The Funnies

Growing up, I loved to read the Funny Pages in the paper. Actually, every day until I moved to NYC, where the local rag doesn't a comics page, I would read them every day. I would start on the top left of the page and work my way down, and then back up the right of the page. Sure, I would skip over the reactionary Family Values ones (Family Circus, right?) but I was very into the other kind of family ones like For Better or For Worse, a long-running strip that chronicled the life of a family in a Toronto suburb. I loved The Boondocks when it came along, and was a faithful reader, but the one I loved the most and the longest was Doonesbury. When I moved to New York, and didn't have any comic strips in a daily paper, I lost track of Mike and Zonker and Honey and Joanie and B.D. and Kim and Mark and JJ and Rick and Sid and Duke and Phred ..... for a while. Until I realized I could read it online, which I did religiously for a while, until somehow I stopped, which I am not sure why, and then just as suddenly, on April 29, 2013, I started again, to my great joy. Here's a recent Sunday strip for your entertainment (and discomfort, which is one of many things I love so much about Gary Trudeau.)

Jake and Eleonore get hitched (again)

There was a moment during Jake and Eleonore's wedding party when Joey was leading everyone in a rich and layered a cappella nign singing circle. Rings of friends and family circled around the inner circle, of Jake and Eleonore and their parents. Our voices rising and falling together, the whole room resonating together, people laughing, smiling, eyes closed, eyes open, drinking, and mostly very present. I had this fleeting thought that went something along the lines of, "This is Joey leading an a cappella song circle. It's what Joey does." And then I stopped, and I thought, "No, this is what Joey DOES and it's amazingly precious and rare, and we are insanely lucky to be part of a community that takes someone like him, and something like this, for granted. That's when I cried a little, and Esther noticed, and she put her arm around me, and we kept singing. Joy.

This week's mide (middah) is GRATITUDE. I've been thinking about it a lot, and wondering why practicing gratitude, which I am actually pretty damned good at, doesn't make me complain less about the things I don't feel grateful for. I thought they would be like two ends of a tether. The more I focus on what I am grateful for, the more I will notice that there is really no need to complain about the other stuff, but so far it feels more like to co-existing realities. Over here in this room are a ton of things I feel grateful for, and over here in this room are all the things that bug the shit out me, and I can walk in and out of both rooms and have as much as I want of either, and they don't seem to preclude one another.

The only difference is that I am very practiced at noticing the stuff I want to complain about, and don't need a complaining practice to pull my attention to what's lacking in my life. I'm less practiced at noticing the stuff I am grateful for, and a practice allows me to notice that there is what feels so far like an endless stream of things I am grateful for.

One of them is my vibrant, mad talented, funny, musical, inappropriate, familial Jewish and Yiddish cultural community.

AWKWARD!

Have you seen the MTV teen comedy series called Awkward? I think it might be the first thing I have ever watched on MTV.  I wouldn't have even watched it if the internet didn't exist, but it popped up on some feed somewhere, and I decided to take a look. It is no substitute for Nashville, but I have a few positive things to say about it. I like that the main character is a smart girl who is surrounded by immature teens and adults and so she needs to be wise and decisive beyond her years. I also like that
the show is often absurdist, which is odd because it is dealing with very UNabsurdist topics: teen suicide, sex, bullying, depression, divorce, fat phobia, etc. But maybe that's its point—these topics are absurd, and Jenna the main character, walks through life faced with people's absurd prejudices, opinions, and skewed advice.

I don't like the racial makeup of the world they live in, not to mention other things I don't like, but I think I'm a sucker enough for the experience of being transported to a world that someone invented. Someone thought Jenna up, thought up her parents, thought up her friends, her guidance counselor, and her school. Someone pitched it, someone sold it,  someone wrote it, someone directed it, and someone shot it, and the fact that anyone can get their work made, from concept to MTV, is worth celebrating.

I think the joy part is not found in the actual experience of watching the show (it's not that good) but in finding something new and trying it, and as always, getting transported to someone's invented world, even for just one 20-minute episode.

If you're a man at night you gotta be a man in the morning.

I don't think of myself as the person who would get joy from people laughing at other people, especially if it's about some perceived lack of intelligence, but I have watched this now about five times, and it just never ceases to delight. I've spent my fair share of time interviewing Olympic swimmers, and, well, there's no good way to say this, but I can identify with Sheinelle Jones.

On the other hand, since this video went viral, I assume it's only done good things for Ryan's new reality show, What Would Ryan Lochte Do?

And it's provided fodder for late night interviews, like this one with David Letterman, which also brings me no end of delight.

"Which is your strongest stroke?"

"Honestly, I don't know," Lochte answered.

"Is there someone we could call?" Letterman inquired.

"You might have to call my mom," Lochte said.

The host went on to ask, "My God, you've been in three Olympics. Were you aware of that?"

"Yes," Lochte replied, nodding. "Yes, I am aware."

Letterman went on to quiz him on the host cities of each of those Olympic Games, giving Lochte a round of applause when he answered correctly.

Later in the interview, Lochte said, "I just want to bring swimming into everyone's living room. So, bringing swimming awareness…"

To which Letterman replied, "Hmm, swimming awareness. So, that's the show."

"Well, pretty much," Lochte said.

"He's bringing swimming awareness into your living room," Letterman said, to more applause. "Wow, that's pretty good."


I just want to say that I hope Ryan continues to develop this "dumb" persona, in the grand tradition of "dumb" comedians.   Lou Costello, eat your heart out.

If a tree falls in the forest ...

I did something, but I can't remember what it was. It was a really good one, too. Joy incarnate. Simple, funny, moving. I remember the feeling I had when I did it, and how I thought to myself, "This is also going to be a joy to write about." And then I went off to work and by the time I got home at 11:30 PM (long but wonderful work day, in which Urban Bush Women and Liz Lerman presented a work-in-progress of a brilliant, beautiful, and fascinating new work about the physical embodiment of wealth and poverty) I had completely forgotten that simple morning joy.

If a tree falls in the forest and no-one is there to hear it fall ....?

I say yes.

I still had the experience. I still felt the joy. I still prioritized the time. I just can't share it with you. Or with myself.

Sorry!

Cropped NYC

The weather warmed up. I wore a sleeveless top. I had time in my day to take a lunch break. I walked down to Columbus Circle to get a supply of my favorite organic black fac tea that I can’t get at the Food Coop. (black fac = black facsimile = decaf black.) I made a bunch of phone calls I’ve had a hard time finding time to make lately. I soaked in the rays. I cleared my mind. I approached Columbus Circle and realized I had forgotten my wallet, and I would not be buying any tea. I headed north on Columbus, and passed Fordham University, and noticed a bunch of beautiful birch trees. I took a photo of them, and thought to myself, “What if I would take a bunch of nature photos in NYC, leaving in the urban parts of the vista. And then what if I would crop out the urban parts, and what if I would publish them in the two versions. The NYC I wish I lived in, and the NYC I actually live in. And what if there would be a way to include the sound of the city, to heighten the juxtaposition between the natural and the urban. I was lost in this thought as I walked, and suddenly saw my friend Sonia, who teaches at Fordham Law. Sonia is one of those friends who 1) brightens the world (or at least my day) with her presence, and 2) I am lucky enough to run into in this huge city. Two big Sonia hugs and a promised lunch date later, I continued on back to the office, a little lighter in my step.

OK, got that? Shall we recap some of the things that bring Jenny joy?  Time away from the office. The great outdoors. Sun on my bare limbs. Tea. Beautiful trees. New sparks of creative projects. Simultaneously appreciating and dissing NYC. Random runs-in with friends.

You are what your mother read

When I was up in New England, I stopped by the storage locker I still have that holds stuff from my parents' house in Massachusetts. A beautiful dining room table. The bed I grew up in. (I mean, they let me out of it in the daytime.) My mother's books. Until recently I didn't have room to pick any of this stuff up. I still don't have room for the furniture, but I packed 10 boxed of books into my car, and drove them home to Brooklyn.

I was looking for five books in particular. Five books that I did not find when I unpacked my own books when I finally moved them from Jersey storage. Five books I've been terrified got lost in transit.

My mother's Complete Jane Austen
Her copy of The Lord of the Rings
Partridge's dictionary of derivations
Her travel journals
Her address book
 
When I got home I had the energy to shlep the boxes up to the apartment, but then I didn't open them up til I got home early from work on Tuesday. One by one, I opened the well-labeled boxes, and yet still there were surprises. I might have written on the outside that the box included LANGUAGE BOOKS, but that didn't prevent it from holding a 1958 Berlitz French Verb Wheel. And who knew that ANN HARDCOVER would include her Girl Scout handbook, Das Kapital, and Adrienne Rich?

One by one, I went through the boxes. I looked at every book. My mother's interests emerged clear as if we were hanging out talking. Wildflowers, gardening, and foraging. Crewel embroidery and calligraphy. Cooking. Poetry. Feminist literature. Tolkien, Austen, and other classic literature. One by one, I fell under my mother's spell. I took her broken-spined Hobbit up to my night table. I put Wildflowers of North America on my flowers and gardening shelf. I wish I had nothing to do but live my mother's life. No, that's not quite right. I think what I wish for is to live my own version of her life, starting with my being able to have a Yard of My Own and skip work tomorrow to go plant in it. (And yes, there was a whole box dedicated to Virginia Woolf and Annie Dillard.)

Her Austen was there. Her Tolkien was there. Partridge, not (I think my sister has it) and neither were her journals or address book, both of which I think I have separately somewhere (and it unnerves me not to know where.) But even without them, it is delicious to piece together my mother's life, and my own, through her library. And so Bilbo Baggins kept me company as I fall asleep, as he did for my mother many a night.