It’s Friday (am I the only one who thinks that this week just flew by?), which means its time to share the first songs that my iPod spits, in order, no additions or subtractions. So here we go…

1. Did Galileo Pray?, Ellis Paul (Live)
2. Blood From a Stone, Jonatha Brooke (10 Cent Wings)
3. Chokin’ Kind, Joss Stone (The Soul Sessions)
4. This Year’s Love, David Gray (White Ladder)
5. Soft Talk, Shelby Lynne (Epic Recordings)
6. Ghost in This House, Allison Krauss (Forget About It)
7. Cello Song, Nick Drake (Way to Blue)
8. Alphabet Town, Elliott Smith (Elliot Smith)
9. A Hundred Years, Tracey Chapman (Crossroads)
10. I Feel the Blues Movin’ In, Harris, Parton, Ronstadt (Trio II)

and one more, just for kicks…

11. Tiffany Queen, The Byrds (The Essential Byrds)

Favorite Album: White Ladder, I remember buying this album when it first came out on cassette, not because it was before CDs were available, but because I was too cheap to pay the three extra dollars to buy the CD.

Favorite Song: Nick Drake’s Cello Song. I just like it.

Song I’ve Seen Performed Live: Ellis Paul’s, Did Galileo Pray? My friend Una is a big fan of Ellis Paul, and we went to see him last winter at the Tin Angel. We were in the seats that run along the wall that leads to the bathrooms and the dressing rooms, and during the opening act, Ellis came out to watch and sat next to me.

In other music news, Eric Hutchinson, my favorite semi-undiscovered musician, will be opening tonight for Bob Schneider at 9 pm tonight at the North Star Bar.

And for more Random Fridays, go check out some of the regular contributors, Luna, Andrea and Ben. Mark doesn’t have a Friday random ten up at the moment, but you should check out his new game, 6 Degrees of Ostentation.

Lately I’ve been inspired to stick my toe back into the world of internet dating. As with many of my generation, I am not a novice when it comes to meeting people online. I found the first guy I ever really loved via match.com, so I have a certain fondness for the medium. As I read through profiles, and look at pictures, I’m not entirely certain that what I’m looking for is out there. Everyone seems to be looking for romance and magic, and while that all seems nice, it’s just not my thing.

Give me a man who will look up at me and grin, with love in his eyes when I let out a really resonant burp. Who will happily eat the leftovers. Who will take me seriously when I say that goldfish creep the shit out of me. Who will let me read the comics first on Sunday morning. Who will help me take care of my parents as they age, knowing full well that I will put as much effort and energy into his.

When my mom was growing up, her father bought toilet paper and light bulbs in bulk each month and had them delivered to the house. He did this because he knew it was awkward for my grandmother to bring them home with the weekly food shopping. I find this to be the deeply sweet. These days my idea of a romantic gesture would be for the guy I’m with to chase down our dog (who currently exists only in my imagination) on January 2nd with a tissue, and remove the tinsel enrobed nugget of shit that is hanging out of her ass. This is why we don’t use tinsel.

Tonight as I was walking home down Chestnut St., I saw two visibly intoxicated guys greet each other like long lost friends. Who knows, maybe they were. They embraced wildly and as one of them stepped back out of the hug, he tripped on the front steps of a brownstone and fell backwards.

Hard.

This all happened just as I was walking by, and as I passed he was still on the ground, and he reached his hand up towards me and asked for help up. And I didn’t give it. I pulled my arms in and shook my head and said I’m sorry. In my defense, there was a burning cigarette in the hand he put out to me, but even if his hand had been empty, I’m not sure I would have taken it.

I’m feeling a bit guilty about this, because I refused to help him. I don’t think I’ve ever flat out refused help to someone who was asking for it, who could have potentially been hurt.

What would you have done?

Today is the 67th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the night when the Nazi movement organized a national attack against the Jews, designed to look like random rioting gone out of hand. Hitler got the idea to organize this attack after a German official was killed by a Jew in Paris. Upwards of 1000 synagogues were destroyed, more than 7,500 Jewish-owned businesses were ruined and there wasn’t enough plate glass in the country to replace the store windows that were shattered. The piles of shards in the streets gave the night it’s name. Kristallnacht means “Night of Broken Glass.”

I digested this fact at 8 am this morning along with my bowl of Cheerios as I read my daily “Writer’s Almanac.” The Almanac arrives in my email inbox everyday, always opens with a poem and finishes with facts about great literary events, writers’ birthday or things of major historical significance that happened the current date.

I don’t remember a time in my life when I did not know that I was Jewish. It was one of the facts of my life. It didn’t matter that I went to a Unitarian church, asked Santa for presents in December and hunted for my Easter basket every spring. I was a Jew. When I was ten years old, my mother confessed to me that every time she and my dad looked at a house we might live in, she would make sure to check for potential hiding places, in case she had to conceal us from the Nazis. (As I thought out this entry today, I asked my mom if she still did this, and she said that about eight years ago, she made a concerted effort to stop, because it was feeding an unhealthy fear. Besides, my dad had pointed out years ago, that modern technology makes it almost impossible to hide the way Jews did in Europe during the Holocaust).

When I was 16, the summer between my sophomore and junior years of high school, I went to Poland for three weeks. I went on crutches, because I had ignored my mother’s warning, gotten on a horse at the beach days before I was scheduled to leave, gotten thrown and broke my ankle.

My experience of the trip was drastically different than I had expected, because of the crutches. I was forced to take things more slowly, to focus deeply on the terrain, to observe closely all I could see from one vantage point before moving on. This approach was especially necessary the day we spent at Auschwitz. Many of the former prisoner barracks have been turned into museum space, and because I moved slowly, I frequently got left behind that day. I was often by myself in front of mountains of suitcases, shoes, eyeglasses, books and other items that had once been precious, important, vital to people who had all been killed. I wasn’t alone as I crutched my way through the gas chamber, but my memory excludes all others who were there with me that day. I remember feeling fear, pain and luck all at the same time. Fear that I would trip while cruching myself over this space, not wanting to come into contact with that ground. Pain for all those who did. And luck that I was there in 1995 instead of 1944.

Reading that little snippet about Kristallnacht this morning pulled these memories to the front of my consciousness. There’s more in me about my identity as a Jew who learned everything she knows about Judaism from a series of childrens’ books and has never been in a synagogue, but I’ll pull the rest out on another time.

Walking into my building tonight I saw a cluster of people heatedly talking in front of the community room door. Their presence reminded me in a flash that it was election day (the retirees in my building take civic duty very seriously, voting is sacrosanct even on the off years).

Last year on election day, my old supervisor and I closed our office at 1 pm and went to the Germantown Home to volunteer. We were there to help the residents navigate their way to the multi-purpose room, and assist them at the voting machine, if they needed help. When we arrived there were only a few people who hadn’t voted yet, and within half an hour, just about every ambulatory or semi-ambulatory vote in the place had been cast. We reported back to the volunteer station and asked if there was anything else we could do to help. The woman staffing the table said that there were a few people who were interested in voting, but they were bedridden and couldn’t come downstairs and cast their vote. Could we possibly find out if there was a way to take a ballot up to them?

Last year was the year of the provisional ballot, for all those people who had been “cleansed” from the rolls inadvertently, and so we were given several of those to use to collect the votes.

I live in a building with a lot of elderly people, but nothing I’ve experienced here prepared me for what it would be like to spend time on the residential floors of that home. Germantown Home is mostly populated with elderly, infirm African-American men and women from the surrounding neighborhood. They have experiences and histories that I can never begin to imagine, and now, well into their 60’s, 70’s, 80’s and 90’s those histories and experiences are really all they had left, as their bodies crumble and fail. For those who’s minds have stopped working, they don’t even have those.

I walked in to Mr. Brown’s room, gently knocking on the door, trying to get his attention over the sound of the television. He was a large man in his 80’s. He wasn’t wearing a shirt and seemed embarrassed about it, but his body didn’t work well enough to do anything about it. I asked him if he wanted to fill out a ballot and he said yes. I asked him who he wanted to vote for, and he told me he wanted to vote the straight Democratic ticket, like he had done all his life. I rolled the table across his bed and positioned the ballot so he could sign it. I left his room, feeling more connected to the democractic process than I ever had before. As a undergrad politics major, I studied the process, the policies, the strategies and the history. But I never felt more connected to the democratic process than in that moment.

I walked into my building tonight just as the Monday night Bingo game was letting out of the community room. Clusters of little old ladies were scattered around the lobby, a slow drifting human obstacle course, complete with walkers and canes stuck out at odd angles, preventing me from getting to my final destination of the evening, my bed. As I walked by the security desk, I overheard some women congratulating my neighbor, Mrs. B, on her winnings of the evening. I stepping on the elevator and heard Mrs. B call out to me, “Hold the door, dear.” I like Mrs. B, all 4 feet 6 inches of her, so stuck my arm out across the left side of the door and waited as she hurried into the lift. Two more women behind her boarded and then I took my arm back. The three ladies chatted as we waited for the doors to close, and inches before they joined, I watched as the foot of a cane was thrust between the doors. The bingo players flapped and clucked and the cane retracted, allowing the doors to close and the elevator to rise.

The other two women got off on the sixth and thirteenth levels and Mrs. B and I started the final ascension to our floor. I offered my congratulations on her evenings winnings. She peered up at me through her cat eye glasses, flapped her hand in my direction and said, “Bingo! It’s such a boring game. Besides, I didn’t really win, I paid two dollars, I won two dollars. I only go because the old lady who runs it begs me to come each week.” The doors opened, she was done talking and we headed off in opposite directions. I walked towards my front door with a grin on my face, enjoying the image of 89 year old Mrs. B in her cashmere sweater set, calling someone who was probably younger than her old.

It’s nights like tonight when I really enjoy and appreciate the community in which I live. Mrs. B gives my life a little extra character and color, which I greatly appreciate.

The first power tool I ever bought was a little Black and Decker cordless screwdriver. I bought it my sophomore year of college to put together my bookshelf. My primary Christmas request that year had been for a large book case that “collapsed into a pile of boards” and my dad, with the help of a handful of screws, eight brackets and a power saw, had converted a one of the tall cases he had built for our living room in LA, six months before I was born, to do just that.

It isn’t a very powerful or impressive piece of machinery, as power tools go, but it has been my go-to item for the last six years. When my dad came to visit me in Philly a couple Memorial Day Weekends ago and found himself recruited to build shelves for my kitchen (needing extra storage space has been a prominent theme in my life) he was so taken by this efficient little screwdriver (with pivoting head) that he asked for one for father’s day.

About a year ago, I misplaced the battery charger for my screwdriver. I’ve wanted to use it on multiple occasions recently, and was always thwarted by that fact that it just didn’t have anymore power. For the last two months the screwdriver has sat on the shelf, next to the place where I throw my bag when I come home, waiting for me to take some sort of action in order to make it function again. At one point this summer, I carefully went through my apartment, simply looking for the charger. I even did some internet research to find out if it was possible to order another one. I could see it clearly in my mind, but I wasn’t able to uncover it.

Until tonight.

Standing in front of the stereo in my living room, I glanced up at a brass dish that had belonged to my grandparents, sitting on top of a stack of cds. It collects change, chapstick, nail files, pens and other life-debris. Tonight, it also held the charger. I don’t really understand how it was possible for me to sift through every box, drawer, cabinet and bin in the apartment over the summer and not see it there. Was it there the whole time? I pride myself on being observant, paying attention and noticing details, and yet this stupid charger has been sitting in plain view in my living room for months, while I have been looking for it, and I never saw it. I am working hard not to read too much significance into this turn of events.

I’m just glad it has returned.

We got to Bob and Barbara’s last night during the lull between the end of happy hour and beginning of Friday night. I hadn’t been there since the night we celebrated my 26th birthday last May, as a friend had given her ex-boyfriend custody of Bob and Barbara’s (as well as Dirty Frank’s) when they broke up. But she had friends in town Friday night that she wanted to take there, as well as a new love to introduce to us, so she arranged with the ex for a one-night visitation.

I nursed a Yuengling and watched as the bar filled up with hipsters, students, long-time regulars and fans of Nate Wiley and the Crowd Pleasers. And I didn’t want to be there. Surrounded by friends and strangers, I was completely discontent and unhappy. Instead of trying to wave off this feeling of being in the wrong place, like a fly buzzing around my head, I went with it and left at the apex of the evening.

This was different for me, because in the past I’ve always hating leaving early, afraid that I was going to miss something, be missed, be forgotten or somehow lose out on an experience that everyone else will talk about for years to come. I’ve found though that when I follow my desire to leave, I rarely actually do miss out.

As I walked home, I was so happy to be out of the noise and smoke of the bar. Happy to be walking north along 15th street with my friend Lara, quietly catching up and making dinner plans for the following week. Happy to walk alone up Chestnut after seeing Lara into a cab, watching my long leather coat (best thrift store purchase ever) swirl around my ankles (it makes me feel like a rock star).

Happy to be listening to my instincts and feeling a little more like the adult I’m trying to become.

The City of Angels has been both very good and very bad to my sister this week. In the very good department was her show at the Clairmont Colleges. She has some friends down there, and they brought a nice sized crowd out to hear Raina. On the very bad side was her show in LA. She was scheduled to play Genghis Cohen. They told her she had to bring her own crowd, and so had done a bunch of promotion, rallied our family and friends in LA and generally gotten the word out. However, Genghis Cohen had gas leak on Wednesday night, closing down the restaurant and bar. Somehow I became the hub of communication between my cousins out in LA and my mom in Portland (Raina was no where to be found) trying to find out what was going on with the show. She got moved to Molly Malone’s on Fairfax, but the situation was far, far less than ideal. There was a rockabilly band playing really loudly in an adjacent room and there were six people in the bar to listen to her, the change in time and location scattering the crowd she had so carefully arranged. But she didn’t let it get to her and instead played the best set she possibly could. I haven’t heard anything from anyone who heard her (my cousins Wil and Deb did manage to make it), but I am confident that she put on an excellent show.

Next stop, Arizona!

Today is Friday, which means I share the first ten songs that my iPod spits out, just for kicks. The rules of this game include the instruction that you are not to skip a song, no matter how obscure, embarrassing or odd it may be. I have to confess that, today, I so disliked the entire first round of music that the pod dealt, that I “accidentally” reselected shuffle and obliterated the first set. I’ve confessed, I hope you all can forgive me.

1. So Far Away, Carole King (Tapestry)
2. Crazy Rhythm, Django Reinhardt (Django)
3. Ballad of Easy Rider, The Byrds (The Essential Byrds)
4. My Friend Joe, Mare Wakefield (Girlfriend)
5. We’re on the Move, Maceo Parker (Funk Overload)
6. Everyday is Like Sunday, The Pretenders (Boys on the Side Soundtrack)
7. Tear it Down, Old Crow Medicine Show (O.C.M.S.)
8. Hurricane Waters, Citizen Cope (The Clarence Greenwood Recordings)
9. Tollin’Bells, Willie Dixon (The Chess Box)
10. Farther Along, Sam Cooke (Sam Cooke with the Soul Stirrers)

and the bonus

11. Roll Over Beethoven, Chuck Berry (The Great 28)
When I was a kid, before the movie Beethoven came out, I wanted to have a dog someday named Beethoven, so that I could say, “Roll over Beethoven” to a dog. Then that (stupid) movie came out and dashed my dreams.

Favorite Song: Tear it Down by OCMS. I saw these guys at the World Cafe Free at Noon concert last spring. They were terrific. What can I say, I just love their country/bluegrass thing.

Favorite Album: Tapestry by Carole King. I got really into Carole King when I was about 12 years old. I would listen to these ancient tapes my parents had made of their albums in the mid 70’s. Then, for easter that year (strange, since she’s Jewish), my mom gave me Tapestry on CD. I still have it and love it.

Want more Random Fridays? Go check out Luna, Mark, Howard, Andrea, Ben and Mac.