Category: Personal

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[insanity]

Came to believe a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

That’s the Second Step, and it carries the obvious implication that in our active addictions, we were insane. In my case, there are plenty of things I am looking back on and recognizing as pretty distinctly nuts, but two stand out.

The first is dancing. For years, Jenny has wanted to take a ballroom dance class with me. I have always demurred. Dance was one of those things I just didn’t do. I had been made miserable in my youth by episodes of forced Israeli folk dance, which made me feel awkward and oafish, and I was not about to expose myself to that sort of thing again. The part of my mind that kept secrets and fed my addiction recognized dance as one of those dangerous situations that could lead to exposure of my true self, and so I steered clear.

This was insane. Since opening up, admitting my powerlessness over my own desires and revealing what I had kept secret, I have gone through a lot of pain, but I’ve also felt a new freedom that is extraordinary. I no longer have to defend my persona, to prove that I have my shit more together than everyone else. I don’t. I’m an addict and I’ve made a mess of things. So now I can dance.

For the past few weeks, Jenny have been going every Saturday to the Dance Chelsea studio for classes in ballroom, Latin and swing dancing. It’s ridiculously enjoyable. Nor am I half bad at it — which is not a big surprise considering how many half-witted, inbred Hapsburgs learned to waltz without injury. Dancing is great fun, and it turns out it’s also a great way to make amends for broken promises. Who knew?

The second insanity that stands out to me is my longstanding aversion to Legos. In my adult life, I’ve always maintained that I shouldn’t have Legos around because I have an addictive relationship with them. Sure, I smoked pot every day and broke promises to my wife, but at least I wasn’t doing Legos. Clearly, I had this whole addiction thing under perfect control.

Legos were my favorite toy as a kid. Renouncing them, at around 12 years old, was a painful step away from childhood and into what I thought I had to become in order to be popular and cool. Since then, I have only occasionally played with Legos, but I’ve found them absorbing every time.

Now that I’m no longer wasting huge chunks of time on my addictions, it has become clear that I need new hobbies. I talked to Jenny about how maybe it was time to try Legos again: it’s something healthy that I can do with my brain on idle, which is helpful when I just can’t read any longer, and that doesn’t make a lot of noise, so I can do it when she’s still sleeping (unlike practicing the guitar).

For the last week, Jenny and I have been apart. To give us the space we each needed, she went to stay with friends. I resisted this time apart, but it was a huge help to both of us; for me, it was the first time I’d spent with myself, without hiding behind drugs or addictions, in many years. During this time, Jenny made it clear that the goal was to strengthen our relationship, not to end it. She sent me playful emails, and she used her credit card points to reserve a hotel room in Philly to celebrate our anniversary with a weekend away.

And then yesterday, a huge box arrived for me at my office: Jenny had bought me a fabulous Lego set. I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet, but I definitely will — when Jenny and I aren’t practicing our box step or our cuddle-turn.

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[dreams]

They say that regular marijuana use suppresses dreams, and that conversely, quitting pot can lead to highly vivid dreams. It also seems to be a truism that withdrawal from any addiction, physical or psychological, will be accompanied by serious nocturnal psychodrama.

I’ve quit pot before, twice. The first time was when I arrived in India the autumn after graduating from college. For the whole ten days that I spent in Bombay, I was without supply (I quickly found some on my second day in Kathmandu), and my dreams were so intensely vivid that I quit taking my anti-malaria pills, which I blamed for the nighttime freak show, along with my jet lag and my culture shock. It never occurred to me until quite recently that the sudden withdrawal from marijuana might have played a role.

The second time I quit was when I arrived in Korea, where I could at first barely manage to procure dinner, much less find a source for pot, and where the drug is anyway spectacularly illegal. Again I was tremendously jet lagged and culture-shocked, and I was also under a great deal of stress because the employer who had rushed us to Korea was now saying we might not be needed for a month or two. I don’t remember about my dreams then.

This time around, I’ve definitely gone through some intense dreaming, and there have been distinct patterns to those dreams.

At first, I had recurrent dreams of using again, or of doing some of the other compulsive things I’ve quit. The feeling in these dreams was never pleasure in indulging my addictions. It was always shock that I had somehow thoughtlessly stumbled into doing something I had no intention of doing (in one dream, I was at lunch with a coworker in a cafeteria and somehow fell under the influence of a reggae song), along with terrible regret and shame and chagrin that I would have to tell Jenny what I had done.

After a couple of weeks, these dreams receded, replaced by dreams of abandonment. In one context or another, some group of my friends — often friends from middle school, though once or twice my current group of friends — made it clear that they had something important to do and didn’t want me around. These dreams were pretty obviously related to Jenny’s decision to spend some time apart from me. Interestingly, now that Jenny and I are in fact spending a week apart — she’s staying with friends — these dreams have stopped.

My current cycle of dreams has been harder to remember. I have woken up some mornings feeling agitated, but in a few minutes the images are gone. When I think back on these dreams now, all I can find is a vague sense of work needing to be done, along with intimations of the mechanical and transportational. This strikes me as just fine: I have a tremendous amount of psychological and spiritual work to do and a long journey ahead of me.

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[going bananas for k-pop]

Humming Urban Stereo: Banana Shake (YouTube)

Spooky Banana: Mr. Firefighter (YouTube)

Humming Urban Stereo is DJ Jeereen, a Korean who seems to be among the first of his countrymen to grasp the poker-faced kitsch approach to pop music that makes certain Japanese bands so hip. “Banana Shake” is a ridiculously charming ditty that seems to be about exactly what you’d think. You can find more Hus music at their MySpace page and at this fan MySpace page, and you can read a bio at KBS World.

“Mr. Firefighter” is a rare glimmer of hope for the continued existence of one of our favorite Korean bands, Spooky Banana, whose CD we picked up in a cool record store on Daehagno (College Street) in Seoul based entirely on how much we dug the name of the band. Apparently the song has found its way onto a recent arcade release of the video game Pump It Up, which is a Korean knock-off of Dance Dance Revolution.

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[the so called seder]

This seems like about the right time to bring your attention to So Called, a Jewish DJ whose So Called Seder is an astonishing blending of weird old Jewish recordings and performances by a range of fashionable musicians — Killa Priest of the Wu Tang Clan, Trevor Dunn of Mr. Bungle and Chassidic ragamuffin Matisyahu the most prominent among them — into a powerful if gestural retelling of the Haggadah. (MP3s can be found at Brooklyn Vegan.)

Despite the strenuous efforts of modern Jewish movements to sanitize the story of Pesach (Passover) into a parable of universal liberation, I find the traditional story — told for at least the last thousand years — to be quite different: a specific narrative of a specific war in which a specific oppressor is overthrown and his land laid waste. Indeed, much of the emphasis is on a detailed recounting of how severely the Egyptians are brutalized:

Rabbi Yosi the Gallilean said: How do you know that the Egyptians were stricken by ten plagues in Egypt, and then were struck by fifty plagues at the sea?

In Egypt it says of them, “The magicians said to Pharaoh ‘This is the finger of G-d.’ At the sea it says, “Israel saw the great hand that the L-rd laid against Egypt; and the people feared the L-rd, and they believed in the L-rd and in His servant Moses.”

Now, how often were they smitten by ‘the finger’? Ten plagues!

Thus you must conclude that in Egypt they were smitten by ten plagues, at the sea they were smitten by fifty plagues!

Rabbi Eliezer said: How do we know that each individual plague which the Holy One, blessed be He, brought upon the Egyptians in Egypt consisted of four plagues?

For it is said: “He sent against them His fierce anger, fury, and indignation, and trouble, a discharge of messengers of evil”: ‘Fury,’ is one; ‘Indignation,’ makes two; ‘Trouble,’ makes three; ‘Discharge of messengers of evil,’ makes four.

Thus you must now say that in Egypt they were struck by forty plagues, and at the sea they were stricken by two hundred plagues.

Rabbi Akiva said: How do we know that each individual plague which the Holy One, blessed be He, brought upon the Egyptians in Egypt consisted of five plagues?

For it is said: “He sent against them his fierce anger, fury, and indignation, and trouble, a discharge of messengers of evil”: ‘His fierce anger,’ is one; ‘fury,’ makes two; ‘indignation,’ makes three; ‘trouble,’ makes four; ‘discharge of messengers of evil,’ makes five. Thus you must now say that in Egypt they were struck by fifty plagues, and at the sea they were stricken by two hundred and fifty plagues.

In a beautiful track on the Hip-Hop Haggadah, a woman sings in a plaintive voice, over and over, “When Moses was in Egypt land / Let my people go.” But what is truly haunting is her very last line as the roiling track comes to a close: she trails off with, “At night I’ll kill your firstborn son …”

That’s not liberation. It’s murder. Pesach is a holiday that remembers the brutality of war while insisting that sometimes the innocent must be tortured and killed for the sake of a greater cause. It’s a celebration of victory, but also a remembrance of deep suffering by all the parties in the conflict. It’s a stark reminder that the journey to the Promised Land begins with darkness, rivers of blood and the bread of affliction.

Happy Passover.

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[facing reality]

I guess most of the folks who need to be told in person have been told in person, so I am relieved to be able to discuss here some of what has been going on in my life.

Over the last month, I have been facing the reality that I am an addict. I have quit smoking pot and drinking, as well as some of my other obsessive and unhealthy habits. I am going to Twelve-Step Meetings and working with a therapist to overcome my addictions, deal with the underlying issues and begin the long, challenging, crucial work of spiritual and moral growth.

There are issues of broken trust that Jenny and I are working through, and we will be spending some time apart over the coming month in order to deal with that, and we are committed to coming together again afterward to work on strengthening our relationship.

I can’t say what the end result of any of this will be. I can’t make promises. I can say that every day for the last 25 days, I have been deeply committed to the path of recovery and healing, and that is also true for today. It hasn’t been easy, and it won’t be, but it’s good. I’m certain of that.

If you’re a friend or family member and I haven’t told you directly, please understand that I have not at all intended to slight you. Indeed, I would really appreciate hearing from you, and I would be happy to discuss these issues in greater detail in person. Jenny could also use your friendship.

In the meantime, you can enjoy this little sobriety counter I’ve set up for myself. I like looking at it and seeing it tick upwards. I am committed to doing nothing today that will require me to reset it. Tomorrow? I’ll work that out when it gets here.

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[sing along with buffy]

Gothamist strikes again, this time picking up on the Buffy Sing-A-Long each month at IFC, at which Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans get together and sing along with the musical episode, Once More, With Feeling.

I am definitely in the Buffy fan camp, but I am currently working my way through the series and haven’t yet seen the musical episode, which is two seasons ahead of me, so no spoilers please. Indeed, our most recent episode, Hush, is kind of the musical episode’s opposite: super-creepy floating dudes known as The Gentlemen steal everyone’s voices. This is one of the scariest episodes in the series, capturing the flavor of an actual nightmare.

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[revs/cost]

When I first came to New York City in 1993, it was a very lonely place for me. That bitterly cold winter, I didn’t know where to go or how to meet anyone to go with me. I would take the train down from my Columbia dorm to what I thought was the cool part of town, getting off the 1/9 at Christopher Street and wandering back and forth along Bleecker in search of a local music scene, my feet freezing in my inadequate jungle-warfare combat boots. I felt dwarfed — dwarfed in my father’s oversized wool Canadian-navy greatcoat, dwarfed in this huge, thrumming city that promised so much but seemed to keep its promise at a distance, always receding.

Against the crushing anonymity and isolation, I remember discovering and then treasuring the mystery of COST/REVS. These graffiti stickers were everywhere pasted to the backs of street signs and WALK/DON’T WALK signs (back when they still had words instead of today’s pointillist icons). At first it was just those two words, stacked up on each other in block capitals:

COST
REVS

Then they started getting blasphemous: COST SAVES, GOD saves COST, COST IS RELIGION. And then there was the phone number, which it took me months to bother writing down and calling. When I did, I got a rambling, incoherent voice message whose content has long since escaped my memory, which in those days was anyway frequently impaired and clogged with details about Apuleius and archivolts.

What I found so amazing about these stickers was the spectacular human effort that had gone into putting them up. They were everywhere, all across town, on sign after sign: thousands of them. And this was no vast collective effort, like putting up the Brooklyn Bridge. This was the dedicated work of one or two individuals, who for no obvious reason felt like altering the environment in which we all lived. It was human and passionate and sort of sad in its uselessness, but beautiful in its dedication and persistence.

For me, those tags are a marker of a particular time. Finding pictures of them online is surprisingly hard, but that was the moment just before Internet ubiquity, and the Internet is weirdly bad at archiving the time just before camera-phones. It was the era of Giuliani’s battles with East Village squatters, of Newt Gingrich, of a world without Kurt or Jerry. A couple of years later, I would be on Sven’s rooftop on the Lower East Side, watching the Fourth of July fireworks exploding over the Lenin statue on Red Square and talking about how New York City was the seat of empire. But that was in the future. REVS/COST helped me get through those confusing, lonely first years in the big city.

Today Gothamist posted a YouTube video of REVS at work on more recent projects. My favorite quote: “I’m into the individual spirit, anybody who does things in a solo way, like Ted Kaczynski, Mother Teresa, Jesus Christ.” REVS’s identity is still unknown, but at least now you can read about him in Wikipedia.

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[language troubles]

As many of you know, when I first started working at the Korean Mission to the UN, there was another speechwriter her, whom I’ll call C. C had started just a couple of weeks before me, and he was not particularly happy here. With his master’s degree in international affairs, he wanted to be doing something more concrete and more noble. Eventually he had a mental breakdown and stopped coming to work, leading over many months to his firing and replacement by Allen, an altogether more stable guy.

Sometime during his tenure, there was a bit of an office switch: I moved from a shared space with Young to C’s old office, and C moved upstairs to a similar office on the 10th floor. I don’t think the increased isolation did him much good.

Anyway, today I found a very old Post-It note wedged between the radiator and the wall. In a man’s handwriting, it says:

Work to use more:

  • Moreover

  • Commend, concur, is evidenced, emphasize, we note with concern, nevertheless

  • We are of the view

  • In this regard

Knowing how frustrated C was by the formal, repetitive nature of our job, I find this note incredibly sad. Poor guy.

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[the truth]

Nations and individuals do not grow weaker by confronting the truth. They grow weaker by avoiding it and coming to believe their own evasions.

So concludes Jacob Weisberg in a Slate article on The Four Unspeakable Truths about Iraq. It’s a good article about the politics of the Iraq war, and it’s good advice generally — advice I’m trying to take in my own life.

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[a year of korean]

Today marks the one-year anniversary of my current self-guided Korean language study program.

On March 6, 2006, I began Lesson 1 of Integrated Korean: Beginning Level 1. Since then, apart from the occasional hiatus between textbooks or while vacationing, I have been studying steadily. My goal is to work my way through all 10 semesters, to High Advanced Level 2, plus the associated readers and Chinese-character study guide, within five years.

At the end of my first 12 months, I am already well into Lesson 3 of Intermediate 1, which is pretty much where I should be. And I am certainly far more proficient with this fascinating, ornery language than I was at the beginning. But this is a long journey, and there is still far more of it ahead of me than behind.

Of course, I wouldn’t have made nearly so much progress without the diligent, thoughtful efforts of my teacher, Yi Young-ae, who has had the patience to answer my many questions, sit through my halting efforts at my verbal exercises and correct lesson after lesson full of fumbled Korean spelling (청수하다, 텐니스, 각도기) and grammar.