Free Coldplay mp3s

Free Coldplay album (legal download) here.

OutofYourLife.com

It's time to break up with his jewelry, too.

LMHO. Talk about niche marketing. Watch the tv ad.

Free Music for Independence Day

A slight departure from my usual free music posts...click here for 10 Amazon free mp3's of patriotic tunes, in honor of our great country, and in spite of the fact that our President and Congress are slowly flushing it down the toilet. When I listen to God Bless America, I feel a little hopeful. Happy July 4th.

On Michael Jackson

Honestly, I will heave if I have to read or listen to another thing about how incredible and miraculous Michael Jackson was...how he changed the world, etc.. No, he didn't. Watch any interview with Michael and you will see a seriously weird individual. Maybe borderline disturbed. Something was not quite right with the man.

I have no idea if he was actually guilty of child molestation. If he was, I hope he is, well, burning in hell, whatever that means. If he wasn't, then I am very sorry he died but really, enough already. He was a very talented musician and dancer. Unique. I saw him perform in the eighties and he was great. It did not change my life.

Assuming he was actually guilty of child molestation, can we still appreciate his music and talent? This is actually a very old question. Can we appreciate the operas of Wagner? The poetry of TS Eliot and Ezra Pound? I can go on and on with a list of creative geniuses who were evil individuals. The entertainment industry in particular seems to breed creative people who either lead amoral lives or hurt other people. Can we still appreciate the art if we abhor the artist? Very interesting question. I have no answer.

Assuming that most of the world thinks child molestation is very, very bad, if you think Michael Jackson deserves to be mourned, you either:

• don't think he was guilty of child molestation;
• don't know if he was guilty or not and have decided not to deal with the question because listening to Thriller gives you the warm fuzzies about your childhood in the eighties;
• think that even if he was guilty, acknowledging that he was possibly a horrible person is enough and you are able to separate the artist from the art;
• think that even if he was guilty, his music was world-changing and therefore he deserves our veneration.

I personally lean toward the second choice, regardless of the fact that I don't mourn Michael Jackson. I'm sort of done with all the MJ specials and tributes, and interviews of people who knew him or claimed to have known him. The excess of the world's response to the passing of a pop icon is too much, too too much. Really, I've had enough.

Peace

And while we're on the topic of pop culture and music

Just for the helluvit, pick a rock/pop male vocalist and female vocalist from, say the last 40 years, who have the most distinctive, clearest, widest-range voices, a voice that you instantly recognize no matter what the song. My choices would be Freddie Mercury and Sheryl Crow. I hate Sheryl Crow's idiotic politics, but boy do I love her voice. I've always thought Mercury had one of the most flexible, amazing voices in rock history.

Attention Pop Culture Musical Geniuses

I'm trying to remember the name of a nineties one-hit-wonder. It was done by some guy with a synthesizer in his basement who had a pretty good techpop song with sort of morbid lyrics about a girl who gets in to all sorts of trouble. I think it was late nineties. Anybody have a clue?

Father's Day

Not sure why Father's Day gets to me so much. It just does. It's been 4 years since I lost my Dad to cancer. Time has worked it's magic and while I miss him terribly, I've more or less stopped grieving. I get through his birthday and his yahrtzeit just fine, with a visit to his grave and some tears and prayers, but then I'm okay. His death doesn't preoccupy my mind like it used to when it was fresh. But come Father's Day, and it hurts all over again and I feel like I lost him yesterday. Maybe it's because the rest of the world is celebrating fatherhood and I can't. I'm wondering if I will feel better about Father's Day if I ever make my husband into a father. Maybe that's part of the hurt.

I had to buy my father-in-law a Father's Day card, since my husband is allergic to all things Hallmark, and this sort of thing is my designated job. It feels pretty empty to be wishing my father-in-law a Happy Father's Day; he is no more my father than anyone else is. I like him; he's a nice guy and good to my husband, but he's not my father. I've also taken to calling my inlaws Mom and Dad, which is their preference, but certainly not mine. I didn't call them that in my first marriage, but I caved this time around, since it means so much to them. It feels very fake, but sometimes in life, you need to do the wrong thing for the right reason. They are wonderful people, and they certainly treat me almost like parents. But, they're not.

I miss my father. I dreamed about him two nights ago. I was living in the house I grew up in. It was the middle of the night and my father came into my bedroom. "What's the matter, Daddy?" I asked him. "I can't sleep. I'm worried about something and want to talk to you." "Want an Ambien?" I asked him. This is where it crosses over in dream-weirdness because if I was young and living in my parents' house, I wouldn't even know what an Ambien was, let alone offer one to my father. In the dream, my father tells me something which I can't remember then hugs me really tight and leaves the room. I can almost feel that hug and I wish I could remember what he told me.

I wonder what dreams mean. Was that my father visiting me from the next world (I can't sleep.) or was that just a product of my grieving mind missing him? I wish it were the former, but I sadly know it's the latter. I do believe my father exists somewhere, but I know we can't communicate. You can't imagine how sad this makes me.

Sometimes I go through some of his things to make me feel a little closer to him. I need to be in the right frame of mind for this though. I think if I did that today, I'd melt away into grief and hysteria. Wouldn't be a good thing. I still have the sefer that was opened on his desk before he was taken away to the hospital for the last time. I keep the bookmark in the place it was opened to. Yes, I know how foolish and sentimental that is. Once, someone was going through my bookcase and took out the sefer and opened it to the mark and then almost dropped it. I nearly had a coronary, thinking that my father's place would be lost. I told a friend of mine about the sefer and she thought it was beautiful that I was holding my father's place. "You know, so that when he come back in tchiyat hamaytim (God's resurrection of the dead), he can just pick up his learning where he left off." My friend is very spiritual. It's not that I don't believe in tchiyat hamaytim. I do. It's just that it would hurt too much to personalize it and give myself the hope that someday I might see my father again. It's one thing to think about it in religious terms; quite another to think about what it might mean to me. Though I will admit, since my father's death, I do say that particular blessing in the Amidah with more kavanah.

Sorry to get so morbid on such a happy day. If you're a dad, enjoy your day and hug your kids. If you're a son or daughter, give your dad a big kiss and appreciate and love the heck out of him. And have a Happy Father's Day.

How to Not Be Romantic

You're not going to like this post. I'm not even sure I'm going to like this post. It's so anti-intuitive. But I'm going to talk about how my marriage has completely changed my ideas about what is romantic.

When I married my husband the first time, we did romance. He sent me flowers. He got me jewelry. We did dumb, mushy, bad joke Hallmark cards. We lit candles. We went out for picnics on the beach, dinners in dark restaurants. We went on weekends away in ski resorts, vacations, etc. We followed the script. We were even following the script when we were being creative and spontaneous. We were both doing romance the way we thought it should be, the way it was on Friends, and in the movies, and in trashy novels. You know, explosive, demonstrative, with big gestures and lots of gazing into each other eyes.

Yeah. Well. Five years later, that romance didn't keep us from getting divorced. What it did do was cause a lot of resentment on the mutual lack of response to each other's efforts. Why? Why didn't I feel loved when The Husband bought me diamond earrings? Why did I silently criticize how small they were and how they were in yellow gold when he knows I like white gold and how the diamonds were so unwhite? Yes, I did think that, internally (thankfully, I knew enough not give voice to such pettiness). On his side, instead of appreciating my gestures, he resented the fact that I was spending so much money on them. The romance was hollow to us. It did nothing to generate love. There was so much wrong in so many other areas that the romance became plastic.

Fast forward to marriage #2. We just passed our one month anniversary and we spontaneously bought each other stuff to celebrate. I got him a portable Ipod speaker (cost: $9.99) and he got me Bananagrams (cost: $14.99). What was cool about this was that 1) we didn't decide beforehand to buy each other gifts, we just did and 2) we didn't spend a ton of money and 3) we bought each other very un-romantic gifts. But we spent two hours playing Bananagrams on Shabbos afternoon and laughing our heads off at some of our lame attempts at cheating. And he used the Ipod speaker while he was relaxing at home and didn't feel like having headphones on. And I think that we both really liked our gifts. And we both felt appreciated and loved.

When we got engaged the first time, I hooked The Husband up with my cousin in the jewelry business and he bought my engagement ring from him. He had a certain ring in mind (round stone, yellow gold, solitaire setting) and so did I (radiant stone, white gold, side stones). We went back and forth and settled on a compromise, but we both felt sort of bad about it. I wanted him to instinctively know what I wanted and was frustrated with what he wanted to choose for me. I realize now how foolish that was. He wanted to pick out the ring himself and was frustrated with how what I wanted was so different from what he thought would be the perfect ring for me. What we compromised on was still a pretty ring. But the process to getting there sort of sucked the joy out of it.

Fast forward to marriage #2. I still had the stone from the first engagement ring (I had reset it into a necklace during the divorce). I asked The Husband about putting it into a new engagement ring for our new engagement/marriage. He said: here's what I'd like to spend, go get yourself a new ring setting and tell your cousin to send me a bill. Very unromantic, right? But I picked out exactly what I wanted, and then threw in some of my own money to buy a matching band. Very, very unromantic. And when I showed him the rings, The Husband looked at my hand and said "Wow. They look gorgeous. I would have never chosen that style. We'll have to work on some matching stuff for future anniversaries." And then I tackled him. And what started as a very unromantic, practical gesture became a very sweet promise. And frankly, I don't care that much about when we actually buy the stuff. It's the feeling behind the promise that was never there in the first marriage. And when I look down at my hand, I feel like my husband really does love me. Finally.

This is probably obvious to everyone else, but at last I've realized how mature, happy people carry on relationships. It's not romance that makes the love. It's love that makes the romance.

Hubris, Part 2

Brig. Gen. Michael Walsh, with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, was testifying on the Louisiana coastal restoration process in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. He began to answer one of Boxer's questions with "ma'am" when Boxer immediately cut him off.

"You know, do me a favor," an irritated Boxer said. "Could say 'senator' instead of 'ma'am?'"

"Yes, ma'am," Walsh interjected.

"It's just a thing, I worked so hard to get that title, so I'd appreciate it, yes, thank you," she said.

"Yes, senator," he responded.

Watch it here.

One who runs after honor will have it run away from him.
-The Talmud, Eruvin 13b

Hubris, Part 1

“I’ve got one television station that is entirely devoted to attacking my administration.”
-President Obama, 6/17/09

Really Mr. President? Would you like some cheese with that whine?

You forgot to mention that you've also got one station entirely devoted to adoring and worshiping your administration and pretty much the rest of the mainstream media soft-balling any criticism of your administration to the point of losing any real claims of objectivity. Oh, and let's not forget the prime time infomercial on your health care program that ABC is basically giving to you. Seriously.

And, btw, Mr. President, let me remind you of the fact that you are The President and that this is a democracy. The President gets to be criticized. Yeah, that's how that the Free Press works.

Why don't you ask President Bush how many stations were entirely devoted to attacking his administration?

Freebies/Deals Roundup

• Free Vaseline Aloe Fresh (must have Costco membership number)
• Free Emeril spice samples (I have no idea if this is kosher or not so check when it arrives)
• Free Johnson's Soothing Gift Set
• Free Dove's shampoo
• Free TP
• Free cereal bars (again, not sure of kashrut...check package)
• Free 2-year subscription to TimeOut NY
• Free Aveeno shampoo
• $10 off $25 at Macy's, Friday until 1pm
• 50% off one item at Michael's (until Sunday)
• $5 off a $50 purchase at KMart (until Sunday)
• Free Tampax
• Free dandruff shampoo
• Free kids binoculars
• Free Kotex
• $1 off Baskin-Robbins frozen drink