More Tales of Crime and Treason on the High Seas

home is where the heart is

2009-04-12T11:44:00.000-07:00

if you talk to college students or any adult children who have been out of the house for awhile, you'll hear the occasional, uneasy remark about the oddness of 'going home for a visit.' it's surreal, as one friend of mine pointed out: if you're 'visiting' home, then your real home must be elsewhere. i think this is true and untrue in different degrees, and you can argue either side.

i think what is true, though, is that going home, for people who don't do it often, can be the same as going back.

i come home and i find all my old things. my old clothes, my old notebooks, my old stories, my old photos. bits and pieces of yourself that you've shed like snakeskin. but they carry your imprint, and you look at them, and you relive entire years. you remember the years when this thing was a part of you, a real player in your life, and how you were different than what you are now.

it's a tricky place: easy to get nostalgic and romantic about and gloss over the unglamorous aspects. i don't know about you, but i had a lot of acne in high school. lots and lots. not my best years.

still, for the past few days i've felt this bizarre tugging. like all my old things are calling to me. and i didn't really understand what their pull was until i visited my great-grandfather today.

now, you may think, 'oh no. here it comes again. how can one 95-year-old man possibly command as much attention as this blog has given him?'

but my grandfather is an endlessly fascinating person. i think the fact that i have written so much about him is a testament to that.

when i went to see him today, he pulled out a tape for me.

for those of you just joining the program, my grandfather is a musician. he has been writing and recording songs for nearly three-quarters of a century. i won't pretend i like all of them, or that the recordings are the highest quality, but he is dedicated to his music, and has been all his life.

so the tape he pulled out for me was recorded in 1989, the year i was born.

the first thing you hear when you play it is my grandfather's voice - to me, it seems, no different - saying, 'hello, pereleh. this is your great-grandfather speaking. you are two weeks old. someday when you are old enough to understand, i hope your parents will give you this tape and you will listen to the songs. i am here with your great-grandmother, grandma dorothy.'

and then my grandmother says, in the thin, reedy voice i remember so well: 'hello, perel. this is your grandma dorothy. we love you very much.'

then my grandfather sings the song he wrote for me when i was born, twenty years ago.

i do not like to cry. i hate it almost as much as my mother. but i wept when i heard this tape. i wept even though my grandfather himself played it for me - clear evidence that, despite his expectations twenty years ago, he has miraculously lived to show me these songs himself, to talk about them with me as equals. he has, kiayneh hara, lived to see me as an adult, and he is as much himself as he ever was. the tape sounds like a time capsule, like something never meant to be opened during one's lifetime. but my grandfather is still with me. so why did i cry?

we both cried. me and him.

i think we cried when we heard my grandmother's voice.

this puzzles me for another reason.

i loved my grandmother very, very much. but i was not sorry when she died. she was very old and hadn't been herself for years. she was in pain. i was sort of glad when she passed away; i felt like she was free. and i think about her sometimes, but not often. as i said, she had been gone already for so many years.

but i guess there is something about hearing that voice addressed to me. so clear and unclouded, talking to me, not to some hazy shadow of me. saying the things i wanted her to say, with intent, like she meant them. and so exactly the way i remembered her voice that she could have been in the room with me. she could have been right there next to my grandfather, like a ghost.

she told me that she loved me when she was well. i was little but i remember it.

i think that is why we cried, me and my grandfather. it was because for those fifteen seconds that the tape was playing, my grandmother was alive and whole again. she was herself again. and we had her. she was there.

i was surprised by this sudden welling of grief. i never really miss her. why did i miss her then? can you miss someone and not know it?

my grandfather wanted to play the tape again, but i didn't want him to. it was too much for me. i did not want to hear her voice again. i am not sure what that says about me, or him.

but this is what i do think. i think the deep, marvelous appeal of memorabilia and pictures and home videos and tapes lies in their perfectly preserved alternate worlds. they are static, but they feel real. you can step into the past for a minute or fifteen minutes and live there, with the people you love who are gone now or even just older and different than you remember them being.

i think it is not home we visit. home is home. we visit the past; we visit because it's too easy -and too hard- to live there.

split-brained

2009-03-30T11:37:00.000-07:00

i am at an interesting intersection in perspective right now, in which i often feel like three different people before lunch.

today is my sick day. i am not really sick; but i haven't been sleeping lately. at night i am unable to stop my brain's rapid loop of nerves and anxieties. i watch 4:47 and 5:54 and 6:23 come and go. i throw the pillows off the bed, fetch them back, write an essay, put on a sweater, take it off, tack up a picture, rip it off my wall. even in these simple, physical actions, i can't make up my mind. what do i need? what do i want?

anyway, as you can imagine, a week without sleep feels like a head full of sand. so here i am. hi.

it seems like i am headed in opposite directions.

i worked on the arts festival recently for yu. like all political endeavors, it was not entirely satisfying. but a part of me thrived off the conversation and the purpose of it. i haven't had an opportunity to discuss my favorite music, my favorite books and films and words and punctuation marks, in some time, and occasionally i forget that side of me is there. i know anyone who read the last few posts would be confused by that claim, since it seems to be all i write about here, but i get to think about those kinds of things almost as rarely as i post (har.) i love hearing about what other people have listened to, what has inspired them, what they've seen that's made them think about things differently or understand things better. i love the wild, messy eccentricity of people who really care about their favorite forms of art, even though i am usually alienated and belittled by their pretension.

so that's a part of my dilemma. i sort of admire that name-dropping, poetry-spouting world, even though i'm not really a part of it. it excites me, and i think i produce better writing when i'm around it.

but there are drawbacks to that lifestyle. not all, but many of the people i know who actively pursue a life in art or photography or whatever seem less...reliable. they're creatures of the wind. they go when they feel a calling and don't sweat the small stuff.

but i am irrevocably responsible. i do not freewheel; it makes me nervous. i crave routine and habit and stability. i eat cereal and milk for breakfast every morning.

and this is part two of my dilemma.

i've dated many people. i guess four years in new york will do that to you. i find myself frustratingly between axioms: too religious and not religious enough at the same time. too religious to get together for drinks, not religious enough to swear off movies. too religious to sing in front of men, not religious enough to wear ankle-length skirts.

let's suppose that i meet someone who is "solid" - dependable and reliable, fun and nice. still to my right, but able to enjoy certain movies and books. another side of me emerges: the side that most of friends from high school and home know, more focused on religion and family and known quantities than hypothetical concepts. it is not, necessarily, a bad side. but does it belong to the same person who interviews women about kol isha and messes around with screenplays?

are the two mutually exclusive? can they coexist?

if i go in one direction, will i lose the other?

glazers do it better

2009-03-01T11:45:00.000-08:00

i've written a few posts about why i love my great-grandfather, none of which capture it quite as well as this phone exchange i had with him today:

FUDGE: so grampa, you know, i'm going on all these interviews now, because if i don't get a job after graduation i'll have to go back to wisconsin, and you know how my mom feels about that.

GRAMPA: she threatened to charge you rent?

FUDGE: exactly. so they told me i have to buy a matching suit jacket and skirt for this interview, but i went to this store to get a jacket, and the jacket alone costs a fortune! it was like a hundred and fifty dollars!

GRAMPA: yeah, yeah.

FUDGE: so then i called my mother, and i asked her if i should buy it, and she said, 'a hundred and fifty dollars for a suit jacket? what are you, crazy? haven't you got anything else to wear?'

GRAMPA: uh huh, uh huh.

FUDGE: so then i said, 'well, sure, i have this jumper that looks pretty professional, but mom, they told me to wear a matching suit and jacket!' and she said, 'as long as you look professional, you'll be alright.' but grampa, what if i wear the jumper and i don't get the job?

GRAMPA: then your mother will buy you the jacket.

song of songs

2009-01-31T17:46:00.000-08:00

i noticed a very interesting phenomenon at a shabbaton i attended recently, and i'd like to present it to you - without judgment or analysis, if i can.

it was a shtotsy shabbos. to reach the proper shtotsiness threshhold, they brought in an a cappella group. these were guys, students, like nearly everyone at the shabbaton. it was a pleasure, not only to hear them, but to observe them: i kept myself entertained trying to interpret the hand signals they would occasionally flash each other as they sang. they performed at davening and a few times during the meal. they beatboxed; they did scat; at the end of songs they would break into astonishing and surprisingly intricate riffs or arrangements. between them they had a pretty wide range of vocal tones and blended them with smooth efficiency.

in short, they were very good. but it was clear that they were students first, yeshiva guys. i didn't know them, but in their white shirts and black pants, they looked the part.

time for a small tangent.

so. kol isha.

it's an inyan with many nuances, many shades, many interpretations. with my poor grasp of the subject, it would be unfair for me to attempt to define it. for that i refer you to links like this and suggest further research.

i do not pose what follows as my personal view, but a description of what i perceive to be common practice, if you can even talk about such a thing, in yu.

in yu circles, it seems that women are encouraged to sing with men during bentching or davening, but in no other context. certainly i've never seen a band or a choir of women perform for a male audience in a university setting. perhaps in other arenas. but i know that most of my friends would consider these performances 'sketchy' at best. at any rate, i think we can agree that standard orthodox policy discourages it.

And by its nature, halachakically sound as it may be, that policy limits.

i am always fascinated by the talent that i encounter in my peers. at this point, it may be a little embarrassing that i am still surprised when a friend opens her mouth and unearthly music rings out, or i pick up her sketchbook and witness a vision. G-d implants all kinds of miracles in people, and i have had the pleasure to know some truly miraculous people, even in passing.

yet in orthodox judaism, the talent of women is no simple thing. with some talents - visual arts, even writing - gender is no bar. but i have always wondered about those of my friends whose throats house treasures. you know women like this too (although if you're male, perhaps you've never heard them): they're the ones who perform at women's benefits; in the back of your shul, quietly, beside you during kedusha; in their dining rooms as they're clearing the shabbos table. and instantly you think of a different world or maybe a different life where they would be on a stage somewhere drawing tears from the coldest eyes. my grandmother has an expression for voices like these. 'to make angels cry,' she says.

i feel privileged to listen as they sing. But in the back of my head i think of the cost. what must it be like to contain this music, to flex a muscle so strong, to cradle so much beauty - and keep the lid closed? don't tell me about women's concerts or women's tours or things like that. yes, i know. but it's not the same. it's not the same as landing your first role in a broadway musical, and it's not the same as singing to thousands at an outdoor festival or a national opera house or whatever else you can think of.

It’s not singing a duet with a baritone, either.

they tell you to do what you love. what if you love to sing - if singing is your life - but you're almost categorically prohibited from pursuing that as a career?

I dreamed once of being famous. wanted to be a nationally-acclaimed songwriter (doesn’t everyone at some point?). I had no particular skill for it, so i mourned that dream hardly at all. But the experience gave me a taste of what some – not all - vocally gifted orthodox women might feel. Denied, a little bit. Constricted.

Of course, restraint, for lack of a better word, is integral to Orthodox Judaism. There’s a lot of things we don’t do. We don’t eat cheeseburgers. We don’t work on shabbos.

But those, for most people who are born frum, anyway, are easy.

We don’t wear certain things, even if they look good. We don’t hang out certain places.

We don’t hold hands.

There are a lot of things we, as orthodox jews, do not do. And some are hard.

In that frame of reference, here is what I stumbled across this shabbos:

I was walking down a stairwell in the building where the shabbaton had eaten. There were some speeches, interesting but longish, and it was somewhere in the grayish midpart of the afternoon. I was tired and focused only on the unfair number of stairs remaining between me and the ground floor.

After just a few steps, an unmistakable swelling of sound filled the stairwell, and I paused, smiling to myself. Apparently the a cappella group had decided to practice in the stairwell, which, running a considerable distance as it did, boasted rich, atmospheric acoustics. I hardly noticed the flights as I walked, the lush layerings of voice floating up to me like magic. I listened closely for each harmony and each part, singling them out as i identified them with my pitiful knowledge of music: this one is holding down the bass end, that one is doing a round, the other one –

The other one was a trilling, gorgeous soprano.

I stopped on the steps, frowned, and listened closely. But there was no mistaking it: the soaring, almost angelic tone was distinctly feminine. And now I heard others. It dawned on me that the unearthly tapestry of sound rising all around me, swelling and subsiding like waves in the sea, was full-bodied. Every range was represented. Baritones, altos, sopranos. They were all singing the same zemer, but the harmonies had shifted, rearranging themselves to accommodate the new flexibility and reach of their voices. These were no ordinary voices: each was rich, elegant, powerful. Together there were maybe twelve.

It sounded like every part of the world, from the earth to the sky, was singing. It was glorious.

But it was also stupefying.

Could I really be hearing what I was hearing? In this place? With these people? The guys had been doing some Yehuda songs earlier. Not envelope pushers as I would imagine them.

I descended the staircase slowly. As I said, the songs came in waves. I detected a trend: the male voices would start, and then, after a time, the higher end would join in. I was utterly intrigued. I kept walking, enveloped in the music.

As I neared the ground level, I finally discovered the a capella group, knitted together in a tight half circle on a landing. I watched their faces, mystified. Where were the other voices coming from? Had I completely lost it? They parted to let me and my friend pass, still singing.

It was at the bottom of the next flight that I found the girls.

I stopped to consider their arrangement.

I don’t remember how many girls there were. Maybe five. Some I knew, some I did not, but all sounded indisputably beautiful. They were separated from the guys by one and a half flights of stairs: they couldn’t see each other at all. Yet the acoustics were intimate, and they could hear each other with perfect precision.

I stood by the door to the flight, watching, noting, wondering how this had evolved.

Had the girls heard the choir practicing in the stairwell and decided to hum along, softly at first, then with escalating volume as they lost themselves in the music? Had the boys asked for their accompaniment? It seemed impossible for either group to be unaware of the crucial and substantial role each voice was playing in the sound.

How did the a cappella group feel about it?

Were the women’s voices an unwelcome addition? Was the group concerned that they were violating an issur, but too afraid to offend the girls by moving to another practice space?

Was it, perhaps, not something which would have occurred to them, but which they didn’t mind? Were they enjoying the majesty of this sound?

What about the women?

What was their justification—or did they even see a need for one? Was this, at last, an opportunity to participate in a full choir? Was I mistaking them entirely—was this just the impetus anyone feels, when they hear a beautiful song, to sing along? Did they feel immodest? Did they care?

Standing there, I doubted anyone in the stairwell could remain unaffected, untouched by the delicate grace of the interlocking voices, building and dying away.

Was it right or wrong? I’ll leave that for you to think about. I'm still thinking myself.

But I will tell you this: the image and the music will stay with me a long while. In a way I cannot fully explain, that stairwell feels emblematic to me of what orthodox Judaism today can sometimes be. You would have found it nowhere else.

are you still my friend?

2009-01-24T16:44:00.001-08:00

so. january, huh? is it pathetic that the last time i wrote anything of substance we all thought hillary would be president? i'd say i haven't had time, but that's not strictly true. i feel pinched: there's so much i would like to write about, and if i ever wrote any of it, i'd have to develop an alias for real life. curse you, google!

these past few months have spun me around a few times, but for the first time in a long time, i feel like i have a direction. that this is partially due to a teen novel sensation is a little embarrassing, but hey. you take your knocks.

my ambivalence about the future has been starting to peek through the cracks in my life. through sheer providence, i started an internship at a major publishing company last week*. i've done the revolving-door-boy thing. i organized the clothes in my dresser by function. (do you ever feel like that? everything you can't control is incomprehensible, but at least your socks should know who's boss?)

nevertheless, i'm beginning to see the trajectory more clearly. post-college is not the vast blank i thought it would be. you move in steps, seeing only exactly what's in front of you: you can get an apartment in these three places, you can apply for a job here, here and here, these people you like will be living this far away, you need to make x amount of money...it's funny how things fill themselves in at the last minute. i'm a student, we're trained to study, but i think you really can't study for life. things either happen or they don't, and no amount of prep-work can ensure either outcome.

this sort of disappoints me, because i can prep like the dickens, so by the old point-system, i could've been home free. but two millenia of philosophers plus my mother can't be wrong.

and i think i'm finally okay with that. i have never been the queen of spontaneity, but taking things as they come has its appeal. a year ago i would never have expected to be where i am now. and while i love stern, love my friends, love what a home this place has - despite all my freshman qualms - come to be to me, i also acknowledge that some of the dreams i had before i came here have gotten buried beneath it.

forgive me, people, but you knew this was coming. let's talk twilight.

so i think my excuse for reading those books is almost respectable. i got stuck in an airport (flight delayed three hours) and knew from experience that david baliducci did nothing for me. some of my friends (you know who you are) had also gone to see the movie recently. 'hmm,' i thought. 'that's a hefty-looking tome there in hudson news. i have three hours to kill. it can't be worse than the one about the mona lisa cult.'

150 pages later i had drawn two conclusions:

1. everyone i know is a better writer than this woman

a. this woman is writing about vampiric high school crushes

b. the plot is a thinly-disguised device to stretch the book out and, in the sequels, resembles z-grade horror movies

2. this woman is a world-famous successful author

then, sitting there in the airport, staring at the long gray stretch of concrete where my plane should have been for a good four hours, i reached another conclusion:

3. if i really, really wanted to, and if i worked hard, i could write something better. so why haven't i?

it's all i ever really wanted to do. that's what it says in my middle-school yearbook. right next to my name. sandwiched in between "i want to be a mommy" and "i want to be a rebbetzin" there was my 20-year-projective: "i want to be an author."

i was one of those kids who was never good at anything. think back to your kindergarten years. fairly early on, you get the breakdown: there's the "artists", the kids who can color neatly inside the lines and whose flowers always look like flowers; there's the fast runners, the kids who are good at two-square and dodgeball and machanayim; there's the kids who are bossy and good at organizing the other kids; there's the kids who win the middos contests. i was none of those. i almost got held back for handwriting. i couldn't cut in a straight line and always put on too much glue. my flowers looked like monkeys and every project i made came out the same unappetizing brownish-black color, because i always tried to marker things over. i was an instant out in machanayim and talked too much for anyone to want to sit next to me. by second grade, i was thoroughly convinced that i would never find my calling.

in third grade, we had to publish our own books.

i still remember the first things i wrote. they weren't as out there as the pt's; nothing special. a girl getting hurt on the slide and having to go to the hospital, where her other friends helicoptered in to visit her (hmm. on second thought...). i wrote a whole series about a teddybear named 'honest' on the run from the toy factory along with his sidekick, who was some kind of penguin or pig, and which got needlessly violent at some point.

but what i remember most is the awe i felt, sitting down in front of a blank page or screen and knowing i could make anything i wanted happen on it. i didn't have to be good at machanayim in real life. i could write about someone who was. i didn't have to stay in milwaukee in real life. i didn't have to be seven. i didn't have to be jewish. i didn't have to be anything. i could disappear into a million protagonists in a million alien worlds and live lives entirely separate from my own. it was like reading but better - because i got to decide the ending.

i kept them from people unless they were for school. i couldn't imagine why anyone would share things like that. every adventure i wrote was a fantasy, someplace or someone else i wished i could be, and i was a little ashamed of it. nobody else in my class ever seemed to want to be anyone but themselves. they found 'what ifs' a little pointless. what if you were a prisoner during the french revolution? what if you were on atlantis? what if you were an actress? but you aren't. so...what does it matter?

for awhile that question stumped me.

i still get it from time to time, in different forms. why do you waste so much time writing made-up things? isn't writing stories kind of like being a professional liar? it makes sense to ask, i think. why do people give hours of their lives to somebody else's make-believe, anyway? we all do it at some point. people sit and watch television for hours. they pay twelve dollars to go to a movie about someone whose biography bears no resemblance to their own. what do we get out of that?

everyone answers that a little differently. i'm curious to know what you think. i was in middle-school, which i think is when you read the books that will be your favorites for the rest of your life, when i started solidifying my answer.

from books, from music, and from any kind of story, i gained two kinds of knowledge.

i'll call the first trivial. facts. you know what i mean. i learned where countries were located, how feudalism developed, what scotland yard was (hat tip, ms. marple). i learned words which were too big for me and which i mispronounced because i only encountered them in writing. i went around calling zimbabwe 'rhodesia' like an idiot because i hadn't gotten up to the twentieth century yet.

but i also learned experiential things. i learned about people.

i think everyone has moments like this, when you're reading a paragraph and suddenly the author has expressed precisely and clearly a feeling you've never been able to understand or define, and suddenly it makes sense. authors have a phenomenal power to explain the experience of being human. in life, you don't get the narrator telling you out of the corner of their mouth why your friend isn't happy that you did well on the test or why your mother seems preoccupied today. but stories peel back the layers. they let you see dimensions of people you'd never have access to otherwise. they point out the significance in details. suddenly you notice what a person's kitchen says about them, you scrutinize the way they wear their backpack, how they stand on the subway. everything becomes educational. everything becomes interesting.

when you're looking at the world with that lens, it's almost impossible to be bored and hard to be lonely. you learn to see people's vulnerabilities and strengths. i guess on the one hand it removes you a little bit: you become more of a watcher than a doer, more of an observer than a participant in the world around you. maybe that's the price you pay. but i don't think anyone can escape involvement in their own lives entirely anyway, do you?

regardless, that's what i think books are capable of. and that's why i think good books, good stories are essential. they have the ability to mean so many things. they can be friends, understanding things about you that you don't understand yourself; they can be mentors, imparting insights into the way people think and respond; they can be tour guides, leading you through exotic locales and times. good books change the people who read them.

that's what i've always wanted to create. a story with that kind of power, characters with that kind of complexity. people who feel real, that you can love, that you want to spend time with, that you can learn from. that's what i want to be when i grow up. if i can create something that will mean the world to even one person, it's enough. i can work a day job forever if i know that somewhere, someone is reading a story that i wrote, living in it, and happy because of it.

it might take five years, it might take ten. but i will do it someday. i think it's worth doing.

and that's why i'm done apologizing to boys for being me. yes, i watch movies. yes, i listen to secular music. i love secular music. i love secular books. i love everything. i think everything is interesting, and i plan to learn more about whatever i can. i am tired of trying to find unconditional corruption and vice in every facet of culture. not every book is a good book, not every song is a good song, but i refuse to write off entire genres of knowledge because of that. one day i will find a guy who understands this; until then, i've got a tall order to fill, and all the time in the world to figure out how.

so that's where i'm holding. will it make all the work, all the waiting, and all the knocks i'm about to get at this out-of-my-league internship worth it?

it's time to find out.

*more about this as soon as i figure out how to write about it covertly

One Day I Will Actually Write Another Post, and It Will Probably Be Long

2008-12-18T10:23:00.000-08:00

But until then, get your fix tonight on wyur.org at 8:00 Pm Eastern! It's the SEASON FINALE! We've got over 25 candidates so far and the newsfeeds are still reeling in, plus an update on the original Lawnmower-Eating-Man! Vote for YOUR candidate tonight!

because friends don't let friends pay their water bill with spider drawings

2008-12-04T12:36:00.000-08:00

tune in tonight at 8 - wyur.org!

no more prejudice against ugly fruit

2008-11-13T11:28:00.000-08:00

yes, human rights have advanced leaps and bounds over the past few centuries. look at us in america. we now have a black president. strides are being made to treat every man with dignity and respect! but ask yourself this: what about vegetables?

sure, life's great if you're ben-adam. but suppose you're a lopsided rutabaga? a crooked carrot? heaven help you, a class-2 banana?

(you all know who you are.)

until recently, handiwork like the above were shunned in britain. but today an article in the new york times announced the repealing of such prejudice. today, at last, it is legitimate and mentally safe to be a curvy cucumber in the U.K.

if you are aware of a recent news development weirder or dumber than this one, im radioyu or call 212-923-2471 tonight at 8 and let us know. you could get lucky and win the Man Eats Lawnmower Weekly National Championship of the Week.

and you know how fulfilling that can be.

the polar bear trophy

2008-11-06T12:29:00.000-08:00

have you had something stupid happen to you recently? did you read about one in the news?

perhaps you got bitten by a wild fox while you were jogging and then decided it would be best to jog to a hospital before removing the fox so it could be tested for rabies.

perhaps you attempted to drive through brooklyn.

either way, listen in to wyur.org at 8 pm est and let me know! you can im us at radioyu on aol or call in at 212-923-2471.

as an added plus, with your prayers, my shuttle might make it on time this week!

tonight at 8

2008-10-30T15:06:00.000-07:00

the premiere episode of Man Eats Lawnmower National Weekly Championship! Have you heard a dumb news story recently? Think it could holds its own in a fight? Tune in to wyur.org - call our studio number, 212-923-2471 - and pit it against our contestants for a chance to win the Mystery Trophy!

my dat wif prins wiliyim

2008-10-23T15:30:00.000-07:00

(click here for more traditional narration)

don't call us, we'll call you

2008-10-06T18:05:00.000-07:00

i caught up with the pt tonight during her bedtime snack and thought i'd take advantage of the opportunity to ask her about her future.

me: the pt, what do you want to be when you grow up?

the pt (eating cookies): probably an orphanidge.

me: er...a what?

the pt: you know. an orphanidge.

me: you want to be an orphanage when you grow up?

the pt: yeah.

me: do you know what that is?

the pt: duh.

me: do you mean you want to run an orphanage?

the pt: oh. yeah, probably. give them clothes and stuff.

me: that's pretty kind of you. out of curiosity, why do you want to do that?

the pt: there's nothing else to do. oh wait! i remembered what i REALLY want to be.

me: oh, okay! what's that?

the pt: a MAILMAN!

me:

the pt eats another cookie.

me: a mailman?

the pt: it's the easiest job in the world!

me: how do you figure that? you have to go to all these houses and deliver the mail.

the pt (confidentially): and that's IT!

me: there's a lot of houses, you know. that's a lot of driving.

the pt (shrugging): so i'll walk.

me: so you'll--the pt, walking is even slower than driving.

the pt (shrugging again): then i'll bicycle!

me: er - okay, but won't you get kind of bored? all you'll ever do is put mail in mailboxes.

the pt: that's what makes it so easy! you just go over to the blue mailbox on the corner, take out all the mail, put it in the bag, and put it in people's slots!

me: i see.

(pause)

me: the pt, i need a job.

the pt: me too. but i know how to roller skate.

me: what now?

the pt: do you know how to roller skate?

me: um...i guess so, but i don't have any skates.

the pt: oh. well that's your problem. if you knew how to roller skate, you could be a mailman.

me (at a loss)

the pt: why don't you just go to college?

me: i already did that.

the pt: well, you could go to medical school.

me: i don't want to be a doctor.

the pt: oh. well, you could go to waiter school. hey, why don't i go to waiter school?

me: waiter school? what is that, where you learn how to be a waiter?

the pt: yeah! that's a great idea! i think i'll do that afterward.

me: after what? after you're a mailman?

the pt: no. after college.

do it for your country

2008-10-12T15:02:00.000-07:00

you know you're excited.

while i'm on this posting spree

2008-10-04T22:16:00.000-07:00

to lighten up all the navel-gazing going on about here of late, here's a 'grandma rose' episode for you, guest-starring everyone's favorite great-great aunt from poland. that's right, ladies and gentlemen, give it up fooorrr.....bobba!

THE SCENE

A grandmother and college student, zooming down Jewel Avenue like the mafia. Time: 6:37 pm, Friday afternoon.

GRANDMOTHER: Oh my GAWD Perlie, I can't believe you are still managing to get on the wrong bus after FOUR YEARS, oh my gawd how I was worrying so that you would not make it, and here you are five minutes before Shabbos and you're a mess, how are you ever going to - HO HO HO!
COLLEGE STUDENT (startled): What the--?

GRANDMOTHER makes a sudden u-turn; COLLEGE STUDENT's face slams into laundry bag on her lap.

GRANDMOTHER (rolling down COLLEGE STUDENT'S window and leaning across her): WHAT HAVE WE GOT HERE!

She has double-parked her car in front of a little fastidious house. An elderly woman in a Hawaiian shirt and sweat pants is standing by the curb in front of the car. She looks miffed.

COLLEGE STUDENT: Oh hey, it's Bobba!

GRANDMA (shouting, as if elderly woman is hard-of-hearing): PAULIE! I SEE YOU HAVE COME OUT OF YOUR HOUSE!

BOBBA (shouting, as if GRANDMA is hard-of-hearing): SO?

GRANDMA: SURELY YOU ARE NOT GETTING IN THE CAR FIVE MINUTES BEFORE SHABBOS!

BOBBA: IF YOU MUST KNOW, I LEFT SOMETHING IN THE CAR. SO NOW I AM GOING BACK FOR IT.

GRANDMA: OH. I SEE.

BOBBA: YES.

(awkward pause)

COLLEGE STUDENT: Hi, Bobba!

BOBBA: ROSIE, WHO IS THIS YOU GOT IN THE CAR HERE, PERLIE?

GRANDMA: YES. SHE IS COMING TO ME FOR SHABBOS BUT EVEN AFTER FOUR YEARS SHE CANNOT GET ON THE RIGHT BUS. SHE IS JUST A BABY.

BOBBA: HMPH.

GRANDMA: SHE BROUGHT ME FLOWERS.

COLLEGE STUDENT: Because she's so pretty!

GRANDMA: OH MY GAWD, PAULIE! DID YOU HEAR THAT? SHE SAID I AM PRETTY!

BOBBA: SHE SAID YOU ARE PRETTY?

GRANDMA: YES! CAN YOU BELIEVE IT?

BOBBA: I CAN NOT SAY. I DO NOT HAVE MY GLASSES ON.

GRANDMA: OH. WELL THEN YOU COULD NOT SAY.

BOBBA: NO.

The cars behind GRANDMA'S car honk in a manner indicating that they would like her to pull up, or park, or get towed.

GRANDMA: Okay bye.

COLLEGE STUDENT: Bobba, can I come visit you on Shabbos?

BOBBA (sniffing the air): It will rain tomorrow.

GRANDMA: Then forget about it, kid. Rain is the pits.

COLLEGE STUDENT: But Bobba only lives a block away from you, Grandma.

BOBBA: It is bad luck to go outside when it is raining.

COLLEGE STUDENT: I'll walk fast.

GRANDMA: No no no, it is no good to go outside when it is raining.

BOBBA: No. No good.

COLLEGE STUDENT: What if it's not raining?

BOBBA: So then you can come. What do I care?

GRANDMA: But not if it is raining.

BOBBA: No! Rosie, don't let her leave the house if it is raining!

COLLEGE STUDENT: But-

GRANDMA: Very well. Goodbye, Paulie.

BOBBA: Good bye and good riddance.

GRANDMA's car pulls abruptly back into traffic and makes a hard right.

GRANDMA: She is a weird one, that Bobba.

a post

2008-10-04T20:44:00.001-07:00

post, says anonymous. alright, alright, alright. generally i like to keep these things quality - i only have a really good thought twice a year! - but we'll see if i can form some of my ramblings into something cohesive.

so....october, huh? geez.

it's senior year for me. the rest of you might recognize this year by its more popular name, 'the Year You Decide That Actually, the Past Three Years Weren't That Bad, and You Don't Really Want to Move Out of Your Dormroom.' stern does offer the interesting option of a fifth year, but in my case, this would be blatant stalling (which is a federal offense in my country.) i love school and could probably sit in classes, doodling in the margins and underlining keywords, forever, building elaborate storylines in my head and doing exactly nothing practical with myself again. but there are drawbacks to the Eternal School Plan (esp):

1) technically, i need experience, not further schooling, to get a good job in my field.
2) nothing practical = nothing paycheck.
3) this would eventually drive everyone i am related to mad.

so instead i am pursuing the Elusive First Job path (efj), which for a journalism major coming of age in the midst of a journalism crisis, looks like this:

-READER'S DIGEST WEB COPYEDIT INTERN: 'Remove excess page numbers and parantheses from multiple manuscripts. Translate Canadian and UK English into American English.' (ie, real english. clearly the use of the term 'translate' indicates that they are indeed foreign languages.)
-COPY INTERN FOR PC MAGAZINE: 'PC experience a must. Mac appreciated.'
-EDITORIAL INTERN FOR SPIN MAGAZINE: 'Interns at SPIN are responsible for transcribing interviews, researching stories, running errands, organizing mail, conducting interviews, and compiling music news for possible use in the magazine.'
-02138 EDITORIAL INTERN: 'Part-time or full-time editorial internships are available this spring at 02138, the new independent magazine for Harvard alumni. We seek confident, witty writers and hard-nosed researchers to join the creative team in our midtown Manhattan offices, starting in January.'

and on and on it goes.

notice something about these postings? that's right - they're unpaid. virtually all of them. i am coming to the slow realization that writing is at the most an intriguing field and at worst a reeeeaaallly low-paying one, so you had better get some job satisfaction to pad your earnings. i'm at a strange crossroads: everything seems possible and impossible at the same time. wow, i could do music interviews! i dreamed of doing music interviews in high school! yeah, but you don't hang around in bars and have only been to three concerts in your life. what music magazine is going to hire you? well- okay, but i could work for ziff davis! they're a block away from my dorm, they publish internationally-read computer magazines, and they even pay! yeah, but what do you have on your resume that a huge publisher like ziff davis wants to acquire? three years of writing center tutoring, a stint as an assistant at hadassah magazine, a summer interviewing zookeepers at your local zoo. there's no harpercollins or new york times on there. what are you going to do about it? how will you break through?

there's nothing to tie me to any one place. admittedly, i am not a light packer, but all i've got is a room's worth of stuff. so where should i go? will i go to seattle and become a radio editer? will i move to miami and duck hurricanes yearround? should i go to the hip singles community in silver spring that everyone talks about, and get a job at a political outlet in dc? should i move to london and work as a tour guide in a castle (impractical, but fun)? should i conquer my incomprehensible fears of ha'aretz and attend grad school for half the price in israel? what about la? atlanta? chicago? toronto?

what about new york? i could stay there. oh Father in Heaven, how easy it would be to stay there and not. ship. my stuff. across country. i could move to the heights like every other stern grad, battling cockroaches by night, working in the city by day, davening in the subway on those loooong morning commutes. i could make compot for the potluck shabbos meals everyone's got going on over there, room with people i went to class with but never knew, and attend the world's maximum-fire-hazard meat market for davening every shabbat. i could eat at the little restaurants in front of yu and wish i was still young enough to be in college. nix!

or i could move to the west side. but um...isn't the west side for people who plan to make money at some point in their lives? you know. people whose out-of-college jobs cover things like having your own bedroom. gee...i really want my own bedroom...and the upper west side is pretty....but it's a 'scene.' what does that mean? does it matter if it's out of your price range?

or i could live in queens. or brooklyn. or the lower east side? unknown. unknown. unknown. two-fare, one-hour-plus commute zones.

(whew. okay, pause for a second. show of hands. how many of you are glad you don't have to live in my head full-time?)

or i could live in milwaukee. in my parents' house. and work for...bridge-building magazine? or get my masters at uwm? and er...live in my parents' house? wait- i'm having a flashback from the future:

middle sister: i'm not on sock duty! SHE'S on sock duty!
youngest sister: how am i supposed to know whose socks are whose? we all have the same size feet!
mom: i don't care who's on sock duty, between the three of you, some one should have figured out that the argyle socks are your father's, and those are MY pantyhose!

ergh. maybe not.

anyway, while my parents love me, we have a strict no-kids-above-18-living-here-permanently rule. and i can't imagine what my bubbe would make of it.

bubbe: i thought you could use some crochet covers for your pencils for school. so i'm going to come over tomorrow for coffee and crochet them for you!

so as you can see, i have a lot of deciding to do. but instead i just feel sort of stuck. all my life i've had a gameplan. it's been like stops on the six train: first comes elementary school. then comes middle school. then comes high school. then comes college. in many households in my community, that last would have been seminary. but in the end - i've found this more and more - we all wind up in the same place:

now what?

the rules were so clear and irrefutable before. everybody knows you have to go to high school. what high school, with which haskhafa, these are details you can worry over and work out on your own, but you always have a general idea of what has to happen. in other careers, the road is very well-worn. going to be a doctor? well, then you have to get into medical school, land a residency, take the boards, join a practice...going to be a lawyer? have to get into law school, be a clerk, take the bar, work at a firm...going to be an accountant? have to get the internship, go to networking events, land the entry-level position...

going to be a...you? what do you do to become a 'you'? what do you do when there is no road, and even you aren't sure where you're going?

i don't know. and neither do many of the girls i grew up with. a lot of them live near me now, in one living arrangement or another, and i find myself having the same conversation with all my friends, high school or stern alike. we're all kind of just 'here', now. we've finished the kid chapters but don't really know how to start the adult parts. we all know you're supposed to get married and have families. but how? suddenly the other person in that equation weighs a lot more than they did when our hashkafa teachers referred to them. we all know you're supposed to get jobs - although we have differing ideas about what's suitable for jewish women - which you need to show up to at eight in the morning. but what? we can get jobs cutting out stenciled borders in kindergartens for mimimum wage - is there more than that? is a job something you do to make money for your family, or is it a way to harness your talents to make a difference in the world? you can't know what your purpose in the world is - but can you guess?

we all want our lives to work out okay. but we don't have a gameplan. there's no rules anymore. so how do we know we're doing the things we should?

some people would argue that all this 'not knowing' is actually freedom. the freedom to innovate, to go where the wind takes you, etc. i've given some thought to this argument, and i'm honestly not sure. i think i'm afraid that if i go with the current i'll get lost somewhere far, far away, and won't know my way back. but maybe that's part of being an adult, too.

i don't know.

by the way, anonymous - you said you'd bake me a cake.

1958

2008-08-16T19:24:00.000-07:00

you know how if you think about the same things over and over, after awhile, they all sound the same? you find yourself coming back to the same reasoning or emotion or anxiety or aspiration again and again? i had a moment like that this shabbos.

we had stopped by my bubbe's house in the late afternoon just to talk with her for awhile, since she doesn't get out as much as she used to. my mother and my bubbe entangled themselves in one of those technical conversations only mothers and bubbes can have about what this family member should go for in college and how many tuna fish sandwiches you should pack for this amount of people to get to this kind of roadside attraction and whether it was worth it to put shabbos clothes in a suitcase or ship them ad infinitum. i listened for a little while and eventually i found myself examining the pictures on my bubbe's walls.

these are not in general things i pay close attention to, since most of them have been hanging from their hooks longer than i've been alive, and i've already had much opportunity to study them in close detail during long sederim, thanksgiving meals, etc. i don't know why i decided to look at them again today. but something tucked into a corner of my grandparents' wedding picture caught my eye, and i leaned forward to pluck it from the frame.

it was a black and white picture, not much bigger than a postage stamp. there were three people in the picture: a middle-aged couple and a teenage boy. the teenager, posed between the adults, grinned at something off-camera; he could have been an American high school poster boy with his crew cut and dimples. His mother, on his right, draped one arm over his left shoulder and smiled down at him, her dark hair in a perfect bob, her elegant shoulders white against her sundress. And the boy's father had one elbow hooked playfully over his other shoulder and his mouth wide in mid-laugh. There was a strong curl dangling over his forehead, a faint mustache, and a glint of benign amusement in his crinkled eyes. The three of them looked to me like the handsomest family I had ever seen, and the photo was casual, as though they'd taken it in a drugstore booth. I turned it over, looking for a date.

The back of the photo just said "1958."

My grandfather had come into the room while I was studying it, and I realized that he was the boy in the picture. Those were his parents, my great-grandma and great-grandfather, the one I call and visit on Sundays. I looked at the picture again. 1958. fifty years ago. the picture itself was older than my great-grandfather had been when it was taken.

it has always amazed me how bodies change so much throughout our lives. we are never quite the same people, from day to day, from year to year. until now, i have been in the beginning stages of life, where you are always growing into something or growing out of it, becoming what you will be when you're an adult. but it has only gradually dawned on me that adults shift with the years too. in the 1958 picture, my great-grandfather is about 44, which is neither young nor old. but i was still shocked by how different he looks: his face so much firmer, his skin lighter, unwrinkled, his hair dark, crisp and curly (he's been going for these civil war sideburns lately), his arms strong and toned. only his eyes, with their mischievous twinkle, are exactly the same. if not for them, he could have been a different person entirely. the same is true of my great-grandmother, whose queenly profile caught me by surprise, or even my grandfather, who is older himself now and worlds apart from the abercrombie & fitch youth in that photograph. but the minds, the personalities are the same. my great-grandfather today has many of the same opinions and thoughts that he had 50 years ago. only the outside has changed.

i find that lately i have been thinking about time a lot, maybe even obsessing over it. until this point, the soothing cycle of school years and summer vacations was really all i'd ever known. this week i dug up an old story i'd written when i was twelve, a wannabe novel, and reading through it, i was fascinated by how much that twelve-year-old view of the world is preserved in its pages. without thinking, i have believed for years that i would never grow up for good (read: irreversibly). i seem to have invested in this 'do-over button' scheme, where if one life decision doesn't work out you can always try something else, and there is all the time in the world to spend with all the right people doing all the important things. didn't take your younger sister to the drugstore on her roller skates to buy her a chocolate? next week! didn't call your grandmother on her birthday? next year! didn't find a way to make your job meaningful? next job! it never occurred to me that you could run out of nexts or that the time you spend waiting for them isn't put back on the meter. my great-grandmother is gone now. i will never write the story she always tried to dictate to me about how her father's horse used to bang on the door when it was hungry or how she drove her parents around when she was fourteen.

and, if everything goes according to plan, i will graduate college this year. throughout my life, almost unconsciously, i find myself comparing where i am and who i am to what my parents, grandparents, friends were when they were my age and what they became later. am i on track? do i understand what they understood? what will i be like when i'm the age they are in that picture? what was it like to be me when that picture was taken? am i still the person i used to be, even though my face has changed its shape, my hair has gotten curlier, my resume's gotten longer, my driver's license is expiring...or am i becoming somebody else, in a picture that hasn't been taken yet?

it's so easy to lose yourself in the minutae--and believe that i am not minimizing their importance--of day-to-day life. in how many tuna sandwiches you need to pack, how you're going to ship your clothes, what kind of cell phone service to get. these are the small decisions our lives are made of--but you lose sight of the timeline. we are all at different points on our lines, but they begin and end. and before you know it, one bright autumn afternoon of fun with your son is fifty years behind you, in a universe by itself.

i am still at a point where i can remember what the "Start" sign looks like. the set of memories i usually reference are all about growing pains: professors i had trouble with, school bullies, birthday cakes, sibling rivalries, household chores, family trips. those are the experiences i've been drawing on to define myself for most of my life. but in these next few years there's a paradigm shift coming. i won't really be any kind of child anymore: not a kid or a teenager or a student. will i be what i wanted to be when i grew up? heaven only knows. but for me, that sheltered and nurturing segment of life will be more or less finished. there will be no do-overs. you can't go back to high school.

was high school that much fun? does anyone really want to do ads for their eighth grade yearbook again? discuss amongst yourselves. i don't have any answers. if anyone invented a time machine i'd be the first to get a mortgage for one, or even just a pause button; wouldn't it be great to be able to freeze life, do all the thinking and stewing you need for a given situation, and jump back in without missing any of the action? or better still, wouldn't it be great if you could be in more than one place at once? you could watch your brother throw together a chulent and push your friend's kid on a swing at the same time.

looking at that stamp-sized picture, taken decades before any of these people i love realized they would have grandchildren or great-grandchildren, only one thing is clear to me right now.

what i want most is for someone, sixty or seventy years down the road, to pick up a picture of me and think as i did: "that was my grandmother when she was young. she learned so much from the world around her during her lifetime and treated everyone with love and respect. i'm proud to be her grandchild."

how to deal with your sociopathic boss, according to the pt

2008-07-29T18:23:00.001-07:00

the pt: hey fudge. can't talk now. i'm busy writing a new casl slugwrth book.

fudge: the pt, may i come into your office?

the pt: you're not dead or a zombie or anything, are you?

fudge: maybe. would you let me in anyway?

the pt (doubtfully): okay.

fudge: the pt, i gotta ask you a question.

the pt: okay.

fudge: my boss is really mean. what do you think i should do?

the pt: what boss?

fudge: the one at work.

the pt: oh. i thought you meant the main boss.

fudge: you know how i go to work? and have a boss? she's mean. what should i do?

the pt: stay home, probably.

fudge: but then she'll say, 'fudge, you quitter, you, you have to come to work! i'm not finished yelling at you!' then what should i do?

the pt: stay home more.

fudge: i like your thinking, the pt. what would you do?

the pt: well, probably eat a snack. i'm getting kind of hungry.

fudge: focus, the pt. focus. i mean, what would you do if you had a mean boss?

the pt: where?

fudge: at work.

the pt: i don't go to a work. i'm a kid.

fudge: well, pretend!

the pt (doubtfully): okay.

fudge: okay, so you have a mean boss who's always yelling at you. what do you do, the pt?

the pt:

the pt: skip.

fudge: skip?

the pt: skip away. like this.

(the pt skips away)

fudge:

fudge: hey, the pt! come back! i'm not finished, the pt!

signs your boss may be sociopathic, part 1

2008-07-29T06:59:00.000-07:00

1. you may not speak unless asked a direct question.

2. you may not use the bathroom without explaining where you are going and how long you will be gone.

3. you may not change the free hours you work on days when she is not in the office, even if you will be working the same amount of hours, without her consent and three days' notice.

4. you may not email photographs of your sister, whom your boss asked you to bring in as a model for magazine photographs, to your parents, as they are not your property and your boss has no intention of giving them to you, despite the fact that it would cost her nothing.

5. you may certainly sign a contract stipulating that you will work less hours on friday, so long as you are prepared for your boss to expect you to work overtime on friday nights regardless.

6. you will be expected to produce an entire written report on photography because you foolishly wasted half an hour asking the photographer questions about his trade while picking up prints for your boss.

7. you will be expected to document every thing you do as you do it and will be punished for failing to keep up with documentation.

8. whatever you are doing, you are doing it wrong.

9. you are probably doing it wrong because you are not working hard enough, did not thoroughly peruse the back catalog of publications which exemplify good writing, or are simply stupid.

10. you are not allowed to make mistakes, which is unfortunate for you, since by definition, interns make quite a few mistakes.

11. you are required to gush at length about what a wonderful mentor your boss is and how much you are enjoying your internship to her supervisors if you have any desire to receive credit for your time.

12. your boss will read any evaluation of the internship that you write long before she writes her evaluation of you, so you must never, ever take issue with her treatment of you.

13. you are looking forward to having your wisdom teeth removed because you will get the afternoon off.

14. and your boss makes oral surgery sound like a day at the beach.

ofis rools

2008-07-14T17:14:00.000-07:00

file this under 'things i found behind the couch, on top of an overturned cardboard box next to a pink plastic folding chair':

Ofis ROOls

1. NO flifl
2. NO shawting
3. NO ZOMBYS
4. NO MUMYS
5. NO DED PEPL

when midwesternisms attack

2008-06-19T07:29:00.000-07:00

SCENE: FUDGE, MOM and THE PT at an aerobics studio. FUDGE and MOM have just finished exercising and are putting away their weights. THE PT is coloring on the mats. Offstage right is a water fountain with a pen jammed in its bar.

THE PT (pointing): somebody left their pen in that bubbler.

MOM (wiping face on towel): they did that on purpose, honey. it keeps the bubbler running.

THE PT (flabbergasted):

FUDGE: you know. so the water gets cold.

THE PT dashes to the water fountain and studies its side with an intense scrutiny.

FUDGE and MOM exchange glances.

MOM: what are you doing, the pt?

THE PT: looking for how he gets in.

MOM: how who gets in?

THE PT (impatiently): the bubtler.

FUDGE and MOM exchange another look. MOM abruptly doubles over, helpless.

FUDGE: no no, the pt. a bubbler is a thing that water comes out of that you can drink from. a butler is a servant for rich people. there is no butler in the bubbler.

THE PT (outraged): then how does the water stay cold?

there's a snake in my boot

2008-06-12T18:46:00.000-07:00

well, i hope you will excuse me for the infrequent blogging, but as i'm sure you know by now, i've been a little busy lately, what with the lake shortages and bat-feeding and all.

never in all my years as a wisconsinite have i seen weather like this. i don't know if it's a function of global warming, as my father and his mother debated while she stayed with us for shavuous (during a recent episode of the twilight zone), or if this is simply the kind of thing that happens every once in ten thousand years, like pinkeye or the ice age, but whichever way you look at it, we here in the midwest are beginning to rave.

there is no tv channel you can watch that isn't boxed in by scrolling, flashing text. there is no radio channel you can listen to without minute updates on water levels. there is no street you can drive on without holes in it and no place you can drive to without galoshes, an adult-sized poncho and a good luck charm. there is no basement without carpet mold. every store you walk into has a checkout display of sump-pumps and cements and wet vacs. every newspaper or magazine article is about how to deal with flood damage, how to prepare for floods in unusual places, 'tornado chic', etc.

for instance, the last time i had time to check the sports section of my local newspaper, they ran some article about what to do if a tornado hits when you're in the woods. 'seek shelter,' the editorial advised. 'if you can't find a clearing, do not lie down horizontally, but rather curl yourelf into a ball. make yourself the smallest targest possible to avoid being hit by lightening.'

i read this over my coffee and scoffed. ridiculous! what kind of person randomly finds themselves so entrenched in the woods on a stormy day that they can't even find a clearing? and why do you have to make yourself the smallest target when you're surrounded by trees? i, a city dweller who could pass for a city expert in these parts, took another sip of my coffee and closed the paper with a disdainful curl of my lip. 'country bumpkins,' was something along the line of my thoughts. 'having the time and availability to get themselves stuck in the woods on a weekday.'

this is what is called 'tempting fate.'

but i remained oblivious to my foolishness and the general paranoia invading wisconsin (where you can now pass people on the street wearing bike helmets to protect themselves from falling fish) and continued to show up at work every day. for those of you just joining the broadcast, i am currently working a summer job for the zoological society, which is, inevitably, located at the zoo. this means that showing up to work involves, among other things, passing giraffes, orangutans, poisonous monkeys, etc.

technically, i am supposed to write the text for newsletters, signs, blurbs, and suchlike. but because most of this text requires some kind of contact with the animal or its zookeeper, i have frequently found myself stomping around the zoo grounds for hours on end, ducking under rocks in penguin exhibits, observing blood-stirring to be fed to vampire bats, avoiding aptly-named 'poo pits' - you name it, i've stepped on it. or under it. i have also ingested more mosquitoes and horseflies than the entire spider population of Wauwatosa, but that's for another time.

anyway, today i set out to work, blithe as a clam, despite the various "Danger! Danger!" weather alerts bombarding me via every possible communicative method excluding smoke signals. we had a flash flood alarm, a tornado alarm, severe weather, high winds, what have you. next, i thought, they will be warning us to watch out for 'extreme sky'. i composed my hitlist of places and things to do, as is my custom, and began my usual trek around the zoo. one of my tasks (sorry, i've been sworn to secrecy) involved a real shlep out to the far end of the grounds. i didn't hear the first thunderbolt until i was three quarters of the way there.

it was loud. really loud. and the sky was bright scarlet, even though it was only an hour after lunch. my first thought was, 'huh. bet that hit something.'

my second thought was, 'surely that can't be hail falling from the sky?'

i stopped and looked over my shoulder. i found, to my dumb amazement, that i was on a narrow, little-traveled path around the outskirts of the zoo. there were tall pine trees and thick underbrush all around me, and a bridge a little ways in the distance. the path continued for awhile and then disappeared around a bend. lightening flashed. the pine trees whipped wildly in the wind, and another loud crash sounded.

'you've gotta be kidding me,' i thought, glancing in each direction as though a 7-11 might materialize. but as the lightening flickered again, i was forced to admit that i was, effectively, stuck in the woods during a severe thunderstorm. i was also forced to admit that i probably should have paid slightly more attention to the editorial in the newspaper.

'****,' i thought.

as the wind kicked up, i held my notebook over my head in a pathetic attempt to keep dry and debated what to do next. was i supposed to lie down? on the middle of the path? in the peacock dung? should i seek a clearing? should i curl myself into a ball? should i stay away from the trees or hide under the trees? oh, john malan! i'll be a good girl next time! i promise!

there was another bolt of thunder, and the sky turned from scarlet to purple. i came to a decision with surprising alacrity after that: i ran for it.

that's all for tonight, folks. if you need me, i'll be right here.

hiding under my desk.

Panik! Aaaaa!

2008-06-12T17:05:00.000-07:00

FUDGE (throwing rain poncho over head and slamming back door): Well, I made it home from work alive! Boy, that was ridiculous. The flash flooding, and the -

THE PT (popping out from behind the pantry door): Did you have a tornado drill?

FUDGE: BWAGH!

THE PT: I had a tornado drill. You should have one too.

FUDGE: How did you get behind the pantry door like that?

THE PT: Being safe is so fun.

FUDGE: What are you talking about? What tornado drill? We never had 'tornado drills' when I was young.

THE PT (blinking in obvious mortification)

FUDGE (grumpily): Well whatever. What was this 'tornado drill' like? What did you do, duck under your desks?

THE PT: No!

FUDGE: Well, thank goodness for that.

THE PT: We ducked under the COMPUTER LAB desks!

FUDGE: Why? Couldn't you duck under your own desk?

THE PT: Uhh....I think you're forgetting the evacuating part. It wouldn't really be evacuating if we just stayed in our very own first-grade ROOM.

FUDGE: True. Well. Okay. What did you do in the computer lab?

THE PT: Told a story and practiced being safe!

FUDGE: What was the story about?

THE PT: I don't know. I was panicking.

FUDGE: The PT, did you run around in a circle screaming, 'Panic! AAHHHHH!', the way you do during thunderstorms at home, for forty-five minutes?

THE PT: Uh, not really, no.

FUDGE: Then how were you panicking?

THE PT: Well, my afternoon morah let me skip the line.

FUDGE: Why was that?

THE PT: Because I was terrified of the tornado.

FUDGE (suspiciously): Not because you were running around screaming, 'Panic! AHHHHHH!' ?

THE PT: I wasn't screaming that!

FUDGE: Weren't screaming that?

THE PT: No!

FUDGE: What WERE you screaming?

THE PT: 'Ahhhhh, tornadoes are the only thing in the whole world that I'm afraid of that are actually real!'

FUDGE:

THE PT (sheepish)

FUDGE: That's...rather lengthy.

THE PT (mumbling): Well we never have monster drills.

-------------------------

FUDGE is an editorial intern and staff writer for the County Zoo and is currently wet-vaccing her basement carpeting. THE PT is a well-known novelist and paranoiac. Her upcoming memoir, "My Turnaido Jril" , will be available for purchase on June 18th.

how to tell if you're a nutjob

2008-05-28T07:22:00.000-07:00

by fudge

1. will you only pick up your toys with a robot arm?

2. do you take a hula hoop to school with you every day, even though they already have hula hoops at school?

3. do you try to smuggle a lunchbox full of water to shul with you under your coat on shabbos?

4. do you hum the theme song to your favorite cartoon show and break into superhero poses on a regular basis unrelated to the context around you?

5. do you have a favorite insect?

6. do you consider an event, such as teethbrushing, not to have occurred until it has been documented and notarized by a parental figure on a markerboard?

7. do you have a one-legged skip?

8. do you consider the rules for grocery-cart riding posted in the supermarket to be enforceable by death?

9. when you are riding in the back seat of a car, do you sometimes throw your arms up, whoop and catapult to the side without warning, as though you are on a roller coaster?

10. do you routinely ask, sometimes up to four times during a single meal, if the bowl, fork, cup, place mat, napkin, etc., in front of you is your own?

11. do you do this even when no one else is at the table?

12. do you gripe for hours because nobody woke you up before seven?

13. do you scramble to hide whenever someone enters the house and then yell "Surprise!", even
though, since you do this on a repeated basis, there is little chance of either you or the enteree being surprised?

14. have you spawned an entire spin-off genre of literature quoted by complete strangers inevitably more than ten years your senior?

this is america, charlie brown

2008-05-13T07:23:00.000-07:00

sticky-note i received on a returned paper from a professor today:

'hi perel,

please find attached your term project. i hope you don't mind that i labeled it 'peril project.' i just couldn't help myself.

yours,

professor x'

the living room

2008-04-29T20:28:00.000-07:00

well, it's the day after the day after pesach, and perhaps you could conclude that if ever there was going to be a have-out between me and transportation at large in all of the world, yesterday would have been it. certainly i believed this, yesterday. i stormed into stern sometime late, late last night, having been bumped to no less than three flights and having boarded two airplanes, then being shuffled onto the sketchiest bus in new york and getting stranded and having to take a taxi in the RAIN and -

i was a little wound up, as they say.

also, i think that classes can never seem more pointless than when there is only one week of them and that week directly follows pesach. you move heaven and earth to get to a classroom only to find that the professor is unfortunately still dwelling, bright and crisp, on the dregs of a topic you probably couldn't even remember when it was fresh three weeks ago. you kind of want to burst into the room with your arms out to a rousing round of applause, but instead, you are met with more weary and bedraggled faces of other students who have been unapplauded for their amazing escape from the airport, and who unlike you have already fallen into the shadows of Final Exam Blahs.

there are many ways of combating the FEBs. theoretically. stern suggests ice cream; my point is, you need more than a half a scoop of cherry vanilla to conquer the whole three-papers-in-two-hours thing. however, i am not one to talk, as my strategy is to scrupulously avoid finals into they crash, avalanche-like, over my head, at which point i revert to expresso.

today i was living up to my ethos as usual by diligently focusing all my attention on a trivial and minute task which had no timely relevance whatsoever, chiefly: ironing.

i was never much of an ironer. back in the day, my mother would force me to iron. subscribing to boot-camp-parenting as she did, she would sometimes force me to iron clothes that weren't even mine. i spent the rest of my teenage years and the first half of college attempting to avoid ironing at all costs, and i must say that i excelled at it.

but then this year i started working in an office, and slowly, the shame began to creep up on me, like the grey on the guy from the 'just for men gel' commercial's head. wearing the same one presentable outfit to work everyday. it being wrinkled and frumpy all the time. being regarded as a sixteen-year-old with cause. so i gathered my reserves of courage and ventured into the manhattan shopping world and emerged victorious with three blouses, a black skirt with a belt, and a tabletop iron, with which to keep the black skirt and the blouses from crumbling into dust in my closet.

now let me tell you something about tabletop irons: they are perfect for ironing handkerchiefs. not so good for anything involving more than one panel.

when i first got the iron i would try to negotiate the board around my room. the board stands all of three inches off the surface of wherever you put it. i would hold it on top of my dresser and climb on a chair to iron that way. i would put it on top of my steamer trunk and kneel on the floor. at one point, in exasperation, i forewent the board and held the blouse up with my hand. i felt like mr. mom. i felt like a fool.

so, in desperation, and feeling slightly illegal, i resorted to ironing in the back lounge, where - you might have heard this - they have tables.

it was embarassing. i had never seen anyone else iron in broad daylight (or poor wattage, whichever.) i am not a great ironer and it takes me forever to reduce the shirts from 'entirely wrinkled' to 'slightly less wrinkled', which is where my standard currently sits. everybody would be able to see me. perhaps i would look even more like a fool. but when i fitted the board on the table i determined that it was infintely better than kneeling on the floor to iron, and so my ironing ritual began. and so i took half my wardrobe downstairs tonight to smoothe out so i could immerse myself in the nonwriting of various things.

but i am glad i did, because i think that when i iron here, it allows me to touch a layer of life here at stern that i can't always recognize for what it is.

tonight, like every other time i've ironed, there is another girl i know sitting at one of the tables. not someone i'm particularly friendly with; just someone i know. she's writing a music paper. she smiles when i stagger in with my board and iron - they all smile, as though i am a quaint relic of some other era. but i don't mind anymore.

as i prop up my board and spread out my blouses, she moves a little closer. she plays a song for me, asks me what i think of it. another girl we know comes in and drops dramatically onto a couch. they smile and greet each other, greet me, start talking about an event i didn't go to. i move the shirt and press down the iron. another girl seats herself at the piano and pumps out a ragtime jazz, and the girl writing the music paper grins dreamily, asking me again what i think of it.

i drift in and out of the conversation, working methodically, my hands busy. i listen. i listen to one acquaintance talk about her upcoming trip to india. i listen as another girl reads me, shakily, the paper she has written, commenting, questioning, turning my shirt. i listen to the music winding out of laptops, from the piano, from a friend as she sings. i listen to the diligent scritching of the girl who lives across the hall from me as she winnows her woodwork (say that five times fast). sometimes they glance up at me and draw me in, and i'm glad to be drawn; sometimes there's no need to talk. the five of us, six of us, seven of us are just down there in the lobby, where the guys and the dates can't go, focused on our separate tasks, but together in one unique, lovely moment of calm. we belong. not friends, but a community - a little town where anything can happen and any topic is relevant and no one needs to be what they aren't or anything more than what is.

i had been aware of this feeling in some of my earlier ironing days - just this thought that flitted through my head like sunshine: "this is so nice, to be here now - i am so happy right now - but i'm ironing - how can that be?" - but i hadn't concretized it until tonight, when one of the girls i was listening stopped talking, abruptly, and laughed.

"it's like this is your living room, perel," she said. "isn't it like a living room?"

i paused for a moment and looked at her. i looked at the other girl by the piano, and the one curled up in the armchair with a notebook and flat pretzels.

i thought about chol hamoed, when i had done just the same in my house. my brothers playing videogames and me in the armchair, watching them. not because i wanted to see the games. just being with them. being around them. absorbing them and what their lives, of which i ultimately know so little because i am away, are about. and i realized how truthfully this strange existence in the lobby was not so different; here we were, more or less strangers, not so much interacting as steeping in each other's presence. not like strangers do here, unacknowleged and unnoticed, but with warmth and comfort.

there are many kinds of stern experiences floating out there. blogs, stereotypes, whatever. i want this experience to be one of them. i want it to be remembered.