For giving us the fruit of the hobgoblin

There are Jews' Jews and there are gentiles' Jews. Jews' jews grew up with a lot of other jews around, their parents may have owned a button factory (based on my summer camp experience), they attended bar mitzvahs with the requisite themes of ice skating, monopoly, and roses, stores in their hometown are called Schwartz's Kosher Meat on a Stick and Lipschitz Furnitue Galleria.
The other Jews, like me, were probably one of the first Jews to ever go to their schools. Because of their mother's yearly Hanukah presentation, their classmates thought their religion was one or pyromania and doughnut worship. Their 5th grade chorus teacher may have told them, "sure, you can not sing about Jesus, but you are going to look like an idiot up there on the risers with your mouth closed while everyone else is singing."
My temple growing up served an hour's drive radius. Shabbat services (which were only held once a month) drew about 10-40 people. Our rabbi was part-time. My family had three other families in the area who we would rotate hosting the big eating holidays (Rosh hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Passover) with. For the 7 collective kids of these families, the goal of these dinners was to see how much sweet (and also 22 proof) Manuchevitz wine we could surrepticiously pour into the punch bowl of Juicy Juice set out for our ladling pleasure on the table. The answer was usually quite a bit.
Since I only saw my Jewish friends at most once a week (for Hebrew school and not at all in the summer), the mainstay of my jewish identity was how I defined myself to the good Christian children at the James H Bean School. In third grade I told them that swearing wasn't wrong for Jews and cloistered a group in a bathroom stall for a whispered rendition of my mother's daily I'm-home-from-work expletives. In the fourth grade holiday musical, I didn't even have to try out to be on of the glow-in-the-dark dancing stars in the one This Song Isn't About Christmas number, I was handed the part. I even brought a second grade Megan Condon to a Hebrew School passover, which went well until she broke into tears and eventually inquired when we were going to drink the blood of little Christian babies.
When I went to college, it was suddenly Jewapalooza. But instead of feeling part of the incrowd, I felt like one in a herd. I went to high holiday services on campus my freshman year with at least 500 other students. We sat, we stood, we prayed, we sang, and it felt like nothing, like routine. The rest my holidays on campus were spent in a park near my dorm, thinking and reflecting and trying to throw in Hebrew words where I could.
There are probably more Jews in Seattle than Maine, but not as many as in Providence. I know a few who I play frisbee with and we do Hanukah together and it is wonderful. There is one friend in particular who I always to passover with because we care for the same balance between praying, eating, drinking, and stroytelling. For the last two years, we have shared a table with our gentile boyfriends and sang the same songs to different tunes and had a very good and tasty time. This year that friend was in Sweden. This meant that the only Seattle resident I have ever done Passover with before was my ex-boyfriend. I was pretty sure he could be relied upon to entertain my need to get my jew on, but I needed back-up to really have a party.
So I set about recruiting. Luckily, if you play it right, Passover is a pretty easy holiday to get people around a table for. You just have to watch how you pitch it. You can't say "I'm having this dinner, where we are going to wait 2 hours before we eat anything. While waiting, I will tell stories about g*d killing Egyptians, and then we will sing a song saying it was all too much, really and we still feel kind of bad about it. When we finally eat, the first thing will small loaf made by putting many different kinds of fish together in a blender and fusing them into one fish with jelly and salt. One very lucky person will find a large piece of a cracker that I have hid in my apartment. And another highlight of the evening will be leaving the door open so an invisible man can join us."
What you do say is, "It is mandatory that we dirnk 4 glasses of wine." That brings in the gentiles.
So I had a crowd for Passover last night. I got home early to cook and clean. Wht your really supposed to do is take a fine brush and go over the entire place looking for Hametz (leavened bread). The only place I took a brush too was the toilet, so it is hametz free if nothing else. We did do really well with the reclining part, however, since I only have two table chairs so everyone else was in an arm chair.
In the course of introducing new friends to Passover, some themes of the evening were hammered home. The sentiments of the dinner conevyed to my guests were: Everyone dies. As jews, we feel guilty about everyone dying. But then, haven't we suffered enough, why should we feel guilty for the suffering of our persecutors? Oh god, we feel guilty again.
Still, they managed to get into it. Even when we sang about circumcision, even when we ate salted parsley as an hoursd'ourve. I think the wine may have helped.
By the third glass everyone had some recognition of the wine prayer -- borai bri hagoffin (thanks for the fruit of the vine). And at the fourth glass one guest asked, "Isn't it time to borai pri hobgoblin again?" And as a gentiles' Jew, that's when I knew my job was complete.

1:06.7

Back when I had a lot of free time I spent all that time, at least in the winter, in a swimming pool, It seems amazing to me know that I would spend 3 hours a day pushing waves and then have meets on the weekends. These days it's hard to find time and energy to work out an hour a day. Though when the season kicks in I will be spending entire weekends at tournaments and a good deal of time in practice, but still not 3 hours a day.
Swimming is from whence grew my love of pop-tarts. Getting my license my sophomore year of school allowed me to develop this passion completely. The pool I swam at was 20 minutes from my house and I would be starving when I got in the car to go home. No matter how good my morning intentions had been, a squashed peanut butter sandwhich or a warm yogurt left in my lunchbag just didn't have what I needed. So I would swing into the Hannaford on the way and pick up a box of pop-tarts that I would devour before stepping into the house. I should note that pop-tarts were strictly forbidden chez my mother as they were the epitome of food that doesn't look like food, taste like food, or do any of the things for your body that food should. I haven't had a pop-tart in a few years now (since I got a box as a housewarming present in my last apartment 3 years ago). Last summer I did have a toaster pastry from Whole Foods, but I am pretty sure they used real fruit so it wasn't the same. I don't know why I have gotten off on this whole pop-tart thing. Probably because though I would not like to eat one now, I do love the fact that I used to love them. There were many times in high school when I had a certain hole that was completely filled, down to the crimped edges, by a pop-tart. And a perfect fit is something not to forget.
But I know what I was writing about swimming. The proof of my hours of pool-time when I graduated in 1998 was seven school swim records (I had also swam a faster time that an 8th record, but in a non-school meet and my coach did not let me swim it in school so another girl could have the record and yes I am still bitter). Only two of those records really meant anything to me, the 50 free and the 100 fly.
The 50 free had been set by a girl who was a senior when I was a freshman and I broke it the next year, and kept breaking it until the end. Shaving even a a couple hundredths of a second of was completely satisfying and I relished meets at our home pool where I was swiming directly underneath the wall-plaques with my personal best on them that, with any luck, the fix-it guy would have to come in and amend the next day. I think I started at around a 28 something and brought it down to a nearly even 26.
The 100 fly had been set by a woman named Cathy Luce 9 years before I started high school. Swimming under Cathy Luce's name was like a gauntlet. I knew I would break her 1:09 someday if I kept doing what I was doing but the wait sometimes came close to torture. I did break it I think at the end of my sophomore year at a home meet. My mother was in the stands sitting next to a woman who, when my race was over, got up to go saying, "Well, that's it then." Ms. Cathy Luce. By graduation I got in down to a 1:06. A girl named Stephanie Uecker broke that record last week at the conference championships. I couldn't find the time she swam it in, just that is must have been faster than mine. The 100 fly was the last of my records still standing. So any day now a fix-it guy is going to come in and unstick fourteen letters and a hyphen and then my name will be gone. I think this girl is a freshman or a sohpomore so she will see the numbers switched again and again over the next few years like a pricing game hosted by Bob Barker. It is a little under the skin that something that was so important to me is now completely erased. I do hope, however, that I was her Cathy Luce, that she stepped out of the lockerroom each practice and her eyes went to my name on the board and that when she finished a race she would look over her competitors' heads to 1:06.7 in red stickers. Good luck to her.

CaseQuest

everyone who lives in Seattle around february/March/April waxes up their metpahor to share how they feel about sunshine and spring after so much rain. So sorry if you have heard it all before. I am solidly from the camp that believes it actually doesn't rain all that much here. Defintely it rains here more than it does in other places, but I have never lived in those other places - in ascending order I have lived in Oregon (just as rainy), Providence (just as rainy plus realy cold), and Maine (so cold you can't tell if it's rainy or not since your eyelids are frozen shut and your skin is numb). I did not always think the Maine weather was as cold as I know it to be now, I only clued into that when I spent a winter week at home a year ago after a couple of years in the PNW. Turns out you lose your aptitude for artic survival when you change climates. I spent the week fearing that the dog was going to get us both hypothermiated with her insistance to poke around every snowriffle before finally blessing one with a midnight pee. This to say, compared to other places (and don't get me wrong other places, i love you too, with all my frozen heart) Seattle has pretty bearable weather that I find ideal for survival at 98.6 degrees with only a few layers of insulation (one of them preferably gore or some other tex). So when November rolls around and I start finding myself in class with wet pants and soggy shoes I tell myself, "this isn't really a rainy season, why it's only a few morning drops that will burn off by afternoon." It's not until february or so that I take a good long hard look at the sky and realize I am deluded and deluged. But then! These sunny days start happening, and then I think, "It's not really a sunny day, this weatehr is just hanging out until the next cloud swarm invades." But they keep happening, and suddenly entire weekends go by where I can spend the entire thing outside without anything tex at all. It is not until this point that I remember how fantastic the summer is here with 17 hours of fresh lovely sunlight and temps rarely over 90 (cause don't get me started on weather that is too hot), not much humidity, pretty green all the time, pretty perfect (one could even say maine-esque). It's like this big climatological surprise. So this year I thought about what it says about me that I have this cycle of convincing myself in the winter that the weather isn't all that stinky, evenutally giving in to the fact that we're all going to die of whatever you die of when you have an extreme vitamin D deficiency, pouting in disbelief on the first run of sunny days, and then grudgingly accepting the fact that the weather is going to be beautiful for the next 5 months. I need to change the ways in which I weild faith. Wouldn't it be better if from the get-go of those first sunny days I started thinking about how great everything was about to get instead of mistrusting it? And to take it a step further, why should I think like that in the winter, "hey, all this rain means that the best weather ever is just around the corner." Sounds like some very peppy preacher talking in my head, but what is wrong with a little pep?

Anyway, I spent some of the sun of last weekend inside finally completing the curtain for my TV. It makes an extreme difference and no one can convicne me otherwise. truth is, when you live in 400 sq. feet, the way you part your hair makes an extreme decorative statement, but it's my nanoworld and no one else has to live in it. I actually bought my sewing machine back in January but hadn't been able to put it through the paces since I was missing a bobbin case, which is like a little suit-of-armor for the bobbin, complete with eye-slit. When I started looking for a bobbin case, sewing stores told me they didn't sell these things and it should have come with the machine. Finally, i ended up back where I purchased the machine and bought me home a bobin case. The follwing weekend, follwoing the instructions in the manual, I opened up the hatch on the undersideof the machine where the bobbin lives, only to find a case already in place. So after three months of case questing, I possess more bobbin cases than will ever be of use.

And when I started thinking about my fruitful but pointless CaseQuest I immediately thought of CaveQuest, the first computer game I every played on our 1985 IBM PC Jr -- the purchase of which my mother painfully had researched in Consumers Digest and occured exactly 2 days before IBM took the computer off the market because of its extreme dumbness. CaveQuest was a mostly black screen, with a little 5-pixel red stick guy in one corner. This little guy was in a cave and relied on your directing the arrow keys to get him out without runing into the cursory dragons, trolls, witches, etc. that live in computerland caves To play, you hit an arrow key and either nothing happened so you hit another arrow key or a note popped up (in electring green of course) that you had run into something and you were now dead. A thrilling game really. For the whole family. When I moved out here I learned that a lot of west coasters of my generation had grown up playing a game called Oregon Trail instead of Cave Quest. i am quite sure Oregon Trail would not have been possible on our machine becasue IBM had only programmed in recognition of the origional 13 colonies, Additionally, Oregon Trail is no kind of game for a New England kid. I have never played, but it sounds like it is all about how proper planning will lead you to an amber waves of grain goiden destiny. Hard work and hope. Those of us forged in real winters, winters consisting of more then a few mopey months of rain that soon give way to 17 hours of daily sunshine, belive in the hard work, but what is the point of the hope part? CaveQuest is more Cotton Mather's game, hard work and inevitable damnation. Cause let's face it, unless you are prone to drowning in puddles, Seattle winters aren't going to do you in, but there are one million and one ways to die of frostbite (or at least it seems there might be). Considering all this, I'm not so hard on myself for my delayed development of faith.