January 30, 2006
Valentines Day
It’s a quiet morning in Boston. 40 degrees out maybe, overcast. I’m supposed to be working but the iTunes player on my computer is conspiring against me. I set the playlist to ‘random’ and iTunes responded by churning out every vaguely romantic song that I own. I have friends that see the iTunes random playlist as a sort of personal horoscope but I don’t take it this way. Instead, I’m sure that somewhere in the silicon, embedded in the million miniature semiconductor bilayers, a set of gap potentials have conspired to send me straightforward messages about my relationship with the universe. Today, for example, it’ clear that the universe wants to annoy me.
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January 28, 2006
Oscar in the Lab
I was never a big fan of Sesame Street but I did like Oscar the Grouch. I've always wondered how he ended up in the trash can. It would be nice if someone wrote his biography. I thought that I'd take a crack at it. Here's an opening.
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January 27, 2006
Botox Wonderland
Gala tonight. The Anthony Spinazzola wine and food event to benefit something or other. I avoided the tuxedo in favor of the black tie. Ryan's play is tomorrow night. Indian food maybe, then the play probably, and billiards If everything works out, not that I know how to play them.
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January 26, 2006
Learning to Drive
I learned to drive on a 400 acre farm in Virginia, in a set of fields that abutted the end of a mile-long driveway. On the morning of my fifteenth birthday, my father came down for breakfast in the kitchen, handed me the keys to the gray Ford pickup truck (automatic) and told me not to flip it on the slope near the barn. I didn’t flip the pickup truck but my legs went numb from the shock of bouncing through gopher holes on a busted spring system until the truck ran out of gas.
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January 25, 2006
SoapFight
Someday, let’s say ten or fifteen years from now, I’m going to end up sitting in a small foldable chair at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Working around the room, the group leader will ask each person attending about his or her problems. When he gets to me I’ll talk about my addiction to alcohol-based hand cleanser. Fifteen people will hurl me from the doorway of the clinic onto the hood of a cab who will charge me half rate for the six block trip to the hospital provided that I can make it there without actually climbing into the car.
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January 24, 2006
Spring?
Feels like spring today, even with the snow on the ground. I’m in a terribly good mood. Great, really. Bipolar good. Good like I’m going to crash out and end up in a padded cell with the world’s least popular upper body fashion accessory pinning my arms to my sides. That’s what spring does to me. I also want to dress up in a Barney the dinosaur suit and mug people on rollerblades. Spring does that to me as well.
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January 23, 2006
Scenarios
I spend too much time thinking about specific scenarios, as if someone screened them on loop in my head. I thought I’d write some of them down:
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January 22, 2006
Python Ankles
I feel slow this morning, horribly stupid and hazy. I’ve been this way all week. If you hold a chicken down and force it to look in one direction, you can hypnotize it by drawing a line in the ground in front of its beak. You could hypnotize me by pointing and you wouldn’t need to hold me down.
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January 21, 2006
Winterpills
So I drove to union square last night, to see the Winterpills play at a hipster bar that would not be out of place in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York, East Coast, United States. Raquel met me in Davis square and we drove over. We arrived at 10:30 and left at 11:30. Short evening but I’m not up for much else on a Friday night. Saw Flora briefly. She sings backup vocals for the Winterpills now. You can still find her solo album—released years ago—on iTunes. I’m listening to it now. On the album she sings lots of the songs that she wrote in college. I’m biased toward her songs so I can’t really assess them, the same way that you can look at an old photo of a friend or family member and think that it would stand with the best of Cartier-Bresson or Mary Ellen Mark and then you realize that it’s only because the content of the photograph has immediate access to the personal that the great photographers attempted to reach in an audience of strangers. We went to college together and it had been over a year since I’d seen her.
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January 19, 2006
19 January News
WSJ: Activists Plan to Sue Viacom and Kellogg Over Ads to Children
Update: Witches no longer allowed to advertise Gingerbread Real Estate on Nickelodeon Channel
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January 18, 2006
Chairs
So I worked from home this morning. I was waiting for a Danish-looking chair that arrived in the mail. The chair is now set up and it looks a bit like a playground bounce-horse, one of those cast iron figurines out near the swingsets with a huge spring at the base. I bought it because it was cheap and it was supposed to be better for you but in the world of chairs, better always means uncomfortable.
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January 17, 2006
Jello Werewolf
When I was in college I knew a student who would sit in the math faculty lounge and grab at the space around her head whenever she encountered a tricky equation. She told me that she was pulling numbers out of the air. It seemed like a very habitual gesture on her part or (at least) I’d seen her do it on several different occasions. She spent half of her time doing math and half of her time sailing Lasers and J22’s with the Olympic-class sailing team at our college. I’ve totally forgotten her name.
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January 16, 2006
Week 1 Comments
I’m bad at responding to comments. I like this method better than adding to comment chains. All the same, it’s a bit of a long entry so I apologize.
Funke is right. Happy meals are a gateway drug to gambling. I see kids exchanging those toys in back-alleys. It’s almost as bad as those Yu Gi Oh cards.
Donovan also had comment:
ED: I find it particularly interesting that Isaac in that interpretation is treated as a positive figure, whereas Christian commentaries I've seen usually stress his lack of discernment in giving the blessing to Esau rather than Jacob, contrary to the divine will (though it's debatable, of course, whether he was in fact aware of the prophecy). Other than that, is Isaac seen doing much in the Genesis account?
I’ll take a crack at an answer but I’ll start with a preface. I don’t have the benefit of Jewish schooling or even of regular synagogue attendance so everything that I write should be taken with the idea that, well... there is every chance that I don’t know what I am talking about.
So who is Isaac and how does Jewish Tradition handle Esau?
First, Isaac.
He stays in the land specified by G-d and he digs wells. Prior to this, he differentiates himself from his brother Ishmael in a single moment when he allows himself to be given over as a sacrifice at his father’s hand. At this point he is 37 years old.
The sacrifice is interesting. I’d always thought that he was much younger, an infant or a kid. That’s how he was pictured in the Catholic school books. The struggle was supposed to be Abraham’s alone. This does not seem to be the case and, while the event takes place early in his life (he lives to 180), it takes place at an age where he is conscious of the sacrifice that he is asked to make. Tradition further asserts that Isaac becomes aware of the situation after he asks Abraham about the sacrifice and Abraham responds "G-d will provide for Himself the lamb for the burnt offering, my son." This is taken from the following line “and they both went together.”
From Rashi:
…will provide for Himself the lamb. i.e., He will see and choose for Himself the lamb (Targum Jonathan), and if there will be no lamb, my son will be for a burnt offering. And although Isaac understood that he was going to be slaughtered,“ they both went together,” with one accord (lit. with the same heart). - [from Gen. Rabbah 56:4]
He also digs wells. We have the birth of Jacob and Esau and a section where Isaac repeats Abraham’s stunt of passing his wife off as his sister but it is the well digging that is interesting. He digs wells and the Philistines stop them up. He decamps to a nearby valley and digs the wells again. This is backbreaking labor but essential (water is more essential than food or shelter) to establishing a community. I think of the wells as anchor points for the Jewish people. They are also notable because they represent a boring, long term struggle, possibly useful as a metaphor for the boring, tedious aspects of religious practice essential for maintaining and promoting Jewish traditions in the face of diaspora.
So what about Esau? I have a great deal of sympathy for him. His anguish at being denied his father’s blessing is palpable. Jacob comes off as conniving. This is no way for a major religious figure to behave.
Jewish tradition seems hard on Esau. He often gets positioned as a second sort of Cain, which is both unlikely and uninteresting. The best explanation I've recieved for the loss of birthright is that, if the Jewish people were going to survive they were going to require leadership that possessed a certain amount of ruthlessness. Esau was happy out in the field, a hunter-gatherer. He gives away his birthright and does not pursue Jacob after Jacob steals his blessing. Jacob is more suited to the travails of leadership.
From the Lubavitchers:
The Lubavitcher Rebbe explains that the fact that Esau was naturally inclined toward idolatry was not, in and of itself, a negative thing. It meant that his ordained mission in life was the conquest of evil rather than the cultivation of good.
and
Jacob and Esau are the prototypes for two types of souls, each with a distinct role to play in the fulfillment of the Divine purpose in creation. Maimonides calls these two spiritual types "the perfectly pious" and "the one who conquers his inclinations"; Rabbi Schneur Zalman refers to them as the "Tzaddik" and the "Beinoni." Humanity is divided into these two types, writes Rabbi Schneur Zalman in his Tanya, because "there are two kinds of gratification before G-d. The first is generated by the good achieved by the perfectly righteous. But G-d also delights in the conquest of evil which is still at its strongest and most powerful in the heart, through the efforts of the ordinary, unperfected individual."
It is also worth noting that the events in this section of Genesis are specifically human. After all, it would have been easier to allow Jacob to be born first. Instead he comes out after Esau, holding on to his heel.
Isaac’s words to Esau are also interesting:
“And you shall live by your sword, and you shall serve your brother, and it will be, when you grieve, that you will break his yoke off your neck."
In the Catholic tradition, this is considered a reference to the first Christian community, which would break Jacob’s yoke as its members gathered together and decided to follow Jesus, at great personal risk and at a time of doubt and grief ( and also buttressing the positive “I will follow you” with the negative “I won’t follow the rules of the Jewish community”), in the hours after his death.
As someone who favors well digging I like to think of Isaac’s message as a very personal warning to Esau about the costs of religion. I can see him years later, pausing in his labor, bent double in grief for the life of a hunter that he lost, separated for a second from the community that defines the borders of the possible, alone again. He has been led into well digging instead of hunting. Jacob is “Tzaddik” and is led by G-d to establish the Jewish people. We can assume that he lacks some of Esau’s perspective. He is less aware of the hunting, of the open fields, of the span of his loss. In establishing himself, Jacob has followed G-d’s will and walked away from Eden. Esau stops and looks back and grieves at the view, breaking for a second a yoke fashioned at the time of the fall, which pulls him like a mule from the primitive to the modern.
Posted by jb at 03:16 PM | Comments (0)
January 15, 2006
Snowed Again
So it snowed again last night. Just a dusting but it means that that the winter heat surge is over. Time to tuck in till April. I plan to wrap myself in blankets and hide under the desk until the grass pokes up beside the trash can on the sidewalk below the window. My brother is even farther north with no car so he ends up waiting at bus stops in Montreal and then playing games like “guess how many fingers I have left” when the bus finally comes. Gets dark up in Montreal earlier as well. 2 pm and lights out. Sun comes up at 1:30. Pedestrians signal to each other with flashlights. Batteries costs at least six hundred dollars apiece. De-Icer salt is the new currency. Rich socialites are getting killed for their LL Bean boots. Mayhem.
My brother puts up with this because he is training to become a nurse. He is planning to participate in Medicine Sans Frontiers after graduating from McGill. His girlfriend is planning to do this as well. They keep mentioning Somalia. Every time they do, my mother gets a new gray hair. She’s been reduced to buying extensions and dying them. That’s how much gray hair she has right now.
What happens when you use fake hair when assembling a voodoo doll? Let’s say that party A practices Santeria and obtains the article of clothing and the nail clippings from party B but through some vicious mistake ends up working with fake hair (an extension, a wig, what have you) instead of real hair. I’ll bet a nylon factory catches fire somewhere. Are hair businesses worried about this danger? Do they have insurance riders?
It’s true that some countries will not allow the import of gag voodoo dolls. I wonder how the barbershops are run there. I’ll bet that the better ones give you your hair back in a bag after you’ve had a haircut. I could use that. I’d tape the hair to one of those robot dogs in order to make it look more real. I’d fire it up on Tuesday evenings, let it run around the room, and think about what my life would be like were I born canine instead of human.
I’ll bet Martin Buber never considered dogs when writing “I and Thou.” Dogs, unlike humans, are pack animals. Their sense of “I” is distributed. It’s more like “Us and Thou” which, among humans, applies only to the relationship between groups of first year college students and the retail staff at Target. It’s true. You can always find college students at Target in the fall, roving in packs, pulling towels and wastepaper baskets off the shelves, trying to find something to match the Ikea desk set that they just bought.
Once I spent the better part of a month lurking around a Home Depot. I hid at the top of the particle board stack and crept out at night out to scavenge for food in the garden center. I was hoping to get found by a producer who would then make a play about me. The Phantom of the Home Depot. It would be like the Phantom of the Opera but with the sound of power tools instead of singing.
Musicals are awful. I can barely tolerate them. I want Cats to get combined with Stomp. I’d pay to see forty people with brooms beating the tar out of Macavity the Mystery Cat* and the rest of them. It would be just like professional wrestling or maybe an ultimate fighting championship. We could get a steel cage, or maybe the battlement set from Les Miserables. That would rock.
Speaking of stage acts. I’ve decided that getting mugged by the Blue Man Group would be one of the worst things ever.
*That, apparently, is one of the Cats. I picked this tidbit up from a Cats fansite.
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January 14, 2006
Metal Detector
Quiet morning. Woke up at nine. Working on investment review of a spectroscopy company while listening to Portishead and Art Pepper on the stereo, not together. It’s better than being on the beach. Way better. Nobody walking around in a speedo with a metal detector looking for lost earrings and Sacagawea dollars. That’s what comes to mind when I think of the beach. Someday I will invest the time and money in printing up several hundred “You are Not A Winner- Better Luck Next Time” coins. I will hide them under the sand in Ocean City, NJ and wait for the gnashing of dentures. Then I will go to Atlantic City to play cards. I’ll bet there is a $500 minimum “Go Fish” table in at least one casino in the continental United States. If not, someone should make one. Come to think of it, McDonald's should get involved in the casino business. Slide, ball dive, and slots for the kids. Dealers in red stockings with wigs. They could include a free Happy Meal in the place of a drink. I’d want the scratch-off bib.
Posted by jb at 01:32 PM | Comments (1)
January 13, 2006
Perfection
Parsha This week: Vayechi. [I need to read it but I've gotten distracted because commentary is always easier to read than verse.] It’s the last book in Genesis, which in its body moves from Adam and the fall through Noah, Abraham, Issac, Jacob, and Joseph.
Yanki Tueber, a Chasidic columnist, offers a light commentary on Genesis when he compares the six major figures above to six forms of perfection. Adam begins perfect only to seek imperfection, Noah exemplifies a sort of rules-based perfection (given detailed instructions, he built the ark), Abraham is perfected through the love of G-d, Isaac is perfected in selflessness, Jacob in harmony, and Joseph in action.
This, of course, points to something more interesting and tragic. Using the broadest of brushes (no really… it's that broad), we can see Genesis as a transformative book that begins when perfected (but static) man is driven out of paradise. For the rest of the book, the better fraction of man—exemplified through the patriarchs*—seeks G-d in the midst of social and moral upheaval, first by following all G-d’s laws (Noah), then by seeking G-d out of love (Abraham) so intense that it leads to loss of self (Isaac). All too late, however: man is cast from the garden and is forced to define its role in creation, first through harmony and the synthesis of social structure (Jacob) and finally through participatory action in the larger outside world (Joseph).
What a perfect—if overly generalized—sense of a kid thrown out of the home, forced to make his way in the big city:
I’m sorry, I’ll follow the rules, I love you, look, I’m not even self-important any more, okay, I can do this, okay, here I am.
There are two lessons in this:
First: perfection, which was a static (or at least unconscious) thing in the Garden of Eden, has become dynamic post-fall. Perfection is no longer limited to a single form and so our ideas of perfect behavior or perfect people fall short as they converge on the concept of perfection that favors Adam and Noah-like stasis.
Second: just as the Patriarchs reflected a spark within the wash of their own culture, so there is a tiny spark in each of us that moves from perfection to perfection, seeking to return to the home, seeking G-d first as the child who will follow the rules but offers nothing, then through gnosis, and finally as an entity standing separate and self-aware, ready to build something new, to participate in creation, to offer a gift back to G-d even as Paradise itself recedes in the face of the world.
*Okay, I’m using this term a bit loosely.
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January 11, 2006
Sculpture
Drove Ryan over to the auto repair shop this morning. He sends his cars to a shop run by the father of a student in one of his science classes. It's a small shop behind the Lowes Theaters in Fresh Pond. Outside the bay doors you can see one of apparently dozens of massive sculptures, all of which are cut from large (this particular sculpture was at least 16ft long by four feet wide) steel sheets; all of which feature designs that would not be out of place in the Watertown Mosque. Mechanic and artist, I’m not sure which activity comes first but he is a very good mechanic. Ryan told me that he holds gallery shows in the car repair shop. I’m going to try and attend one.
Traffic was hideous on the return from the shop. 30 minutes for two miles of driving. I'd like to see more people commute to work on horseback, if only to see the office go quiet when Bonnie from accounting steps through the double doors, posture slung low at the hips, boots grinding into the wood floor in front of the reception desk.
Back in the office today, a copy of the McKinsey Quarterly report on China to my left. I’ve been given an opportunity to get back into China studies (well, somewhat back, I’m illiterate in Chinese and this presents a very solid bar to expertise) which is something that I have not thought about since college.
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January 10, 2006
Cabdrivers
(6:50PM) I’m on the Acela from Philly to Boston and there is no internet access on the train. The conductor has just walked by collecting tickets and the transportation safety administration has required conductors to do random identification checks and since:
- I no longer have a photo id
- and the woman at reservations refused to sell me a pre-reserved ticket without id
- and the quickticket machine that I resorted to had all sorts of dire warnings about the TSA now requiring id placarded on it
- and I'd already evaded one id check when I took advantage of some confusion in the station to walk past the pre-boarding gateway id checker
I’m hoping that I don’t get checked.
I left the meeting in Fort Washington early in order to take a cab from the boonies of Pennsylvania to the 30th street train station in Philadelphia and the cabdriver, after assessing traffic along the toll highway, decided that it would be better to travel back to center city without using any highways at all. He drove getaway car-style, hurtling through red lights ‘cross the back alleys of north Philadelphia [Juniata Park, Hunting Park, Nicetown, Fair Hill] while telling me about his year in Boston (back Bay, with his parents) and six years first in Brooklyn (near the GW Bridge) and then in Manhattan (in St Marks—8th street and 2nd Ave— which was not as clean as it is today). He went back to find his landlord in St. Marks, asked about the rent for his fifth floor walkup and was told to add 2 grand to the monthly rent that he was paying in the 1980’s.
...
Some of the neighborhoods in North Philadelphia have not changed since the 1950s. All the details are complete, down to the old cadillacs and the thin, neon woolworth signs.
...
This has been a great evening for cabdrivers. The cabdriver from the Train station back to Logan airport has just recommended his cousin’s Italian deli, down the road from Russo’s. He has also given me a recipe for braised rabbit.
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Bathroom Wars
There is a trash can beside the flat panel television in the hotel room and the hotel has stopped putting plastic bags in each trash can in favor of a piece of paper, which is a great idea. I like it because it reduces the function of the trash bag to its simplest component and solves the core problem facing a trash can (the junk that you throw out will stick to the bottom) while getting rid of at least three extraneous problems (trash bags take up more space, how do you store the trash bags for each trash can, trash bags billow up and prevent people from putting as much trash as humanely possible in each can). The only time this won’t work is if someone decides to go deer hunting, captures and cleans a deer in the room and leaves the innards—which would stain the trash can—in the trash. I suspect that the trash can would get thrown out and the cost would be added to the already enormous surcharge incurred by the state of the bathroom
Speaking of the bathroom, the room uses an old school showerhead (1980’s massager showerhead, dingy off-white) which makes me think that there should be roller skates hidden around here somewhere.
In the tub, the hotel has placed a hand towel, soap and shampoo. The shampoo is made by a company called Physique and it features the greek letter sigma (Σ) at the top. This makes me think that the shampoo has either escaped from a fraternity or is the sum of all other shampoos. Shampoo qua shampoo. Shampoo researchers decided to take samples of all other shampoos and cram them into this tiny bottle. Right now the apple cranberry grapefruit extracts have formed a power block and are fighting a rearguard action against the German "Science-based" shampoos. The German shampoos are working on a new secret conditioner-based death ray but the herbal shampoo spies who know about this have been captured and are even now forging fake German shampoo passports in a camp behind the enemy lines. The battle is joined, cannons are firing away, tanks, troops, chain guns, mines, grenades and then-bang- the entire shampoo universe is tipped upside down, lathered and rinsed into the Fort Washington sewer system.
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License
This is supposed to be an entry at 10:00 pm but there is some trouble with my username and password so it is getting stored in email. I'll post it when the account resolves itself.
I'm supposed to be writing an article on some medical diagnostics but right now I'm in the lobby of a Marriott Hotel in fort Washington PA and I'm distracted. There are three Guido's at the desk next to me, trying to work out something on the hotel computer. Directions to New Jersey or the secret of fire. I can't figure out which. They all have moustaches and leather jackets and heavy Philly accents and I wouldn't be out in the lobby but the Marriott seems to have no wireless service.
But that's really beside the point. The real point is that I managed to lose my license at Logan airport and this means that I'll be taking the train back north to Boston tomorrow night unless the train requires id, in which case I'll be taking the bus, hitchhiking, stealing a motorcycle, stealing a bicycle and walking in that order. It's one of those not-nightmare-but-heavy-on-the-annoyance scenarios. The average American has his picture taken 2,000 times per day but license and passport are arguably the only two pictures that contain a slice of your soul.
Fort Washington, Pennsylvania is about the most convenient place to lose a license but then I'm not sure about getting a new one since my passport, which expires in 2007, is my only viable form of id. As far as other forms of id are concerned, I need to get a new copy of my social security card and to do that I need a copy of my birth certificate. I lost the only copy of my birth certificate six or seven years ago (this is what I get for keeping it in a FedEx envelope in a pile of discardable papers near the bookshelf) and the original is in a filing cabinet in the middle of small windowless (I imagine) office in Westfalen Germany. Now I think to myself that I can't get on the plane to Germany without a license and so no license no birth certificate no social security card no license and that completes the cycle (or it will, once my passport expires-- I'm glad that this is happening in 2006 and not 2007) but a more reasonable scenario could go: need more than passport to get new license. No other id. No license. Passport expires in 2007. No trip to Germany no birth certificate. At that point I disappear entirely from the face of the earth and spend the rest of my life eating Gila monsters out of a gutter in Escondido, California.
But that's just me obsessing. I'll bet Gila monsters don't even taste so bad and cooking...that totally denatures the poison sacs along their jaw lines.
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