YOU GOTTA HAVE FRIEEENNNDDS...

It’s been hard to get to write anything since my last post. I don’t think anyone noticed, but I did: I only posted once last week. Partly- Yom HaShoa and Yom HaZikaron kind of dampen things. Then, here comes Mothers’ Day. And then I think of my Mum who has been gone 27 years- because in a few weeks is her Yohrzeit, 10^th Sivan, after Shavuot. And that makes me think of my eldest brother whose 5^th Yohrzeit is even sooner, 2^nd Sivan. So with Yom HaShoa, I think of all the unimaginable loss to the Jewish people, including my father’s family. And with Yom HaZikaron, I think of all the appalling loss to Israel and the Jewish people, of 25,000 killed in battle, in army accidents, in terrorist attacks, and I think of my brother Yehuda. And then I think about how I am last one standing in my immediate family. So it’s no wonder I’ve lost my mojo. And then I go play Words With Friends on my iPhone.

So I’ll talk about WWF! Despite accusations of my so-called addiction, (http://thehairpin.com/2011/11/the-league-of-ordinary-ladies-coffee-shops) * I actually function pretty well. I switch off on Shabbos without any real difficulty and wait at least a few minutes after sundown on Saturday night before I switch on, and I check my emails first, THEN I go to WWF. So that’s not what an addict would do, is it? And I don’t dream of dancing letters like I used to back in the day when Tetris was the thing to play, and all I dreamed of was descending block forms and Russian melodies.

I can go for hours without checking the phone (I don’t use the alerts because all these push notifications use up battery, did you know?) and if I’m working, I don’t think about it at all. I might not check from morning to evening.

Also, I used to waste time with Sudoku and crosswords, and now it’s all WWF. So it’s not like I am stealing time from something else.

But I can’t deny that, when business is slow, like now for some inexplicable reason, (possible something to do with feeling too low to check my voicemail, come to think of it), I am just non-stop fiddling with my phone. I go from email to WWF to Facebook to email to WWF until I get sick of myself and play a few rounds of Scramble Challenge- the old one, solo, no internet connection needed, up to round 1288- thus killing a few minutes before checking WWF again. And if I am working on my laptop and I have the phone close by, then I am looping from computer to phone with all these things, as well as Googling things that jump into my head, for use in an article somewhere, sometime in the future. And did I mention Facebook?

Why don’t I go volunteer in a shelter for the homeless or in a soup kitchen or nursing home? Because, not to put too fine a point on it, although I love the ideal of humanity, I have realized that I can’t stand people. I have been talking and listening to people for all my adult life, and getting paid for doing it, and I have helped a lot of folks, and so in my down time I can hardly bear to answer the telephone, let alone ‘do face time’. I have embraced SMS and texting, simply to avoid actually speaking to people. If it wasn’t for Shabbos, I think I wouldn’t talk face-to-face with anybody apart from some family members and 2 friends. According to Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Orthodox Jews will be the last people who actually know how to converse, because of Shabbos.

And it might be a chicken-and-egg conundrum, but it could be contributing to my social inadequacy, especially in situations where I need to be the good corporate wife. I would much rather be working in the kitchen making the hors d’oeuvres than out in the cocktail party eating them, while making nice with people whom I either don’t know or cannot recognize, or if I do recognize them, cannot for the life of me remember their names. I am a useless gossip because I can never remember who did what to whom or when they did it, and usually I don’t care anyway. And all who know me will attest to the fact that I can’t make small talk. I usually end up being the bore who just bangs on passionately about something that others don’t care about but are too polite to shut me down. Or else I get into fights.  I know a guy with Asperger’s Syndrome and I enjoy his company most of the time, because there’s no small talk or lies or duplicity, just great swathes of fascinating information about whatever the subject he is expounding on. He’s just a bit hard to switch off. So I am a sort of non-Asperger’s fellow traveler/nerd, I think.

Anyway, there’s something about the WWF battle that is just magnetic. Sometimes I hate the game when I am getting thrashed, but there’s no better feeling than getting the J on the triple letter and then getting the triple word in a 7-letter word and scoring a gazillion, etc.

OK, I wrote this without once checking my phone, so all is not lost. (But if you want a game, I’m shyrlap.)

*This is a great comic strip written by my daughter Esther, and I am proud that I have featured in it, even though I am not quite as heartless as I am portrayed here.