Yesterday my eyes were opened to the fact that I could be a bit less concerned about aethetics and my craft and a lot more concerned about cash, and even getting some sleep...while making said cash.
Yes: an affiliate marketing conference. Here's where I discuss it in full.
Your thoughts, as always, most welcome.
I have always been a fan of the top ten list. I suppose it started with Casey Kasem's American Top 40 (Yes. I was around and not in nursery school at the time. OK?), the cleverest marketing device the pre-digital music world ever came up with. After which I graduated to Letterman, who used (uses?) the top ten list as a cool comedic framing device, which I enjoyed even more. Kids, this was all before Amazon's Listmania was even an executive web dream.
Of course, the top ten format is as old as the hills...actually, one specific hill called Sinai, where, tradition has it, God's Top Ten was revealed amidst much noisy weather, on this, the Shavuot festival. Whether He intended it as marketing or humor will depend, I suppose, on your general outlook.
I have always been troubled by what my mother calls time management. I’m sure other people call it that, too, but I heard it first when I was twelve, trying to get ready for school but repeatedly getting sidetracked for reasons hair-related. “Boy, do you have a problem with managing time,” she would say. I had no idea what she meant, of course, because time, as I knew, could not be managed, only experienced, or – perhaps– tamed and ridden, like a horse, or a wave. One of us was missing the point entirely. My relationship with time has only gotten more intense over the years...
This past Friday was another kind of Mother's Day: The flip side, the dark side, the impossible side, the side that haunts every mother's quiet moments until she chases the demons away. Friday was the "yahrzeit," or anniversary of death, of Koby Mandell. You may remember Koby from the news, because the story is a hard one to forget. Koby was the 8th grader who, along with his friend, had cut school one beautiful day in May, 2001, as the second Intifada was heating up, to go explore the valley and caves near their home in Tekoa, a West Bank settlement not far from Efrat. They were found in the pre-dawn hours the next day, bludgeoned to death with large rocks, mangled to the point of having to be positively identified by dental records. Koby was going to turn 14 a few weeks later, in June.
There is a familiar pit in my stomach that tells me I must put something down on paper. So to speak.
It's a pit that reminds me of other pits, that makes me 16 again, and 26, all the years joined by a common physiological sense of being carried by an idea or a feeling, literally hungry for something to write. Medical science will tell you that the pit is the work of the vagus nerve in my abdomen, which has translated the meandering chemicals of emotion from my brain into an ache of sorts.
This is all well and good but I think it's more about the weather.
So, you want people?
Let them in, but just so much past the door;
otherwise they will
either park on your soul
or
you
will end up wanting more.
Choose:
Which welcome mat position?
You lose yourself,
Or you simply lose.
.......Is a memory something you have or something you've lost? – Woody Allen
Today we think of who we do not have and why, and then what that lack demands of us.
Tomorrow, about how we celebrate being alive to meet those demands.
Today is Memorial Day in Israel, honoring fallen soldiers and victims of terror, observed here a day before Independence Day. The connection is essential since it is widely recognized that without the former, celebrating the latter would be impossible, while always hoping that one day, this will not be the case. That there will be no more names on next year's list of the fallen. It is, in other words, a sacred day we wish with all our hearts we didn’t need to observe, and in fact grapple with its necessity all the time.
My amazing grandmother, Esther Klein, is turning 91 next month. She was in her mid-twenties when she was liberated by the Swedish Red Cross from an aimless, endless transport, after having spent several nearly lethal winter weeks in Ravensbrueck. Before that, she'd "worked" for several months in Auschwitz, after having lived for a very short time, along with her elderly parents, in a temporary tent city near her hometown of Seredna, constructed right along the railroad tracks, the better for the Jews to wait for their "ride."
Before that, Esther Herskovitz was a bright, active young woman with bad hay fever, living near the Czech border in a small town in a big house with an orchard and a vineyard and a large, warm family, all of which have since vanished, literally, into thin air. Except the allergies… and my grandmother.
Leviticus 10:1-3
Brother,
these rules will be the death of us:
this “how to please me”
this tutorial of the soul.
How can passion
wear a girdle?
Answer questions?
Wash?
Where is the sacrifice
in this ritual
if our flesh isn’t in it?
Today there are no signatures. I sign all my e-mails “S”, and it seems to be good enough. I have corresponded for months with people whose voices I have never heard. I do not know if they have a quick East Coast way of catching your sentences before you say them, or if they’re Midwesterners who listen until you’re well past done, and you’re waiting and waiting for them to say something.
I do not know these things because all the lines and words and sentences come out the same in my inbox, with no spaces or pauses or interrupted syllables, no heavy smoker’s timbre, no just-out-of-grad-school deliberateness. I cannot hear or feel. I know only what passes through the spell check.
My amazing grandmother, Esther Klein, is turning 91 next month. She was in her mid-twenties when she was liberated by the Swedish Red Cross from an aimless, endless transport, after having spent several nearly lethal winter weeks in Ravensbrueck. Before that, she'd "worked" for several months in Auschwitz, after having lived for a very short time, along with her elderly parents, in a temporary tent city near her hometown of Seredna, constructed right along the railroad tracks, the better for the Jews to wait for their "ride."
Before that, Esther Herskovitz was a bright, active young woman with bad hay fever, living near the Czech border in a small town in a big house with an orchard and a vineyard and a large, warm family, all of which have since vanished, literally, into thin air. Except the allergies… and my grandmother.
The Social Well
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