| the blog of human failure
Here’s a question for the fellas. When you’re peeing into a standard model toilet, if you’re alone or if there’s a lot of background noise do you pee directly into the center of the water, but if there’s no background noise or you think someone can hear you from the outside of the bathroom, do you pee on the inside porcelain walls of the toilet so it dribbles down into the water as quietly as possible? Especially if you’re high?
Me too.
This is a scenario for my fellow New Yorkers. Have you ever gone up to the Upper West Side around Columbia or down in Brooklyn to Williamsburg and snuck up behind an Orthodox Jew and started whacking them with and unfurled coat hanger? Whack, whack, whack! Then their yarmulke falls off and the sun hits their head and they start melting or whatever is supposed to happen.
I grew up in the conservative temple and we had to wear a yarmulke when we were inside the temple but we could take it off when we went outside. Reformed Jews don’t have to wear a yarmulke at all for the most part.
In Judaism it goes Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, Hasidic from least to most fanatically religious. It seems the more religious you are the more headgear you have to wear. This seems consistent with Muslims and Catholics as well. Maybe this is my imagination but don’t you imagine God contacting you with a laser beam from heaven directly into your head? This beam would be a direct shot to your noodle filling you with good luck and life advice and well-wishes from the deceased. If this is true then why would you want to put a layer between your head and God’s laser beam?
Headgear seems to indicate the opposite, that God is sending down bad things in his beam and you must protect yourself from them at all costs. The more religious you are, the more you believe in God’s evil energy. The only other positive scenario I can think of is that these people think that God lives under your hat, and you have to wear it every day so he doesn’t escape. This seems pan-theistic, because you would need a separate God under every hat, hopefully all reporting to a manager God in the sky. This seems more sacrilegious then the idea of one God in the sky manipulating many laser beams, whether they be good or evil broadcasts.
Also if you are Orthodox, but you wear a toupee, you have a serious choice to make. Do you wear a yarmulke, so that no one knows that you already have something on your head, or do you admit to everyone that you are really bald so that you only have to wear one head covering? If you’re wearing a hair hat you couldn’t possibly be required to wear another hat, could you? Are their any Orthodox that can answer these questions?
I’ve got more questions about showering and scuba diving. Also about scenarios where it would be impossible to wear a hat, such as brain surgery. Just because you’re in Barbados or you had a stroke doesn’t mean you get to take your hat off.
Let me give you a hypothetical situation. Think of your favorite body part. Have you got it in your mind? Good, now let’s lay you went to the doctor for a routine checkup and the doctor started feeling around in that way that doctors do. After touching and squeezing your parts that have little value to you, first your middle toe on your left foot, then the red mole on your back, and then he settles on that good one. You know the one. He’s standing there really giving it a squeeze, making middle-range guttural noises like you imagine the obese make during intercourse, and then after a few seconds more of twisting and poking at it he furrows his brow in that way that he has seen doctors on TV furrow to indicate human sorrow.
“I’m sorry, but I feel a lump indicative of a malignant tumor. I’ll have to take a biopsy and run some tests.” You leave and come back four days later.
“Good news!” he says. “All tests came back negative. It’s a harmless growth that we can remove without scarring. You’re very lucky.”
So that’s my question. Are you lucky? In my opinion no. To me lucky isn’t the absence of bad things happening, but instead the occasion of an unexpected positive. It’s best coupled with no negative consequences for others.
For instance if you put on an old winter jacket and find a $20 bill in the pocket, that isn’t lucky. You didn’t gain anything; you just retrieved $20 you had previously lost. The wrong has been righted. If your friend lets you borrow a jacket and you find $20 in the pocket you’re moderately lucky. You’re probably a shitty friend if you don’t return the money, but your friend is none the wiser. That is unless he planted the $20 as some sort of friendship test, in which case you’re better off pocketing the money, keeping the jacket and never talking to that person again. Real friends don’t test you. If you go to an upscale restaurant and you forget to wear a required dinner jacket so they give you one to borrow and you find $20 in that pocket, then you are exactly lucky.
I know other people just think this is an issue of point of view. It’s a philosophy or a way of looking at the world. These people are so bereft of good luck or general happiness that they must skew all of life three places to left so that every bowel movement which requires only one wipe is a small miracle. A one-wiper is fortunate, it is pleasant, it is economic in regards to toilet paper and sewerage, but alas, it is not lucky. It’s just to be expected from a healthy colon.
Is every non-negative in life good luck, or is luck a word reserved for the truly positive?
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