A Strange Man

Remember the part in "Crimes and Misdemeanors" when Woody Allen shuffles, dazed, into his bedroom, and Joanna Gleason is in bed, and Woody sits on the bed, a bit slumped, sort of staring off vacantly and says,

"A strange man... defecated on my sister."

If you don't remember that part, of (worse) if you've never seen "Crimes and Misdemeanors", then don't come back here until you have.

I think every creatively-inclined Jewish guy in this life and time experiences a very complicated relationship with Woody Allen. It's not something we decide to experience, like pot or upside-down sex-- or cake-- it's just something that... I don't know... is.

We can't help it, and I wonder if he can't either. I wonder if he knows the power he wields over us. I wonder if he cares.

See? ARRGH! Look at me-- wondering if Woody Allen cares about something. This is exactly what I'm talking about!

Annoying.

There's a piece of us, and by us I mean "Jewish American boy-and-then-manhood" that fervently wants to separate ourselves from him, to distinguish ourselves from his typification of THE NEBBISH-- the schnuffling, neurotic, befuddled, myopic, pseudo-intellectual in the big glasses obscuring the mawkish punim. There's that piece of us that can't wait to say, "Well, at least I'm not like HIM," and this is juxtaposed, of course, with our insidious, troubled, and very real desire to be not just like him, but him precisely.

And I don't mean necessarily that we want to adopt an Asian girl and then fall in love with her and then fuck her and then marry her, or whatever order in which he did those steps, I don't really know, but we want to taste the life he's led up to this point. Woody Allen's life, and his characters' lives. We want to struggle with philosophical and ethical dilemmas, and we always want a clever, annihilating quip to slide effortlessly out of our back pockets like a wallet. And, truth be told, we wouldn't mind hooking up with 1996 Julia Roberts along the Italian riviera while wearing baggy corduroys.

Woody Allen is the ultimate Hollywood paradox. The anti-Semites of the world will happily gnaw your ear off (especially if your ear is Jewish) telling you all about how Jews control the media and the entertainment industry but, when they talk about those Jews, they're not talking about Woody Allen, they're talking about Jeff Zucker and Michael Eisner but, really, I don't think there is a Jew alive today who has more influence over mass media than Woody Allen. If you mention his name in Europe, especially Italy or France, the country swoons. Here, a wide cross-section of the country can remember laughing its ass off at "Bananas" and "Sleeper" and I remember, even as a young child, finding that bespectacled ginger trying to play cello in his high school marching band in "Take the Money and Run" pretty priceless.

The importance and relevance of influence of his wit and his style on cinema today may be disputed, but it cannot be denied. And, yet, how did this little stereotype do it?

I can remember being critiqued in Acting I in college by the professor.

"I love your face," she said to me, "it'll never be the face of a leading man, but, if you want it, you'll find a profitable and stable career getting character roles-- Woody Allen type stuff."

And while I could have been stung by that comment, I was buoyed by it-- for a time anyway. The paradox, though, about Woody Allen is that, except for when he's doing cameos in other people's films, like in the one-scene scene-stealer in "The Impostors", he is the leading man. The unlikeliest leading man ever. The leading man whose sister gets shat on. The leading man who chases after lobsters in the kitchen. The leading man whose attempts at intercourse are comic and painful. The leading man we can't stand, but would have over for coffee above any other.

Sometimes I wonder if Christian kids have complicated relationships with Ryan Gosling or Ralph Fiennes. Maybe, but I kind of doubt it.

I never gave myself the chance to see if my Acting I professor's prediction about me was right-- I never put myself out there to see if I could score that steady stream of character work, the awkward co-star, the unfortunate best friend, the bewildered accountant or the wry uncle, and maybe that's just as well.

Maybe.

AH-ha.

Many several years ago by now, my wife (who was, back then, my girlfriend) was babysitting for two children belonging to this family who lives nearby. She sent me a text message earlier in the night saying that she was craving a pickle, and that there were none in the refrigerator in the house occupied by the two children belonging to the family who lived nearby.

So, I procured a pickle from a local establishment which trades in such things, and I brought the chick who was, at that point, my girlfriend, a pickle.

She was elated. She invited me inside and, although we didn't have sex in these people's master bedroom as I'd been lead to believe we would by Hollywood, we did have an enjoyable conversation. At some point during my visit, my wife left me alone in these folks' living room so she could go do something babysitterly like put children to sleep or fold up the Twister mat or whatever. While she was gone, I was left to eyeball the immense, floor-to-ceiling bookshelf belonging to these people who lived nearby.

Philosophy.

Cooking.

History.

Theory.

Humor.

Literature.

Biography.

While the subjects and the heights and spines and the colors and the ages of these books all differed, one from the other, there was a common element that united all of these published, literary works, or unified most of them, at least.

Jewish.

Jewish authors.

Jewish themes.

Jewish titles.

Jewish slants and bents and perspectives.

My eyes narrowed and moved to the music collection, which I only had a brief moment to study before my then-girlfriend now-wife returned from upstairs.

Jewish composers.

Hebrew lyrics.

Jewish singer-songwriters.

Israeli orchestra.

Irritated, I abruptly cut my visit short and left the house, noticing, as I walked out, the "Evil Eye" hamsa by the front door as I passed.

I would qualify the rest of this post by saying, "I don't have a problem with being Jewish" but, clearly, that would be a lie.

I do. I do have a problem with it. In fact, I kind of can't stand it. I reek of Jewishness.

"I've got a friend who's Jewish, but he doesn't look Jewish," a coworker of mine said to me recently, "but you really LOOK Jewish."

That might sound horrible and inappropriate and offensive, but he ain't just whistlin' Hatikvah.

In Dublin, my wife and I arrived at the departure point for our tour bus on Friday, August 5th. There was an elderly lady standing in front of the steps to the hostel, her bags packed, her slicker on, her teeth-- well, I don't know where her teeth were. Probably in her suitcase. But her eyebrows were drawn on and she was ready to go. We made superficial smalltalk with her about Ireland before my wife said, "I need to go get breakfast, do you want to come with me?" I said no, because this lady was starting to get entertaining, I thought. She had just checked her watch (which read five minutes of nine) and announced, in a thick German accent,

"Ah. Zey are late."

There was no way I was going to miss an opportunity to hang around this woman, I thought, so I said to my wife, "No thanks, you go on ahead. I'll stay here in case the bus shows up."

My wife rolled her eyes at me, thinking she was trying to rescue me from this woman's clutches, and disappeared around a Dublin street corner. The woman, who I silently named "Gerta" chatted amiably for another couple minutes until a natural silence interceded between us. She broke it with,

"You are from Israel."

Notice the distinct dearth of any interrogative punctuation mark. Another silence, this one less natural, took its place before I replied with,

"Uh-- no. We're... I'm-- we're American."

"Oh," she said, "AH-ha." She peppered her conversation with "AH-ha's", making sure to really emphasize the first syllable. "But," Gerta said, "that is where your people are from. Israel."

Again-- no question mark.

"Yes," I said, suddenly wishing I'd gone for that croissant with my wife as sweat trickled into my asshole hair-forest, "my father is from Israel."

"AH! AH-ha!" she ejaculated, with a satisfied smile, indicating "Got one!" on her face. "Your nose, though, your nose," she continued mercilessly, "is Persian. You have a very Persian nose."

Yes, I thought, and you have no teeth or eyebrows. Did you lose them in the war?

Instead of saying that, I came up with, "Well, my father was born in Iraq."

"AH-ha."

I spent a good healthy portion of my 55 minutes in the chair yesterday talking about what it means to me to be Jewish, both at home and abroad, about what it's like having the map of Israel (or Persia) tattooed onto your face, about being perceived as weak, nebbishy, schmecky, cheap, stuck up, intellectual, a nerd, a schdork, a minority, with a big nose. And kinky hair. In 1993, "Frasier" first came on the air, and introduced the world to Niles Crane, the hopelessly pedantic, more hopelessly romantic brother to Frasier. He was always dressed in a suit, and had a head of beautiful, flax-colored, thin, soft, WASPish hair.

When I was thirteen, I went into the barbershop owned by the man who, many years before, had given me my first haircut.

"Bob," I asked, "can you do something to my hair to make it look like David Hyde Pierce's."

He looked at me with a mixture of sympathy, confusion, and despair.

"I don't think so," he said. "But you've got beautiful, thick hair. You'll appreciate it some day."

I'm still waiting, Bob.

Passed Over

I was on my way home from work yesterday when the phone rang. As soon as I saw that it was my parents, indicated by the little pic that appeared on my phone depicting my mother holding my nephew on our living room floor, I knew that seder had been cancelled.

Why else would she be calling me at 4:12pm on Passover?

She reported, in depth, about the frequency of my eldest sister's diarrhea (at least she left out details concerning viscocity and peak flow) and stated that she had been caring for my other delinquent sister's child for over 24 hours straight, and that she and my father weren't feeling well and, well, seder just wasn't going to happen.

This is not the first time that a holiday has been spoiled-- not for us, and not for you-- but, nevertheless, it stung. It's funny, because I can't imagine that anybody was especially sexed up about the idea of spending three hours sitting around my parents' dinner table pretending we were all having a great time in the midst of a thousand things unsaid.

Well, I wasn't especially sexed up about it, at any rate. Nevertheless, the disappointment of the cancellation of the affair was felt keenly. Mostly, if I'm honest, I was dreading coming home and having to tell my wife. I like being the bearer of bad news about as much as I like being the reason for it.

A retired policeman once said that "The New York City Police Departments is the king of disappointing people." My family must be lower lordlings or something in the disappointing people department. I'm not so sure why I'm still continually surprised or even bothered by these cockups and blunders and coincidences that seem so continually and regularly to spoil things around our house, but I am. I suppose it's some infantile, naive hope that "things'll be different this year." And they're always different the next year, and yet it's more of the same.

I certainly don't doubt that my sister is shitting like a faucet, that's not the point. The point is that it's all the missed opportunities and, sorry-how-bout-next-times that have come before this holiday that make this latest insult just one on the heap. On top of everything else. On top of Old Smokey.

All covered with matzah.

Holidays are beginning to give me a bad taste in my mouth, by and large, and I suppose that's part of what getting older is all about. I have this romanticized picture in my mind about what seder used to be like when I was a boy, and I clutch onto that with all the fervor of a night-terrorized child gripping onto his binkie or his bunny. My father commanding the house, making faces at my sister across the table. Reading from the Maxwell House Haggaddah in different accents at the egging on of my family. It was a great time.

At least, I think it was.

Truthfully, I don't know what the fuck my family seder was like in 1987. Or 1989. Or 1992. I don't really remember remember-- I just think I do. And it's that hazy non-recollection that taints whatever comes in its wake-- or, in this case, doesn't.

It's easy to have the present pale in comparison to the past when you're probably making up most of your memories of the past anyway.

This year, it's different. My wife and I, blindsided at the last possible moment, did Passover on our own. We made our own haroset out of apples, chopped up nuts, and pom-whatever juice because we had no sickly-sweet Manichewitz wine in the house. There was matzah-ball soup that we'd made the week before, a hastily-prepared kugel, and dry chicken that I picked up from my parents' house as a consolation prize.

"Just put it in a pan and fry it, Mummy, it'll be great," my father said, handing it to me.

"No, it won't," I said, taking it from him.

See, the thing is, though-- it will. In the end, it will. Because, while I'm not having some big to-do seder with my family like I might have done when I was a boy, I'm having a Jewish-looking/tasting dinner at home with my beautiful, sad wife and, in the end, we're family enough for each other, and forever, too.

Happy Passover.

It Ain't Over Till It's Passover

Yesterday afternoon, we were having a conversation with a friend of mine whose family is "very Jewish." This is a term that I use to describe anybody who knows more than seven words of Hebrew and doesn't regularly consume shrimp.

Anyway, we were discussing preparation for Passover in her parent's house.

"Oh, do they do that shit where you take all your bread and throw it in the river?" I asked.

There was a slight pause in the conversation.

"That's the wrong holiday, sweetheart," my wife pleasantly chimed in.

That about sums up pretty succinctly and accurately my relationship with Judaism. It's very... surface. It's often very... inaccurate. And it's kind of funny, because, more often than not, I feel like being Jewish is such a large part of my identity. It's certainly a large part of my nose.

But what is it about being Jewish is me? It's not the traditions-- the keeping of Shabbat. Kissing the mezzuzah prior to entering a Jewish home and/or leaving one. It's the Woody Allen stuff. The neuroses. The hypochrondria. The guilt. The wry humor. The... poor posture and glasses. The complaining. The incessant desire for self-analysis.

All Jews should have blogs. That way they wouldn't need therapists so much. Oh, shit-- does this mean I should be paying you $150/hr? Um... could you please bill my insurance?

Sometimes I feel like a jewpostor. I mean, I did my time in Hebrew School-- from age 8 to age 13. I have an Israeli father, and that's not easy. But, really, most of the time, I'm just a big faker. When we go to synagogue, which is very rare, my eyes glaze over the Hebrew and it might as well be Japanese. All the fucking prayers sound exactly the same, and if I read about ninety-year-old Joseph impregnating Sarah or Leah or whoever the fuck it was and the rabbi thinking she was drunk because she was praying silently and the burned goats and the burning bush and the seas parting and all of that one more time, well, I think I might puke up my gefilte fish all over everyone.

I mean, gefilte fish already looks like it's been puked up. Who would know the difference?

I feel like a jewpostor during Passover. My wife keeps Passover, and I do it, too, in solidarity with her, because I think marital solidarity is important. I mean, we can't do everything together. Like, when she's menstruating, I don't walk around with a heating pad on my groin, nor do I paint my penis red, but, in ways that we can have marital solidarity, I try to make that happen.

I think being unified with your spouse is a shitload more important than being unified with God because, really, if you piss Him off, what's going to happen to you? Probably nothing. Don't believe me? Try pissing God off and then pissing your spouse off and see which is more uncomfortable.

Passover is always difficult for me because I love eating, and Passover is an extremely restrictive time as concerns what you can put into your body. I'm a carboholic: cakes, breads, croissants, pastries, muffins, sandwiches-- I'm all about the yeast and the bread and the rising. So far, it hasn't all gone to my tits and my ass-- but I keep waiting for it to happen like my 10th grade health teacher warned us it would.

One of the many things I don't like about organized religion are rules about what you can and can't put into your body. Most of the Jewish rules about food I ignore with relish. Actually, I ignore them with shrimp and pork. I don't give a fuck what some inbred graybeards thought a thousand years ago about cloven hooved animals or bottom-feeders, and if someone wants to tell me that I'm not really Jewish because I like lobster tail, then they can go fuck themelves up against a brick wall. But, for Passover, for my wife, I play along.

It's a week? How bad can it be?

There's a little constipation from the matzah, sure, but it passes, if you'll forgive the pun. I don't mind. It is what it is. I just can't help but feel a little, well, guilty. Maybe that's just the constipation, though.

The one thing I do like about Passover are seders with my family. When my father lived in B'nei Brach, his seders started at sundown and would go until 2 or 3 in the morning, with everybody completely shitfaced, probably including the children. Since coming here in 1972, my father has been appropriately Americanized, and, like most Israelis who come to America, he's his own rabbi and his own God. He's realized that he doesn't need to do all that shit anymore, that, having fought in two wars to protect and defend Israel-- he's earned the right to, well, chill. Consequently, our seders are usually over in 15 minutes.

This bothers my wife, and I understand that. "Are we ever going to go to a real seder?" she asked me one day. I could have gotten insulted by that question, but how can I, an ardent jewpostor, have anything to say about that? Only, they are real seders-- conducted by one of the thousands of the motherland's saviors, one of its valiant warriors. One of Israel's hairy-chested, bombastic, good-natured, affectionate, passionate sons.

Whose favorite meal is shrimp stir-fry.

Happy Passover.

Innocent Until Proven Jewish

As we attempted to dig my wife's Honda Fit out from 18 inches of snow on Sunday, our neighbor, Thomas, was just arriving, sailing his Chevy Trailblazer into his pristinely-trailblazered parking spot. He exited the car with a couple of white plastic bags and made some genial, unhelpful comments about shoveling and snow and winter in general.

"How was your holiday?" he asked.

And I answered, "Fine. Thanks. It was quiet, which is just how we like it." As opposed, I guess, to a particularly loud Hanukkah, though I don't exactly know what that would sound like-- a load of tanked-up, kinky-haired frat boys shouting the dreidel song in a slurry, discordant cacophany while pounding Manichewitz wine out of red plastic cups and peeing in our bushes.

I turned away from Thomas and drove my shovel deep into the snow, sending, I hoped, the unmistakable signal that I was finished talking to him, and done being P.J.

Presumed Jewish.

Though I don't want to be perceived as a whiny Jew, being a minority isn't easy. As I looked at the Asian guy waddling down our alley, offering to share his bag of Halite with anybody who needed it, I thought, would Thomas approach him and say, "Hey, did you enjoy yourself some Chop Suey last night?" Why is it that some people think it's okay to make assumptions about a person's religious affiliation?

And, by that same token-- why does it bother me so much?

I know I've blogged about this before-- I'm too lazy to sift through the archives to be absolutely sure, though (if you want to, go right ahead) and I don't really know what it is about the fact that people who don't know me just assume that I'm Jewish. It's not as if I'm particularly ashamed of being Jewish. I'm much more ashamed of the fact that I have toenail fungus and that, when I was in middle school I used to get hard looking at the models in the Wintersilks catalogue.

I guess it's just the presumptuous, ballsy attitude one takes when making assumptions about someone else that pisses me off. I would never wish someone a Happy Ripened Ovary Day unless I was sure they were ardent tomato worshippers.

Even if you're right-- don't assume. Because it's embarrassing if you're wrong, and it's offensive if you're right. Or wrong.

A few days ago, there was a thread on http://www.20sb.net/ that asked the question, "Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays--Which Do You Say?" Well, I don't see really how you can in good faith go up to somebody you really don't know and wish them a "Merry Christmas" or a "Happy Hanukkah" for that matter, if you don't know that's what they celebrate-- that this is their faith. How are you acting in any sort of benevolent holiday spirit by making a judgment about someone else's beliefs? Maybe if they're wearing a green and red goddamn snowflake sweater with Blitzen's ass on the back and a red flickering light where his hemmhroids are, and they've got a crucifix around their neck the size of a windshield wiper and Jesus Air sneakers, fine, maybe you're safe wishing that person a "Merry Christmas." But, you know what-- maybe they just have eccentric taste in clothing and personal adornment items.

This holiday season-- play it safe. Wear a condom. And sunscreen. And shoulder pads. And don't make assumptions.

The Piano Man

"Why did your grandparents buy that piano in the first place?" my wife asked me in Borders while she was thumbing through a lavishly illustrated book on bathroom remodeling, "did they just get it to match the living room shades?"

At first, this question struck me as rather odd and possibly even slightly offensive. Lately, my wife has exhibited an observably decreased tolerance for criticism or joking surrounding her parents, and I suppose I've gotten a little touchier and protective of my family, too, of late. I don't know why, though. Some peoples' skin gets thicker over time, some peoples' doesn't. In any event, I've learned to lift a lighter foot when issues about my wife's family come up, and I usually save my harshest critiques for when my wife's younger sister is visiting, because she's usually game for that sort of thing.

Anyway, the more I thought about my wife's question about my family piano, the more logical it became. I thought about my grandfather, and that man barely had the manual skill-set required to work a motor vehicle, so I doubt very much he had the coordination and touch, much less the inclination, to manipulate the black-and-whites of a piano. My grandmother was much too ill and, with her "crippled" hand, piano-playing was not really part of the deal for her. Then I thought about their kids. My uncles were only happy when running around our old neighborhood wearing coonskin hats and playing at Davey Crockett or Injun' Joe or whatever the fuck it was kids in the 1950s ran around neighborhoods doing. My mother, who was known t don a coonskin cap herself on occasion, was the only child with musical ability, though I have a hard time picturing my grandfather plunking down serious waddage for a piano just for her.

I mean, she was a girl. She wasn't worth a college education, and she certainly wasn't worth a piano. Let's be real here, people.

So, realistically speaking then, the only possible conclusion we can draw here is that my grandparents purchased the black upright Gulbransen for their house because it matched the asian-inspired rice-paper and black wood window shades. If you want to get really cynical about it all, they most likely bought this piano because their interior decorator told them to.

"I think," I said to my wife as she turned to a page in the book showing a thoroughly ornate and orange bathroom, complete with pumpkin-hued bidet, "that, in that time, upper-middle-class Jewish living rooms were supposed to have fireplaces, Ben Shahn paintings, and pianos. And my grandparents' living room had all three."

While I have trouble believing she was the intended recipient, my mother was was definitely the first beneficiary of the piano. She had perfect pitch, was a quiet, humble star in choir, and was recommended for a spot at the prestigious Interlochen summer music program, to which, of course, my grandfather refused to send her. Again, his stoic logic was, "why waste money on her? She's just going to get knocked up and/or married at seventeen anyway."

This, by the way, is exactly what happened. But that's a whole other blog post.

No doubt my mother played piano and my grandfather grudgingly paid for lessons for her, but her at one time assuredly sonorous voice went nowhere and she got a job stringing tennis rackets in a pro shop while my eldest sister played happily under the counter, until she finally found her calling as a librarian. My sister, now 41, no longer plays under the counter, though I'm sure she's inquired about the possibilities.

My wife and I have talked, since we moved into our own home and even before, on and off about getting a piano for ourselves. My wife took piano lessons from first through eighth grade, though she rarely ever practiced. I took piano from I think fourth or fifth grade through seventh grade, though I'm fuzzy on the details.

If you asked her, I'm sure my piano teacher would be equally fuzzy on the details, as she would be if you asked her any question, including what color car she drives or what her middle name is. Francine* (*name changed, lawsuit possible) was, and probably still is, operating under an alcohol-shrouded haze. I didn't know what the brownish liquid in the tumblers that sat on the piano beside us was, go-juice that she sipped gaily as my lessons proceeded, and I didn't know what drunk elderly ladies behaved like back when I was nine, but I now know that Francine was undoubtedly shitsmacked during most if not all of my piano lessons. The notes that she scrawled on my sheet music were totally indecipherable and looked as if they were written by a mentally-challenged person with Parkinsons who wrote them whilst driving a bulldozer. She was always dressed in a pastel-colored muumuu by 5:30. Sometimes, while I played "Stars" from "Les Miserables" or Loesser's "If I Were a Bell," Francine would dance laconically and disturbingly around her living room, twirling her muumuu behind her. Francine's house was dark, musty, unwelcoming and smelled like the stuffing of a Victorian fainting couch inside of which a mouse had excreted itself and perished somewhere around 1885.

My mother was in the habit in those days of dropping me off for my lessons. One day, midway into my 7th grade year, I began to catch on that something was amiss with my teacher, and I asked my mother to stay and observe a lesson, as I was somewhat prone in those days to telling tall tales, and I thought maybe my mom should see this spectacle with her own eyes. She agreed, and that was my last piano lesson.

Now that I'm doing Gilbert & Sullivan operettas with some degree of regularity, and now that my wife has gotten the musical itch back under her skin, a piano seemed to be worth chatting about. I got an email at my office last week that a woman wanted to donate a small spinet piano to the place where I work. Because we already have a piano on every floor, we really had no need for one there, but I asked her if she would consider selling it to me and my wife. She said she would, and, yesterday we went to go on a date with this little guy, and it appears that he wants to come home with us.

Well, he wants to come with the piano movers, that is. I mean, he's small, but he's not that small.

And so our slow, determined march on the road to Jewish upper-middle-classdom has taken another plod. We already have a fireplace, but it's fake. Just like any Ben Shahn we would ever put on our walls, if we had wall-space.

In The Belly, Off the Balcony

When I was a young boy and I found out that there were people out there who got paid to go out, eat lavish dinners, and write about them, I thought that the world had finally just plain old gone mad.

And I seriously wanted in on it.

The life of a food critic-- there doesn't seem to be anything better than that, anywhere. I mean, I love to eat, and I love to write, so could there really be a better career choice for me? Trouble was, I had no idea how to get started. I suppose I could have eaten at a dozen restaurants on my own dime, written reviews about all the food, and shown them to a newspaper editor in the hopes he or she would have given me a shot-- but that takes effort and start-up capital, doesn't it?

The other thing is, I have a very bad memory for everything but dialogue. So I would have been able to expertly recreate, in exacting detail, all the witty reparte between me and the waiter, but, when it came time to actually writing the review, I would have completely forgotten which soup I ordered, or whether or not there were croutons on my salad.

Plus, I don't drink, so I would have to invite along a companion who enjoyed alcohol somewhat so I could make mention of the quality of the libations. And my wife doesn't drink either, so, um, there would have to be some inebriated third wheel joining us, and that would be, um, awkward.

So I didn't become a food critic, much to my dismay. It's okay, though. I'm not sure anybody actually reads published food critics like Craig Laban anymore. If we want the skinny on a particular restaurant, we go to websites with user-generated comments, even if the spelling is littered with errors and the prose doesn't flow like a fine cognac (see, I have no idea what I'm talking about).

I mean, seriously-- I just happened to read my first Laban food column in probably six years, and it was a review of KFC's Kentucky Grilled Chicken. He didn't like it. Shocking, I know.

I wanted to write about food this morning even though I know I'm not particularly qualified. Not that most food critics are particularly qualified either. In fact, I don't know what makes you qualified to write about food-- are you an English major or a culinary arts student? Should you be both? Probably ideally, and you should also know a thing or two about hotel/restaurant management as well.

I was a theatre major, does that count?

I've been thinking a lot about food recently. Yesterday, my wife took me out on a hot date to the HK Supermarket. "HK," in case you didn't know, stands for "Hong Kong," and what an experience that was. Now, it's true, certain locations inside the store smelled strongly of dead fish that had been left for weeks in an overflowing outhouse in the August heat, but other parts of the store were not as olafactorily offensive. In the produce section, amidst the regular old fruit and veg, there was a startling array of dildo-shaped vegetables, as well as fruit that looked like it should be growing on the moon. They also sold fronds of aloe as big as your torso.

There were probably four aisles devoted just to candy. If you're looking for a specific item, good luck, because it may appear four times in the store, in random places. You really have to have an eagle eye here, and if you don't have one, that's okay. I think they sell those, too. They also sell a wide variety of shrimp-flavored candy and chips, if you're into that. All the food has quaint, faintly bungled Japanese marketing slogans or instructions. "Noodles Make With Japanese Technology." "This Norin traditional is to hang outside the home make for status. Today, Norin is found for common families inside or out." My favorite was the Ramen-type noodle bowl with a picture of three Japanese men in white lab coats and name-tags, each holding up one, two or three fingers, presumably to make the claim that making this dish is as easy as "1, 2, 3!"

For those who like their food moving, there was plenty of that over at the seafood counter. There was a box of live crabs, one was burbling up air bubbles (I don't know if that's a good thing or not) and my vegetarian wife was pretty fascinated. There was a large, elderly black man who was criticizing the shape and fitness of some of the fish (that he was purchasing nevertheless) and he was surrounded by a mob of dour Asian fishmongers who stood around him with their arms folded in front of their chests. I thought it was going to be Sharks & Jets time, so I grabbed Mrs. Apron's arm and pulled her away.

The seafood wasn't the only unusual aspect of the market. At the butcher's section, there was very little read meat to be found. Oh, except for cow's feet. They were chopped up and ready to go. You have to do the walking, though. There were also frog's legs, quail and duck eggs (how those huge honkers come out of little ducky poochies I'll never know) and there were also blueish-looking plucked birds that were literally swimming in their own blood. At least, I hope it was their blood.

I come from a Jewish family of pretty uninspired, inept cooks. We don't, for instance, cook vegetables, we overcook them, killing them until they're beyond dead, making sure every ounce of flavor and nutrients is gone and that they're as flaccid as an octagenarian's weenis. My great-grandmother would make us blackened liverwurst burgers that my sister and I would pretend to eat and then throw off her 18th story balcony at unsuspecting passersby. My grandmother's speciality is baked beans and hot dog pieces. My mother, thankfully, is markedly better in the kitchen, but nowadays most of the cooking is done by my father anyway. Coming from this culinary world as I do, I walked the aisles of the HK Supermarket like a babe in the new world, wide eyed and filled with hope and wonder, even as my nostrils were filled with the abundant smells of oversalted haddock and shrimp chips.

I may never be a food critic, but I suppose being a blogger will just have to do, and it'll have to do nicely. And I have steamed pork buns for lunch today, and I'm a better man for it.

The DIY Revolution

The DIY Revolution has come. And it officially suckles my balls.

Thanks, Bob Villa, Norm, and all you other smug, competent, flannel-shirt-wearing bastards.

Stores like Home Depot rejoice in the regained American pride of doing tasks and chores with nothing but a little of your own ingenuity, time, and elbow grease. Lowes sling its arms around our shoulders in a very chummy, cloying way and say, "Let's build something together." Hmm... let's not. Lowes, why don't you go build something with my independent general contractor?

I want to be all DIY-y, but I'm just not sure I'm cut out for that kind of lifestyle. Most toolbelts just don't stay up around my pointy hips.

You see, you never know what kind of a homeowner you're going to be until you are one. When you're a tenant, you call the landlord for every little thing that goes wrong, because that's what your ridiculous rent entitles you to do. That's what you, as a tenant, are programmed to do. You had that motherfucker on speed-dial, back when there was such a thing. You called him when the faucet leaked, or it didn't. You called him when the windows were too tight to close, or open. You called him when the lock was busted or the mold poked through the paint. You called him when you found the mouse floating face-down in the toilet and when you found the pencil drawing of a slightly deformed male genitalia on the closet wall.

You called him, and it was good.

Now that you own a house, there is no landlord. There is just a big, ookie bank. And they won't come fix your clogged drains, even if you call them and ask nicely.

This weekend, I DIY'd our hedges, and, less successfully, replaced a missing piece of wood cabinetry in our kitchen. Halfway through the cabinetry debacle, almost in tears, I pined ruefully for almost any one of the landlords from my younger, more carefree days.

"It's a poor carpenter who blames his tools," someone said to me, on a totally unrelated subject.

"Hey! I just did that this weekend," I replied, entertained by the coincidence.

He looked at me with disapproval.

"Well, there you go."

See? He knows I'm basically good for nothing. And he doesn't even know the half of it.

I tried to replace that piece of wood in the kitchen for almost an hour-and-a-half. I was up on the counter, on my knees, flakes and shards of wood falling in my hair and in my eyes, crouched like a melting pretzel, my back up against the double oven fidgeting with screws that were getting stripped, switching back and forth between a screw gun and a drill bit-- both of which I blamed for my abysmal failure.

I guess my friend who made that comment about blaming your tools is right. I mean, don't guys who can't get it up blame their tools?

My DIY misery really approximated impotence. I was so angry at myself for not being able to perform a simple rudimentary task that people have been doing for eons (screwing fucking brackets into pieces of wood). I mean, I realize that being Jewish is a distinct handicap in these situations-- we as a people haven't assembled anything ourselves since the pyramids-- but I wanted desperately to rise above the stereotypes and the genetic disposition to succeed, mostly so my wife wouldn't think she was married to the human equivalent of a cup of Jell-o.

I ultimately gave up. The piece of wood, instead of being held together with 16 screws and four brackets is now gingerly and tenuously clinging to its base by two brackets and five screws, two of them half in.

Like most things I do in life, it's good enough.

The hedges, though... The hedges look fucking great.