I had a daunting weekend, and it’s splattered all over my week so far. The weather has been more or less wonderful, of course, and I was able to spend a bit of time in the garden Saturday, but for some reason–maybe the planets are in an evil alignment– my relations at the moment are almost universally prickly. The ones that aren’t prickly are like trying to fit square pegs into round holes.

There are times when you’re in the flow, when all those seemingly disparate elements beautifully converge, and then there are times when nothing comes together, and all those perfectly merged elements scatter to the four winds again. Sometimes life is like looking through a kaleidoscope, isn’t it?

And sometimes you just find you’re in the dark. Usually when you bang into something head-first you didn’t see was right in front of you. So many disparate emotions, your thoughts crowding each other out. It’s all a lot of static. Nothing resonates.

It seems to augur change.

So I’m sitting in the movie theater with a friend, watching the thoroughly delightful Little Miss Sunshine, and at the end, when the little girl performs at the pageant—a wonderful scene, even if you saw it coming—I find myself bawling my eyes out. Hmm. Funny.

The movie was a “small, good thing,” to borrow Raymond Carver’s famous phrase. I liked the theme of impotently defying society’s rigid structures. And the peculiarly American take on that modern struggle between artifice and authenticity. I was impressed once again by Steve Carrell, whom I think is the next generation of a venerable comic tradition whose current best practitioner is Bill Murray.

This may have been a hybrid genre piece (dysfunctional family goes on a road trip), but it was a good one. As for whether genre pieces are worth seeing, there was an interesting article in the Sunday Globe by their film critic Ty Burr, about Snakes on a Plane, where the always astute critic asserted: “We go to movies–even honest schlock–not to see what we expect to see but to be surprised by what we hadn’t expected.”

But do we?

This assumption on the part of critics is really a presumption in disguise. It’s like saying that when we go out to eat we always want Chinese. We don’t. Sometimes we want Japanese, Italian, or Mexican. If we ordered a humonga-chonga, we will indeed be surprised if the waiter brings us mugu gai pan, but that’s not what we wanted. Novelty is sometimes not on the menu.

The critic might, out of ennui, choose to distill what is valuable in a picture to “surprise” or “originality,” but this contradicts everything we see in the actual history of art, where a genre is invented, replicated endlessly, mastered by degrees, finally perfected, and then parodied, mocked, and morphed in its decline, cannibalized and hybridized beyond recognition, until a new genre emerges.

The important thing to understand here is that “we” don’t necessary want to be “surprised”–movie critics, because they are bored, because they watch too many movies that seem to be too much alike, want to be “surprised.”

Why do people buy albums and listen to them over and over and over again until they know every lyric, every guitar lick, every little lilt in the lead singer’s voice? The Cult of the New is particularly modern. And has actually already been superseded. Postmodern architecture is not about out-and-out originality, but appropriation and recombination. The ascendant forms of entertainment, like video games, are not about originality or surprise, but about repetition and mastery.

But the point here is that there is no one reason to go to the movies. Sometimes we want the salve of ritual, the stations of the cross; sometimes we want surprise. For me narrative cohesion, pacing, good–that is to say authetic, appropriate–dialogue, and a dose of je ne sais quoi are the ingredients of greatness, regardless of genre.

As for prickly relations. I mean, aside from those that are just generally prickly, regardless. (And you know who you are!)…

I got a good dressing down from a relatively new FWP about my treatment of the Newbury Street shopper a couple weeks ago in my blog. To be fair, he admitted that if he had been people-watching on Newbury Street and she had passed by loaded up like a pack mule as she was, shaking her thang, he might’ve cracked wise, but he would not have gone home and written about it.

It is an interesting distinction. And there is definitely something to it. The diarist sometimes seems petty for recording for posterity off-the-cuff observations that come off seeming unseemly when the moment is past. This is the chief source of danger in keeping a diary, in fact, as anyone who has for any length of time and has the courage to read it over occasionally can tell you. Come to find, we are all petty.

What do we do when we see someone so utterly self-absorbed they don’t even realize they’re being stalked by bloggerazzi? We mock them at a safe distance. My new FB acknolwedged this. What is unseemly is admitting it after the fact. But there is a remedy even for this. Mock the blogger. Pierce made his point–”mock not lest ye be mocked”–by mocking me! Stalked by the online mockerazzi? Mock them back! We will all go down together! In a stinking plume of self-pity and scorn!

I think to many people I heard from on the issue it seemed “unfair,” but also a bit cowardly, particularly to photograph our mystery shopper, especially from behind. It’s like shooting someone in the back. I’ll own it. But come on, people. If you step outside your door these days you run the risk of being shot. It’s not everyone else’s responsibility to be watching your back for you.

Then at work yesterday one of my esteemed colleagues sort of pulls me aside, sweetly says she wants to ask me about something I recently wrote.

Now, I should preface this by saying, about a month ago another of my esteemed colleagues, an Italian gentleman, pulled me aside in the corridor (literally grabbing me by the collar) and growled: You MUSTa Write about a de WARRRRRAH! I was like, which one? I mean, Christ. Well, the Big One, of course. It’s Armageddon, you know.

But I didn’t write about that war, because no matter how judicious you try to be about it, you will get it from both sides, and, frankly, I don’t see where the big emergency is. This has been going on for millennia, and it will go on for many milennia more. It’s the freakin Hatfelds and McKahlils. What’s the rush to write something? And so what if it is the end of the world (which it isn’t)—then what?

But finally I did write something—not really about that war, but about the War on Terror, and not from the Jewish perspective, but from that of the humble Goy.

Oy.

After reading what I had written (which, for the record, made no mention of Israel, the Jews, Hamas, or Hezbollah), my colleague this morning (who is Jewish) totally JEWED-OUT on me.

To my Jewish friends out there (even ones who claim to be Reform Jews and to be all nonchalant about their Judaism): please calm the fuck down. Your homeland is under siege, I understand. It’s painful for you. I understand that, too. You don’t need to go around picking fights and casting aspersions for me to see it. We all see it.

By the way, my Jewdentials are impeccable. I’m not even talking about the part of me–eight and a half inches (give or take a few)–that’s German Jew. I won’t mention that one of the major romantic entanglements of my adult life was with an absolutely Jewlicious Hungarian Jew. (All I will say about it–TMI ALERT– is that in one of the great ironies of History and destiny, I was the circumcised one and he, like many assimilated East European Jews born post-WWII, got to keep his foreskin–where is the justice?)

Is the modern state of Israel problematic? Yes. Is the Arab world a mess? Mm-hmm. But Yahweh is a fighting God and Jews are fighters. Didn’t you see Yossi and Jagger? You want me to drop everything and rend my garments every time a missile is hurled at you? It sucks, but I only have so many garments to rend.