I will tell you of The Street...
2018-Jun-21, Thursday 09:46![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dorchadas
Currently listening to H.P. Podcraft's episode about The Street, but the jokes about Lovecraft's xenophobia aren't quite so funny now in 2018...
I'm still coughing, though all my other symptoms have gone away. I'm blaming it on the pneumonia I had as a high school student--my yearly winter cough finally went away after a decade, but I'm still weak against respiratory infections. I bet the weather isn't helping either--as much as I love chill and rainy weather, a warmer summer would probably be better for getting over a cold, now that we know the old wisdom is right and cold weather really does contribute to colds.
Speaking of health, I mentioned my slight back pain to![[twitter.com profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/e0caa790ec10/-/twitter.com/favicon.ico)
lisekatevans, and how going to ACEN and sleeping on a hotel bed finally confirmed for me that it's probably not just the result of sleeping on a shikifuton, and she suggested that yoga might help. I was sitting the way I often do, legs crossed one on top of the other, feet off to each side, and she mentioned that it was pretty similar to the cow's face pose and some people take years to get to the point that they can do what I do naturally. Maybe I should consider it--I've only done yoga twice ever, and only once with an actual instructor at a Shabbat on the Lake event. I've never had a reason to seek it out, but back pain, even if mild and mostly only right after I wake up, is something I want to head off at the pass.
My father-in-law dealt with back pain for decades, and I think it was a major contributor toward his death.
Yesterday I started reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a book I've heard so much good about but never read. Now that I actually know something about superheroes and the history of comics, I love it. I almost cried at the origin story for the Escapist, the hero dreamt up by the novel's protagonists. Two Jewish kids in New York, with big mouths and bigger dreams, who just need the perfect character in order to break into comics. And thinking of what's happening in Europe, they develop the Escapist, who can break any bonds and enter any prison, and talk about putting Hitler being punched on the cover.
One of my favorite descriptions of G-d is in the Amidah, where he is called מַתִּיר אֲסוּרִים matir asurim, "who frees the chained."
That too was wishful thinking, since Josef Kavalier's family went to extraordinary measures to get him out of Prague, but they failed. He had to smuggle himself to Lithuania and then to America through Japan thanks to one of Chiune Sugihara's visas, and he was still only successful thanks to having family in America. Plenty of Jews were not so lucky, and many of them died. I've seen article about how the Golem of Prague was the first superhero--strong, fast, impervious to pain and injury, super-humanly moral, and dedicated to justice--and that echoes really loudly in the book. It's especially nice to read in a time when atrocities are being committed in our names.
"Never again" is now.
...so that's my life. Got more serious than I expected at the end, there, but it's all I could think of on the L as I was reading.
I'm still coughing, though all my other symptoms have gone away. I'm blaming it on the pneumonia I had as a high school student--my yearly winter cough finally went away after a decade, but I'm still weak against respiratory infections. I bet the weather isn't helping either--as much as I love chill and rainy weather, a warmer summer would probably be better for getting over a cold, now that we know the old wisdom is right and cold weather really does contribute to colds.
Speaking of health, I mentioned my slight back pain to
My father-in-law dealt with back pain for decades, and I think it was a major contributor toward his death.
Yesterday I started reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a book I've heard so much good about but never read. Now that I actually know something about superheroes and the history of comics, I love it. I almost cried at the origin story for the Escapist, the hero dreamt up by the novel's protagonists. Two Jewish kids in New York, with big mouths and bigger dreams, who just need the perfect character in order to break into comics. And thinking of what's happening in Europe, they develop the Escapist, who can break any bonds and enter any prison, and talk about putting Hitler being punched on the cover.
One of my favorite descriptions of G-d is in the Amidah, where he is called מַתִּיר אֲסוּרִים matir asurim, "who frees the chained."
That too was wishful thinking, since Josef Kavalier's family went to extraordinary measures to get him out of Prague, but they failed. He had to smuggle himself to Lithuania and then to America through Japan thanks to one of Chiune Sugihara's visas, and he was still only successful thanks to having family in America. Plenty of Jews were not so lucky, and many of them died. I've seen article about how the Golem of Prague was the first superhero--strong, fast, impervious to pain and injury, super-humanly moral, and dedicated to justice--and that echoes really loudly in the book. It's especially nice to read in a time when atrocities are being committed in our names.
"Never again" is now.
...so that's my life. Got more serious than I expected at the end, there, but it's all I could think of on the L as I was reading.
