irony—not just a river in egypt

for some reason that headline struck me briefly this morning, as i carried a load of laundry to drop off, as funny. now it doesn't seem so very. and, why write this anyway and who reads it anyway. procrastination is an answer to question one.

jesus christ almighty!

that's what my mother or maybe it was my father used to exclaim when they were hot-red mad, sometimes at each other for: not making dinner, which would have been my mom angry at my dad since his hours were more flexible and she for much of my childhood didn't get home from work until 6 and then if no dinner was ready or table wasn't set she'd have a fit. i can't remember a specific recurring event that would spark my father, except coming home midafternoon to find his kids watching television. then he'd yell something like 'turn off that idiot box! go outside!' one time i was watching nighttime drama, this was in high school, and he was working in the same room as the television; he had three computers or was it two, set up side by side, one for a hebrew translation of some text, one for an arabic translation, and then the english version, and to avoid disturbing him, i plugged earphones into the tv and watched the drama, thirtysomething, about three feet from the screen because the earphones had a shortish wire. and of course, that melodrama always made me weep or even sob cause i am soft, like turkey, but that's a different story, and so there he was doing his esoteric thing and i was crying at the prospect of a character's illness and he really got mad at me then and seethed something like 'if you want to know about horror in the world, read the newspaper but don't get sad over some soap opera when there are real things to cry over!'

so i did. and i do.

yesterday, for example, i read about how in italy there is now a law or an ordinance or some such wherein a man cannot publicly touch his crotch, which is, apparently, done as some superstitionally related gesture. they are advised to wait until they get home to lay hands. seems like sound thinking, but does it need codification?

something else: i went to a concert last night. it was okay, not great, it was in a masonic temple and i looked for clues of that, though dunno what those clues would look like. but apparently you can smoke in masonic temples. and people did. not me. but now my coat reeks. but the other part of that is that some time ago, maybe two months or three, i got an email from a guy, a philosophy grad student, who wanted 15 minutes of my time. i didn't know what for. did he want to talk about work? about possible friendship? and i agreed to meet because i was in a good mood and curious; i am usually curious. and he came a long way (well, from very very far uptown but told me he gets his best reading done on the subway) and we met and had a coffee and he wanted to know how i define jewish culture. which i found, oddly, to be hard to answer, too big maybe, and i started down a path of answer and everything i said, he dismissed as passe or irrelevant, which made me think, what is culture generally, what is a living definition, beyond a list of examples, that can stand apart from earlier manifestations of culture, that is, books, music, art historical movements, religious thought? what is the platonic 'ness' of culture? to me it seems that culture (whatever it is exactly) does not exist in a vacuum, unconnected to what it follows and oftens reacts against or to? i suddenly felt very naive and/or underconfident and almost a fraud. and i asked him why he came to me with this question, beyond the fact of a professional affiliation which is not, i realize, insignificant but maybe it is a bit superficial. and he said:

'because you are a dominating intelligentsia.'

i laughed at that because he doesn't know me at all and in my view i am not that and was a little rattled. but back to the concert at the temple, at the end of this unusual but fun conversation this fellow said,

'now what will happen is that you will find some cultural event for us to go to together.'

and i liked the mandate and i liked having a mandate. so when i heard about this concert of a band of which i'm a fan (though last night i was distracted and found it a bit uncompelling) i told him about it, invited him to come along. and i never heard from him again. it's odd how people pop in and out of the viewfinder.

back to jesus. my brother told me a story once about my niece and nephew who used a bathroom in a catholic church in their town. they came out with many questions about the iconography they saw there ('why is that man on a T?' is one i remember) and on the way home my brother was explaining to them about jesus, not proselytizing because he is not christian and also he's not the proselytizing sort, but trying to make them be openminded about other faiths and ideas. and they live in a city, not a town, really, where i don't know what the demographic make-up is but i expect it is somewhat more homogeneous than, say, nyc or la or sf, and my niece said something like

'jesus isn't a name. jesus is something you say when you're angry.'

these are the gifts we impart to the children.