The “Everyday People” heading,
for no pointed reason, alludes to the song by Sly and the Family Stone, but the
commonality between that song and this blog would usually be pretty thin. You
don’t have to like Sly and the Family Stone, nor even share such Baby Boomer
values as giving a fig what the Mamas and the Papas did when they had their life-changing experience of taking LSD in about 1966 or
whenever. (Can it be some in the generation born in 1945-64 thought that sort
of thing, as experienced by themselves or their favorite pop group, was a “historical
moment”?)
A dinner party
I was at a dinner party of sorts
last weekend, never mind among whom. One of the attendees was a new neighbor on
our street, whom I was meeting for the first time. Among much other
conversational ground covered, I found it a bit refreshing that she referred to
the “JAP” (Jewish American Princess) concept—and that in no less a way than
referring to herself, liberally, as one (or as having been one, way back when).
I so infrequently encounter
people in my walkabout “travels” who know about that concept. As I made pains
to point out in previous blog entries, this concept, as I knew it in the 1980s,
wasn’t anti-Semitic, as the relevant Wikipedia article (see here, and scroll down a bit) tends to suggest now. It was a term used (in
the late 1970s and early 1980s, at least) mostly by American Jews, about other American
Jews. And it referred to what was putatively defined as objectionably shallow,
status-conscious Jews—usually females, but it could also apply to males (as in “Jewish
American Prince”). It meant a sort of inauthentic Jew. I understood the concept
without feeling it was anti-Semitic to use the term, as was liberally done at
George Washington University when I attended (1980-85). And the concept was
such that fellow students could even refer, as they deemed appropriate, to “Christian
JAPs”—against, shallow, status-conscious types.
How, exactly, the dinner-party
guest last weekend meant this term in relation to how I’d understood it, I’m
not fully sure. The point didn’t last long in the conversation.
Another interesting bit in that
dinner party was a passing, high-handed comment made by someone else, which in
the days afterward didn’t occur to me as worth discussing, as I did with
someone who had also attended, until just the other day (Tuesday?). The high-handed
comment was in response to my saying to the woman just mentioned that when I
went to college, as hard as I’d worked in high school, I needed to learn a new
way to study when in college. The high-handed comment was something like, “You
go from 35 hours a week to 25 hours a week,” or something that glib and
numbers-related.
Whatever the specific wording,
what I think was meant was that the amount of schoolwork from high school to
college dropped. And in particular, it seemed to refer to the amount of time in
class (because the “25 hours,” which I do recall as being part of the remark,
could only apply to that).
However the whole comment was
specifically meant, I thought it was ridiculous on a number of counts. I had
always been a good student, but had to work hard in both high school and
college, in part because I had trouble with concentrating (even today, I can
have trouble reading, depending on various conditions). Further, the big
difference between high school and college isn’t the amount of time in
classrooms, though that is one difference; but with the drop-off in classroom
time in college comes much more time spent doing “homework.” And if you take
majors that require a lot of reading, you can easily spend a lot more time
studying in college than in HS, overall.
I had two majors, and started
with English as one major (I dropped it in part because the reading
requirements were beyond unreasonable—such as, within a specific course,
several big novels like Moby-Dick,
Henry James novels, etc., crammed into a semester with other, shorter stuff,
not all of which could sensibly and appreciably be read in that time); my
majors ended up being psychology and philosophy. With psychology, for me the
reading was not intensely hard in quality, but quite voluminous. With
philosophy, it was the opposite: lower volume but harder content.
Add to that that I had a paid
job (up to two during summers off) almost the entire time in college (it was
about 20 hours a week, I think), and I was constantly working. Not much time
for social crap. I think plenty of students would say college meant more work
than high school, if they were in the same basic boat as I was.
Christmas charm…and disillusionment
As you might expect, Christmas
brings me a mixed bag of moods. Sometimes I can be more depressed/anxious
during the time, alternating with more fun/appreciative moods. (Also, I have
associations of Christmas being a “treacherous” time in that it’s been the
period where the most tasteless changes in certain work gigs have happened—such
as losing a job, or some other almost-violent development. And this has
happened to others with whom I’ve worked, not just to me.)
Without going into detail, one
big change for the better for me in the late 1970s was no longer being a “maniac”
about getting gifts, which I rather was as a kid (I admit that this puts it in
subjective terms: “how much a maniac?” one could ask). I think this is a kind of
“losing baby teeth” all American and Christian young have to go through: to go
from (1) valuing Christmas in “getting” to (2) appreciating the holiday away from that. I had an especially
wrenching version of that change in late 1977 and late 1978—never mind exactly
how.
Add to this complexity the fact
that, from about 2000 to about 2006, I did a lot to get my nephews the gifts
they asked for in Christmases when they were a lot younger, which seemed to go
against my “developed Puritanism” regarding Christmas gifts. I thought this
strategy was appropriate, when the boys were young, and when “Christmas being a
magical time for kids” seemed a worthy enough value when I had the uncle role
to fill. They were big on Lego sets, etc. Fortunately, they’ve outgrown that; they’re
at ages where one has graduated from college and has his first post-college job,
the other is in his second year of college.
My mother, though, is (even at
83) a big one for still putting out all sorts of Christmas decorations at home.
And she does it to an extent I have a healthy skepticism for: including tacky
(I think) Christmas plates, Christmas-themed hand towels (including a bright
red one in the bathroom that I think looks ridiculous, never mind what risk its
dye might pose in the laundry), and other such items. (She no longer puts up a
small artificial Christmas tree, which is fine by me.) In my own Christmas “skepticism”/mini-depression-related
modes, I passingly look at this Christmas decor and think something like, “That’s
pretty goyishe.” And I say that as a confirmed Gentile.
##
To add to the “earthy”
observations, the weirdest Christmas period I ever experienced as an adult was
when I worked for Wells Fargo Guard Services in 1989-90, and I was working in
what was the Raia quarry in Hamburg, N.J. (it has since gotten another owner).
This was a stopgap job I had between a very-short, abortive, farcical time with
The Vernon News in summer 1989 and
finally starting work (with regular but part-time hours, at first) at a
nationally distributing publisher in August 1990. In the Wells Fargo job, from September
1989 to sometime in early spring 1990, my main location (we guards worked
several locations in that job, which for me ran from September 1989 to December
1990) was the quarry, and the shifts, about four days a week, were from 5 p.m.
to 7 a.m. the next morning (yes, 14 hours in a row, and with no overtime). That
was a beastly schedule, one of the last (maybe the last) regular nighttime work scheduled I ever had. (Generally,
most of my jobs from 1978 to 1990 were at night, and from 1990, most have been
at day.)
So in December 1989, I was
sitting in a dusty, small quarry-management building, with crude windows that
looked out on the quarry, during the graveyard shift, with winter coming on.
The area was as desolate as a desert (a big, momentary deviation was seeing,
one time, what might have been a coyote running through). And the radio was on—we
had the radio on to help us stay away, as the 14-hour shift was a real test of
our ability not to doze off—and it was tuned to a station that played nonstop
Christmas music—carols, Bing Crosby-type numbers, etc. If anything could get
you permanently sick of Christmas carols, it was hearing that endlessly
spooling stuff at 2 in the morning with a brain half-melting from trying to
stay awake in a quarry with nothing going on there. It was almost like being in
an Army guard house, listening to tacky ethnic music as the only thing that
reminded you of something like civilization.
Among my future blog work, what’s to come
I know better now than to make too many promises in
this regard, but I had said as far back as early (late winter/spring) 2013 that
I would write on the radium-soil protests and related stuff that happened in
Vernon Township, N.J., in 1986. This situation, next spring, will be 30 years
ago, so maybe next year is a good time to tackle this story.
