The statement itself seems to beg an interesting story, likely about a fight.  To clear it up immediately, it’s not a statement about abuse. I think my father might have spanked me once as an adolescent, and if it meant that much to him, I likely earned it. In a sense, the statement is about a fight, one to the absolute last. It has nothing to do with punching though, or standing over fallen opposition. It’s the fight my parents are destined to lose as we all are.

Bruises happen every now and again, and generally, depending on the time of our lives, we can guess where they’ll be. Kids find them on their knees and elbows more often than not, still earning how to control their bodies. Teens find them on their upper arms and faces, reminders to practice a little more or badges of honor from trying to prove that they have some. Then adults get them on their thighs and torsos, mystery spots from some thing they did last night that they didn’t expect to or had always wanted to.  Sure, everyone gets a stray now and then from a slip on the sidewalk or a light pole that wasn’t watching where you were going, but the main areas stay consistent. But, for one as yet named group, their bruise signals a membership in their order. They are the only ones that get that particular bruise.

Old people get bruises on their hands.

Its one of those things we all notice by never minding it. You expect an amount of shaking when an older person picks something up. You expect to hear a few words or sayings that don’t get much exercise when you’re having a conversation with your grandfather. And when the owner of the company shakes your hand, you have to ignore the black and blue splotch on the back of his. You ignore it because you have to, it would be rude not to.

You aren’t not seeing it, you’re ignoring it. You saw those splotches on your grandmother’s hand when she reached down to pinch your cheek and you couldn’t help but flinch. It bothered you so much then because it was miles away from your experience, decay and deterioration conflicting with your vibrancy. Shared blood, your blood, clotted on a quaking hand that wants only to feel the life force that once propelled them, now just getting warmed up inside you.

There’s something about the color and location. It’s a deep purple on shallow skin. The bruise is too close to the bones and veins, like their insides are leaking but can’t break through the membrane containing it.  The mystery in how they got it is fascinating because we already know how: they’re old. That’s what old people do. Have bruises on their hands.

Now, my parents have bruises on their hands.

I should have been ready for it, but I was not.

Our parents get to serve as a living mirror for us. Whenever I look in a regular mirror, I still see a teenager staring back at, albeit one with some spreading crows feet and some straggling gray hairs that only look to multiply as much as I want to. The signs of aging don’t register in the glass because I see past them to the boy playing at being a grown up. When I look at parents, I still see my protectors from the boogie men, my discipline for not cleaning up, and food and clothing provided free of charge.

Of course, with years, I see more.

I see people with neurosis and concerns. Pet peeves and guilty pleasures, friends and enemies. Insecurities and moral dilemmas. Getting to know your parents as people is wonderfully humanizing to yourself. The component pieces that make you who you are display themselves in peacock colors. You can draw a line to your bad habits origin. Or, you can thank the gene pool that gave you the work ethic that’s keeping you alive.

When I look at my parents I see the foundation of who I am.

And now, when I look at their hands, I see an expiration date.

They built me up to stand the test of time, and finally I can see the buttresses cracking. Will I come tumbling down without them to hold me up?

As I get older, my parents become more and more the Queen of England in my life, stripped of power, but with a strong significance to identity. They haven’t held me up for a long time. The bruises on their hands say they couldn’t have. They have built me to last and I have.

And I am.

And I will.

My parents are old.

I don’t know what those bruises feel like but I imagine they hurt them the same way all bruises do: a dull ache that can’t be salved except to run its course.

If nothing else, it’s the most painful bruise I’ve never had.

The post My Parents Have Bruises On Their Hands appeared first on Rookerville.

Orthodoxy is fascinating to me. Really because of how confusing is the meaning. At its core, orthodoxy is an adherence to rules, or perhaps even an inability to break them. Someone who knows the particular mores of a system so well, and abides by them, in a manner that shows a resolve deeper than that majority, is said to be orthodox.

Fighting styles are said to be orthodox and unorthodox, depending on a particular set of rules. In fighting, it seems, there is an agreed upon set of principles that should lead to victory. Just as in religion, Orthodox Christians and Orthodox Jews adhere to a very specific agreed upon set of principles that should lead to spiritual enlightenment or, at the very least, salvation. One of the two would certainly be nice, especially if you aren’t getting the other.  But there is a peculiar way in fighting that the idea of orthodoxy varies from religion. An orthodox fighter is very predictable. If you know all the proper rules on how to fight a man, and adhere to them, who’s to stop someone from preparing for those very things?

Unorthodox boxers like to fight ‘southpaw’, left handed, because the orthodox styles are premised on a right handed approach and a right handed opponent. By changing up the traditional approach, fighting unorthodox, one can undo an orthodox opponent. Orthodox fighters are aware of this tactic and must then account for it. Because the fight style presented to them is meant to undermine the orthodoxy, they too must fight in an unorthodox method. Now both fighters in our hypothetical scenario have deviated away from the traditional system that was created specifically and solely to win fights. But is organized religion so vastly different from fighting?

The bible, the Koran, the Torah all have their difficult to interpret scenarios, but each religion has an agreed upon set of principles that need to be abided by in order to adhere to its teachings. Life, it always seems, counts on this and will always present unorthodox problems that need to be dealt with.

So, what is a religious man to do?

For the Orthodox, it seems that there is no conflict. He is to behave in accordance with the mores of the system he has chosen to believe in. Reform religions could be called Unorthodox because they allow for their followers to deviate from the path with greater frequency but still consider them followers. Does that mean that orthodoxy is just meant to be an archaic punching bag for the rest of the world to tee off on? Not quite, because the true measure of Orthodoxy is how you get around your orthodoxy. No matter what faith or creed you follow, in this life there are constant tests of your convictions and a great many times, the orthodox response is not the best one. It is the predictable response, the expected response. The response that any unorthodox predator is waiting to pounce on.

Christianity, in all its wisdom, presented their figurehead as the ultimate in orthodoxy. His responses were accounted for by his enemies when he was challenged. And, as such, he reacted in accordance with his orthodoxy knowing that it would lead to his own demise. He set the bench mark for what all Orthodox should aspire to. But, he had a loophole, oh yes he did.

Jesus knew he was the son of god. He knew that his purpose was to serve as the lamb, that his sacrifice meant salvation to his people, and that heaven everlasting, sitting at the side of the throne of his father was his ultimate destiny. Despite his adherence to his beliefs, the ultimate example of orthodoxy had one particular quality that the rest of his followers do not: he knew his destiny and the ultimate consequences of his actions. For the rest of us poor saps, the results of our decisions are only revealed after we’ve made them.

Orthodoxy remains of course, not in spite, but because of this.

Those who maintain orthodoxies are so sure of their beliefs that they adhere to the words to the letter. But do they? Just as Christ had his loophole, so to do orthodoxies.

In a contemporary society, it is almost impossible to abide by laws written for a society 2000 years more primitive. That is to be expected. The biggest rules remain but there are always excuses made. There are excuses that justify murder and violence of every flavor despite every major religion’s instance that it despises those things. And there is always a way around it, if you look hard enough, and read it a certain way.

The greatest strength of the orthodox is not the adherence to the rules, but their ability to see the rules in adherence to them. To interpret the ancient readings in a manner that allows them to abide fiercely to most cultural customs, but be able to bend other rules so long as the appearance of obedience is followed. And because orthodoxy is so difficult to follow, the very practice requires a constant search for work arounds to seemingly impossible blocks.

How can one consider themselves to be orthodox if all they do all day is hunt for ways around their own beliefs? This is a generalization. Not every moment is searching for loopholes. But orthodoxy is hard for a reason. Which beliefs will you sacrifice in order to preserve the others? It is a question we all ask and all must answer. But why must we insist on having core beliefs if the rest are in flux?

An open mind is a dangerous thing. Keeping an open mind can allow smarter or more conniving people to poison your thoughts. Its also the only way grow and improve. In the end, we all abide by certain orthodoxies, certain rules we’ll try to never break. And there will always be danger in opening ourselves to new ideas that threaten those rules. But the greatest danger is the rules themselves. One must always know if the orthodoxy they abide by is their own, or simply what they’ve been taught. If every day is a struggle to get around the rules you believe in, then the there is no threat to you from new ideas: your old ideas were corrupt to begin with.

The post Religious Southpaw appeared first on Rookerville.

Ain’t no secret, I loves me some arugin’.

I also love a good story. So, here’s a little bit of both.

My favorite topic to argue is religion and I do it as often as I can. Since I was about 14 or 15, I have more than less been an agnostic (I’ll veer into Atheist if I happen to be in a particularly nasty funk). Funny enough though, I’m never really outspoken on my own particular belief structure unless I’m deconstructing someone else’s, and, there is a very good reason this: I don’t really have a belief structure. More, I have a series of vague ideas of spirituality, right and wrong, post life experience, that are at best transient and at worst momentary. It’s hardly fair to argue a point that is constantly in flux while forcing another person to defend a steadfast position. But, that’s what I do.

I love to argue because I love to win arguments.

I love to win. So do most people that start arguments. And herein we arrive at the main problem with an argument. You’re not trying to be right, you’re trying to get the other person to admit that you are right and they are wrong. If you’re engaging someone on an opinion-based matter, especially one dealing in the intangible and with personal beliefs, it will almost always be a zero some game. The end result will be some gratifying self-entertainment for out-witting someone who didn’t see something coming, or bitterness at someone’s lack of appreciation for your cutting insight.

Once, when I was living in Philadelphia, I got into an hour long argument with some Christian fundamentalists who were protesting pornography in front of a well known gay night spot. I fought with them mainly about their choice of venue for the protest, arguing that they purposefully were connecting homosexuality with porn while they argued that there was just good walking traffic in the area. The argument was circular and eventually wound up entirely religious in nature.

Towards the end, when things had completely descended into a theological debate, one of the devout accused me of being a “moral relativist”. I had never heard that phrase until that moment. I had a slight idea of what it meant, yet I couldn’t wrap my head around the concept as a whole. Were my morals as fluctuating as my opinions on faith? Could I justify certain immoral actions based on context? Was there a baseline of genuine moral truth independent of all intention? These ideas flooded my brain and I was fascinated by the answers as I was by the accusation.

But I wasn’t going to give that Christian fundamentalist asshole the satisfaction! I had an argument to win!

Our fight went on a while longer and I hit him with a good zinger as I was leaving, laughing out loud and proud of myself. Looking back on it now, though, I wonder what I actually won in that. I certainly didn’t change his mind any more than he changed mine. The thing was, my mind had no concrete position to change, and his mind could never concede a defeat. We weren’t fighting to solve problem, just to beat one another out.

I think the chief problem with arguing is that we like to think that our side is defending a truth while the other is perpetrating a falsehood. Of course, the opposite side thinks the exact same thing. The sides are attacking each other at the same time without searching for a middle ground.

The idea that the truth is somewhere in the middle isn’t anything new, but I do think it is a notion that is glossed over for the excitement of a good fight.

I remember when I was a kid, those long conversations you would have with your best friends. Does God have parents? Can we dig a hole to the other side of the world? Who would win in a fight, Robocop or Terminator? Childish questions yes, but they were ones that could easily divide on opinions. They weren’t answered with fights. There was excitement in every idea we offered one another, and we would build off of them. Each time one of us said anything, the other would eagerly add on. If you disagreed, it was a “No wait, what about…?”

I don’t feel like I have “No wait, what about…”s anymore. It holds up a good argument.

Truthfully, I can’t remember the last time I had a solid discussion about faith, or politics, or philosophies in which I built on the ideas of the person I spoke to, both searching for an agreeable solution for each other.

Maybe it’s just me. I love a good story. And a good story has conflict. That’s the fun part. That’s the argument. A good argument has a good ending.

A good idea is just itself. A good discussion just keeps on going. No winners, no losers.

But I like to see the hero win, and then the credits roll.

I don’t think I’m alone.

The post For Arguments Sake appeared first on Rookerville.

Where’s the outrage?

The news media is atwitter with the revelation that the NSA is keeping tabs on all us honest hard-working Americans. And, to hear them tell it, it’s a political shit storm of umbrage. Americans are furious that their elected leaders would not only invade their privacy, but would do so on such a grand scale. Or so, once again, the media would like to have us believe. The problem with their story is a simple one. No one cares.

Oh sure, we all know that we should be outraged by the revelation. We all know that we should be terrified that the big brother prophesied in ‘1984’ is presenting himself before our eyes. We should put our feet down and take action to prevent this situation from escalating. We’re not going to, of course. We just know that we should.

What’s everyone’s problem? Why aren’t we as upset as we really should be (present company included)? I’ll answer that with an anecdote.

As anyone who at one point or another tried to friend a celebrity on any social media platform knows, it’s extremely difficult to make contact with popular personalities. If you have a public persona, there are tons of safe guards to not only prevent others from getting in touch with you, but to hide your very existence unless you are on the same level of general popularity. So, when a well-regarded, popular, and public TED speaker showed up on my LinkedIn “People you might know” suggestions, you could understand that I was more than a little surprised. We have never worked together in any professional capacity. Why would LinkedIn suggest us?

Truth be told, we were not total strangers. This woman and I once flirted on the subway on our way to Brooklyn. I had no idea who she was at the time, and she gave me her email address after our interaction. I sent her a polite invitation to a drink and she sent me a polite but firm rejection. C’est la vie. That was our only interaction. Ever. Yet, here she was on my list of possible contacts. The only way for LinkedIn to know that I knew her was for Gmail to be sharing my personal information with them. Since they’re both owned by Google, whats a little invasion of privacy amongst friendly companies.

The world as a whole is already in the process of surrendering its privacy. The prevalence of location specific technologies and personalized software has gone a long way to making our digital thumbprint easier to identify. Cloud based memory systems keep lots of our deepest secrets out in the ethers rather sequestered away. The idea that you can physically find someone from their digital activity is less the horrors of cyberpunk fiction and more the reality of a check-in to get a free drink. You can tell by the spam you get what websites you’ve been visiting and you never even had to sign into them.

Perhaps it’s because we’re a capitalist society that we understand all this privacy invasion from a corporate standpoint. They are trying to sell us products and will stop at nothing to make their dollar. The point is, we’re already used to being spied on. The idea that we’re ‘shocked’ by the revelation that the government is tracking our phone calls is insulting if for no other reason than the story already broke six years ago under Bush. It could be that the media thinks this is a story because Obama was supposed to be the president of change on now he’s making a wrestler like heel turn and keeping this wicked program going. The truth is, however, much sadder.

It’s in every government’s interest to keep the program going. Being able to keep track of your populace is the most important tool in governance. From keeping them safe, to keeping them suppressed, the ability to consistently view your people both and groups and personally is far too useful to ever give up. And they are never going to. From here on out, we are always going to be a society on camera.

Why aren’t we outraged that we’re being spied on? Sadly, because we are getting used to it.

The post NSA Outrage appeared first on Rookerville.

The question of interns is extremely tricky. On the one hand, it makes an indentured servant class out of the young and indebted when they have the most energy and are most eager to offer new ideas. On the other hand, most college graduates don’t know their asses from a hole in the ground and have very limited life experience, so they aren’t the most helpful people to have around. In an ideal world, the intern is given experience in the environment they wish to be a part of. Their payment is knowledge and opportunities, which, if they listen, learn, and hustle, could result in a legitimate job in their desired field. The problem, of course, is that ideal world doesn’t exist. Not all internships are created equal and whether you end up actually learning a craft, or the exact amount of sugar the executive assistant likes in his daily soy latte is a flip of the coin. And that’s even assuming that you got an internship in a field you care about. Given the economic woes of the day, everyone is eager for unpaid help. Consequently, the best gigs are overstocked with free labor. No one likes turning down an opportunity (especially when they are as desperate as the recent crop of new grads are), so now you have people taking internships with companies that say ‘yes’ rather than companies that anyone wants to work for, paid or unpaid. Uncompensated, unhappy labor is seldom productive, or particularly interested in becoming so.

Like most big issues, there’s no right and wrong side, more a wide spread bedlam of sour feelings from the majority seasoned with a few cases over the top success that allow the cycle to perpetuate its myth of overall function. And, like most illnesses, the problem is just the symptom, not the sickness itself. The plight of the post-college intern is tragic, as much as is the necessity of business to function on free labor. The problem comes from how we’re churning out students for the job market. The problem comes from college.

Statistically speaking, if you go to college, you will make more money. The higher education industry is always eager to taut that fact. What they don’t make clear is that this is, in fact, a lifetime average, and that by opening yourself up to a wider berth of people and places and knowledge, you increase the odds of success exponentially regardless of if that takes place at an institution of higher ed. Colleges are a business like any other, and they need to make money. So, they have to sell young people on a dream that, as young and inexperienced people without much life experience, they are highly susceptible to. The kids are already good at going to school, and they are told if they go to more school, they’ll make more money when they are done.

The statistic may be true, but the path colleges provide for students to success is on the whole false. Once you graduate school, your real education begins. Real life very quickly breaks down the walls of theory you were taught were truth. Even the way you learned is replaced from study and exam to trial and error, the latter of which can be very jarring when there are genuine consequences to amateur mistakes. With the massive wave of hungry interns flooding the job market, it’s much easier to be replaced for a mistake than trained to correct it. It’s also much easier to be discouraged when all the life training you’ve been doing for the past 16 years is dismissed by the working world, and you’re forced to start, largely if not entirely, from scratch. The initial years out of school are the years that now dictate a life course, not the years earning a bachelor’s.

What colleges profess to offer and what they deliver are two related, but distinct things. What they profess to offer is the path to a successful career in a field of your choosing. What they deliver is a study of the fields within the given career, allowing you to generate your own conclusions about your best course of action. The logic is that if you understand everything about the field and a range of others, you will be capable of the clever abstract thought to blaze your own trail. This sounds fine in theory, but as everyone who has gone to college and gotten into the real world will tell you, there is a great difference between practice and theory.

Presenting themselves as a stop on the route to a career, colleges sell you on the idea that they are trade schools. That is plainly false. When you graduate from undergraduate school, you are not ready to be a professional; at least, not from what they have taught you. They have given you the tools for success, but their implementation will be extremely complex as the world shows you how it functions, and you have to figure out how to work within its system. Immediately after college graduation is the worst time for an internship: there is never a greater disparity in what you think you know about the world and what is true as when you come out of college. It’s how you handle that disparity which dictates your ultimate success in life.

So, that begs the question: What is the right time for an internship? The best time for an unpaid internship is immediately after high school graduation. Still with the mentality of a child, students in high school are used to older people telling them how things work. This will allow them to listen more attentively to their work superiors. Still living under their parent’s roof and working a part time job will give them a sense of continuance. This will allow the pressure to succeed right away to remain minimal and let them focus on what they’re doing now, not what they should be doing. But more than anything, if they have an interest in a given career path, they can taste it right away. They can learn what it means to be in the line of work from the bottom and fight their way up without a sense of entitlement and without the accrued debt of a degree. And if they decide to be in that field, and that field does require a college education, they can go to school knowing what they’re looking for. They can examine how to apply their education to their work while they are learning. It’s a much more instantaneous system which lets them know if their investment in school is going to be worth the cost.

Internships are never going to be much fun. Few of us like working for free. Still, we all have an imagination, and it’s a matter of keeping a vivid goal in mind that you’re working towards. If you want the internship system to vanish, it never will. Free labor is too appealing. But, if you want the internship system to work more efficiently, you have to know what you’re getting involved with at the earliest stages. And that’s a lesson that few educational institutions are eager to teach you.

The post Internships (or, Get me some coffee Bitch!) appeared first on Rookerville.

Lucky bastard.

Sort of, anyway.

A winning lottery ticket is much more akin to the Ring of Power than the Holy Grail. We all like to think its some sort of one way ticket to easy street, yet every time the country goes lotto crazy, some website or other takes great pleasure in showing how sudden influxes of wealth can ruin your life. Just like the fact that you swallow seven spiders a year (which isn’t true) and that ‘penultimate’ sounds more intense than ‘ultimate’ (its actually one less), it’s a guarantee that even when you lose the lottery you can take some solace in the old adage that mo’ money means mo’ problems.

Then why do we play? If we know about the consequences, well established for many years now, why do people play out the lottery in record numbers? The simple answer needs no explanation: being rich seems very appealing, especially when you don’t have to earn it. It’s the new American dream, wealth and privilege for nothing.

But I don’t want to focus on the simple explanation for why we play the lottery. A much more fun complex reason to play is right next to it.

We play for the fantasy.

When we’re kids, life is about imagination. We don’t understand the world around us and must draw conclusions based on our limited input. We extrapolate and invent worlds and universes the exist just out of our reach but will some day await us. Whether entitled children of privilege who expect the world handed to them or desperate street urchins just starting to learn to fight and scrape for every gain, what we don’t know, don’t have, and can’t wait to see fuels our upbringing. Our fantasy is our reality. Perhaps we do not live the dream at the moment but the ending is never in doubt. Each of us is a unique individual, special and smiled upon from on high, just waiting for the earth to recognize our greatness and reward us the reality we already new to be true.

Then we grow.

We learn. We understand.

Suddenly, fantasy has structure. Where boundless imagination once stretched to the horizon, the line where the sea meets the sky gets a little closer. It might still be miles away, but now there isn’t as much room to fill it. We meet more people with more gifts more adept at filling that magical role we had set aside for ourselves. Age starts to creep up with fearsome persistence, and that career in the pros starts to lap us on the track. Our mentors stop admiring our potential and start expecting results. Our peers aren’t as interested in winning our war against the world so long as there’s a piece of the pie left for their new family.

The fantasy shrinks further. Reality becomes our reality. Our limitations are concrete, their work-arounds existent though arduous. We keep our eyes on the future but have to squint through the translucence of the present. Those beautiful images we colored in as children become amorphous blocks, clouds of promise whose shape move when we look at them and disappear when we reach out to touch. Imagination gives way to goal orientation. We speculate on the probabilities of success and work out the details of how much success should be allocated where. We’re not looking to live dreams, but realize realities based on the criteria we have established over many years.

We desire what we can achieve. We chase what we can catch. The fantasy is alive, but regimented. Computed, structured, and evaluated. Not so much a dream but a vauge instruction manual for a possible happiness. We don’t know, we can only hope.

Then, we buy a ticket.

And for two dollars, you buy back your fantasy.

In our age, we know all the things working against our goals, so what happens when all those things melt away? What happens when the freedom from all we’ve been beaten down by no longer applies to us?

Everyone has an equal chance to win. Why not you? Why not me?

We get those numbers and our visions come back to us. However delicious that steak was that one time, now we can have two of them everyday. That one girl wearing the dress that looked like a man’s shirt who stopped us dead in our tracks will have to give us the time of day. We can be on an island in the morning, a mountain in the after noon, and sleep in the penthouse that evening. Important men will want to ask us for favors. We can tell off that guy that said that thing to us that time that hurt way more than it should have. We’ll have the time to write that book, and learn that language, and play the piano, and stay in bed until three even though we already got bored being there at two.

And we won’t be selfish. Our parents will get a piece so that they can have the retirement they always wanted. Our friends will get to pay back all their loans and will still have cash left over to do what they want. “This isn’t a loan”, we’ll tell them. “It’s a gift, to do with as you please. You don’t owe me anything.”

The homeless guy is going to get a hundred. The tip jar at the pizza place is going to get a hundred. The free newspaper guy is going to get a hundred. And maybe you just happen  to like that guy’s face over, so he gets a hundred.

There are no longer limits. There’s no more structure. The rules don’t apply to you anymore. You are a rich person without maintenance. The world has shrunk back down into the palm of your hand and you can reinsert yourself into anyplace you wish.

Then, some guy in Florida jumps for joy, and you have to be at work early on Monday.

Of course you didn’t win the money. You’re never going to win the money.

But, you did get to win. You did get to dream. You did get to let break down the walls of limitations you built to prevent let down. You did to soar again untethered to the probabilities you know all too well then float on the warm waters that ripple possibilities. You got to wax quixotic if only in your own head. You got to beat the windmill.

I paid my $2.

The fantasy was fantastic.

The post I Won The Lottery appeared first on Rookerville.

A bunch of us wanted to share some quick thoughts pertaining to Mother’s Day.  Below is a collection from a few writers:

Andrew Rose:

My mom’s family is 100% Italian-Catholic from the Bronx, and my upbringing reflected this strongly. Dinner was pasta multiple times a week. Misbehavior led to a wooden spoon. Parent-child communication meant gesticulating wildly with your hands while yelling rapid-fire sentences at one another, and regardless of what you were about to do, you were definitely going to break your neck. That caffeinated brown liquid you drink in the morning? KWAW-fee. The place where your socks go? DRAW-ah. Silence was meant for church, and otherwise, ALL SYSTEMS GO. The first few times my then-girlfriend-now-wife heard me on the phone with my mother, she thought we were constantly fighting. No, I assured her, this is just how we talk. Sorry, tAWK. As the oldest son and grandson in the family, my mom’s devotion to me also likely set totally unrealistic expectations for my future relationships with women. Alas, no one will ever put me on a pedestal quite like she does, but the skinny, blonde, very-not-Italian girl I married fits the bill well enough.

A few years ago, my mom’s mother passed away, and the family did not react well, to put it lightly. My grandmother was probably the strongest person I’ve ever known, and how she managed to keep her family afloat with a deceased husband prior to any of her four children being old enough to drive is beyond me. She was the bond that held them all together. I joke with my mom sometimes about how alike the two of them are becoming, mostly because they are both slightly insane. But besides the tangential monologues and constant fretting, their strength and dedication the familial unit in all situations, at all costs, solidifies their similarity. And really, that’s all you can ask.

Happy Mother’s Day to the woman who holds it all together.

Scott Signorino:

Mother’s Day has always been a bittersweet holiday at the Signorino castle.  My mom, like everyone else’s mom, is the greatest mom on earth.  She’s a hardworking, straight-forward woman who does her best to understand her right-brained only child which is a pretty tall order to fill considering my mom is a Happy Days-era Jersey girl from a family of six.  My mom’s a waitress and sometimes a bartender and so Mother’s Day takes on a different meaning for her than just flowers and a brunch paid for by dad and Scott.  My mom works at a fine dining restaurant a few miles outside of Doylestown where I grew up and her knack at interpersonal communication has caused her to befriend politicians, lawyers, judges, the guy who now fixes all of our family cars, people who have given me job interviews, and an automotive baron who owns about 75% of all of the businesses in Doylestown.  This same knack has caused her to be a stellar waitress and sometimes-bartender and she essentially makes it rain when it comes to tips on Mother’s Day, the busiest restaurant day of the year.  So while I’ll be dragging myself out of bed this Sunday morning and schlepping it to Doylestown from Center City on the long and tortuous R5 line, my mom will have been at work for about four hours of a ten hour day.  She’ll get home in her uniform around 6:30, we’ll have family dinner, she’ll try to give me part of the money she made that day, I’ll give her some flowers I bought at Acme and a funny card with some smart ass remark I wrote in it and then I’ll head home and my mom will go to bed.  I don’t think I can give my mom the credit she deserves on Mother’s Day because she won’t give it to herself.  She’s held two jobs until I was 28, one always being at a restaurant, and when she retired from corporate accounting, she’s continued and she’s now 64 years old. My mom doesn’t get a break on Mother’s Day because she wants to do right by us like she always does.  Mom – I know you read Rookerville and I want you to know that I love you and you’re the most important woman in my life and I wouldn’t have the same work ethic or ambition or ability to talk to people I didn’t know that well if it weren’t for what you’ve passed on to me.  Happy Mother’s Day, I hope you make it rain one more time.

Russ Stevens:

My first memories begin around 3-4 when I was in pre-K, a year early.  At the end of the school year, I said “Mommy I need a break” (because my life was SO hard) and my mother obliged.  For the next full year, I got to spend every single day with my mom.  My routine was so specific, that I still remember it.  Dunkin Donuts, where I’d get a donut and sneak some of my mom’s coffee.  I never liked it, but I always hoped one day I would.  I got to go the park every day, and then come home to watch Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers and be read to before naptime.  Eventually, I got so tired of having to wait for my reading time that I started to pretend to read by myself.   My mom seeing this, and knowing her older son hated reading, spent as much time as possible helping me learn to read.  By the next year, I was the age I should be in kindergarten, and I was the only kid in the class who was already reading chapter books.

I guess my point is this:  I became an English and Philosophy major down the road and to this day and it feels as though reading is and will always be my first love.  This is what makes moms awesome.  They are there with you from day one, helping you learn and grow and figure out the person you are going to be.  I cannot say for sure if I would be the person I am today without her care.  Even as you get older and sometimes dread the phone call you might have to make because she may have an opinion about what are/are not doing, remember that she really only ever wanted you to be the best person you could be. Relax. And say I love you.

Jennifer O’Connell:

When I look back on pieces I’ve written, I find all sorts of topics.  African leg infections.  Motorcycle marriage proposals.  Aboriginal bachelor pads.  Whitney Houston flashmobs.  Shiny spandex adventure pants.  Falling in love and out of planes, narrow escapes and near misses, eating tarantulas, fleeing venomous snakes, wrangling llamas.  Adventures, misadventures, personal illuminations…they’re all there, save one topic: my mother.

I don’t know why it is so hard to put her on paper.  Fed up with trying to do it myself, I’ve resorted to someone else’s words.  It’s the week before Mothers’ Day and I’m standing in a supermarket leafing through stacks of greeting cards, trying to find one that resonates with what I want to say.  What do you say to a woman who is everywhere at once?  I can pick out small things I love about her: the way she throws her head back and laughs a little too loudly, corny puns, apple coffee cake, weathered hands, her favorite hue of indigo.  She is modest, except for when it comes to command of the English language or her aim with a frisbee.  At the family reunion last summer we were all telling stories, singing songs, showing off talents.  “What can you do?” we asked my mother.  “I do a damn good impersonation of bacon,” she said.

I heard a saying once: “there are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle, or the mirror that reflects it.”  I can’t put my mother into words, because she is in everything I do.  She is in every adventure and misadventure; she is in all that I am.  I sigh my defeat to Hallmark and turn and walk away.  I know that soon we will sit on the deck in the fading dusk, watching the mountains, saying more through our silence than we could with all of the words in the world.

Matt Cargile:

The ability to amaze someone by just being normal is a luxury not everyone has.  And even those who do have it don’t really get it with everyone they interact with.  I’m one of the lucky few, but it’s really only with my mother.  See for her I’m a miracle child; so strange how someone can have such a different point of view for your personal development. In my looks back at growing up I have some realizations.  1) even if I was right about grades really not being a sign of intelligence, I could’ve put a little extra effort in and gotten A’s.  2) Picking a college on a whim isn’t the best move.  Especially if you don’t even know the college and only went to check it out when it visited your High School cause it got you out of AP Physics. 3) Just cause you can film a party you threw at your house while your parents were away, doesn’t mean you should.  But if you asked my mom she’d exclaim that 1) it’s amazing I even graduated high school (not like I was a bad kid, but literally miracle baby amazing), 2) Best college choice ever, and she tells everyone else’s kid they should go there too, 3) she’s keeping the tape for when I run for president (which I’m never doing).  See my mom dealt with me nearly dying a couple times after being born.  This is a very interesting time for such dramatic occurrences cause it’s literally like it never happened to me.  So while I grew up, driving like an idiot, doing stupid stunts on my bike, and just floating through school my mom was busy being amazed I didn’t have brain damage.  Amazed I could even talk like a normal person.  In the end I didn’t need to do much to impress my mom, but in her eyes I’ve exceeded all expectations and then some.  For what’s it worth I just did my best to listen to my parents and that seemed to get me pretty far. And now my mother is always praising the skies for gifting me to her, which is a nice sentiment but if I could tell her one thing is that maybe she should thank herself a bit more for who I am.  I know I do.

Jake Serlan:

The angriest I was ever at my Mother occurred six time zones away from her. I was abroad for college, living off an unsubsidized loan paying for six credits I didn’t more than I needed to graduate. But, the girlfriend said she wanted to go to London and wouldn’t go with me. So, there I was.

I was reminded of all these facts by Mom’s delayed shrill through my English style Nokia that still played the Nokia ring tone. ‘Wasted money’ this, she said and ‘squandered time’ that. “My life is mine” I said or something equally teenagery despite being in my early twenties. At some point, I started yelling. I think I did anyway, cause she asked “why are you yelling” in that Motherly way that knows why your yelling and her mission was accomplished.

By the time I hung up on her my face was beet red and I was sweating. I had found my way to the bathroom some how and my girlfriend looked in on me with concern.

“Please come out of the bathroom,” she said.

“Why?!?!”

“Because you’re about to punch the mirror.”

When I looked into the mirror, I was greet by a man who looked just like me, only with his fist cocked back, loaded for a knock out blow.

“Oh.” I said.

I’m not prone outbreaks of anger, much less violence. It took me a long time to realize how I got to that point.

My mom never got mad. She was disappointed.

And she was the one person I never wanted to disappoint.

I would discover as I got older that I couldn’t disappoint her. Not really. Even if she didn’t agree with me or I her, she encouraged my convictions. I would never have gotten the nerve up to raise my fist to the mirror if she hadn’t instilled my sense of indignation, and I wouldn’t have been able to resist throwing the punch without her ability to judge a situation in a second.

My passion comes from my Mom. And I love her for it.

Justine Kolsky:

How do you purchase a gift of appreciation for the person who literally brought you into this world? You can’t. Well technically you can but, the flowers you’ve sent, the Spa day you’ve purchased, or the nice lunch you’ve planned doesn’t compare to the LIFE that she has given you. In most cases, your mom sacrificed her killer body for 9 months to give you a nice little space to grow in.  How selfless is that? Most people are thinking “well it’s not selfless she wanted children” and to you I say, are you serious? Yes, some people plan pregnancy but for MOST, it just happens. So before you start to think you’re the best gift your parents have ever received, think again. A mother is the best gift we all have received in one-way or another (biological or not).

Cyn (aka Mom) is not your average mother and that’s what I appreciate about her so much. She has no issue with confidence and plays the part of detective, doctor, dancer, banker, and weather(wo)man without hesitation. To be clear, professionally, she is none of these things but does a damn good job pretending she is. To be honest, I don’t know how Cyn has made it this long without murdering me. I am the reason why I don’t want to have children. I was the worst child up until about a year ago and Cyn put up with all of it without batting an eye. That’s how Moms are. They are there for you unconditionally, regardless of the situation.

Mom-

Thank you for calming me down when I was having temper tantrums, staying by my side all night when I burnt my hands on the radiator at that restaurant, letting me cut my hair however I wanted to (even though I looked like a boy), allowing me to take the car on my first day getting my license, not getting that mad when I crashed it, picking me up at 2am from a sleepovers because I missed you too much, carting me around until I was 16, laughing it off when I call you a bitch or moon you after dinner as a “thank you”, introducing me to chocolate, introducing me to old movies, always making me aware of the dangers of wherever I’m living at the time, calling everyday just to say “hi”, being brutally honest, and putting up with all of my bullshit. Sorry I couldn’t be home today to celebrate with you but hopefully this will suffice for now. Cheers to you Ma! Keep dancing, humming, cracking cases, and running the hospital – enjoy today, I love you.

The post Mother’s Day: A Rookerville Collection appeared first on Rookerville.

Is North Korea to be feared, or revered. Are they misunderstood.  Two Rookers dissect and discern the rumors from reality.  Spoiler alert, I don’t think they’re misunderstood.

Scott:

Does your mouth water at the possibility of eating mud for lunch and grass for dinner?  Do you yearn to practice for a parade for about nine months a year, so diligently  that once said parade is executed will be the most smoothly-run thing in the entire country?  Does the notion of not knowing anything about the rest of the world except for the fact that you hate and are afraid of most of it because your government says so turn you on?  How about a nice trip for the rest of your life to a place known only as Camp 14 where you’ll be separated from your family all because you threw out a newspaper clipping with your president’s face on it?

Well buddy, if that sounds like the best time you haven’t had yet, have I got just the place for you…North Korea!  Nestled in the Asia’s southeastern corner on a little over a thousand square miles of landmass, North Korea is one of the most fascinating places on the planet, and not because it’s awesome, in fact, anyone who’s not a citizen yet has paid North Korea a visit will tell you that it’s frightening, horrifying, oppressive, and just plain weird.  However, a lot of people don’t really know much about North Korea other than the fact that they love Dennis Rodman and George Bush named them last in his Axis of Evil trio.  So, let’s learn a little more about North Korea, why they’ve been in the news lately, why we may or may not care about what they have to say, and why they just don’t like the United States, South Korea, or anyone who isn’t China or Russia.  North Korea doesn’t even like China or Russia that much, in fact, I’d wager a guess that secretly North Korea doesn’t even like North Korea, but we’ll get to that.

North Korea is a battle born nation to say the least. Without getting prehistoric, we’ll look at recent world history. From about 1910 – 1945, the Korean peninsula was one big Japanese colony.  The Koreans, like other folks we know, decided that being ruled by a foreign empire wasn’t anything they wanted a part of, so, this guy, Kim Il-Sung, got a bunch of peasants together, taught them a little bit about Marxist-Leninism which he learned from the then-Soviets, and, according to who you ask, “single-handedly threw the Japanese” out of the Korean peninsula.  After the Japanese went home and they slowly began to lose their front of World War 2, Stalin decided that the Russians would invade Japan through Korea, however, he required a man-in-charge sympathetic to his cause. and who would be a better fit for the job? Why the same guy who was Soviet educated but Korean born, and responsible for ousting imperialist Japanese in the first place.  Enter Kim Il Sung.  However, at that point, it was a little late for Stalin’s raid on the land of the rising sun because by that point the United States bombed Japan into the Stone Age and World War 2 was essentially over.  A few years lapse, Kim Il Sung gets bored, turns his gaze south, and decides “Hey, it’s the fifties!  Happy Days! Let’s make everyone a Communist!”  So with Stalin’s blessing, Kim and his North Korean army supplied by both the Russians and the Chinese invade US occupied South Korea.  The Korean War ensues, and, again depending on who you ask, Kim almost overruns the entire South Korean peninsula until the UN steps in.

Then the rest is history- we have an armistice, or a cease fire, between the two Koreas, the US stays behind to protect it’s friends in the South as well as it’s democratic and capitalist interests abroad, and the Soviet Union crumbles leaving North Korea with only China to turn to for political camaraderie.  Kim Il-Sung, bathing in the glory of defeating yet another foreign enemy, capitalizes on a cult-of-personality style of leadership stylizing himself  “The Great Leader”.  He instills a policy called “Juche Communism” or “military first” and begins to raises an army which nowadays numbers about nine million strong.  The common folk go nuts.  They have to.  Remember the prison camps? If you don’t go wild for Kim, well, you won’t be seeing your family for a really long time and you’re going to be digging corn kernels out of cow dung to sustain the next few decades of your life in good old Camp 14.  Kim Il-Sung organizes parades in his own honor, builds statues all over Pyongyang to immortalize both his legacy and the legacy of the Korean Communist Party, and enjoys an unopposed rule until about 1994. Kim Il-Sung passes away, his son, Kim Jong-Il steps in calling himself The Supreme Leader (Great Leader was already taken), Kim Jong-Il dies, and his grandson, Kim Jong-Un ascends to the throne. This brings to the present.

I mean, let’s face it, South Korea, really won the breakup from the Korean War.  South Korea enjoys a prosperous democratic economy and open trade from the United States, and why not?  We made them see the light of nation building and hubris and so now they can send some action figures and flat screen TVs our way.  Seoul, South Korea’s capitol, is one of the most densely populated cities in the world, while Pyongyang looks like a ghost town or a scene from Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.”  While North Korea is probably bitter at how lousy of a hand they were dealt even though technically they won the Korean War, it’s not all petulance and jealousy.  North Korea, like South Korea, believes that they are both ONE Korea however divided across the line they may be.  This yearning for unification has been a fly in the ointment and point of contention since the Korean War Armistice was drafted.  People flee North Korea for the south in droves.  They cross the demilitarized zone or go through China and cross their fingers hoping they make it in.  If they do, South Korea accepts them, if they don’t, well, North Korea deals with them via firing squad.  They’re really bitter about defectors.

Lately we’ve seen a lot in the news about North Korea.  In fact, every six months or so, the free world remembers that North Korea is a country because they either fire off a bunch of artillery shells at South Korea and kill a dozen or so people, or they start dusting off their nuclear reactors and test fire missiles like its still the Cold War.  On a good day, North Korea threatens a thermonuclear war against the United States, South Korea and all of its enemies (read: the rest of the world) because the US flew a jet fighter too close to the DMZ in the closet.  Historically, that’s about as bad as its gotten.  Since the beginning of April 2013, however, people have started paying a bit more attention to North Korea.  Just a bit though, let’s not get carried away. See, North Korea has Kim Jong-Un,  a new leader who’s still surrounded by the old guard of generals, business people, Juche fanatic politicos, and a really zealous populous who still believes that they’re in the greatest country in the world.  Kim Jong-Un is the Joffrey of the House Baratheon for that part of the world – an ambitious young leader with a lot to prove who was raised in a country where his father was Jesus, Buddha, Mick Jagger, and Justin Beiber combined. He’s also well schooled in North Korea’s history of dealing with foreign policy:  throw them out if they come here, and if they don’t come here, throw some harsh words around so they remember why we earned that bronze medal in the Axis of Evil.  Kim Jong-Un has taken the warspeak a step further; beyond simply threatening the United States with an open nuclear war, he’s gone so far as to close one of the very few borders shared with the South and the requisite industrial plant that went with it; he’s also moved medium range missile launchers to North Korea’s east coast and has the White House AND the Pentagon saying that an attack is “imminent”.   So what does this mean?  Do we finally pay attention, or is North Korea posturing?

For the short period of time that North Korea had our attention, they’ve now been pushed to the back burner in light of the tragedies at the Boston Marathon which the news is saying but not saying smells a lot like Middle Eastern flavored terrorism.  That sort of terrorism still makes the top of the stuff-we-care-about-list even in post-Bush America; Islamic fundamentalists still pose a bigger threat than a conventional army backed by a sovereign nation still clinging on to Communism ever will.  I mean, how many dead soldiers have come back as a result of anything that North Korea has dished out since the 50s?

See politically, at least, we’ve gone about the whole “caring about what happens with North Korea” a totally different way.  The United States still has a fairly concrete foothold on the Korean peninsula to the South, and as of last week one thing has become abundantly clear, this is going to be China’s problem.  After China basically told North Korea to slow it’s roll, we made sure we sent our man John Kerry over there to bore the Chinese Prime Minister to death about an “unified” approach to dealing with North Korea.  If there’s anyone in the Pacific Rim that can get North Korea to shut up, it’s going to be the country that can also get the United States to shut up.  China has expressed an interest in denuclearizing the North Korean peninsula, North Korea balks China, China says “Look, we gave you the stuff you needed, we keep your country barely afloat, we’re the ones that can call the shots around here, and look, United States, if you piss us off, we’re just going to deflate your dollar even more and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

While the American people may get a little of the Cold War hide-under-your-school-desk nostalgia from North Korea’s momentary mouth off and muscle flexing, we’ve basically said “China, you deal with it, because we’ve got our own problems now, see?  And by the way, you’re still going to build all of our stuff for really cheap right?”  So does it really matter if North Korea is posturing now or not?  Will the United States people really begin to lose sleep over a country we forget about every half-year or so?  Are we that unsure of our own military’s capability to disrupt any hostile action North Korea takes especially when the bigger and stronger China will ultimately be left holding the bag?  Will we really flip to page 4 of the “International News” section of our hometown paper next week in the wake of what’s happened in Boston this week?

In this writer’s opinion:

NOPE.

Jake:

North Korea sure has been on the news a lot lately. And by news, I mean that I see a lot more pictures of Kim Jong Un on the internet while I take breaks from searching for pornography. Like most good American’s, I don’t understand what the hell is going on in the world today. It really goes right over my head. However, when I try to find out, I come to find that the media and government too are in the same dilemma. What should be my window into understanding my world seems to just muddle the issues at hand even further. Right now, the North Korean (Crisis? Dust up? Show of force? Display of Cocksmanship?) Situation is a perfect encapsulation of why Americans are so distrustful of their government and media.

Do you remember when we were supposed to be afraid of North Korea?

Just four short years ago they were a card carrying member of the ‘Axis of Evil’, that rogue group of sinister nations hell bent on taking down the United States. The only difference NK and its Axis compatriots, Iraq and Iran, is that Korea actually stated that they want to destroy the US. In fact, in recent history, they are the only sovereign nation to overtly state that they would engage in us nuclear war and bragged that they had the capacity to do so. And what was the mighty US’s response to these threats?

Shrug

As excitable a nation we have been in regards to threats, for some reason the North Koreans never seem to register as a danger. It would seem that they have all the ingrediants for some solid fear mongering: nuclear weapons, the backing of the communists, and an entitled, deluded, insecure fatty pants at the helm. You couldn’t invent a seemingly more dangerous powder keg of potential terrorism if you tried, and the Bush administration tried really hard to do that.

Even back before we defeated racism forever 2008 and again in 2012, we were sold Iraq as a much more imminent threat than our friends on the Pacific rim. Granted, most of us didn’t buy it, but low and behold, we somehow all managed to pay for it in blood and dollars. When we discovered that Iraq really had no way to harm us, it didn’t come as a shock. We had already moved passed the reasoning phase, and forged head on into the mired in an endless conflict phase. And all the while, the original Mad Man in the East, Kimmy J the Ill, blustered and threatened his Margaret Cho looking ass off. The biggest difference between Iraq and NK at the point was a simple one: Iraq didn’t have any weapons of mass destruction and North Korea actually, and verifiably, did.

So why were we so eager to get into Iraq for a hypothetical danger rather than attack a genuine one? The short cynical answer is oil. The longer more complex answer is…. oil with a side of Chinese influence. However, the truth is, it really doesn’t matter why we went in.  We were never given enough information from any official channel to make an informed decision. We all have our pet theories, but apart from the powers that be, no one really knows.

Now, there’s a new threat from the fruit of Ill’s ill loins, Kim Jong Un.  Or is there? The media has been reporting in its great tradition of sensational panic attacks over nothing that Un is making threats. Nuclear threats. Dire threats with potentially catastrophic consequences. And what has been our response been?

Shrug

            The government has given no strong stance one way or the other. So far, the only thing that even resembles a stance on this issue is John Kerry letting us know that North Korea shouldn’t be doing that in his eminently dull John Kerry fashion. But the news keeps on chattering about nukes and threats and targets. And the government keeps on shrugging. So what are we to make of this?

We aren’t.

Like the Iraq war before, we, as a populace have not been given enough information to make an informed decision. And likely, we’re probably never going to. To maintain its credibility, the news can’t make a conclusion about North Korea this early. If they do, and NK does the opposite, whatever good will they have will be blown away. And the government can’t give us a decided level of urgency either. If they come out and say that North Korea is a threat with their nukes, then why the hell didn’t they do something earlier?  Korea has been making these threats for years. But if they say that North Korea isn’t a threat, then they directly contradict every news outlet and look ill informed.

No one ever wants to look like the asshole. And we, as consumers of information, are looking to the only suppliers we in town and are coming up wanting. The powers that be are forcing us to draw our own conclusions on topics that we are not fit to draw conclusions about. How are we to know the genuine threat level of a country half a world away? How are we to know the global ramifications if that country decides to make good on its claims? Who’s to say that all the bluster isn’t a smoke screen for a terrorist attack on the horizon?  Is there any real threat or is it just filler for a news cycle that relies on constant crises?

Sadly, the answer to those questions is always the same:

Shrug

Then, a couple bombs went off in Boston and North Korea didn’t exist anymore.

And, thus, the crisis, or not, resolves itself.

Until it resurfaces next time.

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