Happy Birthday to Jew

Yesterday was my 37th (solar) birthday. I figured a post the day after would be less self-serving than on the day. Was I correct? :-)

Anyhow, our friends at AskMoses (btw, AskMoses is a cool site that is basically a live chat with an educated observant Jew--often a Rabbi--that has a great archive of previous Q&As) have a nice Q&A on Judaism's view on birthdays.

A Jewish birthday is a very auspicious day. Our sages tell us that on a person’s birthday his “mazel” is dominant. Your birthday is a day to express gratitude to G-d for bringing you into this world, entrusting you with the mission of illuminating it with the radiance of Torah and Mitzvahs. This day, which is akin to a personal Rosh Hashanah, is the appropriate time to recommit to the mission at hand, resolving that the added maturity and experience gained during the past year will cause the following year to be even more productive and fruitful.

My Jewish (lunar) birthday is September 2nd, so I've still got time to do all that AskMoses is suggesting, but I definitely took some time yesterday to thank G-d for all the blessings in my life, despite the tough year that we've had.

One way I thanked G-d was by enjoying nature...at the East Orange Golf Course in Short Hills, and at New Waterlands Park in South Orange. You see, in addition to it being my birthday weekend, it was also my last weekend as a temporary bachelor so getting in some golf and softball was definitely important.

After my wonderful family, the blessing I am definitely most grateful for is my friendships--some of which have been going strong for almost 25 years. In the last month or so, during which I was ensconced in bachelorhood. I've had the pleasure of spending significant amounts of quality time with my best friends from HS, college and business school, and my best female friend. How lucky am I?!

Vulgarity--It's All Around Us

Is anyone else alarmed by the increasing usage of vulgar images and language in advertising? I know this sounds like an old (and old man's) refrain, but it seems in the last 3-4 weeks I've seen a whole lot of new stuff out there that's really going for the lowest common denominator. Now, you know I love words, so I can appreciate a clever play on words, even if it's pretty vulgar, but most of these aren't clever or funny.

Here is one that recently caught my eye. There's a new show on NBC called Whitney. The ad I noticed first was on the side of a bus stop on 7th Ave, and it had a picture of the title character--played by Whitney Cummings (above), loosely based on her life-- and a guy in the background (her live-in boyfriend, apparently), with this text, "Whoever invented morning sex didn't think about morning breath." Now, that's neither a new thought, nor is it a particularly clever way of phrasing it. But mostly, it's a pretty vile image, especially for a public bus stop. Now, Ms. Cummings (incidentally, Whitney Cummings is a pretty good porn name) is a fairly attractive woman, I'll give you that, but come on...

A Palm Eulogy

Palm, which revolutionized the PDA market, was basically laid to rest today. HP bought Palm not long ago and today announced that it was shuttering WebOS, the OS that was the primary spoils of the Palm takeover.

I had a Palm PDA and also a Treo. Frankly, I never really cared for either product. The Palm script never made sense to me. That said, I think Palm did a lot for the adoption of PDA technologies and the convergence of PDAs with cell phones, thus creating the now-ubiquitous smartphone. So...to this, I say, fare thee well, Palm and Palm/WebOS.

What about you? Did you ever have a Palm product?

On Being an Only Child

It wasn't until about seven years ago that being an only child became a letdown. I was never the kind of kid who really wanted a brother or sister. I usually lived in an area that had lots of kids my age, and many were also children of divorce--a much bigger impact than only-childhood, at the time.

But at some point, as my friends started to pair off, the concept of having a permanent buddy started to sound pretty good. Having someone to call on my (50 mile!) drive home from Somers would have been alright. Another factor was the devaluation of the phone conversation. It seemed that having a long conversation became passe around 2003--interestingly right around when people started getting unlimited cell plans!

So one day, back in about 2004, I said to my wife that I finally understood why having a sibling could be a good thing. Unfortunately, there was nothing I could do about it, obviously, and with most of my closest friends getting married and starting families, I couldn't even come up with good proxies.

Of course, we ended up starting our own family not long after, so the hullabaloo of it all kept us pretty busy, and though there were definitely times that I could have used another ear or shoulder, I hardly noticed through the bleary-eyed exhaustion of twin parenthood.

Last year (and this year), as my father's (zt"l) illness progressed, the lack of a sibling partner in the process of planning for and ultimately handling, his passing, was definitely a disappointment. Shouldering the emotional and physical burden on my own made a tough situation even tougher.

In some ways, I still cherish my singleton-ness. But also, I think I've gotten better--and perhaps my friends are more available--at finding proxies. Because we both come from small families, and we're both far from those small families, we often tell our friends that they are "like family." While sometimes that sounds trite, I can say without hesitation that to the best of my knowledge, some of our friends are indeed our family. Another factor at play is the fact that I think I'm more willing to reach out to these friends than before.

Here's a cute twist on the whole issue. Our girls can absolutely understand who's their friend and who's from a friend whom we consider like family. They even coined a term for describing them, "cousin-friend." So to those of you whose kids are cousin-friends, thanks for being there.

My Parents' Song

Thanks to the genius of Pandora, Danny's Song by Loggins & Messina came on this morning on my walk to the office. To the best of my knowledge, this was my parents' song. It's a beautifully written song.

People smile and tell me I'm the lucky one, and we've just begun,
Think I'm gonna have a son.
He will be like she and me, as free as a dove, conceived in love,
Sun is gonna shine above.

Chorus:
And even though we ain't got money, I'm so in love with ya honey,
And everything will bring a chain of love.
And in the morning when I rise, you bring a tear of joy to my eyes,
And tell me everything is gonna be alright.

Seems as though a month ago I beta chi, never got high,
Oh, I was a sorry guy.
And now a smile, a face, a girl that shares my name,
Now I'm through with the game, this boy will never be the same.

(To chorus:)
Pisces, Virgo rising is a very good sign, strong and kind,
And the little boy is mine.
Now I see a family where there once was none, now we've just begun,
Yeah, we're gonna fly to the sun.

(To chorus:)

Love the girl who holds the world in a paper cup, drink it up,
Love her and she'll bring you luck.
And if you find she helps your mind, buddy, take her home,
Don't you live alone, try to earn what lovers own.

(To chorus:)

A Tough Friday And How I Found Beauty to Help

I can't put my finger on the exact cause, the final straw, but I've had a tough Friday. I miss my father (zt"l), there's no two ways about it. But that's not new. It's been 9+ months since he passed away. I'm definitely more emotional in general since then, more likely to "need a moment" when something comes up. In addition, the mother (zt"l) of a dear friend, perhaps my closest, passed away recently. That's also upped the ante a bit, I suppose. As my friend has inched out of her emotional cocoon, we've spent more time together, which is a blessing for both of us. But I ache for her, for her mother, and for the world for losing a truly wonderful person. And in turn, that has made me even more sensitive. The world has felt uglier to me, someone who usually can see beauty in some pretty ugly things.

As I walked to work this morning, surrounded by the visual cacophony of Koreatown, with its bazaar of bizarre West African-owned wholesale shops, selling $2 skirts and alien (to me) hair care products, I wanted to scream out, to tell these clueless people how these two great lights of human potential had been snuffed out too soon. I yearned to shake them from their mundane existence. The intense emotional back-and-forth between sadness and anger was exhausting me, and I still had more than 10 blocks to go. My train had been delayed (again!) and I had had too much time alone on the way in--maybe that was a big part of it.

But as I reached a street in the mid 20s, tears still streaming, I caught a glimpse of a store selling hideous baseball hats. I laughed, at first derisively, but then I paused and chuckled as I thought that probably, it was actually the cacophony, emotionally jarring and cognitively dissonant, that was a source of beauty. It occurred to me that perhaps it was precisely the kaleidoscopic nature of our world, simultaneously messy and clean, happy and sad, loud and quiet, particularly noticeable in New York, a city beloved by both people I was mourning, which was thrilling and terrifying all at once and was in fact, the very definition of beauty.

I don't mean to take anything from the great John Keats when I say that I felt a great truth emerge as I continued to stroll south on 5th avenue, a little less weight on my shoulders and with a bit of a bounce in my step.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know

I'm still having a tough Friday but being reminded of the beauty in everyday life, which has helped me focus on the truth and the beauty of my father's life--and that of my dear friend's mother--has helped.

Good shabbos.

Recovering from a Long Weekend

This 4th of July weekend proved it. A long weekend is more tiring than the weeks leading up to and following said long weekend....at least if you have Energizer Bunnies for children.

Maybe we should institute some kind of rule that allows parents an extra half day after a long weekend. I would have been much more productive yesterday if I could have slept in until 11 and started working around noon.

Is Idiocracy closer than we feared?

Mike Judge's science farction movie, Idiocracy, described a future America run by people who were just plain dumb. It was caused by the systematic genetic dumbing caused by the lower, less educated classes reproducing like rabbits, and the upper, more educated classes always finding excuses to put off having a child. The first ten minutes breaks down this scenario in a funny but sad way. As my father always said, science fiction is just the present slightly exaggerated.

Today, the New York Times has a blog on how my generation is at the root of this issue. The opening sentence shares a frightening statistic, "Nearly half (43 percent) of college-educated Generation X women — those currently between the ages of 33 and 46 — are childless." This phenomenon is often apparent on House Hunters, the default programming on our television these days, it seems. Very often, the featured family on House Hunters is a couple in their 30s or 40s, sans children, looking for a vacation home or an upgrade. They're a dual-income family, clearly well educated, and completely fixated on double sinks and granite. The closest reference to a family is the repeated playful jokes about maybe needing a nursery, "someday." Here's one such example. Maybe they met too late in life to have kids, you say? Sure, I understand that. Mr. Right, etc. But while I'm a believe in fate and G-d's will, I think we need to pick our heads up from our laptops every once in awhile to notice when they are trying to tell us something.

It may sound absurd but I'm always so happy when they highlight a family with kids doing the house hunting.

Meetings about Meetings

My company is at an interesting stage in its growth. It's really exciting. But we do tend to have lots of meetings about meetings. That is, we sit around and talk about the things we'll need to do via another meeting that is or will be scheduled in the near future.

This is clearly not the best scenario and at times is downright laughable. But...what's a better way? Status meetings are a way of life in corporate America, especially in an Agile world. Or are they?

Here We Go Again...

I'm trying to start blogging again. We've started an initiative at work to build a corporate blog, about which I am very excited, but I realized that I needed to drink some Kool-Aid and get back to blogging.

Here's a question: what did people do in the elevator before smartphones? It seems to be completely Pavlovian...the elevator doors close, and people flip open their smartphones. I was in the elevator with our CEO yesterday and we both did this at the same time. Clearly this means I'm upper management material, but what else does it say about our society that it's so commonplace?