Awakening Story

By B.J. Miller

We all need a reason to wake up. For me, it was 11,000 volts of electricity. One night, sophomore year of college, a few friends and I were out on the town; one thing led to another, and we decided to climb a parked commuter train. Fun, no? I scurried up the ladder on the back, and when I stood up, whammo!  The current arced to my metal wristwatch, entered my arm, and blew down and out my feet. I lost half of an arm and both legs below the knee. I spent a few months recovering in the St Barnabas burn unit in Livingston, NJ. One day, several weeks in to the affair, it began to snow. I was told it was coming down hard and pretty. Around that time, a friend of mine smuggled a snowball into the burn unit for me. I cannot tell you the rapture I felt. The sensation of coldness on my skin, the miracle of it as I watched it melt to water. In that moment, I was amazed enough to be any part of this planet in this universe that whether I lived or died became irrelevant.

Are you awake—really awake—right now?

B.J. Miller is a pain doctor and the Senior Director and Advocate of Zen Hospice Project.

Talent Story

By Nicole Spector

As a child I never cared for poetry because I felt I couldn’t write it right. It employed structures that felt menacingly mathematical. Stanzas and couplets—how could I remember all that? I preferred the straightforward sloppiness of prose. But when I was 13, I discovered Sylvia Plath and became obsessed. I wrote poems that mirrored her style exactly and gave them to my mother, who read mostly Anne Rice. “Read this Sylvia Plath poem,” I would say.  

She would. “I think you wrote this,” she would say. Bad answer.

Eventually I went to the Ouija board to share my newfound talent with dead relatives. One had helped me find lost jewelry in the past.

“Stick to stories,” a spirit told me.

When is the last time you tried or dedicated yourself to something that doesn’t come easily to you?

Nicole Spector is a writer and journalist living in New York. She is the author of Fifty Shades of Dorian Gray.

Communication Story

By Theodore Dreiser

How true it is that words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes. Here were these two, bandying little phrases, drawing purses, looking at cards, and both unconscious of how inarticulate all their real feelings were. Neither was wise enough o be sure of the workings of the mind of the other. He could not tell how his luring succeeded. She could not realize that she was drifting, until he secured her address. Now she felt that she had yielded something—he, that he had gained a victory. Already they felt that they were somehow associated. Already he took control in directing the conversation. His words were easy. Her manner was relaxed.

In the century-plus since this passage was written, how has technology changed the way we communicate? 

Theodore Dreiser was a novelist who wrote such works as Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy.

Family Story

By Andy Corren

Mom has a plus-sized can of Maxwell House Coffee clutched to her bosoms, one of those Costco-sized cans you buy for your office, or your camper, or for visiting one of your sons at the Hyde Correctional Institution. Which she has had to do once. Okay, four or five times. Mom doesn’t drink coffee—it makes her paranoid. I sense things are amiss. Why would she carry an entire barrel of coffee on the plane, all the way from Miami to Newport News to Kill Devil Hills? She knows full well you can buy whole beans at the Food Lion for $4.99 a pound. Renay Mandel Corren clearly has a plan.

All I want to do with what’s left of this non-celebratory Passover day is curl up on the couch, watch TV with my probably-gay nephew, gently program him with correct homosexual diction.

I’m too old for my mom to plan for me. So I pretend I don’t see “Free Haggadah With Purchase!” written on the front of the coffee tub. I pretend I don’t see her ripping open a cellophane bag filled with tiny little Jewish hand booklets, and strewing them over the table, her eyes glowing with an unaccustomed religious fervor.

“I didn’t buy it for the coffee!” she triumphantly exults, “I bought it for the free Passover kit!”

Have you ever had a total holiday fail? What did you learn from it?

Andy Corren is a talent manager and playwright in Los Angeles.

Reflecting Story

With the Jewish High Holidays rapidly approaching, it’s a good time to take stock of your year, with the help of the questions below. Answer them quickly and honestly, and then take a few minutes to reflect on your answers.

This week's content is brought to you by 10Q, a Reboot project that engages you annually in a series of contemplative questions around the Jewish High Holidays.
 

Describe a significant experience that has happened in the past year. How did it affect you? Are you grateful? Relieved? Resentful? Inspired?

Is there something that you wish you had done differently this past year? Alternatively, is there something you're especially proud of from this past year?

Think about a milestone that happened with your family this past year. How has this affected you?

Describe an event in the world that has impacted you this year. How? Why?

Have you had any particularly spiritual experiences this past year? How has this experience affected you? (“Spiritual” can be broadly defined to include secular spiritual experiences: artistic, cultural, and so forth.)

Moving On Story

By Jonathan Ames

I was going to write that my heart feels less now that I’m older. I thought this because I was recalling how I used to weep while listening to Cat Stevens. I was eighteen and my heart was broken and I was driving my car on a long trip and for hours I would just play over and over my Cat Stevens album, which was, I believe, Tea for the Tillerman, and all the while I would cry, thinking about the girl I had lost.

So as I sat down to write just now, I didn’t think I could cry like that any more. But I put on a Cat Stevens greatest hits album to reacquaint myself with the music, and maybe because it’s first thing in the morning and I’m tired, but, in my mind, I was back in that car, I was eighteen again, except I was imagining what it would be like to lose someone now, and I felt the tears coming. I felt like I could weep. I didn’t, but I could have. I turned off the music and the water left my eyes and my heart closed; that is, it went back to normal.

There’s something a bit seductive, though, about crying. I sort of wish I hadn’t stopped myself. But I guess it would be melodramatic to cry about a heartbreak that hasn’t happened. Recently I was terribly worried about something that could possibly occur in the future — something that could go wrong, a small personal disaster — and a friend of mine, quoting some Hindu text, said, “The problem that hasn’t happened yet does not exist.” I like that quote; it’s been very helpful lately. [From “Cat Stevens,” Guilt and Pleasure, Issue 6, Fall 2007]

Do you allow fear of the unknown to impact your decisions?

Technology Story

By Ben Greenman

Everyone knocks technology, especially social networking. Everyone worries that the Internet is giving us a false sense of connection while in fact creating new kinds of separation and isolation. Everyone worries that sites like Twitter and Facebook are encouraging us to curate our lives rather than be honest about them, to present ourselves in a favorable light to others rather than keep our own counsel. Everyone wants to lament that children today are harmed by the immediate gratification of sites like Wikipedia. None of this is true. The Internet and particularly social networking is the greatest means ever invented to represent ourselves authentically. The notion of human identity—of the individual—is stronger than it has ever been, thanks to the Internet.

Is this an April Fool's Piece?

Waking Up Story

I picked at the bandage of my new tattoo. When we decided to get the tattoos that morning, I sketched something quickly on a napkin while we ate our eggs. “What’s that?” Joy asked. “Just something I’ve been doodling.” I didn’t mention that to my eyes the six points made up an abstract Jewish star bursting open. When the tattoo artist offered to put special “glow in the dark” ink in the center, I eagerly accepted.

How do you awaken?

Progress Story

By Edgar Allen Poe

There is, perhaps, no point in the history of the useful arts more remarkable than the fact, that during the last two thousand years, the world has been able to make no essential improvements in road-making. It may well be questioned if the Gothamites of 3845 will distinguish any traces of our Third Avenue: and in the matter of street-pavement, properly so called, although of late, universal attention has been directed to the subject, and experiment after experiment has been tried, exhausting the ingenuity of all modern engineers, it appears that we have at last settled on a result which differs in no material degree, and in principle not at all, from that which the Romans attained, as if instinctively, in the Via Appia, Via Tusculana, and others. The streets in Pompeii were constructed on the very principle which is considered best by the moderns: or if there be any especial variation, it certainly is not to the credit of modern ingenuity.

What’s one way that the world has improved in the last ten years, and one way it hasn’t?

Love and Loss Story

One year ago, my dog Ella died. She was a sweet, mischievous, expressive little pug, whose hoarse bark a friend once likened to a broken garbage disposal.

I began volunteering at the pug rescue, from which I had adopted Ella. The backstories of the dogs read like a Debbie Downer routine from SNL—elderly, blind, diabetic, abused. (My wife, who reluctantly tagged along once and only once, dubbed it the Island of Misfit Pugs.) But I felt sustained by the very existence of this place—the relentless optimism and abiding hope that I saw in the people who keep it going.

A few months in, I fell for a sassy 12-year-old pug named Midge and decided to adopt her. When I shared the news, I was met with a variety of incredulous reactions, from my wife’s genuine concern for my well-being, to a stranger at a holiday party who gasped, “But she’s just going to die!”

Mostly, people asked why? Why would you knowingly enter into an emotional attachment that’s likely to end in sadness so soon? It’s a divisive question, one that forces us to consider the relative value of love and hope. To me, it’s worth it. As renowned pug enthusiast W.B. Yeats said, “Man is in love, and loves what vanishes; what more is there to say?”
 

What have you learned from brief loves?