A Song Lost and Found

Tonight while writing a post for Hevria, this amazing new group blog about art and G-d and Jewish stuff, I had to look up something in my own old blog at Diaryland. I got swept up in the tsunami of ego and started reading all these old entries, parts of a self I barely remembered.

The last entry I posted was about the novel I'd written that had just come out, Losers. Almost all the chapters are named after Cure songs, and I was writing liner notes to them, one by one (the chapters, not the songs). In one of the notes, I got lost mourning for a song that I could never find, one that my best friend put on a mix for me before he died:

Another Cure chapter. The song "A Night Like This" is a beautiful song in its own right, track 8 on "The Head on the Door," which some poet-friends in Melbourne performed a track-by-track jam of poems influenced by the songs. But there's another Cure song that my best friend Mike put on a mixtape for me that was just Robert Smith's voice and a brilliant string section and tympani drums that's called something like "Other Nights Like This" -- the handwriting was scratchy. I never remembered to ask him, and now it's too late. Now the tape's broken, and I keep googling the first words, but I can't find anything.

READ MORE>>

That was 2008. Before I had kids, before I had a job or style or a pager (I still don't have a pager). At that point, it was already three years since I'd spoken to Mike. It wasn't until tonight that my ex-roommate, dear friend and how-does-she-do-it-and-with-kids-too-type person Andrea saw my whoa-remember-this post and found it on Facebook.



And, like, I'm sure it isn't as good as you think it will be, but it's been fermented in my memory, and every second of it is about a time I remember more than anything will ever happen again.

And now I am crying.

How to Write a Facebook Invitation

Tonight we're having a rabbi from Israel speak at our place. My wife tasked me with writing the Facebook invite -- meaning, of course, that it weighed on my head whether we'd get a good turnout or not.

The first step was obvious: Don't use the words "intellectually," "stimulating," "rabbi," or "lecture." (Although, come to think of it, "stimulating" on its own might lead people to show up for an entirely different type of party.) Likewise forbidden: "shiur" (the Hebrew word for "lecture"), "conversation," "discussion group," or, most dreaded of all, "Torah talk." I called it a "party," which might be misleading -- or, depending on the subject matter of the talk and whether people stick around, it might be a self-fulfilling prophecy. And it is Hanukkah time. On the other hand: "Free food" always seems to work wonders.

So we've got the list. It's the day of the event, two and a half hours to go. And we've got our statistics in: 19 confirmed guests, 18 maybes, and 64 unanswered replies. I'm sure there must be an accurate way of tabulating how many of these 82 indefinite replies will actually pull through. While I have yet to arrive at an actually scientifically valid way of definitively answering, here's what I've got so far:

* If anyone on your list is married and has kids, put them down as "no."
* If anyone lives more than a 20-minute commute away, eliminate half of them. Eliminate two-thirds of the people who live more than a 40-minute commute away. (If you live in a place where people actually take public transit, and the public transit stinks after sunset -- meaning, anywhere but New York and the Bay Area -- just give up on anyone without a car.)
* Here, I should probably do some sort of analysis of the percentage of single guys who are coming, single-girls-who-like-guys on the "maybe" lists, and vice versa. Like: if your party right now is 65% women, and there are 15 undecided boys, anticipate on getting at least 11 of them.
* The Jew factor. How many people on your list are Jewish? How many of their names sound Jewish? Does the concept of an all- or mostly-Jewish party (er, lecture...sshhh!) excite people, or freak them out?

That's all I've got for now. Can you guys think of any other factors that might weigh in? Let me know, and I'll amend the list tomorrow...after I see how my grand theories turned out.

Want to Join My Cult?

How geeky and sixth-grade USY nightmare does that sound?

Okay, so Facebook is collecting your private data. And it's going to use it to sell your contact information to marketers. Who didn't know that already, or at least suspect it? When any automated website asks you for your five favorite bands, it doesn't want to know in order to agonize about how cool Regina Spektor is with you. It wants to sell you other music that sounds like Regina Spektor.

I was just convinced by my friend, music recommender, and sometime Internet guru Joshua Gee to join VampireFreaks.com. It's a social networking site for goths -- yes, I fly that way sometimes, and I've got my own set of fangs to prove it -- and, over the past two years, it's been proven to be wildly popular. The advantage that Facebook has (that is, it includes everyone in the universe is also a disadvantage, and we can already see the results of it: Every time someone from one of my former lives has friended me -- or, worse, sent me a long and detailed personal message -- and it's been a person that, if it's all the same, I'd rather keep in my former life, I stay away from Facebook for a few days.

If, on the other hand, I join a website that fits with my individual identity or my musical tastes or my personal convictions (vegetarian networks, for instance), I can limit myself to associating only with people who I'm actually interested in and care what they have to say...and I'll feel like my ad money is going to people I support (in this case, goth geeks) instead of Mark Zuckerberg, who I just feel kind of gross about at this point.

In addition to VampireFreaks, there are social networks for Christians, vegetarians, and even pets. So why haven't Jewish social networks ever taken off?

A rudimentary Googling shows there's no shortage of Jewish social networks. So why isn't anyone signed up on any of them? Instead of those (shiver) USY reunions being held on Shmooze.com or JewCrew.org, there are Facebook groups for the upcoming tenth reunion of National Convention '02 with literally hundreds of members -- and you know that all those ex-teens getting together is just going to inspire another round of old photo albums, bomber shots, and messy hook-up sessions, followed by another ten years of practiced Facebook avoidance.

Is that the real reason that Jews don't join Jewish social networks -- because they're so small, you might actually have to run into someone?

For my own part, I'll save my Jewish networking for the same user-platform my parents are on -- the local synagogue -- and use social networking for the things that I really need computers for, like writing protest letters to congressmen and finding new music. In the meantime, if anyone comes looking, I'll be on Vampire Freaks. Want to join my cult?