It Is A Thing

Tonight I went to my friends' house over in a different place and had some drinks. I had tequila mixed with lemon juice and then vodka mixed with lemon juice. Then I came home and ordered Dominos. I waited a while, drank a couple Guinnesses and watched Buckaroo Banzai with my modmate; the guy came and guilt-tripped me into kicking the tip up a dollar. He was right, but still. Then I had some gin.

Anyway, tomorrow (today) I have to read some more theory. Then something will happen, I don't know. See you later!

Pennsylvania

Over the weekend I traveled to Bethlehem, PA with my three friends who grew up there. I didn’t really have any business inviting myself along, but I don’t know when I’d get another opportunity to go and I’ve long been curious about this place I’ve heard so much about. They tend to talk of Bethlehem like it’s any other bullshit American town but it’s actually a lovely and interesting area, and I couldn’t help but wish I grew up in such a rich environment. We stopped in Red Hook, NY on the way to pick up W.’s twin brother S., and had some pie his roommate was entering into a contest the next day. (I wonder how he did.) Chelsea Clinton was apparently getting married in nearby Rhinebeck, though we didn’t see any fanfare on our route. We got into Bethlehem late. The boys pointed out the famous local steel mill that had been converted into a casino, with the shimmering Vegas-like sign ostentatiously splayed over a giant defunct crane, as well as another site where a scene from Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen was filmed. (We had tried to watch the film one night during the last week of school, but I couldn’t get through it even while roaring drunk.)

After we dropped off B. and D. and stopped for a visit at a diner where I awkwardly interacted with their high school friends, I crashed at the twins’ house; S. went to bed while W. and I stayed up watching Cheers and waiting for their older brother who works the late shift at the Crayola factory. W.’s extremely nice suburban house was spacious and incredibly clean, and his large bedroom was spotless, full of hundreds of meticulously organized books. I wasn’t terribly surprised. The next morning I had an ascetic breakfast of coffee and a small piece of homemade coffeecake, then set out on my own. I wandered around for a few hours checking out the charming main drag and the historic district, then I made my way across the bridge to the humbler part of town. Two separate SUVs stopped to ask where they might find the Eagles’ training ground before I made it onto the Lehigh University campus. Lehigh is built quite literally on the side of a mountain, and it’s difficult to traverse. (I wonder if the rich kids who attend the school all have personal golf carts or something.) The first building I wandered into was some kind of campus center and after a minute of snooping around I was faced with a closed door informing me that certain areas were off-limits due to the Philadelphia Eagles’ presence. There was an unattended cooler full of water and Gatorade, and, though I hadn’t eaten or drank anything since that morning and had been walking around in the sun all day, I was too bashful to thieve some cold drinks from a national sports association.

I briefly checked out the (casually majestic) library, then started my way up the mountain. After a few minutes I found myself in the fraternity/sorority sector, an eerie, abandoned uphill neighborhood of small mansions with giant Greek letters adorning their façades. I always thought my school had an odd on-campus residency system, but this was truly bizarre: a lavish, school-sanctioned party ‘hood, seemingly removed from any sort of administrative reserve. I was on my way to some kind of “village” and the summit of the mountain (and, presumably, the foretold Eagles training ground in the athletic area) when B. called. I went back with him to his dad’s house in Nazareth, where we walked to an “Indian tower” by a graveyard overlooking a vast cornfield and then watched part of Love Actually. Eventually his sister showed up, along with a large, aggressive dog, and we drove to a party in some little upper-class hamlet.

I wasn’t particularly looking forward to this part of the day; all the grown-up house parties I’d ever been to were boring affairs full of tiresome, obnoxious Jews, but I was so hungry at that point I didn’t care. Free dinner, right? The food turned out to be great, and so did everything else. I was warmly welcomed by the gregarious older women throwing the party, given hugs and liquor (I took a shot of something warm and syrupy called a Slippery Nipple) and soon I was in high spirits. It grew late and we parted with the sister and dog and drove back to B.’s mom’s house in Bethlehem. We had primo ice cream and sat out on the porch drinking more of his mom’s homemade beer. D., whose parents live a few blocks away, stopped by to say hello. He seemed shaken; he’s been going through some depressing personal shit and has been in a deep funk lately. B. and I took a walk and talked, in a mood of drunken candor, about our demons and reservations about the upcoming year. I unknowingly took a leak on a church on the way back and passed out at 2:00 in the sister’s tiny bedroom.

I awoke 6 hours later, having been told of plans to bike to breakfast. Soon we went outside, where I was introduced to my ride: a bizarre adult tricycle that looks like this, except the seat is a more reclined harness and the headrest is just a padded pole:

I got the hang of it in a minute, although I couldn’t quite figure the gearshift. Riding the thing in traffic was alternately fun and terrifying. On a hill it was like a controllable luge, which is still pretty scary; I was leaning back and so close to the ground that I couldn’t be totally aware of my surroundings. Still, I enjoyed gripping the upright handlebars, pretending I was in some kind of futuristic one-man submersible vessel, like Snake Plissken or something. We went to a café called the Blue Sky, which is owned by skydiving enthusiasts, although I was told it had that name before the current owners. Everybody got some fancy pancakes but I just had some coffee and wheat toast—I feel bad when I’m dining on a friend’s parents’ dollar, and in any case I needed something simple to soak up my hangover. I should emphasize that I haven’t been drinking coffee for three months; the caffeine propelled me through the long weekend on little other nourishment. We took a long way home, stopping to observe the modest skate park across the street from the casino, and by the time we made it back I was covered in sweat (with a change of clothes still in my overnight bag in W.’s trunk across town), nauseous, and with my hangover headache worsened by the trike’s non-headrest. I still managed to enjoy the day. B.’s sister came over and we were joined shortly by a family friend with a surprisingly quiet, solemn 8-month-old baby. We were all entertained for a few hours by the baby’s antics and then I spent the rest of the afternoon reading the New Yorker, drinking more coffee and homebrew beer, rifling through B.’s book collection and so on. We watched part of Three Kings and then met up with D., taking a walk to an empty swimming pool and playground. Eventually W. swung by and collected us, and we headed home. I’m glad I went. It’s fun to see how the other three-fourths live.

Summer

It's July. Yesterday was the 4th; we visited our friend down the street and drank beer and played croquet (I lost). Later we climbed a mountain to look at all the firework shows in the area. It was fucking exhausting.

I still haven't been hired anywhere. It wouldn't be so bad, slowly going broke, if I didn't spend each day listlessly puttering around the house wondering what the hell I should be doing with my days. I add to that the knowledge that I could be spending my time in some local air-conditioned store making $9 an hour and occupying myself with mindless activity that serves some end instead of endlessly replaying the same virtual football scenarios on old videogame consoles, breaking to smoke cheap cigarettes and surfing the web between short bursts of unenthused reading.

I turn 21 in a month, and I'm not sure how to feel about it. On the one hand, 21 WOO GET EFFED UP etc. On the two hand, each of these last few birthdays has its sad side; getting older, slipping further and further from ultimate youth is a disorienting feeling. I guess I'll see how it goes when I get there.

At least there's been some good movie-watchin' going on at my house. Today we watched the Marx Brothers' A Day at the Races. I think it's a mite too long, but damn if Harpo and Chico's piano playing scene isn't transcendent.

Lil' Sis

Summer! I don't have a job. Oh god.

Sister had her Bat Mitzvah last weekend. It was okay. Family, yay! Lots of leftover num-nums and beer, yay! Going back tomorrow, I guess. I have to go empty my bank account to pay for rent. Enjoying the moment, while it lasts.

Things R Winding Down; I Meet Some Jew

The school year is almost over and I might be eff'd. I have to finish a lot of shit in the next couple weeks, while also somehow finding a job to fund my summer living sitch. I suppose it could be worse, although that’s become a phrase I’ve repeated to myself troublingly often in the last few weeks. Anyway, blah blah blah, drinking, depression, you know the score.

***

So I was leaving the dining commons today, having gorged myself on a late lunch of potato soup and chicken parm, when I saw a trio of Orthodox Jews ambling along through the dorm quad ahead. You rarely see such types around these parts—their particular Weltanschauung (I just learned that one) doesn’t exactly mesh with the H-shire vibe, oddly enough. I think the last time I saw black hats on campus was first year, when a couple dudes from the UMass Hillel knocked on my door and gave me a cheap plastic Hannukah menorah. They asked if I’d like to light it with them. I told them it was a violation of the fire code.

I thought I could just slip by these three but, of course, their ringleader, a gregarious and full-bearded gentleman, came right up and started talking, assuming we both knew that he just smelled my Hebrew-ness. He introduced himself as Rabbi Shmuel Kravitsky, the leader of a local group called Chabad Nation, handing me a business card featuring his mug in a sorta spray-paint tag style and the slogan “the time has come.” (The time for bad Adobe Illustrator design work, I suppose.) His group is a cross-five-college alternative to the nominally regular campus religious groups. Our campus Rabbi is a gay Reconstructionist who’s known to bring sushi to holiday events, so the concept of religious alterity takes on a poignant political inversion here; this guy’s seemingly desperate solicitation suddenly didn’t seem so random.

The gist: everyone’s invited, nobody will ask you for money, come hang out and learn, pray, etc. I told him the pertinent personal info: from Connecticut; knew a few Rabbis; Jewish identity currently stagnant. I know next to nothing about the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, but I think it’s weird how these days a kind of forced notion of “hipness” pervades even centuries-old religious traditions, as though late-period MTV commercial groupthink had become a dominant sociological mindset. (It hasn’t, but try telling that to the harried fanatics who run shit like this.) Honestly, even if I disagreed with most of the ideological tenets of a religious-social group, I’d be more inclined to show interest and respect if it was pitched to me with a character of timeless solemnity rather than with weirdly out-of-touch, falsely laid-back youngperson wordplay. The substance of my five-minute, mostly one-sided conversation with this guy was largely obscured by his aggressively en vogue, “popular” communicative style, with repeated references to a promised weekly “Hookah Schmooze” in the gazebo, as he continually referred to me as “dog” like some crazed Semitic Randy Jackson. There’s a distinctive divergence in modern youth-oriented Jewry; there are the Conservative phalanxes consuming flocks of impressionable kids, like locusts, with comfortable, lazy conformity and there are the too-clever post-ironic Gen-Y brats who follow a childhood of undisciplined pop consumption with refined, candy-colored entreatments to the wider cultural dialogue in a self-contradictory bid for exceptionalism-cum-acceptance. (See: the smug, oversexed assholes at Heeb magazine.)

And then you have motherfuckers like Shmuel Kravitsky. Whatever, at least he was an enthusiastic pitchman, even if his faux-eagerness and personable demeanor were fairly transparent. He kept saying how weird it was that I’d never run into him after three years of college, especially in a school as small as mine (“The kind of place where everyone’s slept with his friend’s friend’s ex-girlfriend,” he said, after which I coughed politely) and especially after I told him I wasn’t as frequently high as many of my fellow students. He pointed to a tree blowing delicately in the wind: “There’s a saying in Kabbalah, about every leaf falling where it was meant to be. I think it was meant that we should meet here.” I’ve never studied Kabbalah’s mystical Zohar books and I’d hope they have more to offer than trite bullshit like that, but okay.

Later I checked out the Chabad Nation website, which has a picture of him with his wife and little kid—his wife, Ariel, is an alumna of my college and now runs this thing with her husband. She’s also kind of foxy. (Maybe that whole “rigid, prescribed social custom” deal ain’t so bad.) The website provides a good illustration of the oddly misguided, out-of-touch populist sensibilities guiding these kinds of enterprises. Here’s a hot tip, Jew-boys: don’t assume the biggest guns in your popular-appeal arsenal to be pictures from your most recent “Purim Party Bus” tour, complete with shots of Rabbi Kikeberg in Rastafarian regalia (craaaazy!). Also, don’t post the Smith paper article that describes Kaballah as “the school of thought embraced by everyone from Madonna to Britney Spears.” Not the most celebrated or widely emulated public figures these days, dudes, just saying.

Lately I've been entertaining this High Fidelity-style chicken-or-egg inquiry regarding my disposition. Which came first--the malcontentedness or the lethargy? Am I unhappy and thus unable to get shit done, or is my listless and unmotivated mindset the catalyst for my depression? This is some deep fucking shit, readers. I can remember--with some haziness and slant, I'm sure--a time when I was deeply involved in my academic duties, mainly as a kind of nebulous regimen whose goal I trusted would materialize in due time. And yet I was no more or less happy than I am now, as I recall. Sometimes I make steps forward in some endeavor that is either immediately satisfying or, I imagine, will produce an effect conducive to future satisfaction. For any number of reasons, these efforts peter out swiftly, and I'm left in the aborted remains of personal growth. I use this as an excuse to feel bad, and sometimes drink, which works, I guess. I don't doubt that this constitutes a lifestyle for some. I just wonder if evolution in any measurable form will present itself at some point. One can't help but expect to be "thrown a bone," as the lexicon goes.

I'm Alive

I know, I know. I haven't written in this space for a good two months. Suffice to say that times have been largely dark, and I couldn't bring myself to revisit them even in the interest of cathartic disclosure. The spring semester just started, and I'm warily optimistic--it's a real make-it-or-break-it kind of moment. In any case, I'm dealing with my stress the only way I know how--copious amounts of booze and videogames.

I woke up this morning feeling even shittier than usual, and I think that last night's activities (drinking plus wandering around in the freezing cold) may have taken a larger toll than I expected: that's right, for the first time this year, I may actually be sick. Tonight there is going to be a huge party on campus--I wrote about it last year, somewhat disparagingly--and I intend to rock out and drink tons and go out into the still-freezing night air for a cigarette once or twice, so maybe I'll be dead tomorrow.