week 2, advice

 continued

1. Just because the road is one way doesn't mean there won't be cars coming from the other way

2. Just because an area is a pedestrian walkway doesn't mean there won't be cars

3. Yeah, no, that road is closed today and maybe tomorrow. Or not.

4. I've said it before and I'll say it again -- Israelis don't know how to set up properly laid out/constructed websites

5. Here's a quick guide for dealing with the US (East Coast) while trying to get things done here: You have (at best) between 3PM and 4:30PM (IST) to get things done. Before that, it isn't yet 8AM in the US. After that it is generally not business hours in Israel. There is a little flexibility as some offices in the US open earlier and some businesses here (depending on the day) might close earlier or later. Sapiens sat.

6. Hydrogen peroxide and rubbing alcohol are behind the pharmacy counter. My sister warned me of this but I, being a dutiful older brother, did not heed her wise words.

7. the plugs in your place are all the Type C (2 prong) or H (3 prong) but it looks like small digital clocks no longer use either of those and if they plug in at all, it is to a USB A wall plug. Maybe a USB C but I'm not sure about that. So unless you are in a place that has integrated USB into the wall plugs, you will need to buy an adapter. Or battery power, which I hate.

8. What they call a credit card (from whomever you get it) isn't a credit card. It is a bank-debit card, but it removes the money from your bank account at the end of the billing cycle. You might end up spending a lot more and you won't run out of "credit" because they don't add it up and compare it to your account balance until the end of the month. If you have multiple cards, they draw directly from the bank. Sure, you don't have to worry about paying a bill because the money is applied directly, but you have no way of knowing how "close" you are to your account balance until the end of the month.

9. You don't need as many clothes as you think you do -- washing machines are smaller so you will do loads more often. 

10. Bring twist ties. When I collected all the assorted twist ties I had lying around it numbered in the hundreds. So I threw them out. Huge mistake. Trust me. If you don't need them, I do.

11. This item will be discussed in a separate post which will be posted before this one. So if you are reading this, go back in time and read the other post, then come back here. Thanks.

12, If you go to a catered event, you still have to tip your waiter. Really. 

13. I don't know where you grew up, but I am used to having access to a car or not needing to go anywhere. a walk of a mile or two is considered no big deal so looking for some place "close" might mean something very different. And the hills. Everywhere is up. 

14. Building numbers are not always apparent and even less often, logical.

15. To pay for public transport, you need to get a Rav kav card or set up the moovit app to charge your credit card. I have a card but just set up the app and haven't tested it yet. Once I fail at that, I shall report back.

16. A4 is the paper size. Get used to slight longer and slightly thinner. Like life.

17. Even if you give a particular address, if your building has 2 different addresses, the delivery guy will go to the other, less convenient one.

18. Arnona is a neighborhood and also your "property tax". And a dessert topping, no doubt. Did I mention that neighborhoods have more than one name? Well they do. Renters pay an arnona even though they don't own property. It isn't cheap. So when you figure out your rent, realize that your monthly cost will be larger because you have to pay the arnona. It can be paid in a lump sum or in monthly installments.

19. I have yet to find anything that resembles a dry cleaner. Just saying.

20. Here's a good one -- I usually (clearly, "used to") send my shirts to be laundered at the dry cleaners and they were returned on hangars. I accumulated so many hangars and worked hard to get rid of them. Well, since no dry cleaners here I'll launder my own shirts. But I have no hangars on which to dry them. So, yeah. Hangars. Bam.

21. I don't know where you live but there is construction there. 

This one goes to 11

 Sometimes when I'm trying to get a handle on the whole aliyah thing, I reach levels of self awareness which should be saved for a therapist appointment. But as I, as of yet, don't have a therapist, you all will have to do.

I think that an important part of growing up is reaching an understanding of the self. This isn't about giving up, but about working within reasonable limits and being aware enough of one's own strengths and weaknesses. I'm very much aware of those. So let's discuss the implications, shall we.

When I was a just a little boy, I, as part of a larger family unit, lived in Jerusalem. I was 7-ish and trusted that the world made sense. Then one day, through no fault of anyone's I found out that there were more rules than I knew and I ended up on a public bus headed for Tel Aviv. That was not my plan, but the bus and I diverged on other important points, so this makes sense. Eventually, I was returned to my parents but I have been skittish about public transportation ever since. And truth be told, I probably was before hand also. I think that others, faced with the same fact pattern might have responded differently but since I was already predisposed to living life in fear, this just made it all seem so much worse. In the US, I rarely took trains, and almost never took buses. I get nervous. Heck, I get nervous when the timer goes off on the microwave, but this was on another level. So was it caused by my childhood experience of just exacerbated by it?

That fear/anxiety is a pervasive characteristic. I fear getting lost, I fear the judgment of all people who look at me as lost and see another idiot. I fear ending up somewhere unknown. Now my kids are fearless and maybe this is a function of the ubiquitous phone service but I just never was the type to go explore the unknown. It isn't a singular concept -- I don't have a brain for math, or geography or spatial relations (as it applies to geography) and I have never been good about remembering names and details and learning a language has always been a chore that I found it easier to fail at than not. I was just never wired for that. As an adult, these same issues shadow me constantly but instead of totally freezing up, I live within my limits and accommodate them when I over-plan. Spontaneity has never been my thing because I like to have control over situations and to prepare for the worst. I don't think this has put too much of a hold on the important things I have wanted to do. I just approach them differently and process them differently.  I do have strengths but part of being a good teacher is realizing that I can't expect others to agree that some things are easy just because they are easy for me.

And now, as I approach my 50-somethingth year, I also know that any neuroplasticity which I might have had as a youngster has long since hardened. I am working hard to maintain my failing grasp on the things I know how to do. Adding in more just isn't in the cards and I'm ok with that. Does this mean I can't learn something new? Well, this old dog has no interest in new tricks but I can form new habits as long as I'm mindful and aware of what I'm doing all the time. It is a grind, but I have to create new pathways and burn them in via constant repetition. This takes work. So I need to be very conscious about what new things I am focusing on. Gone are the days of passive absorption. Any "growing" at this age is really intentional and not by osmosis.

Moving, as you could well imagine, is a big deal for anyone, but moreso for someone with my limitations. But moving to Israel includes any number of triggering challenges. My language acquisition is for the birds (uhmerikin birds, thankyouverymuch), and learning where things are and how they are connected to other places is a double problem. Mix those together and add in that bus routes change at the drop of a jackhammer and street names change on the fly (and buildings have more than one address?) and you have a whole lotta mental shaking going on. Also, my temperament guides me away from human interaction in order to protect my fragile ego. I don't like looking the fool by not being able to communicate. And don't get me started on confrontation. Please. I just want to sit back and expect that things will go forward in a predictable fashion and in a proper way. These are also traits often absent from the "live in Israel" experience.

Change and growth are a process and I grant that I cannot blunder blindly ahead using my American standards and privilege and expect the world to bow to my whim. I would like it if there was a bit more of a less severe learning curve, and more explanation of various steps along the way. (take classes to learn the language but to do so, fill out forms that require you know the language already) It seems that people expect me automatically to know things as some sort of common sense even though there is no rational reason to expect that I would. And maybe people who are more "go with it" types can pick up stuff quickly but that's not my strength and it isn't suddenly andmiraculously going to become my strength. It isn't that I don't want to know all the things but that the volume of unwritten rules is rather extensive and until I know them, I just don't, and in the meanwhile, life goes on, expecting me to know all those things.

There are things to do and ways to do them. Knowing either of those is a challenge but knowing both is the kind of combination that isn't happening for me. In a culture which expresses frustration freely and rewards aggressiveness in communication, I'm cooked. 

There are groups and publications that give out info and help and such and I'm not decrying them. I'm just saying that in addition to each person's experience's being different, each person is different and what makes sense or is easy for one person is a very big ask for someone else. This is not a cop out, or a sign of complete resignation, but an admission of who I am and what I am capable of, each step of the way.

So, at the tender age of mid to late 50's, I accept that I understand spoken Hebrew to some degree, but I don't have the vocabulary or mental quickness to respond in kind, and my brain, while it will eventually pick up some more words and phrases, is not going to learn the language the way it did in 1976. And while I'm learning, I'm still going to have to use various translation methods to make the most mundane spam (or it might be a necessary document for my job) become intelligible, and that will slow me down by a factor of about a million (I just spent 10 minutes figuring out how to get some AI thing to translate an image/sign I got in my mail. Finally I found out that there is no reason it was sent to me; it often takes time for me to understand the email header so every email in Hebrew seems vitally important and I can't reflexively delete any).

I now return you to item 12 on my list.

The Wording Way

 I enjoy sleeping but sometimes I forget how and these last few days have 12 to 13 of these times. The good thing about not sleeping is that my brain has all those extra hours to just keep scraping the bottom of the barrel so I end up with thoughts that maybe would have been better served being forgotten. But no, I unlock the back rooms of my brain when I lack the sleep that my brain needs to exercise any judgment or self-control. So don't say I didn't warn you. OK, say it. Who cares? I'm practically a zombie at this point except I can't stomach brains, or vice versa.

I was thinking about a phrase I hear bandied about -- history doesn't repeat itself but it rhymes (attributed variously to Mark Twain and y'know, that guy who wrote about Tom Sawyer, whatever his name is). So I got to thinking, sure, it rhymes, but with what? Mystery? Blistery? Are these things that history should be proud of? And so what if it rhymes with "blistery"? What does that get anyone?

But then I started considering that category of words that do not have rhymes. I felt bad about that -- why deprive them? All those words like month, purple, silver, orange, ninth, pint, wolf, opus, dangerous, marathon and discombobulate, they must be lonely. I bet they have some sort of support group to help them cope. And then, when someone comes up with a potential rhyme, the word feels seen, and doesn't show up to the next meeting. Invariably he comes back when the public decides that nurple isn't really a word; purple slinks back to the group session with all the other words saying nothing but silently scolding him for holding out that phantom hope, secretly glad he came back in a jealous way. And he knows. He knows.

Do words with rhymes (the "benefits" of the dictionary set include rhyming groups) bully words without rhymes? That seems mean. What lesson are we teaching our kids? Check your privilege!

Those words, as I see it, are the prime numbers of the rhyming world. They rhyme with nothing but themselves and the number one. I wonder if there is a similar formula so that scientists can compute  then next prime word in the sequence. If there isn't, someone should invent that and win the Nobel Prize for lexical mathematics (a sadly under-rated field usually only represented by Gematria nerds).

Learning by doing

 So today was another opportunity for me to assess local culture an practices while spending a lot of money at the same time. Like doing psychology field work by buying expensive perfumes and seeing their effect on teen aged boys. Or something like that. My head is a bit fuzzy and for a bald guy, that's a thing to think about. The jet lag, mixed well with some free floating anxiety and who knows what else inspired me (by lack of choice) to pull an all-nighter last night. I used to do that weekly in college but I sense something in me has changed and pulling an all-nighter has an impact on me which makes me even more unfit for human interaction.

So, first, an addendum to the previous post about what I learned. Here is a new one:

I don't know where you live but there is construction right by you. And there will be at least one, if not twelve road closures unadvertised, prompting cars to make K turns in a country in which people clearly don't know the shape of the letter K.

But I gress. It isn't a hill I'll di on.

My sister in law and my niece came over today for a tour of the apartment. That took the whole 2 minutes (we saw one room twice) and then they took me on an outing. First we went to a very local patisserie where I got a cup of cold decaf (2nd time's a charm...first time they put milk in it) and there were cheeses, cappuccino, rolls and eggs and olives and caramel and some sort of spreadable cheese. Heidi added some pepper to her eggs, and an insane woman came by (we were eating outside) and said unspeakable things about me and my family, but always with a smile. So that was fun.

Then we went to Osher Ad, the supermarket.  Step one was to walk to the car and leave the parking lot. We had to wait as the woman in front of us was clearly having an extended relationship with the computer system that controlled the gate. Eventually it was our turn to get frustrated at an inanimate object. Then off to the land of make bereave. The cultural differences started appearing. First, there is so much construction going on and the roads, congested 2.5 lane roads, are everywhere making all driving, and especially left turns, harrowing. If you don't know what .5 of a lane is, you haven't watched Israeli drivers. Next, parking -- the underground lot wasn't a "rows and aisles" kind of place. In the same way that the streets of Jerusalem are winding and interwoven, the passages in the lot were seemingly random. Next, the shopping carts have all four wheels that can turn, so that's neat. But for each step of shopping, you need to be on the lookout for pitfalls and obstacles. My niece was adept and the prep, knowing to get a scanner and a cart with a scanner-holder. I wouldn't have had any idea about scanners, but here is the dealio: Most (younger?) scan each item as it goes into the cart, and take the scanner up with the cart to the self-checkout area, place the cart on the scale and somehow mind-meld the scanner with the scale so see if the weight corresponds to the receipt. We were off by 1 liter of milk which I had forgotten to scan in. It is a very different set of muscle movements -- you don't just find something and put it in your cart -- you have to stop and scan it first, and let me tell you, that if you aren't used to doing it, you forget really easily. My niece had to keep reminding me and I felt like a tool most of the time because I had no idea what I was doing. I pestered them with questions.

Side note, older people use the regular check out but the cashiers are not always focused on the job and the older people get preference on line so if you are waiting and a senior citizen shows up, you get pushed back.

Then you go through the store which seems more like a Target (in terms of the breadth of things available and the layout of aisles) than a Shop Rite. Thing is, I really, really understand Shop Rite. I know what are good prices and preferred products. Here, the sizes are different, the currency is worth a different amount and the price-per 100 ml, or 1 kg or 100 g or whatever is unfamiliar. [I asked a student to make an app which would allow me to compare across units of measure and currencies. I didn't use it in the store because there was too much demanding my attention. But here it is.] So the task is to figure out you would have bought in the US, find what is the closest equivalent is to it (some times and some stores have American items available but those often cost more) and then compare prices per unit. This requires reading the signs and  figuring out what I'm looking for. There is an entirely new set of words that I will need n order to buy the basics and I don't know most of those words. So the shopping is very slow and I have to consider if I want to buy something now or next week, if I want to have to carry that in and up the stairs, or if a difference in quality is worth the difference in price. Each is a unique decision. In many areas, the aisles feel a little closer together and people will scoot around you, cut you off and bump into you (with shopping carts). And also with their cars. Just saying.

I'm the sensitive sort, willing to defer, willing to help and make others' live easier. Which makes me the national mascot, the Door Mat.  Every decision is involved in a game of chicken. I feel I hyperventilated only 3 times so that's make "before." Let's see if, in a year, I do so less often.

And if you buy meat, you have to choose it, put it on a scale, scan it with the special meat scanner, then print up a receipt and scan it with your shopping cart-scanner. Had they not have been there to save my facon, I don't know how I would have figured most of this out. They warned me that buying fresh vegetables would lead to a separate process so I made the sacrifice of not buying produce that was not in cube or powder form. Gosh I'm altruistic.

The general avoidance of things that smack of courtesy made me want to overcompensate by being more amenable an forgiving. This causes me frustration but, I hope, reduces it for others. That attitude is why I was voted "Most likely to shut the hell up" 6 years running, and running fast.

Heidi and B-7 were invaluable in knowing whether the prices are reasonable and whether certain brands or products were desirable or junk. I took their various advices seriously because I really do know that I don't know. I don't know WHAT I don't know, but there is definitely a lot of somethings. More sage niece advice about needing to go through a post-checkout payment at a kiosk that has space for your scanner or else you get stuck. After the maze of the store and the guys checking receipts and people stopping mid aisle to pack their carts (sorry about that to everyone behind me) you go up these magnetic ramps with your cart held in place and go to your car (making your parking choice important) and you pack up and return the cart so you get your money back. I'm glad they had change for the cart. If I remember correctly, you get the first 2 hours of parking free and then costs accrue. On the way out, more construction, more horrible traffic and wild drivers and closed roads (plus one that was one lane wide (with cars parked on both sides) and 2 directional traffic. Just getting back seemed like a nightmare. But my niece helped me move my bags up and then I started my list of things I still need:

decaf tea bags

hydrogen peroxide

rubbing alcohol

bedside digital clocks

plus I need to go to the bank and pick up my Israeli credit card. You can tell it is Israeli because the card asks you if you packed your own shopping cart.

It is overwhelming and on no sleep, over that. I ended up spending a reasonable amount of money for what turned out to be 4 bags worth of food and food stuffs.

I am indebted to my SIL and niece for shepherding me through the experience, and now I feel comfortable never going back. I call that a success, at least until I get hungry again.

Things I have learned -- week one

1. Everything is smaller here. The oven is smaller. The streets are smaller. The sizes of foods are smaller. It reflects one's paycheck which is also smaller.

2. pride in workmanship is less stressed here. Even a very nice and updated apartment shows signs of corner cutting -- things that don't quite fit, or close or make sense. Here a punch list is the things you will have to live with going forward.

3. The attitude in bureaucratic situations is "this is the answer and if you have a follow up question, I will repeat my answer as I yell at you."

4. People in offices assume you know what to do next even when you have said you don't. I explained that I needed to register with the HMO so they said "ok, go over there" -- that was the language: "over there". Not exactly where or what I was going to do there. I wandered over to an area included in "over there" and so no sign telling me if I was supposed to do something or if I was in the wrong place. The screens that were supposed to give information weren't. Maybe I'm just too needy, but if they see I'm lost, someone should provide assistance. I ended up being directed by another patient.

5. There are a lot of cooks working on the broth, often from different cook books.

6. This is more of a selfish point, but if you are going to offer study materials to help people learn the language, put them on a web page which can appear in OTHER languages. If I need help to study it means I don't know enough to negotiate the webpage.

7. There is a LOT of 2-Factor authentication. 

8. Different people have different terms for the same thing/document so when someone asks you for something, you might have it but not know it. I was asked for a document proving X. I didn't have anything like that but I eventually found the document which stated Y, and Y was different from X so the woman said, "yes that's it!"

9. Everyone thinks he knows how to do everyone else's job. Often, while sitting at a meeting, I am asked for document X. I say "the other person didn't give me that document." The answer is "that person SHOULD have..."

10. Just because you have a US phone number doesn't mean that you can necessarily call the US and just because you have your American phone on local wifi doesn't mean you can access all the US websites (Verizon, I'm looking at you). As of now, I can't get in touch with Verizon or look at my account online or on the app. Audacy and IheartRadio don't work here for radio stations (even with VPN) but go to the WQXR website and you can stream classical music.

10a. So far, FM 88 is the only station worth listening to.

11. Keep a log of every meeting and phone interaction including action points, remaining issues and next steps. I did not do that -- I left myself a note saying I needed to get a particular document. I got it but now don't remember why I needed it and for whom I got it.

12. For a country with such a strong ethic of not jaywalking, people really misbehave in a movie theater. Talking, laughing and such, walking in late and standing in the middle, looking around, plus not only using the phone but having that light-flashing notification on the phones which keeps flashing throughout the movie. Also, just because your tickets says you are in seat 6, if you don't get there early enough, someone is going to sit in your seat and not move.

13. The English version of a website (not just a translation on your computer, but the English version offered by the source) is not always (read "rarely") the same as the Hebrew one so if you get directions from an Israeli they might not be possible to follow on the English site. This seems like a problem to me.

14. You get a LOT of filler text messages in some cases (buying a movie ticket leads to many texts and emails but not just ads -- reminders of the upcoming film start time) but no communication or updates on important things.

15. You know how you were squished on the flight? Get used to it. Everything is smaller (including stores) so forget about personal space (and baseline courtesy). This is difficult for me as I was brought up deferring to others until it was my turn. It will never be my turn.

16. When you walk into a building, there is a reasonable chance that you are on Floor 0. Not floor 1, but floor zero. Go downstairs to floor -1. People in the basement really do live in minus.

17. For the Ministry of the Interior, you can make an appointment for an exact time or you can get an appointment made for you by a Jerusalem municipality rep with whom you will meet. A 3PM appointment means that you are in the 3PM group. The doors won't open until three and then you go up 2 flights and wait with the 3PM people until you are called. You can't arrive early and you don't have anything more than a group appointment and then whichever cubicle you are sent to.

18. The Ministry of the Interior wants originals AND COPIES. I don't have a copy machine. Advice -- take all your important documents (apostille'd ones) and make photocopies and bring them.

19. You will need 2 passport pictures for the Temporary booklet at the airport but you can't use more of those pictures at the ministry -- they take their own.

20. For some reason, I was asked for 2 "security documents." I had the apostille'd FBI background check and I know nothing of any other but the woman seemed certain that I was supposed to have another. She got up to go "check." This brings up a different point -- even though people are sincere in wanting to help, they aren't always flexible or able to pivot, or show any empathy for the fact that you (well, I) are new to all this, nervous and just following a list given to me elsewhere. None mentioned 2 security documents. There are other documents you will get at the airport. Save and bring everything because they will ask for other documents and tell you you don't need the ones you brought.

20a. As soon as anything presents a bump, even if it is something which you were not told to be ready for, people act like it is the newest and worst thing, ever. I can't have been the first immigrant to sit in that chair with only 1 security document but she seemed perplexed as to why I only had 1 and troubled by it so she had to get up and check.

21. Everything takes two tries but sometimes, each try takes 25 tries.

22. Age is no barrier to wearing inappropriate clothing. Both 6 year olds and 75 year olds want to look like 19 year olds.

23. Pack a printer and some paper and lots of manilla folders. This place loves printed documents.

Ulpan Pizza

As I begin to settle in I am confronting my own inability to speak Hebrew. I understand it at the level of a 10 year old (if you speak slowly enough) but I really feel horrible speaking it. Everyone (well, many people) says that you have to feel comfortable making mistakes because that's how you will get better. My concern is grammar and vocabulary. I don't have the lexicon of words to communicate the invariably bizarre  ideas running through my head. I don't know the idioms or the slang so I'm afraid I will say something egregiously wrong. Had my kid not corrected me about the different connotations of various words that we learned to mean "finish" I would have been making lewd comments to everyone simply because in my many years of education, no one accounted for the evolution of normative language.

So the solution might be simply to tough it out, make my mistakes, own them, and learn to speak. My other option is to remain pig-headed about it; I will understand what I understand and adamantly refuse to speak, justifying it as more efficient (in an area where Israelis know some English -- more than I know Hebrew) and as an educational experience for THEM -- practicing English with a native speaker. I should be passing out a bill for services rendered when I give them practice time.

However, I have come up with a new method which can benefit the entire community of Hebrew learners (and even of Israeli learners of English). People here go out to eat. That's a thing people do. Some restaurants are more popular with English speaking people than others because of the ease of ordering in a native language. I would suggest that a group which provides Ulpan classes (an immersive Hebrew classroom experience) partners with a restaurant to post signs as follows:

food items (such as on a menu, at a salad bar, or a fixings area) are labeled in English, Hebrew (and possibly transliterated into English as well?) and either posted on/behind the counter, or printed in a menu addendum. There would be properly worded common phrases that an English speaker can use with the confidence that they are vetted by the Israelis so there is little fear of saying them wrong. I am thinking of a sign with the proper and current way of ordering a food ("I would like a ______ with _____..."). Now, remember, different restaurants have different workers who might expect a slang or more "vulgar" wording (eliminating "I want" because when you walk into a pizzeria you just say "one slice" and not the more formal "I would like...") so one would become accustomed to different wordings, all acceptable. These conversational phrases IN USE are much more relevant to invented and sanitized workbook scenarios. A person might return to a restaurant to get more comfortable with ordering so the venue increases traffic, and the Ulpan service gets a reputation for teaching practical Hebrew and being Ulpan friendly.

The signs could be temporary so the restaurant could have "Ulpan night" or the signs could just be part of the decor so that no one has to feel awkward about having to order on any day of the week. We learn by repetition and having these phrases available during the repetition will help engrain them in our heads so after a few meals, we can order (at least at THAT place) comfortably in Hebrew.

Additional idea -- on Ulpan Night, the consumer can expect that the workers will respond in a simplified and slower Hebrew so that one has time to consider and respond properly.

Repentance

 Please let me be the first to usher us all into the high holiday season with a thought about repentance. I have come up with an understanding which strengthens me in my yearly quest to improve and I'd like to share it with you.

I was sitting at my computer while eating a sandwich. My wardrobe was pretty much boring. A worn out, dark blue 3 button polo and black khaki pants of an indeterminate cut, waist or size. Athletic fit with a history of husky, I think. The sandwich was a whole wheat roll with some slices of slow roast turkey topped with yellow mustard. Boring, sure, but I was on the move and had to travel light* so turkey and not much else with a cuppa water on the side. It gave me time to sit, stare off into the dust over the Keurig and let my mind drift and at that moment I felt something end up on my leg, as if my sandwich had somehow released something onto me. Jarred back to reality, I looked down to see a glob of mustard. Big glob. Yellow mustard on my pants. These weren't my old knock around black khakis. Now, these were a recent purchase and I manipulated the wear/laundry cycle so that this particular pair could serve as the "day before" pants -- second place over all but no one was going to catch "traditional khaki" and maybe no one ever should.

So I grab the nearest semi clean paper napkin and smear right across it. Some sticks, some doesn't and some even smears, making it worse. So you wipe some more. You try different things. In similar situations, this worked. Maybe, this. And sometimes one DOES. But the next time and the next, it doesn't. You keep trying.

That's teshuva. We want to get back to that perfect "new" pair of black khakis so we try to fix and we do get a good percentage done on the first pass. But sometimes, fixing one thing has consequences that also have to be considered. And maybe we have stop-gap measures or we cover it up but eventually we are going to have to go to a place with more resources and other people who can help. Expand the time frame  -- immediately after something has happened we take care of most. Is that in the first moment or the first year? Daily repentance might get the spot fully clean or it might get an "it isn't perfect but I appreciate the work you did to get it to this point". But we also have special days at fixed intervals, we use the laundry machine or go to the dry cleaner. Different methods, same goal, all reflect effort. In every prayer and with every prayer we show intent, scratching at some corner before it becomes a stain.

And me? I'm not the same guy. I see the stain everywhere. I regret the decision to eat. I curse how distracted I was -- not that there isn't time for that but this wasn't it. And if the next time I wear clothes, I pay a little more attention, then that might not wipe the stain away, but it will show that you know how to keep yourself clean.

So we wipe ourselves clean after every meal with our prayers and the pants stay almost sort of kind of not unlike the black khakis that I love so much that I named them. I chose the name "Mick". If you were expecting anything else, maybe YOU are the problem. Anyhoo, teshuva is a steps-forward-steps-back kind of thing that we're all always doing, and we get so distracted that we forget that we need to keep our eyes open. It is a process not a place; there is no there there; it's all always here. The pants DO get cleaner on the whole and maybe they even get them back to the closest they can get to new, but what matters is that every attempt was a sincere attempt to get them clean. Maybe there's a stain on them, maybe not. Maybe it is one only I see. But I'll never stop trying to make it better.

Maybe I'm not the perfect Jew I was but I try every day to be as Jewish as I can be.

We can get credit for a job well done, or a job done well, or even a job well, "done." Or even just for showing up for work.

*as those of you who know me and my history know, there are other reasons for the beef based confusion which explains my poorest of poor boys but that's a story for another story 

Religious Kindness

 I have been thinking about kindness recently. How can we raise a generation which will have a normalized sense of kindness? For whom thinking of the feelings of another is second nature? I think that Judaism does something like that by teaching certain strange things.

Should we be kind to people? Sure, but halacha doesn’t start or stop there. Consider the laws of shilu’ach hakein (sending away a mother bird when raiding a nest for its eggs) and even oto v’et b’no, the law forbidding slaughtering a mother and child cow on the same day. These are designed to rein in the cruelty element of our nature and recognize how our actions have impact on other things.

Sure, you say, other things…like cows and birds? Well, if we codify concern over the feelings of animals, then we will become used to considering how our actions might cause pain to other people. Even the notion of shechting (and tza’ar ba’alei Chayim on the whole) is about reducing strain and pain for the animal. Why should we care? Kill the animal and be done with it, right? Some things gotta get et. But then I think back to The Frisco Kid in which the inimitable Gene Wilder says, while chasing a chicken (and I paraphrase) “I don’t want to hurt you, I just want to eat you.” This would be the exact moment when kindness should not matter – when I want to use a resource that God provided, I still have to recognize its inherent soul and feelings and I have to be kind even while do what could easily become a cruel exercise of power.

But Judaism takes it a step further. On Friday nights, when we set the shabbat table, we put the challah on the table first and then we cover it before pouring the wine. Ask any 2^nd grader why, and he or she will probably mention some notion of “so that, when we make the blessing over the wine first, the bread won’t be shamed – placed first but eaten second.” I learned that when I was little and, admittedly, I never looked it up to see if there is a source but as I grew older, I realized that the story is weird. Does my challah have feelings? And not just the basic perception of pain when I cut it, but an embarrassment at a perceived slight or social faux pas!

But if we teach children this lesson before they have the sensibility to look at it and say “wait, what?” then we will accustom them to considering, even in their intentional and proper acts with supposedly inanimate objects, that there is a power we have, a power to hurt even when we don’t want to. We teach care and care leads to kindness. We need to say thank you to automatic doors. We need to avoid knocking over the traffic cone. We need to see that we share our space with “things” and our responsibility to be civil includes these things – not because they need it, but because we need to engrain positive habits into our every moment. Kindness must be intertwined into our being.

That said, I have also been wondering about a potential tension between two halachic mandates.

We have the idea of “dan l’chaf z’chut” – to judge favorably and assume the best, not worst in people or situations. Don’t jump to negative conclusions.

We also have the idea of “lo teetein michshol” don’t place a stumbling block before a blind person (don’t create an unfair challenge or a temptation which might lead someone else to doing something wrong or being unable to do something right).

Don’t they contradict? If I judge everyone favorably, then I will suspect no one a priori as being, for example a thief. But if I put all of the jewelry away before my guest arrives then I have decided that I’m worried she or he will be tempted to steal (which is not judging anyone favorably) so I remove the valuables so as to avoid creating a stumbling block which might entice people to sin.

So which is it? Do I think people are potential thieves or do I believe that people are good and won’t steal?

I’m sure that there are subtleties regarding the implementation of these broad rules and granular discussions about when each one applies and how, but the underlying thinking still lends itself to the question, do we think that the nature of mankind is inherently prone to fail (thus we don’t tempt) or prone to succeed (as we judge all people favorably). Are we being kinder by removing temptation or by assuming that people are good?

This does lead to the old medrashic concern about how kindness is not always expressed as niceness (one who is kind to the cruel will end up being cruel the kind). How do we teach that kindness is not in opposition to justice and not always synonymous with mercy?

No title for this one as I don't know what it is about

 for a long time the internet was the ultimate playground with its own social hierarchy and rules. And in it, way back when binary still had only 1, the nerd could be king. The one who was ostracized for playing with technology was unexpectedly ahead of a major curve so he becomes the expert and the role model for his 15 minutes. And in the online communities, the lone gun who can come in and settle a flame war with a single, silver tongued post, the guy so smooth when he sets a trap and shows the other guy is wrong - the virtual beat down. Knowledge rules and this is the nerd's home field. Trivia matters and finding stuff in the early, unsorted cloud was the skill native to growing up with a friend who is a librarian.

Search engines and GUIs tried to level the playing field. Once even the jerks have access to the compendium of all human knowledge that is the interwingle, even jerks can find-a-fact. But the finding isn't easy and the nerds still hold an advantage -- experience in negotiating search terms and communicating with the computer, a most trusted friend. As is always the case, the expert could still reign by knowing things on the assumption that not every analog memory has been digitized somewhere so that knowing defies www. But if something had to be found, it was the webizen who knew how to read the map.

Now AI makes us fake experts not in knowing, but in finding. Instead of pretending we found the facts when wikipedia found the facts, and then writing the paper we are now feeding the teacher's prompt into an AI interface and having the AI spit out the response. We pretend we even made an effort when in truth we didn't. In the earlier case, you walk away without the content knowledge needed to craft the paper. In the later case you walk away with no skill acquisition on any level.

I'm not saying that "no skill on any level" is necessarily bad, but I'd like a representative from the next generation(s) to defend it so I can hear the argument.

Reading right to wrong

 Here's some confusion to chew on. I will have to take a test to measure my proficiency in Hebrew. Fact is, I am very proficient in Hebrew as long as it is translated into English.

Part of any preparation is a review of the structure of a test. Here are some random snippets I have learned while researching the exam (all are quotes from websites and AI summaries but I added color):

"The YAEL test is approximately one and a half hours long and consists of three sections: the first three sections contain multiple-choice questions, and the fourth section is a writing task..."

It is a 3-part exam, each part allocated 20 minutes."

"The computerized YAELnet exam consists of two or three scored multiple-choice parts. Each part contains 22 questions and you are allotted 20 minutes to complete each one. Each question features four answer options."

"Grading the two multiple-choice sections used for scoring (out of three total sections)"

I have yet to figure out the Hebrew because I'm still wrestling with the English.

A Thought Question

 Here is some information about a hypothetical country that has these rules regarding religion.

"_____'s status as the state religion intertwines it directly with the political and legal systems through several key mechanisms:

The senior religious figures hold automatic, unelected seats in the government allowing them to vote on, debate, and amend all national legislation.

The ruling leader serves as the supreme religious figure and must be a ________ connected to the religious establishment, swearing an oath to maintain it.

Government Appointments: The Prime Minister advises the religious leader on the appointment of religious roles, giving the secular government an official role in religious leadership.

The religion's governing body, can pass measures that become national law, but these require formal approval from the secular branches of government "

Opinions about this intertwining? Is this some form of apartheid?

-----

Can anyone name the country? Mr. Mayor, I'm looking at you. 

The Zoomies

 We are living in an age of unfettered access to the entire compendium of human knowledge. If it is known, we can know it. And this is the problem because if it can't be known, we can also know it.

When knowledge is excised from context it becomes trivia or fiction. Or both.. Lost forests will end up with dead trees.

Context is the ultimate gatekeeper and we're lucky for it. Our brains slurp that up, establishing and testing patterns, strengthening some connections, weakening others. That web of silken thoughts helps hold us together.

But if that fourth Indiana Jones movie taught us anything, it is that without a filter or twelve, the overload of unsorted mass media input laughs at any attempt of a reasonable sense ratio. We are drinking from a fire hose and expecting to emerge somehow better off for the experience. You can't suddenly know the universal everything without your head exploding. Facts.

Judgement, we hope, grows as the temple waxes (h/t Billy S.), but it does so in steps. You can't go from knowing nothing to having any reasonable level of understanding in an instant and you don't have any way to contextualize each of the voices for its agenda so you can't assess validity. You can't go from 0 to 100 in an instant.

So we have instant experts with intellects built on sand and the more we know, the less we can know what is right or wrong.

If you go from 0-60 too quickly, you'll break your own neck. Or so I've heard.

Let's Be Friends

I am approaching my Heinz birthday and I don't have many friends. I don't think that that is unusual -- I have never been especially social or sociable so I never had many to begin with but as I age and forge my path, I find that making friends just doesn't fit in. I was wondering why that was and here is what I have figured out.

When I was young I was relatively simple. My tastes were not yet established and I had fewer experiences and preferences as I was still developing and learning about myself. I was, you could say, like the cockpit of a glider.

There are a few basic controls and a simple readout that lets the pilot know when things are basically level. I grew up with those so they made sense. I could find my happiness with relatively little effort.

I was a piper cub

Meeting someone who is similarly simple then allows two of us to take a flight using both of our simple controls -- like a two person glider

As we grow together and learn about ourselves and the world, new controls are added. We learn them together and add in each one slowly -- there is a process of increase.

Years go by and we don't notice that another button, another routine, another measure is added in because the growth is incremental. By the time we are both in a fancier cockpit, we are familiar with each other and every device.

But then, imagine starting fresh with someone, anyone, in your mid 50's. You introduce yourself to someone and say "come on in!"

"Interesting," the other person says, looking at all there is to learn about me. And then that person introduces him or herself to me and says, "Have a seat!"

To quote Gary Gulman, "Yeah, no."

The Epstein Files

So here it is, my official and public statement about the Epstein files.

I haven't read them. I know very little (in terms of proven fact) about the Epstein case. He either killed himself or he didn't (as I believe the options to be) and he had files. Lots of files that apparently every world leader has and is using to blackmail Pres. Trump. In his spare time he was a monster, and we suspect that anyone who spent any time with him is therefore a monster. I'm not taking a stand on any of this because it is well beyond my ken. But there is another angle to it I would like to discuss.

I spend time online discuss/arguing about Judaism and Israel. I'm found in the "pro" camp. One of the things I see quite often is that people decide to use examples like Epstein to prove something about Jews. Jews, they say, are monsters, because Epstein was a monster and he was Jewish. I see the same thing when it comes to discussing other people (on both sides of various issues) and it is getting annoying. Why must people inject religion into a discussion when it is conspicuously absent.

Let's assume that Epstein is guilty of crimes 1 through 12. Unless his actions when committing those crimes were driven by his religious belief, or he used his religious identity to defend them, then the fact that he happens to be Jewish is as irrelevant as Charles Whitman's interest in coin collecting.

And attribute is relevant when it helps identify or explains a motive. I don't care what Hitler's favorite flavor of ice cream was unless it was that choice of flavor which drove his Final Solution. So if it wasn't, don't give me a headline "Austrian Strawberry Eater commits genocide; the Strawberry Eaters are gonna getcha!"

It works in the other direction as well -- someone shouting down Israel or Judaism finds a supportive quote by someone. That someone happens to be Jewish so the anti- person will point out the Jewishness as if that makes an opinion WHICH IS UNRELATED TO RELIGION somehow more powerful and relevant. It doesn't. So Einstein was against certain aspects of Israel's politics. Why does his Jewishness have any relationship to that? Did he make his statements because of his religion? Does he use the texts and beliefs of his religion to explain his position?

One reason that people get called "anti-semite" isn't because they are posting things that are false, but because they are laying behavior unrelated to religion at the feet of the religious group. Can we try to keep our hatreds in focus, people?

I am not defending Epstein -- he has done the world a disservice on so many levels (not the least of which is that I can't enjoy Welcome Back, Kotter as much anymore) but let's not let the actions of individuals become a reason to hate a group, nor let the hatred of a group impact an approach to the law.

---------

Trying to fall asleep but another point appeared in my head. 

When you start to accuse someone and draw from that accusation an attack on an entire group, you can pick any aspect of that individual's identity and decide that that's the dimension of identity that you'd like to tar with this particular accusation. So if a some famous person commits a bad act you can look and say oh that's the exactly the kind of thing an Irish person would do, or, for the same person that's such a left-hander's attitude, or the Democrats all think like that. 

You can pick any aspect arbitrarily and that's the one you can decide is participant in the bad act. But mostly, monsters are not monsters as an expression of a singular affiliation but because they are monsters. 

Not a blog post

 This isn't meant as a formal post, but it was a thought I had after being accused o being a paid Zionist shill because I corrected someone's mistake on an online forum. The person asked if I was paid to post and if so, how much did I get per post. I ignored his accusation, but it set me to thinking about the business model there so I quickly jotted down some notes that I want to save somewhere.

Welcome to somewhere:

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

if I were to consider a policy of paying people to engage online (money per post) I would consider one primary goal to be the dissemination of information about my position (true or false -- normative), another primary goal would be to spread selected information to make the counter position look flawed or weaker. But I would also have a goal of getting the opposition to betray itself. If a post elicits a response, pay. If the post elicits a response which opens the opposition up to countering, more payment. If the post elicits a response which provides otherwise unknown information, more payment.

maybe more views/click thrus, more payment

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

thank you for not paying attention.

Some additional notes: based on what I have seen in multiple forums, I have developed a new conspiracy theory -- Israel is paying people to write the dumbest anti-Israel things ever so that people will correct them with facts, thus making the Israel side look reasonable. There is no way that so many people are so dumb and say such obviously wrong things. I think the Mossad creates these people to make the anti-Israel side look stupid.

A question of approach

 I will be laying out a set of facts and asking for the proper response based on Jewish law and ethics.

Imagine an organization that represents Jewish ideals and abides by Jewish law. It operates in a secular context in which there has been an erosion of ethics. Some organizations steal or cheat to get what they want from the government.

Should the organization in question:

A) "play the game" as well and manipulate the system as much as anyone else to ensure that the recipients of the organization are kept on par with everyone else

B) take a principled stand and operate normally, refusing to get ethically muddy even though this would put people served by this organization it a severe disadvantage

C) disavow the system as a whole, refusing its benefits if its challenges seem insurmountable. Walk away as an organization. Recipients of services would have no recourse but no one would be placed in ethically questionable position.

Or give me a thought out choice D.

The Lit Essay and the Dim Student

 As an English teacher, I spend way too much time grading writing. I have been assigning numbers (and/or letters) to student writing for over 30 years. And I still can't explain it well. Here is a transcript of a wholly fictional (yet accurate) conversation I have with a student after handing back papers (no line of student dialogue was never said):

Student (S) -- why did I get an 87 on my paper?

Me (M) -- because there were errors in it.

S -- was my answer wrong?

M -- in writing, it isn't about right or wrong -- it is about structure and proof.

S -- But I proved my point!

M -- Yes, you did, but there were stylistic and mechanical errors.

S -- But I got the answer right.

M -- in English class, we aren't looking for you to get the right answer, and then show your work. In English, the work IS the product. The proven argument is just a way for you to demonstrate mastery of writing as an independent skill.

S -- so what did I do wrong?

M -- did you look at the corrections that I made, or the comments that I wrote?

S -- Can't you just tell me?

M -- OK: you have no transition between your first and second body paragraphs.

S -- And that was worth 13 points?

M -- no, that isn't how it works. You had other errors as well. You didn't capitalize, your comma use was poor and you used first person which I had told you not to use.

S -- But how is that 13 points? My friend showed me his paper and it was basically the same but he got a 92!

M -- Every paper is different as is every student's background and tendencies. A student who has shown marked improvement and a student who makes no effort to fix previously corrected errors are not viewed identically.

S -- So another kid can make comma errors and get a 92, but I do it and I get an 87?

M -- Well, yes, and you did other things wrong as well.

S -- How much is each missing comma worth?

M -- That's not how holistic grading works.

S -- You why did I get an 87?

M -- You want an 88?

S -- I want an A.

M -- it wasn't an A paper.

S -- But my friend got an A and I think my paper is better.

M -- If you would like, I can regrade your friend's paper and take off more points.

S -- Why you got to be like that?

***Repeat for over 30 years***

Centrist

One of the really tough things for me to do (I shan't generalize to the entire species -- I'll just recognize this in myself and if you see a shadow of it in your life, maybe you will think about it as well) is to recognize my centrism.

I live, for now, in the USA. I sort of like it here. Things haven't been great recently and I fear for the future, but I owe a whole heckuva lot to America. But one thing that living in the greatest country, state, city etc is the sense that everything else is second tier. And it is true. I'm guilty of that, of seeing New York as the center of the universe and for seeing the US as the single bastion of human culture that all others have to follow.

I know that this isn't true but it is so engrained in my head. I see other country's music as an imitation. I consider a foreign film to be a Marvel superhero movie with subtitles. I don't understand why other languages are even necessary. I'm American-centrist. That's not a bad thing but it limits my understanding. I go into a store and immediately compare it to the Shop Rite in Englewood. I see a TV show and try to categorize it by associating it with "real" shows, meaning shows in the US.

This also has an interpersonal consequence: I expect all other people to have the same values and behaviors as an American. So when I get a book about the social practices of different cultures, instead of celebrating each one as a unique expression of a history, I see everything in comparison to the transcendent norm of "America." I think we do that as a nation, seeing other countries as pale photocopies of the US, so we impose on their actions our sensibility. We assume that because we would react in a particular way to a stimulus, anyone else would also. This is troubling. We look at the media in other countries and complain about infringements on the "right to free speech" as if that is a universal, and not American construct. We mistake our approach to international relations as the best if not only one, so local codes of hierarchy, dominance or such don't register and we walk into a fan blade without knowing that it is we who are the foreigners.

I was watching the weather report and the forecast for this week came up. Apparently, later this week, we will be having a "heat wave." The term "heat wave" refers to 3 successive days of 90+ temps. But it only means that to an American audience. Maybe elsewhere, anything over 80 is a heat wave. Maybe in some places, they don't think of heat waves, but successive days of anything below 90 is a cold snap. I don't know -- I have always taken it as gospel that 3 90+ days equals heat wave. I forgot to put the qualifier "here" into my consideration because I assume a default American-centrism.

Maybe that's normal. Maybe we have to be trained to look beyond our local biases and see other paths as valid and equal, not a echoes or childish attempts to copy. And maybe we should be familiar with other paths before we decide that ours is the only and best, and before we expect that everyone thinks and does as we do in all cases.

The US is great. Our movies are great. Our music, our food, our highway system, our air conditioning, all great. But looking down on any place else because they refuse to be America-wannabees is not so great.

---------------edit------------

so it is tough to see a different iteration of "professionalism" and "customer service" and be satisfied by it if my American-centric standards are "higher." I wonder if I should adjust to acept the local norm or impose my American expectations and hope that the entire system rises to meet me what i think of as reasonable expectations.

In Which I Catch a Ghost

I'd like to address this to my two shining stars -- my kids. Guys, I hope that this little bit of chizuk lasts you for a while because something like this is the exception, not the rule. But here's the truth of it -- you are some how, in some part and some way, psychic.

Here's how I figure it -- I figure with all the times that I feel like I heard or saw stuff, I must be somewhat psychic and so with all the genetics these days, odds are my children and I would be connected somehow.

I have felt my psychic-nessness (the second one is in Hebrew) for years but have never had the proof. Today, I caught it by the tail. I was watching the Mets game and the announcers, at the end of a clean first, noted that a certain pitcher was slated to pitch in the second. There is a practice called a "bullpen game" in which a team uses a long slate of short relievers to fill the game with fresh arms that need work, giving a starter spot a break.

A quick conversation with an AI or two revealed that according to popular thinking, this started in 2018. I recall having thought of this strategy before then. But hey, that's just my off-the-charts narcissism so what evs. So is this another in a ghost-cadre of vague recollections of my prescience? I did a quick check of Facebook and found this post:

In this post, dated May of 2017 I mention that I had an idea of running the bull-pen out there in an "earlier" plan. Even though I don't know where that earlier plan is, it shows that I had the idea well over a year before the league. And since soon after, the league started using it, I feel it is well within my rights to expect a piece of that, there action. So what profit has been generated by the implementation of this approach?

But seriously, this pretty much proves that I'm being monitored.

P.S. this is the stuff you should be pointing to when you are questioned by the authorities and you say something vague like "wellsir, he did seem to be getting a touch, y'know, funny in the head, thinking that everybody from here to Sunday was out to get him.

I Got Taken for a Ride

 No, this isn't about my shameful episode of "buying from a fake website and getting defrauded" so let's just move on, shall we?

Today, my friend and daughter* traveled over the river and through the Englewood** to meet me at the Bean. Our plan? To give blood. I am due to give, as is the kid so she came on out to NJ and we figured on a daddy-daughter breakfast and bleed. We left my car in its spot and she drove me to the blood-taking-place-building.

Well, the car drove me and she sat there and looked very nice.

Never have I ever, up to this point, been on a fully autonomous car ride out in nature. It was unnerving to say the least. But don't worry -- I'll say more:

At times, it was harrowing
and often confusing;
its logic of lane changes,
speed above cruising.

I'll start again.

I didn't really notice it much until the car, after completing an on-merge fairly well but overly-cautiously, moved out of the right lane (which is not a designated "slow lane") in to a middle lane directly behind an ambulance. It fell back a little and then moved into the left lane and drove 6-7 miles above the speed limit. In my rental, I get a red light on my Heads-down-display when I am driving over the locally posted limit. The Tesla has no such safeguard I guess, freeing the AI up to find its level of lawlessness.

It moved into the right lane when we were 1.1 miles away from our exit and there was yet another exit, plus a strip mall before our exit. I question that decision as well.

Then, out of nowhere, the car squirted windshield wiper fluid. Yes, the wipers were going, on the intermittent setting, but there was no cause for the fluid spray. Riddle me that one!

I watched it figure out traffic flow (meh to a meh-ploos) and avoid pedestrians (meh-meenoos and that's generous). I still got distracted by the huge color monitor which is constantly bombarding every thing around us with invisible rays that allow us to record their every move. Do they record that stuff for training purposes? Is every Tesla driver's driving like the textual source for a robot using real world experiences to populate its LLM-equivalent pool of potential? The Tesla would then approach any intersection and pick the movements most likely to appear next based on the database created by analyzing the actions of all other Teslas, everywhere and ever.

Anyway, we got to the blood place on West Ridgewood**** and I was told that my appointment had to be pushed off by an hour and the kid couldn't come in as a walk-in because they had 3 techs call out sick (which is a contraction of "call in to call out sick") and were therefore woefully understaffed. Mmmmm woefuls

So back into the Tesla for another trip as we return to the scene of the chrome. This time, the young person told the AI to take the route which was 2 minutes shorter. It did and this put us on a toll road. Therefore the going rate for time is $.45 per minute.

Overall review: not bad. Unnerving as I said -- the entire idea of being a passenger is anathema to me, but when there is no driver, I don't just feel like I am not in control -- I feel like NO ONE is in control. The claim that a computer can consider options and exercise judgment that will dovetail perfectly all the time and with every other driver on the road? I can't buy it. Learning to anticipate specific drivers based on recent observations isn't part of what I want computers to do. Acting counter-intuitively because of some human based reason is part of driving. Yes, I know one can instantly jump on and assume control and do all the stuff that has stayed in the human domain, but the human is separated from the driving experience and will always have to get "up to speed." The active driver is already at speed. I am floored by the technology and how well it does work but I'll always trust myself just a tiny bit more.

*that's one person...get it? I LIKE my kids and I am honored to have the audacity to consider them as cherished friends. So stop laughing) 

** In all my years, I don't think I have ever written the name "Englewood" correctly on the first go unless I stop and think about it for a few seconds -- this is because many years ago, I had a student named Justin Engel and the "spell" setting*** got stuck on Engel and now I can't get out of that pattern. Thanks Justin.

*** For some words, it seems that my brain simply assimilated them wrong so the default spelling is stuck in the wrong place. I cannot spell the word "friend" without pause. The wrong spelling was Eprommed on.

**** Sometimes I do stop when writing Ridgewood to reconsider if there is an E after the 'dg' or if that's just in England but mostly I remember.

In Praise of Val Kilmer

I watched Top Secret! last night. It has been many years since I have seen it and I wonder if I ever really sat through it beginning to end before, or if I only saw scenes out of order. But this time, I paid attention.

The movie is surprisingly good in many ways. Though Airplane! was great, it was a coopting of Zero Hour, using the over-seriousness of the original become the mode of humor in the spoof. Top Secret! is not based on a specific, earlier text -- it is as original as any other Hollywood mass-market movie. So the fact that the A-Z's created and wrote a storyline elevates this movie. This also freed them up to use comedy that wasn't available for Airplane! (as it was, to some degree, limited by the Ur-text). While Airplane's humor was broad and often overly literal, T-S got to mess around with sight, sound, foreground and back and a whole lot more.

The movie is designed to be a spot on take off of an Elvis Movie, a Cold War spy thriller and who knows what else. So it serves many thematic masters and hits all the right notes along the way. The Elvis angle isn't just about certain physical mannerisms, or a cosmetic approach, but about the structure and the embedded surrealities. The music piggybacks on Elvis music and the entire surf lifestyle (and IMHO, the parody music, both of specific tunes or of genres, was really good) but then the look of individual scenes lends itself to association with war movies. It works as so many things and on so many levels. The music is good for what it is and what it does but the contemporary satirical power is in the intertwined gun play reflecting a take on American culture that is both different from ours and yet eerily echoic of it. Unlike the linear humor approach in Airplane, where jokes wait in line to be delivered, set up, punch, set up, punch, in T-S they step on each other. Repeated viewings are necessary so you can listen carefully to the words spoken while trying to read the ones in the background and all that is happening while the sound-bed is somehow wrong. It is a very demanding movie because of how full and rich it is.  I am sure Yiddish speakers and readers laughed loudest because I only know a little and I heard a lot in there. I can only imagine how much I missed.

Expectations are constantly subverted but that never becomes predictable. Val Kilmer's acting is fantastic - the physical skills needed (underwater fighting?) the constant body awareness and affect. I feel he was always underrated as an actor; he has a presence that leads you to see him in this 2-D hero role (and so, yeah his Iceman was spot on) but he also has the cheeky charm which paved the way for a generation of quipping action heroes brought up on smarmy Bill Murray snark and Chevy Chase subtlety. The Swedish bookshop scene is brilliant. Think about the effect and the method, and then the movements that had to be choreographed and actually performed. There is precious little editing which means they got a lot done without errors in a single shot. The conversation while dancing makes fun of the trope in a way that demands that you pay attention to the dancing as primary for itself qua DANCE, not as a background to the humor.  Show passionate kissing and defuse it with the tongue movements. And then a fireplace. You buy in to the passion and then see the "acting" aspect. Impressive. You realize you are watching a movie and that it knows it is a movie, but you also care about the characters as if it was not just a movie.

And,  yes very puerile and the excessive raunchiness is very (maybe too much)  in-your-face or maybe I'm just being overly sensitive. 

Watching it demands close attention - references, running gags, writing in the background, cultural snippets. It is a very "rich" play with very little wasted effort.

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

so I wrote about 90% of that last night after watching the movie. I worked on it briefly today. While I did, I looked up some details of the movie and find this article from 2014. I had never read it. I'm glad that I got a lot of what they were doing, and I don't think they give themselves enough credit for what they accomplished.

https://screencrush.com/top-secret-30/

Words *3

 I am going to write a semi-political post which focuses on something i am passionate about -- words. I use 'em, I teach 'em and I study 'em so I'd like to talk about them.

Words have meanings. That's a fact. However, words sometimes change their meanings over time. We all know the origin of the word "nice" and how it changed from an insult to a nicety. But that doesn't mean that we should burn all the dictionaries because words keep evolving; words still have intended meanings. So now I get to the heart of the matter -- here is a word "genocide."

Words exist in a variety of contexts and often, their meanings shift depending on context, and one of the most basic forms of miscommunication is caused by the speaker and the listener not sharing a common contextual-definition. If we import a meaning from another context, we run the risk of not being understood. In regular American conversation, one can use a word like "murder" and not mean it in the strict legal sense. It might be used hyperbolically, or it might be used loosely (that is, not confined to a strict meaning but can be used to refer to a larger category which is somewhat connected to the core meaning).

"Genocide" has a meaning under international law. It is a technical term defined in the legal (Geneva Convention) context as "any of five specific acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group"

But the word has been used much more loosely during its history. The word has been used to refer to any type of cultural erasure, or even to atrocities which are horrible and tragic, but not, strictly-legally speaking, genocides. The problem arises when people using the term loosely think that, because the word has commincative value, it can be imported into the legal definition and the loose definition can be used to qualify for the legal consequences. That's not how things work. If I call a particular baseball line up as "murderer's row" that doesn't mean that their actions are now what qualifies for the legal title "murderer." Seeing someone who committed manslaughter and calling him a murderer might feel acceptable but it doesn't change that the legal definition would not apply.

The same holds true for "antisemitism." The word was coined to mean a specific thing. It wasn't a construction which took a known noun and stuck a convenient prefix on it. People have taken the technical word and deconstructed it because they see it in loose use and because they are under the belief that the word is simply the result of gluing its parts together. The Daytona 500 is a race but someone who dislikes it isn't a racist even though the root word is there.

But, you say, the word can grow and evolve and can now mean something different.

Well, yes and no. You can call a potato an onion if you want, and if the people around you agree to that, they will understand the intent behind your use of the word "onion." But anyone in the cooking schools of the world will not because they do not subscribe to your forced evolution of the word. And that locally recognized understanding cannot then be applied to pre-existing cook books and other texts which use the word accurately. Until the authority that enshrined the definition agrees to change the legal definition, any individual's use of the word in another context is at least somewhat inaccurate. Misusing it then impacts others who hear the word used and assume that it is being used accurately. Twisting words and inserting a personal understanding is much larger consequences.

Genocide isn't just any war. Zionism refers simply to the right of a group to self-determine. Antisemitism doesn't mean "being against someone who calls himself a semite". These words mean specific and intentional things. Respect them as technical terms and don't water them down by using them loosely and expecting the world to sign on to your particular interpretation.

Let's write a joke!

Why yes, today's task is to procrastinate and not write a college recommendation. So instead, I'm going to over analyze the construction of a joke I thought of this morning and you are just going to have to be satisfied with that.

The basis of the joke, as for many, is self-deprecation and the mode is a subversion. Start with the bare bones setup:

1. I get confused for a celebrity

2. That celebrity is not one to whom it is flattering to be compared

Mix in some tone and language to make it seem informal/conversational.

That's the easy part. So the basic iteration would be

"People stop me on the street all the time and say I look like a celebrity. But who is Joseph Merrick?"

that has a reference in it which some will get and some won't, and it plays off my ignorance so I don't know I am being insulted.

I could have said "but why is it always Joseph Merrick?" This would have meant I was not ignorant, just insulted -- different mode of humor. It would still not be understood by some.

I could change to any pop-culture reference as long as that referent is unattractive (and that would affect the balance of the humor).

A subtler formulation might be a pop culture reference with no explanation. Consider the following options:

"People tell me I look like Vic Tayback" (he is ugly)

"People tell me I look like Vic Tayback in 1989" (when he was old and uglier)

"People tell me I look like Vic Tayback in 1992" (2 years after he died)

Mixing and matching setups and adding in the bells and whistles, we could end up with

"so the guy got me mixed up with a celebrity. He said I looked like Vic Tayback..."

"That's nice of him to say"

"...in 1992."

Note the broken-up delivery and the use of the date after the confirmation. Similarly I could have constructed

"I don't mind being confused for a celebrity but does it have to be Vic Tayback?"

or

"Hey you look like Vic Tayback!"

"Thanks, but isn't he dead?"

"yes."

The only thing we have to fear is everything

I recall having a conversation with my dad about the world. I complained that I couldn't let my kids out of my sight and he insisted that the world was no less scary when I was younger, but that we weren't aware of all the bad in the world because we didn't have the internet etc. He didn't see the world as grown scarier, but our awareness as out of control.

The fact is, things were different. Maybe there were fewer bad guys, or we were just blissfully ignorant of life beyond our neighborhood. I saw an online video crowing about how special my generation is. It posited that those of us who grew up in the 70's had a unique balance of unstructured freedom and technological simplicity and emotional resilience and maturity. I assumed it would be one of those "rah-rah" videos which spouted generic platitudes about one era so those people can feel special, but then it can be easily tweaked to celebrate another era. I likened it to those shirts that have the "Only the coolest people were born in _________" and the consumer can buy a shirt listing any year. 

But the argument actually bore itself out well. I did leave the house in the morning, not to return for hours. I did bike miles away with no phone or plan. I did have to fill up the time left to my own devices. And none of these are skills that my kids have had to develop or behaviors that I would allow. I kept much closer tabs on my kids -- they couldn't ride around the block without my knowing exactly when to expect them to make the turn back onto our street. I didn't let them go somewhere unless there was a plan for the end as well. Am I more worried than I need to be? Maybe, but better safe than sorry. So I over compensate, reversing the way I was brought up and encouraging my kids to live in fear of the world.

Is the world scarier? Do children need to be kept closer? Is this an expression of love that I didn't see from my parents so I'm trying to break a cycle? Is it the result of the craziness I ran into while unsupervised, as a child?

A Divine-graine

 I believe that, over the last year or two, I have developed a close relationship with my creator. I feel God's presence in my life very often in the subtle miracles which we often fail to recognize. Here is a little and dumb event:

fact -- two days ago, I noticed that my bar of soap has gotten so small that I need to start another one. The bars are stored under the bathroom sink. I forgot to take one out the next day (in the haze of the early morning, I am usually driven by muscle memory and instinct).

fact -- I get headaches, or at least I used to. My current regimen of pills has done an incredible job of keeping the headaches away so headaches are now very rare. Breakthrough headaches show up less than once a month these days.

Yesterday, I had a headache. Nothing too crazy but a good sized ache behind my right eye. I powered through work as it worsened, but when I got back to my place, I knew I would need to take an analgesic. So I wandered into the bathroom, conscious of nothing but a headache, opened the cabinet and saw the pills...right next to the bars of soap.

Yes, I truly believe that HKB"H gave me a headache to ensure that I remembered to set up a new bar of soap for the next morning. These little "coincidences" are the signs of an intelligence, a divinity that shapes our ends.

But the next thought is that, even though it is a sign from above, a headache is still a physical event that hurts like heck. A flame, no matter who lights it and why, can still burn you.

Mein Kraft

 I have some very deep and confused thoughts that I'm trying to figure out. I saw the Minecraft movie last night. I have never seen or played Minecraft and went into the viewing experience the blankest of slates. After watching it, I still know nothing about Minecraft. The difference is, now I'm also stupider in general.

This was the worst movie I have ever seen, but in a good way. I don't think I can explain it any better than that. It was horrible, but its intentionality, its sincerity in pursuit of being actively bad was a redeeming factor. I have seen bad movies that are just plain bad. This was bad but also, horrible.

Jack Black overacted. But he must have known he was overacting, and the writing demanded incredible overacting. So while I never had any understanding of his character or the driving logic of his actions, I stopped getting annoyed at his Adam Sandler-esque childlike behavior because he knew he was being idiotic and that's intentional.

There was nothing good about the movie except for some of the one-liners. I wish I remember any of them, but I do recall laughing loudly at some isolated moments, and shaking my head in absolute wonder at the stupidity on the screen at other moments. I did write down one joke 

Waitress: Are you finished?

Marlene: No, I think he's Swedish. But we're done with our meal.

That's a dumb joke, dumb on a dad level. But it was delivered unexpectedly and quickly.

On the whole, self indulgent, poorly written and presented, over acted and under developed. I never enjoyed watching what Big Dave calls a "steaming pile of monkey crap" as much as this. That doesn't mean it is any less monkey crap, but it is monkey crap with glitter.

There was a preponderance of gratuitous violence including much ham to ham combat which I found amusing. Not the combat, but that it inspired me to write that comment.