michael > Recent Status Updates

“Let us pretend to be professional, you and I, for hell and the gentry await."

“…keep your hand close to your sword."

I paused. "My sword is, ah... still made of wood, ma'am."

She frowned and cocked her head. "Oh. Well... in that case, make sure your boots are laced up proper, boy, so you can run like hell."

“There’s always another wet season, Din.”

“And so it was strange to be nearly forty and not the beautiful, erotic adult woman to my own ten-year-old daughter. To be still the guilty, creeping child.”

“No one on the internet had asked me not to kill myself; in fact one of them had suggested I take my book out onto the penthouse balcony and use it as a parachute. It didn't matter that I lived twenty floors below the actual penthouse. These people cared nothing for nuance.”

I felt stupid, like we’d spent all this effort searching our bodies for an old scar that had already healed, just to cut into the same patch of skin again, all because we wanted to confirm that it did once exist, that there used to be a time when we were bleeding.

Still, when I think about what I want for you, I won't hesitate to say that I want you to live for yourself and forget about everything else you think you need to care for. So what is preventing us from choosing the easy way out? Is it love?

It made me wonder: at what point in our lives do we lose the curiosity of a child and learn, instead, to look away? And when will we ever think to look again?

If I were a log that washed along with the currents, then she would be a fish that swam in the stream. Neither of us could escape the water, but I was the one who didn't fight my fate.

“Grief is a running tap, a closed cabinet, chopsticks touching bowls, teeth chewing. I'd never imagined that would be the case. I hadn't expected it to slip into everything.”

“Faith is just a vessel, and while it can certainly be used to justify truly horrible things, maybe I’m letting the aggressors off the hook by blaming faith itself.”

"But who's going to keep talmudic learning going, if the Jews don't do it? Who's going to continue Native American dance and lanauge...a few anthropologists? To put it another way: who will turn "the mass-graves of the forgotten," to those very nearly buried products of historical Jewish creativity, into "enduring monuments" of those "remembered and cherished...?"

“I love Jesus, I really do, but Jesus would want me to be cool.”

‘The Jew,’ Sartre writes, 'cannot choose not to be a Jew…to be a Jew is to be thrown into — to be abandoned to — the situation of a Jew; and at the same time it is to be responsible in and through ones person for the destiny and the very nature of the Jewish People. The authentic Jew, makes himself a Jew, in the face of all and against all."

did there need to be two of these collections

the best way i can describe this book is academically neurotic

“Instead of Jewish pride — whatever that might mean, but I’m sure it’s not good — I propose Jewish pleasure, Jewish joy.”

this is the most insane, unhinged book i have ever read and would be afraid to know what would top it

i am once again asking some authors to consider removing 15 - 20 pages of boring exposition, or at least to make it exciting

favorites thus far: dogfish, wild geese, a visitor

this book feels like a trust exercise

silly vacation book!