On this warm, wet Christmas, I ambled without purpose somewhere in America. I prefer the inevitable disappointment of a sodden Christmas--the remains of an earlier December snowfall dribbling down storm drains, the exiled smokers unshivering, unbothering with jackets, their exhales elongated by the humidity, the coziness of houses all the more fakely theatrical against temperatures well above freezing.

Through the neighborhood I wandered, on a grid of streets imposed on what I'm told was farmland when this house was built. It was now crowded with houses, fences, carports, patios. It was some kind of aspiring suburbia, a place with no center, a feeling of eerie quiet despite the driveways filled with the cars of holiday visitors, a quiet broken not by the sounds of anything living but the insistent rush of cars down the main road nearby, on which nearly any day but today speeding cars could obtain equally fast food.

All that seems to differentiate most places in America from one another are the subtle variations in suburbia, variations in the sizes of driveways, the crab quotient of grass, the gaud of Christmas decorations. This neighborhood was modest; it was fighting for its notion of suburbia against the odds of limited space and funds. It's been described to me as "The Queens" of the midsized city where it is, and I have accepted this analogy as mostly accurate. But as I wandered and took it in I thought with the indignance of Queens native how not Queens this place was, how many tiny things about it made it a place entirely different from the borough of my birth, how the energy was all wrong, the scale of the highway overpasses was different, and there was no sight nor even the remotest hint of a tsunami of skyline looming nearby, no intimations of a shabby proximity to greatness and ruin at once. The reassuring sadness of the Chinese takeout restaurants was not the same here, and why did they not smell of grease from a hundred yards away? This was not the Queens of this other place, there was still only one Queens and thousands of these places, and this is no less true just because Queens is mine and all these others places are not.

But they are. I prowl the streets of an unfamiliar middle-class suburbia one bleak holiday afternoon and I am uncomfortably aware that I am in the place that is stamped on my passport. I know these streets, these cars, these Christmas lights. The Christmas lights in other countries are different. Differently shaped, differently colored. I bought a strand of the big, multicolored kind of Christmas lights in England once to decorate my room, and they were the same as the big, multicolored American ones, but not. How could they be the same? They were called "fairy lights." (It is not the intent of the British to make us feel like strangers in our own language, but it happens anyway.) It's the little things that are different in foreign countries, the things you never think about. The light swtiches, the toilet flushes, the shape of the flat people on signs that mark bathrooms or warn of imminent danger. So why in America, where the light swtiches and toilet flushes and signage and Christmas lights are all familiar, do I feel so foreign, alternately imagining myself to be predator and prey to these innocuous raised ranches, feeling so alien and lost and full of menace and numbness?

My only company on the street was the smokers. A thin man with a thinner mustache smoked morosely on the hood of a red sports car. His all-black outfit was to big on him, and it included leather pants. I turned the corner and on the next block a woman in a bright red sweater jangled her charm necklace with each drag on her cigarette. Her hair was long and perfectly straight. At first she appeared young, but as I approached, her face revealed her to be older and older. I wondered if she was married or divorced, if she had children or not, how she would fit into the gathering she was soon to rejoin. Was she the single sister who helped aggressively with the dishes? Was her voice raspy from smoking and if so, was it sexy or sad?

I was walking in circles inside the neighborhood, so I made for the main road. I hate to walk on main roads where the cars punch through the air at highway speeds, and you can't walk in the middle of the street. On a quiet side street you can walk in the middle of the street, right on the line if there is one and it pleases you.

There was a park not far away, a collection of well-maintained fields for every imaginable youth sport, bleachers for spectators and a tightly locked building for equipment storage and child molestation. On these fields the unseen children in the decorated houses played their organized sports. Runty kids got hits and fat kids bobbled slowly toward third, soccer was viciously mothered and local buisness were advertised on the small, heaving backs of children young enough to have shoulder blades protuberant as the stumps of wings. The park was empty. Bits of snow melted here and there, no longer snow but frozen and re-frozen into something resembling Sno-Cone before the colored syrup is added.

I turned around and made my way back across the main road, scurrying as I always do, looking left, looking right, looking left, as I was taught in the streets of the borough of Queens. The street we lived on there was so enormous and dangerous that I was never allowed to cross it. As if to protect us permanently from those hurtling cars, my parents moved us to the holy grail of American suburbia: a dead end. It is the job of parents to keep us out of the street, and off if it, to keep us safe from the street in any and all prepositional phrases, and if we must venture into it, to teach us which way to look. The whole time I was in England, my father would end all our phone calls by reminding me to "look right!" He didn't have to. The words "LOOK RIGHT" were painted on the ground, because the British Empire fell, and in the empire that rose in its place, we drive on the right and look to the left.

I made for the only house in this neighborhood whose secret interior I knew. I didn't remember exactly how many blocks it was, or even what street it was on, but as I got closer, I recognized the cross streets. First State, then Federal, then Empire. Empire is where we live.

We here at SuperLefty try not to let a holiday go by without turning a critical eye toward the goings on. What is the real meaning of all the lacivious discussion of a dead, trussed bird? Why exactly are we gathering to celebrate the slaughter of the firstborn sons of our ethnically different neighbors? Why name a day after Labor in a country that has no political party for it? SuperLefty's motto is, if you're celebrating it, it's probably because the Man wants you to. Buy this beeping piece of plastic! Eat this hormone-injected turkey! Act like that enormous talking bunny doesn't terrify you! Pretend the Native Americans just mysteriously disappeared after they taught the Pilgrims about corn!

Yes, the holidays can be stressful, and just as with imerpialism, we have no chance of surviving them if we do not first deconstruct them. Every year, as my neighbors expend even more electricity keeping their lights blinking and their Santa balloons inflated, as my ears bleed upon entry to the most innocuous of retail outlets from the relentless playing of Christmas music, as I try to shut out the chatter of the Christmas outrage du jour, I ponder the true meaning of this holiday of holidays. It's about flashing lights, I decide. No, it's about orgiastic shopping. No, actually, it's about fake snow. It's about a fetishistic obsession with snow, will it snow, will we have a white Christmas, will Christmas be white enough? No, "White Christmas" is an insidious, racist metaphor disguised as a lullaby. It's about family pathology as rendered through orgiastic shopping. It's about the impossibility of trying to figure out what other people want and buy it for them with money. It's about the sorrow of misunderstanding the ones you love. It's about the unbearable gap between fantasy and reality, in weather patterns, in family interactions, in sweater sizes. It's about scarves. It's about felling entire forests of coniferous trees. It's about the lumberjack sexual promise of Christmas tree salesmen. About the gritted teeth in the jaws of the in-laws of interfaith families. From the looks of the parking lot at Yankee Spirits Discount Liquor Warehouse yesterday afternoon, it's about alcoholic beverages. It's about the birth of a pacifist who would later be misunderstood and murdered, and later still used to whip a nation of nearly 300 million into a bellicose frenzy. It's about an ever-increasing number of telltale white headphones on the L train. For my love and I, it's about decorating a two-foot fake silver tree with nicotine gum (someone quit smoking in 2005), eating enchiladas and watching a documentary about the Holocaust. Christmas is about sharing the things you like with the one you love, be the things you like perversity and ethnic food or franchise-store shopping and raw egg mixed with hard liquor.

I was still at a loss for the true, essential meaning of Christmas when I hit upon this bit of wisdom from the source of all lucid thought, everyone's favorite syndicated sex columnist, Dan Savage, to whom Christmas is apparently about running a contest for the goriest loss-of-viriginty stories. Savage writes:

"[W]asn't Jesus Christ responsible for the most traumatic how-I-lost-my-virginity horror story ever told? Not His deflowering, I mean His mother's. As everyone knows, Mary was a virgin when she conceived and a virgin when she gave birth. This means, of course, that Jesus busted His own mom's hymen, kicking it down like a door on His way into the world."

And suddenly I realized: Christmas is about popping Mary's cherry. The whole national obsession--the whole global obsession--with this day and its meanings and reversals of meaning, its amalgamated pagan and Roman and Christian traditions, its songs and stars and mangers and little girls and boys dressed as angels and shepards, its gift bows and gift bags and countdowns and calendars, it's all because of the blessed virgin birth of the little baby Jesus. And what makes this birth so blessed? So miraculous? So utterly unlike all other births?

The fact that Jesus's mother wasn't a dirty whore who fucked.

Mary is a proxy mother for millions of people, a replacement for the one who reminds them of the uncomfortably Freudian nature of their origin. Christmas is about the entire world pretending that their mother didn't have sex with their father.

But as with most valorizations of that which is supposedly so pure, this one ends up inadvertently leaving us with an astronomically grosser image. As Savage points out, if Mary didn't have sex before she got pregnant with Jesus, then it was Jesus Himself who took Mary's prized virginity, not God forbid, the paternal penis. (Does God have a penis?)

I've always been uncomfortable with how much Republicans (and Catholics) talk about the things that supposedly so disgust them. The SEX. And the GAYS. And the GAY SEX. And the WOMEN, having SEX, so much SEX, and then not wanting to be PREGNANT. And the machinations of the medical procedures they seek, the THINGS they stick UP them and IN them, the things the go INTO and come out of their WOMBS. And the SODOMY. The GAY SODOMY we will all soon be having if the GAYS are in the churches, if the GAYS and their GAY, ANAL, sex are sanctified. The SODOMY that we are all inches away from, please, quickly, someone give me a VIRGIN to pray to for my soul, a pure, untouched, untried VIRGIN to meditate on to save me from my sick, sinful sexual predilictions. A nice, pure, innocent, VIRGIN, a mother and a nun all at once, let us never mention her name without mentioning that she's a VIRGIN, let us preface her name with a word that means "untried vagina" every time we pray to her, this will keep us holy, this will keep us SAFE!

When you stop and think about how often the word "virgin" is mentioned in conjunction with Christmas and Christianity in general, it starts to sound a lot like porn. The only pornographically virginal word not used to describe Mary is "tight," but that's probably because none of the male gospel writers thought about what it might be like to give birth with your hymen intact.

Scratch the surface of our culture's attitude toward female sexuality, from puberty to conception to pregnancy to reproductive freedom to the experience of giving birth itself, and you will find a culture obsessed with control and denial. Teenagers are sex objects for grown men, grown women should alter their body hair to look like little girls. There is no amount of scrutiny too great or invasive to apply to any experience in a woman's reproductive life. Let's have teenagers beg judges for abortions! Let's strap women to hospital beds and drug them into birthing before their doctor's next tee time! Let's tell women to be sexually promiscuous and let's still threaten them that they will be childless and alone when their ovaries dry up! Ask any man--straight or gay--about his relationship with the female genetalia and if he is honest, he will probably describe a cycle of fascination, curiousity, alienation and revulsion at this magnetic but alien territory.

The elevation of Christmas to its current status of Most Important Global Holiday is evidence of this complicated fascination with the female as much as it is a lust for the latest piece of beeping plastic or any ritual of family togetherness. Culture has a knack for building us structures in which to talk about that which we find fascinating and revolting from the safety of code and euphamsism. Culture, like people, has a way of bringing the conversation around to what we most want to talk about--but also don't.

People who worship the miracle of birth without sex want to talk about sex--without talking about it. People who want to talk about virgins want also to talk about whores. Everything implies its opposite, and nothing exists without an antipode. A virgin isn't defined by who she is or what she does, she's defined by what has never done. It's no accident that Mary Magdalene turns up later in the Bible. Where there's a virgin, there's a slut. They even sell soap that way. I just wish people would come out and admit it. If you're into the Virgin Mary, you're into virgins and you prefer not to think of your parents having sex. It's okay--lot's of people feel that way. The internet is full of pornography, some of it made by consenting adults, to cater to your sexual predilictions, and New York, at least, is full of therapists who can help us all deal with the somewhat revolting circumstances of our origins. But let's not cover up these feelings with compulsive shopping, compulsive overeating and a lot of senseless bell-ringing. Let's talk about what's really going on. We'll all feel so much better afterwards.

So Merry Mary's Cherry, everyone. This is a beautiful holiday about snow, about shopping, about the smell of pine needles, and about a beautiful young virgin getting her cherry popped by her own son's emerging head. And it's okay.

Day 2: Did not leave immediate neighborhood.

Day 3: Walked from North Brooklyn to Midtown, boarded train, left entire city.

At the exact moment expensive Amtrak train left Penn Station, service was restored. From 200 miles north, I can feel the L train rumbling, and with equal contentment, the well-deserved, intact 4% of workers' salaries settling into their bank accounts.

"I thought I would be rich in America, but I am not," said Malik, my companion during the ninety-minute trip from Williamsburg to Park Slope earlier tonight. In the first evening rush hour of the transit strike, we crawled through bumper-to-bumper traffic as I tried to make my way to a 7:00 tutoring appointment. Sometimes we chatted, sometimes we sat in companionable silence and sometimes we carried on two separate cell phone converstaions in two different languages.

Malik is from Pakistan. He has three daughters and a wife in Valley Stream, Long Island. "My wife no work," said Malik. "So I work all the time." Malik drives his cab fourteen hours a day Monday through Thursday and twenty hours Friday and Saturday. He has pain in his lower back from driving his cab 96 hours a week and his chiropractor just sent him to get an MRI. He's been in America for twenty years and it's been very, very hard. But, Malik said, he loves America, though, loves it very much.

As Malik and I sat snarled in traffic on the BQE, I contemplated for one particularly long, motionless quarter-hour an enormous banner tacked to the side of a building advertising the new H3 from Hummer. The H3 is a smaller, daintier Hummer with a fuel economy of 15 miles per gallon in the city and 18 miles per gallon on the highway. I contemplated just how many people there were on this particular highway, people who were usually in transit unseen beneath the earth, just how many people were dependent on the labor, also unseen, of transit workers to go between Points A and B (and C through Z) on a daily, safe basis. I contemplated Malik, who I realized was about my father's age, and noticed that he looked remarkably like my father. He was driving the car, like my father usually did. He was stuck in New York traffic, as we often were. He was patient and resigned, but also tired and frustrated. I could see his right ear, right cheek and right eye, a view I associate with my father almost as much as his face when viewed from head-on. Just as it had on many car trips, my view drifted from the world outside the car window to the world inside, trying to decipher from the right ear, right cheek and right eye of the driver his facial expression and mood.

Malik worked to support his daughters in Long Island as my father had worked to support us. Malik drove through traffic to bring them and me to and fro as my father will drive through traffic tomorrow to pick my brother up at college for the last time. Malik expected to be rich in America. Perhaps he did not expect to work so much, or drive so much, or drive so much for so long as his work. But as I looked past Malik, father of three, resident of Long Island, expatriate of Pakistan, through the windshield at the looming image of the new Hummer H3, I wondered if he just did not understand that in America, fathers are expected to work and to drive, or in his case, do both at the same time.

Dear Officials of the United States Government,

Not long ago, I wrote to thank you for your interest in my reproductive system. But I never expressed my gratitude for all the benefits I have reaped from your interest in my reproductive system.

You see, around the time of my sexual maturity, I was something of an ugly duckling. Boys did not like me. I was not considered attractive by conventional standards of American suburbia.

But when I realized that men, powerful men, men who flew planes, men who wore cowboy boots, men who owned oil companies, masculine manly men, were fascinated with my body, all that changed. I realized that I must be a very beautiful, sexy, and attractive woman, a woman with a very hot body, and more than that, that my body is a place not only worthy of passing interest, nor even fascination, but obsession. Through the United States Government's willingness to discuss my crotch and womb on television, I began to feel as if my crotch radiated a special power that drew men to me as if by an invisible magnetic force.

The United States government's obsession with my crotch has empowered me to sleep with any man I want. If I was ever plagued by the insistent echoes of the insecurities of the science nerd I once was, I simply thought to myself, "The Commander in Chief is totally obsessed with my crotch! Of course that half-drunk graphic designer would be happy to see what all the fuss is about."

Because of your interest in my body and the confidence it has given me, I have been able to slut around with the highest quality of male specimens one can slut around with. I have slept with egotistical European trend forecasters, incoherent drummers and innovative found-object sculptors. I don't think I would have had the confidence to make witty drunken conversation with these people and then have sex with them if I did not have the voices of my President, my vice-President, my Attorney General and other government officials whispering encouragement in my ear.

I have had a lot of fun, meaningless, no-strings-attached sex with no consequences whatsoever, and it is all because of YOU, The United States Government. You guys always wanted the best for me, even when I was too scared to admit that I deserved it. I'm just saying thank you, from the bottom of my heart and womb, for everything.

Yours in gratitude,
Emily Weinstein

SuperLefty has been tapped by some kind of vast liberal mega-blog. You may join the betting pool to see how long it takes before they notice she doesn't really care about politics by sending an email Subject: SuperLefty Thinks All Politics Are A Method of Mind Control Betting Pool to the address at the bottom of this web page.

SuperLefty's posts can be read here.

Other people's posts can be read here. Other people whose posts you can read include various government officials and John Cusack.

As always, please continue to check in at superlefty.com for posts not related to evading the discussion of the machinations of pasty white men with far too much capital, or if you are seeking information on Laura Brannigan. (SuperLefty fun fact: 20% of all SuperLefty traffic comes from internet wanderers who Google "Laura Brannigan" and find this post.) Laura Brannigan update: still dead, unfortunately.

One of the early signs of aging I have noticed is that I can't stay up for two straight days anymore. Another is that I harrumph into my newspaper when teenagers make noise on the train. I ride the train with a lot of teenagers, since I go to work when they get out of school. I snap my newspaper in irritation, glaring at them as the celebrate the daily event of being sprung from jail. "Harrumph," I grumble. "Some people who work are trying to enjoy their newspapers in peace."

The only people more exhibitionistic and loud than high school students are college students. The only college students more exhibitionistic and loud than the average college student are those in performing art school. The only students at performing art college more exhibitionistic and loud than the average theatre undergraduate are the female ones. I think that's who was sitting next to me the other day as I ate my lentil soup at Murray's Bagels.

The two girls at the neighboring table were extreme versions of themselves, whoever it is they were. One had a clever t-shirt and a trendy Afro, the other a mane of dyed red hair falling in her face and a pair of striped armwarmers. They spoke so loudly, so confidently, with so much emphasis on so many of their words that they turned English into a whole other language, a language of capable of portraying shock and dismay and revulsion and detachment and scorn and most of all, bravado, at a speed and volume for which I believe the technical term is "fortissimo."

"Ugh, sometimes, I'm just like, okay, we hooked UP, now it's the morning, can you please just GO."
"It's like, you didn't have the decency to take off your SOCKS last night, can you just put the rest of your clothes back ON? Now?

"You know Jake?"
"The guy who had fleas?"
"Yeah, the one who gave everyone fleas. Wasn't that SO GROSS? Anyway, Jake..."

"Well, I was living with Chloe."
"The one in the wheelchair?"
"Yeah. But she was so demanding. She thinks I abandoned her, but like, whatever. She hates me know, but I was like, I am NOT going to live with you so fucking FAR from campus. I have to get up at, like, SIX to make a class at NOON."
"How was she getting to class?"
"She. Was. Driving!"
"What the FUCK?"

"Most jazz guys are so weird. They're nonsocial. Like that guy Tom."
"Oh, God, he wears basketball shorts EVERY DAY. It's like he was on the basketball team and one day he said, 'I think I'll go to jazz school.
"I KNOW."
"But Joey's cool."
"Oh, I LOVE Joey. He's so funny. We were like sitting around, and Joey said, we're being animals in improv, and I'm a dog. And then he got right up in Michael's face and said, 'WOOF.' It was SO FUCKING FUNNY."

What struck me the most about these girls was that they were so world weary. That had seen it all. They were so sick of having to talk to guys after sex. They had everyone pegged. Everything that happened to them was kind of a HUGE DEAL, but also kind of completely ridiculous and hysterically funny. And I knew they were faking it, because I was them once, and I faked it. I faked bravado, I faked knowing what lay in the deepest recesses of person's soul because he wore basketball shorts. But somehow these things became true. I acquired some of the world-weary wisdom and ennui I was only faking as inside I lept puppylike at the idea of getting laid or passing off a witticism. Now I really do know what it means when someone wears basketball shorts. I really do take things with a grain of salt. Sometimes. Kind of. I really have seen it all, or at least some of it, before.

I wanted to say to these girls all manner of horrible cliches, like, "don't rush it!" and "Just be yourselves!" or "If you must invent a personality, above all things, be original!" and also, "SHUT THE FUCK UP!" and "There is life after theater class!" but also, "Enjoy it while it lasts!" and "Everything won't always be new!" and "One day very soon you'll stop pretending you're older than you are!" and "Oh my God, you are yelling in my EAR!"

In some ways, these girls were awful. But in other ways, they were thrilling. Kind of like being 21.

Rebecca (Bert to my Ernie, Rachel to my Monica, Trapper to my Hawkeye) overheard this conversation on the subway the other day. Two young bankers were talking, the kind who look like they just removed their baseball caps and sexual double-entendre t-shirts, hit the group shower for an invigorating rinse and towel-snapping and pulled on some spanking new suits from J. Capitalist. But these weren't your average shallow young financiers. These young financiers were the philosophizing kind, and their wisdom is this:

"Life is what you make it. I learned that a long time ago. If you want to be depressed, then you will be. If I wanted to be depressed, I could be, like, a drunk poetry writer."

And if I wanted to be depressed, I'd stop drinking and writing and be a banker.

You read it here first. Now read it without the distraction of doohickies hanging from the edges of the characters.

While I have yet to answer the long-standing reader question on my thoughts on the Isreali-Palestinean issue, I feel ready to address Tony from Austrailia who wrties to ask, "What's in a martini?"

Well, Tony, that's a very complicated question. Traditionally a martini is made of gin, but I actually prefer vodka. We all have our alcohol superstitions, and one of mine is that vodka is pure and clear and good for you, whereas gin is vile and dangerous and will give you a hangover. Unless you mix it with tonic water. As you observe, the G & T is a fine drink, especially for hot summer nights. Or cold winter mornings. Refreshing, twinkly, garnished with lime--nearly a perfect incarnation of gin.

Leaving aside the debate of Gin vs. Vodka (which I do realize is like leaving aside the debate of Mets vs. Yankees, John vs. Paul, night vs. day, Paris vs. London, L.A. vs. New York, girls vs. boys, rock vs. rap, Roe vs. Wade, etc., etc.), here is what is in a martini:

Hard, clear liquor

AND

Not much else.

Technically, there is vermouth in a martini, but a true lover of the martini prefers it "dry," which means very little vermouth. The suggested ratio is 4:1 liquor to vermouth, but I prefer something more like 6:1 or even 8:1. There is a technique known as "dusting" in which vermouth is never added to the drink, but merely swirled around in the martini glass and then poured out, or swirled around in the cocktail shaker with ice and then poured out before the liquor is even added.

But if you're going to drink it dry, you might also like it dirty. The dirtiness of martinis refers to the amount of olive juice in the mix. Because if you're going to drink a glass of vodka, you might enjoy it more if its burn was cut with the briney tang of olives. So if you order (or make) it dirty, you throw some olive juice in there. And ask for three olives, because they look so cute jostling in the bottom of your glass as you sip. You can also garnish a martini with something called "pearl onions," but I think these things are horrid and look like little eyeballs.

In every bar between here and Port Augusta, Austrailia one can find all manner of exotic "signature" martinis from Pomegranate to Espresso, costing upwards of USD$9, but the martini I like best is the one I'm drinking right now--an Absolut vodka martini, very dry and very dirty, with three olives. Three little green olives, soaking in alcohol, waiting to be plucked, sucked and chomped.

Our discussion of olives is as natural a segue as any to the land in which they grow. Michael J. Brandt, if you are still reading, my thoughts on the Israeli-Palestinean issue are these:

I know too little about this conflict. No amount of Googling or reading or querying friends in Peace and Conflict Resolution graduate studies programs has illuminated me on the issue. This is what I think, based on what little I know:

That to a practicing Jewish friend who once visited, the treatment of Palestineans by the state of Israel resembled "apartheid." She used this word with dismay, describing how she expected to feel "a homecoming" and instead felt horrified, digusted, ashamed that she had expected to feel a homecoming in a land where anyone could be treated that way.

That in elementary school when I first found out that the Holocaust had precipitated the statehood of Israel, and then saw the pictures of Israel with its fences and barbed wires and walls, I didn't understand why if the point was to ensure that such constructions happened "never again" the very same constructions had been built in what was supposed to be the new land.

That violence is ugliest when it replicates itself like a chronic disease, bounces back and forth in a cycle with in which cause becomes indistinguishable from effect.

That nothing is holy if people are killing one another over it.

That no one is home and no one is safe if someone else has to die to keep them that way.

That those who have been beaten, persecuted, trod upon, treated cruelly, cast out, brutalized or dehumanized often want nothing more than to turn around and do it to someone else. To a person who has been robbed of his humanity, taking someone else's humanity appears to be the only way to reclaim his own.

That if everyone in the Middle East was an atheist things would not be as they are.

That hate breeds hate, and hate can become habit.

That wherever there is violence and suffering, when the people who suffer the most are brown and those who argue that they bring the suffering upon themselves are beige, I am always a little suspicious.

That to try to quantify who suffers "the most" is a pointless question, and a much better one is, what are the roots of everyone's suffering?

That there are so many shades of gray in any dispute that everyone but the people who live it are tempted to reduce it to black and white.

That just as there are many, many people in America who are horrified at the violence done in our name, there are many, many Israelis and Palestineans equally horrified by the violence done in their name.

That like most wars in today's world (and perhaps most of yesterday's wars as well) this one is not about what it appears to be about, or even what most of its participants believe it to be about. It appears to be about homelands and and history and human rights and whose God really exists, about documents and delcarations and borders. But to me it is an abstraction. There is certainly nothing abstract about a bomb, or the images of a bomb's aftermath. And yet while I've come to some understanding about the idea of terrorism and what that means in our material reality, or the idea of deomcracy or law or civilization, even, and how these ideas are related to our social, economic and political realities, how they are used and misused by politicians, the media, artists, workers, teachers and solidiers, how they are understood and misunderstood, for some reason when it comes to this issue, this idea, this conflict--somehow understanding eludes me completely. I sense that there is something about it I do not grasp and perhaps will never grasp unless I go there, unless I see for myself a tank in an olive grove, a checkpoint, the Wailing Wall. And perhaps I still won't understand unless I go Auschwitz and Dachau, or maybe I won't understand unless I go to Darfur.

That the Jews have a homeland, and I am living in it, and while it is an imperfect place there are Jews here, and Arabs, and we live in relative peace.

It's been a pretty mellow, run-of-the-mill Friday here in Brooklyn. I went to yoga class with one of my favorite yoga teachers. I've been yoga-whoring around lately, trying to use up a book of yoga coupons that expires at the end of the year. It turns out that a free yoga class is not necessarily as good as a yoga class with someone who you, like, trust as a spiritual leader. After yoga class, I had lunch with my yoga teacher and we talked about Oprah and karma. We talked about the spiritual corruption of the West in which we expect objects to satisfy our need for spiritual fulfillment. After lunch, I decided to put off dealing with my bank overdraft by telephone and instead go shopping at the one place a person with a negative bank balance can go shopping, which would be the vintage clothing store that accepts clothing trades. I traded in an itchy scarf for a long-sleeved silk Neiman Marcus dress printed with butterflies.

My boyfriend arrived from the faraway city where he for some reason lives. I finally called the bank and did not speak with the lovely lady from Montana who assured me that all charges would be reversed and instead spoke with some bitch who totally screwed me by reversing one of the charges and then informing me that there were four more increasingly escalating charges on the account (which I knew) that she couldn't deal with because they hadn't posted and now that she had reversed the one (which I had specifically asked her not to do) it was unlikely that anyone would reverse the others. I cried with frustruation about my general stupidity and general financial uncertainty to my boyfriend, who reassured me that I was not a worthless human being because I had overdrawn my checking account. We ate some tuna melts. We took a bubble bath. We watched some M*A*S*H. I experienced the clearheadedness that comes after an adult-frustration temper tantrum (a temper tantrum related to cellular telephone overcharges, bitchy bank representatives, fear of total artistic and financial failure, or hormones, none of which play a role in the temper tantrums of toddlers), and relegated the bank overdraft charges to The Stupid Fund.

The Stupid Fund is a Fund I have set up for the inevitable hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars I will lose in my lifetime due to my own stupidity. The Stupid Fund is where money goes when you just fuck up. The Stupid Fund is now large enough to sponsor several children in the Third World or many months of rent-free living in the First World. It contains thousands of dollars in cell phone overages paid to the AT & T company (now fucking Cingular), hundreds of dollars in unecessary fees paid to Fleet Bank (now fucking Bank of America), $50 paid to the New York City Police Department for trespassing, $547 dollars paid to the town of Port Washington by my parents for the parking meter I destroyed during a rather ugly--but thankfully only mildly injurious--car accient in 1997, as well as countless other sums I have racked up simply by being lazy, unobservant or generally stupid. Luckily, as they say, it's only money. Dent a fender? The Stupid Fund. Accidentally make a $200 phone call? The Stupid Fund. Need to hire a lawyer to defend you from criminal charges?--hopefully, your Stupid Fund is endowed by some kind of genius grant or inheritence.

Then there's also the Sooner or Later theory. Even if I had that money now, Sooner or Later I would need to make more. Even if I hadn't bought that stuff, Sooner or Later I would have bought it. Sooner or Later, money was going to bite me in the ass. That's the problem with living in a capitalist society and not being Paris Hilton. Sooner or Later I was going to have to hustle, sooner this gravy train was going to end. Freudian analysts say that money is tied up with sex and death. I don't know about that but I do know I want a lot of it all the time and I am sure am afraid of what will happen when it all disappears.

It's now just after midnight and there's only one thing I've come away from this day with to ponder, and that is:

Not too long ago, a man who had run for president of this excuse for a great nation appeared on television advertising a pharmaceutical drug that gives impotent men erections. He was on television making horribly transparent innuendoes that Britney Spears was giving him an erection, even though he was, like, ninety. He said, "Down boy," ostensiably to a dog, but everyone knew it was really to his penis. I believe he was advertising Pepsi at the time, and only referencing the advertisement he had done for the drug that gives impotent men erections, which had by that time become a cultural touchstone.

Well, as one of my favortie professors used to say to me in college, "It's the world we live in."

The inhabitants of apartment A2 have been awaiting with rather frenzied anticipation the arrival of the second half of the Scorcese documentary on Dylan from Netflix. The inhabitants of apartment A2 admit to each other that they have been thinking about this documentary a lot, waiting impatiently for its arrival, longing to be watching it. The inhabitants of the apartment drink several glasses of wine and confess to one another that they are wholly, shyly infatuated with young Bob Dylan, a man who ceased to exist when he was in a motorcycle accident and went into seclusion to raise his five children at the exact age they both are. The inhabitants of the apartment watch the documentary and murmur the best pieces of artistic advice to one another. The best pieces of artistic advice seem to be to not care what anyone thinks, shape events and actions to your own liking, insist on your version of the story, trust your instincts, fuck with the media, have an enormous ego, refuse to be a spokesperson for anything, and belong to no institution but that of your own persona and recreate it frequently.

The inhabitants of the apartment watch the documentary and become despondent that they are not, and will never be, Bob Dylan.