What's In A Name?

Apparently, because my name is what it is, I want to kill you. That's right. This Ruvym wants to go on a crazy criminal rampage because, well, that's what you'd expect of someone like me, someone with this crazy name I have, a name that lacks explanation. I mean seriously, what's up with this "u" "v" "y" combo? Where have you seen that before? And "u" and "y" don't even make the sounds they when you pronounce my name. You really say "Roovim" but the spelling should have you saying "Ruvyum." Thanks mom and dad. Thanks for picking a name that's going to make it more likely that I end up being a total psycho.

I say all this because according to a "landmark" study on the correlation between "unpopular" names and criminal activity, boys with messed up names like mine are more likely to be total douchebags. One set of factors show that the person with the unpopular name tends to come from a "disadvantaged home environment," has "residence in a county with a low socioeconomic status," or comes from a "household run by one parent." So this is more of the chicken-egg situation where, because I have a messed up life and my neighborhood sucks and I have no dad, I'm also likely to get a shitty name. That blows, I mean, what a let-down, like all this stuff is crap already and now they gotta go and give me this stupid name so of course I'm going to turn into an asshole.

This of course isn't really about me since I grew up with two parents, my family was working class but I had a decent life, and although I was raised across from a crack house in Queens, the neighborhood wasn't terrible and got cleaned up a lot before my family moved us to the big LI where it was a hell of a lot better.

The other set of factors say that, regardless of where I come from or what home is like, because I have an unpopular name, I will be more "prone to crime" because I will probably be "treated differently by [my] peers" which will make it "more difficult for [me] to form relationships." Plus, "juveniles with unpopular names may also act out because they consciously or unconsciously dislike their names." So now the name is what's turning me into a jerk and I have only my parents to blame.

I look at this analysis and I gotta say that it's spot-on. I remember being at school and having to deal with the taunts from other kids who found a million ways to make fun of my unpopular name. They called me "Ruby Tuesday" (I was also chubby), "Ruvy-Q," "Groovum," "Russian Ruvym," etc. This made it difficult for me to form relationships with others because the taunts turned me into a babbling moron who resorted to torture on small animals and the occasional Satanic ritual. It was around the same time that I stole a Garfield joke book from the Solomon Schechter book fair, a crime which dropped the first domino in the chain that eventually lead me towards bootlegging and prostitution.

And to think, all of this stems from my name. Years later, and thousands of dollars in debt, after all that therapy I spent my time and money on, that's the conclusion I come to from reading a stupid Yahoo! article. Ah! This name!

Missing Tel Aviv

On a night like tonight, when I sit envious of a friend who's off in Jerusalem, I find that I miss Tel Aviv. This is somewhat out of context because you have to understand it in relation to the whole thing, but it touches on part of what goes through my head when I think of it. An excerpt to a larger piece:

          Even though I’ve only ever spent a night in Tel Aviv before (not long enough to see much of anything) I want him to be wrong. He’s close-minded, I tell myself, incapable of giving a fair trial to anything in the secular world.

But Tel Aviv just can’t seem to keep it’s mouth shut. The 70s-style hotels that line the coast, the smell of sunscreen that sits like a thick fog rolled in from the water, make the city seem like nothing more than a sad Middle Eastern version of Miami Beach. A few generations of pasty Ashkenazic immigrants have given way to firm, tanned bodies. Bronze Gods, new idols of worship.

I stare up at the sleek new skyscrapers, those symbols of Israeli progress and modernity, but have a hard time reconciling them with the squat, abandoned Bauhaus structures that still litter most of the landscape, chipped paint and weeds and trash spilling out from boarded-up windows and doors that have long been propped open. I’m embarrassed when I see Independence Hall with its dilapidated exterior, a makeshift flagstaff at the top, leaning off to one side at a slight five degree tilt, a tattered flag sputtering alongside it. This is where a state was formed? I missed Washington’s white-washed Roman architecture, forgetting for a moment that I’d never actually spent enough time in Philadelphia to see where America was born.

             The southern part of the city, away from the water and tourists, is crammed with very non-Jewish-looking people of African, South Asian, and Indian origins. Most are workers, living in purgatory, ready to be tossed back home if their jobs suddenly come to an end - if Shlomi, who runs the laundry service, sees a drop-off in demand for talis dry cleaning, or Mrs. Gittleman decides she doesn’t want her house cleaned twice a week anymore. Lights flicker along the edges of the streets, tacky bright bulbs announcing whorehouses with graffiti painted accents of exaggerated bodies draped in Flashdance-style underwear tearing at the seams. Peddlers spread dusty sheets, once white, across sidewalks to exhibit their worthless wares – rusted tools, used (“vintage”) clothing, manicure sets slipping out of their open containers, unlabelled VHS tapes with cracked plastic screens. It’s all a caricature of the forgotten, a corner of this country that God must not have noticed.

I try to ignore my disappointment because it’s easier not to deal with it. Instead, with the coaxing of more party-minded individuals than myself, I indulge in the familiar comforts that Tel Aviv has to offer. Life becomes one sleepless night of drinks and hookah on the beach, eyeing bikinis and searching for knowing smiles, the resonating slap of matkot paddles off in the distance as the Friday night sun dips behind the Mediterranean and the prayer book grows sweaty in my hands. Most other things recede into the dark corner, just a shapeless mass casting a long shadow at the passing of a light.

The night before our exodus East, I sit out by the sea with a few other people. Our feet buried in the cold sand, each of us contemplates in silence. I allow myself to realize that I’m ready to leave, happy even. I don’t think I will miss having Tel Aviv behind us.

Someone lets out a deep breath. “This place, it’s amazing isn’t it?”

“Why?” I ask, annoyed at the mere suggestion that there can be anything amazing about it. “It’s so rundown, so seedy. I expected something a little more, I don’t know, developed, advanced.”

“You have to realize,” he says, “it’s still such a young place. All of this was built from nothing, in the middle of a desert, by people who came out of Europe after the Holocaust. And they did it in only sixty years.”

I don’t know that I understand what any of it means. The context, the realities, they seem too far removed from my own life. I don’t have anything to say in response, and so I let his words trail off into the salty air as our conversation devolves back into just the sound of our rising and settling chests, the sleepy lapping of the Mediterranean against the shore.

Inaug

He emerges from obscurity (not that he has left it, but at least he has peeked out from within it) to provide some thoughts about the inauguration. Not even that many thoughts, maybe just a couple, but a couple that he nevertheless wants to express (and there's a little bit of that ol' poetic flourish that reminds him of the caliber of the poem recited yesterday which may or may not be related to some of the comments he's about to launch into).

First a very general thought - wow. Not wow for the 1 million + people there (and maybe I'm bad with the numbers), or for the particular content of the inauguration speech (although I thought it was close to perfect and with a great delivery), or for all the pomp and circumstance and tradition that swirls around the day (although I love all of it), but rather for the idea of what an inauguration of a new president means.

I think Feinstein mentioned it yesterday, but what got me most was watching the peaceful transition of power. We're talking about two relatively different men with relatively different views of the world and behind each of them, two parties with relatively different approaches. A little more than half the country votes for one party, and a little less than half of it votes for another. One side wins, and one side loses. Passions are high during the election. And then here we are a few months later and everyone's just watching the same thing and everyone feels a part of something greater.

I didn't vote for either party, I didn't really want to commit to either candidate, and yet I can still listen to the inauguration speech and feel good about my country and be optimistic about the future and sit in awe of how the system (as flawed as it is) still seems to work pretty darn well in certain ways. This place is young, but its as if we've created a mature relationship with each other rather quickly. We're comfortable with change and, sometimes, with being wrong. The relationship itself is what's important to us, not the individual pieces which each of us may agree or disagree with. I just think about how rare that is in the world, how many citizens of the world's various countries can claim the privilege of living in place where every four years they get to express their support for something they believe in. Fine, so the specifics of "change" are very hazy and some will question what can really change within this monster of a government that's very set in its ways. And others will wonder whether there's ever really any different between party stances and candidates. And we'll always have the fear of the "ignorant" masses who aren't informed and don't really know what they're doing. Yes, most people will vote based on "feel" and "emotion" and that's something we just have to come to terms with. But whatever the end result, we go on. We wake up the next morning and it's all still there and we try, at times with a lot of effort, to love all of it despite the flaws and the hypocrisies and the irrationalities. There's something about that which makes me proud even if it's all far from perfect.

Now that I got that little bit of "aww, shucks"ness out of the way, I move onto something I happened to pick up in Rick Warren's "speech." Forget for a second that I have a really hard time with a religious invocation during the inauguration for the president of a secular state. I don't really get it, I don't really feel comfortable with hearing someone talking about Jesus to the rest of the world, and I don't necessarily understand how this particular tradition has been around as long as it has. But if I do manage to push aside all of that, I was a little surprised to hear, in the first few seconds of Warren's prayer, what is perhaps one of the most important lines in Jewish prayer. Known as the "Sh'ma" (I spell it that way, deal with it), it's from the Hebrew bible which is also part of the Christian bible but it's still interesting when it's brought up by a non-Jew. The Sh'ma is a recognition of the oneness of God and is said during the most important (if not all) Jewish prayer portions. The text is - "Hear, oh Israel, the Lord is our God; the Lord is one." I happen to love this line a lot because it plays on a non-religious level for me as well - the pride I have about "being Jewish" and the love I have for the land of Israel. Of course I always interpreted the use of "Israel" in the prayer as more of a proclamation to the Jewish people as a people of one land and of one origin rather than a specific reference to Israel itself, but it likely encompasses both meanings. Either way, I only mention it now because I was a little surprised to hear the Sh'ma (in English) said at the inauguration. Maybe I just didn't expect to hear a prayer and there it was. Surely conspiracy theorists will probably like to grab onto this and claim further proof of the Zionist network that controls the world. But to me it was proof of a shared cultural heritage that we often fail to recognize. Here was a Christian pastor mentioning a line that people of different faiths read and absorb during their prayers. It's a line from a bible that, whether we like it or not, offered much inspiration to the founding of America, despite the secularist leanings of the Founders. It's something from the past that still reverberates and inspires today. Without dwelling on it any further, I thought it was pretty awesome.

The last point, and this is me being a little bit of a jerk but maybe sometimes I can't help it - the poem kind of sucked a lot. Check it out here. I mean, it reminds me of something I might have heard in a college writing class, like some disaffected emo kid who wants to express how alone we all are in the world and how we need to seek ways to come together. I don't know. I swear there are stylistic decisions she made which I see from my own poetry from like 10 years ago, and I'm only (almost) 27 so we're talking me at like the end of high school. I'm thinking maybe it's better not to have these poems because they're always going to sound sort of cheesy (maybe it's because they need to be "accessible" by all people) and after a good speech they're not really inspiring at all. There's also something about a poem that makes it silly when its read over a loudspeaker to thousands of people. I've always seen a poem as the sort of thing you read to yourself or recite in an intimate setting. Maybe that's a big part of what ruined it for me. Although, I gotta be honest, that even after rereading it I sort of rolled my eyes. I just don't think it was really what she felt or thought. It read as something artificial that she wrote because she had to. Maybe she could have done a better job of hiding that fact.

Unremembering

While the world watches aghast as Israel "disproportionately" levels Hamas targets in Gaza, the little pieces of historical context lie untouched at the side, sitting there peacefully, smiling up at the rest of us. I wonder if they ever imagine that they'll actually be pulled into the discussion, their legs straightened so that the rest of us can see what they really are. But that's kind of a ridiculous thought isn't it? History is becoming something you report, package for a YouTube culture that lives off of 30-second video feeds and flash phrases, and then throw in the vault.

The concept of newspeak comes to mind, the Orwellian designation from "1984" that's used to classify the media's ability to tell and then to untell, and the public's ability to remember and then unremember everything that has come before. Perhaps we're not at that exact level just now, but the media does have an incredibly good understanding of what it means to emphasize and to deemphasize, and knows how horrible realities can become forgotten hiccups in our minds.

And so it is with the current "conflict" that is reported in excruciating detail on a daily basis, with play-by-play commentary on bombs dropped, troops amassed, and people killed. Israel, for all intensive purposes, is portrayed as a monster that bombs indiscriminately and with little justification. Yeah, sure, they like to toss in phrases like "militants" and sometimes they like to say that the bombing started because of Hamas rocket launching into Southern Israel, but are we really falling for these pieces of feigned "balanced reporting"? Just this morning a mosque was leveled. A mosque! It doesn't make any damn difference what was going on in this "mosque" or why it was targeted or any of that stuff. And even if they did thrown in some of those cold facts, hey, our sensible Western minds can't help but feel outrage at the idea that a country could bomb a mosque.

But then wait a second, didn't something happen in Lebanon last year (well, 2007) where the Lebanese military went into a "refugee" camp in Lebanon and duked it out with a "terrorist" cell (notice how we've suddenly replaced the word "militant" with "terrorist," although I think we've also been conditioned to think of ourselves as overreactors, that we shouldn't really be scared or concerned about "terrorists" because most of them are, of course, innocent people who our government and the rest of the corrupt governments in the West have misclassified for personal gain, like all that money we were supposed to make off of oil by invading Iraq, you know what I mean)? Yeah, I think something did happen in 2007 but, for some reason, I don't remember hearing all that much about it. For some reason, it never made the sort of impression that everything in Gaza seems to be making now. That, and I'm really wracking my brains to try to recall this, seemed to be very justified and this, well, I don't know, it doesn't have the same feel to it. The same feel, because that's really what matters here, how I feel about all this, not what actually happened. This seems a lot badder than that was. But, wow, look at that, the conflict actually last three months and hundreds of people were killed. Really? Odd that it's not as clear in my head as I thought it would be.

I'm, of course, by no means justifying any specific military actions based on a finger-pointing strategy of "oh, but he got to do it and no one really said anything." I'm only highlighting this one small incident that happened only a year and a half ago as an example of our ability to classify things in our mind based on the outrage that the media wants us to have, based on their portrayal of moral equivalence, and based on our own biases. That didn't seem like such a big deal, but this does, even to someone such as myself who expresses a pretty strong pro-Israel lean. The same way that the 2008 war between Russia and Georgia that killed hundreds of people never really made me flinch the same way that the 2006 "Lebanon War" did. Who will remember that Russia-Georgia war in a year? Meanwhile the 2006 Lebanon War will forever stay singed in the world's collective memory as yet another act of Israel "disproportionality."

You have to have respect for how well the media plays its game. Even people who maybe notice that something is going on are still made to feel as if it's just in their heads, that, no, it's impossible, the media can't really be doing that, and I can't really be falling for it. I guess if you emphasize something enough and deemphasize something else just as much, then you begin believing what is fed to you. And because the delivery can be so subtle and clean, so draped in the promise of "only reporting the facts," you don't really get that empty feeling in your stomach that makes you wonder whether you're being played.

Sorry. Really I am. Maybe I'm just doublethinking this.

New Year

First, I wanted to share this article I read in the NY Times about Bobby Fischer. I just thought it was a great read. Nothing specific I want to say about it, and I think that's OK.

Yesterday I found myself at a low-key apartment party on the border between the West Village and Chelsea. Sixth floor in a nice building, about 20-25 people rolling through over the course of the evening, homemade mac and cheese, roast pork, champagne, a cake after midnight. For the first time in a long time, maybe for the first time ever, the evening felt just like a regular evening, just me hanging out with some friends at a party, drinking and chatting and feeling good.

Usually there seems to be something about New Year that's a little disconcerting. And I don't mean the sense of expectation, that "shit! This is the change-up! Tomorrow is going to be a freaking different year!" thing that happens, or the feeling I've tended to get that New Year is the last holiday before you're thrown back down to the bottom and you have to embark on that steady climb through a cold winter, and then a rainy and somewhat depressing spring, before you finally get to a summer that's only half-way satisfying because, really, New York in the summer is not that cool. Often it's just been kind of depressing, the way we kick up the notch at the end by one number and suddenly it's all a do-over, a year you built for 365 days that just vanishes in one second and is replaced by this emptiness that's 365 days vast, and for what purpose?

The idea of a "year" has actually always bothered me, because really it forces me into this mindset that segments everything out according to this period of time and I remember things based on what year it was when something happened. And I think when you break up life into these quantifiable nuggets - perhaps just really for ease of reference - you're more likely to feel that a particular period of time was actually more good or more bad than it really was. But the thing about life is that it's just one long line of experiences and situations. We're constantly adding to one pool of acquired wisdom and evolving thought so the idea of a year sort of undermines the wholeness of a life. It makes things seem more trivial than they are. Maybe "trivial" is the wrong word but it's the only one that's coming to mind right now. Maybe what I'm trying to say is that I don't want to remember a particular year, I don't want to say "oh, 2008 was ________." Instead I just want to think about it in the context of 26 (almost 27!) straight years of growth (and, of course, some periods of contraction).

So last night when I'm thinking about it, thinking about the idea that the world was going to progress into this thing we've identified as "2009," I didn't have that sense of vehemence that I usually have. I didn't feel a surge of anxiety over missed opportunity that I usually get in thinking about what I haven't accomplished over the last year. At the same time, I didn't get that boost of adrenaline at the idea that with a blank slate, this was a reawakening of possibility, a chance to recreate everything. Again, those are extremes, but it's like the New Year just naturally inspires that in people, at least in me.

Rather, I stood there, champagne in hand, looking at the faces of the people in the room, my friends who had come out to spend the evening with me, and things seemed more subdued than they have in the past. It wasn't the end of anything and it wasn't the beginning of something new. It was just a good moment in a pretty decent life, and that was enough for me.