ObsessiveJew.com

My last spate of blog entries came in late January and, due to circumstances completely under my control, I decided I was too glum to write.  Don’t get me wrong, my misery, perhaps more than anyone I know, enjoys company. Though, on second thought, enjoys is the wrong word as I haven’t enjoyed anything at all since… Well exact dates aren’t important and clearly are not the point.

If you’ve read all of my entries you know I’ve been staying part of the time at my folks place in the suburbs on Long Island and at my sister and brother-in-law’s place in Northern Westchester. At my sister’s place there are the kids. They are completely distracting in the best possible way. I can’t get work done because I’m literally compelled to watch them and listen to them all the time: Telling each other stories; Playing — quite adeptly — on the computer; Singing, dancing and writing; and, Sometimes fighting. But they are a joy and being there is a joy as well.

It’s not quite the same at my folks house.  Don’t get me wrong, I love my mother as if she were my own mother (Although she actually is my biological mother I prefer to keep some ‘healthy’ phycological dysphoria on this one to keep me from jumping). I also love my step-dad. He and I have lots in common, including an unhealthy obsession to with computers and gadgets. But I’m isolated on an island of neurosis. There is never a soul on the street, or in the ‘development’ (this one created just after Levittown and in much the same way: A cookie-cutter Long Island nightmare).

This Our house is also a hotbed of ADD, OCD, perhaps bipolar disorder and your run-of-the-mill neurosis.  My mother is a worrier and it informs everything she says and does. And, if one is not careful, it leaches out and infects everything it touches. Worrying, my friends is a disease — unless of course someone is actually following you with a gun or, G-d forbid, the government starts to mass produce yellow Stars of David.  In cases like that however, active resistance is best and any worrying should be purged tout de suite.

That perpetual progrom that resides just below the surface of most Jewish women’s brains just makes them and, in particular, their first-born sons crazy.  

Save it for when we really need it mom!! There are enough Republican Jews (akin to African-American members of the Ku Klux Klan) out there that are going to need a megadose of reality at some point! Until then…

So I’m back on Long Island searching for the impossible: An inexpensive yet perfect apartment/office in Manhattan.

Kids can be cruel. One of the things you can count on when the prepubescent chips are down is the love of one’s mother. Now, don’t get me wrong, I had her love. Too much love. The kind of smothering love that forces you to sleep in a fetal position. Love with the intensity of four heavy-set adults standing on your chest. Obsessive love with a squeeze so tight and overbearing a python would be jealous. That, my friends, is the love of a Jewish mother.

After a particularly horrible day at school, having been chided by the other kids (probably for exhibiting some obsessive-compulsive affectation), I came home looking for the support a son needs from a mother.

Instead, I was treated to a barrage of attacks:

 

“What did you do to make them so angry? “You should have just ignored them.” “Couldn’t you have asked Michael (my best friend) for help?”

She had turned the entire incident around to somehow make it my fault. And, to add insult to injury, she would have handled it much better, of course. Embarrassment turned to frustration and then, inevitably to anger.  I screamed back at her:

 

“Mom, you’re ruining my life!”

With a cool, earnest yet indifferent tone she responded,

“Well someone has to.”

I went to my bedroom, got into bed and lay in the fetal position.

Schmaltz of the Day: Snarkiness — the New Irony

I’m sick of snarky. Why must all criticism in mass media be snarky to be considered effective?

My mother and a long line of critical Jewish mothers before her criticized not to be funny, but because they were right. They didn’t care if you laughed, cried or suffered years of therapy as a result. They were right and they would stop at nothing to let you know you were wrong. Simple. Comedy, something I believe was a Jewish invention, now takes the place of having an opinion. Snarky falls squarely in the middle of all points of view.

Let the viewer make up his or her mind, they say. The TV personalities and producers that say that, don’t believe it any more than you or me. The viewer has no brain. That’s precisely why he or she is watching television in the first place.

And, that is why they choose to laugh at Bush’s malapropisms instead of doing anything about them. So watch the Daily Show (yes, I love Jon Stewart) and watch Colbert but don’t for a second think that by watching you are doing. Like my mother used to say about anything I happened to be doing at that particular moment:

“Alan, don’t you think you should be doing [fill in the blank]?”

After the shock of being confronted by my mother for not shaking the snake enough to satisfy her need for the marble floor of her guest bathroom to look more like the marble at the Palace of Versailles, all I could do was to fantasize my escape.

I immediately went to the JetBlue site but found nothing I could afford. Then, my favorite redheaded step-child Josh suggested I try Virgin America for my getaway.

Yes! I booked a flight to Los Angeles for that Friday, just 2 days away, on the second Friday of December. Got my best friend in LA on the phone to set up my airport pickup and to arrange to crash at his place. This was looking good. And, according to Josh I’d be flying there in luxury on Virgin’s near-virgin fleet.

There’d be hip electronica playing in the cabin with intense Virgin Red mood lighting that, like club lighting, makes everyone look good. Considering I was in the middle of a nervous breakdown, all this sounded pretty enticing.

So what I’m going to tell you actually happened on the 7th day of Hanukkah, December 11th, but I’ve been too depressed to blog. Everyone says that being depressed is actually the best time to blog, but that’s a blog topic for another blog post…

So back to what I was telling you. You already know, or you should, that I’ve been forced to live with my mother and stepfather due to a horrible moving mishap. And you may not know that while my mother is a lovely, intelligent, intuitive person that looks incredible for her age, she is also insane.

I’m absolutely sure she is obsessive compulsive, to a fault. And she has a Type-A+++ personality. She is overbearing, as any OCD, ADD Jewish Mother should be, and I am the object of her domineering need to obliterate me with her love. (Reading this would kill her!)

For more than 2 weeks I had been putting up with the Hovering Jewish Mother (Sally Field’s Flying Nun has nothing on my mom!) when she finally broke the camel’s back with that proverbial straw. I had just returned from taking a tinkle to “my” desk in my sister’s old room when I heard a knock on the door. I really did not want to answer but I did. She opened the door and had a coy, almost coquettish grin on her face. I knew I was in for it but I really had no idea just how far in.

“I really have to teach you how to pee,”

she said with a silly grin on her face. 
 
As if I hadn’t heard what I clearly had heard, I replied,

“What?”

She said,

“I had to teach your step-father how to pee correctly too.”

As if that confession would relieve the retched strains of embarrassment I was now feeling. 

 
I was already broken, like a prisoner of war, and all I could muster was,

“We are not having this discussion.” 

That was it. She had, at the very least, just undone years of therapy. What a waste of time. Of money. And I had nothing left. Yet she went on.

“Alan, this is serious. You’ll ruin the marble floor! Marble is porous!”

I told her I’d be more careful and then, after she left and had closed the door behind her, I searched the floor for my balls.

I have heard the phrase “it could be worse” too many times to count in the last few months. First, a breakup. Then surgery. Then credit card debt. Then the landlord is suing. Then the IRS wants its money now. Then trying to find a new place to live. Then packing and moving and the ex is not around to help.Then moving day.

Oh my G-d, everything is going smoothly… Too smoothly. And then, the person I’m moving in with — who is subletting the place illegally from the coop’s owner — has not secured the permit necessary for me to move in! My belongings sit on an idle pod (people move with pods now) in the parking lot of a 60′s-era low- to medium-income cooperative housing development that feels like Soviet-era Russia.  

Security guards surround the moving truck KGB-style, though they’re jabbering in Spanish, not Russian like the KGB or, ironically, like my movers, and just stare at me like I’m the enemy of the people, just daring me to move a single possession out of my pod.

So I have the movers re-load the pod and send the moving van to Long Island, to my mother’s house. Now all of most of my boxed stuff (and this was my step-father’s request) is confined to a 3 by 15 square tile area on the basement floor. The rest of my stuff is in the garage and they’ve already made plans to rid the garage of that small line of boxes by exiling them to the neighbor’s unused garage. So here’s the point: Every single one of the above-mentioned trauma’s have caused my friends and family to tell me “it could be worse…”

Well folks, it can and it does get worse. So do me a favor and don’t tell me it could be worse! Here I sit, in the suburbs and I’m not happy. In fact, I’m downright depressed and probably having a nervous breakdown.

And my biggest fear, at this moment, is that it could be worse.