S30: Untitled
When I was a kid and read the word “untitled,” it did not register to me as meaning “without a title.” It seemed to me to be a word completely without context or common root, not the opposite of titled, but rather a common word used as a title for some reason I would understand in the future.
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I would not bet my life on many things. But if the opportunity were to arise, I would put everything on the line for the fact that my grandmother has seen the 2017 movie Norman, in which Richard Gere plays a New York Jew. The film seems to have played for a focus group of one.
Growing up I did not feel a lot of alignment with my Jewish heritage. My father is Jewish, we light candles for Hanukkah, and I feel comfortable saying the word “Jew” without it appearing to have negative implications. I went to maybe a dozen bar and bat mitzvahs but did not have one of my own. I have been to temple less than a dozen times other than those mitzvahs. I did not have much temple cred.
I do not live my life by any particular religious guidance, but I would like to think I am not a dick about it. I used to be. In my teenage years I would relish the occasional sigh at a reference to God at the dinner table. Enough sighs would probably make my sister stop going to Sunday school, I figured. In my freshman year of college I even went to a meeting for an Atheist Club. It was miserable. Everyone there was trying to one-up each other in how vocal they were about their non-belief. One of them loudly yelled “under science” at the pledge of allegiance in high school. Oh but that’s nothing, another person scribbled out “God” on every dollar bill that passed through their wallet. My dinner sighs paled in comparison.
I only went to the one club meeting. Since around that time I have not given much thought to religion at all. It does not matter to me what other people believe, with the obvious caveat of, like, bigotry and government policy. I cannot stop thinking about that picture of the President in the Oval Office with all of his cronies reaching out to him like he is Christ. I cannot think of anything he would love more than to be revered as a messiah. A messiah is harder to pin down for questioning. You cannot charge a messiah with treason or impeach him.
I massively digress. Last weekend Megan and I went to a Jewish bakery and got some of the best bagels outside of Montreal and New York. Jewish food is criminally underrated; my hometown has a significant Jewish population and so has plenty of restaurants. I feel like the chosen folk get a bad rap because of Passover, which serves an assortment of the most vile foods imaginable. But since that’s the point of the holiday, it’s important to look past it and recognize how good latkes are. Not as important as recognizing the difference between Judaism and the state of Israel, or recognizing the uprising and amplifying of antisemitic voices in our society. But still important.
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I had my first night of classes on Wednesday. I’m taking a general intro class and a marketing class. I can already tell the latter is going to be very hard, mainly because the professor told us it would be very hard. The crux of the class is partnering with a library and writing a report to tell them what they are doing wrong. It’s more complicated than that but it still feels very presumptuous.
I met with a librarian for that class last week, making the unwise decision to walk 30 minutes to get there. When I arrived I sweat through my shirt and had to paper towel myself off in the bathroom, then stand in front of an oscillating fan while waiting for the librarian. It was a bit tricky to move along with the fan’s movements, but I managed to find some library pamphlets and slowly sway in a way I have not since the sixth grade town dances.
My favorite part from class was when one girl introduced herself by saying that she was really into video games. Immediately after, I saw three separate men message her in the chat box. Shockingly none of them asked her to name three video games (NOT including Mario, everyone knows that one).
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Megan and I went to the Red Sox game on Monday. I have a complicated relationship with going to baseball games, particularly at Fenway. I love baseball, I always have, but oh my god baseball fans and baseball culture is a nightmare. It is machismo, it is loud and drunk, it is sexist and racist, it is rich white dudes in crisp untucked dress shirts who just cannot possibly contain their being to the confines of their seat width.
Or it’s a kid with a glove in a place where no ball has ever touched. It’s also an organist who hasn’t missed a game for 15 years and takes both of our requests (“Good Vibrations” and Toto’s “Africa” [what a jam]).
But it’s mostly the first part. It’s changed since I am no longer a cute kid. When I was a cute kid I was pushed to the front of the autograph line, I could comfortably fit even in the cramped Fenway seats, and I played little league.
Not well, though. I was consistently one of the worst players on my team. Usually not *the* worst, but one of the two or three worst. I think the fact that I was not *the* worst allowed me to delude myself into thinking I did not suck. That and the fact that I knew how to play. I watched almost every Red Sox game, and I studied baseball all the time. I knew what the right moves were, the right strategies, the right way to stand in the field. I just couldn’t do it. I was so physically untalented that it didn’t matter how much I knew. I could be able to see what was a strike and what wasn’t, but my body just did not move quick enough to make contact with the ball. My body was not strong enough to stay standing up after catching a ball in the field.
I have never been strong. I have noodle arms and have never seen a point in lifting heavy things unless I am either getting a grade for it or am moving to a new home. In the last couple weeks I have been going to the gym, and have been joking that I am going to get huge. I have no interest in actually getting swole, but I would like to feel a bit healthier and look a bit better. And maybe as humans have evolved beyond needing to hunt for their food, so too has the need for body strength gone. But I am vain, and I would like to not get knocked over.
