Sunday, July 25, 2010
Anger
The summer is very hot in Israel. A week ago I hit with my foot knuckle the bed's angle, and since then I am in severe pain. My dear wife would not look at it and when I asked for empathy/compassion/human companionship, her reaction was full of hate: "Magia lekha!" - You deserve it! Next day a fish bone penetrated deep in my tongue as I devoured my daily 200 g or so boiled fish portion. I asked my daughter to take a look and she said "Go away!". Eventually the bone went away alone. I am bitter, lonely, feeling bad in this suffocating heat.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
13 comments:
Take your foot to a podiatrist.
Thanks. I hope to feel better.
If you put your foot in your mouth, you could kill two birds with one stone.
(In English, this is known as a "mixed metaphor").
And, by the way, the tongue is very well vascularized, tends to bleed a lot but usually heals well with a low risk of infection.
Could this be gout in your foot?
Anon.
Rebbe, is it better to marry a kind shiksa, or a mean Jewish woman?
Rebbe will opine, I predict, the first should be your mistress, the second the mother of your children.
Anon.
Anon,
Mashallah if you can pull it off. A wise man once said that it's better to have children with a smart woman and to live with a simple one. But what of the children? Is it better to have loyal and kind children with a shiksa, or mean and disloyal ones with a Jewish woman? Furthermore, what if the shiksa is willing to convert to Judaism?
The answer really is that you should have both, and this is really only possible in France, where they understand these things.
Despite all this guff about "Emotional Intelligence", kindness today does not seem to pay the bills; you need self-starting, smart and aggressive kids who look good enough and who can put on enough of an act for long enough to get married.
The way even medium-level jobs are being off-shored, it is not a wise investment to have children who are simply nice people.
Depressing, but there we have it.
In a couple of generations, the few surviving Gentiles will have raised their average IQ by a standard deviation.
Anon.
Yeah, the surviving white Gentiles will have raised their average IQ by unloading their idiots onto the NAMs, but this is not what I am talking about. Being kind and being tough are not antithetical. If your kids treat you like crap, it is not a good sign for their future in any kind of organization worth joining, as far as I could see. Even in the army, your prospects depend on finding the right mentors; if you develop a reputation for shitting on those who take you under their wing, it is not good. Unless you are a genius of Alkibiades', Brasidas' or Lysander's stature, capable of making your own weather, which is rare, demands a very fortuitous context like the Athenian plague and the Pelopponnesian war, and even then often ends poorly, your ability to create networks depends on your ability to bond with other people. If you lack the ability to bond with your own kin, odds are good that you'll have trouble making that connection with strangers. Daniel Boone is a good example of the kind of person I'm talking about as far as success using this strategy. Know what I mean?
Rebbe, please don't take any of this as my reflection on your wife or daughter-it's just idle bullshittery. Your wife is probably just suffering from the heat, and your daughter, as you say, from teenagery. I'm sure they are wonderful people, and none of this applies to them.
My domestic life could be described as a Jewish joke. An old yid is lying in his death bed when the wonderful aroma of freshly baked cinnamon and vanille wakes him up. "Brezhina, how thoughtful of you to bake my favorite schtrudel to sweeten my agony!" He extends his trembling hand to take one from the bedside table when his wife shouts: Dont touch the schtrudel! It is not for you! It is cooling for the visitors coming to your funeral!"
Another one in the same vein - Moshe and Sarah are in their late '80s. They appear before a rabbi and demand a get (divorce). The rabbi is shocked - why now, after so many years? Sarah replies, "we were waiting for the children to die."
K
B,
Apparently you lack the living experience of a close-knit family. People treat their closest in a way they wouldnt think of treating comnplete strangers. They say things that would never utter in public. And we Ashkenazi Jews are extremely cruel with each other. I think New York crudity and grossness is a Jewish thing. We allow it because we are family.
But we love each other. It certainly doesnt look like that, but it may be.
Again I come to the moderation thing. While I don't advocate behaving like WASPs who keep all their emotions bottled up to the boiling point until one day they take a shotgun and REALLY allow their feelings to vent, there should also be a limit to candor. Last night my father-in-law who is drifting in and out of senility at age 90 saw my daughter who looked very tired and sweaty because she had worked a full day at the lab and then fenced (as in with a sword) for another 3 hours afterward. He looked at her and said," L____, you look drunk.". My daughter (who by the way will not so much as take a sip of wine at Passover) did not appreciate the remark, although her reaction was more sadness that her grandfather's mind was no longer intact than anger.
My point is candor is like a medication that has to be administered judiciously in measured dosages - when we see "too much" candor it is not a good thing. Even if this really was his impression of my daughter, he would not have spoken the words if he still had all his marbles.
K
J,
My family is exactly like this, and it angers me deeply to see it. I do not wish to recreate this experience for myself, or to raise my children in such a poisonous environment. Especially now that women are incentivized to pop smoke out of there when things don't go well. The functional Christian families of my childhood friends did not seem to work like this, though of course there were more dysfunctional ones. In my work, I thrive on strife and chaos, but in my personal life, I value harmony and dislike strife immensely. Also, having banged several married girls in my immoral younger days and been amazed at their utter lack of shame and remorse, I have determined never to be on the other side of the equation. A strife-filled house is not a recipe for loyalty; a house divided against itself can not stand.
Post a Comment