it gets picked up and re-posted in a million places. Well, around 2,640 places according to Google. But that's a lot and includes NPR. NPR! I started thinking, "Maybe this book idea isn't so crazy after all."

In the past week and a half since the article we've added 580 members. It's crazy. In order to keep up the momentum I've added a blog and a Twitter account. These two endevors have taken up a lot of time. Today I read a post by a group member who mentioned that he saw a teaser on our local NBC affiliate's eleven o'clock new cast about a story on the group. Today I waited for two hours before they rescheduled to Friday. So now I might be on TV. For this thing that started on facebook. It's crazy.

I've been Sir Rantalot for six years, pounding out opinions for a readership of roughly six people. Now, in nine months I'm getting fifteen minutes of minor local attention for something that took me six minutes to come up with. Maybe this is my "Java Jacket." The simple idea that starts without fanfare that turns into something bigger than the creator expected. I know I never expected this. But now with the blog going, and the group growing, I'm trying to get this book out there. If it comes to fruition I'll be pretty stoked. I guess you never know what will come of your ideas.