A Curious Instrument

My fathers of old were Jewish.  Of course, because those Jewish fathers ended up marrying women who were not Jews, I suppose that means that I am not a Jew in the traditional way.  I certainly have a Jewish heritage and I have been told it comes out to play occasionally.  One can feel all one wants about parents and grandparents as far as honor and gratitude, but that heritage will always be there, buried somewhere in the genes, ready to pop out at an often inconvenient time. As a Latter-Day Saint by choice , I have made covenants with God.  In my studies, the covenants are the same as the ones that Abraham, Issac, and Jacob made, so though any number of Jews would point out my loss of Jewishness some generations ago, I and my family continue to be children of Abraham (can't take away your genealogy) and continue to make covenants with God just like our fathers of old. That is why the offer of my Christian friends seems like a bi...

Well, I pulled a stunt with NHS Shetland and my job application and found out that I didn't even make the short-list for consideration.  Ah, well. So, now I have a perfectly good passport and no where to go with it!  Perhaps something will come up that will still need it. I guess my days as another modern-day George Bailey will continue for a while longer! Yes, I have about the same outlook at George Bailey, knowing I could do bigger things than this but trying (often unsuccessfully) to deal with other constraints that both keep me down and help to ground me in a more honorable life.  I just love the dichotomies of life!

I was just looking at other people's blogs and all the interesting comments that get attached to each post.  I suppose "interesting" is a bad word to use as I find many of them inane and just pointless. When I started this blog a few days ago, I decided against entertaining comments.  I have seen too many creative people eaten alive by trying to interface a bit too much with their readers.  I once read the blog of a writer that I enjoy (the writer, not the blog) and it seemed like he was having such a time in the give-and-take of corresponding that he didn't have time to actually write books anymore.  He was busy answering endless questions about what his favorite food was and describing his writing process over and over again.  All this chatter just seemed to be hero worship and buzzing static, which I could never personally manage to work with or even alongside. I long for the experience of writers from a hundred years ago.  You write a book.  It...

I got up this morning and I was depressed. I recently applied for a job in Shetland and I have jerked myself back and forth ever since about whether I should take the job or not.  Of course, I haven't heard back yet from the HR folks, but it is a bit early for that, along with being a bit early to be making all these interesting plans as if I have already been offered the job! So, the roller coaster ride begins.  I get happy and excited about a new challenge.  I get down because it might not happen.  I get happy and excited that it has every chance of happening!  I get down because it seems like the problem might be with the UK Border Office and I don't want to mess with that.  I get happy because stupider people than me do this everyday and they get through the Border Office gauntlet successfully.  I get down because my research tells me that my son Matt is too old and I see no way that they will let him in the country.  O...

[No one should let me do anything intended to be humourously informative.  I am atrociously bad at it.] My name is Jason Nemrow and this is not my place. Where I am standing right now is a place where I don't feel like I fit. Frankly, there are only a handful of places that I feel relatively good in and those good feelings happen because there aren't a lot of people around. I feel better in the wilderness. I feel better in open grasslands with nobody in sight. My mother calls it being "asocial", which is to say that some people don't seem to need other people as much as expected. Not that you aren't the most wonderful people in the universe, but I can live quite happily not enjoying the pleasure of your company. There is another word for this "out-of-place" asocial feeling, sort of. I don't want to offend autistic people, but this is one of the diagnostic criteria for the autism disorder. One of my sons was diagnosed with autism in 1...

After I got rid of offense from the vocabulary of children in a previous post (vaguely Orwellian, I know), I recall how I excised the word fair from the household some years ago.  I made the kids stand up at the dinner table if they used it (which is not effective for hyperish kids like our twins), typically in phrases like "That's not fair" .  The kids just used riaf  (yes, fair spelled backward) as a substitute for "not fair", but it put the point across that one should not be expecting equal treatment, no matter what society promises. Of course, this bothers lots of people, but my point is that you should not be expecting something that you are never going to get, as it just breeds a long stream of disappointments that tear the happiness from life.  Also, it may prevent the universal sin that many people have of being demanding , especially in matters that make other people's lives miserable.  The only thing worse than being...

Everyone always focuses on a person who is being offended , their tender feelings, and moving mountains in defending that tender heart. I think it is high time we spend a bit more time on those who offend , what makes them so offensive, and either helping them or, more often, ourselves to change. Now, I am certainly not advocating for some "anything goes" attitude about something as important as how people live.  There are such things as community standards and these need to be honored when we are out in public.  It is sad to see some glorified "do-good-er" from a far-away, culturally-denuded place come to an area and immediately begin working diligently (as only "community activists" can) to remove aspects of life that, here it comes, they find offensive . As an eleven-year-old, I attended a tiny country school in a village called Grady in the arid grasslands of eastern New Mexico.  I was not a hunter, nor were my parents or grandparents, bu...