Sunday, February 01, 2009
Saturday, January 31, 2009
Melavah Malkah Machshava
Friday, January 30, 2009
Erev Shabbos Fiction: 'Isaac' (Part One)
“I* drive around
Thursday, January 29, 2009
My Niece and I (Part Three of I Don’t Know How Many Parts [previous parts down below])
We get off the expressway, and now we really are in sooth almost there. At least physically. Sadly, the mall’s parking garage is, this evening, a fully-stock jumbo-car dealership. There’s less outside noise within this clusterphobia-inducing car-park building, so lines of easier vocal communication can now be opened up between me and Chavie.
“What we doing?”
--Looking for a space sweetheart.
“A space?”
--For the Car.
“Oh,” followed by a momentary pause and then a “Why?”
(Here I forget to employ my sister’s ‘trick’).
--Well sweetie, I’d love to drive through the glass pane doors housing Nordstrom and upend Versace-wearing manikins as much as you would (my mental video player turns on and distracts me to a stream of Chavie giggling and clapping as only she can while she joyfully dons a Burberry cap she has taken off a decimated edifice of plaster crafted into the image of the way a woman is supposed to look, people are taking photos all around with their phones [I can’t – mines broken] of my pummeled car as the police close in), but that is not ‘civil’, so instead we are going to drive around in circles for a longer period of time than it took to arrive here, until a 5X9 swatch of concrete opens up for us, okay honey?
She stopped listening to my diatribe (honestly, she’s only three, I should know better than talking to her as if she was three-and-a-half) when I said the word ‘manikin’. She is cracking herself up. She loves the sound of the word and repeats it to herself on an endless loop, the laughter it illicits from her is getting louder and fuller with each repetition of it. Well, I’m happy if she is. Finally, a Hummer lounges out of its space and we are free to roll in. I kill the ignition, readjust my scarf, open my door, get out of the car, close my door, open her door, unbuckle her seat belt and help her (she really only needs a little assistance) out of the car. Her sneakers now firmly planted on grey ground, she promptly asks me something; her face a fully-dimpled smile: “Uncle Ezz, what is man-ee-kun?”
--You’ll see one in just a minute or so, Chav’s…
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
My Niece and I (Part Two of a Previously Indicated Two, Maybe Three Part Series, But Now Maybe as Much as a Sexogy [That’s a Double Trilogy, Man])
If you're new to this story, please click "My niece and I (part one of a two [or maybe three] part series)" on the left to get up to speed.
The moment Shabbos is over, I make my own Havdalah, throw on khakis and a sweater, and don my Neo-from-the-Matrix-length black wool coat, quickly buttoning it up. My shvugger walks in from Ma’ariv a moment later and he tells me that yes, it is perfectly cool for me to kidnap his daughter for part of the evening. Now I have to ask Chavie if she wants to come with me.
“Apple Store?” Chavie responds to my query with the dialect of those who hold their tongues while talking or are under 40-some-odd months old. She wonders for a moment, but quickly turns ebulliently ecstatic – “Ya!” she explodes. She starts saying a lot of things at a swift super-excited and gaggly pace to her mother and father – I can’t make it all out, but it sounds like she's listing all the yummy fruit she plans on picking out with me at the...um...the apple store.
Chavie’s mother bundles her up in pink, and I walk with her (Chavie) outside to the car. I help her into the back seat, in back of the driver’s side. The mall is about fifteen minutes away. I drive through the darkness towards the expressway and feel awkward. There is too much background noise from the road and the vent for me to really have a conversation with Chavie. I hope she’s not scared. If I were three years old and was being taken somewhere on a dead of winter night by a relative I only barely knew, ya, I’d be piss-scared.
I realize that I’m emitting negative vibes throughout the car. They’re permeating my niece's coat, clothes, and epidermis. They’re seeping past her blood-brain barrier, and the unconscious decision that I’m ‘the scary uncle’ is coalescing. I turn around hazardously to her (I must look like a mutant praying mantis in the dark), and virtually scream so that she can just hear me: “would you like me to put some music on, Chavie?” She nods, very sure that she does want music – that she needs music. And then I remember that there is no music. Sure, there’s FM; but nothing that Chavie’s mother would let her listen to – no Uncle Moishy or MBD. I lie and tell her that the CD player is broken.
“Why?” she asks.
- --Because there’s a CD stuck inside the player and it won’t come out.
“Why?”
- --Because somebody put gum inside of it.
“Why?”
- --Chavie, why did somebody put gum on the disc, causing it to get stuck inside the player?
“Because,” she says – as though I should have a fundamental built-in understanding of what the answer is.
With that ‘because’, I successfully end a string of ‘whys’ that could seriously continue till the sun goes supernova. Chavie’s mother (my sister) taught me this trick of taking the last thing you say to her daughter and flipping the onus of the ‘why’ back to her (Chavie). It’s eerie how well it works, but for now, it does.
There’s some mild traffic on the highway, so our predicted time in the car now looks like it is going to be more like twenty minutes. Of course, I’m telling Chavie every few minutes how we’ll be arriving in a few minutes, losing all the integrity this little three year old has for me by the second – you can’t win trust back; not when you mislead someone at such a young and deeply impressionable age.
Creator of (false?) Hope
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
My niece and I (part one of a two [or maybe three] part series)*:
As my younger siblings progress with their lives and build their families in part through procreation, I am sometimes afforded the opportunity to spend time with said procreates. I have a total of three nieces and nephews, with one G-d willing on the way. This is a story about a (quite short) road trip I took with my nearly three year-old niece; Chavie:
Backtrack. This really happened: I dropped my four month old Iphone in the toilet at work a month before the trip. I did not drop it per se. I left it on the toilet’s tank. Commensurate with Newton’s basic laws, the force of my self-ejection from the seat was rebuffed by enough shaking on the toilet’s part for my phone to fall right into the ugly waters below.
After a few second delay of processing facts like: ‘Yes, that is my phone, and yes, its present location is very undesirable indeed’, I temporarily quarantined my germaphobic sensibilities and scooped the wet phone out of its miserable environs.
I (kind of) did what everyone advised me: “Wipe the phone dry. Clean it with some rubbing alcohol. Put it in a container of rice, which will help to demoisturize the device’s innards at a possibly swifter rate. Leave it like that for at least a week.” I did remarkably well following these instructions, but the last step tripped me up.
I tried turning the phone back on after about two days. A sign appeared on its screen, which may well have said “You idiot, you weren’t supposed to turn me on for another five days, I’m still wet in a few spots dude - &*^% this hurts! You really messed up, pal. Do you hear that hissing sound? It's the hissing of my stir-frying circuitry and five hundred of your hard-earned dollar bills vaporizing. Goodbye.” The sign may actually have been more like a fuzzy Apple logo that flickered out after a second or so; same difference - the phone was fried.
And we shift to present tense:
Monday, January 26, 2009
BS"D
Shidduch Resume For Yanky Crayola
Thermomeson Amu"sh
Born: Tisha B’Av, 1982
Height: 5”7, 5”9 when not hunched
Weight: 140 lbs. (due to a terribly unfortunate incident involving the loss of his large-intestine [sucked out by a swimming pool pump] he is a little underweight).
Resides: Due to a schizoid condition, he currently lives in
Father: Rabbi Dr. Jerome “Herring” Thermomeson; author of the acclaimed book: You + the Torah + Chilled Vodka = Homemade Lubavitch Chassidus.
Mother: Rebbetzin Chaya Sorah Faygeh Hinda nee Rue-Canal nee Smith (once received a ‘get’, but it was the husband that was the problem, really, our rav said so).
Siblings: There are kn”h thirteen, three were chosen out of a hat…
Yossi - Eighteen years old, attends Yeshivas Tikkun Mishkav Zochur, he’s having balls of fun and making steady progress in his rehabilitation, b”H
Yanky (2) – Twenty-six years old. Brought over from Chaya’s previous marriage, he is somehow a virtual doppelganger of Yanky, whenever they are in the same room they walk towards each other, thinking they’re looking into a mirror. Yanky (2) attends the Saint Marco Polo Center for Persons with Restless Leg Syndrome.
Esther – Sixteen years old, student at Hinda Mirah’s School for the Blind, b”H she has 20/20 vision, we are happy that we gave her the opportunity to be at the top of her class.
Education:
K-8: Yeshivas Torah Is To Sweet As Crack Is To Awesome
Curriculum based on a vomited-out worpage of the Montessori teaching method lined with educators that don’t know what 75% of the words on this resume mean.
9th-12th: Yeshivas Be’er Mayim Raglayim
Graduated, receiving his diploma for Being Able to ‘Go’ Without Drops Hitting the Seat.
Madrasas Osama
Accidently enrolled there for Beis Medrash; very similar tautology to that of the typical yeshiva, he really had a blast there.
Contacts:
Rabbi Izz Moeleztin: Rebbi muvhuck since childhood; was also Yanky’s Bar Mitzvah teacher.
Rabbi Ahmad Fadeel al-Nazal al-Khalayleh: Rosh Yeshiva; Madrasa Osama. Yanky learnt Nefesh HaChayyim: Suicide Bomber Edition with him b’chavrusah.
Fleeky: Yanky’s imaginary friend.