bar mitz-vhat?

on the way home from a day of work, walking, and finally hanging out with lina again, i bought some stupid magazines to occupy myself until school starts, during the little bit of downtime i have when i'm not at work or at meetings or trying to see as many people as i can (i'm really happy, by the way, to be this busy, and i can't wait for classes to start, because i think i function so much better when i've got a million things going on). so, in these stupid magazines, there are a ton of advertisements with way airbrushed women in them. i really don't understand that, and for some reason, it really pisses me off. i mean, if the idea is to make the models look as little like real people as possible, advertisers should just use cartoons.

ok, i'm off my soapbox now.

it was so great to see lina again. i missed her, and i'm glad she found her future husband in russia this summer. i love being giddy for other people. i wouldn't call it living vicariously - it's a geniune intense happiness for my friends when things work out for them. and now that i'm officially insanely happy for her, all i have to do is to force her to show me pictures of this dude.

i called home today and talked to clay about how he's going on thursday to meet with a local rabbi to discuss his bar mitzvah. his recently-decided-upon, incredibly shocking bar mitzvah. we've always been good about having family gatherings on jewish holidays, and i know all the important prayers in hebrew (i know, i'm that amazing), and i definitely identify more with judaism than with, say, protestantism (with which my dad was raised), but it was pretty much an unspoken rule that that would be as far as we were expected to go. my parents never really emphasized religion as a basis for morality or good works - my brothers and i were always just expected to be good people, or risk severe parental disappointment. my mom experimented with different faiths, and was a baha'i for a while, which turned out to be a really interesting experience for sam and me. i have all these crazy, little-kid memories of being at baha'i feasts (which are not at all as foreign and strange as they sound - baha'is are concerned more with universal understanding and unity than anything else, if i remember correctly). neither side of my family has been very hardcore about the actual religious practices associated with the two religions that divide them. once, a few years ago on christmas, my dad's mother gathered everyone in her living room to form a giant prayer circle, and i was so surprised by it that i couldn't take it seriously. and every passover/rosh hashanah/yom kippor/hanukah with my grandparents and my mom's family, we just eat a lot of amazing foods, try sometimes to have a proper seder, and then slowly descend into loud conversational madness. i think i appreciate judaism so much because it has allowed me to be incredibly close to my mom's entire family; family and ancestry is valued really highly in the jewish community, and i love that. i guess that makes me one of the bajillion secular jews in the united states.

ok, so basically, i'm equally surprised and interested in my brother's decision to have a bar mitzvah, having never taken hebrew before. he has less than two years to get ready for the ceremony. i tried hebrew school for about two months when i was twelve, but finally discovered that i'd be way too scared to read and sing in the language for an extended period of time in front of everyone i knew. props to clay.

on a completely different note, i'm finding that this blog is severely limiting my in-person storytelling options. seeing as i'm not sure who has read this (and that group is probably very, very small), i'm not sure who has already read about my adventures. and because i write this thing almost exactly how i actually speak, i find myself telling stories using the exact same words i've used here. so, now when i talk to andy (who is the only person i know reads this all the time because he has nothing better to do) or anyone else for that matter, i worry that it's old news and they're tired of hearing about it. and to them, i say: deal.