I was a gender-confused four-year-old.*

*Part one in a series of 'Things that have no bearing in my adult life and really don't give a shit about one way or another but continue to talk about because I think they're hilarious.

So. I went to a Jewish private dayschool from the age of two through eighth grade, and anyone who has any experience with the world of Jewish dayschools will know... there is a lot of pageantry involved. Little mock festivals where every kid has one or two lines of dialogue, and you sit in a row and basically go down the row and say your line. Fun times. Your parents go and pretend to like it but really, they're wondering why they're paying ridiculous tuition so their progeny can mumble badly-written verse about the Founding Fathers/The Pilgrims/The Ten Commandments/Whatever Have You.

My pre-k class did one called Bubbe-Zayde Shabbat where, as the name might suggest, everyone's grandparents were invited and a lovely time was had by all. We made teddy-bear cutouts with a Hershey's Hug in one hand and a Hershey's Kiss in the other and it was all rather adorable, right? (Why do I still remember this in such vivid detail? Seriously, inquiring minds want to know.)

Well, it wasn't adorable if you were me. You see, Bubbe-Zayde Shabbat was themed around figures from the old testament. Every kid was assigned one and then you had a line about it. So there was an Adam and an Eve, a Noach, an Abraham and a Sarah etc etc etc all the way down the line to Moses/Miriam/Aaron. The girls had these really pretty brightly colored shawls that, in retrospect, were just chiffon handkerchiefs but god damn it I wanted one.

Except I was a twin, so I didn't get to be one of the four mothers or Eve or Miriam or even Dinah. No,  when pre-kindergarden Judaica teachers get ahold of a pair of twins, their year is basically made. Said Twins will be constantly referred to in relation to Jacob and Esau. When Bubbe-Zayde Shabbat rolls around, those twins are definitely going to be Jacob and Esau. Even if one of those twins is a girl (even if both of those twins are girls, I bet).

So, Jacob and Esau. Jacob, good. Esau, bad. Jacob, pretty. Esau, ugly. Jacob, sweet. Esau, bad tempered rhinoceros. Jacob's costume was, like, a bathrobe and a shepard's crook. Esau got an itchy red shearling vest, because Esau, as everyone knows, was a hairy redheaded brute. I mean, let's not even kid ourselves, the guy was a temporally-displaced Viking.

Guess who was Esau. I'll give you three chances but you only need one.

She's got two thumbs and she's sitting right in front of you. That's right, Leez was Esau in her pre-kindergarden Bubbe-Zeyde shabbat! I was not happy about this serious case of miscasting. Why didn't I get to be a pretty girl? Didn't they know my brother and I weren't identical? I definitely sat through the whole pageant with a sour look on my face. There wasn't a temper-tantrum involved that I recall, but there should have been. I wanted a goddamn scarf!

But there I was, stuck next to my brother who got to be the good twin and was just so satisfied with his lot in life and I was the only villain on the whole line-up. I got to be the idiot who traded their birthright for a bowl of soup. But for some reason, the worst injustice to me wasn't being forced to crossdress in a school play at the age of four, wasn't that I had to play the biggest dumb brute in the whole Torah, wasn't that I didn't get a pretty scarf (although the pretty scarves were a close second) - it was that they got our birth orders wrong. I'm the younger twin. I should have been Jacob!

I don't know how I ever grew into a functional adult. But somehow I managed.

/sarcasm mode off.

I ♥ my mommy

Just to give you an idea of what kind of childhood I had, the biggest fight I've ever had with my mother was that she wasn't mean enough. This ended with me shouting something incomprehensible about "THIS WHOLE FAMILY IS FUCKED UP AND NO ONE SAYS ANYTHING ABOUT IT" and her shouting back, "WHAT, DO YOU WANT ME TO BE AN OGRE?!"

The only thing that this proves is that I was an incredibly melodramatic fifteen year old, and it should be recognized that I have most certainly changed since then.

Anyways, I was talking to a friend a few days ago, and we hit upon the subject that every one of us, if we're lucky, is born with the best mother for us. That means that you might describe something your mother does for you to someone else and they might be like, "Man, that is incredibly fucked up," but to you she's perfect. And I don't know if that's because we grow up to be adapted to our own parents idiosyncrasies, or just because fate is funny. You could argue nature-vs-nurture until the cows come home and it doesn't change the fact that my mother might be perfect for me in an entirely different way than your mother is perfect for you.

When I was in second grade, I had ridiculous second grade projects for which there was always this expectation that your mother was going to help you make your Endangered Species Mask, or your Historical Figure Costume, or your President Macaroni Sculpture, or whatever. My mother... did not help me. And on project day, I had a shitty lemur mask made of construction paper and everyone else had, like, I don't even know, Manatees made with grey paint and cardstock and socks? Pandas hand-crafted out of felt? And I got to class on project day with my sad little mask and was like, "WHAT THE BLEEP IS THIS BLEEP." Because it was so ridiculously clear that I'd done mine all by my second grade self and everyone else's moms had stayed up until 2 AM gluing macaroni to a cardboard giraffe.

And then at some point I realized I was smarter because my mom made me do my own work, and started looking down on everyone whose parents obviously did their projects for them. Thus creating my fifth grade superiority complex.

My mother has always encouraged me to do my own work, and to be proud of my work, and that is why she is the best mommy for me. :)

ALSO, CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR ENGAGEMENT, ELLEN AND HOUMAN.

(I bet you thought I was not going to call you out on my blog, right?)

late at night and I'm kind of ramble-y

When I was in elementary school, I was really into sewing. I remember that there was a brand of fabric glue my best friend and I used when we were making stuffed animals that had a very, very distinctive smell. I close my eyes and I can still smell this stuff, the odor was strong and could give you a headache after a while, but it's terribly nostalgic.

Once I got to college, I realized that the closest analog for what this stuff smelled like is the cheap marijuana my neighbors like to vent into the hall, and into our bathroom. I guess I'm thinking about it because they've currently managed to stink up my apartment.

On a totally unrelated note, Like a Dog in Space made it to the semi-finals of Blank Young Playwrights 2011! Hooray!!! Fingers crossed, let's see if I get in!

Little Leez :)

My cousin recently posted a picture of me (aged five) to facebook in a big dump of old 90s hilarity. I thought I'd share here. :)

Just to prove that I was cute and little and innocent once.

Sun I am disappoint.

I was really, really excited for the new Golden Sun game. Like, I don't buy video games often, but I would have bought this one. But then I went on the website and read the character summaries and... ugh! They're so derivative of the last generation of games! I know that generation Xerox is a trope, but we've even got villains pushing the protagonists to accomplish their mission and a mysterious masked man. I don't know much about the plot yet, but for a game set 30 years after the original pair and released some ten years later, this is upsetting.

The original Golden Sun games were hailed for their originality in story, setting, and gameplay. While the battles are nothing new if you've ever played any incarnation of Final Fantasy ever, they were pretty fun, and there were a lot of good/nerve wracking puzzles to figure out. The new game looks like it's sticking too closely to the original, and it worries me.

At any rate, the game doesn't hit North America until November 29th, so I'll wait for some American reviews before I decide whether or not to get it. At any rate, playing it would be good for nostalgia, and I am a bit eager to return to that exciting, imaginative world the first games took me to. :)

Unrepentant dorkatude

My idea of a perfect day is getting up at nine AM, printing off an assignment, and hopping a C train uptown to the American Museum of Natural History, a place I am alarmed to say I am beginning to understand the floorplan of. To me, the AMNH is like Hogwarts. For one thing, it's basically a castle. For another thing, it seems like the layout is constantly changing. You take a twisting hallway and two staircases in search of the entrance, and you wind up in an exhibit hall you've never heard of or seen before.

I spent a whole day there today - an hour or so in the hall of human origins, followed by lunch (following a tip from my anthropology TA, I tried the brownies in the first floor cafe - delish!), followed by an IMAX documentary about the hubble space telescope (absolutely amazing), followed by something like four hours in the Hall of Vertibrate Origins, the Hall of Dinosaurs, and the Hall of Mammals and Their Extinct Relatives doing an assignment for Evolution of the Earth.

It was educational.

For example, did you know that reptiles aren't a scientific clade? A clade includes a common ancestor and all of its descended species. Since the reptile category excludes birds, who are descended from dinosaurs (and technically dinosaurs themselves, because the entire definition is based around a shared hip structure). This kind of thing makes me geek out unrepentantly.

I also really wanted to smash some heads together in the Hall of Human Origins.

Guy looking at an exhibit:

"So which one of these is the human arm, and which isn't?"

His friend, pointing to a chimpanzee's arm bones:

"That's the human one. It has an opposable thumb." (Pointing to the human arm) "That doesn't."

Me, interrupting because I think they're dumbasses:

"No, that's a human arm, and it does have an opposable thumb. All primates do."

The first guy:

"Thanks. Man, I told you so!"

The same guys, later:

"So, why didn't all the monkeys evolve into humans?"

And then I went over to the Space Center gift shop to see if they had any books that might be useful to me, but they didn't - I think I got the last copy of Two Sides of the Moon (book review is PFAD... when I finish it, but it's terrific so far) and they just never got more Astronaut Biographies in after that, or else they restock their book selection less often than every two weeks. I thought about getting some Astronaut Ice Cream because I haven't had any since I went to space camp in fifth grade, but then I decided that if I wanted to eat stale marshmallows I'd just eat stale marshmallows, and I didn't want to eat stale marshmallows just because it was nostalgic to me.

(Do real astronauts eat astronaut ice cream, or is it just a space center gift shop gimmick? I might need to investigate.

But all in all it was pretty awesome, and then later when I was waiting for the subway home I somehow managed to get into the same car as my roommate's boyfriend. Don't ask me how, but when the train stopped there was this white guy with dreadlocks sitting right in front of me and I was like, "...Bez?" and he was like, "Hi." New York is surprisingly small once you start to know and recognize people - you run into the same group of people everywhere, even when you least expect it.

Veterans Day (Now with photographs.)

Pop-pop (Bill Goldstein) in uniform, 1942-ish.

So today is veterans day, and I'm sitting here giving a lot of thought to my two favorite WW2 veterans - Bill and Maury Goldstein. I've mentioned my uncle Maury before, in conjunction with a project to record his account of WW2 and my quest for the identity of his kamikaze pilot (no luck there, by the way), but I'm not sure how much I've ever said about my grandfather's service. I still need to sit down and edit the video I took of Maury - I am a horrible niece this way.

Maury, as I've previously mentioned, is the spryest 99-year-old I've ever met. I have a pretty solid account of his travels in WW2, during which he saw more of the world in the course of about five years than most people will see in their entire lives. Maury was born in 1911, so while my grandfather, his younger brother, joined the air force as an enlisted man right out of high school, he'd already finished college and law school. Knowing that he'd wind up serving in the military either way, Maury went to the navy and applied to their legal division. It was full... "But we can give you an armed guard instead," said the recruiter. Maury had no idea what this meant. He went with it.

Armed guard, as it turned out, meant being assigned as the "marine" part of "merchant-marine," manning the large, anti-submarine guns on supply ships crossing the atlantic. He spent one tour on the SS James Turner, during which they lost a coin toss and had to cross the most treacherous part of the Atlantic while their sister ship took the safer southern route. Guess which ship sank in the crossing? I'll give you a hint - my great uncle's still around to tell the story. ;)

Upon returning to the US, they were going to send him to Russia, but at the last second he was called in and offered a post on another ship - they had a new one called the SS Haym Solomon, and they wanted a Jewish captain for a ship named after a Jewish revolutionary. Maury, who wasn't too keen on Russia and had been eying his cold weather gear with quiet disdain, quickly said yes to another two tours of Africa.

What I hadn't known about my great uncle until as recently as this summer, though, was that he'd also served in the Pacific - it was only my grandfather who was discharged once the war ended in Europe. Maury was assigned as an officer on the USS Oconto and he even has a really fantastic "yearbook" with photographs of all the crew, and a map of their ports of call, and pictures from different places they visited. This was very helpful in figuring out some of the islands he was having difficulty remembering when I was interviewing him, but for the most part Uncle Maury was very clear on where they'd been and when.

His Pacific tour is where the story of the Kamikaze comes in. Between ships logs and his own recollection, we've narrowed it down to early April, 1944, off the coast of Biak, and that from there they took their prisoner first to Saipan, and then to Tinian. (The other thing about his story is that it reads like a WW2 version of Forrest Gump - full of lucky breaks, near misses, and unwitting encounters that become important in retrospect. Tinian was the launching point for the atomic bombs.)

Anyway, I'm much sketchier on the details of my grandfather Bill's service in WW2, just that he was extremely proud of it. Next time I see my grandmother I'll have to get her in front of the camera to tell me what she knows about it (my grandfather passed away in 2008). He was the youngest brother, born in 1923 (another brother, Allie, falls somewhere between Maury and Bill, and died in the early 2000s. I'm pretty sure someone told me he was a heavy smoker for most of his life. If not for this and my grandfather's bifurcated heart valve, I'm pretty confident that they'd all three still be around.)

Anyway, my grandfather enlisted into the air force, but he wasn't ever more than ground support. (He was color blind.) I know that he was stationed in North Africa for most of the war, moving around Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, etc, and was later part of the group that moved up through Italy while Eisenhower was taking over northern France. The details are sketchy, and while I know war stories from his time in Africa and Europe, I don't know the chronology and they wouldn't make proper sense out of order. (And besides, I'm saving most of them for a film treatment someday!)

At some point in here, he earned a purple heart for a lung injury. After the war, he had the military wipe the disability from his records because he didn't want to be seen as handicapped. My grandmother tells me that in later years, he regretted this decision.

My mother's father, born in 1910 and as such a year older than Maury at the time, attempted to join the military during world war II and was turned away: he was too tall, had flat feet, and as an engineer, was doing more important things for the war effort outside the military. (Years after the war, in 1956 or so when my mother was a small child, he would move his family from New York City to Orlando to work for a company producing parts for a very different kind of war... the Space Race. However I tend to romanticize this a lot more than Mom says it actually was... Less "Granddad was a rocket scientist!!!" and more "Granddad worked a desk job for a few years and then went and worked somewhere else." I still like to imagine my grandfather diagraming rocket parts in some fabulously 1960s office somewhere in central Florida.)

Earlier today I didn't have pictures, but I have a mother who reads my blog and sends me things. So here we go.

Bill and Maury together, February 2003. (Bill's 80th birthday party.)

Maury's 99th birthday party, August 2010.

(Yes, the fact that these are both at birthday parties speaks volumes about my family.)

Happy Veterans day! Go hug your favorite veteran!

Something about dinosaurs.

For a movie that was made ten years ago, this certainly looks just as nice as anything you might find today. (It helps that they used CG dinosaurs on a live-action background, so this opening scene is basically just a special effects reel.) Also, no flow in CGI... so considering that basically they cheated their way past technical limitations, it looks pretty good. The other thing I'd like to point out is that Dinosaur has a pretty great score, even if no one remembers what it was about, or that it existed.

Let's just not talk about the rest of the movie and its Land Before Time ripoff plot.

I do seem to recall seeing this in theaters as a kid and thinking it was pretty cool. But then again, I also thought Rocketman was a good movie as a kid. So, yeah.

Then again, James Cameron does manage to make this look like child's play... (I think this is actually a fan made trailer.)

WELL IT LOOKED GOOD FOR THE YEAR 2000.

Let's talk more about Monkeys.

Cute catchphrase.

Except Curious George is so obviously a chimpanzee that it's not even funny.

No tail, pale face, hands, and feet? Light, protruding ears? Kidnapped from Africa?

Ladies and gentlemen, this is an ape. :|

XKCD is so true, so often.

Sometimes I wonder why I got out of Star Wars fandom... But every time I wonder, I realize I don't have the energy to get back in. I haven't spoken to most of my friends from those days in ages.

(I kind of miss them, but when some of them IM me out of the blue and I realize how much people change in five years, I don't miss them as much.)

I had this friend. No, the better phrase would be "I had this classmate." I don't know if he was my friend or not, I'd only known him for that one year, when we landed next to each other in English and History. I hardly knew anything about this guy, just that we'd rib each other about passing papers up and ask what we'd gotten for number three.

Anyway, he died. Not recently - over two years ago now. And it was sad and it was tragic in the way that it is always sad and tragic when a young person dies. And even though I hardly knew him, the way everyone spoke about him afterwards made it clear that we'd lost someone really special. But I think I was just taking their word for it, because I hardly knew him.

This doesn't belittle the tragedy any - we lost a classmate that day, someone that some of us had lost someone really close to us, someone they'd known since elementary school and genuinely loved.

But it wasn't my tragedy to be sad over. I could be sad because it happened, but you could have substituted any number of people into the role of victim and I would have probably felt the same. And I regret this. I regret going through the motions and not really understanding them, and for not getting to know this quasi-friend better when I had the chance.

Live every day like you may never see your friends again. :)

Leez.

Runaways and Vagabonds 2

Apparently, according to my mother, she doesn't even remember the occasion listed in my last post - it doesn't hold a candle to the time when I was seven or eight and went on an adventure with the pool cleaner's kids from next door.

I remember this much about that:

• It was a Friday afternoon. I was in my friday clothes from Jewish day school.
• I was wearing these horrible too-big-for-me blue suede Sketchers

And that's about all I remember. I recall sneaking out the back gate and going down the vacant lot to the river. I remember sneaking around the back fence and across the open back part of the yard that faced the river to meet up with these kids. I remember we trooped across at least five or six yards before we got caught.

I do not remember the aftermath, which my mother describes as this:

"I chewed you out so hard! I told you were never allowed to leave the backyard again! But then that night when I was tucking you in you said it was the most fun you'd ever had in your life and I felt bad, that my daughter was so sheltered that the most fun she'd ever had was going five houses down and I wouldn't even let her leave the back yard, so after that I stopped trying to pen me in."

So apparently no one cares about me running away on my bike. (Mom says it doesn't even count as running away, because I didn't pack a bag and didn't get very far.)

Not as adventurous as she thinks she is,

Leez.

Vagabonds and runaways

When I was nine, I tried to run away from home on my bike.

I got as far as the neighboring subdivision, and then spent the next hour and a half riding around and hiding from my friends' moms who I was sure were looking for me and out to report me to my mom. I went home when it started getting dark and I got hungry, and hoped that they'd felt sorry that I'd been gone. No one really cared. I didn't even get in trouble.

Today I wondered why my mom was always so antsy about me crossing that intersection. It's a three-way stop on a T shaped corner on a two lane road.

Furthest from the wound

Wrote this first semester for an assignment about a moment experienced on a walk around NYC. My brother requested I post it.

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They promised me it would be bigger. They promised me I would feel something. I am standing on a pedestrian bridge over ground zero, and I feel nothing. Perhaps I feel a little bit disappointed by the fact that I feel nothing. It’s as if my whole life until this point beginning with the fifth grade on has been being up to the moment that I stand at ground zero, and it is like cosmic erectile dysfunction.

My relationship with September 11^th has never been a meaningful one. I don’t remember where I was when the towers went down. I was in class, drawing in a notebook or maybe on the way to the bathroom or maybe taking a quiz – I don’t really know, because I didn’t find out that anything was wrong until three thirty that afternoon. My mother apparently called the school and they told her they had things covered and she didn’t need to pick me up, and then they didn’t tell us anything. Other kids parents came and took them home, but no one came and got me. I knew nothing then and hence I feel nothing now.

So I am here, and the universe is not. I am ready for an outpouring of grief, or a great revelation about my own fractured psyche (I don’t know it is fractured, but perhaps I will realize it is), or a sudden rush of patriotic enthusiasm. But I don’t. It’s a city block. It looks like a million other city blocks I have driven past back home every day, somewhere between demolished and rebuilt, a concrete wasteland with a ‘Coming Soon’ sign promising new growth. It’s a city block, not a disaster area, and it neither shocking nor moving. It simply is.