The Car Broke Down

The car broke down.

The car broke down a mile away from home.  I figured it made more sense to push it than call a tow truck.  Can’t afford a tow truck.

The car broke down a mile away from home and I pushed it.  Part of the way was uphill, and that was hard.  Part of the way was downhill, and I almost lost control.  There were no other cars on the road.

The car broke down a mile away from home, and I pushed it uphill and downhill.  It took me hours.  Sweating in the twilight, my only thought was “I need my car.  I have to have my car.”  If I could just get it home, I could open the hood, take out my toolbox, do something, find something, figure something out.

The car broke down a mile away from home, and I pushed it uphill and downhill, sweating in the twilight.  When I got to the driveway, I all but collapsed.  My car resting on the asphalt, my body resting on the grass.  I gave myself two good breaths of air before getting up, opening the garage door, turning on the porch lights.  I opened the hood, grabbed my toolbox, clicked on my pen light, and stared at the mess of iron and grease that might, if I was lucky, deign to work again that night.

The car broke down a mile away from home, and I pushed it uphill and downhill, sweating in the twilight until I collapsed on my own front lawn.  My hands worked mindlessly.  My brain no longer relevant to their actions.  Checking all the indicators, disconnecting wires, inspecting every part for damage.  The engine block was still hot.  It had been off for hours, but it still retained enough heat to radiate into my arms, onto my face, coaxing more sweat out of my already-drained pores.  I need my car.  How can I leave the house without my car?  I cleaned every single connection, closed the hood, and tested the ignition.  It worked.

The car broke down a mile away from home, and I pushed it uphill and downhill, sweating in the twilight until I collapsed on my own front lawn, but I fixed it.  And then I wiped my brow, washed up, and went to sleep.

I woke up the next morning.  I needed to check on the car.  Just because the ignition worked once doesn’t mean that it will work again.  If I was lucky, it would just start.  If I was less lucky, there would be some small issue that’s easier to see in the light of day after some sleep.  If I wasn’t lucky at all, I’d need to tow it to a mechanic.  I can’t afford a tow truck.  I can’t afford a mechanic.

So I got out of bed, got dressed, opened my front door, and saw my sinkhole.  Last night I’d have called it my driveway, but it wasn’t a driveway anymore.  It was a pit.  Twenty feet deep, crumbled asphalt lining the edges, and there at the bottom of it lay the twisted remains of my car.

I can’t afford a tow truck.

I Light a Candle

It’s been nine years since Steven passed away.  That’s a lot of time.  I think I’ve had all the thoughts I’m ever going to have about him, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop thinking about him, that he’s going to stop being a part of my life.

So this afternoon, I lit a candle for him.  Because I felt like I should do something.  I don’t know any prayers, so I didn’t say any.  I just lit it, and now it’s sitting there, burning in my living room as I go about my day.  But just that simple action, having that candle out, makes me pause every so often.  Here or there, I look at it, and I think about what it stands for.

It reminds me to think of him today.  Even though they’re old thoughts.  Even though I’ve had so many new thoughts in the last few months that overpower those old thoughts.  It’s important for me to think them again today.  In between talking on the phone or making a sandwich.  Just keeping him in my subconscious.

New Year

Facebook is full of New Years posts, full of all different kinds of perspectives. This year was filled with a lot of good and a lot of bad for everyone, though relative proportions may vary from person to person. And different people are choosing to emphasize one or the other side of that spectrum based on where they sit now, or where they hope to sit. Or some even choose to ignore both and focus only on the present, or even the future.

And for my part, while I feel the need to reflect, I hate myself a little for it. It’s such a cliche. But if we’re reflecting anyway, isn’t this the year I asked everyone to post Monty Python quotes on my wall instead of “Happy Birthday”? That’s who I was this year, throughout everything that happened. And that’s who I was the year before. And that’s who I was for as long as I can remember, and most likely who I will be moving forward for however long I keep moving forward.

And everything else? It’s simply that: everything else. Things will continue to happen. Good things, bad things, the planned and the unexpected. And what I’m allowed to do with that is figure out where the cracks are in the everything else that I can fit myself into, just like I’ve always done.

So will next year be a good year? Yes. And will it be a bad year? Yes to that, too. But so long as it’s *my* year, so long as whatever comes, good or bad, I continue to deal with it in my own way, on my own terms, I can’t have any regrets.  I’m not going to try to change myself or the world just because there’s a new number at the end of the date.  I’ll do it because that’s what I want to see happen.

Trigger Warnings

In the last couple years I’ve been introduced to and slowly become more fluent in Tumblr, and one of the more interesting terms I’ve picked up from there is “trigger warning.”  A trigger is an idea, image, or topic that can remind a person of something stressful or upsetting to them.  A person writes “trigger warning” before a post that may have a trigger, as a courtesy.

It’s a good system, aside from one thing: I think it teaches people to avoid triggers.  Makes the trigger out to be a bad guy.  Triggers aren’t bad guys, they just exist.  A person can use a trigger maliciously, and then that person becomes a bad guy, but a person who simply writes for a general audience and doesn’t realize that they’re writing about someone else’s personal anxieties is simply a person, and their topic is simply a topic.

This is a philosophy that I came up with before I’d heard the term “trigger” used in this way, but having the term certainly makes thinking about it and discussing it a lot easier.

My best friend passed away shortly after I’d moved to the other side of the planet, and because almost nothing in my life had anything to do with the parts he was involved in at that point, I was forced to deal with how I felt pretty much on my own.  That meant that I didn’t have anyone or anything to moderate my reactions to things I did not yet realize were my triggers.

And after several years, I realized that I didn’t like how I’d been acting.  And that awareness, simply realizing “the speaker isn’t bad, he’s just reminding me of something bad, and he doesn’t deserve my reaction” allowed me to start changing my behavior, and start dealing with my own triggers in a way that acknowledges them, but doesn’t let them control me.  It took a long time to get to that point, and it isn’t a process that really has a definite end.

Why do I bring this up?  Something Positive.  Ironically, Randy Milholland’s Something Positive webcomic was one of the things that got me through that first tragedy.  It had a storyline around the same time involving the death of a character’s mother, and I greatly appreciated how that was handled.  But I had another tragedy this year: the passing of my own mom after a years-long mental and physical decline.  And as it turns out, that’s a trigger for me now.

Randy gave Fred, one of his older characters, Alzheimer’s many years ago.  Every so often the topic comes up, but generally it stays in the background.  However two recent comics indicate that it may become very relevant very soon.

There’s a traumatized part of me that can’t help but hear Fred’s words from that second comic coming out of my mom’s mouth.  And on a million different levels, that feels wrong.  But Fred’s reactions are completely in line with Fred’s character, and legitimate in their own way, and that story is happening irrespective of my own personal experiences.  And I trust Randy to do these storylines well, as he has done for almost a decade and a half.

So I have my trigger warning now.  Fred’s story is going to be difficult for me.  But knowing that, I’m still going to continue reading, because it only does me harm to remove things I enjoy from my life just because of a trigger.  And so long as I know what I’m getting myself into, I know I’ll be able to prevent the kind of behavior that I didn’t like seeing in myself years ago.

For example, maybe instead of sending an unfair email to a beleaguered artist, I might just write an introspective blog post for my family and friends.

The Inter-Cultural Legacy of Michael Eisner

Michael Eisner was CEO of the Walt Disney Company from 1984 to 2005.  In that time, he was able to put his fingerprint on dozens of projects, and single-handedly changed the company’s destiny.  Eisner’s tenure saw a massive expansion of the Disney theme parks, a revival of the animation studio, and a transformation into a media powerhouse.

But something occurred to me the other day.  Did Eisner’s influence alter the very goals of Disney Animation Studios?

I’m going to list all Disney films, starting from 1950, to exclude non-story films like Fantasia and Make Mine Music, going on to 1981, the last film before Eisner’s ascent, and generally, possibly inaccurately, describe their cultural sources.

Cinderella – French
Alice in Wonderland – British
Peter Pan – British
Lady and the Tramp – American
Sleeping Beauty – French
101 Dalmatians – British with American influence
The Sword in the Stone – British
The Jungle Book – British novel, Indian subject
The Aristocats – British with American influence
Robin Hood – British
The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh – Canadian
The Rescuers – British with American influence
The Fox and the Hound – American

Now look back at that list.  Aside from The Jungle Book, every film is completely based in what’s generally referred to as “Western culture.”  Specifically they’re almost completely limited to American, British and French sources.  And even the exception, The Jungle Book, is based on a Kipling novel, not any indigenous work.  It’s pretty clear where I’m going to go with this, but let’s compare going forward:

The Black Cauldron – American with British influence
The Great Mouse Detective – American with British influlence
Oliver and Company – British with American influence and Billy Joel
The Little Mermaid – Danish
The Rescuers Down Under – British with Australian influence
Beauty and the Beast – French
Aladdin – Arabian
The Lion King – British with African influence
Pocahontas – American Indian
Hunchback of Notre Dame – French
Hercules – Greek
Mulan – Chinese
Tarzan – American writing, African setting
Fantasia 2000 – N/A
Dinosaur – N/A
The Emperor’s New Groove – Incan
Atlantis: The Lost Empire – American
Lilo and Stitch – Hawaiian
Treasure Planet – Scottish (In Space!)
Brother Bear – Aleutian Native
Home on the Range – American

First of all, I don’t think I quite realized how much the pace had increased in the production of these films until compiling this list: the first one represents 13 films over 30 years, while the second represents 21 films over 20 years.

But more importantly, look at the variety of sources.  It doesn’t really kick in until Aladdin, the first 100% non-Western story that Disney ever put to film, but you get hints with The Rescuers Down Under and The Little Mermaid, both European but starting to push at the “French, British, American” dynamic.  Often where they did use American or British sources, they drew in other cultural influences, most notably in Hamlet with Lions.

But here’s my biggest take-away: within a ten-year period, Disney Animation Studios produced three films (Pocahontas, Emperor’s New Groove, Brother Bear) that focused on Native American cultures.  Three completely different cultures, at that.  Four if you want to stretch definitions and include Lilo and Stitch.  I think it’s easy to take that for granted, but it’s actually a pretty big deal that a studio as big as Disney would choose to tell those stories when they could easily rely on more generic or traditionally European fare.

For example, and I don’t mean this disparagingly as Tangled and Wreck-it-Ralph have become two of my favorite films in the Disney catalog, check out what happened after Eisner left:

Chicken Little – Undetermined/American
Meet the Robinsons – American
Bolt – American
The Princess and the Frog – German with American influence
Tangled – German
Winnie the Pooh – Canadian
Wreck-it-Ralph – American
Frozen – Danish

And to be fair, upcoming films look to include Japanese and Polynesian influences, but here we have 10 years without a single non-Western movie.  And you know what?  Despite the fact that he invented the direct-to-video sequel, and despite the fact that he antagonized Pixar, and despite the fact that towards the end he was kind of running the studio into the ground, I think Eisner deserves a lot of praise for expanding the creative pool from which Disney drew, and for bringing us stories from cultures we’re not necessarily used to seeing.

Philosophy and Sesame Street

So I’ve had this old classic stuck in my head for the last few days.  It’s a nice little earworm.  Fun melody, ironically easy-to-remember lyrics.  But with me, earworms often develop into stranger creatures.  I start playing with them, reading into them, modifying them.

I’ve heard it said, “with words and music
A fella can’t go wrong”
But la-dee-da-dee-dum
La-dee-da-dee-dum
What’s the name of that song?

I’m sure this is a bit deeper than what the writers intended, but look at those lyrics in the context of the song: if all you need are words and music, and you have words and music, why are you focused on the name of the song?  It would be nice to know, but if all it’s doing is dragging you down, focus on what you have and be satisfied.  You have words, you have music.  You can’t go wrong.

But that’s not how humans operate.  If we never let little things get to us, we would just be emotionless shells.  If we think we can solve a problem, we try to solve it.  Even if it’s a little problem, even if there are bigger problems out there, and even if there is so much more good to focus on instead.  And it’s important that we sacrifice our happiness to these kinds of things.

But while all of that’s true, and we do need to give time to all of the things that hold us back, it’s also true that we can’t give them too much time.  At some point we need to ignore the parts of the song we can’t remember, and enjoy the parts we do.

Because, in the end, we can’t help singing “la-dee-da-dee-dum” loud and clear and strong.  And that’s a big part of what makes us human, too.

I Love Jews Just the Way You Are

I was in a weird mood yesterday.  This is to the tune of Billy Joel’s “Just the Way You Are.”  Don’t look at me like that, I don’t know how it happened.  It just did.

Don’t feel shameful when you’re with me
I will support you through and through
Mm-hmm
Even if I sometimes can’t see
Why you do the things you do

If you’re fleishig when lunch is cheesy
I’ll cook you something else or starve
Mm-hmm
No one said that this would be easy
I love Jews just the way you are

Keep on tying your mitpachat
I know you wear it with such care
Mm-hmm
And I’m not one to stand and balk at
How you choose to cloak your hair

I know your wardrobe is concealing
Your modesty goes on so far
Mm-hmm
So while I hope I’m not too revealing
I love Jews just the way you are

Although I know that you will always keep
The halachot you always have
Is it okay that I’m still chiloni
If I’m respectful of your path?

(clarinet solo)

You perform Tashlich, ’cause that’s your minhag
I’ll watch you while I’m in my car
Mm-hmm
But I’ll wait right there like your loyal sheep dog
I love Jews just the way you are

Reference:

Puff the Magic Dragon

Okay, I know I’ve got some friends who know how to art. Anybody want to art this for me?

Hurdles

About a year ago or so, it occurred to me that I could, not unreasonably, chart my emotional state by looking at the frequency with which I updated this blog.  More updates meant I felt good, less updates meant I felt bad.  I didn’t tell anyone because I’d discovered this at a point in time when I wasn’t updating it so much, and I didn’t want people to worry.  I did, however, think that this was a pretty clever tool for my own uses.

In a mistaken assumption of causality, I put in extra effort into posting here, though I still didn’t quite get to a pace I’d call “regular.”  Then, in late January, I left the army and a series of events unfolded that made my “how often do I post” metric irrelevant.  Something far stranger had happened: for a period of time, I stopped reading webcomics.

Now, webcomics are about the most consistent thing in my life.  I found my first one when I was 15, and since then I’ve always had a weekly schedule of at least a dozen (usually around two dozen) webcomics that I check on an update-to-update basis.  When I was an undergrad I never had my class schedule fully memorized, which was about ten weekly timeslots at most.  On the other hand, I not only knew my webcomics’ listed update schedules by rote, I also knew which ones updated in which time zones, and I knew which ones were likely to update late, or even to skip updates.  At one point I was up to thirty or so  regularly updating comics, some having seven-day weekly schedules, some having five-day weekly schedules, some having three-day weekly schedules, and some even having two-day weekly schedules, some updating at midnight EST and others updating at midnight PST, and some just updating at some point or another during the day.  And I could keep all of that straight in my head.

Webcomics have helped me through difficult times.  They’ve moderated my lows and elevated my highs.  Archive binges are therapeutic, regular updates keep me grounded, and I certainly wouldn’t be the writer I am today if webcomics weren’t such a consistent part of my reading regimen.

So my not reading webcomics, even for a short period of time, is both an indication that something has gone wrong, and a forewarning that things will get worse.  I’m still not quite ready to talk about the events of this past Spring on this particular forum, but going back to using this blog as an indicator: I only made six posts here between mid-April and mid-June, and three of them were really depressing.

I don’t quite remember how the process went, but at some point I started reading comics again.  I dropped a few, and there were some that I came back to faster than others, but the fact that I was reading comics on a daily basis again was progress.  Eventually, some time in mid-Summer, I got myself back up to 17 comics, an anemic but acceptable schedule, but there was still one very noticeable exception.  Or two, depending on how you count.

For whatever reason, for several months, I couldn’t get myself to read the work of John Troutman.  I’ve explained in fairly significant detail why webcomics in and of themselves are a big deal, so I’ll be more brief in explaining why this particular author is a big deal: John Troutman’s “Lit Brick” was key, more than any other comic, in keeping me sane during my time in the army.  

Somehow, like the dog that won’t go near his favorite toy, I’d developed a mental block.  Though I wasn’t reading it, I hadn’t dropped “Lit Brick,” or Troutman’s other comic, “Mary Elizabeth’s Sock.”  A comic that I drop just leaves my mental sphere entirely, but with “Lit Brick,” there was always a hole in my update schedule, always a moment where I’d read the comic that should come just before it in my schedule and consciously think “Lit Brick should go here” before I navigate to a different comic instead.  There are plenty of psychological conclusions to draw from this, and I’ve certainly done my share of self-analysis, but in the end I decided that whatever the reasons were, they were a symptom of the problems in the rest of my life, and that I wouldn’t solve this one until I’d sufficiently solved the rest.

One Summer of slow mental rehabilitation later, and I’m back.  Yesterday I had to restart Chrome, and so all my tabs loaded up again (sans flash player, for some reason), and as I sorted through them I found that I’d never closed my “Classic Sporkman” tab (that’s another comic of Troutman’s).  So I started there, read all the remastered comics from the beginning, along with the new ones once I ran out of remastereds, and moved on to the first comic of Mary Elizabeth’s Sock.  I feel like once I get to the most recent comic there, then binge through the Lit Brick archives, I’ll have reached some sort of end-point.  A place where I can say “alright, I’m no longer recovering, I’m now officially doing okay.”

The fact that I’m now studying writing is definitely going to cut into my ability to maintain this blog, so the “posts to this space” metric is no longer relevant by any measure, but aside from that, it means that I’ve got some interesting things planned for the future.  It’s good to know I’ve gotten past this particular hurdle in time to execute them.

Why I Write

Yesterday was my first class of the first seminar for the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar Ilan University.

I’ve been meaning to make it “public” that I was accepted into the program a while ago, I just somehow never got around to it.  So I guess that’s done now.

As it was the first day of the program, there were some basic introductory exercises, the main focus of the first half of the session being “why do you write?”  When asked orally, I answered something along the lines of “because I have weird ideas that I don’t think anyone else has, and I want to get those out.”  When we were told to write an answer to that question continuously without stopping to think or plan, I said, more or less, that I write for selfish reasons.

Everyone who volunteered their answers gave interesting ones, but they were fairly on the spot.  I don’t think any of us really delved too deeply into our prime motivators.  Or maybe other people did, and I’m just projecting my own feeling of having given a shallow answer on to my classmates.

But after that class, I saw the tail end of a news report about the recent escalation in talk about an Israeli strike on Iran that left me with the feeling of “what if there really was a war between Israel and Iran?  What would I do?”

The immediate answer, clearly, is that I’d stay in the country.  I wouldn’t try to leave or evacuate.  I don’t know what help I would be in such a theoretical confrontation, but whatever my role is I’m determined to fill it.

But, with the knowledge that I would stay in a situation that may lead to my death, what would I then do?  Once I figured out what my contribution would be, I would find time to go through my whole hard drive, and any memory device I think may contain something I’ve written, and upload them as attachments to emails I send myself, and organize those emails into a specific folder.  Then I’d prepare an email draft with my gmail and wordpress passwords and instructions to post everything from that specific folder, absolutely everything, to this blog.  Things I finished, things I didn’t.  Things that may already be up here in some form, things I don’t ever intend to actually show anybody.  Things I’m proud of, things I’m embarrassed about.  Everything I’ve written that I still have, from poems to academic papers, would be public and out there where bombs can’t reach them.  And if the time came where my death seemed imminent, I would send that email to someone I trust overseas.

And, more than anything else I said or wrote yesterday, that is really why I write.  Because I want people to know who I am, know that I was here, have some idea of what I’ve done even after I’m gone.  I think that someone in the future will ask themselves “what was it like to live in Israel around the turn of the millennium,” and I hope that my words can provide some insight into that question, whether that insight be from my opinions, my general musings, or my dumb little stories.

And on the off-chance there isn’t a war and I don’t die, that someone from the future will most certainly be me.