Archive - 2010

Resolution number one is a negation of itself

This year my first and most important resolution is to be more accepting. Which is you know, deliciously ironic. I mean a resolution is just evidence that clearly I have not accepted myself, and would like some degree of control over how I will change in the future right? So my first resolution, is to accept that I do not accept myself and work to change that.

That sounds awkward, and perhaps like it should cancel itself out, but bear with me.

Those are some heavy categories I just picked.

Which is funny because I really want to lie down and watch Anchorman right now, but instead I am about to embark on the fastest post in the world about ethics, politics, spirituality, psychology etc...

Oh well, carpe the next 20 minutes right?

So a colleague at work shared this video with me, and I think it's pretty fabulous.

Mad men is a phenomenal show. It is emotionally gripping and covers really intense and important subject matter in a manner so true, that it is difficult sometimes to realize that the show is not based on events that really happened. People tend to be obsessive about it, I certainly am.

People who don't watch it often wonder what it is about, and the answer usually given is "advertising". Which is kind of like saying Moby Dick is about whaling.

I have spent a few years wondering why I care *so* much about this work of fiction, that takes place during a decade I never experienced, dealing with a field that I haven't got very much respect for.

I finally figured it out. Mad Men is not about advertising, it is about failure.

A very dear friend's mom died this week and tomorrow I'll be going to the funeral. Which is going to be at the chapel where we held services for my mom. Then his mother will be buried in the same cemetery where my mother is. Because we are Jewish, and this is how we do funerals. That's what I tell myself, that this is just circumstance. But nevertheless I have spent the day crying intermittently.

The connection I feel to the Jewish community is a strange one. It is not constantly positive. But it is constant. Sometimes it kind of feels inescapable.

Culture is often presented as something we can choose. I can choose to like the music I do, I can (sometimes) choose the company I keep.

But to be insufferably cliched: In matters of life and death, I realize I haven't got the privilege of choice with respect to my Judaism.

It wasn't a choice. For as long as I can remember I have been a Jew. I imagine myself sliding into the world, covered in afterbirth, with two proof positives: That I belonged to my mother, and that I, because of her, was Jewish. If I chose at all, it was in the way that my lungs 'chose' air over the alternative.