Around three weeks from now, I will observe my mother’s 23rd yahrzeit, the annual acknowledgment of the (Hebrew) date of her death. It is, of course, impossible to know for sure how my mother would relate to today’s events, but I think that I have a pretty good idea. My mother had a sunny disposition....
I discovered a previously unpublished Musing deep in the bowels of my computer. From the anecdote therein, I must have written it over six years ago. Within the past few weeks, I have been bombarded with statistics about anxious children, suicidal teens, and emotionally precarious young adults. As society’s hysteria and behavior over COVID upped...
My husband and I enjoyed a delightful Shabbat meal with two popular and lauded teachers. These women taught different grades (lower elementary and high school respectively) in two different schools. Yet, they shared an important commonality. Both of them were getting less satisfaction from teaching than in the past. Both may stop teaching sooner than...
I first heard of Chloe Cole when she was a guest on Dr. Jordan Peterson’s podcast. At the age of 17, she became a public voice against transitioning children. Earlier, as an unhappy 13-year-old, she had quickly been “diagnosed” with gender dysphoria, leading to being prescribed hormone blockers and testosterone, and undergoing a double mastectomy...
After months of steadfastly refusing to add yet another potential distraction to my day, I succumbed and tried my hand at the online game, Wordle. Granted, I can think of playing this game as, ’honing my mental skills,’ and ‘whetting my thinking process,” rather than a distraction, but the danger of one more thing that...
When you need to reach out to a customer-service representative of a big company (let alone a government office) it is possible that, like me, your impulse is to discover that you absolutely, no question about it, must clean out that pesky catch-all drawer in your kitchen before you can do anything else. (My husband...
What would you do? A few weeks ago, a blizzard hit upstate New York, leaving emergency vehicles ineffective as motorists were stranded in almost 52 inches of snow. For drivers, the prospect of freezing to death in one’s car was a scary reality. In one small town, a mechanic by the name of Jay Withey...
If you haven’t read Monica Guzman’s book, I Never Thought of It That Way: How To Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times, I do recommend it. Monica, a left-leaning reporter in Seattle, was disturbed at the lack of respect and conversation between people who held different political views. As a daughter of Trump-supporting,...
Over the years, I have written well over 500 Musings. Every once in a while, as happened this week, one from years ago circles back to my attention. In 2010, while discussing film critic Roger Ebert’s proposal to revamp the movie rating system to accommodate what he thought of as the wider public acceptance of...
If you planned to spend the holidays with family, I hope that you traveled comfortably and safely despite bad weather disrupting thousands of flights in the United States last week. Yet even when the weather cooperates, flight turmoil abounds. When my husband was invited to speak at a Shabbat program for politically conservative Jewish students...
