Jessi Klein’s NotBlog

First of all (and as you’ll see later, last of all) I want to say, to anyone who cares (I know there’s at least one of you) forgive me for being absent for so long.  It’s so nice to see people read this and share their thoughts- even those of you who don’t like it (you know who you are Jojo) – and I know when there’s a blog I like I’m really into checking it every day and am disappointed when there’s nothing new, so – please forgive me.  More on that later.

Some quick news flashes:

I learned how to drive!  I got my license!  I have a license!  I am an adult!  I am cruising around in a rented cherry red Ford Focus with bird shit on the door.  I am so hot it hurts.  I’ve heard that the Ford Focus is a joke car, and for definite, it’s like driving a golf cart (made by Ford.)  But it’s so shitty that now I have pity for it.  The one I’m driving has a weird thing where when you turn on the radio or a CD, the volume changes depending on how fast you are going, ie:  when I speed up it gets louder.  Much louder.  As I slow down, it gets softer.  What the fuck?  This is incredibly annoying and yet incredibly charming.

Another update:  the other day I was getting coffee at the sketchy Starbucks near where I live and, long story short, I saw Ian Ziering, of Bev Hills 90210 fame.  I say long story short because I WANT to tell you all the details about who he was with,what he was wearing, blabla, but the thing is, if I tell you all those things, they will be mean.  And perhaps Ian Ziering is an alright guy, deep down, underneath his overly tight black T-shirt.  I mean he seemed alright.  He’s just so Ian Ziering, you know?

I have become deeply, painfully, vagina hurtingly obsessed with Oprah and cannot wait for the new season.  Actually, I’m considering just turning this into an Oprah not blog, because every day when I watch it’s amazingly great and stupid and wonderful and makes me think about all sorts of ridiculous things.  But this is a separate post.  More on Oprah later.

And now for, forgiveness:

I’m thinking a lot about forgiveness.  The Jewish New Year and Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, are coming up, and I went to a talk the other day where we discussed the nature of Yom Kippur and the possibility of preparing for it so as to make the most of this (to me) always weird, always sad, always interesting, sometimes compelling day.  I don’t really know how people come to forgive people who have caused them pain.  I know why they do it, but I don’t know how.  I visited some really hippie dippy sites today (all I did was google ‘forgiving”) and almost all of them presribed writing a letter to the person you want to forgive – the person you’re angry at –  but not sending it.  More than that:  they say you should write it and then burn it or bury it.  Here’s the thing.  I just know, in my heart of hearts, that if I tried to burn a letter I would end up setting fire to my house and dying.  I mean do you do it in the sink?  Even then, a piece of the paper could fly up, hit the ceiling, and cause your entire abode to immolate.  And then you’d be even angrier at the person who hurt you, because they drove you to look at this New Age shit and burn to death.  As for burying it, I don’t think I could live anywhere knowing that in my backyard is a letter I wrote to some guy.  That’s just weird.  I know how I am and I know I would unbury the letter everyday and read what I wrote, thinking about how I could improve it, etc.  What about burying it in a park, you say?  Burying it  next to a Rite Aid?  Still no good.  What if, by some freak shot of nature, the person I’d written the letter to found it?  Can you imagine?  That you’re with a friend and you innocently joke around about digging somewhere and then you see the corner of a piece of paper and you got to pull it out and it’s a letter TO YOU, telling you what a piece of shit you are, but someone forgives you?

Anyway…someone I was talking to said that part of forgiving others is forgiving yourself; forgiving yourself for being angry, forgiving yourself for being at the place in your life you were at when you got angry, forgiving yourself for not being smarter about getting hurt in the first place.  That sounds do-able to me.  For those of you wondering, yes, I am a little drunk as I write this, in the best possible way.  A little afternoon chard(onnay) while I pay bills and write.  But here’s a note I would like to end on, for today, because it’s key to what I learned from the hurt I’m referencing:

Be OK with getting hurt.  Be open to having your heart broken.  I truly believe it’s the most important thing in life.

Lastly, a quote from Dylan, whose new album is frigging wonderful.  Ironically, in light of what I just said, it’s sort of about protecting yourself from hurt.  But whatever.  You can’t get hurt all the time.

“[DESTINY] is a feeling you have that you know something about yourself nobody else does.  The picture you have in your own mind of what you’re about will come true.  It’s a kind of a thing you kind of have to keep your own self, because it’s a fragile feeling, and you put it out there, then someone will kill it.  It’s best to keep that all inside.”