Category Archives: Essays/My Intriguing Thoughts

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March 21, 2011

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Essays/My Intriguing Thoughts

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How To: Deal With Rejection

Well. I can’t think of any stories to start. I don’t want to even open the behemoth that is The Canterbury Tales: Part Deux. I’m still scared of opening the Glenn Beck book to get to reading it for my review. So, it looks like I’m going to churn something out for this here site. Again.

What’s been on my mind recently, no surprise, is the severe onset of depression/self-doubt that comes with a continuous stream of rejections. It’s rough, and, more depressingly, it’s part of the glorious package of writing (along with anti-social tendencies, reading in social settings when it’s not appropriate and, at least once in your life, alcohol poisoning). But, as I’ve just read in Ender’s Game, humanity has evolved to survive. And part of surviving is coping. And because I’m human, and thus have all of the traits that lead me to not want to off myself every time I see another form rejection e-mail, I have a growing number of coping mechanisms. Further, I’m going to share them with you.

It should be noted that these coping mechanisms might just work with anything else that constitutes mild failure, but I wouldn’t know. Like Charlie Sheen, I have Adonis DNA and tiger blood, and, in everything apart from writing, well, WINNING.

Which brings us to…
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March 7, 2011

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Essays/My Intriguing Thoughts

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When I Grow Up…

It shouldn’t surprise you that I was a kind of weird kid. Sure, I loved playing games and watching movies along with all of my other friends. I was even in the Cub Scouts. (NOTE: I didn’t make it further than the bear badge, because I got really bored of knots and racing wooden blocks–and I think my Dad was getting weirded out by having to take me to a church immediately after Hebrew lessons every week.)

But there was one thing that made me different from the rest of my friends: my ambitions later in life.

See, the normal kids among us wanted to be police officers, firefighters, soldiers, or murderers–like every well-balanced fie year old. They’d talk about it all, discussing the pros and cons of each profession. “I get to have a gun!” said one. “Yeah, well I get to play with fire!” another would respond. “Yeah?” said the weird kid who sniffed only black markers, “Well, I get to bathe in the warm blood of those who cross me.”

We’d laugh, then ostracise him by not letting him play hide-and-seek or foursquare with us. Truly, those were the halcyon days, there in the frozen tundra of Canton, Ohio. We knew not what life had in store for us, and the worst dilemmas we had to face were rushing home from school to get back in time for Power Rangers.

But I was different. Where all of my friends wanted to be something that would allow them to act out their innate, childhood fantasies of firing a gun or playing with fire when their parents had spent years telling them not to, I wanted to be a psychiatrist. And no, before you ask, it wasn’t because I knew it would make me a lot of money.

I wanted to help people. I didn’t know why, but I felt that everyone around me was flawed in some way, and that I could help make them feel better. Now, with the power of hindsight, I look back and I know why I wanted to be a psychiatrist: Bob Newhart.


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March 2, 2011

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On Risk: The 2010 Cast List

Hanukkah is supposed to be a joke holiday. Semantically and pedantically, it’s not even a holiday; it’s a festival. A festival that celebrates the pre-modern Israel Israelites not being slaughtered en mass (just kinda sorta slaughtered) by an occupying army.

A brief history lesson for you. After Egypt (in which country we were, quite possibly, not slaves but contract laborers or the people who did the whipping, and left because we weren’t getting paid enough), the Israelites wreaked havoc across what would be today the Sinai Peninsula, Israel, and Lebanon. And then, after settling down a bit after a few plagues that may or may not have been sent to crush the uppity Israelites by a somewhat bi-polar God, Israel had a kingdom.

And then, because if you put three Jews in a room you’ll have four opinions, the kingdom split and became extremely weak. And then, because this is the way the world works, the area was conquered several times by empires that had their shit together. One such Empire was the Hellenistic Greco-Syrian empire, the head of which decided it’d be a neat idea to sacrifice pigs in the Temple.

If you know anything about Judaism, you know that we, as a religion, have a thing about pigs. We don’t like em. They think they’re smart, they’re dirty, and I hear that they are working on the power of flight. So, after learning that pigs were about to bleed in their Temple, a group of Jews lost their shit, holed up in the mountains, and attacked armies. And, surprisingly, they won.

And so today, that’s why we have Adam Sandler’s SNL skit as the theme song for Hanukkah for everyone under the age of fifty.

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