Mea Curmudg Culpa

On plans, on presence, and why this didn’t become the column I expected.

“We plan; God laughs,” goes an old Yiddish proverb.

This column, Christmas Eve, was going to be my first Annual Mudgies—awards for the people and events that tried my patience and occasionally warmed my heart the most in 2025.

That was the plan.

Ya.

Sorry, but I just don’t feel like being all curmudgie right now.

This past year has been tough. The last few months have been tough. And the week ending December 13? That one has hit especially hard. I’m writing this a week later, and things still feel so very heavy. So sad, with no clear meaning or point.

So I’m sharing here, in hopes it might get you thinking a bit, as well. And maybe to help you find a little meaning of your own in this sometimes dark and confusing time.

We don’t need to agree on politics to agree on this: the year was a grind. Recent events—the tragic shootings at Brown and in Sydney, and the senseless murders of Rob and Michele Reiner—feel like a grim exclamation point.

Maybe what’s making it so difficult for me right now is that I can see myself in each of these three tragedies.

I’m a father of a young woman in her senior year of college.

I’m Jewish.

And Rob Reiner? Of course, I’ve never met him, but I’ve come to see what a part of my life he is.

And I refuse to speak of him using the past tense—was—to honor the Jewish tradition: may their memory be a blessing.

It is not said as sentiment, but as instruction: remember how someone lived, the good they did, the lives they touched, and how they made us feel. All in the hope that their lives can serve as an inspiration for our own.

Rob Reiner will live on in our lives as Meathead. And in the movie, When Harry Met Sally. Or in any movie that has meaning to you. Or in his activism, very often centered around just making this world a little better for others. Like his work in 1998, when he leaned on the film industry to create California state funding for early childhood health and education.

That mattered. It still does. That’s just a small part of what the blessing of his life is.

But not everyone sees the blessing of Rob Reiner’s life. And that’s what sent me into the spiral that became this column.

What the president said about the deaths of Rob and Michele Reiner is flat-out obscene. And unnecessary. And sickening. And narcissistic. And I could go on, but I won’t. I’ll leave it right there.

If you are reading this and you are offended, I make no apology.

I’ve moved on. Because holding on does nothing other than play the game outside of my personal values. And also because it’s the holiday season, and even my Christmas Crabbies told me to take a breath.

So I did.

And I started thinking again about plans.

My other plan—this one with Curmudg—was to sit in my own corner of the internet and ask you to join me for a few minutes each week. My plan was to share a little wisdom, a little humor, maybe provide a little break from the media mishegas. And I planned to keep it a politics-free zone. Because not everything—big or little—needs a political bounce.

But when the bounce sticks its head into the big or little thing, and it becomes the story rather than the thing.

Genug. Enough. More than enough.

That’s when I realized something: the opposite of a plan isn’t chaos—it’s presence, living in the moment. Sitting with whatever it is that is happening both outside and inside of me. Sitting with the sadness and the confusion and even my own curmudgedness about the holiday season.

A tall task.

And then the universe sent me a song.

Ironic, but I’m the first one to get all mudgie about holiday songs. But not this one. It just found me. And it made itself a gift—one that I’m gladly passing along. I take from the song a sense of hope and the message that just maybe mankind can and will reveal its truest potential.

That’s not my plan.

That’s my prayer and my hope. Not for next year, but for the next minute. And the minute after that.

Peace, kindness, and love to all of you on this Christmas Eve. Hold this moment. Hold your loved ones. And hold onto the hope of a better world.

TL;DR: This was supposed to be the Mudgies. It isn’t. It’s a Christmas Eve column about a rough year, real grief, and choosing presence instead of reaction.