Updates:
Finished the minisweater from Glampyre. Even though it's blocking happily on my bedroom floor and looks really nice (I mean really nice; Kureyon 126 looks amazing in this pattern, so much so that the 116 I've been laboriously working up into the Sitcom Chic cardigan may be frogged and turned into this), the armhole on one arm was bound off too tightly, resulting in an uncomfortable tight fit. There's a strong chance that this may end up going to my sister, along with some matching armwarmers from the latest SNB. And what does this teach us?
Gauge. Yes. I have learned my lesson. (Not really, since I've already got 4 rounds worked on the Accidentally on Purpose vest, but since that's meant to fit loose and laddered, I'm not stressed.)
There's a regular frenzy of knitting at Chez B., since it seems to be the one thing that can productively funnel my constant anxiety over Israelp@#@$@@@!. I hate that fucking program with all my heart, and still have to shepard it to a successful finish. I hate it. I hate coming in for 13 hours a day, 7 days a week until April 3rd. I'd rather be licked by rabid coyotes, and yet--I'm still doing it. Because I have no choice.
I'm upping my leave date by another two weeks; a few mean comments were made to me by a co-worker on Shabbat that were so wounding and so petty that I see no reason to stay any longer than I have to. I'll wait until graduation, and then I. Am. Gone. Because honestly, if what you're concerned about is saving salary costs, but not about me as a person, friend, or co-worker, then let me make things easier for you, fuckwad.
Noam called twice Friday, so I guess Casey's brilliant idea was, in fact, brilliant. I was out getting my hair highlighted, even though I told the office I was at a doctor's appointment. I barely made it back in time for Shabbat, but my hair looks supercute. Blond makes everything better.
Glad to see that this post has no rhyme or reason to it. Believe me, yesterday was no picnic; a mild anxiety tsunami made me feel like shit all day, and I don't feel any more human today. Rather, I feel like strangling the next person who makes the mistake of being an asshole around me; I feel like kicking down doors and screaming at the top of my lungs. I feel backed into a very prickly, very tight, very uncomfortable corner, and it is No Fun At All.
I'm also debuting the potential first paragraphs of my submission for Laurel's new book proposal. I feel awkward even being included in that, but when a friend IMs you and needs you--well, my narrative is your narrative, any day of the week, Laurel!
Here it is. Let me know what you think:
I'd like to apologize in advance for the rampant abuse of the innocent question mark in this essay. It's just that thinking about my Jewish identity doesn't lead to any easy or simplistic or sentences-that-could-end-with-a-period style statements. If I were drawing it out, it would be a spiral, endlessly twisting in on itself; it would have no beginning, and it's likely to have no end, either. On the one hand, it forms the battleground for a wrestling match that has driven me to Jerusalem more than once and found me weeping ceaselessly at the Kotel; on the other, it's as innate as the color of my eyes and as much as a given as the fact that I have fingernails: it just is. So, it's hard to figure out where to start. It's hard to find the subtleties, the specificities, in a pattern that you're so used to seeing, it loses all depth and meaning.
I mean, at a certain point, it's just your life, right? I mean, on a daily basis, I don't walk around thinking, "Hmm, splintered life, identity uncertain, must get a pedicure, make sure I tell people she converted before she married my father, oh, there's another Starbucks...". The fact that one aunt works for a synagogue in Miami Beach and one belongs to a speaking-in-tongues-bathed-in-the-blood-of-the-lamb style Pentecostal church? That's just my life, that's just par for the course. The fact that my mother breaks down crying in a restaurant in Spain, where I'm trying to explain in extremely broken Spanish that none of my dishes can have any pork or any meat in them, and weeping, tells me that she feels like the community that she chose for herself 35 years ago is continuously rejecting her? Honey, that's just par for the crappy, crappy course, too.
This is where I hold now: when people ask me how I'm doing, I say, "Baruch Hashem, I'm good." I keep a kosher apartment, I wear skirts almost exclusively, and I study Pirke Avot with a telephone chevruta once a week. My professional life is entirely shaped by the Jewish calendar, and I'm moving to Israel next year to spend a year studying the foundational texts of Jewish tradition. Then again, here's where I'm holding: I'm in my office on Shabbat, working to raise money for a student program and typing away at this essay; my mother wasn't born Jewish, and according to the country I stand ready to embrace as my own, I'm not, either. And that's the well-packaged, well-hidden rift at the center of it all. If I happen to fall in love and want to get married in Israel, I'll lie about my mother. I won't tell anyone she converted before she married my father, into a tradition she found deeper, richer and more ethical than her own, in order to avoid having to undergo a conversion process myself. I've been instructed to lie by my rabbi and my parents, and I'll do so, because to admit otherwise is to deny not only my own truth, which is bad enough, but my mother's potent, powerful and meaningful choice--which is worse.
But let me begin at the beginning, before the broad brushstrokes, so you can maybe understand everything a little better. Maybe, if I'm lucky, you'll be able to understand it better than I can.
Have a better day than I'm having, y'all.
