AN OP-ED

In response to Kathleen Parker's piece. Will be published in the Oregonian soon :)

My Waist Size

Given that nobody ever writes on this blog, I am considering renaming it to honor the rants of aging non-produced rapper--perhaps MC rAGING.  While our country has endured a horrific terrorist attack, ricin-laced letters, and a feeble Congress failed to pass gun control, I have made a huge transition to wearing shorts that fit my waist! I know this is huge news. For the past 7 years, I have worn 35 waist because I like the freedom of the sag and depend on the extra inch to hide any weight gain. I fear waist constriction far worse than a terrorist attack or government ineptitude, but after spending 45 minutes with the sales lady at Eddie Bauer I took the courageous step to purchase new shorts with a 34 waist. Of course my wife,  elder sister, and my 4 year old daughter had to reaffirm this transition a couple of times. I also spent a great deal of time meditating as well as typing in random fashion questions into Google about this transition to gain the wisdom and confidence necessary to deal with summer in this fitted capacity.

Since my last post, I have survived the shingles; we refinanced our house; and my daughter withdrew from ballet. I have not read any good books, but Social Media is Bullshit is waiting for me at the library, so there is hope. I really don't have much to talk about, my life has been really good lately. My daughter is healthy, crazy, creative, and getting ready for Kindergarten, my wife still tolerates my fashion struggles, and I am excited about the changes coming next year. While I will still be the stay at home parent--I hate that phrase, when my daughter is at school I will not be staying home watching Dr. Oz eating bons bons. I'll be at the gym spinning and doing Tai Chi trying to keep my waist size down--I'd prefer trophy husband to stay at home dad.

Besides looking good, I will find a part-time gig that is fun. I am interested in helping our community newspaper and working with my old job on communications and developing social media outreach strategies. The newspaper idea seems like more fun, because I would love to grill community leaders with questions and try to come up with interesting angles on local events. I will contact somebody soon. Working at my old job has some pluses, mainly that I have a proven track record and creative ideas to help raise their profile.



Thinking about working again along with our MacBook beginning to crap out, I am excited about leaving the Mac World to embrace MS Office. I miss Word and PowerPoint and have never found the Mac that great and I freaking hate their Page and Keynote programs, so I will be going back to my computing roots as I slooooooowly reenter the working world.

No more random thoughts....

Thorry Peter

In my last post, I stated that Neil Postman was the first white dude to make my list. I was mistaken. I overlooked my first white man, Peter Gabriel. Nicky alerted me to the oversight (which is a very confusing word it means neglect and supervision, strange). In the early '90s, I  listened to Peter Gabriel all the time. I loved his 1986 SO album, and annoyed everybody in my college dorm with my obsession with his 1992 US album. I listened to US all the freaking time,  I don't how I could devote so much time to an album that is universally rated as mediocre. Actually, I am sure drugs facilitated this enjoyment. There is something oddly depressing about a fit and athletic 18 year old repeatedly getting stoned and blasting Come Talk To Me, Kiss that Frog, Blood of Eden, and Digging in The Dirt, etc, but I loved the Sinead O'Connors backing vocals and the photos in the CD booklet had trippy pictures that enriched the meaning of each song. Seriously, I spent years listening to this album and I am sure I quoted his music into my college essays.

Peter Gabriel incorporated music from all over the world into his songs, which ended up costing me hundreds of dollars as I purchased way too many CDs from his Real World label--I bought some Indian women speaking in tongue and utilizing some drone thing and forced myself to listen to it numerous times. In the cannabis cloud, it became funnier and funnier. I remember blasting her songs out of my dorm windows one Friday night and reveling,with my friends, in the hilarity the soundtrack created as students climbed Jefferson Hill--It was almost as funny as throwing frozen yogurt up to overhead along the walkway to the cafeteria and waiting for it to fall on somebody. I think I would hate my younger self now.

I have to feed my daughter now and thorry this post sucks...peace. 

Mr. Postman you made my list!

It has been over a year since any Margolian has posted on this site,  I cannot speak for my four sisters, but I have used this time to get in touch with myself by embracing my humanity, expanding my cooking skills, quieting my mind so exquisitely that  I can hear a butterfly's flutter and hatchling in Kathmandu cry for its mommy, and reading great books that have blessed  me with a clear lens to see our hurting world. I now eschew social networking and seek true companionship with friends and loved ones, yet part of me that wonders why nobody ever calls me or wants to hang out? I guess people are intimidated by the depth of my knowledge and soul, I have taken deepness to the next level.

In reality, I have been off Facebook for 2.5 months and am rediscovering things that I enjoy like reading, yelling at my mother, reflecting on my past, and trying to be present with my family(not jonesing for the next scrabble move). This is what a recovering drug addict must feel like.  In the past, I  would jokingly list dudes I would sleep with like Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Horace Grant, Barack Obama, Eddie George--Jesus this list is getting disturbing and throwing off my flow--My point is that I fucking love Neil Postman.  I am sure he is elated to be the first white and dead man added to my list.

His writings got my passion bucket overflowing and unplugged a lot of my thoughts. I have read three of his books Amusing Ourselves to Death, Technopoly, and Disappearance of Childhood and believe his critique of American Culture is freaking amazing. In a nutshell, the printing press civilized man and made us a literate based culture and television is quickly returning us to our savage visual roots. It is not a groundbreaking idea, but he does it in a funny, hopeful, and insightful way that inspires somebody like me, who believes that our ability to think critically and live richly is being degraded by gizmos and gadgets that distract and stress us. I am not a Luddite (they were not peaceful), however I do harbor fantasies of smashing a parents smartphone when they're too distracted to manage their kid or try to engage in discussion with me while clutching and gazing at their dumb ass phone.

So much of technology requires no thought. Has anybody ever claimed to be a great smartphone user or television viewer?  Do you get better at watching tv?  Can you become a master smartphone user? Does a smart phone make you happier?  Does figuring out how to access videos on your computer make your kid a genius? The fact is anybody, even a monkey, can watch TV or press buttons on a phone because it requires no thoughts, yet society keeps putting mindless technologies like these ahead of our other needs. Don't get me wrong technology is freaking amazing and supplements so many vital tasks, but I don't think it should be our primary focus. When schools are literally falling apart, teachers are grossly underpaid, and students are hungry and/or hopped on ADS meds, I don't believe bringing I-PADS will make the school better. It simply mindlessly transfers the same problems into a more entertaining format. There are countless examples of these transfers--everything from commerce, scheduling, healthcare, entertainment, and education are being reformatted for the digital entertainment age and with little thought about the consequences.

In Disappearance of Childhood, Postman writes, "Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see," what kind of things will our children say? Fortunately, we have the freedom to choose of how we live and there are so many things we can think about with our kids. I believe, like my new hero, that kids are different and we should not educate them to become workers for our consumer driven society, but as thoughtful citizens capable of making their own path.

I am beginning to sound like a testosterone depleted douche bag, however I must take the next step in my recovery which is to write more and hopefully become funnier and more cogent, but be forewarned it could take a lot Neil Postman posts to get me there.

 I will end with a list of books I have enjoyed in 2013 so far:

• Gone Girl
• Drop Dead Healthy 
• Technopoly 
• Disappearance of Childhood
• Moonwalking with Einstein
• Going Clear

I am currently reading the Ascent of Man.

As always, thorry for my rant. 

My Shirt is Too Tight

It has been a long time! After Nicky's guilt trip and having dinner with two of the Margolian Project's biggest fans, I have decided to start blogging again. While I have spent an ungodly amount of time playing scrabble online, doing geography puzzles with my daughter, playing Candyland with my wife, going to spin classes and chatting up Senior Citizens, and reading books about North Korea (I wish I could be a dear leader), performance enhancing drugs (there are some real positive things there and Suzanne Somers says they're safe), crazy-ass Mormons (polygamy and talking directly with god could be fun!), and curing my back pain (I have TMS (tension myositis syndrome),or what my wife has been saying all along--"it is all in your head, breathe deeper, and chill the fuck out." Come to think of it, it is kind of like PMS).

Right now I am PMSing about a t-shirt I bought from Patagonia, it is too freaking tight and I know I will never ever wear it. While this may be a minor blip in a normal person's life, I have spent the past two days thinking about how the fact that I don't like to wear tight fitting clothes will impact the rest of my life. What will I wear to a job interview when I need to go back to the rat race? Do people that wear tight shirts feel comfortable? Should I like tight t-shirts? I work out to maintain my middle-weight Jewish Lover Physique and my wife says the shirt shows off my body, yet I still cannot accept this t-shirt into my wardrobe--Do I have body issues?.

I have bought Patagonia t-shirts for years and now they have put form fitting over comfort. I even posted a review on their website. Surprisingly, nobody else posted any reviews on their long sleeved t-shirts! Do people just wear a shirt and accept it? Why are clothes getting tighter while the American population is getting fatter? Why hasn't a company created a line of t-shirts that have different colors, but fit the fucking same? This obsession drove me to my closet where my wife, daughter, and I spent two hours going through all my t-shirts and deciding which ones to keep or give away--I have a shit load of shirts, cause I am chasing the dream of a perfect fit and, in reality, only wear about fifteen of my t-shirts, yet I can't get rid of some cause what if it becomes perfect one day? There are people starving in the world or rebelling against a brutal dictatorship and I am busy battling a t-shirt demon and demanding that Patagonia bring back their old regular fit. I have some serious problems, yet there are a VERY few people out there that want to know what it is like to be a Margolian, this is it! The reason I will always be seeking brilliance is I am too busy thinking about how my clothes fit to see the magic all around me--But 2012 will be different! Tomorrow I will return that t-shirt and tell the Patagonia person to please credit my account and I will hold my head up high, then try to find some jeans:) ! I hope this makes sense and it nice to be blogging again.

I won't let this dream die

I am not a commitment-phobe.  If anything, I'm a commitment-phile.  For instance, I recently learned that it is okay to switch out the old photos in a picture frame for new ones.  To me, it seemed that I had made a commitment to that one photo and it was like some sort of betrayal to change it.  What would become of the older photo?  Would it sit in a dark drawer somewhere and wonder why I abandoned it?

I've been with my husband for nearly 14 years, I keep in touch with friends I met in Kindergarten, sometimes I think about dying my hair from a box, but I don't know that I can disappoint my hairdresser like that.

I made a commitment to this blog.  To write.  Something.  Anything.  Max came up with the header "We Are Seeking Brilliance."  And even though I'm not a big fan of the tagline (thorry), I am now committed to its pursuit.

Max recently told me that he was gonna take down the blog.  And fine if he wants to back out, finish something and not start it.  I suppose we already found the brilliance Max was seeking - otherwise why would he give up?  Why after months of talking about writing something together, would he so readily decide that he was finished?

Abby, Jen and Karen you can chime in too if you'd like.

Well, I am not giving up.  And this leads me to my first prompt of the new year - Guilt Trips.  I will not tell the others that I have contributed another essay to this blog.  I will just wait for them to find this.  And as the days pass, and this post goes unread, perhaps it will only add fodder to the brilliant essays they will write based on my prompt.

Mom's dolls and things

Garth was sitting at the Thanksgiving table. Mom had dressed him for the occasion. He wore a 1920s drop-waist peach colored dress, a strand of faux pearls, a floppy sun hat, and big round sunglasses. But it was the addition of a black and white feather boa that drew the biggest coos from me and my sisters. “Oh, he looks so great,” we beamed as we primped and propped him up. Garth was always the most beautiful attendee at house events. I loved his dress. Mom and I found it at the Mellon Park flea market in the summer. I wanted to wear it. But I was not six feet tall and slender like Garth. I was square, and not even 5 feet. At thirteen I was still waiting for another 8 inches of growth and my first bra. I had to admit it looked better on Garth.

Garth was the third man in our house dominated by women. Mom, me, and my three sisters outnumbered Garth, dad, and my only brother. But all of us were outnumbered by Mom’s dolls and things. There was Garth, the six-foot stuffed rag doll whom Mom dressed, nearly always in drag, and placed at the dinner table, on the front porch, or in the giant round couch that consumed our living room. She featured Garth at Thanksgiving, Fourth of July, and New Year’s, but there were others. There was a life-sized knight in full suit of armor that would startle me every time I walked down the stairs; the puppet made in my Mom’s likeness down to its tiny cigarette; the set of flasher dolls, with furry doll genitals, which would make an unexpected appearance in my father’s TV interview; the kitchen witches over the sink; and the pigs, oh so many pigs, the most prized among them bearing the face of Richard Nixon. This is, in fact, the only item listed in my mother’s living will. The Nixon pig will not go to her daughters or son, but to Shirley. We will merely get every other stuffed, carved, and tin-banged thing. Nearly every corner, every flat service, and every inch of shelf space in our half-duplex was packed with human, animal, or alien form. Thousands of eyes peering out as we stuffed the turkey, frosted the chocolate cake, baked the pumpkin and cranberry breads, tossed the salad, and dropped a plate of sausages down the stairs.

And then, years later, there was Inel.

Inel was not just one of my mom’s things. She was my Mom. A small, plastic faced doll with my mother’s pre-cigarette, pre-five children, pre-divorce baby face on it. It really looks like my mom did when she was young. She will tell you, “ask Zadie. this is how I looked.” And my Zadie will confirm it. “This is how she looked.” It looks like Mom. It is Mom.

“Inel” is my mother’s self given name, “Leni”, spelled backwards. And it was my mother that named her. Inel, the plastic faced, toothy grinned, soft bodied pocket-sized doll. What every Jewish Mom needs for guilt and torment. Well, maybe only our Mom.

I was not there for Inel’s birth, a traumatic night for my siblings that I can never quite put together, but it involved Mexican skeletons, things nailed to door knobs, and Cameron Diaz swallowing Tom Cruise’s cum (see earlier posts). Or maybe that is just how Inel was reborn on this blog. In any case, she was likely born in some Chinese factory and then sold across a Walgreen’s countertop. The point is once Inel was born she became mom’s avatar and her children’s little gnome.

I was sent pictures of Inel drinking Portland coffee, resting in the hands of a Chinese man in Prague, grinning in front of movie posters, and being spanked by a Pee-Wee Herman doll. Naughty doll. I was also sent with Inel to take pictures, in the hands of my relatives at a reunion, or at a dinner, or suckling from my breast. Naughty me.

Yes, at moments Inel was amusing. But mostly I was annoyed with Inel, as I would often get annoyed with Mom. Really, I’m not sure if Inel is ridiculous, tender, or sad. However, I am fairly sure she is my mother’s expression of love, of both giving it and asking for it. Here, she is saying, here is a piece of me. Now deal with it.

Inel was one of the best props for my mother to express her true talent: injecting herself and her love, at a distance. She demands to come along with you, somehow, anyhow. This, I suppose, is what mothers do. But still, with Mom, you never know if it is a true desire, a guilt trip, a command, or a rouse. I remember her helping me get ready to attend my first Bar Mitzvah. It was going to be held at the Le Mont, Pittsburgh’s most fancy restaurant. “Bring me back something,” she asked? Joked? Demanded? After the last dance with Alex Berman, I walked quietly back to the buffet table and shoved a croissant into my Jordache purse.

So yes, we do deal with it. We carried Inel, primped her up like Garth getting ready for a Thanksgiving feast and startled at her like a knight in rusty armor. Yes, we deal. With things. With dolls and things. With Mom and her love. However unwanting or wanting, we carry grinny dolls, shove croissants in our tiny purses, deliver embarrassing sick notes to our teachers, stick rebbe trading cards to our fridges, wear goodwill bin finds and take other prompts or props from mom that always result in both, forwards and backwards, joy and annoyance. Yes we do.