Springtime... Almost

Is it just me, or was there a hint of spring in the air today on Long Island? Although drizzly, it was far from bitterly cold. Then again, it isn’t like we received a full-blown white winter this year anyways. So if spring is starting early, but we never really experienced winter… does it make the start of the new season less special because it isn’t arriving as a shock of warmth?

I’ve always secretly envied people in southern regions; experiencing four seasons was never really my thing. Warm, warmer and warmest are the only temperatures I like. Even the promise of snow angels and hot chocolate can’t change my opinion. Last year, if I recall correctly, we experienced some major snow storms. I was shocked when we were finally greeted by the first whispers of springtime. This year, however, we were never snowed in and I wasn’t plagued by cabin fever. Springtime is a arriving as a slow progression, instead of a surprising smack in the face. I’ve never really been one for surprises, so I quite prefer this new arrangement. Philosophical question: Do you prefer quick, shocking changes in life, or do you prefer change to come slowly and surely?

Either way, I’m glad winter will be officially over soon. It is most definitely time for transformation. I’m graduating from college in three months, and change is in the air. I’m looking at what might be the last stretch of time I’ll still be living at home, and figuring out what the next step in my life will be. Like the flowers bloom, so does life.

Springtime in New York means Passover, the Macy’s flower show, dining alfresco, and browsing the Union Square open air market. I look forward to simply grabbing a book and reading on the grass in Central Park.

So relax, grab an iced coffee, and lie back on the grass. The first rays of springtime sunshine are just around the corner. Rejoice!

Nowhere to Go

Well, I’m at a loss. For once, I’m speechless. Honestly I have no idea what to say. School has kinda taken over my life and as such I completely forgot it was my turn until 9:30 last night aka 2 ½ hours till post time. Then I sat until 11 PM writing nothing of value and I gave up. I figured a late post is better than a terrible post, so I decided to give it another day to come up with something half-decent. Therefore, for the first time in my illustrious blogging career, I have missed deadline. It sucks, yeah, but I’m a bit of a stickler for quality and I refuse to put something out that I wouldn’t enjoy reading myself. The problem with this whole arrangement is that I’ve let it sit until today and I’ve still got nothing. I’m not quite sure what to do at this point, and even though I’ve been here before so this isn’t a totally foreign situation to me, it’s not like I can just write the same thing again. However, what got me out of that jam last time was simply typing my thoughts until something made sense, so I tried the free-writing thing for a while earlier this morning. However, after having spent nearly two hours writing line after line of unintelligible garbage, I’ve just come to terms with the fact that I have one of the worst cases of writer’s block I’ve ever had. At this point, a day late and with no more options, I don’t have a clue. So it begs the question, what do you do when there’s nothing you can do?

This is a question I’m sure all of you have asked yourselves at least once. When you’re backed into a corner and it seems there’s no way out, there’s a fear that takes over that’s often paralyzing. The first reaction is often to avoid dealing with it; there’s some place in your mind that convinces you that if you don’t deal with it, it’ll just go away. However, the consequence of that response is one I know all too well. Just because you ignore it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, and in fact it almost always makes it worse. However, regardless of the logical nonsense of that mentality, it still caused some major problems in my life, the foremost being my bombing my second semester of college because I figured that I could just ignore my final papers and everything would be fine in the end. Yeah right.

The responses that generally follow are misguided rationalizations and excuse making. In my mind, that stuff just shows a lack of respect for the other person or for yourself, if it’s you that you’re accountable to. In the end, we all know they’re baloney.

Outright lies tend to come next. This is bad for two reasons. First, it always ALWAYS catches up to you, and when it does it’ll kick you in the teeth much harder than simply owning up to your situation. Secondly, think of what lying to someone’s face does to you as a person, and every time you do it, it gets easier. In addition, imagine being so paranoid all the time because you have a cover story to keep and you need to make sure it holds up or people will figure you out, god forbid.

Really, all of these gut reactions are problematic and the one I’ve adopted now actually stemmed from the last time I had writer’s block this bad. In my first semester of college, I took the hardest class I’ve ever taken: Freshmen Honors Writing Seminar I. I had to write five essays for that class, the fourth of which gave me some serious trouble. After spending two weeks writing something I considered my worst literary offering ever, I called my professor and scheduled a meeting with her for the day before it was due. At said meeting, I had her read my essay and then, when she affirmed that it was in fact quite awful, I threw myself at her feet (figuratively) and begged for mercy (literally). I was completely stumped and had no idea what to do, so I asked for her advice and an extension, both of which, to my great surprise, she gave me. I spent the next 48 hours retooling the whole thing and turned it into my best offering of the semester in any of my classes.

The moral of this story is pretty self-explanatory: when you don’t know what to do, do two things: be honest and pray. If you rationalize and delude yourself into thinking you’re in the clear then you won’t accomplish anything, so the first step is to figure out where you are and how you got there. What’s that they say? The first step to solving a problem is admitting that you have one. Secondly, in a situation where there’s no hishtadlut for you to do anymore, throw your hands up and pray to God. If you truly believe the Hashem runs the world, then there’s really nothing more powerful than putting yourself at his mercy.

In this instance however, I’m not answerable to Hashem per se, but rather to my fellow bloggers and our dedicated readers, and so I apologize for my lateness; it was my bad, and it won’t happen again. Now put the torches and pitchforks down and get off my lawn if you don’t mind.

Song of the Day: Drained – James LaBrie

Pride (And "Looking" Jewish)

Relatively short post today. I'm both overtired and nursing a wrist injury that's interfering with my typing, so bear with me here.

A few weeks ago, on the first truly cold day of winter, a few friends and I decided to stay in during the afternoon and watch X-Men: First Class. I’d never seen it before, and I was excited to watch a dumb action movie.

If you’ve seen it, you know that this movie belongs to Magneto, the Holocaust-surviving, Nazi-hunting, magnetic-field-manipulating anti-hero of Marvel Comics. Several scenes display a cool, collected Magneto kicking butt and generally being every guy’s dream...

...But the story is about his slow descent into villainy. I know I’ve discussed Magneto before, but watching this movie made me just NEED to write a post, and simply because of one scene.

While learning to harness his unbelievable power into moving a gigantic satellite dish, Magneto is advised by his friend, the psychic Charles Xavier, to focus not on his enraging memories of the concentration camp, but rather on a good memory, one filled with nothing but love, nostalgia, and peace. The memory Magneto chooses is one of lighting Chanukah candles with his parents as a child. And it didn't look like the sort of Chanukah you see on TV. No presents or cheesy songs or heavy Yiddish accents. In fact, no dialogue at all. Just lights, and peace, and the love of a family. It looked like Chanukah the way I see it. You know, in real life.

For some reason, this struck me. 

It was a moment of pure good. And a display of a clearly Jewish event without the slightest taste of stereotype or self-deprecation. And as I thought about it, I realized I couldn’t think of a single other scene from a popular movie that showed something Jewish as something purely positive. You know what? I loved it. It made me smile. It made me gush. It annoyed my fellow movie-watching buddies.

But what can I do? I’m a fiercely proud Jew. I always care about how we’re represented and how we’re portrayed. I am, like so many other Jewish New Yorkers, stuck in that place between wanting to be special and wanting to be included. And that place is there no matter where I turn.

Take comics. I’ve written about Jews and superheroes, and how I’ve never found an observant Jewish character in the comic pages. But then I remember that “observant” is usually expressed for those who wouldn’t recognize it otherwise as “exaggerated stereotype.” So in the end, I’d much rather have a proud but non-observant, interesting, and well-rounded character like Kitty Pryde or The Thing than Mr. Instantly-Identifiable-Jewish-Stereotype Man:

And movies! The little American girl in me watches movies and wishes for a Jewish Disney princess, while the rational, jaded Jew in me thanks the Lord Almighty for the fact that there will never, ever be one. Because let’s be honest for a moment. If there ever was a Jewish Disney princess, how do you think she’d be portrayed?

(Being a little shameless for a second here: I LOVE how that dress came out.)

Maybe in this regard, I’m a little oversensitive and/or bitter. But I can’t shake the feeling that when I see a “JEW” on TV, I’m seeing a representation of myself. And whether people admit it or not, we all learn to recognize those minorities or nationalities we aren’t directly familiar with by watching how they’re portrayed on TV or in books or movies. And some part of me is resentful of the fact that so many people are learning to define my people as “physically weak, whiny, a little bit on the ugly side, albeit very witty”. And it does happen. It’s true. I’ve seen people assume a friend of mine wasn’t Jewish because they didn’t “look Jewish”, even though they were hanging around a bunch of us more classic-look Hebrews.

That bothers me, but the truth is, I am nothing but proud of my background. It’s true that I myself am a physically weak, slightly whiny, bumpy-nosed Jew-girl who can err on the side of snarkiness. But I’m proud of that. I’m super proud. 

Maybe that's because, when I tell strangers that I'm Jewish, I'm met about equal times with either "Well, yeah, I assumed you were" and "Really??? You don't look Jewish at all!" It always bugs me the way people say that. Almost like they're telling me not to feel bad. But did they mean it as a compliment, or as anything at all? Or were they just saying what they thought?  In my head, I think "but my hair is dark, my face is pale. What other race/ethnicity/religion DO I look like?" When I look in the mirror I don't see anything but a Jew. What did that stranger think when he looked at me? What did HE think a Jew looks like?

This sticks in my head so much that whenever I’m told that I do “look Jewish”,  I’m proud and, dare I say it, flattered by all the small, skinny, bumpy-noseness it implies... even when the speaker immediately assures me they didn’t mean it that way.

Yes, that happened.

In all honesty, I can talk and talk and type and type about how proud I am all I want. But the best, most raw expression of exactly the sort of pride, and the feeling of being told you don't look like a Jew I’m trying to get across here has been done before, and was sent to me by an amazing friend via YouTube clip. Check this awesome woman out, because she’s saying everything I wish I was saying in the most blow-my-mind way I can think of (heads up, there is one use of crass language in here. Don't say I didn't warn you):

Be proud. "You are your people."

Discomfort

I’ve always found deadlines and boundaries difficult to manage. I work best on my own time, in my own secluded corners, within the system I set for myself. When someone comes along and places boundaries upon me, whether they are in the form of due dates or rules or social systems, I have a tendency to crumble.

I know I’m not alone in my deterioration. It’s difficult to be a human being when the walls are pressing you into a tiny enclosed space and you can barely breathe.

Mayhaps what I’m really talking about here is community expectations. That is, if you can call the Orthodox spectrum a community at all.

Let’s face it: the unspoken deadlines for marriage are downright traumatizing for most young people. You can’t place a deadline on meeting the right person. Then again, the right wing isn’t so into the concept of falling in love. They seem to desire conformity over everything else. I shudder at this thought.

Certain segments of the New York Jewish community take great pride in placing restriction upon restriction on its people. For some, rigidity works for them. They have a set schedule and don’t need to use their brains to decide what they’re going to do with their days. Furthermore, it allows them a certain speshul corner of civilization from which they point and proclaim themselves holier than thou.

I’m struggling with the notion of absolute truth. How can anyone be so narcissistic that they decree their Ultimate Correctness over everything? One might consider this the ultimate boundary. And quite frankly, that makes me rather uncomfortable.

The Few, The Proud, The Jews

You know you’re in trouble when the first thing you read on a blog is a disclaimer, but that is the situation you all find yourselves in now. I am still recovering from a crazy wedding weekend (Mazal Tov Josh and Jenny!!) and it turns out I might have torn the meniscus in my right knee, so aside from the charley horse from dancing and the headache from lack of sleep/dehydration, I now have piercing knee pain thrown into what has become a very physically uncomfortable situation for me. As such, I am unfocused and tired and am only awake now to write this, because we all know that I’ll never start writing a post with more than three hours to spare. There are exceptions to this well documented fact, but tonight is not one of them. As such, while I have a nice thought to share and a reasonably good idea of how I want to present it, I cannot be held accountable for length or philosophical value; I imagine, given my physical state, that it will be shorter and less involved than I normally go. To some that’s probably a good thing, but then again, I’ve never exactly been able to write short and simple so we’ll see how this goes.

I find that wisdom can come from weird places if you keep your ears open and listen for it. I’m not quite sure who says that, but I’m sure it’s one of those “they say” things; it sounds too cliché not to be one. However, clichés become clichés because they’re cheesy and overstated, and while I can’t condone the cheesiness, they’re overstated because they tend to be true. Such is the case with the above, and, since I generally try to keep my ears open to good advice, I now have a nice thought to share with you all, brought to you by my barber, Alex.

Alex and I tend to lengthen my average haircut time by about 10 minutes because we schmooze a lot while I’m in the chair, but it’s okay because the conversations are enjoyable and he’s a pretty intelligent guy so he usually has some cool things to say, such as the one I’m about to share with you. It was this past Friday when, as I was getting cleaned up for the aforementioned wedding, he told me a story about a 10-day cruise he had just returned from. He had originally thought he and his family were the only Jews on the boat holding 200 plus crew, so it surprised him when on Friday afternoon a man came up to him and told him that Shabbat dinner would be on the lower deck at 7 PM. When he got there, everything was set up in a picturesque Shabbat fashion, save for the fact that the husbands and wives were running around with cameras taking pictures with their friends. Alex wasn’t bothered by the blatant breach of halacha though, because he was reminded of something a friend once told him: “To me, Judaism is like the US Armed Forces. What I mean is like this: you have the Navy, the Marines, the Air Force, the Army, and so on, and each division has a job that it’s supposed to do. You wouldn’t tell an air force pilot to drive a submarine, because that’s not his job, he’s not in the Navy! In that same way, Judaism has its divisions and we each do our own part. A Conservative guy shouldn’t be Orthodox and a Chassid shouldn’t be Reform. They should be what they are meant to be and bring Moshiach in their own way.”

The gaping hole in the halachic validity of that statement notwithstanding, I think that’s a beautiful thought. It speaks of an idea that we sorely need to learn in this modern era, one that, strangely enough, comes straight out of the Torah, boiled down to three words here for your convenience: Judge Everyone Favorably. It’s something that I’ve preached about endlessly on this blog and try to apply to my life daily, and while I tend to attack the issue from my own perspective, it’s important to notice that it works on two levels. Yes, it’s a terrible thing to turn away someone less religious than you simply because he is less religious than you, I've ranted about that ad nauseam. However on the other end of the spectrum, one that I am loathe to address given what’s been going on in Beit Shemesh and Meah Shearim these days but is valid nonetheless, it is also important not to globally pan the ultra-Orthodox community. Are the zealots who commit crimes against Jewish and secular law correct in their actions? Of course not! That doesn’t mean the entire Chareidi community is filled with similar nutcases though. So on both levels, it is so important not to judge, because remember, we’re all one family in the end, and a small one at that, so it’s important to stick together.

Song of the Day: Prism and Gate – Scar Symmetry