The JackB

"When you're in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in the cell next to you saying, 'Damn, that was fun'." Groucho Marx

Archives for February 2009

Show Me Your Veins

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It is quiet now and I am thankful for it. I need the quiet. I need a moment, strike that, I need many moments where it is quiet and I can decompress. So here I am listening to The Beatles sing While My Guitar Gently Weeps and sharing these words with you.

Should I share the anatomy lesson of the evening or talk about how Facebook is a walk through my life, both past and present. Can we talk about the future and how sometimes it seems so uncertain and yet so permanent. Perhaps we can bang the blog and see what shakes loose. Surely there are some old posts that are worth revisiting.

Or maybe we’ll just scroll through all of these topics and more and see where we end up. Are you ready?

Show Me Your Veins

Earlier tonight the big guy took his evening shower and regaled me with tales of his day. I got the rundown on what happened in school and what he learned. It was kind of fun listening to him lecture me on how to spell Matisse. He made sure that I understood that it is spelled differently from how it sounds. I heard about math and history and minyan. All sorts of fun stuff.

Midway through his monlogue he looked at me and said “Dad, can I see your butt?” Now, that is not the normal course of conversation, so I asked him why. He told me that he wanted to see if I had any veins in it. I assured him that my circulatory system was functional throughout my entire body, but he still pressed on.

In the midst of the conversation he turned around and bent over. He then spread his cheeks and shouted that I should look at his butt to see his veins. I thanked him for the opportunity and told him to stand up. He asked me if I was concerned about not knowing and I assured him that when he was born I conducted a head-to-toe inspection and was confident that eight years later his butt still had veins in it.

Then he asked me if Darth Vader could use the Force to remove the veins from your butt so that you would die. I can’t wait to talk about this at his Bar Mitzvah and then again at his wedding. As a matter of fact I told him that. So he asked me if his mother had veins in her butt.

I was really tempted to tell him that our bedeken was a bit different. We had the ceremonial checking of the veins, the ceremonial checking of the veins in the tuchus, known as the V.I.T. But common sense reigned surpreme and I did not say anything.

Nor did I respond to his comment about whether we have a main vein. If you don’t follow the reference don’t worry about it.

Somehow we made the jump from veins to basketball and whether I could beat Kobe in a game of one-on-one. I explained that I appreciated his faith in my ability, but confessed that I couldn’t beat him. He smiled and told me that he loved watching the Lakers beat the Cavs and the hated celtics and I told him that loved it too.

I think that I’ll save the other stuff for a different post. It is rather late here so for now I think that I will sign off. See you in the A.M.

24-Losing a Bit of the Love

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Watched 24 again tonight and realized that I am losing a bit of that loving feeling. I still enjoy the show but it is become so formulaic that I am finding it harder to enoy.

Chaos hits and Jack Bauer is there to rescue us all. Somehow, some way it all gets done. I might have to write more about this later.

The Death of Customer Service

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Just in case anyone was wondering great customer service is dead. It has migrated from being something that you expected to having become something that is a pleasant sort of surprise.

I have grown so accustomed to bad customer service that when it does happen I have to pinch myself. I expect that if I could see my face it would show me with some sort of dumbfounded look that would be more appropriate for having been kicked in the gut.

The funny thing is that whenever I have to deal with customer service I spend a few minutes psyching myself up for the experience. It kind of reminds me of the feeling I used to get right before a fist fight, except there is no pushing and shoving and no one on the playground egging us on.

The genesis of this post comes from having spent a chunk of time on the telephone trying to get some answers about a few bills. First I had to traverse the lonely and desolate voice jail systems. Automation is great….sometimes.

I love being given so many different options. Press 1 for billing, 2 for customer service, 3 to make a payment, 19 to be told that you are a dumbass for doing business with us etcetera. The best part of the system is that you are given 57 choices and none of them are to speak with a live person.

Side note. If it is a publicly traded company and I am unhappy with their response I almost always “Google” their corporate profile. There I can find a list of company executives and a telephone number to reach them. Sometimes it takes some doing, but even if I have to go through their IR or PR departments I find my way to the desk of some executive who doesn’t want to speak to me.

Most of the time they will see that the appropriate flunky deals with me so that they don’t have to speak with me everyday. If necessary I can be ruthless and relentless. Answer my call or the consequences will be swift and severe or prompt and persuasive.

Anyway, as I spoke with Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum today I took great pains not to tear out giant clumps of hair. It was exceedingly hard because they were exceedingly stupid. I try not to call people stupid and it is not because the eight-year-old that lives here refers to it as the “s” word.

But sometimes it just fits. As I am speaking to the jackass in Solon I am wondering how hard it is to tell me what the balance is on my account. Apparently he thinks I am speaking about teeter-totters because he keeps mentioning something about tilting over or some sort of incomprehensible gibberish like that.

I ditched him for another native English speaker who can’t speak English either. It is bizarre and incomprehensible. No accent, easy to understand the words, except they can’t construct a simple sentence.

Midway through this experience I start laughing because I have lost my mind. I am laughing because I am thinking about them reciting “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers” over and over again. And you know that if that was the only line in their script that is what they would say to you.

“Excuse me, can you tell me what my balance is?”
“Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.”

It is such a dumb idea it is brilliant. I think that I am going to open my own call center just so that I can see this turn into a reality. That maniacal laughter you hear now, well that’s me. I have slipped over the edge and am floating in the pool face down. Ok, can’t be face down because then you wouldn’t be able to understand me, but I think that you get the point.

Life Is Too Short

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I love music. It is one of the great joys of my life. Music is a source of infinite wisdom. It is joy and it is sorrow. It enriches my life. Sometimes I stumble onto certain songs and find that I play them over and over because something in them touches me.

Wake Up by Arcade Fire has something in it that grabs me, but I haven’t quite put my finger on it. The chorus in which everyone sings together reminds me a bit of walking to the Kotel just before Shabbos begins. As you walk through the quarter you can hear the hum of people davening.

For those who can’t relate try to imagine being at a concert where thousands of people sing along. There is an electricity, an energy that you can feel. It is intense. Music tells a story and I love stories and that really leads to the main topic of this post. I want to live far longer than I am going to.

The Shmata Queen have endless discussions about life and what happens when you die. We debate and argue about what comes next, if anything. She has death issues and so do I, but they’re different.

In December of 2005 I wrote a post called Eternal Life in which I touched upon my desire to live long enough to learn and master many skills. That really hasn’t changed. In fact in some ways it has grown stronger. As I become more conscious of my own mortality and more interested in ensuring that I truly live my life I find myself feeling a bit crazed.

There are so many things that I want to do. There are so many places to visit and so many skills to master. How can I possibly do it all within this lifespan and how can I do it at a lesiurely place so that I might enjoy it all.

Oftentimes when I look back at old posts I find myself cringing because I feel like I missed the mark. I look at it and think that the writing is too rough, too choppy, too whatever. But sometimes I look back and I find that I can still tie into whatever I felt that day. Sometimes I look back and I see that I have changed.

This time I don’t see any profound changes. I still want to master all the skills that I listed there and more. It would be nice to become a doctor and a scientist. It would be fantastic to have a chance to become a history teacher and an archeologist. I can add several more items to the list without even trying hard.

Given the time there are a lot of things to do like revisit and rework old posts like Jewish Sex- Between The Sheets. Ok, that I could do. I really could go back and I suppose that sometimes I do. But let’s not get too far afield.

It is well understood that it I could dramatically increase my lifespan I would. And if I could turn back time I would. If I had the power I’d change certain things. Maybe I’d fix it so that I spent that time in Israel or maybe I would have been in that dorm at Indiana, who knows.

I have to focus on what I can do. I have to focus on what makes me happy. I have to focus on what drives me, the things and people that make my heart pound. I have to focus on doing those things that make life exciting. And I am doing that.

Clarification for those who are interested. I do not believe that life is always about excitement. No matter how good it may be there are moments in which it is going to be dull, boring and unpleasant. Understood and accepted.

But that doesn’t have to be the primary thing nor does it have to define me.

I believe that you can always reinvent yourself and I believe that some dreams can become your reality. All it takes is a will to find the way.

Now if only I had a thousand years I could do so much more. I guess that I can settle for another 90 or so.

Twitter Assistance

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I am a relative newcomer to Twitter but have found it to be interesting. The 140 character limit provides a good exercise in brevity.

Sometimes the hardest part is trying to deal with a URL that is exceedingly long.

One resource that I find useful for dealing with this can be found right here.