From Walmart with Love

I never would have guessed Walmart would give me hope. I never really expected it from one of the saddest shopping places I know. A designer boutique, perhaps, or one of those specialty shops with a focus. Yeah. They could give a guy hope. But Walmart? That place we go because it’s cheap, not stylish, with the smelly bathrooms and scuffed-up floors?

Well. I guess it happens sometimes.

The Darkest Disease

Some of my favorite artists are the Cranberries, Ingrid Michaelson, and Company of Thieves. I grew up to the tunes of Enya, Jewel, and Lisa Loeb. The edgiest thing I listened to for a long time was Alanis Morissette. It’s not much a surprise really: I’m a generally gentle guy, calm and peaceful, quiet and contemplative.

But I’m also a Gemini.

The irony is that my first love of song that breached this facade itself means to fade away–and yet they have remained a staple of my soundtrack to life ever since.

A Landmark Revelation

Life’s like a box of chocolate. Life’s like flying a kite. Life’s like a ladder. Life’s like an adventure. Life’s like a roller coaster. The metaphors are endless (and the metaphors are really similes while we’re at it). Whether we don’t know what we’ve got till we take a bite, whether we’ve caught the wind or we’re falling from afar, whether we’re climbing over a precarious angle, forging forward to a new frontier, or simply riding the world through a series of ups and downs and one too many loops than any of us wants to go through, life’s got a lot to give us.

This post marks my two hundredth post as the Writingwolf.

My life through this point has encapsulated each of these ideas, but these last few days, they’ve been one of the wildest rides I’ve ever ridden on. And let’s just say I made it around the turn okay.

If I Could Tell the World Just One Thing

Ten years ago I was twelve. It was a Tuesday. We were already up, had gone about the day as usual. We were turning on the TV to watch MacGyver like we did every day. My mom was taking a shower before we had to leave. The only problem was, all the TV channels were interrupted by a live newscast each showing the same thing.

The scene was this: Two towers, a billowing cloud of smoke from the second.

My brother told me to go tell our mom, so I ran down the hall, banged on the bathroom door, and shouted the news to her. I didn’t know what it all meant, though: I was twelve, what did I know of World Trade Centers and terrorist attacks? To me a plane had flown into a building. It was tragic, maybe in those first few moments scary and exciting, but what did it mean to me–a twelve-year-old boy a thousand miles away?

Think Fast

There’s a popular joke that asks, Why do fast days go so slowly? The answer’s perhaps too simple, so everyone just laughs, no matter how many times they’ve heard it. Telling it has become as customary as the fast itself.

Tonight began Tisha B’av, the Ninth of Av. It’s a somber holiday, more an observance than a holiday really, for it commemorates disasters, not miracles. The return of the spies that condemned an entire generation to the desert till death. The destruction of the Temples in 586 B.C.E. and 70 C.E. The fall of Betar, the last stronghold of the Bar Kochba rebellion. The day when Jerusalem was plowed over and made uninhabitable.

Common catastrophes? Not quite. These disasters were crippling to the Jewish people, breakers-of-faith and sickening events even two thousand years later. We mourn. We member. We mustn’t forget.

H is for Ḥaverim

These past four days I was attending the ISJL Education Conference, the ISJL being shorthand for the Institute of Southern Jewish Life, the organization that provides Hebrew school curriculum and other services to over sixty congregations in thirteen southern states. It was a gathering of at least a hundred, if not two hundred, Jews from more cities than I’d ever heard of and it was wonderful.

We had a fellow from the ISJL who visits every few months. It’s just part of the program, you could say. One thing she told me often is that I must, that I absolutely without a doubt had to meet the ISJL staff rabbi, one Rabbi Marshal Klaven. He was unlike any other rabbi I’d ever meet, she said, and I’d like him.

I did like him. And he really was unlike any other rabbi I’d ever met.

A Sojourn of Self and Soul

The Saturday before last was the youth Shabbat at my synagogue. In other words, the majority of the service was led by youth from our congregation, mostly middle- and high-school-aged students, with a few college kids and some of the teachers at our synagogue’s congregational school mixed in. It got me thinking. About a lot of things.

First of course, let me say this: You really feel old when you realize that you remember most of these children when they were a third their current size and had barely a tenth of their present Hebrew-reading skills. On the one hand it was gratifying in that way only known to educators to be able to say I shared a slight moment in their development, a minuscule step in the path that brought them each to leading services Saturday, but on the other hand, it makes me feel tremendously old. It’s like looking down at my own grandchildren: They started so small, and now they’re all grown up.

Worse is that this trail of thinking always evolves further. Soon I was thinking about all the other times I’ve lived through, all those faded fads I supported and all those past professions I’ve participated in. Pokemon, Digimon, Cardcaptor Sakura–some of these names you’ll never know if you’re even a few years younger than me–FernGully, Little Nemo, the Lion King and other classic Disney movies before Pixar (which although fabulous, is not nearly as classic) came around, the Brave Little Toaster, Thomas the Tank Engine, Encyclopedia Brown, Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages–all these things that I grew up on, now most of them, gone. It brings a sudden realization to the fact of how quickly time really changes. We don’t think much of those “when I was your age…” stories that seem so trite, but trust me, children: When I was your age, things really were different. And I’m not that much older than you.

Of course, thinking about growing old always leads to thinking about growing older. The average life-expectancy of a man living in the US is only 76. I’m almost 22. That means more than a fourth of my life–or more precisely, 27.8% of my expected lifetime–has already passed me by. I’m more than a fourth dead by that statistic. And, just as I wonder every time I get on the path of wondering this, where have I gotten in the last decade? What have I done with my life?

Since They Say Size Doesn’t Matter

Years ago I heard about the miniWORDS competition, which was (and might still be, I’m not sure) a competition to write super-short flash fiction to win large prizes of money, recognition, and fame! I entered, but never won. Nonetheless, some small words are worth digging up and sharing, aren’t they? Little bits to think about, a moment in time to take another’s breath away.

So let’s get going, shall we? Size doesn’t matter, or so they say, but is it really true? Why don’t you tell me!

Just That Time of Year Again

I began writing a new post the other day:

The world is cruel, and I am its confidante.

In others news, I’ve been just as cruel of late. Specifically, this cruelty is of a subjective kind, one comprising selfishness and laxity. I’ve been selfish in the use of my time–for despite all my friends’ emails who’ve patiently been waiting for responses (some in excess of some months time), I’ve put all my time into reading for my own pleasure and playing on Neopets. And lax I have been in sleeping late, staying up late, and all in all, moving little and doing less.

On the one hand, the relaxation all this brings is want for more.

But on the other hand, it’s simply perpetuating all the excuses I’ve been giving–and this time, I’ve got no excuses to give. School is over for the semester. For my sake, all the holidays are passed. And yet, I linger. I laze. I waste away.

It’s a worthless, shameful existence. It’s pitiable. It’s partly why I’ve not posted in so long.

I mentioned in my last post about it being that time of year, or something such like that I recall (and please excuse my writing at length–ingesting Pride and Prejudice for a few days on end can do that to a guy’s already verbose tongue), and to that end, I intend to return here.

I speak by saying it’s that time of year again even though I know wholeheartedly that each year has its own wants and wishes and that each year, although bearing some similarity to years past, is in effect its own year. However, it seems with good reason, to be a truth universally acknowledged, that a man at the end of his year is in want of what he lacks.

I told you, Pride and Prejudice. I finally finished it, but I ask you this: At what cost?

Obviously I began writing this before Christmas. Obviously I’ve since given a fair number of posts on all sorts of issues, but to this one in particular I’ve not yet returned. The truth is, to pick up where I left off would be a dire injustice.

Malevolent Benevolence

When we came to North Carolina we spent a few weeks with my aunt while my dad got a job at an apartment complex nearby. Then we moved in. I recall a handful of things here: There was a small group of friends (were they distant cousins?) who loved the show Beetle Boys (or something akin to that) about three kids (I think the middle one was a girl) who somehow gained magical Power Ranger-esque powers to transform into beetle-like fighters with special abilities. I liked the show and I watched it in secret whenever I could so I could play with my friend’s action figures, but my mom didn’t let me watch it and that was the end of that.