Loss-Rain-Sunshine-Gain

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

Pluses and Minuses Since Friday

• Loss: No more bonus stimulation of part-time graduate school.
• Gain: Columbia-blue regalia ownership, and opportunity to don the ensemble for graduation on 15-16 May.
• Loss: Friend Riva being in metro-New York for just a few days.
• Gain: Friend Riva teaching me about pouncing as we toured Dürer and Beyond at the Met.
• Loss: Pat leaving for her annual golf trip in Tennessee.
• Gain: Renewal of my appreciation for Pat while missing her presence.
• Loss: Finishing my colleague Alysa Turkowitz's dissertation on how LGBT grad students navigate the classroom; I wanted it to continue, like a good movie or book.
• Gain: Honor at having been among the interviewees included in Alysa's dissertation.
• Loss: Sunday relaxation.
• Gain: The opportunity to prepare for a hugely important meeting at work.
• Loss: Lap-time with our feline daughter Phoebe during a two-day, off-site workshop in New York City.
• Gain: Two-day workshop on how to help a key population with its learning needs.
• Loss: My cousin Joe Silverman (z"l), to Parkinson's, Pneumonia and a stroke, just a couple of nights ago.
• Gain: Memories of Joe's and Joy, his wife's, kindness to my family after the death of my dad (z"l) in 1982.
• Loss: Maurice Sendak (z"l), an icon from my childhood, who drew the most appealing stories he could imagine.
• Gain: Learning that Maurice Sendak was gay and had a 50-year companion via this obituary
• Loss: Rain on and off since Friday.
• Gain: A front-garden full of pale- and dark-purple irises.

Longevity: What It Can Buy

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

In My Experience of Observing My Mom & Some of Her Memories So Far:

• Reminiscences of her red-bearded grandfather when she meets the orthopedist earlier today; the doctor has bright-red hair and a bright-red goatee
  
• A spine that curves at the bottom like a slippery-when-wet sign -- the X-ray doesn't lie
  
• A University of Wisconsin Journalism B.A.
  
• Father loss by her early-20s; she says he looked Swedish and people would buy furniture from him and say, "Thankfully, I didn't have to buy from a dirty Jew," and after completing the transaction, he'd say, "Would would you say if I told you you just did?" (Their name had been Prensky, but Ellis Island officials turned it into Prens, which was not identifiably Jewish)
  
• Marriage to my dad, a tall, handsome, creative, funny, toy-designing, child co-producer x3
  
• Three good daughters who are there for her when she needs us, which is not as often as it could be, considering her advanced age
  
• Trips to Majorca, England, Israel, Maine, France, Nova Scotia and more with various family members and alone
  
• Widowhood at 56; my dad (z"l) died of bile-duct cancer within six months of his diagnosis
  
• Grandmotherhood x4 beginning at age 67, of three gifted, gorgeous boys and a super-creative, beautiful girl
  
• Good friends from 40+ years in metro-Stamford, a number of whom have died; today, she was missing Jane
  
• Lush, Jewish cultural enrichment through her love of Jewish folk art and fiction
  
• A super-active brain that is the cognitive equivalent of a bodybuilder's physique, still!
  

Is Tap Dance the Yiddish of the Dance World?

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

Yes! Obituaries for Either are Premature

At "Dance Under the Influence," the marvelous "feast" -- "The New York Times" called it that -- the audience was invited to ask questions of the performers afterward. One woman asked Dormeshia Sumbry Edwards and Jared Grimes, the evening's tap-dancing duo, whether they worried about the tap's future. The way the audience-member asked the question, it reminded me of similar hand-wringing I've heard around the future of Yiddish. Dormeshia answered the question and her response was similar to mine about Yiddish, which was that it's hard to dignify such a question with a response, rich as the art-form and language both are.

Still, a week later, I must have been slightly haunted by the question, as I was playing randomly in Pinterest, and I decided to create a board called, "Yiddish words & phrased I picked up through listening to my parents' conversations." Here are the first five I've posted on the board so far, and which I heard either fairly often, or memorably; I've translated them based on my parents' explanations when I'd ask, and am spelling them out phonetically, with the disclaimer that I have no idea how to spell them correctly, using either Hebrew or English characters:

Source: sarah-siegel.polyvore.com via Sarah on Pinterest

Source: sarah-siegel.polyvore.com via Sarah on Pinterest

Source: sarah-siegel.polyvore.com via Sarah on Pinterest

Source: sarah-siegel.polyvore.com via Sarah on Pinterest

Source: sarah-siegel.polyvore.com via Sarah on Pinterest

IBM Alumna Edie Windsor's Remarks Upon Winning NOW NYC's Susan B. Anthony Award & Some Bonus, Personal Reflections

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

Re-posted from the LGBT IBMers and Friends Community behind IBM's firewall:

Last week, NOW NYC honored Edie Windsor, an IBM alumna and co-star of the poignant documentary, "Edie & Thea: A Very Long Engagement." Pat & I first met Edie and Thea 10 years ago at the LGBT Center in New York City, at an event co-sponsored by IBM and the United Nations' GLOBE (LGBT employee group). The topic was same-sex marriage laws around the world. Edie and Thea attended, as they wanted to know the latest trends; they were preparing to marry one way or another. They did wed, in Toronto, but sadly, Thea passed away prior to New York legalizing same-sex marriage. And because same-sex marriage is not yet recognized federally, Edie is required to pay a tax on her wife's estate, which would not be required if their marriage were recognized.

Learn more from Edie's remarks, which Edie gave me permission to post:

Thank you so much, NOW NY City, for honoring me with this award. It has particular meaning because of our somewhat parallel histories:

I began dating Thea in 1965, and NOW was founded in 1966. NOW, at that time argued fiercely for the legal equality of women but not for Lesbian women. As late as 2000, Betty Friedan who had founded NOW was finally acknowledging Lesbian sex “Enjoy” but did not want “them” politicized. And at that time Thea and I lived much of our working lives in the closet.

Retired from IBM in 1975 and active in the Personal Computer user groups, I found a new career as a grass-roots gay activist, engaged with almost every gay organization that existed already or as they were being born, meeting new friends of every age and ilk and making them part of my life with Thea. Developing an ever-increasing and life-changing love of the gay community, I came out as a Lesbian in all areas of my life. And received a Lifetime Achievement Award from SAGE in October 2010, one month before I filed my law suit.

I want to tell you why I am suing the United States of America, but first some necessary background.

My late spouse, Thea Spyer, and I lived together and loved each other for more than four decades – in sickness and in health – truly in love until death did us part.

We began dating in 1965, became engaged with a circular diamond broach in 1967, and stayed engaged for 40 years.

We lived through good times – each with jobs that we loved, great friends and dancing – oh we danced.

And we lived through the vicissitudes of aging and illness.

In 1977 Thea was diagnosed with Progress Multiple Sclerosis, in 1996 I had emergency Coronary Bypass surgery. Then in 2002, Thea’s aortic stenosis. And we still lived and enjoyed our life together – and still we danced.

We became Domestic Partners the first day it was offered in New York and we waited to be legally married in New York. But Thea had a lousy prognosis – max one year to live – so we decided to get married immediately – and we did in Toronto in May, 2007. Our wedding announcement in the New York Times completed this couple’s coming OUT.

(The history of Thea’s and my over 4-decades love affair and the LGBT times in which we lived are meticulously and lovingly documented in the film, “Edie and Thea – A Very Long Engagement,” produced and directed by Greta Olafsdottir and Susan Muska.)

When my beautiful, sparkling, brilliant Thea died in February 2009, I was overcome with grief. Within a month I was hospitalized with a heart attack, characterized as “broken heart syndrome”. Grieving and ill, I had to content with the immediate effects of the cruelly misnamed Defense of Marriage Act, known as DOMA.

Although New York State recognized our marriage, the federal government did not. So the government taxed what I inherited from Thea as though we were strangers rather than spouses. I paid over #350,000 in Federal Estate Tax. I’m 82 years old and live on a fixed income. Paying that tax was not easy.

Overwhelmed by my sense of injustice and unfairness, I decided to enter a lawsuit against the government to challenge that unjust law, DOMA, as unconstitutional and to get the federal government to treat married same-sex couples the same way that it treats all other married couples.

I lucked out when I found Roberta Kaplan, a Litigation Partner of Paul Weiss et al who stepped up to support my case. She then introduced me to James Essecks of ACLU who joined us. These two, Robbie and James, lead a legal dream team.

As many of you may know, President Obama and the Justice Department agreed with me that DOMA is unconstitutional and informed the court that they would no longer defend DOMA. But that privilege devolved on the House of Representatives which is defending DOMA.

Our status is that we are “fully briefed” and are awaiting the judge’s decision.

Along with society, NOW and I have come a long way.

I feel so proud and grateful that NOW gives the Susan B. Anthony Award to this out Lesbian for her fight for equality for all of us.

I try imagining Edie, who is to this day a magnetically-appealing woman, at work at IBM among mostly guys in slightly post-"Mad Men" and pre-early-Disco era. When we met in 2002, she said that she was out selectively at IBM, even back then. Wow. No wonder she spent the rest of her life as an activist. She was braver than most, to be out to any degree in any corporate environment back then.

Everyone needs role models and that night in 2002, whether or not they -- or we -- knew it, Edie & Thea became role models for Pat & me. While I had always been out at IBM, having joined 12 years after sexual orientation was included in the non-discrimination policy, Pat & I had not yet had any sort of marriage ceremony, though by 2002, we had already been together for a decade. Edie & Thea's desire to marry, along with the example of our friends David Chase & Gerard Cortinez in 2003, and our friends Stacy Brodsky & Felice Londa in 2011, we saw that it could -- and should -- be done. Finally, this past summer, after nearly two decades together, Pat & I tied the knot legally in my hometown of Stamford, Connecticut, and like Edie & Thea, our wedding announcement was also in "The New York Times,' and at the newspaper's suggestion, we even made a little video about how we got together.

We continue to need heroes in our community. And it's always nice when IBM is their current employer or part of their history.

It Was a Shame...

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

...but Needn't Be Any Longer

Recently, pre-sleep, I couldn't put down the "New Yorker" article on Tyler Clementi. Even as I felt voyeuristic, reading his various tweets and status updates, and those of his college-roommate Dharun Ravi, included in the piece, I still read on, hoping to confirm the complete rationale for Tyler's suicide. I have to believe it was shame and maybe just a bit too much fragility that caused Tyler to throw himself to his death, off the George Washington Bridge, after Dharun filmed Tyler via his webcam, making out with a man. The article didn't theorize, just reported sad interchanges and facts leading up to it.

To my knowledge, no one ever has ever filmed me, making out with anyone. Still, I have film-clips in my head from my pre-teens to age 20, of fantasies of such scenes, and in one case, of a fizzled kiss. To this day, a number of these scenes cause me shame about my shame, recalling how they wrecked a series of dear friendships due to my embarrassment about them. Fortunately, neither sort of shame has caused me to succeed at, or even attempt, suicide, but they still have the power to bring me to tears as a middle-aged adult, when I think of my vulnerable young self and compare her to the grown-up self who nonetheless still feels a bit vulnerable at the memories. Probably, I've detailed a number of the scenes in previous posts over the years --

Let Me Start Over

Freshman year of high school, 7 months prior...

Do you remember your first experience of unrequited desire? I'm not asking if you remember your first experience of desire. Unrequited is the key word here.

Mine was with a best friend when we were 15. We lay in bathing suits on beach-towels on the wooden deck attached to the back of her family's home. We were nurturing our tans and sucking on ice to keep the heat at bay.

My friend asked me to get some more ice from the kitchen behind us. I sat up and looked over at her, lying on her back, eyes shut against the sun. She had a ballerina's body, full of grace, even while prone, and long chestnut hair tucked over behind one shoulder, calling attention to her swan-length neck. I leaned over, causing a shadow, and kissed her lips quickly. She opened her light-green eyes and looked at me questioningly -- not meanly, and also not encouragingly. I jumped up and bounded for the kitchen, bringing back more ice. We pretended it never happened. I wanted to die, but simply lay back down next to her and closed my eyes for more sun-bathing.

When sophomore year began, we saw less of each other and by the time my dad died during my senior year, we had all but drifted apart. At my father's funeral, my tears were paralyzed. I couldn't grieve visibly. My friend and her mother came over for the shivah and we sat side-by-side on the dark-plum rug in my room, leaning against my bed, trying to act natural, because my father was dead, and also, I was convinced, because she felt nervous around me because of the sun-bathing incident.

I didn't get up to walk her out and simply watched her leave my room. As the door shut, I flopped onto the rug and lay there soaking it with my tears. Finally, I could grieve the loss of my dad, and especially at that moment, the loss of my friend's and my innocent friendship.

Fast forward to yesterday, after lots of grown-up experiences: Five of her kids later, and after residences in Chicago, London, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Bangalore and Montclair between us with our male and female spouses respectively, and in the midst of successful careers, we were together again for the first time in a decade, which is when she last visited the United States.

"I never thought we drifted because of that [-- the kiss]," she said. "I didn't think about that."

"You didn't think about it?" After it happened, it's practically all I thought about, mostly from shame.

"No. I thought that most of all, college was when we had a hard time keeping the friendship going, since we were far away from each other."

All the wasted shame! If I had committed suicide from the shame I felt at the time from my experience with this friend and a couple of others who I fantasized about, I'd never have had the poignant reunions as adults, not to mention, my lovely wife and life. What wouldn't have happened had I not stuck around? I wouldn't have helped other lesbian, gay, bi and transpeople among my community, clients and global company. I wouldn't have found Pat with whom I've had a rich time, including our adopting two feline daughters. I wouldn't have helped our company's leaders to be more effective. I wouldn't have been a comfort to my mom in her old age and who knows what else?

Last summer, reading while tanning my shoulders in prep for my wedding

Makes me want to say the "Shehecheyanu" - the prayer that thanks God for enabling us to reach this occasion:

בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְיָ
Blessed are You, L-rd

אֱלֹהֵינוּ מֶלֶךְ הַעוֹלָם
our G-d, Ruler of the Universe,

שֶׁהֶחֱיָנוּ וְקִיְּמָנוּ
who has granted us life, sustained us

וְהִגִּיעָנוּ לַזְּמַן הַזֶּה׃
and enabled us to reach this occasion.

Amen.

What Will We Do When We're No Longer Outsiders?

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

Death and Art Propel Big Questions This Weekend

At the funeral of our neighbor Megan of blessed memory earlier today, bookmarks-as-mementos sat next to the guestbook. One of them featured a girlhood photo of Megan and a quote: "When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change." -- Wayne Dyer

The quotation reminded me of some insights shared with me earlier this weekend, and how I might change the way I look at lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) identity.

Last night, with our friends David & Gerard, I attended a lecture by Jonathan Katz, the co-curator of Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture. Most of the works he featured in his slideshow included metaphors and symbols and codes that were dense and tense and rich for eyes that could recognize the homosexual subtext of them; in a number of cases, Jonathan Katz decoded them for us, as a number of them were subtle.

As I watched and listened, I was touched by the artists' ability to make visible to any degree a segment of society that between 1898 and 1991, and even still, today, depending on where in the world we live, typically was marginalized, stigmatized or at the very least, in the shadows.

During the Q&A afterward, I asked, "What happens when LGBT artists are no longer outsiders?"

Jonathan Katz said, "Other differences will emerge....It will not be central to their themes."

I was shaken by this answer. And I told David and Gerard so after walking through the exhibit together.

Gerard: "He was saying something hopeful, I thought, like that even heterosexual artists might include us as subjects and we'd just be more visible."

Me: "Maybe I'm too literal, but I don't ever want to be lesbian just incidentally. It's part of my core identity."

David: "I'm literal, too, but maybe assimilation's not so bad. I mean, isn't it nice being married now?" (He meant, he to Gerard and me, to Pat.)

"Yes, *so* nice. Your use of the word 'assimilation' helps me a bit because it reminds me of some alarmist Jews in my community who say that Jews will disappear if we assimilate too much, and yet, we've been here for 3,000+ years. I don't really think we're gonna disappear, since we've hung on for this long."

Dance? No, Lurk Around the Margins.

We said goodbye, since I was ready to go home, while they wanted to linger at the exhibit a bit longer. Making my way toward the exit, I found a free dance party on the third floor of the museum.

Oh, the music was so good with Rhianna's voice bouncing off the paintings in the nice and dim, cavernous room. I was nearly ready to enter the dance floor and move alone among the crowd, which likely would have been fine had I not been too shy.

I wished that Pat were with me, so that I'd have a partner. It struck me that no one would even notice us; in fact, we might stand out more so for being older than most of the crowd, rather than for being a same-sex couple -- to Jonathan Katz's earlier point. After "Sweet Dreams" by the Eurythmics played, I slunk away to my car in the parking lot. When that song was first popular, I was most of the dancers' ages, and I just owned a bicycle and a subway pass, and a radio/tape-deck I got as a premium for opening a bank account.

Driving home, I thought, Oh, no! Have I become like the lesbian separatists who used to alienate me when I was first getting involved in the gay community in the late-'80s? Who thought that "womyn"-only spaces were supreme while I thought they were unappealing and even obsolete as a group due to their insularity?

There's an analogy, right? AIDS and other societal realities made lesbian separatism untenable back then, just like today, staunchly gay, lesbian, bi or transpeople were misguided whenever we ghetto-ized ourselves, smothering ourselves with an insecurity blanket; more and more polls showed that younger people weren't half as discriminatory as previous generations, so why did any of us hang on so fiercely to separateness and outsider status?

Still, the chip on my shoulder had become comfy after all these years of hauling it and the prospect of heeding Wayne Dyer's/Megan's advice to change my thinking was scary. Earlier today, I spoke with a heterosexual relative, to tell her of my new confusion around my identity, and of my fear of losing my minority status and as usual, she had great on-the-spot wisdom in response:

Sarah, you don't have to be ghetto-ized or Marrano-like anymore [in this area of the world]. And compared to Jews, I think there's less of a chance of LGBT assimilation causing the end of LGBT people, since you won't intermarry.... And in any case, don't worry that you'll lose your identity when people stop being hateful, as there will always be hateful people; there are persistent taboos in every stripe, like unwed mothers. There's always someone who will make sex dirty.... Sex is the engine for intrigue and betrayal and murder and art and politics.... Your sort of desire won't disappear just because it's more so accepted. It will simply be less underground, which should be good, right?

We Are All Outsiders.

In 1998, two years after Pat & I moved in to our neighborhood, Megan, Steve and their young son Ben moved in three houses down from us. I never brought them a house-warming gift, or any food or drink. Never invited them over. Promptly forgot their names as soon as Megan introduced her family and herself to us one day in the street. Thereafter, Megan would drive by us while we were raking leaves or gardening and would always wave. Whenever she had her car-window down, she'd address us by name, and I always felt bad that I had to try to stretch "Hi" into a multi-syllable word, since I was too embarrassed to ask Megan to tell me her name again.

Every time she passed us, she smiled whole-heartedly at us, but after all, what did we have in common with a woman who had a husband and a young kid? So why bother to be friendlier and learn more about her by talking with her? When other neighbors with whom we've been friendly since we've moved in, called to tell us of Megan's sudden death from a massive heart attack the other night, first, I was relieved and ashamed finally to know her name, but then realized that I'd lost the chance of ever being friendlier with her.

What did we have in common? Through loving eulogies from her husband, son, brother and best friends, I learned what I never bothered to find out from her while she was alive: One of only two other families in the neighborhood (that I know of), Megan's family and she were Jewishly-affiliated, attending High Holiday services and bar mitzah'ing their son, who was now 18 -- our nephew and niece's age...like Pat & me, originally, Meg & Steve spotted each other across a room...like part of Pat's heritage, Meg's was French-Canadian...and volunteered from the early days, helping PWA's (People with AIDS), and so likely saw a number of friends die over the early years, like we did. And probably, we'll never discover how much more we might have had in common. It's just ironic, and tragic, how I was so busy, being shy of a stereotypically nuclear family, that I didn't stop to consider that Megan and her family felt like outsiders in the neighborhood initially, which we could have softened by being friendlier.

The other bookmark-as-memento that sat next to Megan's funeral-guestbook had an adult photo of Megan, smiling the smile I recognized, and the quote associated with it came from the poet, Rainer Maria Rilke: "This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love: the more they give, the more they possess."

Happy 5772, 2012 and Soon, Year of the Dragon!

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

This is My 600th Blog Entry, Which Is a Cause for Hope in Itself

I've been at this -- blogging -- since Passover, 5768/2007, or for nearly five years. Granted, whereas for the first two+ years, I managed to blog at least three times a week and lately, I'm lucky if once a month, it's still a friend to me and I use it when I need it.

My blog has been a friend when I'm wondering, inspired, sick, lonely, celebratory, suffering from indignities, sad, mournful, grateful, hopeful, what-if'ing in positive or catastrophic directions. On the yawning first day of every new year, I find myself what-if'ing in hopeful directions, though not usually aloud/publicly, as I'm superstitious. What if, in 2012, the rest of 5772 and the upcoming Year of the Dragon, what if I weren't superstitious? And what if:

• The Green Bay Packers won the Super Bowl again
  
• Pat's and my trip to Israel in June was life-changing and wonderful
  
• My thyroid challenge turned out to be only temporary, i.e., just subacute thyroiditis
  
• I collaborated with colleagues to design and deliver more first-of-a-kind social learning activities for new internal clients
  
• Traveled to a new city or country for work
  
• Exercised at least three times a week and was nice and fit
  
• Earned my Masters in Organization & Leadership with a specialization in Adult Learning and Leadership
  
• Studied and regained some Hebrew fluency
  
• Celebrated my mom's 87th birthday and Pat's mom's 89th
  
• Saw real progress in marriage equality for same-sex couples
  
• Found time to do more fun things with friends, more learning or volunteer work.
  

Reflections on *Ek Naukrani Ki Diary* & *The Help*

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

We Are Not Essentially All the Same

...And the trick is not to be afraid of our differences while we're searching for common ground -- and not all ground needs to, nor should, be common. A light-brown-skinned Indian friend of mine recommended that I read *The Help* more than a year ago. At that point, I was in the thick of my part-time Masters program and wanted only to read books that I had found, since so little of my discretionary time was available for reading anything other than journal articles and textbook chapters.

A couple of months ago, I reached the point where I had much more time available and finally read first a fiction recommendation by my mom, *Cutting for Stone*, about twin boys raised in Ethiopia and much more, which was superb. When I picked up *The Help* directly afterward, I was jarred by the dialect and thought it was predictable initially, and put it down for more than a month. In its place, I picked up *The Stranger's Child*, the writing of which was beautiful, but the plot of which did not compel me the way the author's prior novel, *The Line of Beauty* had.

And then suddenly, Pat and many of her Facebook friends were reading *The Help* and loving it, and that was almost the nail in its coffin, since Pat and I rarely have the same taste in books. Still, I picked it back up and went ahead.

What I Related To:

Now that I'm done with the novel, which turns out to have borrowed from the author's experience -- and doesn't all fiction? -- I do appreciate it and feel enriched for having read it. *Ek Naukrani Ki diary*/*The Diary of a Maidservant*, which I found and read while we were living in India in 2007, was written by a well-educated man and translated by a well-educated woman, rather than having been written by an actual maid in India, and yet, I heard the maid's voice, just as I heard the voices of the maids in *The Help*, which was written by a well-educated White woman.

For six months in 2007, we benefited from the cleaning services of a daily maid. That was the first and last time in our lives, and the whole time I was reading the book, I was feeling like I needed to keep it out of sight of our maid, who spoke good English, and I was also feeling guilty, that is, there but for the grace of God or whomever go I. With *The Help*, a lot went through my head about my own Whiteness and the memory of recognizing it best when we lived in India. The same Indian friend who recommended *The Help* once said to me, "If I were in a wheelchair and you and I entered a restaurant, you would be attended to first [because of the color of your skin]."

In the United States, I always felt not quite White, since as a Jew, I was on the Ku Klux Klan's list along with Black people. I'm pretty sure I've written about this here before. And yet I also recall my dad's stories about growing up in Washington, DC in the '30s and early-40s and how discriminatory it was there for Black people, and also how during his U.S. Navy experience on the USS Alabama, he said that all of the Black sailors were waiters and they lived at the bottom of the ship.

Both books -- the Indian and the U.S. one -- were about abused workers who wanted a vehicle/voice to express the abuse, but who were not historically entitled to express it or protest it. How can I relate to them? Can I?

My second semester at Michigan, I needed more work-study hours and signed up to mop the cafeteria floors. They paired us up -- two per half -- and the cafeteria spanned the width of the super-wide dorm. As moppers, we were invisible, cleaning the floors pre-meals and then disappearing. It was the closest I ever got to being a maid or janitor and it didn't feel great. The difference was that when my shift ended, I could go study, or to class, or to play badminton with my friend Gerald or go eat in the cafeteria, and the janitorial identity was just temporary -- a means to help pay for my terrific education.

Wait, when I stretch back further, I recall a relative who treated my sisters and me like maids. Often, this relative lay in bed watching TV. Routinely, she would ring a cow-bell and one of us had to come running. "Get me an orange and a knife," she'd command. We'd run and get it. "You forgot a napkin!" she'd say with frustration and we'd go running again. She also paid us 50 cents an hour to clean her home. Back then, that felt like a good wage because we were eight and 13, though it wasn't minimum wage...and I don't think we even knew about the concept of minimum wage.

Still, ultimately, that was all temporary. Why was I born White, with education-oriented parents, in the 20th century? Many Indians would respond that it's the effects of karma, but it's mysterious to me. Still, through their maid characters, both authors did a detailed job of enabling the maids to observe the pain of their employers, of being anyone who's alive -- whether privileged or not. The jealousies and heartbreaks and pettiness-es and desires and shame -- they are the common ground.

Like the Jewish Cartoonists Who Invented Superheroes

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

Feeling Part of the American Family Once Removed

Every year around this time, I begin to feel un-American. U.S. Thanksgiving is the gateway to the Christmas season that many now inclusively refer to as the holiday season, but I always feel like many Americans really are still thinking of Christmas.

Thank God, this year, "a first look at life's newest solutions:"

This patented "menorahment" reminds me of a similar impulse I learned of five years ago with Pat and our friends Judy & Jim at the Milwaukee Art Museum. While there, we saw a terrific show on comic book artists. Through it, I learned that many of the most famous American superheroes were created by Jewish artists who were realizing their deepest fantasies of what it would be like to be ultra-American, which at that time, was a contrast to how they felt as Jews, i.e., to be loved/admired/respected by the whole community, and to be able to protect it from evil-doers. Somehow, this tree-topper seems born of similar wishes -- to be a star that is part of, yet in parallel apart from, the rest of the earth-bound ornament community. This item was featured in "Skymall" magazine, just in time for the holidays.

Who Am I Kidding?

When I am with people from beyond the United States, I'm reminded that compared to them, I'm as ultra-American as any comic book character, to the point albeit unwittingly of caricature occasionally. For example, with a Dutch friend who lives in Paris, I'm visible from a mile away when we're in Milan on business, in my bright red raincoat; Europeans do not wear such bright colors in their rainwear. Or I'm silly for taking a series of vitamins daily with my breakfast. But here, in the United States, I sometimes feel like a foreigner during this season compared to most of my fellow countrypeople. Perhaps it's the impossibly challenging combo of being a Jew who would never have need for a menorahment along with the challenge of staying engaged in the series of football games that populate our Green Bay branch of our family's home all day on Thanksgiving (and every Sunday and Monday night during the long season).

This year, though, I came to think about this outsider sensation in a new way, since I'm fresh from finishing my Masters thesis on cultural intelligence. Yesterday, I even tweeted about it: "In one way, surely, I'm culturally intelligent: I try to dress like the locals when in Green Bay; today, I'm wearing Packer-logo'ed pants." In the case of my thesis, cultural intelligence referred to being able to work effectively with colleagues and clients from other countries, but in my own life, currently, I've come to realize that there can be a domestic version as well. In addition to aligning my sartorial choices with those of the townspeople, when in Green Bay, Wisconsin, I need to be able to "talk cheese." Or at least, I need to be able to comprehend it when Pat and random strangers engage in it.

At breakfast today, the hotel cook chatted with us during his break and Pat and he went on endlessly with what I've always thought of as small-talk. I've never seen a conversation like this anywhere in the Northeast, where I grew up. Here, it's common. I first learned about it during -20 degree Fahrenheit weather, when Pat was pumping gas in Green Bay during one of our annual visits 18 years ago. "Where were you?" I asked Pat when she finally returned from paying the gas jockey.

"Oh, we were talkin' cheese," she answered simply.

Somehow, no matter how American I seem to my European friend, with my multivitamins and red raincoat, when we head into Football Season, into the Christmas gateway of Thanksgiving and into Green Bay, Wisconsin, I feel like one of these things is not like the other, to borrow a phrase from the American kids' show, "Sesame Street."

My Blog as Confidante

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You're Not Going to Blog About This, Are You?

My thyroid's messed up. A few weeks ago, my mom and Pat & I did not yet know why I had lost 12 pounds in a month without any reduction in my food intake. It was pure scariness then. Total mystery. Blind anxiety.

When we first discussed my health a few weeks ago, "Please tell me you haven't blogged about this," my mother said.

"No, Mom, I haven't yet."

"Yet?"

"I may want to at some point."

How can I explain that even though up to a couple dozen people stop by daily and I have some followers, my blog feels most of all like a friend in whom I confide.

Today, I went to the endocrinologist and she said that I have some form of hyperthyroidism and she's sending me for a bunch more tests to determine precisely which kind.

I will not be done with the tests until the 29th of November, my middle sister's birthday. On the up-side, the doctor complimented me on my fitness, which never happened before. My blood pressure was 105/70 and my resting heart-rate was 68 beats/minute, which for someone who hasn't done much exercise in the past month, and who is 46, we didn't think was bad at all.

God, I must count my blessings, rather than being babyish and anxious with fear. Next step might be to tweet about it and see who's willing to share any experience s/he has w/hyperthyroidism. As with most life-situations, I'm sure I'm not alone.