Went In To Work

On a Sunday. Didn't want to, but my room was chaotic, and I NEEDED to put in six hours or so of real work uninterrupted by teaching classes. So I went.

Not easy. The Balabusta does not have a car. The fella could not drive, as a result of the the van having an iffy wheel he does not want to take on the freeway. And the Balabusta does not have a front door key to the school. That has to be taken from the flowerpot of a science teacher who lives about a mile and a half from the school. No problem with a car. Without a car...

I took BART to Fruitvale, and got a cab. When I arrived at Fruitvale, there were two cabs, both driven by sober-looking middle-aged Sikh men in turbans, and my heart rejoiced. Unfortunately, both these cabs were claimed before I got over there, and I got the one driven by a battered-looking Anglo dude of a certain age, whose cab smelled like cigarettes, and who was mightily hacked that I needed to go to two different addresses.

We made it. I worked in my room from nine to three, which was fine, except that the building is totally abandoned, and I cannot get the hall lights to turn on.

I walked to the science teacher's house, afterward, dropped the key off, and got the bus. And it was all basically okay. But I don't feel okay. I feel sad. I feel overwhelmed by all the junk in my life. The friends I don't call much anymore. The job that eats all my emotional energy. The STUPID new teachers induction program, which eats too much time--and requires I spend six Shabbosim a year attending stupid classes and eating sandwiches out of my backpack because the only veggie options they serve are just too awful to be considered. My masters thesis, which I'm making no progress on, less, now that all my notes are in a computer which has died, and I don't know how I'm ever going to get it fixed, since the van can't go on the freeway. Books late to the library, bills overdue. I feel as though I've been working too hard for years now, and I'm still always behind. A day late and a dollar short, for way too long.

And I've completely killed my nails. I only bite them when I'm under stress these days. I've had to stop biting, this weekend, because I am out of nail.

I know that tomorrow I will get up and go to work. I will make a bunch of photocopies, and send jobs to the copy center. I will practice my Fred Jones schtick where I pretend to be Queen Victoria (feh, murmurs the Irish-American, but I can't think of a better example of a nonresponsive face). I will teach my classes, and finally maybe call and find out why I didn't get credit for the full forty hours of the class I took in August. I will try, again, to set up a time to talk to the vice principal about my discipline issues. I will write a lesson plan for the sub on Yontiff, and choose between going by the district office to sign my contract or going in to Berkeley to return library books. I will set up a doctor's appointment, and pay a couple of bills, and maybe e-mail my thesis advisor to apologize for falling off the face of the earth again. Maybe I'll call the USF library and find out how much I owe them in late fees. Maybe I'll even call the woman who set up an independent study for me last semester that I completely flaked on, and apologize.

Maybe I will even call my therapist and tell her that I feel the depression creeping back, and set up an appointment. Maybe.

But right now I just feel cornered. Tired. Really sad. Out of steam. I don't feel ready to deal with Yom Kippur. I don't feel ready to deal with much.

The fella says I need another job, and strongly suggests going back to my first plan of teaching high school, and NOT ESL. Sounds good to me. Anything that doesn't involve fighting on a daily basis with kids whose learning disabilities are being masked by their bilingualism sounds GREAT right now.

I actually like the vilde chayas. Sometimes. Sort of.

Celery and Crock-Pot Fear

Why can't you buy a little bit of celery?

I always end up buying a whole thing of celery, and I never USE more than a couple of stalks in any given recipe. Say I make a pot of lentil soup and put in some celery, and then I make a chicken stew, and put in some celery. And the rest of the celery turns yellow, and gets thrown out. Then I buy another whole thing of celery. Can you freeze it? I can't imagine it would freeze well.

I guess I could pack celery sticks for lunch. But then you end up with celery strings in your teeth.

Also, while grocery shopping, I got a brisket. I plan to Crock-Pot it, with prunes and carrots. Then make soup (perhaps with some celery) from the leftovers.

What I need, is to get over my fear of leaving the Crock-Pot unattended during the day. I always assume it will set the house on fire. I realize this is not rational.

Odd teacher moment

I gotta tell ya. The vilde chayas are plenty interesting.

My advanced intermediate ESL class took a test on the first day of Rosh Hashanah, with their substitute teacher. When I came back, of course, I had to correct them.

One of the short-answer questions after a selection of the book in which they read about Diego Rivera's murals, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and Pablo Neruda's gate was this: If you were going to make a memorial, who would it be for? Why? And what would it look like? (These are out of the book, I do not make these suckers up.)

Some of the kids had beautiful answers, some were bad for various reasons. Then I was correcting the test of one of my fairly new-to-the-country Chinese students. Her answer read: I would make a memorial for Robert W. Napier because he was brave and fought in the war.

I look at it and think who? I have never heard of this person. Should I have? I resolve to Google him. I correct the test and move on.

Then I get another one. I would make a memorial for Mark Hambleton, because he was brave and he died in the war.

Who ARE these people? I'm now completely baffled. Both students are Chinese, fairly new in the country. Who are Napier and Hambleton, and how did they learn about them? Why do they care? When the first one came up, I wondered if he was possibly a U.S. officer who served in China during the war, and has been remembered, but TWO of them?

Suddenly, I get a suspicion. I get out their textbook, and turn to the page where the photograph of the Vietname Memorial is. Sure enough, Napier and Hambleton's names are carved on the section of wall closest to the camera, close enough to read.

I HOWLED. We gotta work harder on the idea of application questions, and the whole issue of answers that may not be in the book. But still...

Jews Go To The Beach

My San Francisco shul is four or five blocks from the Pacific Ocean, so we take advantage of this for tashlich each year. It's spectacular.

I still have sand in my shoes.

Happy Cleaning

I'm funk and panic mode right now--too much to do at work, Elul basically over, and feeling kind of inadequate on so many levels--so today I tried to do nice things that would help during the week.

I went to Kinkos and spent some money that will make work tomorrow easier--copying, etc. And I cleaned the bathroom.

It looks smashing. The bathroom is our only really coordinated space, anyway, and I tidied and shined and scrubbed and dusted and swiffered.

Right now, I'm trying to get the bathtub clean. The bathtub is where I fall down. I have all these sprays that are supposed to clean the tub without scrubbing, but they don't. Even with scrubbing. I have no idea how this is supposed to work, but it just doesn't.

Maybe when we go grocery shopping later, I will get Ajax and gloves, and go old-fashioned.

The Kabbalah Factor

Apparently, Madonna has gone and written a song about Isaac Luria. Well, all right. It's a free country.

The Balabusta was reminded of the time a couple of years ago, when a friend mentioned that she had a tenant who was doing a paper about women in world religions, and wanted to talk to someone about kabbalah. The Balabusta, being the only rabbinic school dropout this friend knew, got volunteered. Mind you, the Balabusta's knowledge of, and interest in, kabbalah, is pretty minimal. I know a little of the basic history, and have read some Chava Weissler. And I grew up on stories about some of the greats, and their Greatest Hits Miracles. I was also raised to keep a considerable distance between me and anything that even smelled a little kabbalistic, so there you are.

But I figured I'd see if I could give this girl a hand, and at least recommend Weissler. We made contact, by e-mail. It was an interesting encounter. This young woman seemed very nice, extremely sincere, and had a question.

The question was this: she had done enough reading to determine that you're supposed to be thirty, or forty, or seventy-four, or whatever it is, before taking up the Study of the Stuff. Also that you should be male. Her question: why were women not included in the study of kabbalah?

She had even gotten a tentative theory together. Her theory was that possibly, since she had also determined that studying kabbalah was dangerous, that in a matrilineal culture like Judaism, women were too valuable to be risked.

Ze'ev Chaifets says something in one of his books about a kabbalah class for some adult ed program, and describes it as being like teaching advanced physics to people who believe that a ball thrown in the air continues to rise. I had a similar reaction to this. How to respond?

I explained, gingerly, that women were generally underrepresented in Jewish scholarship, and that kabbalah is pretty arcane, also impractical as all get-out, so historically speaking, if you get a woman who's learning, it probably still won't be Kabbalah. It's funny. I'm usually the one with the examples showing that women were more learned than we think, but I found myself painstakingly trying to explain the gap that existed between men's and women's access to text in most Jewish communities, historically (and currently).

I didn't hear back. I hope she recovered. It's not easy to be told about patriarchy for the first time at twenty-two. Also, I think her grip on the structure of Jewish texts was kinda vague, so I'm not sure how much sense I was making.

Now Madonna-Esther, I hear, doesn't even sit behind the mechitza at her shul, because she's just too darn spiritually advanced. I don't much hold with a mechitza myself, but permit me to throw stuff as I consider THAT turn of events.

I wonder if I can download the song somewhere. I can't imagine buying a whole Madonna CD, but heck, to hear a pop song about Luria...

Anyway, I have a terrible confession to make. I read a book of inspirational Hasidic stories about pious women not too long ago, and there's an intriguing piece about some rebbe boasting of his daughter's kabbalistic coffee-tray arranging. You're supposed to pour the milk into the coffee, not the other way round. I've been carefully doing it like that ever since. Am I deranged, or what?

Media Creepies

On the way home from work today I picked up a copy of the San Jose Mercury News. They were running an article about how the police chief of New Orleans has resigned.

Among other things, the article discusses the apparent fact that crime in the Superdome and convention center was apparently overreported. This may well be so. We didn't have a lot to go on for a while, and the media got excited.

This bothered me however. Knight Ridder's reporters write:

But now, a month after the chaos subsided, police are re-examining the reports and finding that many of them have little or no basis in fact.

They have no official reports of rape, and no witnesses to sexual assault.

Can we consider why this might be? I remember one of those reports. It was told by a woman at the Superdome to a reporter. She said that two girls had been raped the night before, that they had called for help, and no one had done anything.

Now the NOPD have 'no official reports' and no witnesses. Does this mean that the reporter made the story up? Does it mean the lady who told the reporter the story lied about it? Hmmmm.

Let's consider the more likely scenario: the victims, rapists and witnesses are now scattered across several states, and have pressing survival needs. Getting in touch with the NOPD about a rape that happened a month ago is undoubtedly almost impossible, given the demands on NOPD's time. No one can 'come in' to give a statement, on account of they're in ARKANSAS. Or TEXAS. Or MISSISSIPPI. Or BATON ROUGE. Strangers were thrown together. Victims and witnesses can't find each other. They would probably not be able to give more than a superficial description of the suspects.

And face it. If I were a woman who'd been raped in the nightmare that was the Superdome, I think I would have received a real clear message about the ability of the NOPD to protect me. Things fell apart, and the center did not hold. Going back to be told that unless I have more information, they can't do anything (again), would not seem like my idea of therapeutic.

This seems pretty obvious to me. But along comes Erika Bolstad and Nicholas Spangler for Knight-Ridder in a tone that suggests that maybe REALLY no rapes or beatings happened at Superdome, and those who reported such to the press were just getting worked up. Hysterical. Self-dramatizing. Let's point fingers at Ray Nagin now!

Feh. Morons.

Author! Author!

The Balabusta, some years ago, used to work hard on getting published in magazines, as part of building her career as a Jewish feminist maven. She still writes a little nonfiction from time to time, but is concentrating right now on her career and her novel(s).

But occasionally, I check out my name on Google to see what's out there on the web under ME. Occasionally it's irksome--I found a response to an article I wrote some years ago that basically calls me a racist--occasionally it's funny or interesting. Here's my current bafflement:

Some over several years, I sold several articles to a Jewish online publication at two zuzim a piece or some such price. Since then, several of them have been reprinted. In some cases, I was contacted by the people who wanted to reprint, or the original publisher called "Hi, is this Balabusta? The Jewish Journal of Wyoming wants to reprint your article about buying earrings before Pesach, can they have it?" I always said yes, because like P.T. Barnum, I really just want my name spelled correctly.

But Beliefnet.com picked up one of my articles, and I got no call, I found it out on Google. I tried later to sell them another piece, pointing out that they had already published me, and got no reply at all.

Now the WZO has included me on not one but two of their sites, reprinting an article I wrote nearly ten years ago. I got no notification, no money...no nothin'. I don't really expect money, but I guess I sort of want to at least be told so I can add it to my resume. I realize it's the Internet, but, eh...I don't know. It's weird. My work gets picked up by organizations that I don't think would HIRE me to write for them.

On the other hand, the WZO used my article! I am TOO a real Zionist!

High Holiday Tickets

It's that time of year when everyone who doesn't belong to a shul gets nuts trying to get holiday tickets, and bitterness arises about exactly what 'no one will be turned away for lack of funds' means.

Years ago, the Balabusta was a very young meydl who had a rotten job working at a really nice synagogue. (The congregation was great. The congregation was also temporarily between synagogues, and had taken refuge in a German Lutheran Church. The church's pastor was great, but her congregation was elderly and German, and had issues about our presence. Serious, major, issues. Also, the rabbi was, er difficult. But I digress.)

Anyway, part of the Balabusta's job during the late summer was to take phone calls about High Holiday tickets. No one was to be turned away for lack of funds. But there were a couple of rules. They got tested.

The worst part was that the people who clearly couldn't afford to pay kept trying to pay. One woman asked if she could pay us the full cost in installments of twenty dollars a month. People offered to help out at the services to cover the cost of their tickets (that was actually welcome). People explained that they could pay ten dollars, twenty, a double chai. I hoped they weren't going to give up something else they needed for the holiday to give us that.

Then, we had the people who probably could pay, and didn't want to. They asked if they could have free tickets because they might join the synagogue, and if they joined, their friends would join. One woman tried to get an exchange ticket through her parents' synagogue back east. She was twenty-seven. We had the people who told me that if I didn't bring the cost down they would go to another synagogue, and then where would we be?

My all-time favorite call was from a man who was extremely irate because I wouldn't give him several free tickets for friends of his. He was particularly unhappy about this because a couple belonging to the synagogue had been given three tickets to the children's service. I explained, patiently, that this was because they had three children. He did not seem to find this good enough. I considered offering him three tickets to the children's service as well, but decided against it.

Somewhere in the middle of all of this, a Palestinian woman called to see if she could borrow a shofar for a production of Godspell. I am not kidding. We had a lovely conversation.

On How The School I Work For Is Lousy

Right now I am unable to get any support or interest about my computer situation because the entire administration is working hours and hours of overtime to balance the classload before the stroke of midnight on Tuesday (or eight AM on Wednesday), when the union will strike back if contractual obligations are not met.

I would be the last person to say this isn't needed. There's a woman across the hall from me who has over forty kids in a middle school math class. This is a recipe for student failure, and teacher collapse.

But my computer doesn't work! Hasn't worked for over a week!

On a positive note, I managed to figure out which of the four extra computers lying around in my classroom had the grading program on it, plugged a cranky but basically working printer into it, and managed to power the whole thing up. So there's that.

I have my health. Thought I was getting sick on Friday, but it turned out to be some kind of allergy attack.

Only one parent showed up to my ESL-parent meeting. Luckily, he was the dad of one of my best students, so it was easy to be nice to him.

I need to do laundry now.

Mitzvah watch

Reading Time Magazine I came across the story of Forrest King, a 'self described "dyed-in-the-wool" conservative' from Massachusetts who decided he and his family needed to take in a Katrina refugee family.

"The government failed," says King. "The citizens have to stand up and say 'Get out of the way. We'll take care of our own.'"

So he's been matched through some online service with the Meehan-Hoos, a lesbian couple with three kids.

"The adults are same-sex and I don't care," [King] says. "I don't care if they're purple and got horns coming out of their faces. They're Americans first."

Okay, it's a feel-good story, a little fluffy, and in the same article they point out that some families have had much worse luck taking in strangers (while many have done fine.) But heck, I needed it, the reminder that there are a lot of nice people out there, who watch (even) Fox News and come to the conclusion they need to do a huge mitzvah, rather than tuning out the world. People who may be a teeny bit freaked out about lesbians, but offer them a home because they're Americans and need one.

While I'm on the subject, let me also sing the praises of the blondish woman in the blue Capri pants in downtown San Francisco, who rushed over to a homeless woman who had fallen out of her wheelchair, and helped her get settled again. I was at the corner, weighing the possibilities of helping--safe? Needed? Should I ask one of the stores to call an ambulance? What about the smell of liquor pervading the scene? When this gal walked right up, righted the wheelchair, and helped this woman get back into it.

We have some good people running around out there.

Computers Down, Balabusta Shaky

The computer at my work went down Thursday. That means I can't send e-mail, or take attendence, or do any kind of work on the computer. Luckily I keep my grades on my home computer, and planned to do some lesson planning on that computer as well this weekend. However, as of this morning, that computer is down too.

I am typing this on the boyfriend's machine. I did a week of lesson plans on lined paper.

I simply feel overloaded. I was planning to post the grades this week to scare my do-nothing morning class, but now I'm going to instead spend time reconstructing my gradebook from paper notes--guess I'm back to entering it by hand into a notebook until I can get a mouse that works with the work computer that I can ask for the grading program to be loaded onto the computer that's different from the computer that's down. The printer I scavenged at work doesn't work at all, so I can't print out at work. Oh, and all the writing I've been working on is in the home computer that's down--I have backups of most of it, but the backups are on disks in the garage...somewhere. And I have nothing to transfer them to.

I wept. I simply broke down and sobbed like a little kid that none of it was fair. I still feel incredibly shaky. None of this is too awful by itself, but in terms of getting set up for my second year of teaching, which so far has been very messed up and complicated, it just seems that one thing after another is happening, and I can't deal with all of it--and it's assumed at work that I will function at a high level whether the computer works or not.

I think I need to be working at a different school next year. Perhaps the kind where they have computers with grading programs on them, and printers attached.

Also, I am presiding over a meeting of the ESL students' parents on Wednesday, and I have to share the floor with our principal, who is just a problem. And I'm already tired on Sunday afternoon. Ugh.

Shul Shopping Part II--Temple Beth Abraham

This morning the Balabusta finally got up, got dressed, and went to the next target on the shul shopping list, Temple Beth Abraham, Conservative shul of Oakland, CA. To get there, I took the BART to MacArthur, disembarked, considered the bus situation, and took a cab--this relates to some of the issues with this shul discussed below. But no major transit problems.

I seem to have incredible bat mitzvah luck these days--just as at Netivot Shalom, I arrived to discover that there was a bat mitzvah in progress. I realized this as I arrived, since standing on the steps was a girl of twelve or thirteen, in a party dress and holding a gift bag with ribbons on it--dead giveaway that there is a bat mitzvah on the grounds. Sure enough.

The bat mitzvah was a little shy, but did very nicely. She likes pink. I was able to determine this not only from the decorations at the oneg, but also from the fact that the satin cereal-bowl yarmulkes with her names and the date stamped on the lining being passed out by the family were pink. Not just pink. A bright, vivid hot pink so pink that it makes the white lining look royal blue in contrast when I wear my glasses. The Balabusta kept her hat on, but took one of the yarmulkes anyway--it was just too incredible. The bat mitzvah's father went so far as to mention from the bimah that he was fifty-four years old, and this was the first time anyone had ever succeeded in making him wear pink.

Here follows the report:

PROS of TBA

Their hospitality is fabulous. I sat down randomly at the oneg and was immediately drawn into conversation by a woman who not only filled me in on various synagogue events, and asked all about me, but when she heard I needed transportation advice to get back to El Cerrito, rushed into the crowd and returned with a congregant who also lived in El Cerrito and could give me a lift. This woman, in turn, introduced me to her friends, told me all about the rabbi, and engaged me in a discussion at her table about what a terrible bat mitzvah portion Ki Tetze is.

The shul is beautiful, with gorgeous old-fashioned brickwork, and beautiful cut-metal artwork illustrating the holidays over the windows. It looks Reform inside--I don't know what I mean by that, except sort of a combo of Edwardian detailing with dramatically modern 50's-ish touches. The doors of the ark are lovely.

I felt very appropriately dressed in dark slacks and a nice sweater. And although many women were bareheaded, and some in the amazingly pink yarmulkes, I was not the only hat in sight.

There seems to be a nice range of generations, and the small kids come up on the bimah at the end of the service to sing/shriek Ein Keloheinu, which I always appreciate.

The cantor has a beautiful voice, and great presence.

From conversation at the oneg I deduce that they have a great deal of congregant involvement in organizing events and leading the davening.

The rabbi looks rather like Matthew Broderick, and seems to be very good with kids, and warm toward the bat mitzvah and her family.

They have a really nice little gift shop. I notice these things. And they have those great old-fashioned seat backs with racks for your siddur and chumash.

CONS of TBA

Their location is not great for me. The lady who drove me home gave me her card, and offered to drive me any time she was planning to attend shul, but, say that she's NOT going some week, it's nearly an hour's schlep on transit, and once you're out, there's really nowhere to go--they're in a residential neighborhood right off the freeway.

This may have been a function of the bat mitzvah, but the atmosphere of the davening seemed a little cool. I like it noisy and multi-layered, this was more formal, and, like I said, a little more Reformish in style. People seemed quite quiet, and the singing didn't really get off the ground.

The rabbi seemed slightly at a loss as to what to say about Ki Tetze's less savory chunks (not that I really blame him, but).

I really hate it when the chairs are bolted down in the sanctuary.

CONCLUSIONS:

I really liked the people I met, but kind of wished I'd seen more people around my age. The davening atmosphere does not seem entirely perfect to me--but what's perfect? The location is a point against the place.

I'm not entirely sure that judging a shul first by its Shabbos morning services is the best idea, but that's my most common shul activity.

I shall check out some more places. I still need to check out Kehillah.

I've heard good things about Beth Jacob and Beth Israel. Both are Orthodox, and I'm not sure if that could possibly work out for me in terms of membership, but I figure I might as well visit and see what I think. Even if I don't end up a member at every shul I visit, I figure I'll find out about classes, things that are happening, etc.

I wish there was a Sephardi synagogue in the East Bay--I like services at Magen David in San Francisco--but there doesn't seem to be any.

I'm going to take a nap now.

Hunters and Gatherers

We're talking over on DovBear's site--sorry, my hyperlink ability is still shaky--about Dennis Prager's dubious view of women. On a related note, the Balabusta and the boyfriend went out into the night to get pizza, since the Balabusta managed a beautiful chicken stew in apricot sauce last night, but has a headache tonight and cannot think about cooking.

We stopped on the way at Barnes and Noble, and the Balabusta wandered for a while. As we headed out, the boyfriend promised that soon we would return, and I would be allowed to run barefoot through the books "picking them up, and looking through them, and putting them down for no apparent reason".

"Don't you ever browse?" asked I.

"I usually go in knowing what I want," he said. "It's a hunter thing."

I have this theory, which I've shared with him, about the real core differences between men and women being based in a hunter-gatherer split. I do not know enough about early human development to have any idea if this is even possibly scientific, just that it seems to explain certain patterns in shopping to me.

The theory was born out of a phone call with the Balabusta's mother a couple of years ago. Apparently the Balabusta's father had mentioned he needed a new belt, and there was a sale on at Mervyns'. The Bluejeanses Sr. went to Mervyns', where my dad riffled through a couple of belts, and selected one. "Where do you want to have lunch?" he asked.

"Don't you want to look at the other belts?" my mother demanded. He didn't. He wanted a reversible black/brown belt to wear to work. He'd found one. It was time to eat.

The theory I produced is this: men shop like hunters. You want an antelope. You look for an antelope. You kill the antelope. If you dither around looking for a better antelope, you may not get an antelope at all.

Women shop like gatherers. You can only carry so much back to the cave, so you choose carefully. You look around to see if something new has grown, or if the stuff you liked last time has new fruits or sprouts. And you look CAREFULLY at each thing you select, because if you don't look CAREFULLY, you could poison the whole tribe.

It's a flawed theory, but it helps put in perpective the boyfriend's tendency to regard a pleasant trip to the grocery store as something akin to Iwo Jima. He runs up and down the aisles, throwing stuff into the cart and occasionally developing strategic zig-zags if it looks as though we might be slowed down. A pause to examine produce makes him nervous.

And bookstores are for BROWSING. If I knew what I wanted, I would order a used one online!

More About Edmund

Just recalled a story I wanted to mention--last week, in class, Edmund, my book-losing student, pulls out a Q-tip and begins to clean his ears. In class. I raise my eyebrows, but decide the battle is not to be fought right then. I go on teaching.

A few minutes later, Edmund raises his hand, and asks if he can get up to throw the Q-tip away. This is too much, and I shake my head. "Put it in your pocket," I tell him quietly. He looks at me in HORROR. "But it's dirty!" he protests.

I am surrounded by vilde chayas. With very clean ears.

I Knew There Was A Reason I Didn't Like Orange

>



And I suppose that this is it.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/4238442.stm

It's the third straight night of rioting in Belfast, as the loyalists swerve out of control. It barely made the U.S. papers (for some obvious reasons, we are a little preoccupied at the moment), but frankly, the British press clearly doesn't care too much either.

Welcome to the fabulous world of the Irish peace process. 'Loyalist' nutjobs have attacked a police station with gasoline bombs and vehicles, and have been fighting both Belfast police and the British army in the streets. (Does it make sense to call them loyalists when they're trying to kill British troops?) Cars have been torched, property destroyed, and about fifty police officers injured at last count. Police came under live fire, in addition to attacks with blast bombs, fireworks, and Orangemen with 'ceremonial sabres and pikes'.

The cause of all this nightmare is that the Orangemen were prevented from taking the parade route they prefer, the one that runs threateningly right up to the edge of Catholic neighborhoods. When they were ordered away, through a factory grounds, all hell broke loose.

Shouldn't surprise anyone. These are the same folks who lost it in Ardoyne a few years ago when Catholic elementary-school kids had to walk past a Protestant neighborhood to get to school. There was an element in town that objected. The kids had to go to school with armed police escorting them. A blast bomb was tossed at cops escorting small children to school. It was a matter of principle.

Now, here we go again. New Orleans is under water, all the war zones are still war zones, and look who thinks they're oppressed--the guys whose parade route was altered so they couldn't menace the neighbors.

I have roots in that corner of the world, and while most of the time I limit my involvement to ceremonially cursing the IRA on St. Patrick's Day, occasionally the ugliness and the stupidity that Belfast can erupt into a moment's notice gets through to me. I'm more or less used to the idea of the large number of people in the world who hate me for being a Jew. Now and then I get to recall the folks who hate Irish Catholics--which I am by ethnicity though not faith--as well. Some people will tell you these are regular working-class people who feel threatened by perceived concessions to the 'other side'. That's also what they'll tell you about the KKK.

I knew there was a reason I didn't like orange as a political color. Just remembered what it was.

Textbook Definition

"All right class, open your books to p. 8."

"Ms. Balabusta! Ms. Balabusta! I don't have it."

"Why don't you have your book, Edmund?"

"I left it in your class Friday, and then I came back, and you were gone, and now I don't know where it is."

"Edmund, this is the second day we've had the textbooks, and you're telling me you lost yours already?"

"I didn't lose it! I left it here, and then I came back, and you were gone and..."

"You don't know where it is. Edmund, I hate to tell you this, but leaving your book somewhere and not knowing where it is is the textbook definition of having lost it."

"I didn't lose it! I left it here."

"Where is it now?"

"I don't know!"

This kid has never in his life copped to being unprepared for class. We have this conversation a lot.

"Ms. Balabusta, can I have a pencil?"

"This is the second day you've come unprepared to class, Edmund."

"I didn't come unprepared!"

"Yes, actually you did. You don't have a pencil."

"Nooooooo. I'm not unprepared, I just don't have anything to write with!"

Brought Kid X, my child-I-suspect-is-ADHD a stress ball. He immediately broke it. I could only find the kind that have squishy plastic stuff inside. No match for Kid X. We'll try again.

Brought the janitor some windchimes--my best interaction of the day. I owed him for bringing my fish up from the first floor.

The Watchtower

Last weekend we had a knock on the door, and when I opened the little grille we have instead of a peephole, there was a pleasant-looking middle-aged couple who wanted to share a Bible reading with me. I explained I wasn't available, and they left.

This, I can see, is going to be a disadvantage of the 'burbs. I'm on ground level here, and there may be more roving missionaries out there. The only roving missionaries I ever encountered at my door in San Francisco were the nice young people who showed up from time to time to ask if there were any baptized Catholics in the house. That was fine. It was like the Mitzvah Mobile, except I wasn't a target. I said "No, there aren't," and they said "Okay, thanks," and left. I went upstairs, the first time, and checked to see if the boyfriend might secretly be a baptized Catholic, but he said he wasn't.

Downtown, of course, we had Mormons, and Jews for Jesus, and several less well-defined groups, plus the guy who's been standing at the Powell Street BART station since I was in grade school, advocating chastity, and the Fallen, Fallen is Babylon the Great Sandwich Sign Guy. The Fallen, Fallen is Babylon the Great Sandwich Sign Guy is notable for at one time having taken on a helper, who also wore a sandwich sign with the same quote from Revelations. We also have Frank Chu, known only as the Sign Guy, whose message may or may not have some religious content. But I digress.

Anyway, on Friday morning I was waiting for the bus in Alameda, drinking my coffee from Tillie's, and a lady came by and offered me a copy of the Watchtower. I took it. On closer inspection it turned out to be in Tagalog. She came back a couple of minutes later, having apparently realized I probably didn't read Tagalog, and exchanged it for something in English.

I never know exactly how to deal with these sorts of things. The Mormons I am aggressive with because they want to TALK to you, and also I can't deal with nineteen year old boys wearing nametags that identify them as Elder Soandso. And I am bluntly hostile with the Jews for Jesus--the boyfriend was once startled when I suggested, only mostly joking, that he should ram the vehicle a group of them had just parked. But the Jehovah's Witness folks are usually nice, middle-aged ladies who don't get in your face, go away if asked, and just give you literature. I generally end up taking a copy of the Watchtower and smiling. Then I feel as though I should have given some sort of speech, and didn't, and feeling rather inadequate. But it was seven-fifteen in the morning, and I really just wanted more coffee.

Shouldn't Have Paid My Bills This Morning

I kept having to write the date.

Got it!

Okay, it's weird, I apparently have to type in posts to Edit HTML, rather than compose, but who cares? I can actually see blogger blogs in paragraph blocks, rather than one word at a time running down the side of the screen. Life is good for the Mac OS 9 user.

The boyfriend hates the Mac. I don't know why. Rosie (the computer is Rosie Robotnik, she's a red IMac) has never done anything to him. I will admit though that I have had this computer--a Christmas present about six years ago--for about six years, and although she runs fine, it's getting harder to find software and updates that work. Anyway, the boyfriend is a manic PC user, one of these people who thinks a single-button mouse is a personal affront. At least he's not as insane as some of the nuts I've met online, who seem to feel that using a Mac is an offense that entitles them to abuse you in language I normally reserve for the president of the United States. It's pretty extreme out there. And until recently I was an AOL user as well. Double whammy.

Anyway, we're up and running, and I think I can actually do pictures and hyperlink again.

Trying Again

Let's see if this works. The Balabusta is trying to use Mozilla, and while it has fixed some of her problems with Blogger, it's been sort of weird...

Aaaaargh.

 

Whack-A-Mole

Hit one problem, see another pop up...

Work is wild right now, with teachers frantically demanding information, and the administration sinking under the load.

I went by the counselor's office to see if I could nag her about something. I couldn't. Her plug-in Glade air freshener had shorted out the wiring in her office, and she'd had to close down her computer.

It was that kind of day.

Wanting to Be Perfect

As I may or may not have mentioned before, I adopted the nom de blog 'Balabusta in Blue Jeans', because 'balabusta' is one of many Hebrew and Yiddish words referring to women who have got it going on, at home and away, which I find endlessly tempting and fascinating. Being a balabusta is a goal on my part, one I slowly work toward with a copy of Flylady's book in one hand, and a To Do list in the other, and a Swiffer clenched between my toes.

One of my most basic self-assigned problems in life is this:

I am inherently disorganized. I forget to check my messages and am then afraid to call people back because it's too late. I pu things down in big piles on the furniture, rather than putting them away where they belong. Cleaning takes forever. I start big projects I don't have time for. I am afraid of looking bad. I work incessently on lesson plans, trying to make them perfect, and they're not, and then I've spend two hours on one lesson plan, rather than planning the whole week and being done with it already. Nothing is ever done, because I'm still making long lists of what I'll do to it next.

Things die in my fridge. I've half to seven-eighths written three novels. And I let all of this get to me at times.

Some people seem to be able to take this kind of thing and make it work for them, because it tells them they are free, and spontaneous and creative. It makes me insane. I have a fantasy, you see...

She's a bit like the RenReb's Dinner Rebbetzin, I think. The fantasy version of me gets up in the morning, showers, and her hair falls into place. Great, inherently appropriate clothes fly off the rack, and on to her body, while I am trying to decide if my bra straps will show through that shirt, and realizing that the wrinkles didn't fall out of my skirt after all.

She davens Shacharit and Maariv and never gets confused and thrown off by the directions for assorted yontiffs. She drives. (Trying to get there.) She's active (superactive) in her synagogue, Hadassah, the Irish Cultural center, the SCA, the local young writer's community, Planned Parenthood, the teacher's union, and the Democratic Party. Occasionally she organizes a fundraiser for Magen David Adom. She can make a martini. (I won't even drink a martini, so I don't know what use this is supposed to be.)

She deals effectively with her principal, who worships the ground she walks on. She hosts fun evenings for the other teachers. She is always there for her students, and they love her. When she is firm and clear about her classroom expectations, it sticks. She never accidentally writes the wrong grade on a paper in red ink and then has to cross it out. If she did such a thing, she wouldn't worry about the kid showing it to other teachers and them thinking her a dingbat.

She cooks from scratch and freezes. Nothing goes bad in her fridge. She's published a novel already, and has a contract for another. She manages money sensibly, and is not afraid of landlords. She weighs about forty pounds less than I do, and her trichotillomania is totally under control. Also, she does not bite her nails. Also, she moisturizes every morning and always wears sunblock. All her friends turn to her for support, and she is able to fix their problems, find them people to marry, and organize the wedding in her sleep. Everyone needs her for everything, and she is able to take care of all of them. She never makes mistakes.

Also, she buys Christmas presents in October, forgets no one's birthday, and throws at least four big, charming parties every year. And she leads her own Seder and hosts Thanksgiving. She has never paid a bill late in her life, and her credit rating is great. Her house is immaculate. And beautifully, although inexpensively, decorated.

She still has time to sit on her deck and watch the sunset, and spend quality time with her boyfriend.

Deep breath. That's the horrible truth. Unfortunately, this woman is not me. She does not exist. Her only actual job, which is probably why she's able to do it so very well, is to sit in my head and criticize everything I do.

Yes, I've got a therapist. She has allowed me to get to the point where I realize this is sort of silly, and have made changes in my life that make me very happy. The superego twit still hangs out with me and interferes.

Her plate has actually gotten more focused and less full. There was a time when she was also supposed to belong to a million and a half save-the-world type lefty organizations, and work for zilch pay at a heroic women's nonprofit, and write a major third-wave feminist book. Then the Balabusta turned twenty-eight, and her tolerance for the anti-Semitism of the American Left bottomed out, so the superego twit is now at least allowed to hold down a middle-class job. This is big progress.

I'm sitting here giggling, but this woman really takes up too much of time. And it's tricky to sort out, because she may be fictional, oboxious, and impossible, but she really does represent all of the things I want to do. One thing at a time, I guess, and some careful picking and choosing.

Anyone else out there got one of these people?

New House Puzzles

I've been back to work for a week, and in that time, the alarm clock situation has become dire.

The bedroom of the new house is small, although big enough--we tend to live in the living room and computer room, so the bedroom is basically used for sleeping, storing clothes, and occasionally I will read in there, sitting on the bed, if the fella is watching something on TV I'm not interested in.

However, it has two electrical outlets. One is across from the foot of the bed. The other is now behind the head of the bed.

I can't plug anything into the one behind the bed, because the bed rests against it, and will work plugs loose. So I can't put my alarm clock on my bedside bookshelf, which is what I normally would do.

Instead, the clock is opposite the foot of the bed, on a stool. That would be okay, except that a. I have to physically leave bed to turn it off, sometimes requiring stumbling and confusion, and b. I am shortsighted enough that I can't see the glowing red time without my glasses.

And the Balabusta is paranoid about missing her five-thirty wake-up call and being late to work if her horrible commute is thrown off, so especially in the fall, she is prone to wake up for the first time around four and wake up to check the clock at periodic intervals after that. The boyfriend remarked recently that he has been awakened in the night by odd clicking noises, which he was able to identify after some confusion as the Balabusta picking up her glasses from the nightstand, putting them on to check the time, and then putting them back down.

There must be a better way of doing this.

Also, the Balabusta does not really have so many clothes as all that, but the clothes rod in the closet is sagging in the middle.

On the bright side, I did a TON of laundry today, and have socks and tights and undies that will last for quite some time. I also found a sweater I was missing, and opened a box that proved to have some work clothes in it including my favorite black work slacks, (Chicos, comfortable, cut big enough, and sort of textured fabric, go with everything) and some long-sleeved T-shirts, as well as a couple of wedding-type outfits (less necessary, but hey, someone could get married.)

I also washed some things of the fella's, including his overalls. The overalls proved to have a handful of big nails in the pocket. The washing machine suffered no damage that I can tell.

Watching the World On TV

Growing up in an earthquake zone, you get used to the idea that the natural world can kill you easily, and that some day the Big One will come, maybe today, or maybe twelve years from now.

But I'm still glued to the TV and newspaper coverage of Katrina, overwhelmed with the disaster that's come down on the Gulf Coast.

Various persons out there have attributed Katrina's fury to (I'm keeping a list, in no particular order), the Gaza pullout, homosexuality, the Iraq war, and general malfeasance of the United States.

Yesterday I was taking the 1 California bus toward downtown, and passed the Chinese Baptist church up in the Fillmore. Tagged on the side:

Bush Sent Troops to Iraq.

Katrina.

I am reminded of a scene in Vikram Seth's excellent and endless novel _A Suitable Boy_, where a young God-seeking man attends a huge Hindu festival where a panic breaks out in the crowd. Hundreds of people die, trampled to death. Dipankar, the character, turns to the man he hopes will become his guru and asks why it happened, expecting a deep spiritual answer. The old man tells him that the emergency planning for the festival was not good.

In this case, of course, there's a clear natural cause for what happened, combined with lousy levee funding and emergency planning. I am not a theologian, in fact I think theology is pretty silly by its very nature. But I will go on record as saying that I don't have a particularly satisfying reason for why the world was so organized that people and their lives can be destroyed like this, but I absolutely reject the idea that any of us can find out God's motivations by exmaining our own political beliefs.

On Friday, the kid who always comes by from the library and delivers the Oakland Tribune to my classroom came by. I took the paper. A home nurse was screaming to passerby to bring her patient oxygen. This was just a badly paid, maybe emotionally satisfying job until Katrina hit--and now this woman is in a ruined city, trying to protect her patient. I nearly burst out crying in class.

Meanwhile, I'm cheerfully encouraging my students to go frost cupcakes for hurricane relief. (A local store wanted some volunteers.) It's at times like this that I really wish I worked in a Jewish school, or at least with kids who spoke fluent English. Sometimes I want to tell the kids things I can't communicate to them, about living in the world, and the responsibility we have.

I need to go write a check or something.

Fringy Madness

Week before last, I went to Shabbos morning services at Netivot Shalom in Berkeley, and wrote a long rambly memo on it to myself, which got some happy conversation going. I noted that in the shul's literature it states that everyone is to cover their head, and adult Jews are to wear a tallis, but that both of these are optional for women over the age of twenty. I was confused, never having heard that twenty was the age at which women traditionally could decide whether to wear a tallis or not.

Anonymous from Netivot Shalom wrote:

"As for the women over 20 thing...the whole asking grown women to cover their heads was a huge shul issue a few years ago, with many older women saying that they hadn't grown up with it and DID not feel comfortable with it. The age 20 thing was supposed to be a generational compromise (to reflect that people who had grown up in the shul WOULD be comforable with it), and the age limit was supposed to increase a year every year...but I'm not sure that it has in practice. We've all been a bit distracted with the move to the new building.... "

Anonymous from Netivot Shalom 2 (married to the first Anonymous) wrote:

"For the age 20 thing, after the rabbi decided to require women to wear head coverings and tallesim, it was decided that they couldn't enforce this on older women who spent their whole lives without doing this. The compromise is that they took the age from the first year when the bat mitzvah girls were required to wear them and they've been increasing the cutoff age annually. In reality, most regularly attending women wear a head covering and a tallis except the rabbi's wife who I guess didn't agree with his decision."

The Balabusta, when she attends shul, (or when she davens at home), wears a tallis (the same tallis she got as a bat mitzvah gift from her parents). Having learned that yarmulkes are getting more, not less, aggravating for her as she gets older and wears her hair fluffier, she has abandoned them for a variety of hats, mostly black and floppy.

I grew up in a synagogue where a tallis on anyone was an oddity. I wore mine for my bat mitzvah, but it was never intended I should wear it to services at Emanu-El after that. I sometimes wore it to pray at home. It wasn't until I began to attend Conservative services as an adult that I began to wear it regularly to daven in public.

The Jewropean said...

"As an Orthodox reader, I am surprised the rabbi would actually force women to do this. Here, women are proud they aren't required to wear tallis and tefilin because their bodies are holier than men's. (If anyone wants a detailed explanation, I can post one).

I have never seen an Orthodox woman wear a tallis though, though different kinds of headcoverings are not uncommon. Many unmarried women choose to wear a had or a cap in shul, same for married women who don't wear a wig, and some even wear a hat in addition to a wig."

Alan Scott responded:

"As a different Ortho individual than Jewro, I'd just like to highlight that even according to us, halachically there is no actual prohibition on women choosing to take on the mitsva of tefilin, or tallit, or lulav, or musaf, etc.
And that "women are holier than men" thing *really* irks me. It's fluffy reverse sexism meant to mask real sexist attitudes some have against women. Next they're gonna tell us that Kohanim are less holy than Israelites, because of *their* extra mitsvot. There are much more reasonable, equitable understandings of obligational dimorphism out there."

And the Jewropean responded to THAT...

"alan scott,
I'd never say they're forbidden. Actually my choice of words "aren't required" was explicitely chosen in order not to exclure it as a volontary act.
And while the statement that women are more holy might annoy you, it is definitely implied by Chazal. It also is an explanation why women have less BINDING mitzvos.
I strongly reject any abuse though and especially using that statement as an excuse to prevent them from taking on voluntary mitzvos."

The idea that women's exemption from certain mitzvot is based on a superior feminine holiness definately annoys me, simply because it seems obvious that, gracious as it is, it's just not true. Not that women aren't holier--the Balabusta sees some evidence there ;)--but that historically speaking, it's not the reason for exemption.

But I am a third-wave Jewish feminist rabbinic school dropout with hat hair. I have a complicated relationship to exemption and tzitzit.

On the simplest level, I attend synagogues where the custom of the community is that women wear tallisim and yarmulkes-or-some-equivalent. Truly, I don't give it an enormous amount of thought. It's what people do, me too. I assume my daughters, if I should have some, will, although they could become old-school Reform or hard-core Chassidic for all I know. It's ordinary, in my neck of the woods, to compliment a Sisterhood macherette on a pretty tallis she picked up on a trip to Israel.

Now, back when I was applying to rabbinic schools, I had a very tense conversation about tefillin with JTS. They informed me that whether or not I was required to lay tefillin (which I don't, never have, although I sometimes think about it for several minutes at a time), would depend on the decision of their board. This made me intensely cranky. If they were going to obligate me, I wanted a decision made with some halachic solemnity, not a year-by-year whim of the board's. Didn't go to JTS, so it was never an issue. It was only later that I started to understand the compromise position the Conservative movement was taking around women and time-bound mitzvot--essentially that if you want to be a woman who gets such male privileges as smicha, you take on male obligations.

Now that is where the third-wave Jewish feminist with hat hair starts to pick at the threads of tradition and get cranky again. Because it makes sense, from one standpoint, and none at all from another. If we are going to admit that 1. Women have been exempted from time-bound mitzvot and their trappings and 2. Women have been excluded from crucial sources of authority in Jewish communities and that 3. Those two things are directly connected, then presumably if we change 2, we change 1. Right? Right.

Or not. I sometimes have an uneasy feeling that when we do this, we are signing on to generations of spitefulness and condescension towards women's Judaism. There is an elaborate spiritual life and body of practical knowledge that developed in the absence of men's obligations and learning. My enthusiasm for it was largely slammed in rabbinic school. And of course, the basic concept of two classes of women seriously underlines the inequity that's there. All Conservative men are obligated to lay tefillin, even though most of them don't. If they want to go to rabbinic school they will. Simple. For women...you can be a perfectly observant Jew and NOT lay tefillin, or you can be the kind of Jew who gets to be a rabbi, and obligate yourself to the REAL Jew's mitzvot. Erk. I see the logic. But I also see the nasty subtext.

Does this make any sense? I wear a tallis myself, but I bristle at the notion that rabbinic authority can override generations of tradition that state a woman does not need to. I don't like the idea that for women to be given respect and authority in the community they must prove they're good enough by doing things the guy way. At the same time, I'm aware of exactly how powerless Jewish women have historically been because they were exempted, excluded, and shut out from sources of Jewish knowledge and authority, and that all this talk about gender differences and women's superior holiness counts for less than nothing when a get is on the line. Why shouldn't I take for myself/obligate myself/just be another Jew out there...?

Anyway, I also didn't make it to Beth Abraham again, since I spent the night in San Francisco, and spent Shabbos morning drinking coffee and talking to my parents. Maybe next week, excpet I may be out of town. This is taking a while for me to do.

Tomorrow it all starts...

I skipped Beth Abraham...actually I didn't wake up until close to eleven on Shabbos. Getting up at 5:30 three days running after keeping summer hours wiped me out. I never actually got dressed at all on Saturday, I wore my jammies around the house and ate things with calories. It was extremely pleasant.

This morning, the gardeners arrived again. I'm kind of getting used to being awakened by the crunch of workboots on the gravel, and hushed conversations in Spanish about garden hoses.

Today I had to go to a memorial service in Alameda. This was for a lovely woman in her fifties who was the attendence secretary at the school I work at. She worked in the district for nineteen years. A nice lady. Warm, bubbly, like an aunt to all the kids...I had only been working at the school for four or five months when we learned she had pancreatic cancer and wouldn't be coming back to work. She died last Wednesday.

It was a warm, pretty, service. Her daughter and two sisters, husband, nephew, sister-in-law, and someone she had worked with for many years all spoke. Lots of tears, lots of stories. I learned that she was a trout fisher, and loved camping. I heard how her family left South Dakota--I suppose this must have been about 1960 or so--looking for work in California. Everyone was weepy.

Now I'm trying to get everything together for the first day of school, and I'll be thinking about her all day...I think we all will. We owe it to her to give the kids the best.

Back to School

I'm exhausted. Two days of professional development, back to the school building to pick up my class lists, and, well, they won't work. I'm going to have a tough couple of weeks while I teach disposable lessons and try to get us through the worst of it.

Basically, back in June, the counselor of the school and I carefully planned some great class lists, including current students and the incoming sixth graders. Then, over the summer, she quit. We have a new counselor and a new vice principal. My class lists are problematic as follows:

1. I have nine kids in one class, and seven in the other. This is ridiculous. I should be starting with at least fifteen in each group, possibly more than twenty-five.

2. Many kids who should be in my classes aren't. Presumably they were signed up for mainstream classes. (I teach ESL).

3. The kids who are in my classes are hopelessly jumbled according to skill level and cannot be taught together effectively.

4. None of the new sixth-graders have been put in my classes.

Monday is going to be very fun.

Yes! The Hummingbirds are FEEDING!

We've had three come by at once, although only one has fed at a time. I assume they can get to the syrup, since they spend a fair amount of time there, lower their heads repeatedly to the holes, and don't seem to be getting annoyed with the feeder.

They're brown. I should see if I can figure out what exact species they are. The hummingbird site said Northern California gets one type all year round. It would be cool if these would stay for the winter.

I need to get a stronger cord for the feeder. It seems to hold up, but the plastic is stretching, and although I realize they can fly, I worry about it falling while they're trying to drink. I'll see what we have in the garage that might substitute.

All riiiiiiiight.

I Have Livestock

I finally got around to filling the hummingbird feeder. It came with the house, hanging off a post of the back deck. Yesterday I took it into the kitchen and cleaned it off. Not easy. It was covered in cobwebs--and the Balabusta is arachnaphobic--and then I managed to get it open, and, well, it had not been cleaned before it was left. Whatever had been in it had congealed to a thick jelly-like amber substance--like evil honey--with some dead flies for variety. I managed to flush it out as best I could with hot water, filled the bottle with the recommended hummingbird formula--one part white cane sugar to four parts tapwater--and hung it up.

The main motive behind this was that some time ago I saw a hummingbird come by and inspect the feeder. It flew right up, made a couple of turns around it, checking it out, and seemed to register 'yup, still empty', as it flew away. I figured I should provide something. I'll have to see if they actually come though, and if they don't show an interest, I may have to get a new feeder. I don't know if they care about grungy. The website I looked at said they won't feed if the syrup has gone bad.

So far no visitors that I've seen, but I was out for much of the day.

Also, we have cats in the back yard, I think the neighbors', who wander around, and squirrels. A couple of days ago we got a squirrel on the deck. He jumped into the pot with my sweet potato plant, and I thought he was going to try to eat it, but instead he buried something in the pot. Peanut sized and shaped.

I hope he won't mind that I'm watering it, whatever it was.

The boyfriend is almost well again, but kind of deaf.

And the parakeet needs more seed.

Shul Shidduch, Part One--Netivot Shalom

After a summer of sleeping late on Shabbos and thinking about what kind of East Bay shul I wanted, the Balabusta got up this morning and went so check out Netivot Shalom in Berkeley.

Looking at a new shul is kind of like a date, in more ways than one. I decided that since I really didn't know what people wore at NS, it would be a good idea to dress up a little. Then I decided that since I was going out on Shabbos, I should give my new clothes an outing, so I got out the new skirt and the turquoise sweater, and got spiffed up. I even put on a dab of makeup, and perfume. Then I decided I looked too conservative (as opposed to Conservative) for a Berkeley shul and layered on a couple of funky necklaces to take the edge off.

I wanted to get there right at the start of services, but was hindered in this because I forgot my BART ticket and had to get a new one. At one ticket machine: two middle-aged ladies in Berkeleyesque clothes who have evidently never used one before. They are operating the machine in a manner reminiscent of people feeding a goat at a petting zoo. (Thanks to my mom for this image.) One woman gives the other woman a dollar bill. The second woman feeds the bill to the machine. The machine eats it. The women exclaim about this. Then the second woman says, 'give me another dollar'. This is taking forever.

At the other machine: five or six middle-aged ladies, by dress and accent tourists from the Midwest. They, obviously, haven't used a BART ticket machine before, and are having to deal with all the details--it will only give you so much change, and each passenger must have a ticket, and etc. I hear the train leave, over my head. Okay, it's Shabbos, I will take it easy. I got there.

Here follow the pros and cons of Netivot Shalom. I will say that I will need to return at a later date, since they were having a large, well-attended Bat Mitzvah, and I may not have gotten a perfect impression. Basically, though:

PROS:

It is easily accessible from my house, only about thirty-five minutes each way.

It's a pretty, modern building, with moveable chairs in the sanctuary.

I was not the only woman wearing a hat, there were several of us.

Even for a bat mitzvah day, it seemed very well attended.

The service is "traditional egalitarian", the way I like 'em.

They have a nice prayer for the United States in English, and a misheberach for Israeli and U.S. soldiers.

The bat mitzvah girls' friends were incorporated into the service--they got to come up and lead "Adon Olam", stuff like that. I thought it was cute.

They seem to have nice arrangements for children's care and activities during the service. This doesn't directly affect me, but it speaks to wanting women to be included in the life of the shul, and a good attitude about children. I've been to shuls that lacked both.

They do a snappy musaf. I have tried to learn to like musaf, but it just irks me.

They are slightly disorganized in a cute way. A hundred and fifty people, all trying to wash hands at once, and guy starts belting out a niggun, apparently spontaneously, trying to give everyone something to do while standing in line.

The oneg was AWESOME, but I think that may have been a bat-mitzvah related thing.

CONS:

The building is just a little too moderne and gleaming to feel heimish. My San Francisco shul used to be a nightclub, and it's still just a big partitioned room with a stained glass skyline of Jerusalem installed at the front to make it pretty, and at least two shul's worth of memorial plaques.

No flags. I like the flags.

When they do Misheberach, they sing the Debbie Friedman version. Despite my Bay Area upbringing, I don't like davening set for the acoustic guitar. It annoys me.

They don't have MY cantor and rabbi there.

No one talked to me, although I think that may have been a bat-mitzvah issue too.

I like shuls where there's a hard-core group of old men in suits who know the davening in their sleep, pronounce it in Ashkenazes and keep stuff rolling. They didn't seem to be present at NS. I like places where there's a discreet bottle of slivovitz out for the old guys. I like places where they serve herring in cream sauce despite the fact the people my age can't handle it.

I found it a little hard to see and hear what was going on.

SUMMARY: Basically, it seems like a nice shul, but it didn't grab me immediately, so I'm going to go back a couple more times when they're not having a bat mitzvah, and check out some more places. I did determine that my generation priorities have changed. I used to check out a shul thinking "Will I have a profound spiritual experience here? Will I find my right path in life? Is that guy my intended, or maybe just a stalker creep?" Now I check out a shul thinking "Huh. Nice to see they have children's services..." Just thinking ahead.

THING I FOUND ODD: In the 'welcome to the shul' handout, they explain that everyone is asked to cover their head, but this is optional for women over 20. They also say that all adult Jews at the shul wear a tallis, but this is also optional for women over 20.

Why 20? Why make this official?

I realize that a lot of women don't do either of the above in Conservative shuls, for a lot of reasons. But it seemed like a strange thing to lay out in such detail. Also, does this mean little girls must wear a kippah until they're 20? Does this mean you must wear a tallis from bat mitzvah until 20, and then you're allowed to skip it? I did wonder. Since I do both, not an issue for me, though.

Next week is Beth Abraham.

The Rabbi's Cat

I just finished _The Rabbi's Cat_ by Joann Sfar, which was just released in English. It's a graphic novel in three parts, narrated by a cat belonging to an Algerian rabbi during the early 1930s. I love Jewish comics art, so this was right up my alley.

The cat likes the rabbi, but adores his beautiful daughter Zlabya. Their relationship is complicated when the cat gains the power of speech (and turns out to be a liar and a freethinker, both of which upset the rabbi), and later, when Zlabya marries a young rabbi from Paris. The cat, the rabbi, and Zlabya all go through a certain amount of trauma and emotional upheaval during the book, but it ends on a hopeful, slightly offbeat note.

The book gives a sense of the pre-war Algerian community that feels alternately fanciful and realistic. The drawings are quirky and wonderful, and an endearing touch is the back-flap photo of the artist posing with his cat, who is clearly the model for the novel's narrator.

It's a little edgier than I expected from the reviews it's been getting, but I really liked it. Definately looking forward to the next installment.

Girls In Black Leather

I keep resolving to give up reading Heshy's blog. Heshy, for those of you who don't know him, is a very unsual man who keeps a very unusual blog. From Heshy I have learned that Jews are opposed to life on other planets, that Jews are forbidden to live in Manhattan, that Iran is a really great place with good morals, and that God is going to smite just about everyone pretty soon. (I'll provide a link when I can, my computer is being weird about Blogger right now.)

I keep resolving not to read the blog any more, because I really don't think I should, but it is extremely funny at times. I fell into temptation this evening, and discovered Heshy's detailed plan for bringing secular Israeli Jews to Heshy's version of Judaism. My favorite agenda item:

"Special crack-units of tall, highly intelligent young adult women who are well trained in Torah ideals, outfitted in all black (leather jackets & gloves, long skirts and stockings) are to target secular streets of Tel Aviv and Haifa dishing out steaming, hot portions of cholent from mobile crock pots into heavy-duty disposable black bowls with sturdy black forks"

People have suggested that the weather in Haifa and Tel Aviv may not be ideal for the proposed outfit. I'm just imagining the movie based on this. In my version, the Cholent Chicks (okay, it's not alliterative, I'm trying) ride motorcycles (with the Crock Pots mounted on the back), and zoom through the streets of Haifa, targeting secular Jews and feeding them. Our heroine, Gittel, becomes intrigued with a handsome, disheveled young Modern Orthodox type who has his own Crock Pot of dafina on his bike, and wears a crocheted yarmulke.

Will Gittel take off her leather jacket in the 95 degree heat?

Will dueling traditions of Jewish stew be able to make peace, or be doomed to fight to the end?

Will Avi put on a black hat in order to win his Harley-gunning love?

Will Heshy have to ride in on his own bike and rescue the dizzy damsel from the crocheted menace?

How much cholent does it take to bring someone back on the derech?

Can you tell the Balabusta watched "Chopper Chicks in Zombietown" last night?

And It GLEAMS!

Today I got back to basics: setting myself specific goals to get me out of my rut of not-getting-stuff-done.

So I cleaned the living room. I got into one of those zones where you just do a teeny bit at a time and accept that it's going to take all day, so I stopped myself and told myself I had an hour. I cleared off the little coffee table, and windexed the top of it. The floor is all picked up, except for a couple of boxes and the tops of the bookshelves. The dining room table (it's in the living room) gleams. The floorboards shine. I swiffered. It looks lovely. I had to stop myself from trying to interrupt progress by trying to do other rooms. The boyfriend was impressed. He's now settled down in the middle of gleaming, wrapped in a blanket and coughing.

Now, lunch. Then I'm going to run an errand.

Oh, and while putting lunch on the stove, I swiped a stain on the kitchen floor, and discovered in the process that what I thought was a scratch in the linoleum from moving the fridge is actually just a scrape mark of gunk. Comes off. Doesn't come RIGHT off, but comes off. I managed about half of it, will need stronger cleaner for the rest.

My work sent me a back-to-school letter. Should I be offended that my name wasn't mentioned in the list of teachers who did continuing education over the summer?

Crying Over The Chron

Our local paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, has been running this multi-part series about the disengagement. It's not particularly well-done, but today's was about a family who decided to leave Gaza rather than stay on, at the last minute, agreeing finally at five AM on Tisha B'Av. I started getting weepy on the BART.

I did dry up, slightly, when I got to the bit where the father of the family is described as having helped to build the settlement 'as a young, Zionist soldier'. I was briefly overcome with parallel inane descriptions. "Frank Levy participated in D-Day as a young, Federalist soldier" perhaps? Anyway. I did say it was not particularly well done.

Then I got into the New York times, and I got to the picture of the girls in jeans skirts draped in orange ribbons blocking a road, and I just sprung a leak.

I think I finally got to the emotional part of this.

I couldn't, yesterday. I went through the fast thinking that somehow this would start to seem more real, I would feel more about it, but it wasn't until today that it really hit. And it's confusing, on a deep, fundamental level.

I support the disengagement. I have a lot of trust in Sharon's judgement, and I believe this is the best plan for the forseeable future. I think we have to do this.

I feel terrible for the people leaving. I feel for their losses, for what they built that won't continue, for how this has cut open their lives. I feel angry this has divided Jews from each other. I feel afraid for everyone involved. I can think of a thousand ways this could become even worse, very fast, in the next couple of days.

And I feel so proud of those teenage girls wearing orange headbands and standing hand in hand together to protect home that I'm crying. They're so beautiful, so strong, so full of emunah. I was overwhelmed.

My mother thinks this is NOT contradictory, and maybe she's right. Maybe it's just complicated.

May this be for the best, for all of us.

The Fella Is Sick, I Am Driving, Tisha B'Av Is Over, Target is Evil

The fella is sick, he's got what I had. Question from him: "How many times did you want to stab your own eardrums out?" I am feeding him Campbell's Vegetable Beef soup, and lots of tea. He is very miserable.

Yesterday, he slept most of the day, and roused around eight o'clock, disoriented and weak, and needing patent medicines. Couldn't find any of ours, except for the Sudafed, which wasn't what was needed. He won't touch liquid NyQuil. So I broke the fast with a peanut butter sandwich, eaten as I walked to Target to get medicines, since the local corner place closes at seven.

(Note, on Saturday we were with friends at an SCA event in Golden Gate Park. I left early to go carbo-load. A friend, Jewish, noticed my absence and asked the fella where I was. "Balabusta left to get ready for the holiday," says the fella. "Holiday?" our friend asks. "Yeah, you fast all day and feel lousy." "Oh, Tisha B'Av's tomorrow?" says our friend, proving the accuracy of the description.)

I arrive at Target (you gotta imagine that this is pronounced "Tar-zhay", since I always do), and discover with horror that although I can get throat drops, they've responded to recent governmental pressure by taking all products containing pseudoephedrine off the shelf. NO NyQuil. No cold caps at all, except for Coricidin's high blood pressure version, which lacks pseudoephedrine.

I curse the War on Patent Drugs. I consider making my way across San Pablo Avenue in the dark to get to the Walgreens, decide to go with the Coricidin and return home.

I mean, sheesh, people. Meth labs are bad. Feds are scary. I get it. But I had a sick boyfriend at home. All I want is ONE box of NyQuil caps.

I found the NyQuil caps this morning, right where I'd put them, under the bathroom sink in a Sterilite box.

This morning I went for my driving lesson. I was allowed to steer around a parking lot. Unfortunately I cried a little on the instructor before getting started, but this is a driving school that specializes in the tense and phobic, and he assured me he's used to it. I think I did good.

Then the Balabusta shopped for shoes. She's already got new work clothes, needed shoes. (Clothes shopping note--I was persuaded while clothes shopping to buy a pale turquoise sweater to compliment a fudge-and-turquoise skirt I loved. I have not worn pale blue or green next to my face since, er, middle school. I am slowly getting the hang of cold colors. It's kind of interesting.)

I HATE shoe shopping. Shoes are expensive, often uncomfortable, and it's hard to find flats. Love clothes shopping, HATE shoes. Finally I managed to get a pair of black pumps and some brown stitched loafers at the El Cerrito Plaza Ross For Less. The Ross on Market Street in San Francisco let me down. So did Shoe Pavilion, DSW or whatever it is, Nordstrom, Aldo, John Madden, and a couple other places. I hate shoe shopping. I need to start shoe shopping more OFTEN, so that when one pair of shoes dies I have another waiting in the wings, and don't get stressed out. As is, I usually have one pair of black work shoes I wear almost every day, and when they fall apart, I am desperate.

The boyfriend is propped up in front of the TV, drinking tea with honey.

The Gardeners Came

So I'm lying in bed, around 9 A.M., thinking about doing the laundry, and preparing myself for a day when I get up and don't immediately make coffee. And I hear footsteps outside, and voices.

They sound as though they're crunching across the mega-gravel in the xeriscape out front of the house, but that doesn't make sense, and I convince myself it's the neighbors working on some yard project.

Then there are many crunching footsteps, some conversation in Spanish, and someone turns our front yard hose on, which causes the entire house's plumbing to thunder.

I put on a bathrobe and tiptoed out into the living room to check out the situation through the front door's peep grille.

The gardeners had arrived.

I'm just glad to see that they really exist. When we moved in, the deal was that we would pay an extra forty bucks a month, and the landlord would provide a gardener to come by once a month and keep the yards maintained. This suited us fine. The Balabusta is insanely busy, and the fella hates yard work. Good deal, we thought.

Then we saw neither hide nor hair of a gardener for--well, I guess we've been here six weeks? Anyway, today they arrived, unheralded, watered, clipped the tree out front, sprayed some weed killer around, and left.

We made no contact, since the fella and I were both too underdressed and baffled to actually try to speak to them. After a while I realized the noises had stopped, looked out again, and they were gone.

Teachers Behaving Badly

Third day of this textbook training I've been at. So far it is going, by my standards, really well. I'm learning more about how the program (which I've been teaching from for a year) is structured, and maybe more importantly, gaining some confidence. Most of this year I've felt awfully vulnerable in my classroom. I'm learning things that are validating some of my ideas and experiences, and will allow me to meet with my principal and say 'this is what will work, here's why, and I will do it'. I hope. Maybe. It's pretty cool. I just wish we didn't have homework.

It's being taught by a young woman who is, compared to past people I've taken program trainings from, a genius and a mensch. She's non-saccharine, direct, and will even say "if some detail of the script or planning doesn't work for you, you are the teacher. Teach as seems best." (The usual reaction is "If you deviate from the script, the children will never learn anything. You are a moron. The script is LIFE.")

She has not yet used 'diverse' to mean 'not white', or said 'when teaching THESE CHILDREN it's important to...'

She explains research to us, rather than dismissing criticism with 'the research says so'.

Anyway, nice gal. Today I ended up eating lunch with a group that included the two women who talk and laugh between themselves right next to me all through the training. I joined them because some of 'em are in my district.

The group was not nice about the trainer lady.

I think I need to eat lunch with the positive people tomorrow.

The funny thing is that at my teacher induction program, I am usually one of the bad kids making noise--but that's because those are STUPID.

Of course, I'm also miffed because I said I was getting a real sense of what the program did, and how it worked, and another teacher said 'it's not really rocket science'.

Without going into all the reasons this past year was so hard for me--I still appreciate getting trained in the bloody program!

Teaching is a new career for me. It has a lot of advantages, and I think I can become good at it. But one thing I've noticed is that teachers can be some of the snarkiest most hostile people I know. We put other people down a lot. (Kids don't imagine this.) I don't want to become someone like that.

Better start tomorrow by picking the company I keep a tad better.

More Addendum....

"It's kind of like living with a caged animal in pain," he says. "You know, it paces back and forth, and growls a lot, and smells funny."

Addendum

The fella has read the preceding post, and wishes the world to know that he has been wronged.

I detailed my pain, and neglected his. For five days he lived in fear of his life, as a psychotic maniac rushed around the house, moaning about her ears, pounding her fists on chairs, and threatening his physical and emotional well-being.

He only wanted to help, nurture and protect the Balabusta, and she was mean, cruel and vicious towards him. He is, quite possibly, scarred for life.

I Can Hear Clearly Now, The Pain Has Gone

Self indulgent complaint about having been sick to follow:

What started as a slight scratchy throat on Wednesday turned into, well, five very unpleasant days.

Normally when the Balabusta gets a cold, she has a sore throat for twenty-four hours, while her chest fills with gunk. Then she coughs and sneezes until the gunk is cleared. Then the cold is over.

On this occasion, the lungs were pretty much clear, and my eustachian tubes got the gunk.

Every time I swallowed, twin jabs of pain in my eardrums. Up and down in intensity, but hard enough at its worst to make me flinch each time. You know how many time you swallow in the course of, say, a minute? A lot of times. More times than you would think.

Advil, didn't work. Throat spray, suggested by the doctor who looked at me for two minutes on Saturday morning, didn't work. NyQuil worked because NyQuil knocked me cold for eight hours at a time, during which time I could not feel my ears. Instead I romped in fields full of golden autumn trees, and walked on ceilings, and argued with long-dead philosophers. They were great dreams. Then I would wake up and swallow.

I looked up middle ear pain. Apparently it's mostly found in babies. This did not make me feel better.

Last night I was nearly hysterical, because this had been going on for five days, and pain that's tolerable for a while gets hard to deal with over a long period of time, and today I HAD to go and spend six and a half hours at a training. No way to cancel unless I was actually in labor, or had surgery. I tried to go to sleep without the NyQuil because I had already taken the Sudafed. (One small blessing, I got to go on a patent-medicine spending spree behind this. I love buying boxes of pills to be taken four to six hours apart. And the nightime Sudafed was on sale.)

Slept shallowly, no more golden trees or philosophers, and woke up swallowing and swallowing desperately, and hurting more each time.

It was one AM. I had to get out of bed in five and a half hours, max. I wandered into the bathroom, took a slug of NyQuil and lay down to read until it kicked in.

Half an hour later, the pressure dropped. No pop, no warning, just swallowed and that time it didn't hurt like crazy. I have no idea why. I went to sleep. My ears are still slightly sore when I swallow, but they have not returned to flinch level, and I got through the day without drugs.

Healthy ears are the best.

Maybe the World's Best Potato

There is a farmer's market Tuesday and Saturday mornings at El Cerrito Plaza. Tuesday we went, and on a whim I picked up some big baking style potatos from one of the organic produce booths.

The guy weighed them and said 'seven dollars', which came out to about a buck thirty per potato, but I gulped and paid, and reminded myself to ask the price BEFORE bagging the produce next time. I also wondered what it WAS with these potatoes. Grown in gold dust or something?

Last night I didn't go to my mom's for Shabbos because my ears STILL hurt, but I got into action cooking a nice little meal at home. We had grilled chicken in the fridge, so that, and green peas, some black olives for nibbles, and what else does the boyfriend want on the side?

"Corn. Corn. Corn? Corn! Corn. Corn." (He's imitating the seagulls from Finding Nemo, in case you were wondering.) Okay, corn, and anything else?

"How about a baked potato?"

That's an idea. I could put them in the microwave. Let's see if the million-dollar-spuds are any good. I mean if they, are, I oughta use them for Shabbos anyway, right?

I baked two of them, and I have to report, they may be the best potato I've ever eaten. The boyfriend not so impressed, but he basically sees vegetables as staging grounds for margarine and salt anyway. The potatoes cooked to an even mealy consistency (this in the microwave, mind), with slightly crispy jackets and smooth, crumbly white interiors. I regretted not having sour cream, (the chicken), but with margarine they were simply superb. Gonna try one with sour cream tomorrow, maybe.

I don't know if I can really justify buying these things again, but they're really, really, good potatoes.

The Speed of Prayer

There have been a number of blogversations going on about tefilah, tehillim, and other good things that start with a 't' sound, by AskShifra and on DovBear and other places, and, well, I'm thinkin' about it all.

First, the basics:

1. I was raised in a Very Reform Shul. (Insert suits, hearty summer-camp Zionism, rabbis in robes but no yarmulkes, an organ, German accents, and the absolute conviction that Yiddish was dead, dead as a doornail, and not a minute too soon. I'm getting nostalgic, but that's another post...)

2. We were taught to read Hebrew with Israeli pronunciation. We were told it was Sephardic. We were told it was better than the awful kind of Hebrew with all those s sounds some of us heard at home.

3. We were not taught to daven. We were not taught to DO much. One of my more baffling memories of childhood is the time the shul let Chabad come and try to get all of us kids in the religious school involved in a weird project featuring Beetle Bailey in tzitzit--I am NOT hallucinating, I still have the flyer somewhere--called the Army of Hashem. I know, they sound like a subplot from Frank Herbert's Dune books. They wanted the boys to wear tzitzit and the girls to light Shabbos candles (this I was already doing), and all of us to daven Modeh Ani. I cannot imagine why the shul agreed to this, or, perhaps more importantly, where they thought nine year old boys going to Temple Emanu-El were going to get tzitzit from. Or what their parents would do if they actually wore them.

4. Then I went to rabbinic school for a year after college.

Despite all of this, I actually can't read Hebrew. I mean, I can read words I understand, and sound others out, but I am horrifically slow. I joked on another blog recently that I regard saying tehillim as a sort of prayer filibuster. Listening to me read tehillim would lead anyone to heal anyone, just to make me stop sounding the words out already. (I have also been known to spend hours in the lady's room, hoping that someone else will have started to lead the Birkat by the time I emerge.)

This has been a long-standing barrier to one of my long-standing goals, which is to begin to daven the Amidah daily. The key problem I've run into each time I've begun is that I only know the first three or four brachot with any fluency, and then I have to read. Correction. Aaaaai. Haaaaaa-vuh. Toooooooooo. Ruh-eeeeeeee.........duh. It takes a terribly long time, and stomps any kavvanah I might bring to the process flat.

Today I discovered that at this site they actually have the Weekday Amidah transliterated. SCORE! I'm going to get a printout and work with this until I actually know the words well enough to start reading the Hebrew properly.

But I would love to get over this problem. Has anyone got ideas? I know the letters, I just can't seem to scan properly. I read English very fluently, can read Latin off the page, French, Spanish--what gives with the Hebrew? Has anyone found anything that speeds them up or gives them more confidence? My Hebrew is not good, but it is good enough that I can follow what's happening in Tanach most of the time. It's just SLOOOOOOOW.

Berries

Also, the boyfriend is one heck of a dessert designer. As I was finishing the last post he walked in and gave me a bowl of raspberries and blackberries from the farmer's market, smothered in strawberry-banana yoghurt.

Gooooood.

The Insider's Guide To Judaism

I explained to my boyfriend that I had read something in "one of the Jewish blog world blogs". He asked, 'how many Jewish bloggers are there, anyway?'

Sometimes I realize, with a small shock, that I am his only window into Judaism. He is not one of these gentile guys who grew up in a town where half his buddies were bar mitzvahed, or dated Jewish girls in high school. The whole Jewish world, the history, lore, behavior and activities of all of us, (twelve or thirteen million?) are viewed by him pretty much only through me. It's kind of a strange feeling. What is not important to me he will not see. What I don't say, he doesn't know.

Sometimes what he sees is reflected back to me in ways that make me uncomfortable. I was chatting with him about the religious schools to which we will (I imagine) send Bubba and Jezebel, and waxing a little rhapsodic about the community they will have as children. And he said, "because the Jewish community has made you so happy?"

Well, there's that. He met me at what was close to the bottom of my relationship with the Jewish world. I wanted some things--a job, justification, my childhood sense of chavurah--more than I could begin to articulate, from 'the community', and I was not getting. I was bitter. I was nuts. I cried myself to sleep more nights than I care to remember because I could not figure out how to be Jewish in the way I wanted to be. Judaism, for him, is something that makes his girlfriend despair a lot. And remember, I am the whole show to him. I am (grin), the most observant Jew he knows.

He's seen other things--the joy I get from the holidays (and also the madness that Pesach produces). He's seen me develop a more comfortable relationship with a shul and a rabbi. But I think his initial impression was that it's hard to be a Jew. First impressions are lasting.

But he meets me on the way. He works on Jewish for me--shooing me off to shul (why, he wants to know, can't I tell him WHEN the service starts?), and he can find lard in a grocery ingredient list faster than I can. For a man who, early in our courtship, forwarded me a Jewish joke he'd read and then asked me what a 'bubbe' was to clarify the punchline for himself--we've come far. Yesterday he snatched a marinade away from me in the grocery store and pointed out that it had cheese in it and couldn't be used for chicken. I'm tellin' ya!

He's getting the rules down. What I'd like to show him, more, is the 'ashreinu' part, the real joy and fun I get from Jewishness. Something to think of, as the chagim get closer.

Gasket Blown

So I hear back from the people who are running the training. Training I was going to was cancelled. If I did not receive notice, they're real sorry. Normally they send out both e-mail and mail notice.

NOTHING on other trainings they might have.

NOTHING about my district's money.

NOTHING.

AAAAAARGH!

The Daily Half-Dozen

1. I have a sore throat. Not feeling particularly chipper.

2. The fella's tires need replacing. The van's in Richmond right now.

3. This is nothing new, but George Galloway is being his usual self, on steroids. The image of Jerusalem and Baghdad as beautiful girls crying out for help from the Arab world would impress me more if I didn't think he'd stolen it from one of Saddam's novels.

4. The training I'm supposed to go to next week still has not sent me anything. No materials, no confirmation, no time I'm supposed to show up. The last communication indicated that I should go to a particular Catholic high school in San Francisco, but NOTHING else.

5. I have a new driving lesson scheduled for Monday after this coming one.

6. The recyclers took our recycling! It's GONE...well, what I could fit in the bins. The fella and I danced with joy. It seems like a sign...of what I could not tell you.

Names Not To Call Children By

So there I am, typing away on a big SCA research project having to do with medieval Jewish names, and the fella happens to ask me what 'stein' means--so I tell him--and then he asks what "Frankenstein" means, and I say I don't know, and I chat on for a bit about the origins of German Jewish surnames.

Apropos of this, the fella declares that if he were to be asked to choose a family name, it would be "Schadenfreude".

I tell him that while he still has some lingering hope of persuading me to take his last name, making it "Schadenfreude" will kill that off right quick.

He says that that's okay, but he and the children will be Schadenfreude. The children, he declares happily, will be Bubba Schadenfreude and Jezebel Schadenfreude.

He has a recurrent interest in "Jezebel" as a name for a child of ours. I don't think he knows her story, he saw the name in a list of 'Biblical names not to give your baby'. He was briefly interested in "Cain" at about the same time.

I've said I will consider Jezebel as a middle name if her first name can be Yentl.

Yentl Jezebel Schadenfreude. Sounds presidential to ME.

The Parakeet is Out

(This is not the parakeet, this is a stock photo. But the parakeet is also green.)

Our parakeet is another inheritance from the machetenim, and had spent his whole life in the old house, except for a few months in a pet store as a baby. The boyfriend drove him over in the van early on in the moving process, and we put his cage by the windows in the front room.

It must be strange for him. He's not used to so much light, and through the windows he can see all sorts of new things. I kept the cage shut until late last week when I opened it to see what he would do.

What he did was stay inside. I worried he would never come out again, but figured he might just need some time to work up the nerve.

Anyway, this evening he decided to get out and explore. He flew around the room several times, landed on various surfaces, sat on the boyfriend's finger, and eventually managed to get back to the top of his cage, where he is sitting and talking about the whole thing loudly.

I guess we're settled in.

Life in the 'Burbs

We went to OSH this morning, and purchased ant traps, also some clear caulk--I think sealing the cracks in the cabinetry will help--and some more Simple Green, plus Simple Green wipes. I have distributed the traps. I keep thinking how much harder this would be if I had children, or dogs, in the house.

The city of El Cerrito refused to take my recycling last week. It was left behind--two giant tubs of it, now turning yellow in the sun--with a snarky form note checked in many boxes to let us know the kinds of sins we had committed. Primarily, I think it is a shatnez issue--we had mixed paper and plastic in the same tub, and bundled paper IN plastic. Also we had included clamshell plastic packaging.

We had also practiced sorcery, settled in the land of Egypt, showed mercy to idolaters, offered peace to Ammon and Moab, made offerings without salt, sheared a dedicated beast, fed the Pesach offering to a ger toshav (since this is August, we had to thaw it out first), delayed payment of vows, barbecued and eaten the flesh of a stoned ox, added to the Written Law, and appointed a king not born an Israelite.

I think we can actually blame that last one on the Supreme Court, but by that time the recycling guy was just checking boxes with abandon.

The recyclers were pretty mad at us about all this sinning, and as I say, they left us with the recycling. A few days later I got a packet in the mail (three WEEKS after we signed on as new customers), explaining how their system works.

Basically, they will only take a few highly resellable kinds of items. No plastic bags. No clamshell containers. No milk cartons. No frozen food boxes. It has to be sorted. Plastic cannot be packaged in paper. Paper cannot be packaged in plastic. We cannot yoke an ox and a llama together when mowing the lawn, or they won't take our lawn clippings. These are the rules.

In San Francisco, you just dump all the recyclables into the recycle bin, and they sort it all out somewhere. Sigh...