What Art Does

What Art Does

I love this artist’s attempt to give an accurate representation of the faces of Occupy Wall St. More pictures and an interview at the link.

I’m a Jew on Christmas (and all those days after…)

Hello my intermittent companions/readers!

The holiday season is still making its final hurrahs and while many are thinking about gifts to return and the ongoing onslaught of emotional baggage, I’m thinking about this whole holiday culture.

The winter holiday season is a time many associate with familial traditions but more and more the mainstream conversation is circling the divide of the religious and the secular. Year after year, we argue about the “reason” for the “season” and whether or not saying “Happy Holidays” is somehow betraying your hatred for all things Christmas or just trying to include everyone in a generic statement of positivity. Having said that, let me place myself within this context before I go on.

I identify myself as Jewish and Agnostic (while verging on Atheist) and yes, that means I’m coming from an already complicated an ill-defined starting point. However, I grew up simply as a Jewish kid in a household that was only ever casually religious. And, as we all know, it’s often the way we grew up the more accurately sums up what we think the holidays should be. This means that the winter holiday, for me, was/is Hanukkah (or Chanukah, or Hanukah, or this website gives you sixteen different ways). I celebrated by lighting candles, opening presents for eight nights, eating fried food, and wondering why we didn’t have a Christmas tree or Santa but not really caring why.

Of course, as I got older I was taught to care by my friends. Why don’t you have a Christmas tree? Why don’t you celebrate Christmas? A simple explanation that whole CHRIST part of Christmas was really a Christian thing worked for awhile but then I grew up and suddenly even that got more complicated.

At some point, I entered the realm of discourse of adults that believed that Christmas exists on two different levels: the Church’s religious Christmas and the average American’s secular holiday tradition. The CHRIST part of Christmas had become relatively meaningless to most people (hence the prevalence in some areas of “Jesus is the Reason for the Season” advertisements) and so I was prompted to ask, why wasn’t it meaningless to me? Why wasn’t I comfortable participating in Christmas and all of the secular aspects of it because religion seems to be less and less of a Christmas calling card.

It’s really hit me hard this year. For the first time since I was a small child, I’ve asked myself: why don’t we have a tree? Do I want one? If the aspect of Judaism that I most relate to is the cultural and historical community that I come from, how does it’s religious traditions have any more/less ownership of me than the others? I mean, let’s get real, Hanukkah isn’t really a major holiday for the Jews. However, thanks to the gift-giving zeitgeist that is contemporary secular Christmas, it has become the Jewish holiday-cousin of Christmas.

Afterall, Christmas itself isn’t even really Christian. It seems every year a couple of emails go around to remind us that.

via http://i.imgur.com/9f8Th.jpg

So, even that which divides was born as an amalgamation that was an attempt to unite. 

Which I guess is what was bothering me to begin with. In year’s past there American culture has gone out of its way to make sure to honor everyone during the holidays. The de-emphasis of Jesus and the re-emphasis peace and brotherhood as an effort to unite during the holidays was always refreshing and welcome. 

But this holiday season, my TV shows disappointed. Even Glee, which has episodes that forefronted their Jewish and Atheist character’s different beliefs, ended with those same characters cooing over a telling of the Jesus story (again, the capital R “Reason” for the season). Frankly, it was disappointing.

Christmas has come and gone, gifts have been given, and many of us have headed back to work. We’re edging up on the New Year and I’m left feeling just as ambivalent as before.

Because here’s the real thing that bothers me. Christmas, and any other holiday, is only what you make of it. This year, no matter how much I wanted to celebrate any holiday no matter what it was, my family was hit by tragic circumstances (a family member is still in the hospital). In addition to that, my fiance got one day off from work and we won’t be able to visit family for a few months yet. 

This is reality. And maybe this is why people fight over what the holidays mean, because like anything else in life they are constantly changing. But for whatever reason, this is the time of year where we tell ourselves it’s okay to take a break on yourself, to think of hope, to spread love.

When it comes down to it, I don’t care why you choose to do it. If it’s because you feel compelled by the story of the birth of a savior, the story of a magically burning lamp, the story of a people and its principles, or if it’s purely because it’s cold outside; if you choose to focus on peace and spread love, you are choosing to bring people together. And that’s enough for me.

So, for all that 2012 will hold for us, I hope it holds more reasons to focus on those aspects of life that bring us together instead of those that will force us apart. Because no matter what religion or philosophy I believe in, I believe that there is a goodness in people that can work wonders.

My Post-MFA Malaise

Hello there blog-reading world! I’m back— but this time, I’m making no apologies and I’m making no promises.

Why?

Well, I’m trying to be realistic. In the six months since finishing my MFA, I have been on a roller-coaster of emotions and expectations that has left me confused and excited, determined and depressed, and all of this at once.

Because identifying the problem is the first step...

I had this idea that Grad. School would give me the tools to achieve all my goals but not just that, that it would help me understand what those goals were and how to achieve them. In some ways, it did and others it didn’t. I understand the academic world, and really the adult world, more than I did and got to know myself as a writer but I was always able to step away when I wanted to because, I was a student after all.

I had my heart broken a few times, by friends and colleagues, by the business, bureaucracy and bullshit that comes along with it all. I realize every day a little more how much of an idealistic I am.

It wasn’t until I had the experience of getting my first “real-world” job (and then a second) and was caught up in its own milieu of problems, that I’ve had the distance to really recognize this.

But what I think I’ve really learned is that as a writer, as an idealist, as a human being, it is our job every day to fight for ourselves.

And as if every day wasn’t enough, the most recent episode of “The Simpsons,” titled “The Book Job,” discussed over here, was a handy reminder of this fact.  The story itself was fun and Neil Gaiman’s guest role was funny but what caught my attention and tugged at my heart, as always, was Lisa’s shining moment of addressing her own disillusionment.

Lisa Simpson is often held up as an avatar of what it is to be the idealistic woman of our generation and, in this episode, also what it is to be a writer. We watch as she scorns those who write for *gasp* profit and sets off to write on her own, for the sheer love of it, and fails.

Which brings me back to where I am. Because of all the things that the MFA program did teach me, it didn’t prepare me to be my own business. Which, in the long run, is part of being a writer. Promoting oneself, sending out to get published, finding others to collaborate with, and any other aspect of writing is a full-time job. One that can feel impossible to maintain on top of those jobs you must keep to pay the bills.

On top of that, there is a strong sense of isolation. My years in Michigan have left me feeling profoundly isolated, even more-so than the semester I spent in China the year after my mom died. It might be because of the ridiculous weather here. It might be because I am, for the first time, confronting the realities of things like “adulthood” and “career”. But it might also be that artistic notion of finding my voice and myself that, once you think you’ve found the answer, that answer immediately becomes less and less satisfying.

So, I’m trying to identify myself as a writer again and, for the first time, it’s up to me. Maybe this anxiety I feel is what people criticize as the phenomena of people not knowing how to write outside of the workshop. Or maybe I should trust everyone that says it’s okay to take some time and I shouldn’t be pressurig myself but really? There’s so much I want to do and so much I want to write that I don’t know where to begin.

Today, I’m choosing to begin here. And hopefully, I’ll keep to it this time.

Why the New Facebook IS Worth Complaining About, Kind of.

Yesterday, like everyone else, I logged into Facebook and was a little disconcerted to find everything in disarray. Things simply were not where I expected them to be and suddenly there were status-updates scrolling on the upper right that were also updating on the main part of the page and, well, that seemed a little pointless.

And oh! The blue tags.

Yes, I was annoyed. And so were others. As quickly as I thought to be annoyed memes were sprouting legs:

(I found via Urlesque.)

And this:

(Grabbed off FB, no idea where it originated, let me know if you do, overusing, commas, done.)

But as quickly as people started to complain, other people started to complain about the fact that we were complaining.

Evidence:

(Self-citing image is go!)

Yes, now I feel put in my place.

But then reality set in. People choosing to take the high road used status updates to proclaim that they couldn’t give less of a sh*t about the Facebook change because guess what? Lots of really shitty things are going on in the world.

Another 14 year old boy, who once believed that “It Gets Better” killed himself because the bullying wouldn’t stop.

A man, who many believed to be innocent, was killed by our justice system.

And this headline “Mexican drug lords dump 35 dead bodies on road as they wave guns at passing drivers,” from DailyMail.co.uk, is horrible without even having to hear the rest.

Those things are awful.

They won’t stop being awful.

I will be sad about them today, tomorrow, and for years to come. This news makes me want to jump up and do something with my votes, but also leaves me feeling sad and helpless.

Do we trust our politicians? What exactly are they calling class warfare?

The sad, and sometimes devastating, reality of our world is overwhelming. This is just a part of life.

But for many people, so is Facebook.

And whether you like it or not, Facebook is often how I find my news and I know I’m not the only one. I didn’t know about Troy Davis until one of my friends posted about it. The majority of what I know about the Libyan Revolution has been through linked information on Facebook. When there was the earthquake on the East Coast, I could pinpoint the location based on where my friends who posted about it were updating from. It’s also how many people during the last storm season let family abroad know they were okay.

I could go on but let’s say that Facebook is more than just “social” networking it’s a finely woven web of communication. I rely on it to find out about the well-being of my friends and the world.

And so what if it annoyed me when they changed their interface yesterday? It made it harder for me to find out about everything that really is important. It was annoyance that I could wrap my head around. It was an annoyance you could feel empowered by. You could say:

Facebook is annoying me. Facebook is making my life harder. Facebook is something that I can blame and feel productive.

Because when it comes down to it, it’s a fleeting moment of frustration that we can quickly learn to laugh about.

(Click to embiggen, go here for more.)

Whereas all those other things? They’ll never be funny. They’ll always be sad. They’ll leave us feeling frustrated and helpless and maybe even scared of the world we live in.

So don’t belittle the small battles we fight, no matter how meaningless they sometimes are, they fuel us to keep fighting the big battles. And man, we’ve got plenty of those on our plate.

Commercial Girls: Gender and Sexuality

I’m not usually impressed by commercials. In fact, I tend to watch them critically trying to figure out who it is they are targeting and how they think they’re achieving their goals.

However, while that-dude-that-I-live-with fast-forwards through commercials (to think we haven’t always had the ability), I still like to watch them because commercials are little balls of societal focus all rolled up in less than a minute. They target an audience and tell them a story and they always want us to do something.

And in an time where a show about the very kind of advertising execs influenced advertising to become the manipulative force that is today is one of the most popular and award-winning shows on TV, we should all be paying a bit more attention to what we’re being shown.

So maybe this is something I’ll return to in future posts and maybe it won’t be but I saw two commercials over the weekend that I just had to point out.

Good News First

In a time period where the LGBT community is struggling to find equal footing and basic human rights, I have a heightened awareness to all media that tries to reach out to them. While Logo is an exception in having a wealth of LGBT focused commercial campaigns, you don’t often see commercials portraying or addressing the LGBT community at all. Then I saw this:

Okay, so this is an exception on some terms because the use of this product is strictly sexual. By opening up their commercials to allow a wider range of audience by including lesbians and therefore addressing the LGBT community at large, they’ve admitted a wider customer base. But that argument could be made for ANY product.

Instead of shying away from their topic, it’s use, and the kind of people who use it, this campaign of commercials (that has already been around for awhile) reaches out to an audience that other companies refuse to admit exist.

Let’s just say, there are always opportunities to criticize and this commercial caught me by surprise, in a good way.

Bad News Second

Then I saw this:

In the era of “It Gets Better,” videos; shouldn’t this come as a red flag to even the most conservative viewers? Is that exactly what they’re hoping for? As Margaret Hartmann said over at Jezebel.com,

In 30 seconds this Tide commercial presents a troubling cocktail of gender stereotypes, and it’s a bit hard to decipher. Are we supposed to relate to the uptight, creepy mom who wishes her daughter wore pink, or laugh at her for being neurotic and over-the-top girly? At worst, the ad plays on the fears we’re supposed to have about girls like Shiloh, and at best it’s just uncomfortable to watch.

Shiloh, of course, is the daughter of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie who is media-notorious for wanting to dress “like a boy.”

So what are we to take from these commercials?

To overly simplify it, this is what I see: KY, a newer product that has a limited audience, is open-minded while Tide, a product that has been advertised as long as advertising has existed, is still burdened with the baggage of its past.

What do you think?

Do you want to buy these products any more or less?

Why Are Smart Women Always Saying How Stupid They Are?

I’ve mentioned in passing that I have a new job. I am no longer graduate student! Instead, I’m a university employee in a softly IT position.

Go geek!

What this means, for the purpose of this blog entry, is that I am often working with self-proclaimed Luddites who are taking their first step into using any kind of computer technology in the classroom. This is definitely the norm.

It is a norm that is not gender or age based, as far as I can tell. Of course, those in the Sciences are generally more prone to using technology in their courses so I guess we could say it’s slightly academically skewed (?).

Anyhow, we’re going to take a moment to go into anecdotal mode to begin the real conversation I’m interested in:

I was working with a slightly younger faculty member who, while very intelligent, was more Luddite  than I had assumed. I made the mistake of throwing some terms around that I assumed she would know based on interactions with her husband.

Her immediate reaction, instead of asking for clarification, was to tell me that she wasn’t smart enough to understand what I was talking about.

I quickly reassured her that it was my fault for assuming her to have knowledge that I didn’t normally assume people to have but the comment stuck with me throughout my day.

The truth is, it bothered me because this is something I do all the time but it’s harder to contextualize the impact of saying these kinds of things until you see someone else, someone you respect, do it themselves. This faculty member was/is not stupid or less than in anyway for needing a little extra vocabulary lesson to get up and running with the technology I was teaching her about.

In fact, when I first started this job I was really frustrated that, at the end of the first week, I didn’t understand everything. I went home feeling like I was stupid. That was until Super-Fiance-Man informed me that I was, in fact, being too hard on myself.

So, why is it that some of the most intelligent women I know are so ready to be exactly this hard on themselves?

My immediate answer is: I don’t know.

I saw a reference to a quote once (and if anyone knows more about this PLEASE let me know) that said that our generation of feminist daughters was told that they could do anything they wanted and heard that they had to do everything.

I’m not saying that all women feel this way, or even that all smart women feel this way, but there’s a big chunk of us over-achievers that (somewhere down the line) seem to feel we have inherited the burden of all To-Do Lists in our generation. Not necessarily because we feel it’s our duty but because we feel we should be able to, right?

Alas, this has turned into another rambling post. But what I really want to say is this: you don’t need to know everything. When you’re an expert in your field (even if that is a creative field and sometimes deemed less intellectual), it’s okay not to be an expert in other fields.

The learning curve can be steep but you’ve climbed steeper before.

What Can We Learn from Cons and Faires?

This weekend was a mixture of events in my own corner of the world. While I watched as Facebook slowly filtered in up-dates from my handful of friends and friended celebrities who were attending Dragon*Con in Atlanta, GA; I myself got to attend Holly, Michigan’s Renaissance Fair.

Between the two events, I’ve been thinking a lot about why it is we enjoy going to events like these.

Part of this, I realized, was a little bit of detective work of identifying what “kinds” of people are attending.

Ultimately, the first group I always identify are geeks. As a self-identified geek I don’t use this term as a derogatory judgment, instead I have come to think of geeks as those of us who are passionate (sometimes obsessive) in some corner of the world deemed “geeky.” This ranges from Science Fiction and Fantasy, the worlds often explored in the Con circuit, to reliving history, the realm of Ren Faires; and so much more.

But among the geeks come the tourists, the gawkers, the less-than-devoted sometimes fans and it’s their interaction that has come to be more interesting to me.

The Industry of “I Do”

Alright folks, I’m letting you know now. Just in case you thought this whole wedding thing wasn’t a big deal: get engaged. Then everyone you have ever known will let you know exactly how awesomely big a deal your marriage will be!

Just in case the dozens of reality shows, cable channels, movies, and more hadn’t convinced you that people are obsessed with weddings, starting the walk down the proverbial aisle (even from a year away) is daunting.

I’ve been engaged since June and I was overwhelmed from Day 1 (alright, maybe it was Day 2 or 10 or something like that) by the number of things I need to do and questions I need to answer and really, just the numbers

And it’s not just a big deal that you’ve found the one. If you’re like me, by the time you get engaged your friends and family will have seen it coming (especially if you’ve told them).

This is a multi-billion dollar industry that has a multi-billion long list of choices and demands.

Already I’m having to say, we’re not really going to do that. No, I will not go over my budget, why? Because whatever that budget is it’s already going to make me uncomfortable spending that much money on one single day. Albeit a day that will have hopefully the best party I ever go to, but still one day. One party.

What has been the most confusing and frustrating part has been trying to convince other people that what I want is different from what they think I want. It’s not that I’m upset, in fact it can be quite sweet, but I am, no matter what, pretty uncomfortable.

I switch into Passover Mode: why is this day so different from all the other days?

Negative Nation

My absence from this blog was a culmination of many things, good and bad, but one trigger keeps rearing it’s ugly head. Haters.

No, no one is hating on me specifically. But there’s just been this cloud of negativity lately that has been weighing me down.

Even Oprah, the queen of easily found sobs and smiles has said:

The world is a mess. We all know it and talk about in our private lives. It’s depressing and overwhelming at times to look at how much potential we have and yet we’re constantly bombarded by images and information that speaks to the lowest common denominator.

Via.

It’s gotten hard for me to get on Facebook where I’m assaulted with this barrage of daily disappointments and struggles, links to articles ranging from depressing news to more depressing social dialogues. I could blame the media, as people often do, and say it’s their fault. They are the ones who have decided that entertainment news is more important than understanding politics, they are the ones who would rather drive a celebrity (or pseudo-celebrity) to suicide rather than reassess their role as enablers to addicts.

But according to them, this is what we want.

Return of the Knack — Requesting requests!

My knack that is.  The knack for writing, more specifically the knack for blogging, or the knack for getting things done as opposed to my recent knackless-ness. What I really want is just to post this video and say something mildly clever without rhyming myself into a “hack,” or having to call myself “Mack.”

Anyhow, The Red Speech Balloon is back in business! Again.

I’ve recently started a new job and, thanks to said job, now have a regular schedule that will (hopefully) allow me to wrap my head around each day and find time to really devote myself to writing here again.

I really missed this space and the conversations we’ve had, so I hope I haven’t lost all of you and that there’ll be more reading along the way.

Having said all that, what is there to write about? Well, everything!  So, I’m asking for some reader requests to help me narrow it down!

Is there something you’d like to read me jabber on about? Some posts in the past you found particularly interesting? Let me know! If not, I’ve got a few ideas in the works… but hearing a little something from y’all who are still out there would certainly help me build the momentum I need!

After all, I want to write what you want to read. And as long as you read, I’ll try not to disappear again 🙂