757. Snakes

No more long lists of birds; juicy tales of iniquity and enlightenment await instead. A while back I sung about the serpent and apple, and a week later stars in the sky. Up next: 23 verses about the rape of Dinah, just short of the part about her brothers' payback. As I'm still having trouble getting back to real, non-holiday time two months after the fact, still catching up on work I put off during all those weekdays of chag (and hoping the crappy economy will oblige with new work once this pile is gone), it feels good to get up early, take many deep breaths, and practice telling a great story. It's a tragic one, but the next parasha will not be--and I bet the one after that will. On Simhat Torah, little tributaries kept breaking off from the big, dizzy crowd of dancers and, hands on shoulders, winding sinuously around twirling circles of people and Torot. From the balcony the lines looked like a network of joyous, sneaky snakes, squeezing in and out clumps of flying spinners when they least expected it. I was surprised to find myself describing this ecstatic scene with a metaphor of the symbol of humanity's worst sin. The line between good and evil can be tenuous; it seems somehow fitting that I sing about infinite promise one week, and bottomless anger the next.

756. Blindness

Five people from different parts of the world found this blog yesterday by Googling "baruch dayan emet." I am guessing this has something to do with the deaths in Mumbai, a tragedy beyond words. Today at services the rabbi spoke of Isaac's's life as bracketed by fear, the Akedah at one end and Jacob's deception at the other:

Isaac was seized with a violent fit of trembling. 'Who....where....is the one who trapped game and just served it to me?
--Genesis 27:33

Because Isaac was a fearful man, explained commentators, God commanded him to remain in one place and dig wells. This enabled him to look deeper and deeper, in all senses, without having to venture beyond safe walls. But it was also the reason for blindness in his old age:

Isaac had grown old and his eyesight was fading.
--Genesis 27:1

because when you never move from one place, you can't see what lies beyond the horizon. Moshe, in contrast, who brought the Jewish people far beyond all imaginable borders, had clear vision until the day of his death:

Moses was 120 years old when he died, but his eyes had not dimmed, and his natural powers had not left him.
--Deuteronomy 34:7

As the news brings more and more stories of war, hatred, and senseless murder, I wonder if we human beings will ever learn to see beyond the blindness of our own narrow walls.

755. Chair

I'm on a constant search for an ideal space in which to write. This is mainly an excuse to procrastinate, as I tell myself I can put words together only if the chair is perfectly comfy and I hear a flowing river in the background, or maybe some cooing birds, instead of the sound of honking cars. But until I find this Shangri-La, I think I've created a good interim solution. A few weeks ago I sold the hulking dust magnet of a rowing machine that sat for years in front of my bedroom window. I once tried to convince myself that if I set eyes upon this behemoth the minute I awoke, I would actually use it. This was not the case, and instead I began each morning with a large dose of guilt.



I've now moved the nostalgic, somewhat comfortable easy chair of my childhood (a big, overstuffed pillow for my back will do wonders, soon as I find time to buy it) into that space. I thought about hiring a carpenter to build a window seat, but then the chair would need to go back into the dark corner by my dresser. I like looking at it and remembering how grown-up I felt when my mother decided to move the chair out of the living room and into mine, and the afternoon I hunkered down into its graceful Danish Modern embrace, covered with throws and cushions to mask awkward and elegant wooden anorexia, to write my college application essay. Now it overlooks a wide expanse of Broadway and reminds me of all the buildings I've yet to explore.

Top photo: the chair
Bottom: Broadway (thorough a trippy windowscreen haze)

754. Tattoo

(Is this thing on?... testing, one, two, three...)

Hello world, again.

Coming up for air, perhaps briefly or steadily. I have been drowning in work, afraid to stop and even more scared that after all my deadlines have passed, nothing else will appear in the queue. But I've been wrong about this before, so hoping the dying economy will bypass me this time, too.

Last night I had a dream that convinced me I was stuck in a rut. I was wandering in an enormous Tower Records/HMV/Virgin-type megastore (hmm, all of which have bitten the dust). I stopped in front of a wall lined from floor to ceiling with magazines on all topics imaginable--massive and overwhelming, a paper version of the Internet. My favorite sections, the graphic design/architecture/media porn titles, practically reached the sky. Suddenly I bumped into an old colleague I hadn't seen in ages, a wiry punk rock dreadlocked skateboard animator guy who is also one of the sweetest and most gracious people I've ever known. We hugged. "Wonderful to see you!"

"Hey," he said with a wink, "want to have some fun? Why don't you take my magazines to the cashier, and I'll bring yours? Let's get even more and really freak her out," he added.

It sounded like a daring and even dangerous proposition. What would people think? But I knew I had to do it.

So we raced up and down the aisles, I amassing a pile of biker, tattoo, and video game magazines, and he staggering under the weight of People and Martha Stewart. We ran up to the cash register and threw our respective stacks on the conveyor belt. The cashier looked at us like we were nuts. I smiled.

I woke up realizing it was time to charge a few bad habits and become a (relatively speaking) tattooed biker once again.

Meanwhile, Happy Thanksgiving (to those Americans who happen to be reading)! The hall outside my apartment has smelled like turkey since about 7:30AM. In a few hours I'll head downtown for my usual tradition of a movie and dinner with family and friends, much more fun than sweating over a stove. Wishing all of us what the pilgrims dreamed about: freedom, bounty, and peace.

753. That same old post title

I can't bring myself to type "I'm still here" yet again, especially in light of my complete failure at this NaBloPoMo thing, but I am, and there's always next year. Life is boring if you achieve all your goals, right? I remain mired in work, some of it fun, the rest not, and all of it eating away at the parts of my life set aside for other things. I am grateful to have clients during this era of a sewer economy, so don't dare complain. I continue to dream about balance... I'll figure it out, because this blog has at least 753 more posts to go.