In 2001, I met this Latina Jewish girl at a succah party.
After some talking, I walked her to her car and made out with her. We made plans to meet the next day, a chag (holy day), for lunch at the home of friends of mine.
So far so good. We meet up. She complains about this Israeli guy I know who’s been causing me problems in the community (trashing me behind my back). She says he’s harassing her. That he keyed her car. Hmm.
I bring her with me to lunch and she won’t eat even a mouthful of bread for chamotzi (blessing over bread that follows kiddush, the blessing over wine, and starts a meal). I’m embarrassed. I realize I can’t take this girl anywhere.
After lunch, she breaks up with me. If I won’t take care of this guy who keyed her car, she’ll find someone who will.
I’m not big at taking care of things for my girl if it means confronting someone or other physical acts of courage. I don’t want that drama in my life. I like a strong woman who wants stuff I can give her like conversation. I’m not a practical bloke. I’m a talker, not a doer.
I guess I have lingering fears about my masculinity over this. That image of her telling me, “If you won’t take care of this, I’ll find someone who will” has stayed with me, left me feeling not so strong.
Dennis Prager says that women look for a man who will clear the path in front of her through life. They will protect her and keep her safe.
I don’t usually find neediness attractive in a woman. I certainly don’t find the pathetic a turn-on. I did have this one girlfriend who repeatedly said to me when I complained she was irresponsible, “You love me because I’m pathetic.” I protested that she was wrong. I loved her because she was available and ready for love and easy to get along with and undemanding, but once I realized her incompetence at life, I started to leave.
I had this beautiful girlfriend (one-eighth Jewish and not the good eighth) for a year. She broke up with me about half a dozen times during that time, and with each break-up, my willingness to sacrifice for her diminished.
So after her fifth break-up with me and then us getting back together, she got a bad case of the flu. She was staying with her family a few miles out of town. They were out. She called me about 3:30 p.m. on a week day and asked me to bring her soup and salty crackers. I thought for two seconds about all the work I had to do, and said to her, “Isn’t there someone else you can ask?”
I wanted to keep working away at my blog and to then go to an LA Press Club party that night in the opposite direction from her. I’ve never asked anyone, including her, to make such a trip for me. The idea of doing it for salty crackers and soup seemed silly. I have asked a girlfriend to bring me some soup and aspirin, but that was because she offered and it was on her way home.
So, anyway, my girlfriend found my suggestion that she ask someone else a stab in the heart that she never got over. She ended up asking her ex-boyfriend, who abandoned his work on the spot and drove out to her.
I think the next day she broke up with me. We got back together a couple of months later, but on our first date back, I didn’t wait around for the waiter to pack up her dessert to go because I wanted to get to the movie on time, and that was an unforgivable offense. She put it on her blog. I commented with my position. She erased everything. I haven’t seen her since and the internet tells me nought about what happened to her.
Posted inDating, Personal|Comments Off on I Met This Girl
Rosh Hashanah begins Wednesday evening. For the next three days, I’ll be off-line. I won’t be going to work. I won’t be answering my phone. I won’t be updating my blog or my Facebook.
Most people who try to reach me during this three days off-line are fine when I don’t get back to them until after the holiday, but other people take it as a personal rejection. Which type of people are most likely to take my silence as rejection? The anxiously attached aka people like me.
I have an anxious attachment style. I worry about my loved ones being there for me and when they don’t answer when I call or email, I start to worry after about 24 hours of silence.
The emotionally avoidant place a premium on their independence and don’t like to acknowledge feelings of vulnerability so they’re unlikely to reproach for not getting back to them sooner. For the securely attached, they don’t mount any protest behavior over my delayed response.
KENDRA CHERRY WRITES: During the 1970’s, psychologist Mary Ainsworth further expanded upon Bowlby’s groundbreaking work in her now-famous “Strange Situation” study. The study involved observing children between the ages of 12 to 18 months responding to a situation in which they were briefly left alone and then reunited with their mother.
Based on these observations, Ainsworth concluded that there were three major styles of attachment: secure attachment, ambivalent-insecure attachment, and avoidant-insecure attachment. Researchers Main and Solomon (1986) added a fourth attachment style known as disorganized-insecure attachment. Numerous studies have supported Ainsworth’s conclusions and additional research has revealed that these early attachment styles can help predict behaviors later in life.
Posted inPersonal|Comments Off on The Jewish Holidays And Secure Attachment
Vlinden posts: After reading about Byron Katie on this board, I was interested to see her in action. Here is a link showing a session with an Israeli woman who tells Katie that she’s afraid of war.
I’ve never seen anything so insane in my life, outside of a mental institution. I’ve watched other videos and read parts of her writing, and now I am just stunned, once again, at what people will pay money to believe.
Katie’s reasoning is more deranged than anything put forth by Landmark Education, though there are basic parallels. She incorporates Landmark’s extreme (to the point of completely irrationality) existential you-create-everything and blame-the-victim philosophy, but then she essentially attempts to turn reality completely on its head with her reversal questions. For example, “My father abused me” becomes “I abused my father.” This doesn’t even begin to make rational sense, it’s like insisting you can wear your hat on your feet and walk just as easily, if not better.
My friends and I have been watching these videos with our jaws on the floor.
In this one, Katie is dealing with an Israeli woman essentially suffering from PTSD, who needs some basic therapy and human support and understanding. She’s afraid of war. Of course she’s afraid of war. This is perfectly normal and sane, given where she lives. In fact, it’s healthy and important. Her fears of war could lead her to take every kind of appropriate action.
But according to the New Age Self-Help snake-oil soul “savers,” no one need or should ever be afraid, ever be upset, ever be angry or feel guilt or shame or anything “negative.” By promoting this patently ridiculous concept, they create the illusion that people actually could walk around in a state of bliss all the time — and this they call a state of “grace” — by simply disconnecting from their egos, their rational selves, and their critical minds.
If they just did back-room lobotomies it would be so much easier — but they’d sell less books.
Landmark and other LGATs of course trade in this counterfeit psycho-babble, at the expense of people’s lost minds and souls, but Byron Katie seems to take it to a new level perhaps because she was, for many years, actually barking mad.
So we have a barking mad woman now telling people to just “reverse” their thinking until they can convince themselves maybe nothing is what they believed, maybe everything is ass-backward, maybe everything is just FINE if they only stop thinking rationally . . . and people are calling her a guru and “the real deal.”
She actually tells this poor woman that she shouldn’t worry about war, because the FLOWERS ON THE TABLE are not worrying about war.
That’s right. The flowers. They’re not worried. They have no brain. Be like the flowers.
What a sick, sorry situation we’re finding ourselves in today, people. We are devolving. We need to be rational in order to survive. It’s our critical minds and rational thinking and respect for pain, fear and danger that allowed us to rise up out of the primordial swamps, harness fire, build cities, create laws, art and our greatest ideas. These New Age lunatics will have us drooling like the mental patients they once were, incapable of correct action because we no longer trust our most important faculties.
The issue isn’t whether we should ask ourselves questions, or question our own beliefs, motives, patterning, etc.
The problem with Byron Katie is that she supports the New Age perspective that people should live in some altered state of consciousness (called grace, I believe) that is without all of the “negative” states that Katie herself could not handle, and therefore ended up in a mental institution.
This is not a healthy perspective for the average person.
The woman in Israel was afraid of war for a very solid and logical reason. She also clearly wasn’t being incapacitated by it, she was out and about, sitting up on this stage. What she needed was community based therapy, support, and maybe even to join a pro-peace organization and work to make change for the better within her own country. Perhaps she could volunteer at a hospital for wounded soldiers or children, to feel she was contributing positively during a dark time.
But Katie wanted to promote the delusion that this woman could exist in some disconnected perpetual NOW where she doesn’t have to remember the fears of the past, or think logically or pro-actively about the future. This isn’t possible. It IS NOT POSSIBLE. Some stress-reduction therapies and techniques could help this woman deal with the moments of fear that may overtake her. But beyond that, she’s living in a war zone, and she’s in danger, and she damn well knows it. And you know what? That’s okay. It’s reality.
Katie wants to show rapid “transformation” and “conversion” up on the stage. Just like Landmark she needs people to “get it” so the audience can cheer. I don’t believe for a moment that the woman on stage, after being pressured to “get it” actually went home and felt she “got” a damn thing. Except manipulated so Katie could sell more books. And embarrassed for taking part in a New Age swindle.
Here is a review of her book from Amazon:
If no stars were available, I’d choose that. This self-help book is aimed primarily at helping the author. I found it preposterous, and downright dangerous. I don’t think this woman has any credentials; rather, she seems to tout her qualifying experience as the fact that she had a nervous breakdown when she was 43 years old. Katie’s “help” is presented as a series of questions that branch from her initial query of “Is it [the situation, feeling, etc.] true?” Nothing intended to help people break out of lifelong conditioning works as fast as Katie would have one believe. Especially annoying parts of the book are the intro by her husband (who has no more credentials than his wife) where he belabors Katie’s lecturing on the ideas in her book for free (the book certainly is not free; thank goodness I borrowed it from a library), the many times Katie showcases her approach in a cult-like way as “The Work,” Katie pretending to be an objective participant when she is clearly steering people toward her sometimes-dangerous ideas, and Katie using endearments that just seem patronizing with her interview subjects in the dialogue transcripts (e.g., “Nice Work, honey”). I was muddling through the book and wondering when I’d get to something helpful when I read her exchange with a woman who was repeatedly raped as a child (around age 8 or 9) by her stepfather. Then the author, through a series of questions, ended up turning the blame for the rapes around on the victim, culminating in the idea that rape was the woman’s way of receiving love. All this was done in front of an audience. Brainwashing and abuse in the guise of therapy. Ghastly.
Posted inAbuse, Cults|Comments Off on New Age Flavor Of The Month Byron Katie
When I was growing up, husbands stayed away from the delivery room because the blood and mess would put you off sex for life. Nowadays it seems like all the husbands I know are in the delivery room. The prospect fills me with terror.
I asked a shiksa delivery nurse at Cedars-Sinai what percentage of husbands are with their wives in the delivery room and she said 100% except for the Orthodox Jews who stay away for modesty reasons. Hmm, that’s another good reason to be Orthodox, along with not having to wear a wedding ring (a traditional Jewish man does not wear jewelry and extraneous clothing and stuff that belongs to a woman, etc).
Plenty of Orthodox men wear wedding rings and plenty of Orthodox men are in the delivery room with their wives but the Orthodox practice is against both things. Just because an Orthodox Jew does something doesn’t make it the Orthodox way. Plenty of Orthodox women wear pants outside the home but that isn’t the Orthodox way. The Orthodox way is for women to wear skirts and for married women to cover their hair, etc.
* You tell a Christian he raised good kids, and you’ll likely hear, “It was the Lord.” You’ll never get that response from a Jew. Instead, you’ll hear, “Thank you” or “It was luck” or “It was genes” or “He had good rebbes”… Protestants in particular tend to deflect compliments while Jews generally lap them up and ask for more. “Did you see how awesome I was” is a typical though often unstated Jewish response.
Posted inOrthodoxy|Comments Off on Should The Husband Be In The Delivery Room?
Chief Rabbi of the British Empire, Herman Adler (who dressed like a Protestant minister) refused to accept any of the suggestions of the newly arrived East European rabbis, such as the banning hindquarter meat. Rabbi Adler referred to them as “people who came over here uncultivated and uncivilized.”
This is the first thing that breakaway communities do — open up their own shechita (rabbinic supervision of the slaughtering of animals). If you say you don’t trust the shechita of the rabbi of the town, you’re saying he’s not reliable in general.
So the East European Jews brought over their own rav in 1891, a Zionist, Arthur Cohen.
The traditional reaction to a breakaway community opening up their own shechita is to declare it trafe (unkosher). It’s trafe sociologically, not literally. It’s akin to the Satmar sect in Williamsburg that in the 1970s hung the Lubavitcher Rebbe in effigy.
The East European Jews didn’t care that Rabbi Herman Adler declared their shechita trafe and they got many East European rabbis such as the Chofetz Chaim and the Rogatchover to back them up.
There is Jewish history in Malta. The Knights of Malta would kidnap these people going to Israel and leave them on the island and ransom them. There would be all sorts of Jews, mainly from Italy, who’s job it was to ransom kidnapped Jews. The Jews were in better shape than other people. The typical Christian? No one ransomed him.
Our whole kashrut system depends on the owner being shomer shabbos (Sabbath observant). You can’t have inspectors in there 24/7. You rely on the owner being an observant Jew, which means the Jew observes the Sabbath and the other Jewish laws.
The hashgachas (kosher supervision agencies) can create doubt where there is no doubt to benefit themselves. A few years ago, the Vaad of Long Island, based upon nothing, cast aspersions on Rabbi Moshe Soloveitchik’s hasgachah on Streich’s matza, which has been in the family for two generations. If you want to destroy someone’s business and make sure you get part of the action, all you have to do is to cast aspersions.
What about Rav Shach declaring Lubavitch shechita trafe? That’s sociological. Rab Shach regards the person doing the shecting is a heretic, but nobody in America took that seriously aside from David Berger.
Rabbi Yitzchak Elchanan Spektor declares separatism forbidden in England but other rabbis felt they had justification for their separate kashrut organization (East European rabbis had a problem with Rabbi Herman Adler of London, Chief Rabbi of the British Empire). The Yiddish-speaking separatists got support from the Chofetz Chaim and the Rogatchover.
Rabbi Adler declared a particular type of Orthodox kashrut supervision (from Eastern Europe) trafe (not kosher) and they responded in kind. Rabbi Adler got support from Rabbi Yitzchak Elchanan Spektor, the greatest Ashkenazi posek (decider of Jewish law) of the time.
Why didn’t Rabbi Yitzchak Elchanan Spektor feel the need to check with the other side in the dispute? He was not concerned with the kashrut controversy. He was concerned that it is forbidden to set up a Bais Din (Jewish law court) in competition with an existing Bais Din.
The Rogatchover doesn’t care about Rabbi Yitzchak Elchanan Spektor. He was no respecter of persons. He sided with the East European rabbis against Rabbi Adler. The reason the other rabbis in Lithuania go along with Rav Spektor is that they are following the famous old rabbi of Kovno [Spektor] like a blind man’s stick. They don’t think for themselves. But thank God, there is a Torah. We’re not like these other rabbis who don’t use their minds. Send me his words and I’ll scatter them like chaff.
That old man is sitting there in Kovno and writing and publishing with no end. Who asks him for this? Are we lacking books in this world?
Herman Adler was not a great Torah scholar. He was not on the level of his father Nathan Adler. Today Herman Adler would be regarded as a great Torah scholar but he was nowhere the great authorities of Eastern Europe. I think that Nathan Adler is the first rabbi in modern times to get a PhD.
Jonathan Sacks is not a great Torah scholar. He’s a great intellectual and a philosopher. He’s the greatest Orthodox public intellectual of our time. He may be the greatest Jewish public intellectual of our time. He’s the most significant religious figure in England. When they got this new Chief Rabbi of the British empire, they wanted a rabbi who focused on the Jewish community and on rabbis. Jonathan Sacks was the rabbi for the entire country, more respected by Christians than their own religious leaders. No one takes him as an authority on Jewish law.
There’s a blurb from Rabbi Shmuel Kamenetsky: “I am Lithuanian and everything in it is true.”
We Jews have an old principle that there is no book without an error (Ramban). I only skimmed the book. I didn’t have to look far to find errors, such as on page 130. Berel Wein writes about the ascendancy of Torah learning as a distinctive phenomenon in the modern Jewish world began with the Vilna Gaon. That makes no sense. We had Jacob Emden, Noda Biyhudah, etc. Berel Wein calls the Vilna Gaon “Rabbi Eliyahu Kramer.”
I’ve been studying the Vilna Gaon for 20 years. I don’t think it was more than two or three years ago that for the first time I saw the Vilna Gaon referred to as “Eliyahu Kramer”. I don’t think Berel Wein invented this falsehood. We’ll see another falsehood he invented.
It’s always the same thing. It’s people who want to sound sophisticated, I know the Vilna Gaon’s last name, when the Vilna Gaon had no last name. Nobody in history called the Vilna Gaon “Eliyahu Kramer.”
In the next paragraph, Berel Wein says that foremost among the Vilna Gaon’s students was Rabbi Chaim Rabinowitz, who served as the rabbi of Volozhin. I am certain that Berel Wein originates this, that Chaim of Volozhin had a last name and it was “Rabinowitz”. And Berel Wein goes on and on with “Rabinowitz”.
There’s a mathematical formula known as Kramer’s Theorem and some Orthodox Jews attribute this to the Vilna Gaon, but that’s nonsense.
Yeshivas are hotbeds for these sorts of ideas. Rabbi Jehiel Yaakov Weinberg was the first one to argue in print that Rabbi Yisroel Salanter preceded Freud in discovering the unconscious but what Salanter and Freud meant by the unconscious were different things. When Freud was big, it was very yeshivish to say that Yisroel Salanter preceded Freud.
Berel Wein does a good job popularizing Jewish history but he does make mistakes, such as not knowing the generation of Azriel Hildesheimer.
How many people think that “Satmar” comes from “Saint Mary.” That’s another myth.
Posted inMarc B. Shapiro|Comments Off on The Rogatchover Was A Genius
When I read this comment on Facebook, it triggered two responses in me: “Have you considered that 2 witnesses is required in order to provide validity to the case. Otherwise anyone can walk into the court and accuse the innocent party that they were molested for example or caused them any other harm that they seem to make up. How do you know the other party is saying the truth unless there are at least 2 witnesses. Manipulative people use this tactic at best and get great results and accuse and cause irreparable harm and damage!!! That is what you call lashon hara?”
First. Nobody knows what “lashon hara” (evil speech) is in this sort of situation.
Second. The need for two witnesses to prove a case in Jewish law is theoretical, not the real way Jewish law has usually operated.
In his sixth lecture on R. Chaim Ozer Grodzinksi for Torah in Motion, history professor Marc B. Shapiro says: According to Rav Nissim of Girona (aka The RaN) says that in our Jewish system, there are two types of governance — Torah law and the law of the king. Take a look at how difficult it is to convict people in Jewish law. You have to have two witnesses. The perpetrator needs to be warned. How do you run a state like this? How do you put people in jail? Every single person in jail would not be in jail by Torah law. First, there’s no jail in Torah law. None of these people were warned before committing their crime.
According to Wikipedia: “Nissim ben Reuven (1320–1376, Hebrew: נסים בן ראובן) of Girona, Catalonia was an influential talmudist and authority on Jewish law. He was one of the last of the great Spanish medieval talmudic scholars. He is also known as the RaN (ר”ן, the Hebrew acronym of his name).”
Marc: The standard view is that the Beit Din has the authority to do whatever they want to do as an emergency measure. There’s a famous case in the Talmud where the rabbis executed someone for riding a horse on Shabbos even though that’s only a rabbinic prohibition. To establish Torah law, the rabbis are allowed to break with Torah law and to do extra-judicial measures. The Beit Din can do what it needs to do. That’s the way Jewish society worked in medieval time. All sorts of punishments were given to people that were forbidden by Torah law.
The RaN said that Torah law and real law (law of the king) operate in different spheres. According to Torah law, you need two witnesses to convict someone but the law of the king can set up any proof it wants. The king sets up a parallel legal system.
You could conclude that Torah law is only meant as some theoretical law. It is clearly impossible to run any sort of society based on Torah law. It’s almost law for a messianic society and not meant for the real world.
The RaN is not talking about emergency measures. He’s talking about a complete parallel legal system. Many people aren’t aware of this. They think that if you don’t have at least two witnesses warning someone, you can never convict. I think this is a disgrace to the Torah because it makes people think that Jewish law can not function in the real world.
Posted inMarc B. Shapiro, Torah|Comments Off on Do You Always Need Two Witnesses To Prove A Case In Jewish Law?
Wednesday night. Gotta change things up in my life. I’ve paid the $5, now I’m going to take the 30s-40s ride. Match.com is throwing an event at 8029 Sunset Blvd and I’m going. Yes, I know BINA LA has an event at the same time in Santa Monica but it costs $30 and is for the 25-45 crowd. I’m 47 now. I didn’t have success with my last runs with JDate and Frumster. So now I’m keyword searching “Jewish” on Match.com and POF.com and emailing everyone I find attractive. I’m getting a 10% response rate.
So I walk in and start meeting people. Everyone’s nice. Considering the awkward circumstance of a singles mingle, conversation moves along. Still, I’m itching to leave when I hit off with two women about 40 who work in the entertainment industry. I hole up with them at their table for about an hour. They’re not Jewish. They ask me, “What are you doing here? You’re looking for someone Jewish. Why aren’t you on JDate?”
People keep asking me that, “What are you doing here?” As I step out into the wider world, I keep feeling that I don’t belong.
I run into two Israeli guys. They have no plans for Rosh Hashanah. I’m about to leave when this high energy Creole woman with kinky hair walks over and lights up my night. Eventually, I get her alone. “What am I going to do with you?” she says. “I’m never going to become Jewish. I’m not going to change. I like who I am. I can’t drink with you. I can’t eat meat with you. I can’t have sex with you. I’m going to circulate.”
It’s almost 10 p.m.. Time to go home. I do a u-turn across double yellow lines on Santa Monica Blvd and the police pull me over. They ask me to wind down all my windows. They ask for my driver’s license and registration. They ask me if I have anything in the car that I wouldn’t want them to see. I told them they’re welcome to search. They ask me if I have ever been arrested. I say no. They ask me where I was. “A match.com party,” I say. “I don’t drink. You can smell my breath.”
“Do you know why we pulled you over?” asked the officer.
“I followed the example of the car in front of me and crossed the double yellow line,” I said.
“Where are you going?”
“Home,” I said. “I live about four miles from here.”
They run my information and let me off with a warning.
Ivan posts to my FB: “In my opinion, you traded one very controlling religion SDA for another very similar one.”
Michael: “Gives a new meaning to the expression that if we forget we are Jewish, the gentiles will remind us.”
It never ceases to sting when it takes strangers to remind me of who I am and where I belong.
The non-Jews I meet have nothing but respect for Orthodox Judaism. Frequently, they see us more clearly than we see ourselves.
I really like black girls particularly if they have a white girl’s body. I like their strength. I love their gleaming white teeth and kinky hair. They make me smile. They seem to like Jewish guys. They don’t hold back with what they’re thinking.
If I could just land a black (Jewish) wife, then nobody could accuse me of racism and I’d have carte blance!
It was so nice to be wanted and desired by women. I don’t get that so often in shul.
I like women who dress nicely. I like it when they offer to buy me a drink. I walked around last night afraid some woman would ask me to buy her a drink. I’m not into that unless we’re already in a relationship.
There were some women there last night who had a filthy mouth. I like that in a woman. There was this one exec in a super posh outfit, sipping champagne, and the varieties of the ways she could say f*** took my breath away.
I met a therapist and got to talk about John Bowlby and attachment theory for 15 minutes.
Posted inDating, Personal|Comments Off on ‘What Are You Doing Here?’
I’ve been suffering through a relapse of my Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) over the past three weeks, brought on by a vigorous month of exercise on my new stationary bike, bring my weight down to 177 pounds (down ten). Every time I begin an exercise program (since 1988), after a 2-3 weeks, I get a CFS relapse, which always begins with a flu-like sore throat that never turns into the flu. Only sustained physical exertion brings this on, not stress or anything else. At least with my daily modafinil, I’m fully alert.
Posted inCFS, Personal|Comments Off on Slogging Thru Another CFS Relapse
>Is love real? Is it not brain chemicals that humans developed in order to be inspired to mate and thus keep the human race going? A sort of evolutionary necessity. Perhaps it is a cynical way of thinking. Maybe if I fall in love one day, I’ll believe in it. In the mean time, I observe others being “in love”.>
Love is real. It is what we depend on to survive. Love means that our partner is there for us, can hear us, can come help us if needed, is concerned about us, and values us. If we don’t have this, we fall apart, freeze up, become rigid. If we have it, we can be open to new information and become curious about the wider world.
Do our problems lie primarily in our internal conflicts and unconscious fantasies (Freud) or in our external relations (Bowlby)?
“Curiosity comes out of a sense of safety, rigidity out of being vigilant to threats… The more we can reach out to our partners, the more separate and independent we can be.”
We need close connection with others. Historians observed that the unit of survival in the Nazi death camps was the pair, not the individual.
In 1939, women ranked love fifth as a factor in choosing a mate. In the 1990s, both men and women ranked it first.
Underneath all the distress, partners are asking each other: Can I count on you? Depend on you? Will you respond to me when I need, when I call? Do I matter to you? Do you need me, rely on me?
Posted inPersonal|Comments Off on Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love By Sue Johnson
When I moved to California from Australia in May of 1977, I was 11. Over the next year, a major way I assimilated to American culture was by learning its sports. They were a narcotic that soothed my loneliness over the next seven years. Much of that time, I dreamed about becoming a sportswriter or sportscaster when I grew up.
After I graduated from high school in June of 1984, I moved back to Australia for a year to live with my brother. It was hard to stay in touch with the fortunes of my favorite American sports teams (particularly the Dallas Cowboys and the Los Angeles Dodgers). The Australian national newspaper had a weekly column on American football and through it I learned that the Dallas Cowboys had missed the playoffs for the first time since 1974. In October of 1984, I didn’t see a minute of the World Series. In January of 1985, I didn’t get to watch the Super Bowl live. I had to wait for a week for a friend to mail me a videotape of the blow-out 49er victory.
I returned to California in June of 1985 and worked that summer in the newsroom of KAHI/KHYL radio where I covered sports along with the rest of the news. My favorite baseball team, the Dodgers, lost in the NLCS to the Cardinals setting up a World Series of Kansas City vs St. Louis.
As I started watching this series, I realized I just didn’t care who won. I had no feelings about these two teams. They bored me. It was the first time I checked out of a World Series in years and I realized at the time it was a symptom that I no longer cared so much about sports. I was growing up. I was creating a great life. I had adult things to accomplish.
The San Francisco 49ers trained at Sierra Community College, which I attended from September of 1985 until August of 1988. During the summers of 1985, 1986, and 1987, I went to the 49er training camp regularly to report for KAHI radio. I even covered two of their games at Candlestick Park during the 1985 season (a loss to New Orleans and a win over the Dallas Cowboys).
The Cowboys were my favorite team, so it was a thrill to go into their locker room after their defeat and see Tom Landry, Randy White and others stars of my childhood.
Landry was standing outside the locker room when I stopped by and he was talking about Skip Bayless. He said he hadn’t spoken to Skip in years. He was so close I could touch him.
By covering the Cowboys professionally, I felt like I had squared a circle. I was no longer just a fan. I was a big boy.
When you take a hobby and turn it into a job, something changes inside. When I covered professional sports, I quickly stopped being a fan. There’s no cheering in the press box. It was easy for me to turn off my feelings, step into the objective reporter mode and to talk dispassionately on the air about the San Francisco teams of primary interest to my radio listeners.
My favorite local sports columnist was Lowell Cohn and I often saw him at the 49ers training camp and at Candlestick park. I never spoke to him. He intimidated me.
In 1986, I decided to become an economist. My life was full. I didn’t need sports to distract me from my miserable life because I was no longer miserable. I didn’t loathe myself anymore. I liked where I was going with my life. I had big plans. Things were finally on track. The Dallas Cowboys didn’t make the playoffs for the next few years and that had almost no effect on my happiness.
I moved to Los Angeles in August of 1988 to go to UCLA to major in Economics. A friend took me to Pasadena’s Rose Bowl Sept. 10 to watch UCLA’s shocking 41-28 defeat of Nebraska behind the accurate passing of quarterback Troy Aikman.
One time during the following school year, somebody told me I looked like Troy Aikman. I never forgot that. I’ve repeated it to dozens of people. They often say I look more like Brad Pitt or Bill Clinton.
I shared a mail box at the Rieber Hall dorm with somebody subscribed to Sports Illustrated magazine and when it had a cover story on the new Dallas Cowboys coach Jimmy Johnson, I borrowed it without permission and read it avidly before returning. The Cowboys then drafted Aikman as the number one pick in the draft.
I was a Dodgers fan and the Dodgers were doing well that fall of 1988 and I enjoyed reading about them in the newspaper but I rarely, if ever, listened to their games. I was focused on getting ahead with my life.
I didn’t have a TV in my room at UCLA and in that fall, I didn’t seek one out to watch the Dodger games. I was sitting in my room studying on the Saturday night that began the World Series. Suddenly there was a loud roar all around me, unlike anything I’ve heard before or since. It was a reaction to Kirk Gibson hitting a home run in the bottom of the ninth to give the Dodgers an unexpected victory.
I don’t think I saw a minute live of that World Series.
Look at the LA smog at the beginning of this 1988 Game One of the World Series video. It was so bad some days that it would hurt to breathe when I played basketball. I’ve never experienced anything like it before or since.
I was thrilled to be living on my own in Los Angeles — home of the world’s most beautiful women — and a little smog didn’t bother me.
In February of 1988, I came down with an illness that felt like mono, only it didn’t go away. In the Spring of 1989, I got the diagnosis of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and I realized I might be sick for a long time. I was now willing to distract myself with sports once again, and I’d wander into a dorm mate’s room to watch March Madness college basketball.
Andrew Gaze, an Australian, led Seton Hall into a thrilling overtime loss to Michigan in the NCAA championship.
I didn’t pay much attention to sports until January 6, 1992, when I shuffled to the mail box and opened up my neighbor’s newspaper and saw that the Dallas Cowboys had lost to the Detroit Lions in the playoffs. I had no idea the Cowboys were back in the playoffs.
I kept track of the Cowboys the next season but never watched a game until the NFC championship versus San Francisco, when I called my former classmate Kevin McKee and asked if I could come over like I had years before and watch the game with him and his dad.
I think that was the last time I saw them.
I watched the Cowboys Super Bowl victory on my own. I had this vague sense that my life was turning around like the fortunes of my favorite football team. Over the next few months, I’d have a few girlfriends, begin a partial recovery from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and move to Orlando and finally Los Angeles in March of 1994.
I’ve never fully gotten over CFS so I’ve had to live more gently over the past 20 years than I’d like. One of the ways I take it easy on myself is to watch some sports. I only follow football avidly to make sure I don’t waste too much time. I also give myself permission to watch as much sports as I like as long as I have the sound turned off so I can listen to a lecture or a Dennis Prager radio show or a book on CD at the same time so I’m not wasting my life.
Sports no longer occupies the same role in my life that it did from 1977-1984, but my happiness is affected by the fortunes of the Dallas Cowboys. I remember in the fall of 2007 telling a friend that nothing was going right in my life then except the Cowboys (who went 13-3 before losing in the division round of the playoffs to New York).
I don’t feel the same control over my life I had in 1985-1987 when I felt like I could do anything. I’m not as strong and as a result I can’t be quite as driven and focused and aggressive and ambitious. I have to take it easier than I like and with my failures to bond normally to others, I still spend too much time with sports. It’s a symptom of my attachment disorder.
In 2008, I interviewed by phone my childhood hero Lowell Cohn, the sports columnist.
I’ve never touched illegal drugs nor had more than a few mouthfuls of beer and wine, but over the past year, I’ve received great benefit from listening to 12-step lectures for drug and alcohol addicts. I feel like I have a similar hole in my soul.
I was just reading the 2011 biography of the late sportscaster Howard Cosell and it remarks that sports is a narcotic.
Hmm, that hit me hard. I’m a big sports fan. I’ve also noticed that the more devoted the sports fan, the more likely that he’s unhappy.
So that has started me thinking, what have been my favorite escapes from reality? What have been my favorite drugs? And can I rank them in terms of time I’ve expended?
Here goes:
* Following sports got me excited. I wasn’t happy with the life I had, so I shucked it off and dissolved myself into the identity of my favorite teams, which I selected largely on the basis of their winning ways.
* When I moved away from my parents in January of 1980 to stay with friends of the family so I could finish eighth grade at Pacific Union College Elementary School, I started listening to pop music on KNBR and KFRC every night. Listening to pop music was a sin in my home, but out on my own, I had more freedom. I quickly found out that pop music articulated everything I was feeling and it has been my major source of solace over the years.
* I was an unhappy kid. I didn’t have many friends, so I read a lot of books. They stimulated my imagination. I developed the skill of sitting in a chair and telling myself thrilling stories of battles and explorations where I was the hero. I could bliss out within seconds and stay distracted for hours. As I grew older, my fantasies of grandiosity traded time with romantic and sexual obsessions.
* In eighth grade, I became good friends with my classmate Andy, who who was bigger and stronger than me and he ate an enormous amount of food. I tried to keep up with him and got into the habit of stuffing myself. I got attention for the amount of food I could put away. I liked that and I liked how a full stomach took away my anxieties. I still struggle with over-eating.
* At age 12, I took up long distance running (I started running a couple of miles every day in fifth grade), logging more than 30 miles a week. I finished five marathons. I found that when I physically exhausted myself, my anxieties went away. Exercise was a great distraction from my failure to connect normally with others.
* Attention-seeking aka chasing distinctions. I entered school in second grade and my smart mouth didn’t make me many friends. When I came to America in sixth grade, I used bizarre tricks to get attention such as eating insects and stuffing eight bananas in my mouth at once. I’d also try to stir up debates in class and rip loud farts. For as long as I can remember, I’ve had this one question running through my mind — “How can I get the most attention?”
* My anxiety goes away when I can throw myself into my work, particularly if I enjoy it and I am good at it and I’m around people I like and I get recognition for my efforts. From age 19-21, I spent many weeks working over 60 hours.
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