The Way Smoke Smells

So I really love going into the conference room at this day job, and I just realized why. Everyone who smokes goes through the conference room and into the fire escape, and so there's a residue, not of smoke, but of sort of pre-smoke and post-smoke, maybe the smell ignited by freshly burning paper, or a special smell that only happens at the moment when a match strikes?

It reminds me of my aunt's house growing up, and of inch-high shag carpeting, and of the '70s. No word on whether there's a bunch of furtive, antisocial Siamese cats patrolling around the office, but I'll keep you updated.

Praying, and Cookies

There's this little afternoon prayer service inside an office building. Today, because it was the anniversary of his aunt's death, one of the elderly gentlemen brought in boxes of cookies and brownies for everyone. Before anybody ate, this one guy held up his phone and said, "This is the kosher certification for the cookies. I'm not saying anything about it, good or bad. I'm just saying I don't recognize it, and you should all know that before you eat it." He didn't take any. I left right away, disgusted with that guy. Now I wish I'd taken a cookie right away and sank my teeth into it. Or maybe I just wish I would've sank my teeth straight into that guy's face.

Scott Pilgrim, You're Old.

So I've been having a bad week and basically a bad year, and just not happy with anything, and my publisher just gave me a list of corrections that's literally half as long as my book and my Sesame scripts are falling apart and there's this guy who really wants to get me fired, and I couldn't even write on the train this morning. And I dug in my backpack and came out with Scott Pilgrim #5, the one where he fights the twin ex-boyfriends and Ramona tells him that she hates his band, and I started thinking about the movie, and how it was the first movie we brought the baby to. And now that baby is five years old, and how can it be true that the Scott Pilgrim movie is that old, that it's been a part of my life that long? And I thought that, if it's been five years since I sat in that theater and watched Scott Pilgrim, I can totally make it through the next five years at least. I think. I hope.

Amplify Is For Sale

The latest: I just got quoted at length in a news story about the company, Amplify, where until a month ago I wrote video games, and how it's ostensibly failing, and that the company is up for sale. I kind of don't believe it's failing -- not entirely -- except that our games have barely gone on sale (they're still not yet available to the public) and there hasn't really been time for anything to happen.

I'm kind of depressed and kind of surprised (almost everything I said about Amplify could basically be boiled down to: "They let us make amazing stuff and it sounds like they're going to pull the plug before anybody gets to see it"). And, unlike my quote, a lot of what we made wasn't even for the Amplify Tablet. I mean, the only game you can actually officially get of ours, Twelve a Dozen, is for your friendly neighborhood iPad.

The entire piece is here, if you want to read it. But hopefully I'll have something better for you to read very very soon.

And one thing that has nothing to do with Amplify: A website I co-founded and sort of semi-secretly co-run, Hevria, dedicated to finding creative folks within religious communities, is trying to raise money for new films and sites and programs. It's an unbelievably worthy cause, and if you've got a few extra bucks, it'd be awesome if you kicked some of it their way.

Skiing with Babies

For Passover, we left behind New York (and our kitchen) and went to a ski resort in remote Canada with my in-laws and a ton of kids. It wasn't a nightmare. It was really wonderful. But me and my anxiety made it a nightmare anyway. Maybe the fact that I took my baby on a 6000-foot-high ski lift had something to with it. Here's my latest piece for Hevria:

I Forgot to Selfie

BY MATTHUE ROTH • APRIL 14, 2015 • ESSAY

I went away for Passover with my kids and my wife and my wife’s family. We went to the mountains, to a really nice ski resort, and I took pictures of trees. I mean it. That isn’t, like, a metaphor for something — on my phone, you click GALLERY and all you have are pictures of furry green. Well, a bunch of stony white patches, too. We were in the mountains. There were a lot of rocks. You couldn’t take pictures of the trees without shooting a bunch of rocks.

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The Talmudic Secret of Foreplay

 Via Daniel Boyarin's epic book Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and and the Invention of the Jewish Man:

So, um, I believe a wow is in order. Also in the same chapter: I learned that James Joyce's Ulysses uses the phrase "goyim naches."

#fuckyeahtalmud