Things to make your head explode, just a little

There are signs all over the law building, calling on students to join in on an organized day-long boycott of the new coffeehouse, for:

1) having prices that are too high and
2) not offering products that the student community wants (like sandwiches).

Can someone- anyone- explain the logic behind this? Or is this just knee-jerk Israeli strategy kicking in?

Zombie Day

One of the cooler things that I have done in my short life (for a given value of cool) happened on Friday and since so often this poor blog (yes, I have decided to anthopomorphize my blog as a hungry, bored little child. run with it.) has to make do (I know that I have too many parentheticals, but did you know that until a few weeks ago, I always thought that was "make due". I am full of shame) with random musings or angst (or random angsty musings!), I decided that I would tell you all about it.

So that was all one sentence, setting aside the fact that it ignored all the decent rules of grammar. Huh.

Anyway, on Friday I was a zombie. And not just in the ordinary recreational sense. I was an official zombie extra for the first Israeli post-apocalyptic zombie movie. (Sidebar: do not see this movie. It's going to be entirely in English, to appeal to the international audience, and it is unbelievably proud of the fact that its zombies are not reanimated corpses but ordinary humans who have been struck with some biological weapon that makes them feral, vicious, and super-powerful. Bless their sweet souls, they seem convinced that this is groundbreaking. And one can't even hope for classic cult B-movie because it doesn't seem to have any sense of humor about itself. Here is their website. You'll see what I mean.)

Anyway, it all started a couple weeks ago when my roommate heard about a zombie training day for people to learn how to be zombies so as to be able to extras in the movie. Zombie training rocked. We learned how to snarl and claw and maul and run and get shot and fall and roll and limp and be electrocuted. On concrete, too. So that was pretty awesome. Then we told them the days that we'd be willing to come (for me, days when my classes don't take attendance, and don't get me started on the fact that I am a Master's student and still having classes that call roll) and off we went.

Then Friday morning, at around nine, they called me up and asked if I'd be willing to come in right away. A bus, a train, and a ride-from-someone-from-the-crew later, and I was in the mall parking garage where they were doing the shooting. I got there around 10:30.

What happened next was 3-4 hours of standing around. When I arrived they costumed me up and then spent the next hour or so being re-costumed. Every so often one person in charge would wander by and criticize the outfit and the person costuming me would mumble and find something else and have me change into that. Fortunately, they were responsive to my expressed desire for nothing too revealing. Unfortunately, what with one thing and another, my outfit translated into "Seminary Girl Gone Feral"- the inevitable tiered, floor-length denim skirt and a white t-shirt covered by a long, black, hooded sweater/jacket. Every time I got a new costume, I stood around in it for several minutes having them dust it up with various colors and types of dust they had. (It was actually pretty cool- they were like a mesh floor bag of dust or something).

After the costuming, we stood around for a long time. Then we got our glowing red contacts put in. Then we stood around for a long time. I should mention that there were only 5-6 zombies, so it wasn't like I was standing around while they were working with other people. We were all just standing. Then we got our make-up, which in this particular case meant that we were squirted, painted, smeared, and generally soaked in a corn syrup-water-food coloring blend. It was pretty cool, actually and a lot disgusting, particularly as it got into my hair, making it impossible to detach my hair from my neck or my shirt. 

So then we stood around for a bit more inside the parking garage. Then we went to stand around outside, to be ready for the shoot. Then it started to rain, so we went back inside. Gripping stuff. Eventually, we actually did the shot, which was literally 15 seconds during which the principals run into their car and the zombies chase the car. We did the take several times, but mostly because they kept changing their opinions about where the zombies should come from. I can well imagine that they were having a hard time figuring out how to make six people look like a zombie horde. (yeah, like I said, z-movie territory). Still, the whole thing took about a half an hour. Then they had us do another shot of running directly at a hand-held camera. Then we were done. I'm guessing no more than 30 seconds worth of footage.

Then it was time for lunch, but more importantly, it was 3:30 and I was getting antsy about shabbat. They had promised me that they would send me home by 3:00, which of course I didn't take seriously, but time was a factor. So while people were eating lunch I hovered around being nervous. I also ate a pita, since I didn't want to bother anyone with asking whether the catering was kosher.

Then one of the other extras wandered by and told me that the director had said that he was done with us and we could de-make-up. There was an entertaining bout of cleaning up the upper half of one's body, including most of the hair, in a portable-bathroom sink, but I eventually got enough to be able to ship out.

Almost as soon as I left the bathroom, it turned out that they actually wanted us for another shot. People were entertainingly annoyed at the director. The lady in charge (I have no idea what her real role was) asked me if I would be okay with costuming and make-upping up again. I looked apologetic and mentioned the sabbath thing.

It was, actually, incredible how instantly she accepted that and started reacting to it. Immediately, she sent somebody else to get made up, and recruited a crew member to give me a ride back to the bus station, with the immortal words "One of the zombies is shomeret shabbat. Hurry!" which are words that should be said more in this world. And so, hair mostly covered in corn syrup, torso covered in blood and ditto, I made it to my shabbat destination with a couple of hours to spare. And that is the story of my zombieness. I leave you with this picture. Guess which one is me:

Huh. I really don't particularly enjoy blogging life happenings. I mean not anti, but it's just a bit dull. Good to know.

Random Class Thought II

If female lawyers choose to work in the public sector rather than the private sector and if the reason they choose to do so is because they feel less of a need to earn money and therefore can pick jobs they like better, is that sexism? Sexism against men? And who should be changing it and how? If women care less about money (perhaps because society does not value them based on their earning power, perhaps because they don't have to support a family)- is it wrong to pay them less?

Obviously, that's not the only possible reason. There could be real sexism. It could also be a question of the insanely long hours. And again- is it sexist if women prefer not to work insane hours? Is it only sexist if they do so because they feel obliged to raise a family?

In other words, I do not think I get a word of what this professor is spouting.

Edit: Do you ever sit in class and listen to people asking questions and think to yourself: "How on earth could you think that's a real question? For your sake, my friend, I hope that is a thought that popped into your head and your hand went up before you finished the thought because if you actually thought about that thought for more than five seconds, I simply don't understand what it must be like in your head." Not questions of failing to understand the professor, but questions of ah-ha! I have thought of something clever and you're just like oh honey. oh no. For example: Can something be disparate treatment and disparate impact at the same time for different groups? Yes, honey. It can. Good question.

What's so bad about genocide?*

*And then the lawyer in me feels the need to quickly disclaim that the above question is obviously facetious, intended to pique interest rather than to suggest that genocide is anything other than heinous. That said...

Genocide is really the prototypical evil thing, both in terms of convenient rhetoric for a lot of debates and for international law purposes. And I agree that it's pretty darn evil. But I'm not entirely sure what about it is more evil than the murder of an equivalent number of people based on some other grounds. I should note that I also have some instinct that this is the case, although perhaps not so strong an instinct as is common. 

Okay, so is it a question of mens rea- the mental state of the genocider? It's less moral to kill somebody based on ethnicity because it compounds the offenses of murder and of racism, so assuming that racism has a non-zero evil quotient, the same murder will be x + y evil instead of just x evil (presumably the justification behind hate crime legislation as well). Although if we are accepting this as mathematical in any sense, at some point the genocide of a relatively small nation would be less evil than the non-racially-motivated murder of a whole lot of people. Which I'm not sure is the case, but it would be interesting to run experiments to see how people feel about that. However, I don't think it's just the compounding effect of racism. I don't really know the full legal definition of genocide (and I'm pretty sure that there's not a simple or uncontroversial one) but racially-motivated mass murder may not qualify unless there is some real goal of annihilation. (Interestingly, I'm not sure mass murder based on other discriminatory patterns- murder of gays or the handicapped or lefties- would count as genocide, even if the goal was annihilation).

This implies that the real concern is something closer to the value that we place in diversity. Perhaps a better analogy than hate crimes would be endangered species. We think that there is value to the continued existence of variety and diminishment of said variety is a real harm. This is all very well and good, but as Rachel (my older sister, for the, like, two readers who are not family members) has pointed out, the value is never to maximize the number of animal species. In fact, those who are most concerned with conservation of endangered species also tend to be those who are really offended by the idea of frankenfruits and so forth or any sort of human-created diversity. And back to the human example, I don't know of that many people who encourage more people to go split off and create new ethnicities or cultures or what have you. Although the general lamenting of globalization and so forth is prevalent, I'm not sure anybody thinks it's as evil as genocide. Is the difference intent? Or is genocide precisely as evil as mass murder + globalization? 

Random Class Thought

The press conference as the modern embodiment of eglah arufa, in terms of form, content, and goals, specifically the public self-humiliation by public figures as a means of illustration the seriousness attributed to murder and specifically unsolved (and thus unpunished) murders and as a means of drawing attention to the murder to ease the solving. Discuss.

Pseudo-Anonymity

It seems, and this is a fact that flatters and disturbs me, that this blog is actually still being read, not merely by safely anonymous strangers but by people within a degree or two of separation from me, myself, personally. For that matter, who can say but that my family members might not be checking in from time to time? One would have thought the months+ delays between posts would have thrown them off my track, but this does not seem to be the case.

Well, this is in many ways worrisome and I will tell you why. Bloggery- particularly on a most defunct blog- has a comforting sensation of anonymity. At the same time, it allows a sense of officialdom that thoughts and sentiments lack when confined to your own computer or your own mind. The best blog, I am convinced, or at least the best blog in the narrow category of blog-as-diary, which this blog, largely although not exclusively, but definitely increasingly, is, would be one that could be read by anyone but isn't. (Yes, that was a sentence. Ish.) A blog that is read by strangers is nearly as good because everyone knows that strangers aren't really people.

What such anonymity allows is the expression of thoughts/sentiments without complete endorsement. I read a lovely theory of privacy that included the idea that access to people's thoughts is wrong because what is important is the thoughts that people choose to endorse by granting them verbal (or other) expression. Anonymous blogging is not the same as saying something because it does not imply the same level of endorsement.

For me, this is particularly critical when it comes to my angst. I angst rather more than I strictly speaking approve of, and therefore I tend not to endorse such angst by sharing it with others. I do, somewhat hypocritically, write poems with the angst, but I regard that as fair play because: 1) I rarely do anything further with the poems and 2)I try to make sure that they are decent poems and worth existing (it's a low bar, but I think it would keep out most of the angsty poetry out their). And also I may blog the angst- more recently since I became more convinced that nobody who knew me would read it.

The upshot of all this is that my blogging needs to become

1) more anonymous: which would mean killing this blog, so there's that.
2) less honest: which would probably entail less existing (although there's not a lot of room for that with this particular blog).
or
3) less blog-as-diary and more blog-as-random-thoughts, which is all very well and good but I had been hoping that the blog would, to a small degree, chronicle the way I was at this age so that I can read it in a couple years when I have completely forgotten. (I already can barely envision my high school self. It's weird).

Going Gentle

This too shall pass me by
And I will watch it as it goes.
I will smile.
I will comfort.
I will give sage advice.
I will try to avoid comparisons.
There will be ice-cream.
There will be congratulations.
In either case, there will be hugging.
I will be happy for them.
I will be patient.

Time will pass and denial will be harder.
There will be crying into pillows
But less than you'd expect.
It will not be unbearable.
It will not be a tragedy.
At some point, they'll start to notice.
Subjects will be avoided.
They'll try to be more sensitive.
In some ways that will be better.

It came to me that I am not entirely sure that there is anyone in my life who really knows me well. Not even in the sense of all my hopes and dreams, but in the sense of being able to predict how I would react to a variety of situations with high accuracy. An angsty teenage delusion or a testament to my uncommunicativeness or inconsistency?

Disney Alienation

So I've been entertaining myself by watching some classic Disney animated films on youtube, and I was struck by a theme that seems to unite many of them, certainly in the era after they discovered that heroines should actually be given personalities. Beyond even the twisted notions of love for which Disney is so justly famous, almost every protagonist was suffering from a severe case of alienation at the beginning of the film. They all felt different, out-of-place, mocked, and so forth.
I stole the list below from the official Disney site- let's have a look:

1937 –Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: not really, I suppose
1940 –Pinocchio definitely
1940 –Fantasia well, no, but N/A really
1941 –Dumbo yup
1942 –Bambi I suppose not
1943 –Saludos Amigos never heard of it
1945 –The Three Caballeros ditto
1946 –Make Mine Music ditto
1947 –Fun and Fancy Free ditto
1948 –Melody Time ditto
1949 –The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad never seen, not really a classic
1950 –Cinderella well...she is out-of-place and unloved, but she doesn't really harp on it because of the aforementioned personality thing
1951 –Alice in Wonderland haven't seen the Disney version, certainly high on the alienation in the original

okay, this is tiring, let's skip over several because it seems pretty clear at this point that all the films I was thinking about are from one, shorter era.
1989 –The Little Mermaid: whole songs about it
1990 –The Rescuers Down Under: haven't seen
1991 –Beauty and the Beast very much so
1992 –Aladdin: to some degree
1994 –The Lion King: I suppose not.
1995 –Pocahontas: a little, but not a major theme
1996 –The Hunchback of Notre Dame: well yeah, the poster child for it. Not even posting links here
1997 –Hercules: quite
1998 –Mulan: very much so
1999 –Tarzan: oh yes and understandably so

So in that 10 year period, 6 of the films had alienation as a major theme, including 4 in a row. (And all those four with a pretty uniform structure: Someone feels that they will never fit into their society because they are different and flawed. Others assure them that they are wonderful as they are. Then they dare to be themselves, save the day, and everybody recognizes how very wonderful they truly are.) Now I know that alienation is one of the themes of modern existence, but that seemed a little extreme.

And the situation is even more odd when you think about the target audience. Firstly, these are little kids- is it really true that all little children see themselves as ostracized outsiders? And we're not talking about fringe films for the kids who are a little different- this is mainstream entertainment that seems to assume that every child will relate to the problems of this protagonist.

It's possible that these messages are pitching to slightly older children- the little ones will come for the music and adventure and so forth, so the messages of alienation are trying to hook in the young adolescent crowd. And such feelings are stereotypical of adolescence.

It's also possible that Disney just enjoys the message and doesn't really care about the target audience, but that hardly sounds like their M.O.

But still, this sentiment of being a rejected outsider- I had always assumed that it was typical only of those who are atypical. It's strange to think that Disney, at least, assumes that all kids feel this way enough to make it a major theme of their existences.

Ad Hoc Poem

Explicating the diagram: This evening, I suffered something of a disappointment. Nothing apocalyptic, but enough to be legitimately frustrating. Short version: There was a poetry reading in Jerusalem. Miri talked me into coming and reading with her and I got myself sort of psyched at the idea of reading in public, since I've never done it and I'm trying to make myself have experiences. Psyched enough to re-arrange my studying schedule, ignore the fact I have a final tomorrow (albeit open book), rush out of my final today straight into the 1.5 hour bus ride to Jerusalem, skip dinner to make it there as on time as possible. Unfortunately, there was a technical glitch and my name did not get on the list and this was not realized until it was too late. The following is the extremely ad hoc pseudo-poem that I scribbled on the bus ride back just expressly for the purposes of this very blog post:

I'm not quite sure how to play it.
I mean, I think that once
I have the character down
the line readings should come
more or less naturally.

I mean, okay, anger is a given,
and disappointment, sure,
frustration, sure,
bits of stress slipping over the edges,
sure sure sure.

I think maybe she might cry a little?
Not on stage, obviously,
but off on one of the pockets
soliloquy-style.
Maybe when she's walking home
alone
in the darkening streets
in the rain.
Except obviously it's not raining
and I'm not good at crying
and the timing's all horribly off.
Walking down Yaffa sobbing
crosses the line into bathos.
And this mustn't seem ridiculous.

My instinct, of course,
is to go straight to martyr-
Brave smile, chin up,
think of real people with big troubles.
But would the audience get it?
I mean, would they notice how very, very
wonderful she was being?
Because if not,
well that just misses the point.
and if I have to keep on
shooting them pointed looks,
it sorts of destroys the whole illusion.

I suppose someone else might play it
straight out anger
or grumpiness
or resignation
or whatever.

Actually, I have no idea
how they would play it.
I think I'd like to see
some talented people give it a shot.
Maybe I could pick up
some techniques.

Yeats, Just Because

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert.

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Automatic Breathing

Last night while I was waiting for the paralysis of sleep to strangle my brain into unconsciousness, I started wondering about the following hypothetical: what would happen to a person for whom breathing was exclusively a voluntary function?

I don't see any way that they could sleep without being hooked up to breathing machines, given that one generally loses control over voluntary functions with unconsciousness. Perhaps one could train oneself to have some sort of surface-level sleep, like those who can sleep standing up or the descriptions given by soldiers of learning to sleep while marching. Of course, I'm not sure how such a training process would be conducted, under the circumstances.

But the day time is actually, for me, a more interesting question. If we posit that the person would experience all of the normal discomfort associated with holding ones breath when they forgot to breathe, then they might be able to function. Should they forget to breathe, they would be alerted to the fact in plenty of time to take a deep breath without any real adverse effects; their breathing might be more sporadic, but there's no reason to assume that it wouldn't get the job done.

After a certain amount of time, I think it would become an automatic function of its own- not in the sense that the brain stem would handle it, but in the sense that every thirty seconds, the person would remember to take a breath so that it became a part of their daily rhythm. I wonder if that would interfere in any manner with higher brain functioning- having to have a basic point on one's mind constantly, like they say that having to remember a three digit number impairs mathematical ability, etc. It's even possible that the person would prefer to be hooked up to the automatic devices to avoid the trouble of remembering, although this is somewhat dubious considering the degree to which such machines impair ones freedom.

Of course, the person could never fall asleep accidentally, since we've pretty much determined that that would mean stopping breathing. This, though, I don't consider such a huge limitation on freedom, compared to the other stuff, but that could be because I tend not to fall asleep until I have given myself 'permission' to do. In any case, it would probably be wise for the person to have some sort of device monitoring oxygen levels and emitting a loud alarm before they become dangerous, since the unpleasant sensations of holding one's breath might not be sufficient to wake the person up in time.

American Students

I love American students. It's been years since I've heard Nietzsche quoted with such fluency, such fervor, and so little relevancy.

Update: And today, they presented our professor with a birthday cake. With those trick candles. Our professor, for this particular class, is Dean Kenneth Starr.

Biography

I have decided that if I could pick one person to write my biography, and under the assumption that I had accomplished something in my life to justify such a work, and under the condition that being dead was not construed as a barrier to such a service, then I would totally pick Irving Stone. I have read only a few of his books (Agony and Ecstasy, Those Who Love, They Also Ran), but from what I've seen he combines sensitivity to historical context and character with healthy dose of fictionalization that would be necessary to make my life interesting and relatable to future generations.

I Prefer Adjectives

I have recently discovered why I so badly hate the term "Jewess". Not because of any cultural load that it may or may not have adopted over the course of years of antisemitism, sexism or both. It's because it's a noun.

Here me out. There is something about adopting any sort of noun that I find gets deeply on my nerves. I know, on some basic level, that is almost entirely a meaningless semantic distinction to which no real difference can be attributed. Yet there it is. I have discovered that, while I will freely state that I am Jewish, under circumstances when such a statement is relevant, I cannot imagine myself ever using the phrase "I am a Jew" (let alone a Jewess).

And it's not just the tricky things like Jewishness, or femaleness (yes, I vastly prefer to say that I am female than to say that I am a woman. There it is.) It's also the more bland things, like saying I am an American, or saying that I am (going to be) a lawyer. Any noun, excluding perhaps 'person', just seems strangely limiting.

To adopt a noun seems to fully embrace a label, or perhaps even to fully embrace it as a category that can completely define you. It seems to place an equal sign between you and that adjective* and I am not comfortable with making any such equivalency.

*Perhaps if the English language allowed for more complex shades of meaning in 'is', I have less of a problem with the noun. If we could incorporate such mathematical shades of meaning such as "is a set containing, but not limited to, the following element" or "is greater than or equal to" or possibly even algorithmic conventions such as "has the lower limit of" or better "has as one possible lower limit". But I digress.

It's Aliiiiiiiiiiiiiive

Does that call for an exclamation mark? I find it more entertaining if it doesn't have one. So I shan't. You see, I have reached a new conclusion with regards to my blogging.

Blogging, done right, requires a good deal of devotion. The blogs that succeed are those whose authors work hard at posting frequently, putting up quality posts, keeping updated and involved in the blogosphere, keeping tabs on the world at large, and/or all of the above.

I long harbored a secret wish to have a successful blog. Not a very strong wish, but enough that I would be gnawed with envy at people whose blogs actually had followings or whatnot, beyond their immediate relatives and a few random stumblers-upon.

This was not, of course, the reason that I stopped blogging, but it may have played some part in it. I wanted to blog right - I tend to want to do things right, but I have very limited resources of caring, which I must ration strictly. Blogging doesn't make top twenty.

But I still enjoy blogging and I have somewhat missed it as a template for the organization of my thoughts, so the new plan is this: I will post as I choose and when I choose; I will not mind that I get no readers; I will make no effort to be involved in the blog world as a good little community member; I will post as weird and random as entertains me; I will take down anything that might monitor hits; I will respond to comments if I so choose and likely not at all; I will, in short, pretend that y'all do not exist and see if this is sufficient to support the current vague whim towards unforsaking this particular hobby.

Update: ten minutes from having posted the above, I begin to doubt to my ability to remain uninvested in the process. This will, in all likelihood, simply be another reincarnation, short-lived and inherently ephemeral, that fades into another long lull. I almost prefer to leave the blog dead, unpolluted by posts that will, I know, be increasingly apathetic and low quality. But that would be caring, and I'm really making the attempt to avoid that, in this particular case. So...I guess the update is just to expand my un-caring front to my attempts to uncare. Now I've gotten meta and that makes me cranky.

My Facebook 25 Things List

1.My favorite form of "athletic" recreation is scrambling up rocks like a spider monkey. Not rock climbing- scampering.
2.When I'm bored, I play text twist in my head, with words picked randomly from my surroundings.
3.I have gotten drunk exactly once, in an effort to discover what kind of drunk I would be. Turns out I talk a lot, demand attention, and use a vocabulary about four times more sophisticated than my regular one. Also, I analyze my level of drunkenness a lot.
4.I was secretly hoping that getting drunk would turn off my continual self-editor, so I could see what it would be like to not have one for ten seconds. It did not.
5.I waste obscene amounts of time fooling around on the internet.
6.I pick up verbal quirks with malice aforethought. Some of them end up sticking, but I never have any way of guessing which ones.
7.I use the terms 'darling', 'dear', 'honeychild', and such like constantly, but on principle I will not use them towards male friends.
8.I stopped wearing my retainers after six months. This was because they broke and I was too afraid of my orthodontist to dare to admit it to him. I spent months afraid that I would run into him at a social gathering, remind him of my existence, and be called to task for not having had a check-up in years.
9.I have at least two alternate personalities that tend to surface when I am around unfamiliar people. One of them is sweet, demure, and quiet. Refraining from the urge to lapse into them is one of the achievements of my adulthood.
10.It bothers me that all of my talents are mental-related. Properly well-rounded people should have discrete talents, in my opinion.
11.I think that I could be very happy as a cat lady. I wouldn't even need cats, per se- I could function chillingly well with little to no contact with other beings. I base this not on conjecture, but on around a year of experimentation.
12.I have never had to work hard in school. I wonder what it would be like.
13. have an eight year old nephew who requested a potter's wheel for his birthday. I have high hopes for his geekiness potential.
14.On the subject of geekiness, I'm not sure that I'm a proper geek, despite my proud self-identification. There is no one topic that I am sufficiently obsessed with to be a geek in that subject. The closest I get is law geek.
15.I have no idea which vaccinations and so forth I have actually received. No doubt records exist somewhere, and I am operating under the assumption that I received all the regular ones, but beyond that it is all an enigma wrapped in a mystery.
16.I am constantly assumed to be vaguely British. This is due to a combination of my slight speech impediment and my tendency to inflect Britishly. I have no way of accounting for either of these.
17.I learned to talk at an insanely young age and was extremely verbose. The rabbi's wife at our synagogue allegedly wrote her doctorate on said phenomenon.
18.In middle school, I wrote poems so typically mediocre that I still cringe to think of them. Poems about the seasons as spirits, rhymes like 'Sunrise, sunset\caught in times endless net'. I can't decide which is more painful: the phase itself, or the fact that there are many adults who do not seem to realize that it's a phase they should finish going through by junior high.
19.I am terrified of speaking in front of crowds. It is for this reason that I forced myself to join the debate club and to act in Bar Ilan plays. They have not been one hundred percent effective, but at least I am learning to play through the fear.
20.My nose is distinctly crooked. All the cartilage veers off to the right side at the bottom. You mostly notice if you have occasion to feel my nose or to look at it from the underneath. I also have weird toes, but that's harder to describe.
21.I am having a surprisingly hard time thinking of 25 interesting things about myself. This worries me.
22.I went to a Beis Yaakov high school and have yet to discover how not to be bitter about it. I was a model student during high school, excepting my tendencies to ask heretical questions and to wear uniforms with gaping holes in the elbows and stapled-up seams.
23. I played the piano for several years, off and on, receiving lessons from my mother. I gave up just after learning 'For Elise', having suddenly realized that I had neither talent nor large amounts of interest in the whole thing. I sometimes regret it.
24.I am magnificently sedentary. During seminary, I could spend weeks at a time not leaving the building without feeling the least bit claustrophobic.
25.I believe that most emotions, particularly in the long run, are decisions. I therefore have little patience for consistently unhappy people. It seems inefficient.

Monkey Shines

In re this clip of the opening from Monkey Shines: an paper I once wrote analyzing the show from a sociological perspective. I'm reprinting it in full below.

We Have Met the Monkey and He is Us:

Introduction

Who among us doesn’t remember Monkey Shines, that classic sitcom that, despite its truncated tenure on television, managed to win itself a place in the canon of childhood staples? Who among can't still hum its catchy opening theme Monkey Business? Who hasn't caught himself using the catchphrases that it made a part of our language: 'Monkey Attack!', 'What was the baby using?', and, of course,'How many monkeys does it take?'

Yet from a sober, academic perspective, Monkey Shines is notable not for the entertainment that it provided, but what it taught us about ourselves, both in its messages and in its ultimate cancellation. Monkey Shines was a daring ideological experiment, ahead of the monkey-related conceptions of its time and even of our own; it dared to confront The Man with The Monkey. At the same time, the limitations of society's mindset, unconsciously existing even within the writers, subtly blunted, subverted, and eventually silenced this cutting edge message.

As I discussed in my earlier article Monkey Tropes in Popular Culture: From Gilligan's Island to the Justice League, humanity necessarily fears the message of the monkey. In him, we see too much of ourselves, and yet a version of ourselves that we are not ready- or able- to accept. As a result, portrayals of the monkey in popular culture necessarily transform the monkey into the 'other', and marginalizes his message via a variety of tactics. Monkey Shines sought to change this; its very premise was that Man could and should learn from Monkey. Nevertheless, the classic marginalization tactics can be seen within the show itself. Beyond that, the show's untimely cancellation proves how unready society was to hear even the muted version of the voice of the Monkey that Monkey Shines was willing to provide.

In this paper, I will briefly illustrate the use of these marginalization tactics and discuss how the fate of the show and its protagonist reflect the failings of our society in terms of acceptance of the monkey psyche.

A. Vilification

The easiest way for Man to escape the message of the Monkey is to convince himself that the Monkey is evil. By doing so, he avoids having to confront and assess the truth of the monkey. Although Monkey Shines seemingly avoided this pratfall by casting the monkey as a hero instead of a villain, nevertheless, the monkey is subtly cast as a dangerously chaotic character.

Take, for example, the very first episode, in which the monkey steals from rich Jonathan Crouton, and is therefore ordered to serve as his butler. How can we not be disturbed by this blatant portrayal of the monkey character as a criminal? Such a portrayal, furthermore, is strengthened by the recurring motif of the "Monkey Attack", in which the monkey was shown leaping at one of the human characters' heads without warning. Cute, no doubt. Charming. But what sort of implicit messages about monkeys was it drilling into our subconscious? That they are dangerous, erratic, and unpredictable.

And these same messages were reinforced by the 'comedic' rants put in the mouth of the irascible drunken writer played by Neil Gaiman. Frequently, and most notably following his failed attempt to use the monkey to write him a novel by chaining him to a computer (a glaring case of exploitation, which warrants further examination beyond the scope of this paper), he would launch into anti-monkey invective. Granted, the show put such vitriol in the mouth of Gaiman, by no means the hero of the show, and it can be argued that the viewer was supposed to side with the monkey in such circumstances. Nevertheless, in view of the show's premise and the 'Monkey Attack', it is difficult not to notice a trend of vilification of the monkey, even in this show intended to counteract such stereotype.

B. Infantilization

When it is impossible to view Monkey as evil, he is often reduced to an infantile position, allowing us to subconsciously denigrate his message and thus, once again, escape it. This trope is startlingly clear in Monkey Shines, perhaps because its more subtle impact made it more difficult for the writers to identify.

Throughout the show (a simple viewing of the title sequence will support this assertion), the monkey was shown being held and/or cuddled by other characters. Crouton's character went so far as to carry the monkey around on his back, in a manner reminiscent of similar backpacks for children. This, despite the fact that the monkey was, in fact, 44 in monkey years, making him older than any of the other characters on the show. In the episode A Very Special Monkey Shines, this child-like image was further reinforced by deliberately paralleling the monkey with a young child learning about appropriate touching. This attitude was reinforced by the fact that he was never allowed even a passing love interest, unlike all the other roommates. The sole exception would be the scene in A Threesome, a Monkey and a Whole Lot of Ripple, in which his crush on a pretty girl led the roommates to invade a hotel dressed as sheikhs. Nevertheless, viewers will recall that the love interest quickly paired up with the rich Crouton; the monkey's status as the adorable child character thus remained unchallenged.

C. Anthropomorphism

Lastly, to deal with the reality of the Monkey which our society and our minds are not yet willing to accept, we eliminate the unique monkey point of view by recreating him in our image. Monkey Shines did not escape this failing. Beyond the smaller examples of the monkey's modern dance obsession and his Christmas sweater, can we not see the entire premise of the show as an example of this theme? The monkey- the paradigmatic free spirit- is transformed into a butler, forced not only into the human construct of employment, but into the role of a servant. This is, perhaps, the most poignant expression of the failure of the show's ambition.

D. Where are they now?

Such tactics, however, were not sufficient to save the show from Man's opposition to any positive portrayal of Monkey. From our perspective, perhaps, Monkey Shines did not go far enough; from the perspective of its era, it went much too far. Can the show's cancellation and 'disappearance' be regarded as mere coincidence, in light of the messages that it forced society to confront? The opinion of this author is unequivocally 'No'.

Equally troubling is an analysis of the eventual fates of the show's stars. All four of the human protagonists went on to semi-successful careers in their chosen fields; where is the monkey now?

Conclusion

In the end, Monkey Shines must be viewed as a brave, but ultimately failed attempt to confront Man with the message of Monkey. Its primary message, that a man could and should learn from a monkey, was too bold, too daring for its time and perhaps even for our own. The pressures of society and the limitations of our minds muted the message, subverted it, and at last silenced it. But by remembering both its message and its failings, we can remind ourselves of one basic truth: the monkey is a part of ourselves that we must confront, no matter how frightening or how difficult. Monkey Shines, in the end, forced us all, like Crouton in the opening titles, to look into the mirror and see, to our horror, the monkey looking back at us.

Jezebel's Letter

And Ahab told Jezebel all that Elijah had done, and also how he has slain all the prophets with the sword. Then Jezebel sent a messenger unto Elijah, saying, "So let the gods do to me, and more also, if I make not thy life as the life of one of them by tomorrow about this time."

-I Kings 19:1-2

You know I'll win.
You knew it even on your hill,
even as you stood there in your rainstorm,
clutching your fiery truth.
You knew.

Whether you heard it whispered
in your holy-haunted dreams,
or glimpsed it in their ovine eyes,
you and I have seen their naked hearts
and know your Truth is nowhere in them

And don't you wish that you were wicked
and could savor it like hot revenge?

Well, go run to your cave and warm your hands
on your little truth and your mighty rage.
Go enjoy your righteous misery
as I enjoy my wickedness.

And they'll go on, self-delighted,
their fingers in their ears so hard
they gouge their brains out.
And they'll enjoy that too.

How Romantic Comedies Train Women to be Abused Wives

Today, I had a lecture basically about the Battered Wives' Syndrome (in the technical context of self-defense as a defense for criminal responsibility in cases of murder). As the professor lectured about the typical behavior patterns of the abusive husband before and after the marriage, I realized that a lot of them sounded quite familiar. And that is because I have consumed my fair share of chick flicks in my life.

What do I mean? Well, firstly, I don't mean that chick flick heroines, immediately following the ending credits, would become abused wives (even if they were bereft of the protection offered by fictionality). The movies are written with certain implicit assumptions about time compression and such like that make it impossible to judge the actual relationship. But a lot of the behaviors exhibited by abusive husbands, even long before they become physically abusive, are the very behaviors that chick flicks laud, expressly and implicitly, as healthy and/or romantic. Examples*:

1) The Big Romantic Gesture: Abuse generally works in escalating cycles, typified by extremes on both ends of the spectrum. Immediately after the abuse (and particularly in the earlier stages of the abuse, which usually starts just after the wedding), the husband is effusively apologetic, romantic, sweet. He buys jewelry, presents, new furniture to replace anything that he destroyed. (One police officer says that every time a woman came to report abuse, he could tell how often she hadn't reported it by counting her rings, necklaces, and bracelets.) Every good romantic comedy has a scene in which the hero engages in some over the top romantic gesture to atone for something that he has done to the heroine; the gesture proves that he is a good guy, that he truly loves her, that he will never hurt her again. Obviously, this is never physical abuse, but the core idea of "Gestures atone for misdeeds" is well-established.

2) They're all Just Jealous: Abusers typically seperate the wife from family and friends who attempt to stand in the way of a relationship that they see as problematic. They have never really understood her; they are just jealous that her relationship is succeeding; they want to keep her for themselves; they don't understand how happy she is; they are over-protective; will they never be happy for her? This serves both to silence any voices of protest and to cut the woman off from other people who might be able to help her get out of the situation later. In the romantic comedy form, there is usually only one over-protective parent or jealous friend/sibling and in the end they always acknowledge their flaws and the beauty of the relationship. Nevertheless, the idea that you should listen to your heart and boyfriend over your family is pretty well-rooted.

3) The Stalking of Love: Abusers typically slowly take over every aspect of their partner's life. They want to be with them at every moment, they pop up at unexpected times, because they always just want to be with them. Romantic comedies are full of this stuff, and it's hard not to notice the creepiness even without the abuser stuff going on. Nonetheless, even if the behaviors are exaggerated, the idea that there is something romantic about them wanting to spend every moment with you, and popping up in every aspect of your life, is reinforced. To make matters worse, romantic comedies often have an aspect of fixing your life as you find your man, who is often the one to point out that character flaw that you need to fix to make yourself happy and healthy. Of course, in the romantic comedy, he is generally absolutely right. This does not change the controllingness of the situation, or weaken the message that the man should be introducing major changes into your life.

The list continues, my time does not. In summation: Chick flicks are more than innocent cotton candy for the mind- they reflect some seriously twisted conceptions of love, and not just those of the "love conquers all variety".

*Based on one 1.5 hour lecture on a slightly different subject