Late Year Swoon

Final work day of calendar year.  A few loose ends, really nothing that cannot wait until the next calendar year.  Then I start having some Musts.  IRA withdrawals, a court date.  Some medical care.  And some Like To's.  A short trip, resumption of OLLI, next entry to Voices of UD contest, alleviating Loneliness, visiting some new places.  And some Should Do's.  Public writing, tending to house, telling My Story.

The transition of the calendar year can be a useful demarcation point, which may be why half my Semi-Annual projects have that as the start date.

It's been a tough exit to the closing year, though still with its share of accomplishments.  But time for a new set of Semi-Annual projects and a new commitment to completing them.

Languishing

I needed to get out, escape My Space and the screen.  I've not felt particularly well.  Cheer seems to elude me, though there are pockets of reversal, usually when in conversation with somebody else, suggesting more loneliness than depression.  I've done a few changes of pace, getting away for the day, going out for coffee or breakfast or lunch.  Getting myself stuff, or even looking at stuff to purchase in a store on online does not change my perspective.  

Not that those changes of location are worthless.  They are not.  Just transient.  Doing something for myself does not seem to do very much.  I've devoted some effort to making My Space closer to what I had originally envisioned.  I ironed shirts.  I've made a few special dinners.  All things that now generate less pleasure than they once did.

Post-Holiday sales.  To Boscov's.  Second floor: stuff, none needed, none wanted, none discounted. First floor.  Clothing.  Some attractive button down shirts.  Maybe go back for one if I get invited someplace where I could wear it.   Then Marshall's.  Decent discounts, about 20%, and a fair amount of stuff referenced to St. Louis, if you count Budweiser as part of St. Louis.  There are things that I could use.  In fact, I replaced my broken safety razor.  But a 20% discount on something you don't particularly want does not alter loneliness.

My forum of engagement has recently been kiddush after shabbos services or having guests to my shabbos table.  But as the final weekend of the secular calendar approaches, I find myself shuled out, annoyed with a couple of key people, and approaching Jewed out but not quite arrived there yet.  Need a break from synagogue.  An offshoot of work burnout for me.

Electronic interaction with others has not gone especially well.  While Twitter is a public blight, it is a forum for me to convey what I think.  Responses are few, and it is the responses that ease loneliness.  FB is a little more personally interactive.  The Stanford alumni of their how to deceive people into thinking they are engaged when they really aren't understand the value of Likes.  Any kind of response is fine.  Reddit allows me to express what I think, and occasionally people write back.  But all these lack the spontaneity of banter at kiddush.

As I move into the new secular year, addressing what appears to be loneliness needs to be one of the twelve Semi-Annual projects.

Winter Plants

Inventory of what I will try to sustain through the cold, mostly indoors, is complete.  Herbs stay outside if above freezing, inside to avoid the frost.  I have active leaves of sage, rosemary, spearmint, and basil.  In chia pots, parsley seems to be taking hold.  New seeds for chives and basil.  And I planted six pods of aerogarden, don't remember what, but they are labelled. I also have a Bonsai sprig that needs to get six inches tall before transplanting to a larger pot.  And in a small box there are seeds for another Bonsai that I can prepare in the refrigerator according to package instructions. Check on Tuesdays and Fridays for the indoor plants. Daily weather report for the herb pots.

I don't know why my indoor plants never seem to look like the indoor herb gardens that the TV chefs snip in their home kitchens when they need aromatic leaves.  Maybe they aren't.  Perhaps they go to a nursery the day before a TV shoot, buy something flourishing there, and bring it to the kitchen for the camera to capture the cook harvesting.  TV Land has a way of making somebody else's reality better than mine.

But for now I have some chance of enjoying some home herbs in my own kitchen before spring arrives.

Mopping the Floor

When I remodeled my kitchen, using an annual bonus to fund the project, I focused on utility along with visual appeal.  Wipable refaced cabinets, stainless steel sink, tile backsplashes.  And modern resin tile floors in a faux granite pattern.  Soil resistant.  Needs no protective sealants or resurfacing.  It does need periodic cleaning, something I perform much less frequently than I should.  It was long past due time for a thorough mopping.

Another advantage of the tiles is their 1 x 1 foot size. Mopping the kitchen floor requires exposing the floor's surface.  The convenient square pattern enables me to create zones.  I can move some furniture with my wife's assistance, creating zones of about ten square feet, then sweep and wash.  Let it dry, then expose another zone.  In one afternoon I mopped about half.  I can easily assess what still needs to be done and move enough stuff to do two or three more zones of the remaining surface.  Then with nothing in its usual place, I can decide if there might be better places to situate tables, carts, bins, or other parts of the floor designated to a set purpose.

I bought two new mops.  The Mr. Clean one, the more advanced of the two, I could not figure out how to use.  Some pine sol and hot water into a galvanized steel pail with rollers purchased not long after I moved into my house, then wet and wring the mop.  The water turned muddy.  The tile cleaned look cleaner, though not stunningly so.  I got a sense of where the grime accumulates.  Mostly where we feed our cat and along the stove, sink, and refrigerator, that triangle which makes a kitchen function.

Finish today.  I probably need a better schedule for doing this.  Rather than removing all things that cover the tiles, that can be done once or twice a year.  Maybe monthly, I can take a brush and pail with some pine sol or spic n span and hand scrub the more soiled area in the usage triangle.  Or maybe make my dormant Swiffer system functional or restore a sponge mop, both easier than the string mop.

That still leaves me with cabinets and light fixtures to clean.  Maybe windows.  Somewhere I will probably need professional cleaners, but not yet.

Semi-Annual Grid

Roughly two weeks remain in this calendar year.  Each June and December I select twelve initiatives for the six months to follow, doing my best to think in the manner of SMART Goals.  Titles go on the Whiteboard to the left of my desk in My Space, within my direct line of sight.  I did OK this cycle, not great, not poorly.  And not very differently than other end of six month assessments.  Yet the projects selected six months ago, even if not brought to completion in the time frame set, as SMART Goals require, were still the right initiatives.  

So for the last week or two I've been filling out my twelve rectangle grid.  Categories are the same each cycle, taken from a master template.  

1. Health
2. Community
3. Family 
4. Self
5. Frontier
6. Purchase
7. Mental
8. Travel
9. Long Term
10. Friends
11. Financial 
12. Home 

It's a useful template, though as a senior, empty nester, retired person, some categories matter a lot more than others.  My Health comes less under my control.  There is not a lot of future for Frontier.  I don't need to save for any big purchases.  Long term has a limited trajectory.  My finances are what I've made them over a working lifetime, not subject to any serious enhancement, though their management will change as I enter a mandatory IRA withdrawal requirement.  It may be better to have two, even three pursuits in a relevant category and drop one or two which my best efforts can no longer seriously influence.  Yet the twelve block template offers focus.  It makes my thinking orderly.

Each block in the grid has gotten five minutes on a timer.  I can generate a lot of ideas in five minutes if the title of that section prompts the creative sections of my mind to its possibilities.  For most categories my five minute sessions can generate about ten.  Now all filled out.  I need to select only one for each category, if I opt to keep or twelve.  Some coffee at a coffee shop while I sort further.

Ineffective Message

Two years ago I enrolled in a course at the Osher Institute which highlighted contemporary issues.  Each week the course committee of four which organized the presentations invited an expert, about half from my state university faculty, the others from non-profit agencies that promote the communal good.  I sort of panned the class in the semester evaluation and never enrolled in subsequent semesters, in large part because of a message theme, that idea version of the Greek Chorus, which for many classes registered as I'm not buying that.  Most of my other course selections get rave feedback for content, effort, and teacher.  As a university graduate, medical graduate, and physician, credibility has always been the coin of the realm.  I have no reason to dismiss Thermodynamics even if my understanding is now paltry, or to tune out a survey of American education where disagreements with the presentation are integral to the discussion and welcome.  For the contemporary issues, there was a committee agenda and challenge was sidestepped.  The price of not confronting legitimate challenges to the party line is usually some version of disrespect.  The legitimate points unify with the dubious, or even manipulated ones. They go into the mental wastebasket without separation.

There's a disturbing poll making the news.  Without getting into the science of polling, just accepting the results at face value, it seems young people ages 18-24 expressed a majority view that the world would be better without Israel.  https://nypost.com/2023/12/16/news/majority-of-americans-18-24-think-israel-should-be-ended-and-given-to-hamas/

As an older fellow, I fall into the senior citizen majority, an overwhelming majority.  Indeed, from the mid-30s, that age when Americans can be elected President, there is no element of Gee Whiz.  It is as much a poll on responsibility as it is on political views.  Indeed, my first Presidential vote went for McGovern at age 21.  He wouldn't appear in my political universe at age 40, if only because I had become partly responsible for an America of respectability.  That is probably the best interpretation of the results.  Though not the only one.

Following the poll's release, Jewish advocacy agencies came out in force to belittle the young adults, their secular educators, the news media, cyberspace.  But sometimes Pogo is right, we have met the enemy and he is us.

Back to the OLLI Course.  An esteemed guest, the regional associate director of the Anti-Defamation League, took her turn on the weekly Zoom presentation.  I absolutely support the aims of the ADL, reporting my own anti-Semitic encounters to their ongoing database, and putting their retired Executive Director Abe Foxman as the most esteemed Jewish advocate I have ever personally met.  And she dutifully told the OLLI group the activities and initiatives of her agency.  She put public education of anti-Semitism at the top of her list.  The ADL has been doing this for a hundred years, prompted by the lynching of Leo Frank in a very racist Georgia prior to World War I.  The obvious question at the presentation, at a time when the anti-Semites were becoming more public in their American presence, would have run along the lines, "if the ADL is so good at this and has so much experience, why is anti-Semitism ever on the rise in America as it is now?"

There are a lot of answers to this.  They probably have an element of Dunning-Kruger, where people and agencies overestimate their ability.  A more valid assessment would be that education makes the advocate feel accomplished but really does not impact behavior nearly as effectively as enforceable laws.  We see that in many settings.  Public Service Announcements on seat belt use and smoking cessation appeared regularly on TV for decades.  People drove unharnessed and smoked until fines for not buckling up and eliminating smoking from public buildings and the workplace became the enforceable behavioral expectations.  Of course the insight of the legislators who enacted these came in part from the understanding of the problem that the advocates promoted, but the solution came not from education but a vision of how to achieve a desired outcome.

So with the poll, AJC, ADL, every Jewish advocacy organizations have their pet excuses, though never an internal one, never the realization that educational initiatives do not bring desired results.  Yet they lack any enforceability.  They may not even have the ability to create negative consequences for deviance.  And our universities don't help.  Some of those elite institution Admission Offices laid an egg.  These kids already demonstrated the ability to learn, which is why they have acceptance letters from the places that sent me thin rejection letters in my era.  The goal is not to change attitude but to change behavior.  And that means creating consequences that favor one behavior over another, something our advocacy groups don't seem to understand.  The alumni of those elite schools are not in that 18-24 cohort.  They understand propriety.  They understand what type of person makes a good protégé.  So the solution would be to create a disadvantage to sloganeering for the odious, either by fist in the air or online trail.  When the med/law interviews don't come, when the lucrative hiring goes someplace else, behavior would change.

Does forced, or coerced behavioral change reverse fundamental thinking or reasoning processes?  It probably does, though not for certain.  People did not really reject American slavery as an institution until abolition was mandated.  Once they couldn't own slaves, it was short shift to shouldn't even if allowed.  Same with seatbelts.  Behavior forced, but soon accepted as the proper thing to do.  Or integrated restaurants or not smoking.  I can't eventually becomes I won't even if I could.  It is a difficult transition, one requiring examination of what our esteemed agencies really want to achieve, and abandoning what has not worked well, especially when it can never work well.

Alas, I think many of my Jewish advocacy agencies, whose goals align with mine, have just gotten too inbred to schect their sacred cows to breed a sturdier cow.

Escape for Coffee

Coffee Houses of Europe. They go back a long ways, not only as places to perk up for the day but places to enhance the mind and spirit.  Friends met there.  New friendships blossomed.  People wrote books, imagined their next musical creations, even discussed religion and politics in a cordial way.  And they sipped coffee, in part to block their adenosine receptors but also to savor the taste of a liquid not as readily available to them as it is to me.  I don't know what a Viennese menu would look like.  Most likely drip coffee and pastries.  And I would imagine on a chalkboard.  Maybe Turkish coffee or something made in a finjan, poured with ceremony.  I suppose they could froth milk with a whisk.  And no reason not to have a stovetop espresso brewer.  I really don't know the history of how the different forms of coffee preparation came to be.  

Coffee for me, as for many others in America and beyond, starts my mornings, nearly always at home.  Clever minds have created k-cups and drip machines that require no effort other than placing a cup in the right place and pushing a button.  There are drip machines for ground coffee and individual cones that require only a Melitta filter, a scoop of coffee from a can or bag, and some patience while hot water is poured over the ground beans.  Then the mug, mostly from my collection with decorations or writing that mean something to me, gets a splash of white stuff and goes upstairs to my desk.  Spills are rare.  I sip and begin whatever task I think best to undertake.  By the second cup, I feel fully alert.  Cost, minimal.  

We still have coffee houses and we have takeout, something our European forebears had not really thought of.  In my younger years, coffee at a diner counter was part of other caloric intake, though with the development of styrofoam and 7-Elevens, people could pick up a cup and move along.  Instead, we had coffee breaks, which exist today.  Workers set aside their tasks for some social time.  Food trucks stopped at large employers' parking lots.  Companies kept an urn in a central place.  Part nutrition, more restoration and interaction.  For about thirty years, though, the coffee house has been repurposed.  WaWa and the like does enough sales to offer a variety of urns with different flavors, then a counter where people can customize additives before placing a spill proof lid atop the cup, paying, and returning to their car.  They usually sip alone.

Starbucks and regional shops offer fewer varieties, usually four or so, but they offer people.  Sometimes people go as small groups, though usually not.  And they bring their laptop computers. Not that different from Vienna, where some came to schmooze while others came to work, though without that disturbing silence of a home nook or corporate cubicle.  

Periodically, My Space is not the best place to perform my next task, even if making the next cup of coffee is trivial.  It is often worth putting on a coat, deciding which of five destinations would be my preference and driving a few minutes to get there, select my coffee, pay the barista, and find a place at a table or counter, all before I've done anything productive.  Then as I sip, with chatter around me sufficiently unintelligible to keep me from trying to listen, I take out my pad and pen, rarely laptop or smartphone, and focus on the work I brought with me until the coffee is gone, sometimes a bit beyond.  I am not really buying coffee as much as I am renting workspace for $3.  Counting driving time back and forth, I could have devoted more task time by not venturing out but at the expense of focus.  So I travel a few minutes each way, settle down, but with coffee fixed to my preference I usually depart having accomplished something of satisfaction.  Never regret the effort or the expense.

Visit Somewhere

Winter starts officially this week.  It really starts for me when my OLLI Semester concludes, which was last week.  I try to get away periodically during the off sessions, more often a round trip without an overnight stay, though sometimes a short trip to a new place.  I have already visited a most disappointing water park.  I'd like to have a day in NYC, still possible.  And there are places closer to home.  Trains have gotten expensive, as has parking in cities.  And tolls can add up.  

Going to a single attraction makes the outing easy.  Web sites tell when open and closed.  They give not only entrance fees but ability to purchase tickets right from my laptop screen.  Train timetables are reliable.  Connections to the bus less so, and parking options often rather obfuscated or otherwise misrepresented.

Weather determines some outings.  Puttering Mid-town in bitter cold detracts from any of its amusement potential.  And having to catch a return bus after dark does not seem very inviting either.  

Museums make a good default, whether art or history in NYC or a niche collection closer to home.  Zoos are not the best place in winter, though the animals that dislike the cold even more than me have shelters that I can share while I admire them in their enclosures.  Still, zoos have more outdoor walking than I really want to do to navigate between exhibits.

Amusement parks generally close for the season.  There are some historical attractions that I've not yet seen.  Never really toured Staten Island beyond its Ferry.  And there is always the Immigration Museums where I should be able to drive, though perhaps I really don't want to drive to metro NYC as a day trip.

I've checked the weather for my preferred day.  The two selected museums both closed that day.  A drivable attraction within a half hour seems to be open, though entrance tickets limited and much of the attraction is outdoors.  But I think I want to be away from My Space enough to plan a day trip somewhere.

PENN’S UNWELCOME PUBLICITY

 

Penn’s President stepped down voluntarily, largely to generate shalom bayit, or peace in the house.  Calls for her ouster had already begun. Some came from donors of influence.  Some came from advocacy agencies.  Some came from nobodies who never made a peep before, infuriated by pictures they saw of student or faculty protesters condoning or redirecting blame for what every person of Ivy League intellect should be able to pick out as a targeted ethnic massacre. Virtually everyone who knows her or has worked with her through a distinguished career describes Liz Magill as a thoroughly honorable person.  The UPenn search committee in all likelihood performed its role diligently before selecting her, as successor to their very iconic, widely admired University President.  I might have expected a towering figure in the world of academic Law and Legal Education like Prof. Magill to be more forthright when questioned by Congress, or perhaps part of legal education is acquiring skills to sidestep being straightforward.  In any case, her performance, as Hollywood would say, laid an egg.  While she gives up her high-profile office, she does not give up her talent or her mind as she licks the recently inflicted wounds to her legacy.  President Truman, who had not attended college, kept a Buck Stops Here plaque on his desk in the Oval Office.  While Prof Magill did not create the growing anti-Semitic expression or its tolerance at Penn and at other top academic institutions across America, she also was not at the forefront of repelling it, let alone reversing it.  And she won’t be the first Penn President to have dropped the ball when pressured to resist harassment of Jewish students.  Sheldon Hackney, who presided in the 1980s, probably did his best to advance the University’s academic stature.  His legacy will be about Water Buffaloes, where he sold two Orthodox students down the river, putting their degrees in jeopardy over a trifle.  In a bestseller written not long after Prof. Hackney’s tenure, Bernard Goldberg, in his 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America, not only outlined the incident but created a fictional award which he termed The Sheldon.  Its statue has no spine.  Prof. Magill could have used a more rigid spine too.  This seems to be the majority opinion of many Jewish alumni, who, like me, owe a good measure of our adult success to our years on the Penn campus.

My family’s attachment to UPenn spans three generations.  The classes range from ’37 to ’08.  From my own direct line, I have my entire household, wife’s father, two wife’s siblings, my sibling.  Extended a little farther, we include my wife’s uncle and his son and that son’s two children.  All undergrads.  My brother and I have some experience with their graduate programs.  We all had fulfilling and reasonably prosperous careers.  We served as doctors, scientists, engineers, educators.  For seventy years, we were individually secure on campus, less a few punk crime risks from the adjacent neighborhood.  Over time, the University addressed this downside through a combination of physical expansion and tighter security measures with ID access to buildings.  But as I returned to campus for my 50^th graduation programming, anybody could roam peacefully amid the public spaces, seek medical care at the many divisions of its world class medical facilities, or purchase a ticket for an athletic event, or buy lunch.  Jewish students had a presence.  I worshiped and ate at Hillel.  People wore their kippot to classes and in dorms.

Opposition to a Jewish State with Jewish sovereignty existed then but in a dignified way.  During my undergraduate years, men with crew cuts, blazers, and black bow ties mandated by their leader Elijah Muhammed would stand on the part of College Green closest to the Hillel Building handing out tabloid style newspapers with anti-Israel headlines to anyone who would take one. I never took one, but had a one sentence verbal quip or two as I moved on to my next class.  A grad student who would go on to be a pioneering scientist, a native Egyptian, would periodically stand with a picket sign accusing the Israelis of some type of global infractions, this prior to the Yom Kippur War of 1973.   But our physical safety was not at risk, and it would have been unthinkable to tamper with the grades of pre-meds with Jewish names.  We had protests over Vietnam policy.  We even had a professor shot in his classroom by a disgruntled student in the Rittenhouse Physics Lab.  What we did not have was the collective targeting, let alone intimidation of classes of people.  If the Admissions Office made an offer, the person had the right to not only attend but partake of any facility, join any campus group including a pro-Nixon one and rather unpopular ROTC.  Our Conaissance Series, which brought lecturers of public prominence to Irvine Auditorium, included provocative speakers who the majority would vote against.  And their talks could expect a few jeering signs, but not jeering people.  Nobody got disinvited in fear of how some might receive their public message.  If they were household names, we knew what their controversial stances included. 

And for those seventy years of my family’s inclusion in this academic pageant, the people with whom I shared the campus used the knowledge they acquired there and nurtured skills of lifelong value for dealing with people you didn’t particularly like but knew you had to tolerate.  These are the foundations for advancing commerce, science, the arts, medical care, entertainment.  It is how doctors learn to give their all even to the most bothersome of patients, and law graduates do the best they can for their most guilty client.   For all the turmoil that campuses have, from the Kent State shootings of my undergraduate years to some very ugly targeting of vulnerable people on campus now, the telos, or fundamental purpose of the university has not changed.  It is those alumni who gave us our electronic advancements, take mRNA science from the lab to mass immunization from a catastrophic disease, create highway and air grids that get us to places where people are different than us.  We still read novels, perform a variety of civic and social functions, often earn a high enough income to live well and invest in our own children.  All enabled by the education we were able to obtain at UPenn for my family and hundreds of peer universities.

Prof. Magill’s tenure, now brief, does not negate any of that despite her misjudgments.  What seems to be failing are the pleasantries, as they are in other contemporary experiences.  People hostile to us, whether on Twitter, on the political stump, or in a random parking lot, no longer seem to register as outliers.  In some ways the universities, once the best hope of correction, have taken a dysfunctional path of least resistance.  Some adverse experiences needed to become effective antifragile adults have been unduly protected, whether microaggressions, dorm insensitivities, or disinviting speakers you would rather not hear.  At the same time confrontational assemblies whose purpose is intimidation flourish.  Upon graduation, we proceed on to workspaces where the executives want their employees judging their experiences with the company favorably.  The most vocal critics of the President’s handling of anti-Semitic confrontations on campus came from those most accomplished, generous alumni, where such ethnic targeting would have very negative consequences for any employee that besmirched the company’s reputation for fairness that way.    

The workspace can be rough and tumble in its own way.  People really do get fired for reasons of their performance, their behavior, or changes in corporate fortunes.  But hostile workplaces diminish output.  There are safeguards, and there is enforceability and accountability.  Our feeder universities have been failing on this for some time, though never quite put to its current exposure of what the University values.  The Bernie Goldberg’s fictional award, the Sheldon statue with no spine, first appeared in print in 2006.  It seems it needs to be mass-produced and granted to university Presidents far beyond its namesake and the three at the Congressional Hearing microphones.  Students should never be shielded from the slights that make them stronger but they cannot be subject to some very real harm that genuine intimidation and mixed desire for defense and retaliation invariably creates.

We have a few favorable models, both on campus and in our communities.  On football weekends, Saturday on campus, Sundays on our big screens, we set aside our local animosities.  We only care that athletes perform to capacity, fans in the stadium follow the scoreboard’s instructions to Make More Noise, and that injured players have their heroism cheered when escorted off the field.  Even the opposing player who performs well gets some expression of admiration.  And infractions of good conduct, those personal fouls and targeting, generate the most severe penalties meted out with consistent vigilance.  Our science and art classes, our labs, our frat parties with open kegs also don’t seem to need policy makers to shield anyone from hostility.  The models are out there.  But certainly the experience of those at UPenn now needs some restoration to those seventy years in which my family once thrived there and beyond.  And it takes a more global commitment to assuring that no citizen of the campus should ever study in fear beyond not knowing the answer to what the professor may ask on the next exam.

 

Ironing Shirts

During my working years, and for some time past retirement, the dry cleaner around the corner became my friend.  As a young adult first needing to look professionally appropriate each work day, I realized that permanent press was OK for slacks, not very good for shirts.  I purchased a good iron, which I still have, retrieved an ironing board whose origins I don't really know, and taught myself how to iron shirts.  While the iron had low settings for synthetics, steam worked better.  I got adept at doing this every few weeks.  I didn't mind doing it, though I never advanced in skill beyond good enough.  Eventually I got spoiled by promotions for 99 cents per shirt from a few local laundries, more than worth the time and effort saved.  These were not my around the corner places, but still in proximity of other places I would otherwise drive.  They were probably not profitable to the sponsoring laundries, and eventually disappeared, leaving me to pick a laundry or two either around the corner, en route to work, or in proximity to work as the destination to have my shirts and lab coats laundered regularly and more expensive jackets and suits dry-cleaned periodically.  As I accepted professional employment, the tailored dry-clean clothing exited from the wardrobe and my employer took care of the white coats, leaving me only with shirts.  Shopping for price did not pay, as I was really purchasing convenience, eventually settling for a place around the corner where I could drop off and pick up an accumulation of shirts, often as many as twenty, maybe more sometimes, either on my way to work when they were always open, or on my way home when if I returned before their closing time.  They also became the place to get pants legs hemmed to the right length.

Periodically I would arrive as the owner or his wife were preparing the clothing.  He did not use a hand iron like me.  Instead, he had a professional steamer of impressive output.  With the shirt on a hanger, he would run it over all surfaces, making a uniformly smooth surface requiring only seconds per shirt.

And then the pandemic.  And OLLI.  I rarely wore a full button down shirt.  Sometimes to shul, but even there I found collared knits or mock turtlenecks very convenient, as they did not need a tie.  I could toss everything in whatever load of washing the care label specified, fold it and wear it.  And to a large extent, I went to shul much less, partly due to pandemic limitations and partly to avoid Hebrew School flashbacks generated by the Rabbi's comments.  And my dress shirt wardrobe had accumulated to the dozens.  Eventually I accumulated another twenty or so, returned to my usual laundry after a couple of years, and found some sticker shock.  The going rate for cleaning had soared to $3.50 each, leaving a very big credit card swipe to get them done.   I could buy four new shirts for that sum.  That does not reclassify dress shirts as disposables, but it does cause me to ration their frequency of wear and their professional cleaning.

The casual button downs, those plaids or checks in broadcloth, could just go from the dryer to a hanger.  Anything of Oxford cloth and most solid broadcloth, though, looked wrinkled.  After accumulating and washing eight of them, it was time to restore the iron.  It sits in a nook in my kitchen, retrieved from its basement home some time ago when I needed to apply an iron on decal to something.  The board, though, remained in the basement, where it had become one more flat surface to put stuff indefinitely.  I harvested the surface contents, then brought it upstairs to the den.  I left the spray starch on my workbench in the basement.  

The silicone cover had withstood its time in the basement but the padding did not.  I salvaged as much of it as I could, but it will need to be replaced in the near future.  Then some type of internet How To Iron a Shirt got reviewed.  I filled the iron with tap water, plugged it in, set it to steam mode, and waited for it to heat.  By pressing release, steam emerged from the soleplate as it should.  

Two shirts at a time, four sessions over three days.  Collar first.  Then placket. Then front panels, then back panels, all from the interior surface.  Finally, the sleeves and cuffs from the exterior surface.  Onto a hanger or downstairs hooks.  Ready to go.  Eight restored shirts to wear mainly to synagogue.  Will last a very long time if I get to wear each four times.  Not as good as the dry cleaner man would have done but adequate.  And with the $28 I saved, I can replace the ironing board cover and padding and maybe still have a little left over for a beer or some other treat.

Breakfast Where To?

No treadmill or stretch scheduled today.  No appointments.  One email invitation for late afternoon that I will tacitly decline by not responding.  And a small outing yesterday, a disappointing one at that, and two much more desirable places to be tomorrow.  No reason to get dressed today.  But these relatively infrequent blank days generally go better if I grant myself some kind of treat, either a reward for notable attainment later in the day or out for breakfast as a small reward for being fundamentally a decent person when my electronic news feeds show a deficit of honorable people.  So last night, I resolved to go out for breakfast today, even if it meant getting up at my usual time, grooming first thing in the morning and putting on the clothing I wore to my outing yesterday.  I even decided where.  When the clock radio flashed its red numerals, I dutifully got up, made coffee, outlined my day, washed as many milchig cups as I could fit onto the drying rack, then recycled yesterday's clothing.  I drove to my destination, finding it too islolated, so quickly selected a backup, where I spent a little more generously on an enhanced omelet and a slightly larger tip than I needed to offer. 

Breakfast has an interesting personal history, an offshoot of my autobiography.  Not living in a cave,  not being a hunter-gatherer with meal uncertainty, I am well aware of the expert consensus on the importance of breakfast.  It takes minutes to heat a pan and fry two eggs, a little longer to poach them.  Sometimes I have packaged hash browns in the freezer or frozen kosher vegetarian sausage links that take minutes to make.  And not that much cleanup either.  For all the Aunt Jemima controversies, I always admired her picture on the box.  She portrayed concern for the people she fed, racial stereotypes aside.  And now with Pearl Milling on the box instead, the prouct has become even easier to use.  Just mix in a 4:3 ratio with water in a coffee mug, maybe a half cup mix, stir a bit and pour into a hot oiled pan.  Flip once when bubbled, then transfer to a plate.  Pour some syrup, for which I have maple and few others at hand.  Then eat in minutes while drinking coffee.  Easy nutrition.  And when I go to the supermarket each week, some cereal is always on sale.  I get a box or two.  Yet it serves as a between meal snack.  I've not poured it into a bowl with milk in decades.  And instant oatmeal available in a variety of flavors goes on sale, can be made in minutes in a coffee mug, and eaten just as quickly.  Not bought toaster waffles in ages.  I have farina and wheatina and packages of real oatmeal and grits.  These are more tedious to make, so I rarely do, though have better sensory outcomes than the instant varieties.  And either bagels or English muffins usually occupy my refrigerator shelves, along with stuff to coat their bite surfaces.  No excuses, really, for not stacking my caloric needs earlier in the day, but I rarely do.  Instead, my fondness is for the antagonism of the adenosine receptors by coffee, most often my own as a k-cup into a porcelain mug.  Two cups worth while I sit at my screen.  Coffee in a mug is portable upstairs each morning.  In my commuting years, coffee was portable in a car, either in a paper cup from WaWa designed for the car or in one of many logo insulated mugs given to me by organizations in anticipation of or appreciation for some of my money.  And my fondness for varietal coffee tastes goes back to the 1970's when The Coffee Connection on Harvard Square or Peet's nearby offered experiences new to me.  Modern commerce and astute observers like Starbucks, K-cup manufacturers, and WaWa's knew that a lot of other people would pay a little extra to have their morning perk-up enhanced by the need to select from among taste options.  So, despite the relative eas of a caloric breakfast, my mind and later daily agenda prioritized wakefulness.  At least at home.

Having somebody else make breakfast is a whole other matter.  After a grueling night of weekend On Call during my medical residency, my first destination after signing out would invariably be Bickford's Pancake House.  All types of pancakes, multiple syrups.  I would never go there any other time.  And a pot of coffee to wash down those perfect pancakes, rarely duplicated since.  When I travel, breakfast always starts the day, whether at hotel, whether for professional or leisure travel.  Breakfast buffets ranging from packaged everything at chain motels to serious elegance at Caribbean resorts, Israeli hotels known for their arrays, or over the top cruise ship offerings each get a due measure of my time, and if more than cursory, a level of indulgence that carries me forward.  When not provided by my hotel, I seek out a pancake place mostly, though I will choose from the larger menu.  No skimping here. Omelet, hash browns, toast, coffee.  Always a big input of calories, as I will mostly not eat again until supper except for a cruise ship's day at sea when meals begin on arise and go continuously until bed time, interrupted by some aquatics.  So when I have breakfast I generally do it lavishly.  

Going out for breakfast has its home version.  While studying for my periodic professional exams, I would take my review book to one of several restaurants, bone up a bit on what I might be asked, while ordering either eggs or pancakes.  Once exams are over, I would often go out for breakfast on my days off, and when on weekend call, I would invariably break for a massive breakfast buffet across the street from the medical center where most of my effort would take place.  Occasionally the hospital cafeteria would have to suffice, though rarely for breakfast.  Over a number of years I accumulated my favorites.  Hollywood Grill a five minute drive was the default.  Coffee Station was nearest.  New places open, always tried out, others close.  Once retired, these outings drifted down to one or two a month.  And they started to include a few samplings that registered in my mind as no more repeat visits.  But those two a month or so became my most reliable breakfasts, and invariably my largest.

While I seek out breakfasts in public settings, whether my personal outings locally or as part of a travel experience, these meals rarely have a social component, though perhaps they should.  I am cordial to the waitress and tip adequately, but prefer the buffet to the menu and waitress.  For a while, my roughly weekly breakfasts at the Hollywood Grill seated me at a counter.  I recognized the waitress, her pleasant manner part of making this my preferred destination, and I came to recognize the many regulars who came each week.  I evesdropped on their banter with each other and with the waitress but never got invited into the conversation itself.  I effectively ate alone amid a crowd.  I could say this about most breakfast experiences, travel with my wife and me as a pair, breakfast locally or professional travel solo, irrespective of how crowded the buffet or commonality of purpose as at a professional annual meeting.  The exception, and not a very big exception, might be formal tours where the group assembles for the day's itinerary, but even there I usually seek out my own table, filling my plate with what I find most inviting, then letting my mind wander by itself.  On cruises, I am dining alone with my thoughts and plans, even with hundreds of others filling the tables and sampling the food at the buffet, which I invariably prefer to breakfast in the formal dining room.  There I sit with whomever the dining staff seats at my table, exchange pleasantries or maybe a comment on the ship's destinations.  But my breakfast table is not a place where thoughts, insights, or experiences transfer between people.  It is a place to sit quietly, think to myself, admire what the kitchen staff was able to assemble, and recover from the day past or anticipate the day ahead.  For as many people as may be present, breakfast from a simple bagel with homemade gravlax at home to the elegant repast of a classic Israeli hotel buffet, remains fundamentally Me Time.  A few minutes to make food choices perhaps but also time in a virtual cubicle that lacks separation walls.  

Might I do this better, or if not better, then differently?  I could take better advantage of what I already have at home.  When I go to the supermarket, I rarely target what I will have for breakfast, other than making sure I have enough eggs and perhaps deciding when I should make another pound of gravlax, which takes a few days.  Part of the barrier seems to be my treadmill schedule.  To do this without fail, I set a fixed time of 8:15, before calories other than coffee.  And this has been so successful, as it gets what I am most likely to make excuses to not do out of the way first, that I will not change the schedule.  But every third day there is no treadmill to walk.  I could target those for breakfast, two at home, followed by one away.  And after treadmill, I could eat something that takes little time or effort.

When I am out, can I take better advantage of the environment.  I prefer the open counter to a table, but even there, only the Hollywood Grill, now defunct, had an vibrant counter experience.  As I get to the other places a short drive from my home, the food really isn't that much better than what I can assemble myself.  The Country Buffet has become defunct, and I have little reason to be in that vicinity other than as a periodic platelet donor.  When I don't eat breakfast with any substance, I still have a measure of Me Time in front of my screen, checking messages, contributing my thoughts to recipients known and unknown in cyberspace.  So even if I could make breakfast more of a social experience, it would be infrequent, though more spontaneous in its interaction.  And professional travel is no more, recreational travel infrequent, and the buffets at places where I stay mostly cursory.  So my best upgrade would still be at home.  Perhaps starting with a real breakfast, the kind a dietician might recommend on the treadmill days off supplemented by two served breakfasts a month locally.  Small upgrades, both to my nutrition and my psyche.

Hanukkah Efforts

First candle tomorrow night.  All gifts purchase, half wrapped, half still need to be wrapped then brought downstairs for my wife to open one after each candle.  Food undecided.  There will be latkes for shabbos.  I don't know yet what will serve as the shabbos entrée.  Our menorah, for which I retain the traditional word as much of the Hebrew world shifts to the more accurate Hanukkiah,  sits on the living room table year round.  Candles on sale.  I bought a box and put it on the living room table.  That table also has some dreidels which stay there year round.  And we got another box of candles as a promotion from a yeshiva, no strings attached, though with a request for a donation.  I don't know if these candles are identical to the no frills brand that I purchased but  I will at least open the box.

Rabbi's Talmud class this week devoted to passages about Hanukkah.  What it is.  Even that was not obvious to the sages.  Consensus that we light candles, though several opinions on the optimal way to do this.  Consensus that we do not fast, though unlike Purim, no mandate to feast.  We recite Hallel and read Torah, which can make the services lengthy, both weekdays and shabbos.  We insert a special prayer in the Amidah and add a psalm.  Those who die miss getting a eulogy.  That's the legal basis of the festival.  And it's enough to keep it pretty separate from Christmas, which dominates the American calendar.

That's enough to keep the time special.  I have a few activities, a mixture of challenge and pleasure.  Our Gabbai invited me to lead shacharit on shabbos.  I've not done Hallel in years but should be able to learn it in the three days allotted.  Only remember doing the special insertion of Al Hanissim one time in the past.  Can probably brush up on that as well.  Arranged to visit a new water park not very far away.  An indoor respite.  And a reception at a restaurant around the corner, really within walking distance but a minimal drive, which is better in mid-December.

And need to donate platelets.  I'm overdue.  Final day of OLLI classes overlaps with first day of Hanukkah.  Should make a better effort to activate my snow blower.  And pay attention to whether outdoor herb pots outside the front door need to warm up inside some of the time.  And while my next Torah portion comes after the Festival, I still need to maintain daily practice during the Festival

So Hanukkah plays out part celebratory, part seasonal.  Some of its elements are unique, others blended with more ordinary activities.  Some restful, some challenging.  Some social, some solitary.  But eight days of personal immersion and transition.

Getting Militant

My stay on my Representative District's Democratic Committee needs to be reconsidered.  We represent a phantom elected official who declines invitations to present his efforts in the state capital to the committee that sponsors him, to say nothing of ignoring constituent contacts.  He needs to be defeated in a primary, and I said so.

Then a young socialist, the type who likely does not appreciate a day's work for a day's pay, asked the committee to endorse an anti-Israel resolution by one of the most despicable representatives in Congress, a lady elected to represent a failing district that was once adjacent to mine and later to my son's.  I avoided name-calling and personal demeaning comments either of the socialist or the person he wanted to support, but was upfront about moral clarity on the Gaza attacks of Simchat Torah and some basic moral clarity.  I support a just war, not his or that congressman's ceasefire which enables a Next Act.

To be fair, after the meeting I met with the committee chair and the recording secretary.  The socialist did have to get his piece approved by a legitimate editor to appear in print.  But that's not the purpose of our Committee. And even during the meeting even my best friend on that committee would think me too militant.

But I see the party of Roosevelt, JFK, Johnson of his Presidential years, and Clinton becoming relics, and me with them.  These men all saw an obligation to enable others to rise to their potential, as do I.  JFK saw all boats rising with the tide.  I see it through more Jewish lenses.  We have Mitzvot, things we are commanded by Torah in the name of the One God to either do or not do.  Fulfilling them is hard, and we often fall short, though not inevitably fall short in the manner of Christian Original Sin that dooms everyone to inferiority.  Instead, we have those Mitzvot as benchmarks.  We must rise to the mitzvot.  We cannot diminish what is expected of us to accommodate our own shortcomings.  There are rules of what we can eat.  While Kosher enough is what many of us, including me, actually do, we do not change commercial certification of the products that we purchase.  We must rise to the occasion by purchasing them.  Shabbos and Festivals are on specified days.  We do not change the days to adapt to our schedules, even when it risks not fulfilling our best observance.  We rise to the Mitzvot, the Mitzvot do not descend to us.

Where I see my Democrats shifting, and Jews shifting with it, is along those principles.  We not only cannot have the butchery that came our way last Simchat Torah, planned a year in advance, part of an express Hamas quest for Jewish elimination, but we cannot tolerate its rationalization. We all know what rape, child abduction, dismembering, massacring are.  And like pornography, perhaps, we know it when we see it.  That means doing what it takes for a humanity that raises its fists in the air now but benefits later.  That means calling out anyone, from that scripted socialist ignoramus to those like his admired congressman who divide the world into oppressed like them who need to squash the oppressor like me.  No, the better outcome is to enable their rise, which the Democrats of my own day, including the current President, seek to bring about.  But you cannot even pursue that when the moral clarity fails, which theirs has.

Controlling Social Media Time

Social Media needs some personal restraint.  For a lot of people it has become destructive, a time sink that bypasses more substantive achievements that people could have, myself among them.  Yet its popularity, even when toxic or because of that toxic element, continues.  It is alluring.  Nobody really needs Adderall or Ritalin to pay attention, as attention is not needed.  A Tweet requires conservation of words, which means you can read a lot of them in a short time.  And as we keep our device and tablet screens in our visual focus, these programs assure us that there are other people on the other side.  We used to have other people at the Mall, and probably still do at the workplace.  The stadium may have tens of thousands of people, but they are not interactive with us.  The electronics match us to people who respond in an era when, even in the workplace, the cubicles and factory floors keep responses intermittent at best.

I am not on all platforms.  I never signed up for TikTok, which at least one state tried to ban.  A site restricted to physicians called Sermo wore out its welcome.  I don't miss it.  The WhatsApp app has been downloaded to my smartphone.  I never open it.

So my daily cyberspace surf sessions really begin with four, all with their own overlaps and their own uniqueness:

1. Email
2. Facebook
3. Reddit
4. Twitter, now rated X

Each morning I go to all four, though not in the same sequence.  Any notifications from each, from the most trivial Like to the usual email updates of places where my subscription is intentional.  No message?  Move on.  More typically, I just admire myself momentarily for having posted something yesterday that caused a reaction in somebody else.

Then I move to my daily blog to begin composing the next entry. And my daily five crosswords come next.

But the discipline to do things that advance me yield to things that get my brain to release endorphins and enkephalins.  So at the very least succumb to the social media in a defensible way.  

Email enables me to conduct my personal business.  Its delete trash can makes it easy to clear.  By now I can recognize phishing and move it to spam.  That winnows the messages to notices of articles related to my professional activity, a writing group I subscribe to and periodically post what I have written, notices from reputable publications where I am also a subscriber or participant.  Requests to do a Torah reading arrive that way, along with notices of my synagogue's activities.  Clutter easily managed.  And there are times when I need to send somebody else a message.  Virtually no politically generated thought takes place in this forum.  

Facebook lives off its more glorious past.  Like many of my era, HS Class of '69, the lure of reconnecting with old chums, most in limbo for forty years, had endless merit.  We learned of each other's careers, families, geography, personal and political views, in a short summary, where their adult lives took them.  My HS had its bullies, but not a lot, and learning how to cope with them made most of us antifragile, fully capable of swimming through our personal circumstances.  While everyone on our contact list was designated Friend, we found gradients of friends to be the reality.  As we learn about people of our past nearing the completion of their careers, grandparents or at least empty nesters, the people we connected to as electronic friends were often very divergent from the people we had hung out with, shared classroom space with, or went to USY with as teens.  Was never close to the Cheerleader types then or now.  Found myself attracted to people whose posts and reactions displayed kindness.  Unfortunately, Facebook became Meta, algorithms ruled, and advertising made stockholders rich.  Those several dozen sources of electronic banter and sharing parts of our current lives dwindled to about fifteen, all admirable people if not the fifteen that I would have selected to continue from my original list of a hundred or so if free of algorithms.  But with those fifteen, we still share interests.  I like seeing places that they visit as they visit them.  Parents have died during that interval, with abundant messages of condolence.  Birthday greetings are conveyed by thoughtful reminders.  In order to get to the people, I have to endure a feed of twenty commercial, political, ideological, and otherwise disruptive messages.  And I have acquired my own Likes.  Pictures of cats, whether cute kitty or awesome tiger, can get a Like.  And I have my teams.  The algorithms figured out which ones they are.  So FB needs the time on it rationed, the responses mostly limited to messages to people I know personally who have made their own contribution, and maybe a swipe at a coach of one of my teams when they falter.  And as unsolicited faux news appears, I am generous with its remove procedure.  They ask you why.  "I find it offensive" needs to be added to the options.

Reddit enables me to think.  I subscribe to r/Judaism and r/Jewish cooking.  Unsubscribed to r/my  home state due to some unwelcome responses to one of my rare posts.  And usually I allow my initial screen to just be HOME with whatever the company thinks I should see.  There are thousands of subjects.  Everyone is anonymous with an avatar.  It also seems to be moderated, as trolls and overt nastiness is rare.  For r/Judaism I am a serious contributor.  People present dilemmas from anti-Semitic experiences to how to engage more to other queries more suitable to Dear Therapist.  My range of knowledge, my experience with synagogues and organizations, and my advanced age that has lived through how the Judaism of today got that way is helpful to scores of other people, Jewish and not.  Since my satisfaction as a contributor does not depend on keeping score with Likes, I can be at that site a very long time.  While often rewarding, I could and should be doing other things instead.

And finally, Twitter, that cesspool of toxic applications of the English language.  Its only redeeming feature is that people of major accomplishment, whether celebrities, elected officials, thinkers of the upper tier, have all established their base there.  While they travel in spheres other than mine, I am not likely to meet any of them.  But they let me into their electronic space where I can have my say if I keep to the rationed number of characters.  And it has helped my expressions.  When I exceed my allotment, I have to edit the response to make it more compact.  An unexpected benefit. People have been harmed by engaging too seriously, but if I really want is not friendship but access to ideas from people of public presence, that will suffice.  Harm to me is unlikely.

Sites I either neglect or reject are much larger that the four in which I engage. In another century, our endogenous CNS pleasure chemicals came from opium dens where people escaped from anything else they could be doing instead.  We have that now, more with X than with any of the others.  Except it is not really the escape from engagement but its illusion.  I keep a daily task list, created each evening, reviewed each morning, referenced periodically through the day until I compose a new one the next evening.  Engagement with old friends is on the list, FB being the best way to do that.  Many of these tasks, the writing and learning in particular, are also best done on screens, though my mind acting solo with what is presented or with what I create.  Engagement is better done selectively, even if helpful to others, as my contributions to r/Judaism often are.  Put your own mask on first.  Advance my own brain, environment, face to face encounters first.  And some rationed time for 

1. Email
2. Facebook
3. Reddit
4. Twitter, now rated X