I hope all of my Muslim readers had a meaningful and joyous Ramadan.

Hat tip to Muslimah Media Watch (yes, I only remember the Muslim holidays because of you, good women of MMW, but then again, I only remember my friends’ birthdays because of Facebook). MMW has a very thought-provoking cartoon up, and would like to hear the thoughts it provokes in you. Go check it out.

… is online here.

Sooner or later, I want to start doing podcasts of columns. I would have loved to podcast today’s first question!

UPDATE: Link fixed. Thanks, occhiblu!

So, as noted, tomorrow is Rosh Hashanah — and International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Since I won’t be posting tomorrow, then, may I draw your attention to this post I did last year, translating a passage from my 1942 copy of Emily Post into piratespeak.

Do you know how to tell if a pirate has good manners? He’ll ARRRRRRRsvp.

The Rosh Hashanah/TLAP Day thing has sparked a fair amount of comedy among my Facebook friends. Molly rewrote the major prayer of the High Holy Days:

On Rosh Hashaaarrrnah it is written; on Yum Kipper it is sealed:
Who shall live and who shall die
Who shall pillage and who shall be pillaged
Who shall plunder and who shall be plundered
Who shall die by drowning and who by cannon fire
Who by walking the plank and who by keelhauling
Who by scurvy and who by plague
Who by mutiny and who by navy
But rum, rum and rum shall lessen the severity of the decree.

… and also came up with this gem:

What is the most important text in Pirate Kabbalah? The ZohARRR.

This was in response to mine:

What’s a pirate’s favorite part of Shabbat service? The pARRRRRRRsha.

What’s a pirate’s favorite parsha? DevARRRRRRRim.

But you don’t have to be Jewish to play! My friend Jane posted this great YouTube video of a sportscaster calling a horse race … in which one of the horses is actually named “Arrrrrrrrr.” It’s 90 seconds long–watch it all the way to the end–

Happy Talk Like a Pirate Day, Happy New Year, TGIF, and have a good weekend! (And feel free to post your own pirate jokes in comments!)

Nice post on the New York Times “Happy Days” blog about the inevitable way we compare ourselves with others, and how insidiously easy it can be to see other people’s life choices as a referendum on your own:

Quite a lot of what passes itself off as a dialogue about our society consists of people trying to justify their own choices as the only right or natural ones by denouncing others’ as selfish or pathological or wrong. So it’s easy to overlook that hidden beneath all this smug certainty is a poignant insecurity, and the naked 3 A.M. terror of regret.

Beautiful. This is a major theme in Mind Over Manners. In the conclusion, I wrote something similar:

Many of our choices have ambivalence to them. Even the most happily married person occasionally misses the freedom of her single days. Even the most career-driven professional would like on occasion to chuck it all and become a beachcomber. Even the most ardent locavore is occasionally attracted by the whiff of a McDonald’s French fries. That ambivalence within our own souls—we can so easily project it onto others. Many of the choices we make represent an argument we’ve had with some part of ourselves. When we see another person who made the opposite choice, we’re afraid that she might awaken the part of us that lost the argument and therefore introduce conflict into our lives. Often, out of an instinct of self-protection, we go on the attack.

Happy New Year!

(And sorry for the kind of high Jewish/religious content here lately. I try to keep mixing stuff up on the blog so there’s a nice variety, but sometimes you flip a coin and it just turns up heads ten times in a row, you know?)

One of the things I like about being Jewish is getting to celebrate New Year’s in the fall, which always feels like the start of the year to me anyway. A lifetime in the educational system will do that to you.

If you’re confused about all those Jewish holidays in the fall … you’re not the only one. (Even if you’re Jewish yourself!) There are plenty of books and guides online that can clear things up or mystify you even further, but here’s what it all means to me. I don’t know why the metaphor of an ocean voyage is the one I use for the holy days. I grew up in Kansas, for heaven’s sake. But this is what works. (Especially this year, when Rosh Hashanah falls on International Talk Like a Pirate Day!)

The month before Rosh Hashanah is Elul. During Elul, we are supposed to do a kind of “spiritual accounting” of the past year, and reflect on what we have done right or wrong. This is like preparing for a big sailing trip. What questions would you be asking yourself if you were going on a long ocean voyage — I don’t mean a cruise, I mean the kind where you’re part of the crew? I think they’d be questions like this: What do I really need to take with me in order to survive? What should I throw out? Who should I say goodbye to, and what should I say? Do I owe anyone apologies? Do I owe anyone money, or favors, or their copy of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union back? Am I in good enough shape for the rigors of this journey? What do I need to do to prepare myself? Do I have illnesses or injuries that need tending before I go?

Then, Rosh Hashanah! The New Year! And our spiritual ship is launched. Rosh Hashanah is serious, but joyful. There is risk ahead but great adventure. We all wear our best clothes and wish each other a happy journey.

The 10 days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are known as “The Days of Awe.” Everything you do on these days is fraught with significance: we try to be as observant as possible, as strict with ourselves and forgiving of others as we can. Imagine living on a ship, where a mistake might cost you a limb or life, where you must get along with your shipmates at all cost. The Days of Awe are a time for being very care-full.

And then — shipwreck! Yom Kippur! The ship of our souls and our best intentions is not enough to keep us afloat, and we crash. We fast. We do not wash. We live the day, as much as possible, like walking dead, taking no food, no water, no joy in our own bodies or those of others. We allow ourselves to be shaken and wrecked. And yet, at the end of the day, we break our fast together, and celebrate that we have survived.

But survival after shipwreck isn’t easy. We’re on a desert island now, aren’t we? So we built huts! The next holiday — not properly considered one of the High Holy Days, but still connected — is Sukkot. Sukkot is a harvest festival, celebrated by building booths (the sukkahs) and eating and sleeping outdoors. Removed from its agricultural meaning, and put into the context of the HHDs, Sukkot can be seen as a kind of regrouping after the shipwreck of Yom Kippur. We are safe. We are alive. We are with our loved ones. But we are not comfortable yet. We’ve found a desert island to sustain us, but we haven’t claimed it as our land or built a civilization on it. Sukkot celebrates the joyful body, the joyful community. But it isn’t complete.

And then — Simchat Torah. Which literally means, “Happy Torah.” We read the Torah completely through every year, with a different portion for each Shabbat. Simchat Torah celebrates the end of one year’s Torah cycle, and the beginning of another. This — this is when we say, “We have survived. And we have built something. And that thing will continue beyond our short lives.” We celebrate living, not just surviving. Peoplehood, not just community. Civilization, not just culture. We aren’t refugees on a desert island any more. We are citizens and nation builders.

So there it is. We prepare for the voyage, we launch the ship, we sail as careful and true as we can, we wreck ourselves anyway, we drag our bodies to shore and find nourishment there, and then we begin to build something to be proud of.

Every year, we get to do this.

Every year, this wonderful adventure.

I set sail tonight.

If you can’t pronounce chag sameach, then wish me bon voyage.

Finally wrapping up a little series on religion and language. I talked about the use of magical/religious language even by non-religious folks here, and the magic of swearing and singing here.

When I think about religious language, one moment always comes to mind: our first trip to Australia, when we encountered a troop of kangaroos quite by surprise while exploring a park in Alice Springs. It was a magical moment, one of those little snatches of beauty that you’ll remember forever. And in a moment like that, you can say one of two things: a prayer, or “Duuuuude.”

I chose the prayer. I went with the Shehecheyanu, the Hebrew blessing for special occasions. I’m still grateful to my religion for giving me words in that moment, when no secular speech would do.

I’m not that damn reverent, though, so I repeated it afterwards in a heavy Crocodile-Dundee style accent, which sounds pretty funny if you know how it’s supposed to sound. I couldn’t make meeting those kangaroos into something so sacred that I could never approach the moment again in my own mind.

And I wonder … is that what’s behind all the “Mary is My Homegirl” and Candy Torahs and all that? What do you think of religious kitsch, if you are a religious person?

You can become a “fan” of Jesus on Facebook, you know. What do you think of that? (Besides the obvious point that he probably doesn’t write his own updates.) I think I’d become a “fan” of Torah, but not of God. That just seems — unseemly. What do you think? Is this kind of domestication, kitschifying, joking around with the sacred a healthy way to relate to our religion? A fun in-joke among a particular faith community? Or does it diminish without adding?

One of the things I look forward to every fall is the beginning of theater season. Tonight, we’re going to see “Mr. Roberts” at New Rep, our first show of the season.

I used to work in theater when I lived in Kansas City, and when I moved to Boston, it took me a long time to figure out what theater companies were good. As a grad student, I didn’t have a lot of money to play with–and let’s face it, theater tickets are expensive. Most folks will rent or go see a movie that they know they may or may not like, but if you’re plunking down theater money, you want more of a guarantee.

So if you’re new in town, too, or just don’t get to see as much theater as you’d like, here’s my recommendations. Mr. Improbable and I have season tickets to all three of these companies:

Central Square Theater. This is a new theater in the heart of Central Square, that houses two separate companies: Nora Theatre and Underground Railway Theater.* (Yes, the inconsistent spellings drive me nuts, too. Personally, I’m a believer in “-er” style theater. We’re not British, a fact rather decisively established over 200 years ago.) Nora does more traditional plays, while URT has a more community-based, experimental approach — not in some godawful way where they’re going to make audience members come on stage and relive their birth or anything, so don’t worry about that. It’s perfectly normal theater, but there might be some puppets, and the script might have been written by someone who lives in your town. You can handle that, can’t you?

Central Square Theater also has an outstanding subscriber package this year: you can get tickets to all six shows for only $150, and they even throw in parking and a free drink! And their 2009-2010 season has wonderfully diverse offerings, from a Pinter classic, to a holiday combo of two one-acts by Grace Paley and Truman Capote, to a brand-new play about evolution, to a play about — an advice columnist! Oh yes, we’ll be cooking up some fun publicity events for that one, I assure you.

Actors’ Shakespeare Project. I’ve written about these guys before: they’re simply brilliant. This is Shakespeare the way I’ve wanted to see it done all my life. ASP plays in a lot of different venues, so that can be fun as well, seeing how the actors employ different, and sometimes quite challenging, spaces — ASP doesn’t limit itself to actual theaters to perform in. That would be too easy.

New Repertory Theatre. These guys used to be in Newton, and are now in the Arsenal Center for the Arts in Watertown. This means that before the show, you want to go get dinner at Casa de Pedro. (Isn’t it funny how much more classy that sounds than “House of Pete”? I recommend the “cod a la Ozzy Guillen.”) New Rep is the most conservative of the three companies I mention: they do a standard mix of old and new plays, comedies and dramas, and one musical every year. And they do them well, with great fidelity to the script and superb production values.

Season tickets are still available to all three theaters, and I have to say that if you can afford it, this is the way to go. It’s much easier to organize than buying tickets on a show-by-show basis. (And don’t worry about the fact that you don’t know what you’re going to be doing on the third Thursday in May yet, so how can you possibly commit to “Hot Mikado”? You can always exchange your tickets for a better date if it turns out you can’t go when you thought you could.)

*Full disclosure: I’m on the board of URT, which is why I recommend but won’t review their plays.

I woke up this morning to a rather long, and surprising, comment in this blog’s comment queue, in response to my post a few weeks ago about Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony tickets being on sale. (And there are still good seats left!)

The theme of this year’s Igs is “Risk,” and the ceremony will kick off with a pre-show “Risk Cabaret” featuring songs by the “Penny-Wise Guys,” who will be “presenting juicy cabaret songs about risk, reward, and Bernie Madoff.”

What’s not to like?

Quite a bit, as far as our commenter is concerned. (He also posted his comment on his blog — which otherwise appears to be entirely dedicated to examining the difference between reading on paper and reading on a computer screen — here, and here, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find his objections popping up elsewhere over the next few days, either.)

Mr. Bloom is concerned that our mockery of Bernie Madoff will add fuel to the fire of anti-Semitism, you see:

Why not pay tribute to Mr Sanford [sic] or Danny Pang of Taiwan, and other world ponzi schemers? Why focus just on the Jewish guy? Of course, there is no antisemitic intention on the part of the Ig Nobel people, they are Jewish people themselves. But by putting on this “SHOW” about Bernie Madoff, who is a known Jewish man among hundreds of antisemitic bloggers around the world — just google “antisemitism + Bernie Madoff” and you will see — the organizers of this show risk– RISK – creating MORE antisemitism online and in newspaper comment sections when the news of this SHOW comes out in the media, worldwide. Oi.

Now, if we were planning to do a cabaret called, say, “Bernie Madoff: 21st Century Shylock” in which a hook-nosed, yarmulke-clad Madoff danced around to a parody of Cyndi Lauper entitled “Jews Just Wanna Have Gelt,” yes, I could see grounds for concern. But we’re not doing that, nor does Mr. Bloom have any reason whatsoever to believe that we are.

When a member of our in-group — our race, our religion, our profession, our political party — does wrong, should we call them out with appropriate mockery or punishment? Or should we sweep it under the rug and pretend it didn’t happen because “he’s one of ours”?

Which course of action do you really think will lead to more stereotyping? And leaving that question aside — because there are, in fact, more important questions in the world than “But what will the goyim/whites/Yankees fans/Democrats/customers think of us” — which is the right thing to do?

I know what I think is the right thing, and it’s what my husband is doing. (Of course, if Mr. Bloom is right and Mr. Improbable does get a reputation as a terrible anti-Semite, I’ll at least be spared the awkward annual conversation with my synagogue’s dues committee about why I claim “single” instead of “family” membership.)

Comments open. Repetitive comments will be deleted.

I’ll be chatting today from noon to 1pm EDT here. If you miss it, you can read the transcript later.

I have my disagreements with Slate’s “Dear Prudence,” but boy was she on fire in this chat. This was my favorite:

Winchester: Help! My husband and I have no money, and our anniversary is tomorrow. Any fun ideas to celebrate that don’t involve money (or a lot of time to plan?). We also have to work, although we might be able to leave early. We are both out of ideas but feel the pressure to celebrate somehow.

Emily Yoffe: Let’s see, what is it that a happily married couple can do together to celebrate their union that doesn’t cost any money and can be done spontaneously when they get home from work? I’d better try to remember because my 15th anniversary is the day after tomorrow, and we haven’t made any plans either.

Since I do these chats myself (I’ve got one coming up Wednesday, don’t forget!) I had a strong empathetic sense of just how gleeful Ms. Yoffe must have felt when that question came through. There’s nothing like getting the perfect straight line handed to you on a silver platter.

Speaking of tough-guy lines:

“All that doesn’t kill us, only makes us stronger.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche

“All that doesn’t kill us, only makes us stranger.”
– Dariusz Jemielniak

Which version do you like better, and why?

Hey, gang. Here’s a little bleg for you. What are some good “tough guy” lines from movies? I’m thinking of — obviously — “Go ahead, make my day” “Say hello to my little friend” and similar ones. I need a few examples for a column.

(My personal favorite, of course, is from “Deadwood.” All of Al Swearengen’s lines are great, but his “You would not want to be starin’ like that, at me” is, well, a gem. It’s at 0:50 in this compilation clip of Al’s greatest hits — a word that ought to be interpreted quite liberally in this case.)

… is online here. This one was a hard one to write.

UPDATE: The video’s up of Wednesday’s “Chronicle” segment on inventions. Here’s the whole story, and here‘s the segment with Mr. Improbable — and Milo! (In this segment, Mr. Improbable is teasing Milo with a broom so that he will bark and demonstrate the effectiveness of Bow Lingual, the dog-to-human translation device. Don’t worry. Milo had fun.)

[From Wednesday] If you’re a Boston local, tune into Channel 5′s “Chronicle” tonight at 7:30. They are doing a report on inventions. Mr. Improbable will describe some Ig Nobel Prize-winning inventions, and Milo will demonstrate a few, including Bow-Lingual and Clocky.

Eight years ago today, Mr. Improbable and I had been living together for a month. I was working four days a week at Harvard as the communications manager for a software-implementation project. I was also finishing my dissertation on the psychology of narrative — why we read what we do, and how we tell the story of our own lives. In the spring of 2002, I would become a “Dr.” and a “Mrs.” within a few months of each other.

Eight years ago today, I still knew that I’d better keep writing something besides academic jargon and instructions to end users on how to access the new system, or my skills would atrophy. Eight years ago, it wasn’t as easy to get a blog started as it is today, so I kept a journal instead.

Eight years ago today, I wrote this:

I have been in a dangerous state of non-motivation lately, not wanting to deal with the dissertation or anything related to it—i.e., this diary. I’ve been alternating between reproaching myself for my faithlessness, swearing to get this on the web soon so that I’ll have no excuse not to do my entry every day, and telling myself that it doesn’t matter, with all I’ve done lately I can afford to slack off for a week, I’ll begin again next Monday.

Then this morning the world changed.

There are psychologists who study “flashbulb memories”—those memories that burn into the consciousness of an entire culture, that give rise to the question “where were you when”—when Kennedy was shot, when the Challenger went down, when the OJ verdict was announced. And what they’ve found is that, though the memories feel profound and authoritative, they are in fact as fragile and changeable as any other memory. Ask a person the day after The Event what happened, and you get one story; ask them six months later, and it has changed. Those who were alone say they were with friends. Those who were numb remember searing pain.

I don’t remember, even now, how I heard. I was at work, catching up on e-mails and checking the web for news as I do in the morning, and Marc called, and somehow I heard it from him or from a colleague’s shocked announcement over the cube wall or perhaps I saw it online, but then there was shouting back and forth as we all told each other what we knew, and everyone was on the phone to someone else and yelling their news across the cubes and yelling back to the rest of us in the office.

Another hour or two of this, and pacing while the news websites slowly, slowly loaded, and I went home. Not because I felt in danger—despite a few hysteric pronouncements, I certainly didn’t think Harvard would be a target, and anyway if it were I’d not be much safer at home, six blocks away—but to be with Marc, and to see the news. And to see those towers down and think, “No.”

No.

The World Trade Centers are gone. I don’t know why it’s that thought, and that combination of words, more than any other, that brings me to the edge of tears. The human toll is greater, and more meaningful—I’ve have given up the Empire State Building too, and the Golden Gate Bridge, and let them fill in the Grand Canyon with styrofoam peanuts while they were at it, to save those lives. But there is something so egregious about the destruction of the skyline. It’s like those countries where rejected men scar women with acid, destroying their beauty, turning their glory to shame. Human beings die, but we build things, create great gorgeous improbable things, to live after us. Destroying those is a blow to the spirit as well as the heart.

Marc and I sit on the couch, holding hands, watching the news for hours. Occasionally one of us gets up to check e-mail. Sometime in the afternoon Marc decides we should take a walk, and we do, and I feel a little sanity ebb back in: there’s still sun and cats on porches and my new Rockport shoes feel good—until we see the plane overhead and Marc says, “Look, a plane,” because there aren’t supposed to be any, and I realize how many things there are to think about now that there didn’t used to be.

There’s a school near our house and you can hear the children playing. I don’t really know at what age a child can be old enough to realize what happened today, to realize that it’s not a movie, not a “far away” thing. But I do know that whatever they realize, they don’t know that this is not the way it’s supposed to be. They don’t know the unwritten rule that America is never, ever, supposed to be attacked. In a strange way it’s like the election fiasco last fall, the sense of wrongness, of this-can’t-happen-here, the sense that the rules have changed. But for these kids, it can happen here. And even if it never happens again, it will change their assumptions about the world, it will make them a different generation, it will separate them from older brothers and sisters and, maybe, lovers, the way being pre- or post-Watergate separates Marc and me.

Dare I relate this to my research? Oh, yes. Until today America was one kind of story, a triumphal story about wealth and unquestioned belief in our own goodness. For many, we were a romance, in the classic literary sense of the term as used by Northrop Frye: the quest of an extraordinary people going from one glorious adventure to the next. For others, we were a comedy: the struggle of workaday folk to make a living and a life, enjoy simple pleasures and avoid the absurd traps of fate and their own foolishness.

We may come back to believing in one of these stories again. I wonder how, because I think the only myth that can get us through a crisis this huge is the “romance” story, and the tawdriness of politics and dissolution of a shared set of reference points—religious, epistemological, aesthetic—have done permanent damage to our ability to see ourselves as a romantic hero of a nation. Even those who cling to this myth today ascribe it only to the “Greatest Generation,” which of course so inexplicably raised the present lot of self-absorbed, self-loathing Boomers. America may well only work as a comedy now, and something just happened that is not supposed to happen in a comedy, where things can bend but cannot break.

What story will be left to tell?

Eight years later, I’m asking that question even more intently, even more despairingly.