This week I don’t want to write at length. I’m still dealing with a bunch of nasty stuff done in Australia on Friday night. It struck me, though, that most readers of this blog are also dealing with bad things. We are not having an easy time of it, any of us.
What I would love to know is how we all handle things.
My best approach (and the most difficult) is to think everything through and understand. Twenty years ago I could take that understanding and share it with activists I knew and we’d find ways fo helping people and moving past the logjam that the impossible creates. Right now, most of those people aren’t talking to me because I’m too Jewish, but I still delve deeply and understand, and when someone asks, I can help them reach the stage where they can identify the hate and the slogans and the dark alliances and make their own decisions for their lives. I really miss teaching – I don’t get to explore ideas with many people and certainly don’t get simple solutions. This was once the best approach, but now makes me feel helpless. Also, I find it exhausting. It’s especially exhausting when friends tell me “The group I marched with was not at all antisemitic. You are imagining things.” Perfectly good people can march alongside vile bigots and as long as the bigots are polite in their presence and the good people accept the rhetoic unquestioningly or don’t know the dowhistles then those good people do not know what is being done in their name.
Solitaire is not the best way to deal, I have discovered. I start playing when things get too much and then cannot stop.
Cooking was a great support (because I love cooking) when there were friends around who could eat my food, but, between COVID and our charming new present, not many people eat my coking and so all I have is too much food and… my freezer is full.
Last time there was a wave of antisemitism (the Molotov cocktail years) I did a lot of walking and enormous amounts of dancing. They were so good for me. I cannot walk far these days and I can only dace for maybe 2 minutes. I am so proud that I can now dance for two minutes, it’s like life returning. I needed 2 hours of dancing back then, to give me a break from everything. I would lose myself in the music and my feet would replace my brain in ruling my life and over time, my body forgot the burdens it carried and life was wonderful. If my illnesses would go into abeyance, I would dance again, but, right now, dancing has a Jew has its own aches. Walking doesn’t. I will work on improving my walking.
Superhero movies and TV and K-drama help a lot. They’re not my everyday and I can take a break from my everyday when I’m watching them. Crime dramas and sad stories of sorrow… less good. A couple of friends suggested I watch things to do with the Holocaust, or one of the documentaries about October 7. If I want to sleepwalk, I promise, I will watch those things.
These are a few of the things I’ve tried.
We all live different lives and we all have different approaches to turning the impossible into something we can handle everyday. The impossible for someone in the US is quite different to the impossible for someone in Australia. I’d love to know some of your ways of dealing.
Immersing myself in k-dramas (subtitles only!) has helped immensely. It’s just a different kind of storytelling than the typical Hollywood fare (sorry to say, I’ve lost interest in the mainstream superhero offerings). I love the focus on food (an essential character in and of itself) and the sharing of meals, and the fact that halmeonis and harabojis) are visibly vital to the social fabric and often central to the storyline, and not just incidental—or nonexistent altogether.
That’s not to say that there isn’t a fair amount of unsavoury cultural and racial stereotyping still being depicted, plus the fact that Korean culture is still very patriarchal, but change seems to be happening in those areas as well.
Our viewing has been on hiatus owing to an unanticipated and chaotically hasty move, but I’m anxious to get back and finish up Dear Hongrang shortly.
Mr. Queen remains one of my all-time favourites.
I am halfway through Dear Hongrang right now. And yes, subtitles only. I won’t watch them on some streaming services because they won’t let me hear the original actors.
I think one of the reasons I keep coming back to K-drama is that I like stories with that touch of fantasy, so I know it’s not real history and that it’s not pretending to be… and I like the food. I can now cook that ginseng chicken that appears from time to time, and a few other dishes. I suspect this is why the series are so comforting, despite various cultural issues. At least in K-drama the problems are not in a culture I have to turn around and see everyday!
I need to watch Mr Queen but I wasn’t certain about it and was waiting to see if anyone liked it. Now I must watch it!
“At least in K-drama the problems are not in a culture I have to turn around and see everyday!”
Exactly this!
An added bonus to subtitles (aside from being able to luxuriate in the tonal quality of the original language and the voices speaking it) is that I’ve managed to pick up a few words and expressions in a heretofore unknown to me language. And hangul is a fascinating script—the history of its creation is equally so. I’m still struggling to master it.
I am usually loath to recommend my reading/viewing preferences to others, since everyone’s tastes and sensibilities vary so widely. But I will say that I laughed to the point of tears at many scenes in Mr. Queen, so if there’s a possibility that my suggesting it will bring that kind of joy to someone else, then I’m happy to do so. If you do watch it, let me know what you think!