A Journal of My Mid-Life Crisis

27 September 1998 - Sermons and Television

A minor amusing incident the second day of Rosh Hashanah. The rabbi was using a microphone which kept drifting downward, forcing him to have to keep adjusting its angle. He apologized and said something like "I wish I could find a way to keep the mike up." And someone in the back of the room said - just loud enough for everyone to hear - "viagra."

The rabbi's sermon the first day had to do (more or less) with how Bill Clinton's actions would be viewed in Jewish law. Which is not all that relevant since Clinton is not Jewish, but I suppose everybody feels obliged to mention zippergate. (My only comment - aside from my being sick and tired of the whole subject - is that it doesn't surprise me that Clinton doesn't think oral sex doesn't count, since more or less every guy I ever dated in high school and college tried to persuade me that it didn't "count".)

The second day's sermon was more interesting and hit home to some extent. The general subject was "you can't have it all and you can't do it all, but that's no excuse for not doing anything." Which is, of course, the fundamental dilemma of life. You can have anything you want, but you can't have everything you want. No matter how well I know this intellectually, it's still a hard thing to accept emotionally. I suppose it is some consolation that everyone else I know seems to have the same problem.

As for actually doing anything this week, I seem to have spent most of it fighting with my mother. A significant number of those fights had to do with the subject of television, which she watches constantly. How can anyone conceivably believe that seeing the weather for the fourth time in five hours is more important than finding out how the Red Sox did? I'm not even going to discuss Court TV or "The Price is Right." (On a positive note regarding television, I watched "Win Ben Stein's Money" and found it to be reasonably challenging as trivia games go. So I am thinking about trying out to be a contestant after I am settled back in Los Angeles.)