Shut Up, I'm Talking

For all those who have ever stumbled, bluffed, or bullshitted their way into a job that they're supremely underqualified for...I give you Gregory Levey! Greg is a second year law student when he applies for an internship at the Israeli embassy in New York. After surmounting the predictable bureaucratic runaround (and surviving a series of hilariously random security interviews and questions) he finds himself the new speechwriter for the Israeli UN delegation. This seems a little strange; yes, he's a Jew, but he's also a Canadian citizen with zero ties to Israel. At first he can't believe his luck, but Greg soon finds that the Embassy is populated by a pack of neurotic, lazy, shiftless weirdos. For example, the librarian is the only person in the place with a lock on his door, and he spends his days screaming at invisible people behind it. The head of security is convinced that his Japanese roomate is a Syrian spy. The foreign minister can only be given speeches with sentences less than six words long, and Greg repeatedly finds himself representing Israel on the UN council at strategic meetings and votes. Did I mention he's not even Israeli?

Now, this might seem like a recipe for disaster to you and me, but Greg soon finds himself promoted...to the Prime Minister's office in Jerusalem! Of course, the madness is only heightened at headquarters, and soon Greg is reduced to slipping Seinfeld references into the Prime Minister's speeches just to keep himself sane.

A horrifying but hilarious look at the slapdash, off the cuff political structures behind the Israel we think we know.

The Ten Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer

This is honestly the most depressing piece of self-therapy that I have ever read. I'm sorry to not post for so long and then post a rant, but honestly, i thought this book might be good, and I became more and more pissed off as I read it.

Some background. I've been thinking about having kids lately (spawning, as my sister so genteely puts it) and so I"ve been consumed by a frenzied need to research and prepare. (was I always like this, audrey? so preparing?) Anyhow, I've been reading whatever I can get my hands on about moms who combine work and kids. It seems like such a shitty balancing act, and before I read this book I was leaning heavily towards the realm of working only part time. Seems like the author made that choice, and is bitterly, resentfully, snidely, unproductively, meanly regretful.

The book follows the lives of four or five friends (I was never interested enough to count exactly how many) as they galumph around sponging off their overworked and dramatically flawed husbands. The complain nonstop. They bemoan the fact that their 10 year old kids don't need mommy anymore. They pine for the sense of meaning work gave them. And yet they DON"T GO OUT AND FUCKING WORK!!

Instead, they have boring and dreary conversations with each other about their boring and dreary lives. They become resigned to mediocre sex and mediocre marriages. They have failed and boring affairs. They are Boring. Eventually some of them go out and make halfhearted changes and get undesirable and boring jobs that they don't care about. I didn't care either. I wish I could unread this book.

The worst part was the air of inevitability that the author gave to these women and their shitty half ass lives. This is a book about a bunch of disillusioned, depressed women who don't like their lives and should have made better decisions. The message? I"m not sure. It could have been "don't have kids, they will fuck up your life and drain your soul", or maybe "middle age is the end of meaning". What crap.

News flash: if your life sucks, change it. If your husband is a jerk, dump him. Better yet, don't marry him in the first place. Life is a maddening, jungly brilliant explosion of change and growth. Ageing is not a disaster or a decay. It is a fabulous journey into the unknown, where no one has ever gone before. Disaster is opportunity. Every moment counts, and if you treat them like they don't, it's your own damn fault. I hated this book and its sad, lame characters; they were like literary entropy aimed directly at middle aged women. My life isn't like that. Yours isn't either. No one's has to be.