PICTURE THIS

I got my first smart phone recently and went a little crazy taking pictures with it.  Here are some of my favorites that I took in Central Park:

                                                    Shadow Wedding

                                                    Office Upside-Down Cake

                                                    Shadow Couple ask for Directions

                                          Archway to Heaven

SUBWAY READING

NYC Subway 6 Train (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I board the subway every morning.  And when I do, I'm frequently not in the best frame of mind.  Blame it on the cheap instant coffee I drink or the hoards of people around me sucking all the oxygen out of the atmosphere, but I'm not always the happiest of campers.  I always bring reading material with me, but if it's too crowded, I don't have room to read it.  As you can tell from that last sentence, when I read, it's real stuff, like newspapers or books.  That's because I refuse to read anything longer than an email address on a screen the size of a postage stamp. (For those of you too young to read anything on a screen bigger than a postage stamp, "postage stamps" are little colored pieces of paper people used to put on bigger pieces of paper when they wanted to send messages to other people without having to put them in a bottle and throw them out to sea.) In fact, sometimes it's so crowded even the postage-stamp-sized screen-readers don't have room to hold up their postage-stamp-sized screened devices. Sometimes we're squeezed together so tightly we all look like overweight, overdressed versions of The River Dancers without the rhythmic stomping (and a lot of unrhythmic toe stomping). 

On those days, I entertain myself by reading the ads on the subway car walls. Some days, it can be as involving as a novel.  To show you what I mean, let me take you through the ads that I saw on just one morning a couple of weeks ago. The ads will be annotated with the comments I made about them in my head, which is where I most frequently make comments.

Ad #1
Ad: "The Gift of Happiness - Jobs come and go,"
Me: Do they know something I don't? (My morning haze tends to make me a little paranoid.)
Ad: "physical beauty fades,"
Me: Give me a break! It's 8am on a Monday morning!  (See paranoia reference above.)
Ad: "markets rise and fall,"
Me: I wouldn't know. I never have enough money to invest in them. (Before my second cup of coffee, my self pity runs a close second to my paranoia. After my second cup, it's self righteous indignation alternating with juvenile humor until I clock out.) 
Ad: "but the benefits of philosophy last a lifetime."
Me: Really?  'Cause I know a lot of philosophy majors who have even less money to invest in the markets than I do.
Ad: "The School of Practical Philosophy"
Me: Talk about a contradiction in terms. Maybe instead of Plato they teach how to unclog drains.

Ad #2
Ad: "At age 80, who doesn't need a face lift?"
Me: Ok, now this is getting personal. (Continue to see paranoia reference above).
Ad: "We're refurbishing the F and G stations."
Me: Nice try, but I'm not buyin' it.(Continue to see paranoia reference above, coupled with self righteous indignation.)

Ad #3 This was actually part of the MTA's "Poetry in Motion," with posted poems.
Poem:"The Good Life - When some peope talk about money, they speak as if it were a mysterious lover who went out to buy milk and never came back..."
Me: As if?!
  
Ad#4
Ad: "Spinlister, the global bike share.  Let your bike pay for your dates."
Me: Great! Now I have to flashback to my single days?

Ad#5
Ad: Protect-A-Bed.  Beware of bedbugs! Protect yourself!
Me: More flashbacks to my single days?

Ad #6
Ad: Bramsonart College - create you own games!
Me: Will these references to my single days never cease?!

Ad #7
Movie poster: "Love is Strange"
Me: Now I have to be reminded of married life?

Ad #8
Ad: Finger painting  play dates in east Village are tough. Bounty is tougher. New York tough."
Me: I'll tell you what's tough. Being called old,poor, possibly unemployed and with a checkered past in front of a bunch of overweight, overdressed unsynchronized River Dancer wannabees before I've had my second cup of coffee. If I see one more annoying ad, I'm going to do some very serious, motionless glaring.

Ad #9
Ad: Do you smile in your selfies? If not, come see Arnold Jankowitz, DDS.
Me:Oh, I'm smiling. And glaring. Seriously.

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FATE WATCHERS' KARMA COUNTING

English: High priest offering a sacrifice of a goat, as on the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur; from Henry Davenport Northrop, "Treasures of the Bible," published 1894 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Yesterday was Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. So it seems an appropriate time for a blog that's a bit more philosophical than usual. Even though I was raised with a good Jewish education and continued to practice my religion as an adult, years ago, when I was having a tough time of things, I looked into eastern philosophy. I found its emphasis on things like love and tranquility very comforting. But there were other concepts, like karma, that were a bit more difficult.

According to one school of thought, karma involves not just the moral consequences of a person's behavior, but a general balancing of positive and negative experiences. Thus, for every negative experience a person suffers that is not a consequence of bad behavior on their part, they will eventually experience a positive experience that they did nothing to earn in order to "balance" their karma. Conversely, for every positive experience a person enjoys that they did nothing to earn, they will eventually experience something negative that was not due to their behavior to balance that karma. One book I read stated that even small things, like a person saying "thank you" or smiling, or, conversely, frowning or being rude, could be forms of positive or negative karma.

When I first read the book, I didn't think much about it. But soon, my pre-eastern thought processes caught up with me. I had always been a big, if not obsessive, "counter." Would that piece of cake be "worth" its 380 calories? That dress be worth the month's salary it would cost? My fiber cereal clean my intestines well enough to justify eating a breakfast more depressing than the newspaper it tasted like?

Once the wheels began turning, I zealously applied them to this tantalizing new concept of karma. I began trying to calculate exactly how positive and negative karma in my life would balance out. For example, if the coffee guy smiled at me and said "good morning," would that be balanced by my bagel having more calories? If a saleslady suggested the perfect outfit as soon as I walked into a store, would some bozo have to "balance" that by spilling coffee on it on the subway ride home? If my husband told me how great I looked, would I now have to pick up the dry cleaning even though it was his turn? (Ok, that wasn’t a hypothetical.) If the IT guy wasn't incomprehensible or condescending, would it take him two more hours to fix my computer? (If he charges by the hour, that’s not a hypothetical, either. Also, even though I bought into the whole karma thing, the idea of an IT guy I could like and understand was just too "out there" for me.)

In short, in my obsession to get the best karmic "deal" (as I said, I had a good Jewish education), I created my own "Fate Watchers" karma counting point system. I got so paranoid about the opportunity cost of receiving positive karma that wasn’t "worth" it, I freaked out when people afforded me the barest of common courtesies. If someone thanked me for anything more than once, I’d tell them to stop it. If they insisted I deserved the credit and started to thank me again, I’d hiss "Stop it. Please!" (Two can play that game.) When I found myself profusely thanking a guy on the street corner for telling me I was going to burn in eternal hell, I knew something was wrong.

So I decided to get back to my Jewish roots. These are the gems of wisdom I found:

Proverbs 27:1:  Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring.

Job:11:12:  But a stupid man will get understanding when a wild donkey's colt is born a man!

Genesis 3:19: From dust you were made, to dust you shall return.

My mother (she's Jewish, so this counts):  For someone so smart, you can be pretty stupid. 

What did it all mean?  To me, the message from Above was pretty clear: "You're dumber than the mud I made you from, so stop trying to 'game' me and just behave yourself!"  Humbling as it was, I knew that this tough love was right, and then and there, I gave up all attempts to keep track of my karmic account balance.  Unfortunately, the guy on the corner never got the memo on that.

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