Never Trust a Politician

Riddle me this: How can you tell me one moment you don’t care what I do, that it’s my own business and the government shouldn’t stop me, but then tell me you support legislation that takes away my rights? How can you tell me that you oppose the amendment, but that you’re going to vote in favor of it? How can you tell me that we’re all sinners and in an instant reduce my entire life to one of your misjudged laws?

Ah, Politicians! How art thine lies construed…

Shouldn’t a want for less legislation put you against these bills? Shouldn’t stating that you don’t care cause you to favor equal rights? How is it you can speak one thing while looking me in the eyes and move your hands in another? I just don’t understand. How can you argue in favor of personal rights and then vow to abolish them?

I don’t understand.

Republicans. The sad part is I don’t completely disagree with them, their goals and values, but the more I learn about the party–the more I deal with them daily–the less I think I could ever stand behind them.

Black and White: Part One

In a moment I was called a bureaucrat and a dictator. I was told I’ve spent so much time up top I’ve forgotten how the people at the bottom still think. How they feel. How they live and die and prosper and are crushed, decimated, dessicated, turned to poison and ingested in the cannibalistic universe we live in. All these things in fewer words, but all these things nonetheless.

The truth is I haven’t forgotten. My hide has grown thicker. My skin has grown harder. My muscles, stronger; my bones, impassioned, have turned to steel. And my mind–that precious vestibule of unarticulated prowess–my mind has only sharpened as in these days of misery I live life. But I have not forgotten.

People don’t know me. Even when I see a man a hundred times a day, even when I share my deepest thoughts and my most hidden inclinations and my most obvious and embarrassing faults with him, he does not know me. Maybe I don’t speak as clearly as I think I speak. Or maybe, as is more probable, I’m simply deeper than I think I’m deep.

Maximum Occupancy Approaching

When protests began in New York City on September 17, coinciding with Constitution Day, most people had no idea what they were there for, if they knew of them at all. Certainly their mission seemed disjointed and unclear, and at best the media portrayed merely a mass of people with little else except a slogan: Occupy Wall Street. Surely no one knew where the idea had come from–or that its origins weren’t even American.

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.

Despicable Meandering

This evening I was given some terrible news: The vote on NC SB 106 and NC HB 777 has been moved up from September to tomorrow. These sequences of letters and numbers sound innocent on their own, but they sound ominous when you know what they refer to: A pair of bills introduced to the North Carolina General Assembly trying to write discrimination into our State Constitution. If passed, the public will decide whether or not to amend the Constitution to explicitly prohibit any and all legal recognition of same-sex couples in North Carolina.

Not only is this news disheartening, it also makes me somewhat thankful.

I am not, nor will I ever be, thankful for the hateful hearts that fill our world. Same-sex marriages are currently illegal in North Carolina and writing this into our constitution is merely an act of intolerance. It speaks volumes of the hatred and bias that runs through the veins of every man and woman who has supported these bills. I need not give names; their hate will return to them someday, and I can only pray that they may change their ways before it’s too late. No one–not even them–deserves to be treated with such malice. I pray their hearts may open to the harm they’re hands are causing even as we speak, as I write these words, as you read them.

What, then, do I have to be thankful for at a time like this?

If Students Be the Food of Life, Lead On

Two down and one to go. My in-depth analysis of my college grading rubric is coming to a written close, and yet is still just blossoming into something more tangible and usable than written thoughts alone.

On Wednesday I discussed the features of a college’s basic profile–their location, their expenses, school colors, and a few other points. Yesterday I spoke about academics, math and Judaica, foreign languages and politics, as well as some things like student/faculty ratios and accelerated programs, and I got some great feedback, too.

Today, I’m talking about life. Student life in particular.

The Julia-Mandelbrot Love Child

First and foremost I am a man of ideas. I have always been a man of ideas and I presume I shall always be a man of ideas. As such, I am of this nature easily inclined to fall in love with an idea, to infatuate myself in concepts and theories, to indulge in the orgasmic philosophies of imagination and the perpetuation of thought itself.

As such, I am also of the nature of put into things more thought than one might deem reasonable for the affair. I consider at length where I’ll spend my money, how I will spend it, and what will remain after it’s spent. I can spend days on end merely considering which movies, which books, which ideas I liked more than the last.

Take history. But two short years ago I was beginning college. I loved the idea of history, that ability to raise one’s eyebrows and make a well-informed comment upon how this has all happened before. Just look back in that year, at that place, at that one moment which parallels this, and you’ll see, very clearly, how we’ve just repeated our mistakes–for better or for worse I’d leave to the audience, but it’s only one such possible encounter with a historian.

Of course, but two short years ago, I was also beginning my first course in history. And I can assure you all, there was no delight in the act for the delight that mirrored the concept. I was bored. I sought answers and insight that did not exist in the text, that did not exist in the mindset of history. Though I still do love the idea of history, and of being historically knowledgeable, the study itself remains elusive, a passion I cannot hope to touch.

As a mathematician, I’m also exceedingly fond of tangents.

Kung Fu Rabbi

It’s been nearly a year to the day since I wrote my very first post about the Pirkei Avot, and I refer anyone new to the series to that post. It’s a good start, and I promise you, it’s the only one I think you should read to get introduced to the whole thing (although my last one is also well worth the word court).

So hear I am again. I was in services this morning for our teacher’s appreciation Shabbat and since I was there a few minutes early, I decided I’d read ahead. Obviously you can see it’s now past midnight, so I’ve had plenty of time to let this story steep. And the truth is, I’ve needed every minute of it. And probably then some, too.

So without any further ado… Press the button below to follow me on this next (and I assure you, rather exciting) step on my journey through the so-called Ethics of the Fathers.

One More Yellow Brick Behind Us

The news is late. If by now you haven’t heard, what are you reading my blog for? I’m an openly gay Jew–so I would presume most of my readers should know–and on account of this, if you’re following me, you’ve surely been following the news. So it’s no news today what I’m going to be most thankful for, and if it hasn’t been guessed already, then, really, why are you here?

No, I jest! Please stay! And here I shall refrain from writing “lol.”

24. The Repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

I had hoped my scathingly sarcastic and inherently ironic post a few weeks back would help push the people to seeing sensibility, and I suppose somewhat it might have worked–for not even a whole week or two after, it was successfully repealed! It’s been a long and arduous fight, but we’ve made it, my fellow monsters, we’ve made it!

It’s Fractal Almost

Plinky says:

“Ten years from now, what do you hope your life will be like?”

I asked myself a similar question this last summer when I was Israel. We were in the Beit Knesset (that is to say, in the vulgar, the chapel) and I was looking up at the stained glass window, thinking of where life might take me.

It started with a seed–who I was and where I was.

Then it started to grow: A stem (where I’ve been) and branches (where I’d be going). As it grew onwards and upwards, the branches kept breaking and breaking apart more and more, each traveling about the same distance before it bifurcated itself into two more possible futures, almost as if the fractal tree that branches perpetually.

I still see that tree, but now it has many more branches.

Among them:

The Mathematician: Herein my education is straightforward. I graduate GTCC, get my Bachelor’s in Mathematics with teaching licensure, and then I get a job either at a high school or a middle school and teach children how to understand math. It’s a passion of mine, both mathematics and teaching, and in this branch I’m happy and enjoying life, perhaps not making six figures as someone once complimented me by saying he could foresee me doing such, but it’s still a good life. At some point I might return to school and get my Master’s or Doctorate and teach at the collegiate level (GTCC’s head of the math department has implied she’d love to see me take her place someday), but no matter which way the branch continues to grow, I’m always doing what I love.

The Rabbi: This branch puts me in one of two places, either here in America or back in Israel. In either scenario, I complete my Bachelor’s as before and then migrate back up north, where I attend the Jewish Theological Seminary in NYC where I’m later ordained as a rabbi of the Conservative movement. Then again this branch diverges once more, wherein some leaves take me back to teaching and others to a congregation and still more to the Committee of Jewish Law and Standards. It’s an odd bunch of branches, I’ll admit, but they’re a nice place to bathe in the sunshine of spirited possibilities.

The Politician: This branch is still a new bud, spawn of my time in Raleigh at the SLI and also the political rally I aforementioned attended. In either case, much like the others, I continue till I’ve achieved my Bachelor’s, and then while I teach for a bit (or perhaps after I’ve taught for a bit), I return to school to get my Associate’s in Political Science (since you don’t need any political training to be a politician, I could just jump off the bridge here, but I’m of the philosophy that if you’re going to do something, do it right, so I’d take the time to make myself properly acquainted with politics before making myself a so-called politician). From here, I’d run for office. Perhaps on a school board at first, perhaps straight to state congress, later on to Congress itself, then perhaps as far as the Presidency. That part’s debatable. In any case, I’d bring common sense and sensibility back to America, looking at the facts first, not the favors we’d be offered, and do what’s best for the nation, not what’s best for me. I’d lobby for intelligent functioning and equality for all. It’d be a good day in my country.

And the Writer: This one’s like a willow branch, long and slender and wispy like the wind. It flutters in and out, through the other branches, wherever life may take me, as I continue to write here–upon my blog–and elsewhere, stories and novels and many more things. Sometimes I get published upon this branch and make millions, sometimes only thousands, sometimes only a dedicated fanbase. But no matter where this thread of life goes, it’s always a part of where I am, always a part of who I am.

The sad part is that each of these branches lacks a little thing like a flower: They’re covered in leaves, but all trees have leaves, and mine is lacking some color. In all of these scenarios, I’m career-oriented and goal-driven (the picture of America right there), but I’m loveless and, if yet still happy, lonely. They forget to factor in the indiscernible future, the love interests and relationships, the man I’ll marry, the family we’ll have. And whereas I can’t see any of that, this tree is but a seed still and little more than that.