Good Monday!
Easter and Passover are now behind us and if you’re lucky enough to still be working,
I hope this Monday finds you back to work, hopefully from home and, if not, hopefully from somewhere where you can somehow manage to stay safe--each one, no small thing to hope for during this post-holiday, post-Holy Day day in the pandemic. Even in normal times, Monday’s suck--and so today, I wish you a “Good Monday!”
I love a good oxymoron. (Who doesn’t? Is there such a thing as a bad oxymoron?) The point of the best oxymorons, it seems to me, is when they point out something--some word or combination of phrase--that turns out, upon examination, to be the exact opposite of what it purports to be. I hate hypocrisy and have always been struck by the ironies and inconsistencies of personal situations and large institutions from government and corporations to workplaces and religions.
At the same time, turning something on its head and bringing out its absolute absurdity has always helped me turn anguish into amusement. One of the low points of these last five weeks of stay-at-home life came on Friday night, Good Friday night. Sara and I were lucky to both have the “day off.” We spent the day unwinding and avoiding the online demands of staying connected while working from home.
(On Friday, I put up an OOO notice on my work email. It read: “I am AHBNCWE until Sunday, April 12th. (At Home But Not Checking Work Emails)” Calling it an “OOO message” just seemed absurd when millions have been “OOO” for a month. One coworker emailed me right away upon getting my automatic reply to let me know that I had made him laugh in the middle of the night. When I logged back in Sunday to go through hundreds of work emails, i discovered that another colleague--whose name I did not recognize--had emailed me to let me know that he had emailed me to get my automatic reply because someone else had told me that my “OOO” was worth checking out. Mission accomplished.)
So, back to Friday night. I am hard of hearing and wear hearing aids. I have what’s called a high frequency loss and without the aids, I have a hard time following conversations, especially in crowded places like cocktail pastries and restaurants. I also have a hard time hearing dialogue on TV. For years, Sara and I have been watching TV with closed captioning turned on. The hearing aids help a lot. In the last year, I've also gotten new hearing aids which have bluetooth capability. With bluetooth, I can synch my hearing aids with my phone. Any phone call rings in my head and I can talk on the phone without touching or holding the phone. In essence, my hearing aids are stealth airpods. They work with a small, clear wire that goes into my ear, the hearing devices themselves hanging on the back of my ear lobes. No one can see them--and no one can hear the voices that are sometimes speaking to me in my head. This has caused some crazy moments of panic. At my nephew’s wedding last October, I was driving with Sara and Ted. Before we’d gotten into the car, I’d opened an ESPN app on my phone, looked up a football score and swiped the phone to another app. A few miles out on the highway, a video began to play, loudly and In my head--and only in my head. It was a video report from ESPN. It startled me so much that I almost pulled the car off the road. Sara and Ted had no idea what was going on--and both were not amused, at least not initially.
The hearing aids also have a bluetooth box that I can hook up to my TV. The audio from the TV then plays in my head. I like the volume loud and the only problem is that the volume for the hearing aids is controlled by the small box that is connected to the TV by wires. In short, it’s across the room. The TV is also set up so that it automatically connects to my hearing aids the moment it’s turned on. Sara and I had finished eating dinner and I had gone upstairs to get the TV cued up to the right episode of “Ozark,” the show we’d agreed to watch. I turned the TV on and the audio began to blare inside my head. Over that din, I could hear that Sara was calling from downstairs--but I could not hear what she was saying. To stop the noise from the TV, I couldn’t get to the controller so yanked my hearing aids out--but then I could not hear what Sara was saying as she called up from the kitchen downstairs. I literally screamed in frustration. The very thing that I needed to help me hear was preventing me from hearing what I needed to hear. I stormed downstairs to find out that Sara was asking me if I wanted something to drink. She was, to say the least, taken aback by my upstairs audio outburst as I tried to explain that I wasn't mad at her--I was mad at the hearing ads. Onto “Ozark” and the story of mayhem (and murder) in a seemingly normal family.
I work in TV news and for 13 years, I worked on the overnights, an upside down world if there ever was one. I am sorry to say that long before hearing aids, it really messed with my head. Ryan, my colleague and good friend, spent 18 months working with me on some of those overnights. He could sometimes see my frustration coming and said that what I really needed at my desk was a mirror--that if I could see me face and saw how frustrated I was getting by some stupid small thing, I would literally see that it was really a stupid small thing.
In the last month, a lot of us have become familiar with video conference tools like Zoom and Teams. The technology is great--until it’s not. When clicking an unknown setting in the middle of a video conference somehow kills your audio so you can no longer hear people or speak to them, but they can still see you. You pantomime that you’re not hearing them until someone calls you on a landline which works for a moment until the feedback then blows away everyone on the videoconference. Argh!
I started off Good Friday with a text message exchange with Annie, my daughter who is a psychiatric social worker at a hospital in Queens. We text several times a day these days and I know that on Friday, she’s just looking to go home and unplug, to veg out from the tensions and stresses of the week which are very real for her (and all the rest of us). My typical Friday text is to repeat the line from the Geico ad, “What day is it?” But instead of “Hump Day,” the question is meant to remind her that it’s Friday. This Friday, I reminded her that it was not only Friday, but Good Friday. I texted, “I have never understood why they call it Good Friday. 1. Seems redundant. 2. J died today. Shouldn’t it be Bad Friday--especially to distinguish it from the 51 other Fridays?” She responded with a small flyer she’d seen, taken outside a New York City church. It had a picture of Jesus and the caption read, “Christ has risen! But you won’t if you die from COVID-19. Please don’t attend church this Sunday.” Only in New York, but it speaks to the inconsistency and absurdity of anyone who calls themselves a person of God who insisted on calling for worshipers to come together in large groups during this pandemic. God help them.
On Good Friday, I also read a great story in the Understandably newsletter from Bill Murphy Jr., “How Can I Help You?” Murphy told the story of going to a Jesuit college when Orrin Grossman, a Jewish professor in a music appreciation class, told his Catholic students they needed to understand the Protestant Reformation to understand a particular piece of music. The professor proceeded to explain the Reformation in 90 seconds--before he burst out laughing.
Reader, to this day, decades later, I have never seen anyone laugh so hard. None of us understood, but we started laughing too. You couldn’t help it. ‘Oh, how I love America,’ Grossman said, trying to catch his breath. ‘Only in this beautiful country… could you have a Jew… stand up in a class full of Catholics… and give a lecture about the Protestant Reformation.’
That story from Murphy reminded me of something that's always struck me as an absurdity about TV news. TV news is a 24/7 thing. “The show must go on” despite holidays, religious or otherwise. There's shift work to cover tasks around the clock throughout each week, month and year--and on holidays, there’s a tradeoff. You work Memorial Day to get July Fourth off--and that especially applies to religious holidays.
So, it's typically Jewish reporters who are working and assigned to cover Holy Week and Easter--while Christian reporters cover and explain Passover and the High Holy days of Judaism so their Jewish colleagues can fast and repent.
As a result, we in the business--and sadly, too often people at home--end up with a 3rd grade, Wikipedia understanding of the basic story of the other's religion. I don’t know much about the Book of Life, but I do know that I likely need more than 10 days of prayer and repentance to get myself in. Most Catholics don’t typically take off on December 8th, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, a so-called Holy Day of Obligation. It’s also an especially complicated holiday for anyone of any religion to comprehend and explain, let alone in the simple terms required for basic TVnews coverage. It should be called the Feast of the Immaculate Misconception. Jewish reporters typically cover for Christians on Christmas and Easter--and they get the basics right with the death of Jesus on the day we call Good Friday.
Working from home on Easter night, I got terrible news from the alerts from my Facebook page. A colleague I had worked with at another network for 3 years more than a decade ago had died. I joined the people who worked with her, flooding Facebook with stories and remembrances. The woman who died was Jewish.
One coworker, also Jewish, wrote a very touching tribute. It closed with these two sentences, "I loved ordering Chinese food on all those Christmas work days with her. But most of all I loved her incredible passion for life and the way she rocked being a journalist." Two Jewish journalists, working together on Christmas, when the office was mostly vacant, a skeleton staff of non-Christians. Their meals, this woman remembered, always take-out food from a Chinese restaurant.
So, on this Good Monday, Sara and I started our day quietly together, sipping coffee as the morning light came up in the living room. It looked to be a dreary day with light rain already falling. Sara said that made going back to work all that much harder. I told her about my former coworker. (It was not coronavirus.) We talked about what else was in the news. Killer tornadoes down South, now headed our way here in the Northeast. Sara checked the weather app on her phone. The National Weather Service had posted a high wind alert for our area until 6 PM. Avoid windows and try to stay on the ground floor. As if the pandemic wasn’t enough. Outdoor hospital tents are in danger and even working from home is a crapshoot. I hope it’s a good Monday wherever you are. You just need to make it until Tuesday. And then what? Well, as I like to say, “We’ll jump off that bridge when we get to it.”
What did NOT happen?
A. I’ve been working to gather feedback on Steve’s Coronavirus Stay-at-Home Quiz. Sara has told me that the “What did not happen?” question feels like a gimmick. She’s suggested I drop it;
B. Monica, Annie’s friend who’s a big fan of the family holiday newsletter sent out as a 3-page, single-spaced “What did not happen?” quiz, suggested that the coronavirus quiz question come first so people can decide to skip the long essay;
C. I’ve been emailing Murphy about taking this quiz to Substack, making it a subscription newsletter. He’s told me it would grow my audience beyond people that I know;
D. Sara has signed off on me posting the coronavirus quiz to Substack;
E. I’m having second thoughts about Substack because, unless you pay them $13 a month, they run ads on your blog--and I don’t want commercials associated with what I write here.
Want the answer?
Answer #27. Good Monday!, April 13, 2020
If you’re a subscriber, the answer will be sent to you as a separate email when the question is published.
Want more?
Here’s the next quiz in the series: Quiz #28. Shakespeare.
Here’s the previous quiz in the series: Quiz #26. Fantastic.
Here’s the first quiz in the series: Quiz #1. Stella and Social Distancing, March 13, 2020
The quiz is explained here: Steve’s Stay-at-Home Coronavirus Quiz.
Here is an archive of all the quizzes.
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