Prison letters

So, as I've mentioned in past posts, I'm pretty close with my poppop (grandfather). I always have been. And, when I hit the age of about eight or nine, my dearest poppop decided in all his hardly elderly wisdom that I was no longer a child worthy of kootchy-kootchy belly tickles and colorful propeller hats. No sir, at that point, I was officially declared a young adult, fully mentally capable of maturely handling all of his teachings of profanities and psychological warfare techniques. By that, I mean he taught me almost all of the curse words I know, began taking me to serious operas and symphony concerts when I was about six, and comedically taught me all about my Jewish-Russian heritage. This is the man who taught me to never let anybody step on me, to kiss no asses, to put myself first, and to assert all of these mannerisms with the utmost amount of class.
He also taught me that chocolate is the most important food group and that there is no such thing as "too young to watch The Simpsons." Currently, I'm receiving vast amounts of knowledge pertaining to my ancestry on his side of our family.

YAY JEWISH-RUSSIAN GREAT-GREAT GRANDPARENTS

Anywho.

Recently, my poppop thought it best that I finally read all the letters that he sent my uncle Howie over a 2 year time span, when poor Howzy was sent to prison. My uncle was in prison at the turn of the millennium, which was right around when I was born! So recently, he scanned all the letters, and sent them to me via interwebs.

In total, I believe there are around 76 letters, which I promptly read all in one night. I will be sharing with you a few of my favorite passages from these letters, just so you can get a sense of what my family is truly like. (note; do go ahead and click on the screenshots in order to make them bigger, for your viewing pleasure. I realize they're kinda small as fuck.)

(note once more; I did, in fact, get my poppop's permission to share with you all these wonderful examples of family hilarity. Enjoy yourself.)

This particular passage was from a letter that my poppop sent just a few days after I was born. He hadn't even met me yet. Apparently, my great-great grandfather would not have approved of my new-age name. "Yetta" apparently would have been more adequate.

This legitimately made me laugh so hard I pulled a muscle.

Isn't it interesting to hear about yourself from another person's point of view?

Prostate exams. 

Describing my beloved grandma.

Once again, depicting a typical television-viewing session with le grandma.

Our family religious views. This man confirmed my atheism by the time I stopped shitting in my pants three times a day.

So there ya go; I hope you enjoyed these passages as much as I did. Honestly, reading these makes me really happy because my poppop is like me best friend/partner in crime and knowing I inherited his sense of humor does most certainly make me a happy little chicken. 

I'll be seeyin' ya.

What has band done to me?

GOD DAMN YOU, CONTEMPORARY CLASSICAL SYMPHONIES, YOU ARE RUINING ME. LOOK AT THE THINGS I AM LISTENING TO. I AM A FAILURE AS A METALHEAD.



LET ME EXPLAIN.
So I joined my school symphonic band around 3 months ago. I play the trumpet. I started playing trumpet in 5th grade, in my elementary school band. I continued playing trumpet in the school band until last year in which I took a break, but this year I took it up again, and let me tell you something; our symphonic band here is about 8000% more amazing than any other symphonic band I've been a part of. Like, for reals, we're like really tired, hungry, hormonal professionals.

Lately we've been working on this big ass piece called "Dusk," and it's like the noise angels make when they win the lottery. It looks easy, but you have to pay such close attention to how much force you put into each note and every single dynamic and when to stop and exactly how everyone else is doing it and there are parts when we have to hold whole notes for like THREE LONG ASS MEASURES and it's DIFFICULT but it's SO DAMN PRETTY OH MY GOD.

Yesterday in band practice we just did this song over and over for basically an hour and a half. I guess this forced it deep into my subconscious and fate then decided that I was destined to be a huge nerd and I become obsessed with that damn song.

I went home, and instead of doing my homework, I looked up Dusk on youtube and just kept playing it over and over again. I was dancing around the living room like a deranged chimpanzee, attempting to be graceful while conducting an invisible symphony band. My dad was there the whole time and he didn't say anything pertaining to "Stop that and go do your homework," as he usually does. Honestly I think he may have assumed that I was on hard drugs and that it was best to just leave me alone with my classical hoedown.

My mom gets home every day at 5 pm, and by this time yesterday I had been insulting the good name of dance for about two hours. My mom walked in the door and just kinda watched what was going on in her home, which consisted of her mature teenage daughter having what appeared to be a well-structured seizure and her husband sitting in the corner with his laptop and not doing anything about anything.

Then she promptly began conducting and dancing with me.

So instead of actually doing any sort of homework last night, my mom and I just spent the whole night on the interwebs looking up songs similar to Dusk so we could conduct more. Now I'm obsessed entirely with contemporary classical symphonies. They're fucking beautiful. I'm taking a break from being a metalhead in order to be Beethoven.

A neat little family history lesson

I got a pretty fucking cool thing in the mail today.

My super awesome Poppop sent me this photo in the mail. That's right, you can send pictures by mail. Like, physical mail. Email can go screw itself.

This picture, as you may have already noticed, is of my great grandparents and great-great grandparents. It was taken at some really fancy party in the 1940s. They all came over from Russia, and they were all extremely elegant. They came through Ellis Island and lived in the fabulous developing New York City.

They were also extremely Jewish.

My Poppop sent this to me because we have an extremely similar sense of humor, that being we're both intelligent and enjoy dry anti-jokes and South Park and stuff that a lot of people would hear and be like, "Wait, dafuq?"

Actual photo of my Poppop and my Gramma who pretty much raised me. Love those old peeps.

My Poppop is damn sure that our shared intelligent sense of humor can be blamed on our Jewish roots. That's why he sent me this picture. I've never really known much about my great-great-somethin-somethin grandparents besides that fact that they were Jews, they owned a clothing business, and they were chain smokers and mild alcoholics. I didn't know what they looked like, and I didn't even know their names. According to my Poppop, my great grandpa Henry Hirshon (on the far left) and my great-great grandpa Julius Levine (on the far right) were both pretty damn funny along with their Jewishness. Not only were they fancy and elegant and really Jewish, but they apparently are the source of our dry, intelligent funniness. Honestly, I wish I had met them. They all died of either lung cancer or the aftereffects of scarlet fever before the year 1970, so that could never have happened. I don't know if they'd like me anyway. I think they'd like my sense of humor that apparently is so similar to what theirs was, but if I were to reveal my actual ADD spazziness, I don't know if they'd be totally into me.

INCONGRUITY DETECTED

But yeah, so that's a bit of a little explanation as to why I am the way that I am. Probably. It's pretty cool to know that I have a big ol' clusterfuck of New Yorker, Russian, Jew, and classy-as-fuck-ness in my blood.