Blog O' Verse

Wanna write a poem? You know you want to.

I just do titles.

Winkin', Blinkin', and Ringin' - A Philosophical Reflection With No Particular Action Plan

My 16-year-old VCR just broke, giving me an opportunity to reflect on the many changes that have taken place since my childhood in the little things of daily life: I'm talking about memories from age 4 and up. I remember going to sleep with the door partly open and the hall light on. For some reason there was no night light, although some of my playmates had them. I remember looking out my window at night and seeing the lights of the Empire State Building, twinkling like Oz. Now there are many tall buildings to block that view, if I were to go to sleep in that room. And the night sounds...our Queens row house had a driveway and a garage, but the majority of our neighbors were non-car-owners. The sound of one car driving up the street more unusual than the sound of an airplane flying overhead on its way to Idlewild Airport. We used to have nice brass chimes that rang (acoustic!) when the doorbell was pressed. There was one console radio with a record-player in the living room and little radio in the kitchen where we listened to WQXR at 6PM, during dinner. We got the first TV on the block, and neighbors would come over to watch baseball games, or just to look at the test patterns that took up a lot of the daytime hours.

Now I look around my house and it's a humming hive of 24/7 electronic activity. My technical advisors tell me it's better to leave the appliances turned on if I use them frequently, so I do. Little green lights and little red lights blinking away on the computer, the keyboard, the optical mouse, the modem, the monitor, the TV, the VCR, the microwave oven clock...not to mention the traffic noises, which do slow down at night but never stop completely (except on Yom Kippur). The remotes have their own little caddy. Wires are everywhere, and they annoy me... I'm thinking about going Bluetooth. Or maybe camping instead...

So many things ring or buzz to remind me to answer something beside the front door: the phone, the cellphone, the computer (Skype is great). And then there's the insistent blinking things: voicemail on the cellphone, SMS on the cellphone, Instant Messages on the computer, voicemail on Skype.

It would be so different to live today without electricity, never mind without electronics, yet there are millions, maybe billions of people who do, right now. No wonder the world has become more complicated as it shrinks. The discrepancies are getting bigger. It worries me.

Hark! I think I smell another dog!

Do I smell another dog?
Originally uploaded by savtadotty.

I hope I look this good when I reach her age (10). We're celebating our 9th anniversary together. Such happiness!
More dog photos...

Avatar Savta

AvatarSavta
Originally uploaded by savtadotty.

I take my "sunset years" literally: that's my Mediterranean sunset in the background.

You can make your own avatar.

A haiku-esque review of antidepressant brand names

Prozac prosaic
Zoloft so lofty
Paxil mean wallup.

One more book report

From Publishers Weekly

Novelist and playwright Zakes Mda's Ways of Dying was a big hit in his native South Africa, where it was even adapted into a jazz opera. Toloki is a Professional Mourner, making a meager living by attending funerals in the violent city where he lives. In his ratty suit he adds "an aura of sorrow and dignity," often serving as peacemaker when fights break out...

Ways of Dying was my favorite book in 2004, bb (before blog). It's South African magical realism, wickedly funny, optimistic, entertaining, serious, beautiful (and only 210 pages long...great for airplane trip). Highly recommended.

A post book tristesse post

I've finished the three books I was reading, one each in the living-room, bedroom, and kitchen. They were all so interesting that I couldn't figure out which one to read first, so I just stayed in whichever room each book was in until I had to go to the other room for some other reason (I was never a bathroom reader.) The three books were are:

A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz (translated from Hebrew)
From a literary point of view, this was the most beautiful of the three. It is a masterpiece: comic, tragic, historical, contemporary, rightist, leftist, very layered and very deep. My favorite sentence: "I didn't want to write a book; I wanted to be a book." This is also the book I felt closest to, no doubt because of my 17-year immersion in Israeli life. Because of strange editing, or weird translation, or a subtle intent on Oz's part, there were oddly disturbing repetitions, but after a while I figured they were part of the memoirist's prerogative, like poetic license. Oz's original family name is the same as elswhere's paternal grandmother's maiden name, and they came from the same city...could they be related? And if so, then what? His memories of being an 8-year-old boy are frighteningly open: I haven't felt that 8-year-old-boy panic since Call it Sleep by Henry Roth (no relation to Philip). This is a book I would love to discuss with anyone who's read it. I plan to read it again.

The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
Another 8-year-old boy's memoir, this one fictitious. Roth's writing is so much like a New Yorker Magazine report that it's hard to believe the things in his three recent books didn't really happen (American Pastoral, The Human Stain, The Plot Against America). The background and foreground of an American Jewish family during the Roosevelt era resonated for me, but more distantly than Oz, probably because of where I live now. And again the beautiful vulnerability of an 8-year-old boy. This book was definitely the scariest of the three.

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
8-year-old boys must be this year's little black dress. The setting in Afghanistan is for me the most exotic, and yet in some ways very familiar now that I've settled in the Muddle East. I am always impressed by immigrants who write well in a second language. Although I knew what was going to happen from the start, it was really a page-turner and a Good Read. What I came away with from this one is the certainty that a boy's relationship with his father is just as complicated as a girl's relationship with her mother, in many similar ways.

Naches* Time

*Naches: pleasure/pride in the achievements of one's progeny. According to sociologist John Murray Cuddihy, naches and yichis are universal life goals, even if you don't know Yiddish. Who am I to argue? (According to Leo Rosten, "Yiches, more than pedigree, is family status or prestige that must be deserved, earned as well as inherited." Still working on that one.)

Congratulations to elswhere for winning this month's Blogging for Books, together with two other winners! I am one proud mamma. And congratulations to the judge, for having the good sense to recognize literary talent when she sees it. (Am I biased? No way.)

Thanks for teaching me how to link, everyone who did. Was it only six months ago?

Ayzeh Medinah (8) - Pupik on Sheinkin

Pupik on Sheinkin
Originally uploaded by savtadotty.

Is there someone who doesn't know that pupik is Yiddish for bellybutton?

Graduation Day (Updated*)

You're all invited to join me watching Prowesslessnesslessness graduate from Law School webcast live tomorrow, Saturday, May 14, at 9:00 a.m. Eastern Time (that's 6 a.m. on the West Coast and 4 p.m. in Israel). If the technology works, that is.

*Well he may or may not have been present. I saw and heard the requisite bagpipers, and parts of the speeches of the Dean, the President, and the Guest Speaker (a judge), but Quicktime got very twitchy on my computer and kept rebuffering itself two or three times, and then telling me it had lost its connection to the server, requiring me to re-open Quicktime every 1 or 2 minutes. I was doing this during the minute when they may or may not have called Prowesslessnesslessness up to receive his fake diploma. His diploma would be fake because he has two more courses to finish by July, thanks to his "paternity leave" during the Fall Semester, to welcome The Little Bear. But this being a Florida school, they mercifully don't require the summer graduates to parade in their gowns when the temperature and humidity are both in the 90's. And I can't call him because he and Pippi Bluestocking and The Little Bear are all on an airplane now, going to visit friends and relations in the wilds of Southern California. Grrrr.

Garbage School Dropout

I was just reading (in the NY Times) about the 30+ recycling categories in Japan, and was reminded that the more accustomed I become to living in Israel, the less familiar the U.S.A. becomes with each visit.

A few summers ago I was privileged to house-sit for a month in the Wedgwood district of Seattle (don't bother to look it up...it's fictional because I can't remember the real name), a lovely upscale neighborhood with sidewalks, coffee shops (of course), bookstores, sidewalks, Thai restaurants (of course), an arty movie film theater, and did I mention sidewalks? The house was fabulous, the owner "Blossom" (whom I'd never met...a great match made by elswhere) lots of fun ... when Blossom came back from her holiday we became housemates for a couple of weeks (!), and the only mishap I had to report was my Great Embarrassment with Garbage.

I thought I had covered all bases by getting a Recycling Tutorial from Renaissance Woman: the plastic goes in the blue bin, the paper goes in the green one, the glass goes in the open basket (color irrelevant), the garden waste goes in the brown one, try to minimize the rest which goes in the black one because that's the only one the enlightened municipal authorities charge for. Oh and the green, blue, and black ones are emptied every week on a different day in each neighborhood, and the brown ones are emptied only every two weeks on another day. I marked my calendar and thought, "This house-sitting work is pretty easy. I just have to remember what day it is, which I think I can do once my jet-lag clears up."

Blossom had left a trusted workman Hans to finish up some repairs, which he did. Hans and I together dumped his debris in the black bin. When the appointed day rolled around, I pushed the bins to the curb and went off to enjoy another day with Mermaid Girl. How sad I was to return that evening to see said black bin still full at the curb with a white "report card" stuck to the lid. Among the many sins listed with checkboxes, my sin, the checked one, was "Overweight." For a moment I thought The War on Obesity had gone way overboard, until I realized that the weight limit was for the contents of the garbage bin, not for its owner. The rubble Hans and I had dutifully shovelled into the black bin was too heavy for the dainty muscles of Seattle's garbagemen.

Humpf. Well, every culture has its peculiarities, and living in Israel has definitely increased my tolerance for such*, so I laughed it off and next day Hans carted the offended rubble off to the dump in his pickup truck.

I thought I'd learned my lesson until last autumn in Florida. The Sarasota recycling system seemed pretty similar to the Seattle one, but I was fooled, having missed the fine points of plastic categorization. I'd put an empty plastic juice container with plastic, when in fact it did not meet Sarasota's standards for recyclable plastic. And to the public humiliation of Prowesslesslessness, Pippi Bluestocking, and The Little Bear (who, at age three months had limited tools with which to express her outrage), the offending bin was left at the curb after collection day, full, rejected, no reasons given. This provoked a schism in the otherwise seamless relationship of P. and P.B.: P's policy is to take all the offending items and toss them in the regular garbage, Sarasota's municipal government being less enlightened than Seattle's and not charging its residents for garbage by the pound. P.B. is willing to sort through the rejected items and re-submit the acceptable ones the following week. As a guest, I deferred to my hosts to resolve the issue, and decided to work harder on my relaxation and deep breathing exercises whenever I have to throw something away in the U.S.A. And not to visit Japan any time soon.

*One fine day, while walking on mixed-use commercial and residential street in Jaffa, I was nearly hit in the head by a small bag of flying garbage tossed overboard from a second floor balconey by a less than civic-minded resident. And now I add to my daily prayers, "Any day you're not hit by flying garbage is a good day."

Sleeping a lot

All you insomniacs out there: I am doing your sleeping for you. I don't know whether it's the weather, or the exercise, or the being content, but I am doing exactly what my dear departed father used to fear: "sleeping my life away." If I get less than 9 hours' sleep at night, I take a nap. My accounting system works differently than his. According to my accounting system, every minute spent sleeping is a minute added to my life span. I guess my dad wanted an insomniac daughter. G_d works in mysterious ways.

If I Could Be...

A while back, Katie-Yael tagged me with a meme, and I've been pondering, contemplating, even thinking about my answers (not losing sleep, though). The problem is, I'm supposed to both answer it and pass it along, and I'm reluctant to do the latter. I'd really prefer to send it to volunteers, so please let me know if this meme interests you, and I'll tag you:

You chosen people volunteers have to pick five of the options below and tell us what you would do..

* If I could be a scientist…
* If I could be a farmer…
* If I could be a musician…
* If I could be a doctor…
* If I could be a painter…
* If I could be a gardener…
* If I could be a missionary…
* If I could be a chef…
* If I could be an architect…
* If I could be a linguist…
* If I could be a psychologist…
* If I could be a librarian…
* If I could be an athlete…
* If I could be a lawyer…
* If I could be an inn-keeper…
* If I could be a professor…
* If I could be a writer…
* If I could be a llama-rider…
* If I could be a bonnie pirate…
* If I could be an astronaut…
* If I could be a world famous blogger…
* If I could be a justice on any one court in the world…
* If I could be married to any current famous political figure…

If I could be a musician…I would be a singer and conductor of off-Broadway shows, Broadway shows, and operas. I would have an amazing voice so I could sing bass, baritone, or alto parts (the soprano parts are not for me). I would be in great demand, and I would own my own private jet to get around, just like John Travolta. Only I wouldn't want to pilot it, as John does, but he could be my pilot or recommend his favorite back-up pilots.

If I could be a painter...I would be Cezanne. Not that I know anything about Cezanne's life, but I would like to be able to capture what he sees the way he did. However, I think I am somehow related to Giacometti, although I have absolutely no basis for this idea, other than a Romanian-born mother.

If I could be a gardener...I would spruce up the ground around the building where I live. The repairs have been completed, but the ground is bare. Come to think of it, this is actually a project I could present to the building management IRL with my friend who designed Miriam's garden, and we might be able to make it happen. Wow!

If I could be an architect...I would specialize in residential architecture. When I was a little girl, I used to walk to school past a house that had a beautiful doll house at the end of its driveway. When I thought no one was looking, I would snoop inside that dollhouse to see how it was laid out and what furniture it had. I love designing structures according to functions, and I'm very nosy.

If I could be married to any current famous political figure…it would NOT be Bill Clinton. He's all yours, Hillary! Perhaps Vaclav Havel from the Czech Republic: I like the idea of a leader who is also a playwright, and the few Czechs I have met were worldly and witty. And Prague is such a magical place, it could be fun to live there. And John Travolta could fly us around when we had important events to attend.

The Sugihara Story

I'm embarrassed to admit that I never knew the Sugihara story until now, although at least the name was familiar. What a legacy! (Here's another version.)

Yom HaShoa

Holocaust day begins at sundown today, Wednesday. All places of entertainment in Israel close, and the TV stations broadcast only history documentaries. We'll be back in business tomorrow night.

Finals Week

Sailboat Sweater
Originally uploaded by savtadotty.

At many colleges and universities, it's finals week. This brings back long-ago memories of the stress I used to experience, thinking I would never be able to pass my exams. Then I would say to myself, "Don't be so melodramatic: when you're old and a grandmother, sitting in your rocking chair, knitting sweaters for your grandchildren, you won't even remember this exam."

Well, the rocking chair is at elswhere's house, and this sweater is for my friend's new grandson, but I was right in principle: I don't remember the exams. And anyhow, I did pass enough of them to graduate.

Good luck, all you students, don't get too stressed.