The Zeitgeist with Howard Barbanel

       

Some men have Sugar Baby fantasies but what normal guys want is something like Donna Reed from "It's A Wonderful Life," and maybe some home cooking, although that's optional.

WHAT MEN WANT

Most of my male friends are married. That, as you would expect is probably the normal state of affairs for a 52 year-old. Many of these long-time married guys have no end of ribald bacchanalian fantasies of what my now single life must be like (and what theirs might be like were they unattached). I get peppered with questions about all the supposed legions of young hotties I must be surrounded with, harem or Hefner-style and all the jet-set parties I surely am attending.

There is a delusional vision on the part of many married guys that there is an ocean of centerfold-worthy 25 year-olds just panting and waiting with baited breath for their imminent arrival; that by virtue of their incredible middle-aged manliness, professional accomplishments and Amex Platinum Cards that Aphrodite herself is waiting in the wings. Al Bundy’s improbable imaginings sprung to life.

In earnest fashion, I try and dispel these feverish dreams so as to make them realize that no matter how imperfect their marriages are (and all marriages are by definition imperfect) they’re probably a damn-sight better off sticking with the devil they know, rather than the devil they don’t because divorced life in middle age is not the heaven on earth they think it may be.

First the 25 year-olds: They’re not waiting around even for such reasonably well-preserved specimens as myself. Not the nice, normal, well-adjusted sweet ones anyway. No normal, decent twenty-somethings are interested in geezers on the other side of the big 5-0 (or even of the 4-5). They, naturally, want to meet a nice guy within 10 years of their own age, as they should. Going to parties, clubs or events and trying to hit on these young women is skeezy and unseemly, sort of like the verse from Jethro Tull, “eyeing little girls with bad intent.”

You can get that near-magazine exterior quality girl but it involves money, and a lot of it. For plunking down the Black, Plum or Platinum you can treat yourself to a chimera and a mirage for a short time but you best believe that none of these gold diggers are really into you for you – it’s just a short term lease with no pretense of love that most normal men will become bored and/or disgusted with quickly if they even go this route at all. These aren’t the women you’ll be bringing to the annual synagogue dinner.

One thing is absolutely true however – it is a man’s world in terms of dating at this age. There is a never-ending stream of dates, but rather than some nirvana, in my view it is tedious. I’ve only been at this for 14 months now but it feels like being trapped in the movie “Groundhog Day,” where every day repeats itself on an endless loop. It’s the same first and second dates over and over and over again.

Women north of the big 3-5 tend towards being jaded, burnt-out, filled with a measure of bitterness and ennui. The never-marrieds often have an attitude of “well, I’ve waited this long to get married and because of that that, I’m not compromising on my list of requirements in a potential spouse,” as though this were some kind of singles endurance contest. Things as trivial as the way one cuts his broccoli (or even if one likes broccoli) can rule you out of the running in a nanosecond. You would think that approaching one’s biological point of no return would push women in the opposite direction, i.e., “I’ve waited this long and maybe I shouldn’t have, so I’m going to be more flexible in pursuit of a potential mate,” but you would be wrong, they actually get more obstinate in holding on to their lists and sense of entitlements, paradoxically in opposition to their best interests. Some of these women really don’t want to get married but it’s socially unacceptable to say such a thing, so by erecting insurmountable walls and unachievable qualifications they give themselves an out.

Many of the divorcees, as I’ve written about earlier, have an immediate presumption of guilt, or original sin towards the men they meet – you’re guilty until proven innocent and you’ll have to work real hard to prove to them you’re not a dog. Their ex-husband was a pig and all of mankind will have porcine qualities until demonstrated otherwise.

At most dates I’m subjected to a CIA-worthy interrogation just short of waterboarding where every minute aspect of my life, goals, values, interests, dating history and financial status is scrutinized like ancient Roman priests examining the entrails of sacrificial goats and lambs for signs from the gods. There is precious little just hanging out and enjoying oneself for its own sake because for these women time is precious and time is money. Hence, my tedium.

Most older single women have no sense of what men want (and often they don’t care). So here it is – the big secret – what normal guys want is just someone to be nice to them. That’s it. They don’t care if you’re a rocket scientist or a waitress. They don’t care if you have money or not. Most nice guys marry the woman who was the nicest to them. A little nurturing and empathy thrown in also doesn’t hurt. Food also helps but its not mandatory. It’s really not much more complicated than that. But over-complicating things will turn men off and send them running.

I probably have a more jaundiced view of the dating scene than many men my age owing to the fact that unlike some guys who had a midlife crisis and ran off with the secretary, the stripper, the Twitter buddy or the neighbor, I didn’t want to be here and harbored no desires to chase skirt.

Some women ask me what I want. “Dinner,” I say. “Dinner??” Yeah, just the normal humdrum every day ritual of coming home and having dinner with the same person every evening and having a best friend, someone who actually cares how your day went and who has your back in challenging times. I can’t tell you how many single women have told me this year that that sounds utterly claustrophobic, how it impinges on their need for “space” and “independence.” So therein lies the rub, marriage (a good one anyway) isn’t a part time gig that’s all about you. It’s a full time engagement that requires giving of oneself and opening one’s heart to others. Until a lot of these ladies change and start seeing the world this way, they’ll remain on the never-ending dating carousel, conducting their interminable interrogations which impede intimacy and obstruct the attainment of happiness.

The Zeitgeist with Howard Barbanel

    

Father's Day and a Bowl of Cholent

GIVING DADS THEIR DUE AND FIGHTING ‘KUGELEXIA’

Father’s Day was this past Sunday. Around these parts Mother’s Day seems to be a bigger deal – mothers get taken out for brunch or dinner, flowers, jewelry and other gifts are procured and no end of sentimentality is gushed forth. In many households being a mother is a tough row to hoe and much praise for mothers is wholly justified.

Dads on the other hand tend not to want too big of a deal made about them. Many fathers take the quiet, stoic approach to their paternal duties and become self-effacing when confronted with the specter of any attention. Father’s Day is also when an annual ritual of tie and polo shirt purchases (which invariably are either retuned, gather dust or look ridiculous) get made along with no end of tzotchkes of no discernable utility and gallons of men’s cologne that will ultimately gather dust in medicine cabinets.

In our area, which is very expensive to live in, many fathers engage in backbreaking commutes combined with exceedingly long hours of toil beneath the fluorescents in the vertical filing cabinets we call office buildings. Dads endure no end of corporate politics, endless, mindless meetings and corporate travel. To say a 40-hour week is the exception and not the rule is an understatement. And after fathers eventually get home, thanks to the miracles of modern technology, they are expected often to keep the ball moving on whatever projects they left behind when they hopped on the 7:30 eastbound train. Between all this they make time for the kids and even an hour or two for their harried spouses.

There is a quiet heroism that comes from decades of self-sacrifice and often even self-abnegation that many fathers often are not recognized for. In this remote-control, mouse-click age, the commitment, responsibility and stick-to-itiveness demonstrated by dads every day when it would be far easier and perhaps much more fun to just run off and flake out is truly inspiring and worthy of all possible praise for a least one day a year.

Raising the next generation isn’t easy and it’s not for the faint of heart but without it we’d have no stable society and no posterity. So while it often takes two parents, we shouldn’t forget the fathers who often eschew attention. Sometimes the best way to express it is just the simple way, “Thanks Dad.”

Food as a Drug

Our neighborhood suffers from addictions and abuse but contrary to what you might expect, drugs and alcohol are probably not foremost among them. What afflicts vast segments of our population here in The Five Towns is overeating and over indulging.

In the Orthodox community this can been evidenced by the profusion of eateries, take-out, catering and grocery establishments. Go to Rockville Centre and there is a bar every other storefront that may serve food, here it is food places that probably only serve just more food and has no bar.

The heavy eating culture takes off in earnest on Thursday evenings at places specializing in Cholent – a Jewish type of stew-slash-chili that is slow cooked for many hours and comprising beef, beans, barley and potatoes. No clubbing for Five Towns men – they can be found in droves scarfing down enormous plates of Cholent, often topped with freshly carved Shwarma (a type of Souvlaki) beginning at 10:00 p.m. and running well past 1:00 a.m. at places like Delicious Dishes in Woodmere and Mauzone and Carlos & Gabby’s in Lawrence.

This gets followed by a Thanksgiving-sized dinner on Friday nights in “honor of the Sabbath.” On Saturday mornings many will start-off at a “Kiddush Club” at 10:30, followed by a Kiddush smorgasbord at 11:30 and then lunch at 12:30 or 1:00. A “third meal” around 8:00 p.m. is then followed by a post-Sabbath run for ice cream and/or pizza. All you have to do is lay out a table with food in front of Jews and they attack it as though it were their last meal. Want a crowd? Advertise food.

Two weeks ago I attended a “destination Bar Mitzvah” at a swank hotel in Westchester held over 30-plus hours from Friday afternoon thru Sunday morning. I lost count of the food somewhere after the eighth meal/buffet. Passover programs in Florida, Arizona and the Caribbean are deemed a failure unless food reaches wretched excess proportions. Ditto with celebrations like weddings and organizational dinners. If the Iranians really want to defeat Israel and the Jewish people, forget terror or nukes. All they really need to do is put out a free daily shmorg and we’ll be stupefied to a level of inertia and inaction.

The Orthodox community suffers from the opposite of anorexia – I’ll call it “Kugelexia,” as many haven’t met a free kugel they don’t like. Synagogues also only seem to know how to serve regular soda with high fructose corn syrup to wash all this food down. Seltzer? For wimps. The prodigious eating is to a point where we need synagogues and kosher restaurants to put in bars and offer free cocktails just to moderate the vast food intake. Exercise? Gym classes? After school sports? Please, this just gets in the way of more eating. I would wager that per-capita food consumption in The Five Towns is significantly above the national average.

There is such a thing as too much of a good thing. We need to see more folks jogging, bike-riding, packing the gyms and trimming down (although the vast number of doctors in our area might not be happy with all this newfound health, bad for business) and kids need a whole lot more fresh air, sunshine and running around. We’re killing ourselves with kindness and Kiddush. “Super-size Me” needs to be dialed back to “regular” and we need to psychologically examine what compulsive need all this food satisfies, what pacifier-effect all this food has.

Eating at this level won’t somehow make up for all the starving our ancestors endured in Eastern Europe or wherever, all it does is turn us into balloons and set a bad example for the next generation. I call on the Cholent purveyors to take the first step by offering chi-chi nouvelle-cuisine sized portions and charge exponentially more for trough-sized plates. We need to stop glorifying groaning tables and instead heap praise on the grunts emanating from those working out.

The Zeitgeist

           

Mexican Coke (left), U.S. bottled 6-pack and a fatty Hot Pastrami Sandwich.

Gourmet Imported Coke and When Pastrami was Pastrami

One of the things about working in publishing or the media are the long and sometimes odd hours, it’s not exactly a 9-5 job. Thanks to my Blackberry (being sarcastic here) it can sometimes seem like a 24/7 job. Journalists are known to be big consumers of caffeinated products. We have two coffee machines here in our office that get a lot of use. I’m not a coffee guy (never cared for the taste) and generally shy away from caffeine in general but sometimes you just need a jolt to get over the hump at some strange hour of the day or night.

My stimulant of choice on those rare occasions when I will indulge is classic Coca-Cola. But, I’m very particular on what kinds of Coke as would befit someone who spent 18 years in the wine business. For me, Coke is best in thick glass bottles. Somehow, plastic bottles or cans diminish Coke’s taste. Cans make it tinny and plastic makes it flatter to my palate. Obtaining Coke in thick glass bottles isn’t as easy as it was back in the day as glass costs more to make, more to fill, more to pack and most significantly in these times of high energy costs, more to ship.

In light of that you probably won’t be surprised to learn that Coke in thick glass carries a premium price just about anywhere. Here in The Five Towns, Key Food in Woodmere generally carries six packs of the little glass bottles, the kind that were so ubiquitous decades ago. These don’t come cheap and I tend to sip them sparingly like some rare vintage Burgundy or Bordeaux. Lately there is an alternate source of glassed-in Coke – at many area convenience stores (such as the 24-hour shop down the block from our offices on Broadway in Woodmere) one can now find 12-ounce tall bottles of Coke smuggled in (I mean “imported”) from Mexico. These bottles are the Holy Grail of Coke as the Mexicans use real cane sugar (the original, original recipe) instead of the hated high-fructose corn syrup which has helped turn America into a nation of obese burghers. These bottles absolutely look and taste the way Coke did in 1968. They also are priced like fine vintage wine at $2 a bottle. Compared with the cost of a latte at Starbucks, I suppose that’s something of a bargain however. I remember buying these bottles from vending machines for a quarter, but then I also remember candy bars for a nickel, (yes, they were that price in the mid to late 60s) Good Humor ice cream for a dime, pizza for 25 cents, the Atlantic Beach Bridge toll for 10 cents and the subway for 35 cents (late 70s).

My ultimate Coke experience is even harder to come by these days and that’s at a genuine soda fountain where they mix Coke syrup with seltzer and even better, will make you a real cherry Coke with Coke and cherry syrup. There just is something so intrinsically American about a juicy burger with lettuce, tomato and onion with a fountain Coke that foreigners will never fathom. These days in an effort to keep trim, I rarely consume any kinds of soda, let alone Coke. But when I’m having a Coke, I want a Coke, not some diet thing with chemicals that purports to be a Coke. Way back in the day I used to like Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray when it was also made with real sugar and only came in big glass bottles that could only, tantalizingly, be obtained at kosher delis and never at supermarkets. Today, the plasticized corn syrup version is a pale imitation of its original self (ditto with the cream soda) along with the quality of much kosher deli in general.

There was a time when men were men, women were women and pastrami, corned beef and brisket came piping hot out of steam trays and were so moist and tender from the steaming that it would melt in your mouth. The meat had fat in it (no one asked for lean pastrami – please!) and the rye bread had real onions, garlic and/or seeds permeated and infused throughout the bread, not just as some decorative ornaments on the exterior crust. Chopped liver was made with chicken fat and pickles, peppers and sauerkraut were so pungent you would wince from taking a bite. And the people who ate this stuff all the time (not just once and a while as we do these days) somehow managed to live well into their 80s (or so it seemed) and beyond without working out, aerobics, spinning classes or marathon running. (Granted, they didn’t look too good though…).

One reason for this diminution in the quality of much deli is because the old timers who but their body and soul into smoking and curing their own corned beef and pastrami were just as smart and talented and driven as their progeny who now are some of the nation’s top financiers, attorneys, real estate moguls and movie producers. But they never had the educational opportunities our generation did, do they did deli.

Homogenized standardization and mass-market production is the rule of the day, but still, once and a while with a “contraband” Mexican bottle of Coke imported from Monterrey one can kick back and feel that all is still right with the world, that we’re heading off to a barbeque or for deli in my late grandfather’s block-long white Cadillac Sedan DeVille, that $5 was a lot of money and that no one can reach me across six platforms of media at all hours because Blackberrys and i-Phones hadn’t been invented yet.