HM: Relating

We all think we are pretty special and unique. Its OK to think this way, its what saves us from being taken advantage of, giving up and allows us to hold out for a better job/bill of health/relationship/whatever. Thinking we are special is common, even though few of us will admit it.

The thing is, thinking this isn’t always helpful –  like when you feel alone or sad or insecure. Feeling like you are the only one to have ever felt this way since the  beginning of time can be pretty scary. This is why I was so happy to re-discover Tales of Mere Existence (http://www.ingredientx.com) The artist’s art is simple, as are his thoughts. What makes it so unbelievably great is how bang-on he is with his story tellingand how it resonates so fully.

There are clips that are funny, clips that are depressing and everything in between, but this site gets my HM for the day because it is impossible to feel alone after watching them. I think he’s a genius.

On becoming your parents

“I was so focused on not becoming my mother, that I became my father. I did not see that coming.”

-Rachel on Friends

Loved this and thought I’d share.

Its all Timing

“The difference between a romance and a tragedy is just a matter of where you decide to start and stop telling the love story”

 

Have truer words ever been written?

Screw 4:20, I Want 4:10!

This plan makes ’slacking’ look acceptable, environmentally friendly, family-positive and chock-a-block full of good will. Its not a new concept but switching our work week from 8 hours each day for 5 days to 10 hours/day over 4 days is making a come-back. Much of the state-run services in the US state of Utah, some businesses in Ontario Canada and who knows where else are working with the idea…  Choo Choo! I’m all aboard this 4 day work-week train!!

Quote

For the man who is beautiful is beautiful to see

but the good man will at once also be beautiful

 

-Sappho

Passover

I am a traditional Jew is the sense that I value and carry out Jewish traditions. I also respect the basic tenants of the religion (family/community, education, performing good deeds). My personal brand of practice includes my not keeping kosher, my going to synagogue on high holidays, my knowing (most) of the biblical stories, my not agreeing with the role of thesexes. Some call this cherry-picking, I call it evolution. I may disagree with some of the customs but to my mind, over all, Judaism provides a solid moral and intellectual foundation from which to explore the world.

Religion however is not the main point of this post…

This year marks the 28th sedder I have attended/participated in and I think it noteworthy that this is the first time that the ‘counting of the omer’ has had any significance to me. I will leave it to you to read up on the background info. For now I’d like to relay a passage from the Haggadah, the prayer book used for Pesach (Passover):

‘S’firat Ha Omer (the counting of the Omer) is also a time for personal accounting as we measure and perfect our soul traits over the seven weeks. The primary traits are: love, fear, balance, constancy, gratitude, bonding and integrity.’

I plan on going through these in the coming days. These seven ’soul traits’ strike me a important ones and very worthy of both ’personal accounting’ and perfecting.

Tonight I start at the beginning; Love.

What do I have to take stock of this year in the Love department? There are surely several anecdotal offerings but I feel a distillation is best. In accounting terms I feel emotionally and know intellectually that I have managed to somehow continue to be surrounded and supported by good people who, each in their own way, love me. I also know that I have been reminded many times why I love those I love so very much. In terms of perfecting, I know that I have a long way to go before I am the friend I want to be. I am ever full of good intentions but my execution is lacking. I know I love but I also know that sometimes to love is not enough. Sometimes love needs to manifest itself. I want to call people more, send more mail (not e-mail, REAL mail), I want to remember people’s occasions. This is my self-appointed homework.

On a less cerebral level, I have reevaluated and reinforced my ‘wants/needs’ list as well as my ‘can’t handles’. I have a clearer picture of what I hope to find in a romantic/sexual partner and my heart and head seem to be coming closer to conversing in a language understood by both. Also I am inching closer to understanding where the disconnect between what I want to believe I feel and what I actually feel lays. This is perhaps the hardest bit because I know how capable and effective I am at building walls and bringing them down is admitting that I have been untrue to myself and dishonest with the world (not maliciously so but still…)

Its a life long process this business of living and love plays a huge part. I understand why it falls first in the line-up. I have missed much here and only scratched the surface. I may revisit. Either way, tomorrow: Fear.

 

Books!

“Bookshelves are not for displaying books you’ve read…. Rather, the books on your shelves are there to convey the type of person you would like to be.” —Ezra Klein

“My experience is that some books end up accumulating out of a misguided attempt to win the approval of authors already well-entrenched on my shelves.” —McLemee

Both these quotes can be found in the blog on the NYT site

http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/21/bookshelf-etiquette/index.html?hp

 It got me thinking about my bookshelves. Having moved very much on the fly I took with me only 5 books. Two for comfort (Leonard Cohen and an inscribed book on hugs my mum gave me long ago) and three that I intended on reading (a book on the laws of power, a non-fiction titled Exuberance and The Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. I had someone over a while ago who commented on my anaemic shelves and truth be told I felt a little bit of shame. I am a reader. It is, in part how I describe myself. A large part of my identity is bound in books and so to be called out (not his intention I am sure) on having 3 books leaned sadly against the side on my bookcase was a moment that stayed with me.

When I go to a person’s house for the first time I do not look at photographs, I don’t check for healthy plants or pets and I certainly do not concern myself with how tidy the place is. I head straight to the shelves and yes, I judge. I do. I do not judge a person’s worth or intellect but I do judge how well I might get along with them. Particularly if this person has potential to be a mate, I scan those spines with as much interest as I would listen to them speak about their passions or their families. 

What one chooses to surround oneself with speaks, all puns intended, volumes, which is why I was so diminished when my naked shelf was noticed.

I want to be the girl who is known to bravely mix Kafka, Atwood and Winterson together on a shelf. Literary cocktail parties chez moiwill have Leonard and Gabriel mumbling in low moody tones on one end of the shelf while Marguerite and Jean-Paul canoodle softly at the other. And I do have these, or did when I lived at home, but moving 4 cities in 6 years I have left them all there and travel light these past years knowing that my mum is keeping my library safe. I am moving again next week. Maybe this time ‘for good’ (whatever that means). I think the move will be marked official when I send for my boxes of books. A house in never a home without them for me and if this new life I am starting on is for real you can bet my books will be following me down the 401 very very soon.

On My Mind

This poem creeps up on me, no that’s not true. This poem lives in my head all the time just most if the time it sleeps. Lately its been popping up more frequently. Spring fever? Second thoughts? Who knows… Its a kick-ass piece and the rest of her work is pretty dope too. Recommended.

http://www.hebrewmamita.com/poetry/PMFGA.htm

On the topic of the US primaries…

Pop-culture spin on US politics:

What Would Alex Keaton Do?

http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/03/what-would-alex-keaton-do/index.html

My CBC tangent for the day

Listening to DNTO on the CBC I heard a man refer to his basement as a Museum of Discarded Passions. I love this. What an evocative image, both visually and emotionally. I immediately thought of my shoebox. I have a shoebox. Its one of those fancy ones you buy at the dollar store; a bit more sturdy and in this case, covered in a sunflower-themed paper. Before I moved I kept it under my bed-side table. Its not that I opened it much, it just seemed to me that the bed-side table and its reputation for housing intimacies, was the most appropriate place…

Anyway, this shoebox of mine houses letters. Letters I have had written to me, letters I have written to myself, letter I have written to others and never had the guts to send and conversely letters I had the sense not to send.  Having not opened it in many months I can still tell you my favourite pieces:

1) A light yellow paper, cut to look like an amorphous cloud-like shape. Its permanently rolled even though the little piece of tape is long gone. There is a little white feather in the box to that was attached but has since become separated. There is, what I can only refer to as a non-love letter. Its a pseudo-poem about us coming together and moving apart, He made some allusions to birds flocking together and apart or something – hence the feather… Its a reminder that cheesiness aside, being ‘rejected’ can be a beautiful and friendly thing. Or something.

2) A letter I wrote to the second man I ever loved, and the first I loved once I knew what that meant and who I really was. I never sent it because he was involved and we were best friends. Reading it now I teeter between being mortified and seriously impressed at how bare I laid myself in that letter. I also keep in at a reminder of how a partner should make me feel, no matter how old I get.

There are dozens of pieces in there. Scraps of paper, bits of napkins covered in late-night (often drunken) bar scrawlings, crumpled post-it notes, messages on torn corners of free weekly papers. There are old notes books, journals, diaries… This box is my Museum of Discarded Passions. Except maybe not quite, because its still there at my mother’s house, still tucked under my old bedside table.