A Blogging Community

Merely three months after Bobby tagged me, I'm finally ready.

So what is this thing? Well, Bobby got sick of the profit-oriented direction the blog-world was taking, the ease with which anonymous enemies were created, and the whole John Chow-ism of our society. These are not the eighties, after all, and as much as we create a blog as a platform for our unique thoughts and dreams, none of us would still be here without the feeling there's a community of readers and writers around us.

And while some of us write posts about the intricacies of ear-hair, others actively try to make this whole blogging-thing, this Lord of the Flies experiment in human interaction a meaningful one.

Which brings me to Dan, who asks for our support. He wants to walk 78 miles--who am I to stop him? Please read his post and see what you can do. And if all you can do is wish him luck on his journey, well, that's plenty.

A Week Before My Thirty-Fifth, I Want to Make a Few Things Clear:

I can deal with the loss of energy, the loss of opportunities, the memory thing.

I learn to live with an uncooperative body. Like an old, dying car, where ice on the wheels means unresponsive breaks and a scratch on the windshield means a defective ignition switch, my body has become random; a decaying mystery. But I can deal with that.

I see myself through the eyes of my society and learn my social identity is shifting. I learn I no longer belong to one group of consumers but to another; a less demanding one, presumably less inclined to fall for the hidden persuaders of advertising. Passively and apathetically I welcome my new identity.

I can deal with all that. The balding hair, the headaches, the goddamn teeth, the strange spots on the back, the snoring, the heartburn, the allergies, the weight gain...

And I welcome it all, because life is a journey and my body adapts as well as it can, and every day is a new adventure, if not an external one, then at least I can find the beauty of it all through my own private transformation. Because after all, thirty-five is the new something-or-other, and maybe I won't be the President and maybe I won't even be Employee of the Month but I'll never forget my dreams and I'll never stop pursuing them, and I will not let a playful body and a confused mind stand in the path of my dreams. Thirty-five means nothing.

But so help me God, the single curly coming out of my ear is unacceptable!!!

A Post About Nothing

I write about once a week. Which is good. It makes me feel this is more than a blog; it's a literary magazine (with only one subject: me). When I write, I try to avoid subjects other people can't relate to. I write about my relationship with my father, and readers can find their own strained relationships there. I write about my wish to be a good father, and you can find your own doomed wishes, or laugh with scorn or with love because I'm bound to make mistakes throughout this parenthood thing. Just like everyone else. And I can talk about the book I'll write one day and the need to escape mediocrity and you can smile and say to yourself, "Wouldn't that be grand? To be somebody? Or maybe as long as we strive for that greatness we keep ourselves alive," and look, I've made you think and reflect about your own life. Which is what I'm trying to do here even though I am indeed using only one subject. Me as a metaphor.

But sometime... Sometimes I look at blogs of people who write every day and have nothing to say. Pages and pages of literary masturbation (Welcome, Google Perverts). And I'm so goddamn jealous.

So here:

I went to the dentist. It hurts like... what's a good swear word? Shit. It hurts like shit. He has two rooms. One has a peeling wallpaper with "Floss Daily" written everywhere, and the other room has this fun drawing that for a brief moment makes me forget this shit is torture. I should floss more often.


I'm sick. No big deal.

I got into Cribbage lately.


Hollywood Writers, no one cares about you. Now you know.


Saw this billboard. Gotta love Baltimore. Sometimes.


Got me a webcam. It's easy to say, "Mom, I didn't move to the other side of the world just so you could see me every day," but I couldn't say much to her "I want my grandson to know he has a grandmother in Israel." So I got a webcam and I got Skype, and now my computer is slow, and waiting for pages to load makes me want to strangle a puppy. It reminds me of a word people used in the last millennium: modem. Remember these things?


Ahhh, man it feels good to let it all out. You know what? I said it wasn't a big deal but I hate being sick, and between the dying computer and the lack of good night sleep and the dog who hurt her thigh, and the running nose, and couldn't they make a visit to the dentist less painful, and Please God: make me strong enough to ignore American Idol, and Has it been six weeks already? and watching those idiot Republicans on TV, and watching CNN in general, and the goddamn sinuses--I'm allowed, every once in a while, to write a goddamn post about goddamn nothing!

This guy is so cute.

Mistakes

Aren’t things supposed to get better from one generation to another? Aren’t people supposed to ever learn? Or maybe it’s another thing altogether: maybe by repeating the mistakes of the past we learn to accept the limits of our predecessors and acknowledge their humanity, and as a result, we're able to forgive ourselves the inevitable repeated mistakes.

My father liked science experiments, so we had to like science experiments. A former meteorologist in the military, he liked to discuss cloud shapes. He liked politics, so we had to talk about politics. He liked to talk about his family history, so we had to memorize names. And in all of these things and in countless others, I’d failed him.

His disappointed face is something I always carry with me. Always the same routine. A sigh, his head down, an angry expression, and the ultimate blow: “Why do you hate your father?”

“I don’t hate you,” I used to say.

“Yes, you do. Otherwise you would do what I told you to do.”

I got used to that after a while, learning that this phrase meant the end of me having to do something I hated doing. Hearing him tell me I hated him meant I no longer had to know the difference between a Cumulonimbus and a Cumulus, I didn’t have to role-play as a journalist interviewing his favorite politician, and I didn’t have to learn about all the relatives who died in the Holocaust. That “Why do you hate your father” meant one thing: I was free.

But there was also pain associated with this sentence, and many times I’d tried to argue and explain that, well, there were things I’d rather do than be his lab-partner; that I was just a kid, and who cares about cloud-classifications when you can look at clouds for hours and find animals and monsters? And that, again, I didn’t hate him.

So why am I writing this now? Because the other day the new guy was having a good time with his mother—feeding, and playing, and smiling—and then she passed him to me when she went to take a shower. Now, as soon as I took him and started singing my favorite childhood song, his expression changed to suspicion, which soon turned to sadness. Soon, he was crying with the most painful, offended expression on his face. And I looked at him cry and thought about how happy he was with his mother just a few minutes earlier, and how come I couldn’t make him happy even though I sang him a beautiful song, and then I said, “Why do you hate your father?”