Abandoning Eden

A jewish wedding

2012-02-18T12:42:00.006-05:00

Apparently there were some "Amazing" pictures of a segregated orthodox jewish wedding posted in a newspaper.

Well I can do that too, ha!

Here's some pictures from my first cousins's marriage. My cousins are misnagid/yeshivish orthodox jews, and my cousin married a hassidic jew. The marriage was arranged through a matchmaker- her parents and the parents of her groom talked beforehand and knew that the couple was a "good match" before they ever met. My cousin met with her husband in public places or in houses under parental supervision about once a week for a few hours for about 6 weeks. Then they got engaged and didn't see each other more than once or twice over the next 3 months, at which point they got married. They both grew up completely segregated from the other gender (Other than close family), under strict rules that dictated they never touch someone of the opposite gender. Then they are expected to go from never touching a man to having sex on their wedding night. After which they can't touch for a week because the woman presumably has bled, which renders her 'impure' and which means she must wait until she has been clean of blood for a week, at which point she will dip naked in a ritual bath in front of another woman in order to have sex again. Unless of course she is so unfortunate so as to get her period during those 7 days, at which point she has to wait until her period is over and then count another 7 days clean until she can touch her husband and sleep in the same bed again. If there's any questions about her "cleanliness" she must wipe herself with a cloth and give it to her husband who will send it to a rabbi to inspect it. Oh and of course she can't use birth control- at least not until she has had two boys and two girls.

There are the rules my family follows.

The bride walks down the aisle with her mother and father (my aunt and uncle) holding her arms and holding candles. The men sit on one side of the aisle and the women sit on the other side

The bride's mother and mother in law (Both wearing wigs to cover their hair) walk her around the groom 7 times under the chuppah, a cloth held by which symbolizes the home that they will build together. Why 7 times? Cause Jews are superstitious, that's why. I'm sure it symbolizes something. I always disliked the circling thing and fought against including it in my wedding when I was engaged to my ex fiance at age 21. This chuppah is one of two my mom has made using quilting techniques. She has this one which is white and more traditional for my more traditional cousins (who are getting married in these photos) and a more colorful one that has a tree of life and a dove and stuff that she designed for that wedding I never had back in the day. The groom is wearing a black knee length coat and black hat that his particular hassidic group wears, and under that he is wearing a kittel, a white garment that kind of looks like a bathrobe but made out of a thinner fancy shirt like material. He first wears this garment at his wedding, and later will wear this garment again at certain holidays each year, and one day he will be buried in it.

After the wedding ceremony there is a meal during which there is lots of courses and lots of dancing between courses. The men and women dance separately. This is the women's section.

Here is the men, dancing in a circle dance.

Blueberries!

2012-02-09T08:14:00.004-05:00

When we moved in we had a hedge of evergreen bushes along one of the fences in our backyard- one bush was already dead when we moved in and a second one died from being choked to death by the millions of morning glories that the prior owner thought would be a good idea to plant. SO meanwhile we have 2 gaping holes in our hedge. Good thing this is the neighbor we like, but our dogs tend to stand in the holes of the hedge and yowl, and the neighbor next to our neighbor has already complained about them a few times (like a jerkface).

So we decided to get some blueberry bushes to fill in the gaps! After doing some internet research I decided on two different varieties of "highbush" blueberries. Highbush blueberries grow to around 6 feet tall, as opposed to the lowbush varieties which only grows well in the north and 2-3 feet tall, and the rabbiteyes which (Unlike the name suggests) get like 12 feet tall. I got two different kinds, because when you have two different kinds they get cross-pollinated and somehow that leads to more blueberries (I think the blueberries know there's competition so they grow more blueberries to win the competition)

So on Monday our two bushes were delivered and I planted them on Tuesday morning. On Tuesday Barkley (or possibly max) dug one up and I had to replant it by moonlight, and so on Wednesday we got some nice little fences to put around them.

Supplies: two blueberry bushes, dirt for acid loving plants like blueberries, and a bucket full of peat moss that soaked in water overnight (if you don't presoak it it just sucks all the moisture out of the soil, which is not good for growing anything)

Two holes, each about a foot and a half deep and two feet wide. After digging out the top layer of dirt, I dug out the deeper layer of clay and moved that to the sinkhole. Then I refilled it with about 1/3rd native dirt, 1/3rd peat moss and 1/3rd acid dirt, and planted the bushes shallowly. I planted them a little further away from the fence, since blueberry bushes can spread up to 5 feet wide, and I don't want to have a bunch of blueberries falling on my neighbor's driveway all the time, that's just rude.

I think this one is the sharp blue

This one is the gulf coast one

After planting the bushes I pruned them by about a third to encourage growth. This year I'll remove all the blossoms so that the plant puts its energy into growing a good root system versus growing blueberries, but I should have a decent amount of blueberries next year! Next year I will probably have to get some sort of netting to keep the birds away from the blueberries, since they love to eat them right when they ripen. These bushes will grow to full height by around 6-7 years, and should continue producing fruit for the next 30 or so years. Once they are full grown, each bush should produce 10-15 pounds of blueberries each season.

Black dirt live again!

2012-02-05T15:07:00.006-05:00

It's been drizzling here the past few days, which made today the perfect day to go dig up the hard clay soil, as the water makes it diggable. Yesterday I bought a hoe, peat moss, lime, high acid dirt (for planting blueberries and potatoes), low acid dirt (for covering the asparagus), and compost. Today I dug out the area which will be a long raised bed garden on the south side of my house, and another area out front which will be an asparagus bed.

My ground is clay, so next week I'm going to mix in compost and pre-moistened peat moss (after soaking it in water overnight so it doesn't wick all the moisture out of the soil) to improve the drainage, as otherwise the clay will hold too much water and be too dense and drown my seeds when I plant them in a few months. This morning I started loosening up the top layer of soil with a hoe and mixed in lime (to lower the acidity) and the leaf compost that's been sitting around all winter in a corner of the garden.

My seed collection for this year! Not pictured but also will be growing/planting: asparagus, strawberries, blueberries, onions, garlic, potatoes, rosemary, oregano and possibly lemons (if my tree decides to bloom this year)

Also next weekend I have plans to plant 2 blueberry bushes in the backyard that will eventually grow to be around 6 feet tall. And I'll be starting bell pepper and eggplant seeds indoors. And a few weeks later the lettuce and peas and onions will be going in the ground and i'll be starting basil seeds, and a few weeks after THAT will be carrots, and after that the frost season will be over and it'll totally be on!

Now I'm making about 2 gallons of chicken soup for our "stay home, be antisocial and watch the superbowl while eating tortellini soup" fest tonight (and lots of extra to freeze).

What being female meant to me at age 19

2012-01-20T14:04:00.012-05:00

A few months ago I wrote this email:

Hi Professor H! You probably don't remember me, but I took a few classes with you back in 2001 or something like that. :) Your classes changed my life- I remember you had us do an assignment reflecting on how gender had affected our lives, which was the first time I had ever reflected on such things. That assignment was a huge turning point for me. Up until your classes I had been planning on being a housewife after graduation (like every other women in my family- they all go to college and then become housewives/stay at home moms). After your classes (and as a result of that assignment) I ultimately ended up minoring in Women's studies in college and then going on to a PhD in Sociology specializing in gender and the family. I finished my PhD last year, and I'm now an assistant professor of sociology at X university.

I thought I should let you know how much influence you've had on my life. Thanks so much for all you have done for me!
AE

Since I wrote that essay 10 years and about 8 computers ago, I thought it was lost forever. But yesterday I was going through my old notes from this class (while working on lesson planning) and I found a rough draft of the essay I had written in my notebook! I had forgotten that back when I was in college and commuting back and forth to my parents for 4 hours a day, I used to write rough drafts of essays in my notebook on the train, and then type it into a computer later.

So this is what 19 year old baby feminist me had to say about being female, transcribed word for word, horrible grammar and potential factual errors included. I'm also going to include some things I crossed out in this draft that I can still read, cause I think they are interesting in terms of my own self-censorship:

What being female means to me

In order to apply to a private jewish high school, one must take a standardized test called the BJE's. Like the SATs, the BJEs included sections on math and english, however the BJEs additionally had several sections testing biblical knowledge. I remember being so relieved in 8th grade that I was female- for boys who take the BJEs, an additional section was present, testing talmud knowledge. I was happy, because I did not have to study this extra subject. I wasn't expected to know it. I was not held to as high a standard as the boys were. I was not tested on the talmud, because unlike the boys in my class, I was not going to be learning the talmud in high school. This was a given. It was a given to the extent that standardized tests for young jewish students standardly left out an entire section for the female test-takers. If I had gone to a co-educational Jewish high school, the girls and boys would be separated every day while the boys learned talmud and the girls learned something easier.

In my all female high school, we were permitted to learn talmud for one year because "when we grow up and become mothers, we need to be able to teach our sons talmud on the elementary level." The easier biblical subjects that replaced talmud in our curriculum were limited to the more "useful" subjects for women - such as the jewish laws pertaining to cooking, and other subjects were applied towards our futures as housewifes - we learned about cooking in physics, and child care in psychology.

Growing up as a jewish female I have constantly ~~been faced with this degradation of women in all aspects of life, not only religious~~ felt my options were limited.

Being female means I am constantly experiencing emotional tension. On one hand I fully expect anyone I choose to live with to do his or her equal share of work, yet on the other hand I resent my mother for not teaching me how to cook, for how can I be a good wife if I can't cook? I want to defy the culturally controlled image of women as thin and yet I can't help choosing the less tasty but lower in fat item in the vending machine. I don't want to promote cultural differences between men and women but I want to wear the tighter shirts, and shave my legs, and carry a pocketbook, and paint my nails, and wear makeup, and tweeze my eyebrows, and have long hair. So every time I shave, or tweeze, or put on make-up, I feel guilt, but I ~~feel like I look too bad to leave my house if I don't~~ keep doing it.

Most of the women in my family have been housewifes- my mother, her mother, her sister, my dad's sister. I have one aunt who is a lawyer (and feminist) and who did not stay home to raise her child. She is looked down upon by my family for having an outsider replace her "role" as mother. When I was in high school I assumed I would be supported by my husband, and did not see the point of getting an education. Yet if I asked my parents if I could skip out on college, they laughed at me like I was joking, and said I would need college to get a good job. Why would I need a good job? So I wouldn't have to be dependent on a husband. When I got to college, and became a feminist, I told my father that if I did get married and have children, I would be returning to work as soon as I was up to it. My father told me that I would have to stay home and watch any child I had until they were old enough to go to school. When I questioned this, he explained to me that as the person who had carried a child to term, it was my responsibility to watch it. He seemed to have forgotten that it takes two people to make a baby.

Since I am female, I am constantly being told what I can't do. In kindergarten, I wanted to race with the boys on the playground, but my teacher forbade me because "it wasn't ladylike." In high school my peers told me that I shouldn't listen to metal, because that was "boy's music." I fooled around with a guy or two and my friend started calling me a skank. This is my friend who got laid by a girl whose name he didn't know until afterwords, when she gave him her number. My teachers told me I couldn't wear pants because that was men's clothing. ~~Is it any surprise that I've wished I was male since I was little?~~

I recently spoke with a friend who was married last December. When I asked what she was doing with her life, she answered she was waiting for a baby. She is 19. For most of my childhood friends, this is the norm. I am the exception.

I am the exception. Although I am sure my appearance and experiences are not atypical, I can't help but feel that I am somehow different than other women. I am a feminist, yet I find the majority of my close friends are men. ~~I emphasize with men. The stereotypes that are applied to women do not apply to me.~~

It cuts off there. Reading what I cut out there towards the end makes me realize that much of what I had problems with in the ortho-jewish community is that I wanted to have more of the "male" roles, and this was just not possible in the ortho-jewish community. But out here in the real world, I can have a leadership position that commands respect (kinda like a rabbi!) and my behavior definitely falls within the normal range of behavior for women. I wonder if I would have become non-religious if I was a man and had those roles available to me?

Planting food, 2012

2012-01-15T17:29:00.005-05:00

Now that I've been blogging more than 4 years I've decided it's time I have an actual blog design..so with my photo and my husband's photoshopping skills, new banner has now been designed!

It's winter, which means it's time to hibernate inside and plan next year's garden! I'm greatly expanding my veggie garden for this year, moving it to the south (vs. the north) side of my house, where last Fall I built a little stone wall less than a foot high leaving about 3 feet of dirt between the wall and the house that I will soon dig out and amend with new dirt. Also this spring I plan on doing some landscaping stuff that is non-veggie related. Today I ordered a bunch of seeds + a bunch of plants which will be shipped to me later in the spring when it's actually time to plant things.

Already planted:
A ton of garlic. Due to living in the freaking south and what I'm told is fairly normal for winter, the garlic has all sprouted already because it's been in the 50s and 60s (and even 70s some days) all winter long. Hopefully that won't be bad for it.
Oregano and rosemary grows perennially here so is still around from last year. My strawberry plant from last year sent out some runners which I expect will grow more strawberries next year

Seeds ordered:
Mesclun lettuce seed mix
basil seeds
thyme seeds
(still have bell pepper, eggplant, zucchini, snap peas, cilantro and dill seeds from last year which will be planting again).

Corn-heirloom golden cross bantam seeds
Green beans- heirloom kentucky wonder bean (pole bean) seeds
Jack o' lantern pumpkin seeds

These last 3 are the "three sisters" which are 3 crops traditionally grown together by Native Americans. The corn supports the climbing beans, the beans add nitrogen to the soil which helps feed the corn, and the squash creeps along the floor and keeps the ground free of weeds. I'm going to plant these in the backyard because we're not going to eat the pumpkins (using them as jack o' lanterns) and the beans and corn grows high enough that the dogs can't pee on them.

I might also grow some pickling cucumbers to make pickles. I hate cucumbers but I love pickles. I haven't decided yet- still plenty of time!

I also got plants that will be delivered later on in the spring:
Jersey Knight asparagus (10 crowns, to be planted in the front yard and not harvested for 2 years- the plan is to remove a dead bush on the side of the house, move the hostas in the front yard to where the dead bush is which is a shady areas, and plant the asparagus where the hostas are in the front yard where they will turn into pretty fern-like bushes every summer after harvest)
Red onion "Sets"
red seed potatoes

A japanese red beauty painted fern (to be planted on the sinkhole)
Honeysuckle major wheeler (a red flower honeysuckle vine to be planted on the trellis on the north side of the house where I grew peas last year)

2 blueberry bushes (highbush- which grow to about 5-6 feet tall- gulf coast and sharblue varieties) to plant along the backyard fence where two of the evergreen bushes died leaving a gap that my dog (Max) likes to sit in and howl at the neighbors from.

The crape myrtle I planted last year did very well over the summer- the flowers were pink, not purple, but the instructions said they are lighter colored when the plant is younger, and it's now only about a year or two old. I'm going to prune it around February, since the flowers grow in clusters on the end of each branch, and every branch you cut in February grows 2 new branches over the year- if you prune it back every year, you get a lot more blooms.

My meyer lemon tree (which I'm growing in a container which lives indoors in the winter and outdoors in the summer) has grown about 4 branches, but so far no flowers or lemons.

Five years

2012-01-12T10:52:00.002-05:00

Five years ago today I met my awesome husband B. Happy anniversary to us! :)

Parents visited!

2012-01-02T08:38:00.003-05:00

So much cleaning for just a few hours of visiting...my arms still ache from all the cleaning (mostly from using the leaf blower).

Parents arrived at around 5pm and stayed until around 9pm. We gave them a tour of our house and my mom complimented the bathroom tiles + the moldings and baseboards + the wood floors + some of our flowers outside (which my mom informed me are narcissus and not mutant daffodils like I thought. Except wait- the internet informs me that daffodils are another name for narcissus so I guess we were both right). And she didn't criticize anything! It was nice. :)

After we showed them around the house we sat in the living room and chatted for a few hours. My mom bought a kosher chocolate cake for us which we all ate some of (using paper plates and plastic utensils left over from our wedding, weirdly). My mom wanted to see our wedding painting which my brother had told her about, and looked at it for a long time. We talked about lots of various things like my job, my brother, my dad's surgery, etc. My mom was scared by our dogs and they didn't help by trying to jump all over my parents all the time.

Around 8pm I offered to take them on a small tour of our city, but they only had one open seat in their car (the rest was filled with luggage because they were just on vacation) so we left B behind at home and I sat in their car and directed them around town and showed them our two blocks of downtown + the university I work at. Then they drove me home and we stood outside talked for like another half hour. My parents ended by telling me I should call them more and I said they should call me more too and my dad suggested we make some kind of appointment for talking on the phone the way my grandparents always called my dad every Sunday at 10am (when they were still alive). So I said I'll think about it, mostly because I don't wan to commit to some kind of weekly phone call.

But all in all it went very well. My dad said as we were standing outside that I seem like I'm very happy living here. Unlike at my PhD graduation, my mom addressed B directly and they actually talked to each other. B was pretty quiet most of the night, but I think that's cause me and my parents talk on top of each other and interrupt each other all the time (which I think might be a jewish cultural thing), and he later was like "the only time I could get any word in edgewise was when I was interrupting you." ha.

Happy new year everyone! Now it's time to get back to the grind...classes start a week from today and I'm teaching a new one this semester, and since my class prep schedule is to prep each class the week before I teach it, and since I also have to do a whole lot of other things this week for class like scan readings into blackboard, set up blackboard for 3 classes, reserve movies and workshop speakers and print up my syllabi, that means my semester basically starts today. Wonderfully, I also didn't finish everything I needed to finish over winter break, so this week I'll also be trying to finish 2 papers that need to be submitted to a publisher and a conference (they are both mostly done but both need 1/2-1 day of work to be really done), and working on an encyclopedia entry I agreed to write that's due in less than 3 weeks and that I haven't started yet...oh plus there's the grant proposal due at the end of the month that I haven't started yet either. And then after that I have two conference presentations in March and one in June to prepare for, a thesis proposal defense + later this semester a thesis defense that I'm the chair of, a research assistant to supervise on another research project, and of course that new class to prep which will be around all semester.

It's going to be a crazy semester, so I probably won't be posting much new content over here.

preparing for parents to visit

2011-12-31T08:33:00.002-05:00

Been cleaning like a cleaning fool..I guess we only "deep clean" when someone's parents are coming, cause this is the first deep clean since May when my in-laws came to visit. About twice a year of scrubbing soap scum off showers and scrubbing down the baseboards and washing windows seems about right to me.

My mom's house was always meticulously clean, which I didn't enjoy much growing up (I prefer a house that looks lived in) but which has ramped up my anxiety re: her seeing my house for the first time. Especially since she always makes comments that makes it seem like I'm filthy. Actually the first of 2 times she came to visit me when I lived in Philly, she brought a bunch of cleaning supplies like she expected me to be living in filth. Which I'm not! It's funny, my mom always used to talk about how her cooking was never good enough for her mother- I feel the same way about cleaning and her. Can't really feel that way about cooking since she would never eat anything I cooked anyway! :)

I took down the christmas tree and we're probably going to take down the lights today. I'm not going to take the christmas cards down off my refrigerator though- christmas is over so it's reasonable to take down the tree and the lights even though we would probably leave them up a few more days if my parent's weren't coming to visit, but I like those cards, and if they have a problem with that then maybe they should send me a chanukah card and I can put those up too (we got none of those, but several christmas/holiday cards from B's family and my coworkers).

We are going to get some fruits and entenmenns cookies and bottles of water (we also have canned soda) for snacks when they get here. There's not a whole lot of kosher food where we live, so we don't have many other options.

I wrote back to my dad's email asking if they were going to stay overnight here in our guest room, which we invited them to do about 6 times and he never responded to before, and he wrote back that they booked a hotel in a small city about 45 minutes north of here so they can "get an early start on their drive home the next day." (They are visiting me on their way back to NJ from Florida). Trying to be happy they are coming at all and not focus on these bullshit hurtful excuses to not spend more than an hour or two with me (at my PhD graduation- the first and only time they have met my husband so far- they also booked a flight later that day so they *had* to leave immediately after the graduation ceremony and couldn't stick around at all). Small steps, right? At least they are coming, that is huge, for them to actually spend the night would be insanely huge.

Maybe I'll just blame this on my mom's fear of dogs...I mean my in-laws didn't stay at our house either when they visited cause my MIL is allergic to cats. It's not such a big deal...

Well, it's a new year tomorrow and maybe this is the start of a new relationship. Never in a million years would I have expected my mom to come visit me here- I thought my dad would come eventually, but for my mom to be coming to visit is huge. I hope she thinks my house is as awesome as I think it is. :) More importantly, I hope she sees when visiting that my life isn't bizzarely different from hers- no alters to satan, no crosses hanging on the wall, just a normal looking house. I think part of the problem is she thinks I live a crazy different life and that she can't relate to me, and I hope she see's that other than the dietary restrictions and not using electricity or driving once a week (On her part not mine), our lives are pretty much the same.

AhhhH!

2011-12-29T19:57:00.000-05:00

Hi Abandoning Eden,

Depending on various factors, our tentative plan is to come by and visit late Sunday afternoon. Probably around 6 pm. As we travel, we'll call with more accurate updates and timeframes.

Looking forward.
Abba

Parental Visit and a Mezuzah

2011-12-12T07:30:00.005-05:00

Talked to my dad on Saturday night about him and my mom visiting. They are probably driving down to Florida on Christmas, so they can't visit on the way down (since we will be in the midwest visiting my in-laws on Christmas) but I suggested they come visit on the way back up, which they probably will. So now they might visit on New Years Eve or the day after. Not sure if they will be staying overnight here or not- I invited them to, and told them I could find kosher food and sealed plates and utensils for them and whatnot, and my dad responded he would "take that under advisement" which I guess means see what my mom wants to do. He mentioned something about my mom wanting to check out our new house and I joked about how I'm cleaning frantically for their visit.

One weird note of our conversation- my dad asked if he could bring us a mezuzah as a house warming present. For non-jewish readers, a mezuzah is this little box (usually fancy) that has some torah passages in a scroll rolled up inside, and jewish people put this up on the doorway on the entrance to their house (very religious jews like my parents put it up in every doorway IN their house too). Here's a picture of one I found on the internet:

It's basically supposed to protect your house from bad luck and/or the "evil eye" (Ayin harah) jewish people worry about, and when a family has a run of bad luck, people are all like "Check your mezuzahs" to make sure a word isn't mispelled in the scroll. Cause, god gets pissed when you misspell words in your magical door scroll and causes everyone in your house to die and break their legs and have miscarriages and get fired from their jobs and shit. God is pretty much a douche like that.

Anyways my dad is like "Can I bring you a mezuzah, would that be pushing my religion on you." And I was basically like "umm, no, we dont really want a mezuzah and yeah that's kinda pushing religion." and my dad was like "well I'll have to think of something else instead."

So one sour note to our conversation. There's a reason I've been keeping my distance from my parents for several years, and it wasn't just because they disapproved of me and didn't come to my wedding. It's cause of stuff like this. I want to talk to my parents, sure. About neutral things that don't involve religion. I don't want them bringing me religious artifacts to stick on my front door, or trying to kiruv me, or asking me if I'm doing anything for jewish holidays, or trying to convince me to circumcise my future children, or anything involving religion. It's like one massive jewish guilt trip. Plus it's just plain awkward to be like "No, please don't bring me an expensive box of scrolls I don't believe were written by god to protect me from bad luck I don't believe exists." In not so many words.

It just worries me that now that me and my parents are getting a little closer after many years, the first thing they do is suggest some more religion.

I told this to B and at first he was like "sure they can bring whatever mezuzah they want" before I explained to him what a mezuzah actually is and how this would involve holes in our doorway and magical torah scrolls. I kinda think he would agree to it anyway to make my parents happy. He doesn't seem to think it's a big deal and was like "well you know one of the paintings we have has a bunch of religious symbols on it, how would this be any different?"

It's funny, on thanksgiving right after talking to my parents I was like "if my parents come we should take down the Christmas tree before they get here, cause that would be pretty shocking for them to see for their first visit to our house." And B was all "NO we can't change our house just for them!" Now a few weeks later, looking more and more like they ARE visiting, we still haven't actually put up our tree (mostly out of lazyness since it's up in the attic and we're not even going to be home for christmas) and B said something this weekend about how we definitely can't have the tree up when my parent's come here, at least not for the FIRST visit! :) And he's agreeing to mezuzahs without even knowing what they are... :) We agreed if my parents ask him anything when they are here and he doesn't understand what they are saying he should look to me first and not agree to anything. This will only be the second time B meets my parents- the first was at my PhD graduation in May 2010.

A thanksgiving miracle

2011-11-24T15:18:00.004-05:00

Last night I was super sad about the fact that I'm not invited to my parents for thanksgiving. For years thanksgiving was always the one holiday I spent with my parents every year, since its the only holiday we both celebrate. When I was in grad school I went home every thanksgiving until I moved in with my husband in 2008 and felt I couldn't go to holidays at my parents if he wasn't invited. Since then we've been going to my in laws instead.

So today I called my dad and we ended up talking about that email exchange, which I ended up never writing back to. I told him it wasn't that the e-mail itself was hurtful, but that it was a reminder that we weren't invited for thanksgiving which was hurtful ( the email exchange was about my cousins wedding, which was last night. Since we wouldn't have had anywhere to go for turkey day, we went to my in laws and couldn't go to the wedding). He said If thats what was bothering me i should call my mom cause she is the reason were not invited. I was all "but she said if I married B. I should never call her again so I dont want to call her if she won't take my call." And he said that she said that because she was angry I got engaged but that sometimes people don't mean what they say when they are angry and I should call her if I felt up to it.

Anyway long story short I called my mom for the first time since 2008, and we ended
up talking for like an hour- not about religion or anything but just catching up, and I talked about my husband and gardening and school and about going to a grateful dead cover show with my provost, and it was just normal. It's a thanksgiving miracle! Oh and they might possibly visit us at the end of december if it works out with their travel plans! Trying not to get my hopes up too much for a visit in less than a month, but its a huge step forward.

I also called my grandmother and talked to her for a bit.

Response

2011-11-09T14:37:00.002-05:00

Hi Abandoning Eden,

Perhaps we had a misunderstanding. I sent the info about the wedding because you two are part of the family, not to make you feel bad. Just the opposite.

Thanks for the invitation.

Abba

I don't even know what to do with this response. On the one hand, yay he just said B is part of his family!!!! That's the first time that ever happened!

On the other hand, well, I still have only talked to my mom once in the last year. And my dad is married to my mom and all. So I feel like this response is just a way of avoiding talking about our issues in the hopes they will go away. Which they clearly arn't.

Maybe I should be emailing my mom, not my dad. But I don't know. I feel like emailing her would be like begging to be let back in the family. The last time we had a *real* conversation was in November 2008, when she told me if I wanted to talk to her I can never mention B and I told her if that's the case than I can't call her anymore. That was the last time I called her. Then she sent me that nasty email in early 2009 about how if I marry B I can't have a relationship with her and I responded with an equally nasty email which she told my dad she thought was an "overreaction" (what's the appropriate reaction to your mom telling you if you get married to someone you love you can never talk to her again?). Since then we've only spoken 5 times- twice at family weddings (both times very awkwardly and not very much) once at my graduation (they came for the ceremony and left immediately afterward so I didn't talk to her much then since most of the ceremony I was busy ceremonizing), once when my grandfather died last year and I called my dad and she picked up the phone, and once this past April when I called my dad back from his twice-a-year phone call on erev pesach (and she got off the phone within two minutes).

So anyway, with all that, I feel like emailing her would be like I am "apologizing" for getting married. Which I most definitely am not. And I don't want to beg to be let into the family.

Plus, there's this other thing- I always end up feeling bad about myself when I talk to my mom. Or at least I did in the past (it's been so long I can hardly remember, ha!). When my mom disowned me, I didn't make a big deal about trying to change her mind and was more like "WELL FUCK YOU TOO" (in not so many words). And that was partially because for years we had a contentious relationship- pretty much ever since I decided to go to grad school in college.

And in 3 years of not talking to her, I feel great! It's like my self confidence has improved 1000%. And I think some of that is..well, when I did talk to her she was always talking about my weight and how I should diet more, and always completely in denial about me not being religious and saying things like "where are you going for shabbas?" And she never wanted to talk about anything other than religion or how well I was doing at school. Even before B- for instance before I moved down south to a musical wasteland, I used to go to concerts almost every weekend. And she never wanted to hear about that because she disapproved of me going to concerts (since it's not a torah lifestyle type thing). And having someone a) always talking about how I need to go on a diet b) acts like my life choices don't even exist, and is so disapproving of my lifestyle she pretends like I'm living a different one she would approve of and c) making me feel like I must not talk about any aspect of my life other than school/going to the gym..well all these things is not good for ye olde self esteem.

So I don't know if I'm ready to reach out to my mom and start having a relationship with her again. I do miss having a mom. But as someone said in a comment in my last post- I don't miss my parents as THEY are, I miss having parents I wish I could have. My mom was at one point one of those parents- we were very close until I became openly not religious. But based on evidence thus far, she's not going to be that mom that I want, ever again. Then again, we basically haven't talked in 3 years, so maybe she's changed? Probably not though.

Meanwhile, things ARE still awkward with my dad, or at least that's how it seems to me. He never visits, he sort of giggles whenever he says anything about B, and he's only met B once- at my graduation- for about an hour. That's not normal, right?

And while he's thanking me for the invitation, he's not taking me up on it either.

So what do I do, do I write back and say basically what I just said here minus the part about my feelings about my mom (and also that it's not about the wedding invitation in particular, it's about the general awkwardness of everything always and I want to get past that), do I just count this as a victory and leave it at that and move on with my life pretending to have a normal relationship with my dad while continuing to not openly speak about this underlying awkwardness and oh, the fact that I never talk to my mom? Do I email my mom and attempt to "make up" with her, perhaps while simultaneously addressing some other long standing issues (like that this won't work if she continues being in complete denial about me and my life- but in a nicer way of saying it)?

Reaching out

2011-11-02T17:29:00.005-04:00

It's been years since the last time I tried, so why not?

Got this email from my dad a few days ago about my second cousin's wedding:

Hi Abandoning Eden,

How's it going?

I wanted to keep you in the loop. D_, Cousin S_'s son, has planned a wedding to A_ the night before Thanksgiving day. The invitation sent to us was to Mom and me "and family." (I'm not sure if that includes you or not.) My sister, Aunt T, is writing me that she is planning to fly in from Israel to attend this wedding. She will be staying for 2 weeks.

All the best,
Abba

Just sent this reply:

Hi Abba,

I'm sure when S_ sent an invite to you and "family" she included me. Because I AM part of your family! And so is B, whether you want to admit it or not. :) (if your daughter and son in law aren't included in "and family" then who is your family?). S_ and D_ probably know about me being married, since we're facebook friends and all.

But unfortunately we already have plans to visit my in-laws for Thanksgiving. Plus what would we do for Thanksgiving the next day? Unless you're inviting B and I over for Thanksgiving. :)

Speaking of which, when are we going to get over all this awkwardness about B already? Yeah I get it, you didn't condone my decision to marry B, but it's done, we're married, so what, now we're just going to talk like twice a year for the rest of our lives and never see each other again? And mom's never going to talk to me again? What's the point of that exactly? I mean I'm just as stubborn as you and mom are, and I'm sure we can both keep up this stand-off indefinitely, but it seems kind of silly. I'm never going to convince you that religion is wrong and you're never going to convince me that religion is right, and we can't travel back in time so that you come to my wedding, so why don't we just accept that we made different choices in life and that's ok? Can't we get along and have a normal relationship despite our different religious beliefs, so that you won't have to wonder whether your daughter is part of your family or not?

You should come visit us sometime, you and mom have an open invitation.

-Abandoning Eden

I predict my dad will reply with some sort of lecture about how important their religion is and they can't condone my decisions blah blah blah. But maybe he'll surprise me.

What do my mom and the Westboro Baptist Chuch have in common?

2011-10-05T15:40:00.005-04:00

Hint: Watch around the 5:20 mark

I say my mom and not my parents, because I've actually been talking to my dad on a fairly regular basis lately via email (I have not talked to my mother since erev pesach in April, when I called my dad back and she picked up his cell phone and talked to me for all of 30 seconds. Before that the last time I talked to her was last year October when my grandfather died and she again picked up my dad's cell phone.)

During Hurricane Irene me and my dad seemed to have gotten back in touch, as he commiserated over his destroyed basement/breakaway shul (message from god?). While emailing back and forth several times I asked him about a few things that have been bugging me that only a parent can know..like for his perspective on what happened when I was in first grade and was hit by a teacher in school, which I've been thinking about lately. Maybe I'll write a post about that at some point.

He called me on erev rosh hashana for one of his 3 annual phone calls (erev rosh hashana, erev pesach and my birthday) and I managed to steer the conversation entirely clear of religion until the very last minute when he had to go. He called me between appointments- which he always does, so there's always a limit on our convo time, boo. But we actually talked almost 25 minutes last week on the phone.

Anyway at the very end of the convo he told me that "Well we wish you AND B a gmar chasima tova" (and he emphasized the "AND B"). I told him he should call me sometime when it's not erev pesach or rosh hashana or my birthday.

Progress? Some weird bizzaro progress, in which my dad acknowledges B but still tries to push his religion on both me AND him now? Who knows?

Meanwhile since we are back in touch a bit, and my department is having a "better know your professor" contest which includes baby pictures of us, I was able to get my dad to send me quite a few pictures of my childhood via email. So yay!

Me circa 1985

Kreplach!

2011-09-19T10:50:00.003-04:00

Every Fall I get nostalgic for Jewish food as soon as the weather turns. I think it's because there are SO many jewish holidays right at the beginning of the Fall, so I associate the Fall with Jewish greasy foods. And as I've said before, I'm a food jew- I have no interest in celebrating jewish holidays per se, but I LOVE some traditional jewish foods, and occasionally end up eating them around that holiday season. Especially around Rosh Hashana season. Also in the Fall I get the hankering to cook a lot of soup and other foods and freeze them. I think this might be an evolutionary instinct to hoard food for the winter or something.

Last Fall I attempted to make cholent and vegetarian kishke. I used my mom's recipe for cholent and a recipe I found on imamother.com for the kishke. The Cholent turned out..well, just like my mom makes it, terrible. The Kishka was even worse. I had one bowl of cholent and kishka and the rest ended up in the trash.

It's been getting colder the past few weeks, and I've been getting that familiar hankering for jewish food. So this year I decided to try to make Kreplach soup. My mother never made kreplach at home, but every time we went to visit my grandparents in Florida growing up (so about once a year) we had kreplach soup. Kreplach is basically jewish wontons or jewish ravioli- the meat is flavored differently than wontons or ravioli, but essentially it's a bit of meat wrapped in dough. When my Savta (grandmother) died in 2007 some people tried to look around her house for recipes, but if she had any written down it was in polish (which no one else could read) or she just never wrote down her recipes, because we couldn't find any. So I thought her kreplach recipe (and her amazing rugaluch recipe) was basically gone forever.

But I found a kreplach recipe online so this weekend I decided to make them! A few weeks ago we had dinner with some other OTDers who live near us, and I mentioned my kreplach hankering, and one of them mentioned they used wonton skins instead of making their own dough. Which sounded genius to me, cause the dough making part seemed like the hardest part of kreplach.

So on saturday morning, B and I went and found a local asian grocery store, and got a whole bunch of wonton skins (and also asian candy and noodles and lots of meat that was mysteriously $1-$2 cheaper than the meat they sell at the regular grocery store, and a lot better looking).

And then I made some kreplach!

Last weekend I had made a huge pot of chicken soup using In The Pink's Recipe and froze about 2 gallons of chicken broth:

Soup right after it went in the pot

Soup after cooking a while

This week I made about 100 kreplach, froze most of them (you freeze them uncooked on a flat tray and then take them off the flat tray when they are frozen to put in ziplock bags) using the epicurious beef recipe and wonton skins.

Uncooked Kreplach, some shaped into wontons

Then we took about 8 of the kreplach and boiled it (gently) in the chicken broth from last week for about 10 minutes

I would have taken a picture of kreplach in a bowl of soup, but I ate it too quickly.

Definitely a winning recipe, and so happy I have around 80 kreplach still in the freezer! They taste almost exactly like my grandmother's, and it was awesome to have authentic tasting kreplach for the first time in probably over a decade!

Next year (or possibly even later this Fall) maybe I'll make yerushalmi kugel. I've tried to make it before, but it just wasn't greasy enough.

9/11/01

2011-09-11T09:18:00.005-04:00

Ten years ago today my dad woke me up to say "I don't think you're going in to school today, a plane just hit the world trade center." I was living at home and commuting into college (this was my sophomore year), and normally I would be on a subway in Manhattan when the planes had hit, but that semester I didn't have a Tuesday class until 4pm so I had been taking the later train in and was still asleep.

At the time we had no idea what was going on- we figured it had been an accident until a bit later when the second plane hit. I spent the day on the couch watching TV- channel 2, CBS, the one channel that worked. My parents didn't have cable, and every channel except CBS had been broadcasting from the top of the World Trade Center (CBS broadcasted from the Empire State Building). The whole thing was one of the most surreal things I have ever seen. My little brother who was an EMT went off to the the triage center they created at Liberty State Park in NJ, where they were going to send survivors from lower Manhattan by boat. Only he told us very few people were coming over- only a few people for smoke inhalation. He also passed on rumors of boats full of dead bodies floating around in the Hudson River, and said his impression was that everyone had either died or was pretty much ok, so there wasn't all that much he could do.

Later that night my ex fiance and I went to his office building in northern NJ, which was a high rise building that had a great view of the NYC skyline. From there we saw the huge cloud of smoke and ash and people that was rising up into the air from lower Manhattan.

That semester was a nightmare commuting into NYC every day. NYers were on edge, and some bright individuals thought it would be funny to throw bags of flour down subway station escalators and yell "Anthrax!" when all the anthrax scares happened a little while later. At least four or five times I had to take an alternative subway route to get to classes cause this anthrax BS had shut the Times Square station down, and I would have to walk across town to catch the 6 train- I was constantly late to my first class of the day that semester. Once a plane went down in queens about a month later and I arrived at the path train to find every turnstile was red (meaning no entry allowed)- Manhattan had been shut down.

A couple of students and alumni from my college died in the attacks. We had big bulletin boards put up in the hallways where people could share their thoughts about 9/11. My professors held support groups during class. All sorts of horrible stories started emerging from friends, and friends of friends...I personally didn't know anyone who died, but I knew people who were in the building when the plane hit, including my dad's friend who was in an elevator that thankfully just went down to the bottom floor and opened up, so he was able to escape. My grandfather worked in the WTC neighborhood and his office windows were blown out, and he had to walk across the Brooklyn bridge on foot. My aunt knew someone whose husband called her from the stairs down, but never made it out of the building. Everyone was telling stories after 9/11, and they were all one of two kinds- either of a miraculous escape, or of a phone call from someone who died in the towers, right before they died.

The armory next door to my school that had always been used for conventions and expos now started being used as an armory again. Soldiers with machine guns were everywhere, and big tanks started rolling up and down the street outside my college. They blocked off part of the street next to my college so they would have a clear path for all the military vehicles coming in.

People started using 9/11 for politics. Giuliani, who everyone in NYC hated before 9/11, suddenly was forgiven for being an asshole who tried to shut down all the gay bars. I hated the way everyone started using 9/11 for political gain and the way our civil rights were suddenly up for question and everyone was just going along with it cause they were afraid. There was some incidents on campus involving anti-Muslim graffiti on the signs of the campus Muslim group. I had my first ever public speaking experience (Since my Bat Mitzvah) when a staff person at my school who overheard me ranting to a friend asked me to be a student members on a school discussion panel about "9/11 and democracy." Until 9/11 the only part of the newspaper I read was the NYTimes style section on Sundays and the comics and crossword section of the Bergen record, but after 9/11 I became an obsessive news reader, which I still am.

All politics aside, what I remember most about 9/11 is not anything that happened on 9/11 itself, although I will never forget what it was like watching the news when that first tower came down. But what I remember most is the missing persons signs.

When I commuted into NYC my first two years of college, I took the path train, which is a train that crosses over from the NJ central train station to NYC. The path train used to have two routes that left from the same station. One was the route that I took, that went to midtown. The other train was one that had it's final stop under the world trade center.

So after 9/11 there were hundreds and hundreds of missing persons signs put up in the path train station, of the people who were killed in 9/11. No one would take the signs down, so for months every morning while I would wait for the train there was nothing to do but read hundreds of missing persons signs and stare at the pictures of these people. People were pictured with their kids, with their partners, with their pets, smiling at christmas and at birthdays, and there was always a desperate message attached to the sign with the names and phone numbers of the surviving relatives. And we all knew that every one of these people were dead. These were people who I had brushed shoulders with in that train station while we all commuted into the city.

That's what has always stuck with me the most. The people. For all this had been used by various douchebag politicians for various horrible political gains, to erode our rights, to try to get elected in future presidential elections (*Coughgiulianigough*) in the end, this was about the death of thousands of people, people who had kids and partners and pets and birthdays and who had other people who cared enough about them to go put up missing persons signs in the train stations where they used to commute to work, even though they knew their loved one was probably dead. Let's never forget that.

How I went OTD and left the Jewish Community for good: Part 6

2011-09-01T09:00:00.004-04:00

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5

My second year of grad school I managed to win a really big national multi-year fellowship that paid a significantly higher stipend (still not anything great, but a several thousand dollar raise). I moved on up to a 2 bedroom apartment in a converted rowhouse that was mostly rented by grad students, still in the not-too-great part of the city, but at least pretty big compared to the 20 by 14 space I was living in previously. Even if it was dark as a cave in most of the house (other than the sun porch) cause it was a rowhouse next to an alleyway full of trash, where a dumpster was noisily emptied every morning at 6:30am right behind my bedroom window. Even if there were holes in the sink and the bathtub and the washer and drier didn't really work so you had to dry everything 3 times, and I STILL felt afraid of leaving the house at night, until we got Barkley (our first dog). Even if my upstairs neighbor was once robbed at gunpoint right down the block, and she stored some of her dissertation work in my apartment and took off for her parents house until the locks were changed, cause he had stolen her drivers license AND her keys (and even worse, a hotkey with 3 months of work on her dissertation on it that she lost forever).

At least there were no roaches or mice! I also finally got cable tv for the first time in my life- my parents didn't have it, and I couldn't afford it when dorming or my first year of grad school. I had a living room where I could have guests over, and a small backyard where I held several BBQs for all the new friends I eventually made. I ended up living in that apartment for five years.

My home for most of grad school and my first 'official' apartment with B. You can even see the dumpster in the alley behind the barbed wire fence! Awwww I miss this place..

Throughout grad school I worked every summer as a research assistant for various professors. Once I was advanced enough that the school would let me, I taught night classes to supplement my stipend income. I still didn't have a car. By taking every opportunity for a job that I could get and not buying a car or spending any money on things other than living expenses and the occasional music show or festival (ok, up to 30 small music shows during my happiness project- but the majority in the 5-10$ range and I volunteered at shows and festivals to get in for free), I was able to save up over $30k in addition to being able to meet my living expenses. I had a few roommates at various times to help split expenses for my 2 bedroom apartment and saved even more money. I wanted to save as much money as I could, cause I was determined to never have to beg my parents for money. Even though my mom had said they would not give me any money help again, I knew I could probably get help from them if I was really desperate- but I also knew that money would come with strings attached, because my parents' money ALWAYS came with strings attached. And I was determined to be string-free.

One thing that really helped in leaving the jewish community after my split with the young adult jewish community for good was finding another community that I landed in for a few years. M, the same guy who told me at 15 that he sometimes wrote poetry on shabbas and changed my life forever, also was the one who introduced me to this community my senior year in college- the neo-hippie/jamband community of the northeast. In grad school, especially during my year long happiness project I became heavily involved in the local hippie scene. The same folks went to the same shows and festivals over and over (especially the ones who were dating or married to band members), and became my new community.

They taught me an entirely different way of living- give freely of whatever you have extra and don't take more than you need, help other people whenever you can and don't expect anything in return, treat people fairly, accept everyone no matter how different, clean up after yourself and respect the earth and your fellow humans and treat them with love and compassion, assume the best of people instead of the worst, and if you do this (especially while hanging out in a whole community of people who do this), wonderful things will happen. Some people might argue that some of these are also Jewish values, but the hippie community is where I learned them and began to live by them. It was hippies who first gave me the idea for a happiness project at all, although my therapist was very enthusiastic about the idea.

Almost weirdly, the "happiness" part of my happiness project started to take hold during my year off from dating when I spent most of my time with hippies. For the first time in over a decade I felt completely happy with my life, and with myself, and my self confidence began to grow as I spent time in a community that practices radical acceptance. At the time my friend M commented that I was much less "bitchy" then I used to be, which he attributed to my hanging out with the hippie scene. But it was more than that. It was freedom. Once I wasn't living with my parents anymore, and not going to their house every weekend and spending all weekend fighting about religion, once I had gotten over that initial shock/transition period of moving to a new place, once I wasn't forcing myself to go to Jewish events out of a sense of guilt and obligation rather than any personal enjoyment, it was like a weight was lifted. I became a nicer person as a result of being more happy in my life.

Halfway through my third year of grad school, a few weeks after finishing my year long happiness project, I met my (non-jewish) husband B. After a few weeks of dating he started calling me his girlfriend, which almost gave me a panic attack again when I realized I was in a serious relationship with someone not jewish, whom my parents would never approve of. But I was sunk. I had never met someone I just wanted to spend EVERY SINGLE moment with, not even my ex fiance. He was brilliant and as smart as I was, and we could talk about politics and religion and society and everything until the end of time and not run out of interesting things and ideas to talk about (still haven't, almost 5 years later- one of our good friends has told me several times that she loves just watching us have crazy long conversations together because they are always so interesting). We certainly don't agree on several things (nothing actually important to our lives though, and the conversations wouldn't be as interesting if we always agreed), but we both share a love for ideas and intellectual debates. And he WAS willing to move with me wherever I ended up for my career, which I made sure of very early in our relationship after my experience with my ex.

After a few weeks and several dates we hooked up for the first time on a friday night, and I just stayed at his apartment the entire weekend. On Monday we both had to go to school (He was finishing up his undergrad degree at the time), and he said to come back that night when I was done with classes. Since then we have barely gone a single day without seeing each other (except when I have to travel for business). I would spend every night at his house, walk back to my apartment (5-6 blocks away) in the morning and take care of my cats and get ready for school, and then go back to his place right after my classes were over. Sometimes we would stay up till 2 or 3 in the morning just having long rambling conversations about everything. Sometimes we would even stay up all night having those conversations. Sometimes we still do. :)

I told my parents about him a couple of months after we started dating, and my mom told me that if I married someone not Jewish it would be like I was a serial killer or a child molester- she would still love me but wouldn't be able to have a relationship with me. My parents started sending me long letters about why I should marry jewish people, many of which are documented on this blog. B moved in to my apartment 'for reals' at the end of my 4th year (which my parents found out about shortly afterward), and we got married at the end of my 5th. I used part of my savings to pay for our wedding and had the small intimate and completely not-jewish wedding we both wanted. In the middle of the woods. We had 20 guests and after an 11 minute ceremony (according to the video) we had an outdoor picnic, and it was totally perfect. That story is already well documented on my blog, so I'm not going to rehash it.

At the end of my 6th year, when I was 28, I graduated and we both moved to the south where I had gotten a job as a tenure-track Sociology professor. With my savings and some help from my in-laws, we bought a pretty sweet house last year (3 bedrooms AND a hot tub!). We finally live in a nice (middle class) neighborhood where I DON'T feel afraid leaving the house at night, in the best public school district in the city. The closest Orthodox Jewish community is an hour and a half away. Sadly I've had to leave my hippie community as well, but over the last year I've been slowly meeting some deadheads and other local hippies and building up a new community, and working in academia as a professor is a community in and of itself.

I will not say it's been easy. My parents haven't given me a dime since I graduated college and moved to grad school, which was 7 years ago today, and I would not accept any money from them even if they offered (which they don't) since I know it comes with strings attacked. Knowing I had no 'safety net' of parents to turn to made me very cautious with money, and I burned with jealousy over some of my fellow students who had parents who helped them pay for nice apartments. I lived in bad neighborhoods, in bad housing, battled mice and roaches, and have never been able to afford to buy a car (my husband came with one free, so now we have one). I didn't achieve a middle class lifestyle until I was 28. I wasn't even able to escape the Jewish community until I was 22, and have spent half the time I have been OTD living a double life in the Jewish community.

But I made it, and I made it to the point where I have a good job and a good life and a good living situation, even if it took me many years of crap situations to get here. And despite those crap situations, those 2 years where I got to spend most of my week on my own in NYC, and the 6 years in grad school where I was completely free of my parents and not having to pretend I was religious, are some of the happiest years in my life. Immeasurably happier compared to my childhood and my teenage years, because I was FINALLY able to live a life that's completely free of religion, in which I had complete freedom to live the way I wanted to, and in which I was(and am) the only person who decides how I live. Although nowadays I usually take my husband's feelings into account too. :)

-----
So that's my story. Do you have a story you'd like to share? If you're not a blogger but would like to write a guest post about how you went OTD and left the Jewish community, I would love to post it here for you- email your story and whatever name you would like to have it posted with to me at abandoningeden@gmail.com . I reserve the right to edit your post for grammar and spelling before posting it here.

sorry bout that

2011-08-31T18:23:00.003-04:00

My blog has been down all day because of some malicious code that someone attached to the atheist blogroll (which used to be in my sidebar). Apparently some hacker has nothing better to do but hack a whole bunch of atheist blogs (and the atheist blogroll I used was not the only blogroll hacked). But now it's fixed! Part 6 will be posted tomorrow morning!

How I went OTD and left the Jewish community for good: Part 5

2011-08-29T09:00:00.036-04:00

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 6

My way out of the Jewish community I grew up in, and away from my parents,was full financial independence, which I got on September 1st 2004, the day I moved away to the city my graduate school was located in. Graduate school, and the stipend that came with it, was my ticket to freedom.

Living on my own and not getting any money help from anyone was definitely not easy at first. $15,000 a year (minus taxes) is not a ton to live on, even though technically it is above the poverty line. At first I lived in a small studio apartment in a big building in a terrible neighborhood near my school that cost $500 a month, the cheapest apartment I could find. My first day there I looked across the room to the kitchenette and said to myself "did I drop something in the kitchen?" Nope, turned out to be a cockroach the size of my hand, come to welcome me to the building.

My neighbors in the shitty apartment building I lived in turned out to be some of the more interesting people I have met- the painter (not the art kind, the walls kind) who had been kicked out of the navy for dealing cocaine and who once told me a long rambling story about how he had been sexually abused by church elders as a kid, the older African American dude who lived next door and played the drums for a jazz band (and was REALLY good), but who would occasionally blast Britney Spears (once I found a joint in the hallway outside his apartment). On the other side of me lived a nice older Mexican lady who was always carrying buckets of roses around, which I think she sold from the side of the road somewhere. Across the hall at first there was a law student, but later he moved out and this white dude who was a parolee who had just gotten out of jail for selling drugs moved in. The couple who lived on top of me fought constantly (which I could of course hear through the thin walls/ceiling), and once I had to call the cops on them when I heard lots of loud crashing noises and yelling and what sounded like people getting hit, at 3am.

Didn't really feel safe going out at night. Constant roach and mice infestations that were never taken care of no matter how many times I called the landlord. Once there was a fire alarm and everyone came out with cats in carriers, so I finally figured out I could get a cat even though it was technically against the rules, which took care of the constant parade of mice running from under the stove to behind my futon couch somewhere. My cat (that one, I have 3 now) is an excellent roach killer too- I found a whole bunch of half eaten roaches when I was moving out.

My first semester in grad school sucked, as major transitions often do. I didn't know a single person when I got there, it took me a while to make some new friends, adjusting to the insane work load and expectations of grad school was hard, as was going from being the top of my class as an undergrad to being an average grad student. Going from a very diverse public college to an elite private ivy league university gave me culture shock all over again.

I was living in a shitty apartment in the middle of a terrible area where hearing gun shots was not terribly unusual. I had no car, no air conditioning- the bars on the windows made it impossible to get a window AC unit, so I used to spend the hotter days working in my grad school office and late afternoons hanging out at a local coffee/cigarette shop shooting the shit with local people. That last part was actually pretty awesome.

In graduate school I participated in the local jewish community at first, but it was not orthodox (or at least the one I participated in was not orthodox). I tried meeting jewish-but-not-religious people to date on Jdate and at these events (grad student/young professional jewish networky things), and had several short relationships with men I met there and on jdate.

None of these mini-relationships lasted very long, and a few ended pretty badly (although in retrospect, hilariously). One somewhat-promising relationship ended when the man in question brought over a bottle of wine for dinner about 6 weeks after we started dating, and then drank most of it. He got very drunk and confessed that he owed his credit card company over $5,000 and that creditors were harassing him all the time for the money. And why did he owe them this much money? Because when he was in Italy two years before for a study abroad program, he had gone on a 3 week cocaine binge, and paid for it all with credit card cash advances. After confessing this he dropped a bottle on the kitchnette floor, stepped on a piece of glass, and got blood all over the carpet of my shitty apartment. After helping him clean up his foot I let him drunkenly moan about how "I'm dying, don't leave me, I'm dying" on my couch all night and ended the relationship in the morning.

Another relationship ended because the guy refused to be exclusive- he claimed he really wanted to get married (he was 29, I think his goal was to get married by 30) so he couldn't settle down with one person and stop dating other people until he was SURE he was going to marry them. Seems like a horrible strategy to me (and he's still not married at 35 now). I dated him about a week more after he declared this (which he declared about 5 weeks into dating him), but when he started hitting on one of my grad school friends in front of me, I ended that too.

I went on several spectacularly bad first dates, all with jewish men. One told me a story of how he had posted naked pictures of his ex gf to the internet, in which she was tied up to a chair with a broken leg (WTF???? NOT first date material!). One man called and planned a second date and never showed up for it (Um, why not just NOT plan a second date?). One man started serenading me with (really bad) "opera" in front of my school building. One guy started shouting at me in a bar about how women shouldn't pay for drinks, because I offered to buy him a second drink (he had paid for the first round). I turned down second dates with two men because of their jobs- one programmed missiles to kill people (not in the military, he worked for a place that had a defense contract, directly programming the missiles), and the other wrote papers for college students for a living (i.e. a professional cheater). Not every date/mini relationship was horrible, some were ok, but the ones that weren't horrible all ended with us being friends for various reasons (and I did make quite a few friends this way too).

I stopped going to my parents house on shabbas or for yuntif (holidays) entirely the day I moved to grad school. Once I was no longer forced to go to my parents house for shabbas every weekend, my remaining observance dropped off rapidly. At first I celebrated holidays with the local jewish young adult professional/grad student scene- sometimes at hillel, sometimes at chabad, sometimes at other places around town. I went to conservative services for the high holidays for a few years. I also celebrated quite a few holidays with a classmate's reform family. Even though I met some great friends through this crowd, including a later roommate, I felt less and less of a connection to Judaism and the Jewish community as the years passed. I started eating more and more non-kosher foods.

I can't pinpoint an exact moment, but around this time I realized I had stopped believing in god entirely, for reasons discussed in yesterday's post. As I came to see religious rituals as man-made rather than anything god wanted anyone to do, following those rituals because less and less compelling to me. Eventually as my beliefs about religion coalesced, it came to a point where I felt like a complete phony going to these young Jewish professional network things, since everyone there was really into the religion (or at least it seemed to me) and assumed I was too. But I wasn't. I enjoyed hanging out with people my age, and the opportunity to network, but not the services or the rituals or talking about religious ideas. I didn't feel like I fit in with them, even in a highly diverse crowd of young jews my own age. I just wasn't INTO it the way they were. I wasn't a believer. And the meat market nature of these young jewish events and the extent to which some event organizers (especially Chabad) would push us to get drunk and hook up with other jews so we could mate and make more jewish babies...well that also got to me. And I started to look upon these events with dread.

I was having a kind of existentialist crises I guess. At one point about a year after I got to grad school I started having panic attacks before going to jewish events. Then I started having them before EVERY jewish event or service like clockwork, about an hour before I was supposed to leave the house. I started going to a therapist because of these panic attacks, and went through a year of talk therapy.

In therapy I decided that after some really pretty bad dating experiences with several men met through Jdate and this young jewish professional network over my first year and a half of grad school, along with going through almost weekly panic attacks before jewish events, I needed a radical change in my life. About a year and a half into grad school I started a year long "happiness project" in which I decided to take a year off from internet dating and cut way back on the young adult jewish events (just about my only social activity at the time, which I was going to almost weekly my first year of grad school) to explore what it is that makes me happy. After being in a relationship for 4 years in college and then jumping from bad dates to a mini relationship to more bad dates and more bad mini relationships, I needed to take the time to myself to not think about dating and to figure out who I was, what I liked, and what I wanted in life. And after spending my whole life in the jewish community, I wanted to explore other social communities.

During that year I grew dreadlocks, took classes at a local arts collective on yoga, figure drawing, watercolor, and tai chi (in addition to finishing up my masters in grad school and teaching my first class), joined a gym and went all the time, took up biking again, quit smoking (which I started in late high school), went to about 30 shows and 5 music festivals and became a regular part of the local hippie music scene, and wrote a LOT in my other blog.

My year of dreadlocks

About half way through the year I stopped going to all organized jewish events and services, and started limited myself to smaller gatherings at people's houses, like the shabbas night potluck my reform friend hosted every month or so. The panic attacks stopped immediately when I stopped going to big Jewish events, and I haven't had one since. I concluded that Jewish community events, especially those that revolved around services and religious discussions, were making me miserable, and the only reason I was still going was out of a misguided attempt to find some kind of a Jewish community I fit into and that I actually got something out of. And that my primary motivation for doing that was because I felt obligated to my parents to try to find some kind of Judaism I'd be happy with, rather than getting any personal enjoyment or benefit out of it. I realized that after 5+ years of searching I still was getting little out of any of the jewish services or community events I had gone to, other then a bunch of panic attacks and miserable/boring experiences. I did find many friends there, but I had learned to make friends outside of the jewish world too. So I stopped going entirely.

The other thing I decided after much thought and writing was to stop limiting myself to dating only Jews, but that I didn't want to date someone who was part of another religion. I went out on a date with my first non-Jewish guy around September. The date was about the same as every date I had been on with a Jewish guy, except less Jewish geography. But I didn't find that guy particularly interesting, so I turned down a second date with him.

Somewhere in there I told my parents I wasn't religious a few more times, until it eventually started to stick, but I don't think they fully accepted that it wasn't still a "teenage rebellion phase" until I met B (and maybe not even after that). After my year long happiness project in 2006/break from internet dating, and being bored over winter break when a lot of my friends in grad school were off visiting their own families, I joined okcupid right around new years 2007 and limited the people who could see me to jews, atheists and agnostics. About a week later I got an email from a young man named B. After several hours-long instant messenger conversations, we met in person a week later. Like most internet dates I scheduled it for a couple of hours before I had to be somewhere else, so our entire first date was about 45 minutes long, in which we just talked the whole time. Later that night I went to my next plans- one of those shabbas potluck dinners. That entire night I kept thinking...hmmm....that guy I went out with today was pretty neat actually...hmmmm.

To be continued...

Intermission: Why I don't believe in religion and god

2011-08-28T10:03:00.003-04:00

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” - Marcel Proust

I tend to like to write narratives and stories instead of long philosophical treatises (after all I'm a sociologist, not a philosopher), but I'll attempt to outline my thought process in which I stopped believing in god and a god-made religion.

It basically goes like this: We have no empirical evidence for god- all we have is a bunch of stories written down around 3000 years ago that clearly violate our modern knowledge of how the world works. So how could I believe these specific stories, when not only is there no independent empirical evidence for any of these stories happening prior to a certain time period (around the second temple), but those stories clearly violate scientific laws of nature and would be laughable if told today? Why are they any less laughable for having been written down 3000 years ago, when people had much less of an understanding of how the world works and so of course attributed all sorts of thing to "god"?

And if there is a god, why is Judaism the right religion? Every religion says THEY are the right religion, so what makes judaism more right than any other religion?

The more I thought about it, the more the idea of a personal god who cares about religious rituals just didn't make sense- why would god care if I ate a piece of bacon? What possible reason could an all knowing omnipotent being have for requiring these obscure rituals? If there was a god, and god was good, wouldn't it be more important for people to treat their fellow human beings nicely vs. following a bunch of obscure rituals while acting like assholes, which I found to be common among the jewish community? If god was so into these rituals, and those rituals were more important than how you acted towards your fellow humans, then he must be very petty. And if god is so petty, why should I follow god?

I eventually came to believe that no person can know what the hell 'god' wants if there is one, there is no evidence at all for god existing, and even if there is a god, the best bet is to just be a nice person and treat people well, rather than follow any specific religious rituals. Eden's wager if you will. Or like the quote from Kurt Vonnegut I have on my sidebar- "Live so that you can say to god on judgment day "I was a very good person, even though I did not believe in you." I started reading more about humanism, and realized humanist ideas were much more in line with my personal beliefs about life and how people should behave.

A big influence on my thought processes was Emile Durkheim's book The elementary forms of religious life which I read for my classical soc theory class my first semester of grad school. I loved his ideas so much that the cat I got at the end of my first year of grad school is actually named after him (his name is Durkheim).

Durkheim (the sociologist, not the cat) was also an OTDer, who lived in late 19th century France- his dad was a Rabbi. He argues in his book that religious rituals were a way of increasing group solidarity in the ancient world, designating things as sacred or profane and therefore designating people and objects and behaviors as "us versus them." This served an evolutionary purpose in that designating things as "us versus them" increased solidarity among the "us," and therefore increased safety in the ancient world. He also argues that an important function of religious beliefs is to give the believer strength and motivation to keep going in the face of adversity, and that in order to gain this benefit, religious people must constantly engage in rituals in order to renew that feeling of strength and motivation they get from religion.

The more I peered behind the curtain of jewish religious rituals and thought more and more about what some "latent functions" (underlying purposes) of those rituals may be, as I used this new Durkheimian framework to understand my upbringing, the more I became convinced that religion was man made, and that while the purposes of these rituals are beneficial to many people in contemporary society, to a non believer like myself they do not carry the same benefits.

I do believe religion serves an important purpose in society that has an evolutionary purpose- it still encourages group solidarity, which results in dense social networks willing to give social support, which therefore increases the probability of survival and reproduction. Some religious rituals - the niddah laws for instance, and modern prohibitions against birth control- increase the probability of reproduction directly.

Other benefits such as social support are still present in religion, but not necessary to survival the way they used to be. As any orthodox jew knows, if you run into an orthodox jew anywhere in the world they will probably be willing to help you out and invite you over for shabbas. You can get jobs and other social support though your jewish networks. These are all examples of the results of group solidarity.

I also think, as Durkheim points out, for some people the idea of a god, an afterlife where everything is just and assholes like JP get punished while good people get rewarded and you can meet up with your lost love ones- well it's a very nice dream. It would be great if it were true. It's especially important for people who are facing overwhelming adversity, which is why you always see tons of churches in poor neighborhoods. I think I get extra sad these days when people die (compared to how I felt when I still believed there was a god / olam habbah [afterlife]) because I just don't believe it's true.

On the other hand I know my parents draw a lot of comfort from that idea- for instance when my grandfather died, my mother told me that he kept talking to his dead wife on his death bed. To me that's just the result of someone with alzheimers hopped up on morphine and in the process of dying, and of course talking to the person who was his companion for over 60 years and had just died a couple of years earlier when his alzheimers was already starting to advance, but to my mom it was proof that my dead grandmother was in the room with them. I can see why that idea is very appealing, and I can see why it's a major aspect of many popular religions (A great movie about this point is "The Invention of Lying").

I just can't bring myself to believe in it personally, since ideas of the world to come seems to be based on pure speculation and desire for it to be true, with no empirical evidence. And since I don't believe in it, it doesn't give me comfort.

How I went OTD and left the Jewish community for good: Part 4

2011-08-24T09:00:00.021-04:00

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 5 and Part 6

I took sociology 101 having no idea what it was about, because it fulfilled a social sciences gen ed requirement and when I was trying to figure out my schedule for my second semester of college my friend said "Take Professor Battle's Soc 101 class, I had him this semester and he's really funny!" How different my life might have been if she had never said those words.

Professor Battle opened my eyes to a completely different way of viewing the world, a way that made SENSE and involved LOGIC and DATA and EVIDENCE and in which questioning was welcomed and respected. Quite unlike the evasive way my Rabbis avoided my tough questions in HS, I discovered sociology above all is about exposing the TRUTH about society, as best as anyone can measure the 'truth,' no matter how unpleasant that truth is, no matter how much it may challenge social conventions or make people uncomfortable. Professor Battle also made us all do an assignment where we looked up the application requirements for PhD programs in Sociology. And he shared some even more important information- the best PhD programs in sociology will pay YOU to go to school! (tuition/health insurance + a stipend).

At the end of the semester I went up to him and said "I'm declaring my major as sociology and I want to be a sociology professor." He kind of laughed and gently tried to tell me that not every sociology class will be exactly like his, and I should take more than one class before I made up my mind, but my mind was made up. I love learning about sociology, every day in that class was an epiphany, and the idea that I could actually make a (semi)decent living as a professor, learning about and discovering things no one has known about our society and the way it works, and then teaching them to other people, was the greatest epiphany of all.

I had recently discovered that I was actually good at school. After almost flunking out of high school I was shocked to make deans list my first semester of college, once I was able to take classes I actually was interested in taking and that were more challenging to me. I threw myself into school like I never had before, and throughout college I became entrenched in the mini-society that is academia. I served on the school senate as a student representative (a great place for people like me who love to debate/argue), on several school committees, was president of the sociology club, and took every sociology class I could. I got into the honors program and won several awards, both for academic merit and service to the school. I got a job as a peer adviser and ran student orientations and gave tours of the school to prospective students, and helped them register for class. In short, I fell in love with academia. The idea of being a professor fit right in with that.

To get into a graduate PhD program you have to have research experience as my Soc 101 Professor informed me. So the next year he helped connect me with another professor who was doing a project related to a topic I was interested in. And I started researching graduate programs for serious. My original idea of going to college, getting my degree and becoming a stay at home mom went out the window. I was going to be a sociology professor.

My ex fiance was not super thrilled by this idea. My parents weren't either- my dad (who also has a PhD) seemed genuinely confused by the idea of a woman having a career, and asked why I would want to go through all that training if I wouldn't stay in a career long term, and how I would ever be able to keep my job once I had kids and wanted to stay home with them. Cause the assumption in my household, and the one I had grown up believing in since it was so taken for granted, was that every woman wants to have kids, and wants to stay home with kids, and that the only women who don't stay home with their kids are the ones who can't afford to. He could not comprehend that not every woman wants to be a stay at home mom and was convinced I would later change my mind when my 'biological clock' kicked in. You know, cause every woman just drops their careers once they have babies- except for the 75% of them who keep working when they have kids.

But once I had broken out of that bubble and gone to college where people with a different set of assumptions about life, I thought more about staying home with kids all day, and the idea was not appealing at all. I mean I understand that some women like it, and that's fine, but I think I would go completely insane if I only got to interact with infants and toddlers all day long. My problem is not that some women are stay at home moms, but the assumption that EVERY woman wants to be one, and would be happy doing it. Once I began to question that assumption too, and thought about what being a stay at home mom would actually entail, the idea became very unappealing. I wasn't even sure if I wanted kids at all.

My mom also did not take my grad school plans very well. One of the first research projects I was an RA on involved stay at home moms, and I was more and more vocal about not wanting to be one myself once I graduated. My mom (who I don't think really understood what my research was about- she also called my field social work instead of sociology for YEARS) took the fact that I was doing research on stay at home moms to mean that I disapproved of HER being a stay at home mom (not true at all), and seemed to feel that I was rejecting her lifestyle by deciding to go to grad school instead of aspiring to be a jewish mother like her. After many years of being fairly close- in my teenage years my dad was the scary religious one and my mom was the one on my side- our relationships flipped. My mom started being kinda hostile towards me and we started fighting more and more. At the same time I got closer with my dad as I went through the application process and later grad school, since he had been through a PhD program himself and we suddenly had a lot more to talk about as a result.

Eventually my ex fiance and I had been dating 3 years and my parents kept 'gently suggesting' we should get married once I was done with school. So the summer after my Junior year we got engaged, had a le'chaim (engagement party) with all our family and friends and then started planning the wedding for the month after I was going to graduate college.

We started fighting more and more after we got engaged- I wanted to go to grad school and leave the area entirely, and then move on to who knows where after I was done with grad school to be a professor. Most professors end up moving to a random place anywhere in the country to get a job (which I did last year when I moved to the south), since colleges aren't all that common, and professorship jobs that fit our field and specialty are even less common, so we end up with very little choice over where to live until/unless we become more famous later in our careers. I was fully aware of this going in but I wanted to do it anyway- in fact the idea of moving off to random new places for grad school and then a job was thrilling to me (and in retrospect I'm very happy I did, everyone should try living in a different region of the country than they grew up in for at least a while). He wanted to stay in the same area and maybe have me move into his place, which I knew meant staying in the same Jewish community and going to shabbas and yuntiff at my parents house all the time, since he still was living 3 blocks from my parents. Although he was also OTD to some extent in practice, unlike me, he still believed in Orthodox Judaism, at least at the time (my impression is that he is completely OTD these days but we aren't really in touch anymore).

I also started having huge fights over the wedding with both my parents and my ex, frequently at the shabbas table. He and my parents wanted a completely orthodox traditional wedding. I did not. I was still in my "angry at religion and religious people" phase. I did not want to circle around him 7 times which I felt was like a dog circling its master's feet and challenged my dad to find a halachic (jewish law) source saying this custom was necessary to be halchically married, which he couldn't. I didn't want to have an entire ceremony in which I didn't get to say a single word. I didn't want my father signing me away to a binding engagement without me even being in the room in the chosson's tish. I wanted to give him a ring under the chuppah too. These were the main sticking points. I also wanted a simple ceremony somewhere outdoors like in the woods, with maybe a hippie jewish band (my choice was Soul Farm) but my parents refused to get that band and eventually talked me out of the woods thing too, cause you can't have a huge traditional jewish wedding with every relative in existence in the middle of the woods. We compromised by finding a hotel with an outdoor area for the wedding.

But eventually the fighting over grad school + the wedding was too much, and after he consulted with a few rabbis (but not me) my ex dumped me one day with no warning, the Fall of my senior year of college, the day after I sent out my first grad school application. I think that until then it hadn't been "real" to him, just something I had been talking about hypothetically for 3 years at that point and which we fought about all the time...or maybe he was hoping I would decide to pick him over grad school...but when I sent out my applications it became real and that was the final straw. This is pure speculation on my part, as he didn't really give me a clear explanation as to why he was ending our engagement. I was devastated that the relationship ended- for all our fights I still loved him very much at the time, enough to have committed to marrying him. Another important life lesson learned- love isn't the only important thing in a relationship. Having compatible goals and expectations about how you will live your life is equally important.

The breakup sucked majorly in a number of ways. Apart from breaking up just being hard and sucky in general, this breakup was PUBLIC. We had already had a le'chaim, gotten a huge stack of presents for the wedding, and my parents had put downpayments on almost everything for the wedding already. Like this wedding was PLANNED even though it wasn't supposed to be until around 7 months after that. My ex disappeared for a while after we broke up, leaving me to cancel reservations and wedding plans, return gifts and write checks out to people who had sent us money for a wedding present. Having to tell everyone I knew that we had broken off the engagement was humiliating and embarrassing and made me feel like a failure at life. The worst was the random people who didn't know we had broken off the engagement(/he had dumped me), and for months and months afterwards would ask about the wedding, which of course meant I had to tell all these people (lots of random strangers from shul) that we had broken up too.

About a week after we broke up my mom took it upon herself to inform me that "Now that I'm single again, I better not be bringing any non-orthodox men around the house and thinking that would be ok." We had a pretty big fight in which I basically said (again) that I'm not orthodox, I never will be again, and that I have no reason to date orthodox men who follow a religion I don't, so don't expect me to.

After my ex and I broke up, I had little reason to keep following Jewish laws. Until then he had been a conservative force on my OTDness since he still believed in everything even if he didn't keep it all, and wasn't comfortable with going 'further' than we were-- eating non-kosher vegetarian and dairy and fish (but not shellfish, like tuna and salmon), watching tv and playing video games in his apartment all shabbas long. A little over 2 weeks after we broke up I ate my first piece of non kosher chicken in Applebees in times square- it wasn't planned, we just happened to go there after me and my OTD brother and some friends couldn't get into a sold out pink floyd cover band show at BBKings, and I impulsively ordered buffalo chicken wings (with blue cheese dressing!) instead of my usual fish/vegetarian food. A few months after that I had my first non-kosher beef- a delicious empanada made by one of my dorm friends. The next year (when I was in grad school) I tried my first cheeseburger, and the year after that my first shrimp and the year after THAT bacon, crab, lobster, and scallops.

Each food was scary to eat the very first time- I had a physical reaction in which my heart would start beating really fast, my palms would start sweating, almost like a fight or flight reaction. I now use this as an example in class about what happens when people first break strong norms that they have grown up with. Norms are unspoken and spoken rules about how to behave and appear that are enforced through social sanctions, which are social rewards or punishments. Like when people look at you funny when you do something weird, you know that thing is "weird" and you don't want people looking at you funny, so you avoid doing it again. Norms are anything from "don't kill people" to "stand facing the door when you are in an elevator instead of facing the back wall" and "say sorry when you bump into someone" and vary from culture to culture. These norms then become embedded in your brain and neural pathways grow that tell you DO THIS or DON'T DO THIS, which are hard to change later on. Hence the physical reaction when first breaking major norms- that's your brain's way of telling you "WAIT, this is one of the things you learned NOT to do!! STOP or there might be social consequences!!" From such neural processes all of society and civilization is born. I still haven't been able to bring myself to try oysters, they are so foreign and disgusting looking and I can't get over that normative barrier in my brain. Maybe one day...

Getting back to the story, despite feeling devastated about the break up, I continued sending out my grad school applications. We broke up in November, I sent out applications and finished a very challenging Fall semester (I was taking 2 graduate level classes to help improve my grad school applications even more). I finished sending out applications in early January, after which I collapsed into a depressive episode for like a month since the break up finally 'hit me' when I didn't have work to throw myself into.

It was winter break and I stayed in bed most of the day and couldn't even bring myself to walk to the grocery store, so I lived off of muffins and ice cream from the dorm vending machines for a few weeks. I found a great cognitive therapist during that month and went to about 10 sessions in total, which in retrospect completely changed my outlook on life for the better. She helped me get over some major self esteem issues I had and taught me another important life lesson- that when people act like dicks, 9 times out of 10 it's cause they have some crap going on in their own lives, and it's not personal.

But being depressed for a while didn't matter, because all my grad student applications were out. And then I started hearing back. With (at that time) 2 years of research experience and high grades, I got into 8 out of the 9 programs I applied to, and every single school I got into offered me full funding. I could have moved as far away as Austin, Texas or Madison, Wisconsin, or stayed closer to home at NYU. In the end I chose to move to an ivy league university a few hours away from home, where I accepted full funding, including tuition, health insurance and at the time a $15k a year stipend.

I think going through that break up influenced my decision to not move TOO far away- Wisconsin all by myself with no partner seemed very scary, even though it was the #1 Sociology program in the country. The school I chose was only a few hours train ride to my friends/back home, but far enough away and expensive enough (over $100) that my parents couldn't try to force me to come home every weekend anymore.

I moved back to my parents house the summer after I graduated college for a very awkward few months during which I was now entirely open about not being religious anymore (although I still didn't openly violate any rules in front of them) and my mom told me not to talk to my youngest brother so I wouldn't be a bad influence on him 'the way I had corrupted my other brother' (really, me and my other OTD brother just went OTD together at the same time-he hung out in the same local OTD crowd I did, and he even ate non kosher meat before I did). My mother said after I left home at the end of the summer that was it, they wouldn't be giving me any more money help, and I couldn't move back home again, so I should go through everything in my room and take it with me because everything I left behind would be thrown away. I spent that summer biking everywhere to get out of the house as much as I could (would take long 10-15 mile bike rides), sorting through my entire life to decide what to move with me and what to throw away or donate, and getting ready to move to grad school.

After I moved my mom kept her word and threw away everything I left behind- my knee high steel toed doc martin lace up boots (those were expensive, mom!) and all my college artwork- I took a bunch of drawing classes in college for fun and took a class on figure drawing she disapproved of, which is why I think she threw all that stuff out. The next time I came to visit was Thanksgiving, at which point I discovered she had painted my entire room a different color and rearranged all the furniture, and as I said, threw out every single thing I had left behind. I felt like I had been erased from the house completely. The only thing to indicate I had ever lived there was my 8th grade class picture up on the piano.

To be continued...

One of my old figure drawings that I took a picture of before my mom threw it out.

How I went OTD and left the Jewish community for good: Part 3

2011-08-22T10:05:00.002-04:00

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 4, Part 5 and Part 6

In college for the first two years I commuted back and forth to Hunter, 4 hours on a train every day. It was actually great for studying- I got so much work done on the train (and later by reading at home when I was stuck there for shabbas) that I ended up graduating summa cum laude. My level of observance at this time was at a level it had been stuck at for years. I didn't believe in orthodox judaism (but still believed in god...kinda), I didn't keep shabbas at all, I ate non-kosher vegetarian food and cheeses, ate fish (but not shellfish) out, but I still did not eat non-kosher meat. I bought a secret pair of jeans and every morning I would leave my house wearing a long skirt with the jeans rolled up underneath, and on the walk to the train station would whip my skirt off when no one was around and stuff it in my bag, and roll down my pants, and go to school.

While in college I also started 'experimenting' with other forms of judaism. The thought occurred to me that perhaps I hated judaism because of my parents/HS/whatever, but that other sects would be less horrible. I became very involved in Hillel and my college's jewish (non frum for the most part) community, and was on their programming committee for years where I organized many fun (IMO) jewish events like jewish movie viewings and a hillel open mike night with brilliant people performing various things every week for a year. I even was co-VP of Hillel for a semester. I went to chabad lunch and learns every other week and had long discussions with other hillel folks about whether the documentary hypothesis might be true and how we could prove it wrong, the various beliefs and practices of people in various sects of judaism, life in general. One of those folks was Malkie S., the woman who started the organization Footsteps, an organization for OTDers which she was just starting while we were in college together. She later tried to get me to join in my senior year, but I never made it to a meeting.

Meanwhile I went on birthrite Israel with hillel during winter break of my freshman year and meditated with hippie jews on the top of mountains in sefat. I went to my first reconstructionist shabbas services when they told us we had a choice of which services to go to and had ones of all stripes. While I did enjoy the guitar and being able to understand what we were saying, it was very foreign and kinda offputting to me because it was similar and yet so different from what I had grown up with. On birthrite I also got really drunk for the first time on Ben Yehudah street at Mike's Place, and after the trip was over I paid a $50 to delay my ticket home and spent 2 weeks crashing with my friend who was doing a year at Bar Elon University near Tel Aviv, where I got my belly button pierced. I visited with my cousins in Beit El in the west bank. I went to shabbas dinner at my friend's cousins where they had a traditional friday night shabbas dinner, after which we sat around watching tv. My first exposure to "cultural jews."

Back at college I had many long conversations with the reform rabbi-in-training at hillel and some conservative friends. I started identifying as conservative and then as a cultural jew. I also started taking yoga which led to reading some buddhist philosophy, which I liked. Through some of my clases I learned more about christianity, which I knew almost nothing about at that point. I had long conversations with non-jewish people at work at my college (who were mostly Muslim and Hindu, with a couple of Christians and some other Jews) where we compared our religions and their various beliefs.

It was the first time I had non-jewish friends, and really talked to anyone of another religion in depth about what their religion believed. I went to one of the most diverse colleges in the country (#3 in the country) and being in NYC and working to help run freshman orientation, I met and talked to people from all backgrounds and from all over the world. It was heady times. I went through a bit of a culture shock when I first got there but after a childhood in which I never had a conversation with someone who wasn't jewish, I loved all the different kinds of people I was meeting. I had to struggle to catch up with things my professors took for granted, like that we knew what the protestant reformation was (I didn't, and wikipedia wasn't really around yet). I also had to train myself to speak straight english instead of yinglish, as I soon realized once arriving in college that a lot of the words I used in regular speech were actually a foreign language.

I was still dating my ex fiance (we went out for 4 years- from fall of my senior year of high school until fall of my senior year of college). For around a year and a half after my parents found out about our plans to spend a weekend away (around 6 months after we started dating) there was a family stalemate, during which I refused to stop dating him, and he was not welcome in the house. After 9/11 happened during my sophomore year in college when I was 19, my parents decided they would be cool with him again cause "life is short." He was invited over to the house again for Thanksgiving 2001. My dad and him even eventually came to be pretty close.

The summer after my sophomore year my ex's own parents decided to move to another part of the country and since he was making a decent wage at that time, he decided he would stay in the area and not move with the rest of his family. He got an apartment about 3 blocks away from my parent's house. As you could imagine this was AWESOME for me since I had a place literally 3 blocks away where I could go violate shabbas all I wanted, with no parents around! Me and several other OTDers in town started hanging out at his place friday night after dinner and shabbas day after lunch, watching cartoons, and he started coming to my house for almost every shabbas meal. I was 20 at the time.

That summer something else happened- my school started opening up a very limited number of dorm rooms, after they were closed for renovations for several years. The dorms had very limited space-only 600 rooms at a school with 16,000 undergrads- so they were mostly for athletes, honors students in a new program, those on exchange programs, with a few "emergency rooms" for students who had major issues at homes. I desperately wanted to move there. I went to the vice president of the school and asked to be let into one of the emergency rooms on the basis of that I was spending 4 hours every day commuting, and that I was having problems at home. I explained the massive fights my parents and I were having over religion and how I was living a double life. I was also an honors student in the old honors program (and they were letting honors students from the new program in so why not me?). I told her every reason I could think of and every argument to get in. I got a room.

The next step was convincing my parents. The dorm rooms were incredibly cheap - around $250 a month (no meal plan) to stay in the Gramercy Park area of Manhattan (the dorms are on 25th street and 1st ave in Manhattan). My parents were paying around $250 a month for all the NJ transit train, path train and subway fees to get me to school each month. I worked out all the numbers and proved to my parents that it would be cheaper to let me dorm than to make me commute.

I think the deciding factor was my ex moving 3 blocks away from my parents- my parents wanted me to go off to the dorm so we wouldn't be "tempted into sex" in his apartment or something (which they probably convinced themselves we weren't already having- we had lost our virginity to each other a couple of months before my 18th birthday). My dad definitely mentioned something about how he "knew I wasn't going to be sleeping around with a bunch of guys at my dorm cause your boyfriend is right here with us." Lovely, dad.

We worked out a deal where my parents would pay for my tuition + dorm and I would pay for everything else -food, clothes, the phone line and DSL internet connection my senior year- out of the three jobs I was working while in college. I was then working as a paid research assistant, a peer adviser and later admin in the school's student center, and an occasional statistics tutor. I also promised (in writing on another one of those damn contracts my dad was always making up) to come home every single shabbas and yuntif (holiday) to stay with my parents, or they would stop paying my tuition and dorm fees immediately.

I still hadn't escaped completely, and at the time I was working 30+ hours a week and taking 5 classes a semester, living in a room that was 8 feet by 12 feet while sharing a bathroom and kitchen with 60 filthy people on my floor, but I was on my own for almost 6 days of the week, and it was completely glorious and I loved every second. I wore pants every day but Friday when I went to my parent's house after school was over. I ate whatever I wanted- although still vegetarian non-kosher food for a while, so I rarely ate meat except on weekends. I ate a lot of tuna fish and bean burritos from taco bell ($1.06 and very filling!).

Every Friday I would take the 2 hour train home, spend as much of shabbas as possible at my ex's house, and every Saturday night my ex or my dad would drive me back into the city. That moment when you are on the George Washington Bridge and first see all the huge lights and buildings of NYC- that was always the greatest moment every week, I would sigh a huge sigh of relief for being FREE again, at least for a week.

Meanwhile over these years I had learned a very important lesson- as long as I still depended on my parents for money, they would always be able to control my religious life. They were able to force me to come home every single weekend to celebrate shabbas (which was very much against my will), which I hadn't kept in like 6 years, but they could do it because I needed their money. I was still forced to miss class to come home for holidays. As long as I needed their money I would have to live this double life, pretending to be nominally religious so I wouldn't piss them off so much that they would cut off my college tuition. So my new goal was financial independence.

Fortunately something even more amazing happened at the end of my freshman year- I discovered sociology. Not only that, I discovered the possibility of becoming a sociology professor.

To be continued...

How I went OTD and left the Jewish community for good: Part 2

2011-08-17T09:00:00.008-04:00

Read Part 1, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 and Part 6
After being grounded over the summer for meeting up with my no-longer-a-secret BF, I went back to school and called him from the payphone down the block from my school for a few months, but we didn't meet up in person again. Eventually we broke up when I heard he had been seen holding hands with another girl (awwww, young 15 year old me, so sad and convinced I would never love again).

After 4-ish months my parents finally un-grounded me. I still hung out with that group of friends my secret now-ex boyfriend had introduced me to in my town- a group of people my age who secretly were OTD. We started hanging out nearly every single weekend, and I got involved in NCSY (like they were) as well- we were the kids hanging out outside the building chatting with each other while the NCSY (brainwashing) "sessions" were going on inside. we were probably the ones they were referring to as "kids at risk" in the late 1990s.

At home I learned that if I turned the speakers off my laptop I could spend all shabbas playing video games and my parents would have no idea. My parents had no idea the extent to which I was not keeping shabbas. I kept counting down the days till I turned 18.

Years passed. When I was 17 and a senior in HS I met my ex fiance at an NCSY shabbaton (actually simchaton for those who know what that is). I was completely open with my parents about dating him, as I had been about another boy I had dated for a few months right after my 17th birthday. However my parents didn't like that my ex fiance was a convert, even after checking out his conversion papers and talking with the head (orthodox, very respected) rabbi involved. They tried arguing with me about it and even consulted with the rabbi about their rebellious teenage daughter who is always dating people they don't approve of. He advised them to 'ship me off to Israel' for a year (my mom's words). They had me talk to my grandmother, who told me she was praying for us to break up (also because he was a convert). I told her not to hold her breath. She didn't talk to me for several years after that as a result (although we eventually made up and she was remarkably accepting of B many years later).

At some point my parents put a tracing program on my computer that would track everything I typed. This program might have been on my computer for years, but I didn't find out about it until many months after I had started dating my ex fiance, when my parents confronted me about my plans to go away for a weekend with my him (which we had discussed over instant messenger). It was basically an exact repeat of what had happened at 15- I wanted to go away for a weekend and stay at someone's house, he was going to stay at someone else's house in the same area, and we would meet up for meals and to hang out. Only this time I got caught before it even happened.

After they confronted me on this, they decided that based on this weekend thing and everything that had gone down when I was 15 (or rather, everything they knew about), I must be a pathological liar (who only lies about weekends away with my bfs?), so they sent me to family therapy. I was a bit too old to be grounded again (almost 18), and it wouldn't have really worked out since I had a job after school I had to go to, so they told me they would stop paying for my flute lessons as a punishment for lying again, but that they would start paying for them again if I broke up with my ex. I ended up giving up on flute. Which was a shame, since my teacher had been encouraging me to apply to Julliard so I probably wasn't too bad. My ex fiance was also no longer allowed in my house, although he stubbornly kept coming to the front door to pick me up (my mom would look at him through the peephole and then go get me, leaving him standing on the stoop).

In family therapy, when I first went in to talk to the therapist alone, I told him I had secretly been breaking shabbas and kosher for several years and I didn't believe in the religion at all. He insisted I tell my parents this, during therapy. I was soo uncomfortable and scared, it was probably one of the scariest things I've ever done, but I told my parents "I'm not religious anymore." My dad started tapping his foot (the way he always does when he's freaking out, he never yells, only shakes with anger) and was like "What does that mean? Do you eat shrimp? Do you eat ham?" Of course I had to answer no, since at the time I was still only eating vegetarian non kosher food. My parents were so relieved, didn't question me any further, and they instantly dismissed it as a "teenager rebellion phase."

That was the last time we went to family therapy. But from then on we started having huge fights about religion almost every shabbas meal. Not about my level of observance per se, but about the things I thought were stupid and evil about religion, the things that didn't make sense, and the thing my dad couldn't come up with a good enough explanation for. When we weren't having fights it was because I had brought a book to the table and checked out of the conversation entirely while reading from my lap (which I did throughout my teenage years during shabbas meals after I started going OTD and which drove my mother nuts, she was always yelling at me to put my book away). In retrospect I can see I was going through the "angry at religion, lashing out at religious people" phase that I've seen several OTDers go through.

Around this time I was also figuring out what my college plans would be. I grew up in a household where education was highly valued and everyone had a college degree, and most men have a graduate degree. The women in my family have always gone to college. They have always gone to college, worked a few years, gotten married, and then become stay at home moms when they had either their first or second child. So that was what I assumed would be my life. I would go to college, finish my degree, get married and get some crappy job, and eventually become a stay at home mom when I had kids.

When it came time to picking a college, my parents really wanted me to go to Stern. Actually, they really wanted me to go to Israel for a year, especially after consulting their rabbi about me dating my ex. But I flat out said to them "I'm going to be 18 by then, you can't force me to leave the country against my will, and I'm not going." I think my dad was partially relieved because it was so expensive. So they told me to apply to Stern college and maybe Touro and a few local backups. I begged my parents to let me go AWAY to college, but they said they would only help me pay for college if I lived at home.

So my dreams of escape when I was 18 were put on hold. I didn't know much if anything about student loans- I thought you could only get financial aid if your parents were poor, and my parents weren't poor, so I figured I wouldn't be eligible for anything. I had a job at the time, but it was for minimum wage, and was part time besides, and there was no way I could just leave my parent's house and set up my own apartment on that level of income, especially not in the NY area. And I had no idea how to get a better job. And I couldn't NOT go to college, that's what everyone in my family did, and like going OTD was before I was 15- it just didn't occur to me as an option. But I wasn't particularly thrilled by the idea either. Once I knew I wouldn't be able to move away to go, college seemed like just something else to get through before actually starting my life. At least until I got there.

I applied to Rutgers, CUNY and NYU. I didn't get into NYU (not surprising since I skipped a bunch of my jewish studies classes in my junior and senior year of HS, so I had a whole bunch of Ds and Fs in those topics on my report card). I got into Rutgers and CUNY, probably purely based on my unusually high SAT scores- scores that came as a complete shock to me and every administrator and teacher in my HS. I told my parents I was applying to Stern College, and even filled out an application to show them, but I never mailed it out. I really didn't want to go there, so I made sure it wouldn't be an option. By the time they found out about it, it was too late to apply.

My choice was between Rutgers, closer to home- but which would make me more dependent on my parents since I would need their help paying for a car to drive there, or Hunter College- CUNY, which was a 2 hour commute each way by train/path train/subway, but I could walk to the train from my house and would not need a car at all (I also got into some other CUNY schools but they were even further away). Plus it was in Manhattan! The big city!

I chose Hunter.

To be continued...

How I went OTD and left the Jewish community for good: Part 1

2011-08-14T09:18:00.018-04:00

Elsewhere in some of the several new facebook OTD (Off the derech - former orthodox jews) groups, people have been discussing their escape stories. How they escaped their parents. Some of these stories are incredible- people leaving home with nothing but the clothes on their back, moving across the country and staying with virtual (very kind) strangers so that they can get away.

My story is not nearly so dramatic, and took place over several years. Seven years to be exact. But I don't think I've ever fully told it in one place here. So here it is. In it's entirety. Well not exactly it's entirety, I wrote out the whole thing and it's *really* long so I've broken the story up into 6 posts which will be released over the next few weeks.

Part 1:

Like many OTDers, I was always a skeptic of those in authority, was always a bit of a trouble maker and rabble rouser, but I had never before turned my skepticism on religion until around my 15th birthday when I had an "out of the box" moment. Everyone I interacted with regularly was an orthodox jew. I knew there were jewish people who were not religious at all, and I knew there were jewish people who were not orthodox but were part of another sect (which to us was also "not religious" since OJs love to confuse orthodoxy with religiosity), but the possibility of transitioning between these states just never occurred to me.

The weekend of my 15th birthday, which was towards the end of 9th grade, a friend from school invited me to her house for shabbas. That weekend changed my life in a number of ways. Her family being more "modern" orthodox than mine was, after dinner on friday night a bunch of her friends came over to visit- which included some young men.

So friday night after shabbas dinner all of us-a group of MO young men and women start wandering around the town, just talking and roaming around. Something that I was to repeatedly do for years afterwards- wander around on friday night talking to my friends, not really doing anything cause it was shabbas, not really going anywhere cause we had nowhere to go.

So we talked and walked. And one of the boys there, M, blew my mind with this information: He keeps shabbas, but sometimes if he comes up with a really good poem (He was writing poetry at the time as many teenage boys do) he will write it down on shabbas so he doesn't forget. Mind blowing! Here was a boy who was raised modern orthodox like me, but was actively violating a rule that I had never even considered violating! Within weeks I was tearing toilet paper on shabbas and eating vegetarian food without a hechsher at a hospital where I volunteered (the previous summer I had used my volunteer $5 lunch voucher to get horrible kosher hospital food. The non kosher food was still horrible, but much less so).

The other important thing that happened that weekend was that I met my first boyfriend, and had my first kiss, on my 15th birthday (the kiss occurred on motzei shabbas when the same group from friday night got together in someone's basement to watch a new Highlander movie that had come out). It wasn't M, it was a friend of his, let's call him "Avi" since that was his name, and it's generically jewish enough.

Avi was my first boyfriend. A few weeks after we first met and kissed, he came to my town for shabbas and stayed at the house of a boy my age who I didn't know. I told my parents I was going to visit a (girl) friend of mine and went over to visit him instead. That was my introduction to a group of people in my town who were also secretly OTD. The boy he was staying at turned the TV on when his parents went off to visit some friends on shabbas afternoon.

Throughout that summer Avi would come to some guys houses in my town for shabbas, I would go to his town for shabbas a few times, and my parents had no idea. I would tell my parents I was going to take the bus to the hospital I volunteered at, and more often than not I would take the bus the opposite way, to Avi's house, where we would make out while his parents were at work (never had sex with him though). I didn't tell my parents about my boyfriend because I knew they would not approve-they only wanted me to date for "tachlis" (marriage) and when I asked when I could start dating they said when I was 17. Since I was 15, I knew it wouldn't be a good idea to tell them. So I continued this secret relationship for a few months.

Eventually my parents caught on that something was going down and started being suspicious of my 'good friend' Avi, and in early August I went to visit my friend for shabbas, my dad made me sign some document saying Avi wouldn't be there cause he was so suspicious at this point (he was always making me sign written documents of things he wanted me to promise), Avi went to stay somewhere down the block from my friend and ate all his meals at my friend's house, my dad came to pick me up and my friend's mom was like "Oh can you take Avi home too?" So I was caught. That was a super awkward 40 minute drive home.

When I got home my parents grounded me indefinitely. No phone, no tv, no computer, no leaving the house or my room except for meals, and no volunteering either (I'm not sure if they knew I wasn't actually volunteering all the times I said I was, or if they were just trying to keep me at home). It was early August and school didn't start for another month, so the first month of what turned out to be more than 4 months of this, I was trapped in my house without even school for social contact. As you can imagine I fell into a depression and at one point towards the end of the first month when I felt like I was trapped in my room forever and I would never be able to be happy again, I ate a bunch of Tylenol to try to kill myself. I did not take enough and basically slept for 2 days and then woke up ok. As far as I know my parents didn't notice- since I was depressed and grounded, I was spending most of my days sleeping anyway.

At that time I pulled out a calendar and started adding up the days until I turned 18. I naively thought that my 18th birthday would be the day I would finally be free of my parents and religious life forever.

To be continued...

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 and Part 6

Just heard some fantastic news!

2011-07-29T08:42:00.002-04:00

A fellow alumni of mine from Bat Torah Academy (which later changed its name to the Alisa M. Flatow Yeshiva) has announced that it's shutting its doors for good! Boy do I have some stories to tell about that place...

But unfortunately I don't have the time right now, as I'm about to leave for a road trip with B and the dogs to visit my in-laws in the Midwest for the weekend. I figured out an alternative route for the way back home that takes us through some cool places and cities we haven't been to before in Kentucky and Tennessee, and which only adds an hour to our driving time (and when we're already driving 10+ hours, one more isn't a big deal). So that should be fun, cause the route we usually take is pretty boring- only 1 major city, and just a bunch of farms and forests and hillbillies the whole way there.

An Atheist's Personal Moral Code

2011-07-23T20:08:00.012-04:00

If there's no god, then there's no one to bail us out. It's up to us as individuals to make a society in which we would want to live. It's up to us to not waste and to not use more than we need and to not fuck up the planet. I want to live in a society where I can get help when I need it, so whenever the opportunity comes my way I will help out others, and will go a reasonable amount out of my way to do so. If I have more than I need I will share it freely. I will recycle, only purchase what I will use and need, use public transit when I can, drive a hybrid or other more fuel efficient car, plant my own vegetables, buy local, smile at whomever I pass in the street, and say "thank you and have a great day!" to the driver when I get off the bus and to the dude who makes my breakfast. I will treat people working in the service industry and homeless people and ALL people with the same respect and dignity that I give my students and colleagues. I will tip at 20% or higher. I will do my best to not actively make the world a worse place for other people. I will pursue a career in which I can promote understanding and social justice and equality, and in which I can help people improve their own lives.

We're the only ones we've got. This is the only life we got. All we are is how we impact other people on this earth. That is our legacy. All we have is one short life that could end at any moment. If we're lucky we can leave the world a better place when we're gone.

In our house we have a plaque with a Shakespeare quote that we found out on the curb somewhere when we lived in Philly...it's a pretty good summation of my moral code: "Love everyone, trust a few, do wrong to none"

A brief history of Abandoning Eden

2011-07-21T12:15:00.017-04:00

A few new people have found my blog lately from the new and improved Off the Derech facebook page, and I figured that now that I've been blogging a few years it might be nice to put up a post linking to some of the more 'exciting' things that have happened to me over these past years. A brief history of Abandoning Eden if you will.

After a long and convoluted journey Off the Derech (or, out of Orthodox Judaism) I first started this blog almost 4 years ago, right after my grandmother's funeral. My father used half the eulogy to give me a musser speech about being religious since about 6 months earlier I had told him I was dating my non-jewish, now-husband, B. When I got home from the funeral I was so angry I started googling around trying to find some support group for OTDers. That brought me to the blogger Jewish Atheist, one of (if not THE) only OTD bloggers at the time. After spending like 3 days reading his blog and doing nothing else, I decided to start this one.

For some more info on my relationship with B and my parents prior to when I started this blog you can check out the reposts of several posts I wrote in a previous blog about the beginning of my relationship with my husband and here is the response I wrote to my dad back to the first of the many letters and emails we wrote back and forth while he was trying to convince me not to marry my husband.

About a year and a half after we met each other (and after a few months of living together), B and I got engaged at which point the shit hit the fan. My dad almost immediately told me they would not be going to the wedding (which they did not), my mom told me if I wanted to talk to her I couldn't talk about B after which I didn't call her again for three years, my dad asked me to ask B to convert, I refused, my little brother called to say that his rabbi had said within 1 year either me and B would break up, he would convert, or he would die (didn't happen!), my mom wrote to say that if I marry B we could not have a relationship anymore (here's my response), my cousin "stopped by" to try to convince me not to marry B, I went to my cousin's wedding where I barely talked to my mother and saw my grandfather for the last time before HE died. And then finally we got married and the crazyness all seemed to die down.

After we got married I was pleasantly surprised by the responses of some of my extended family members- and disgusted by others, such as when my grandfather tried to convince me to marry a nice jewish boy after I was already married and told me I wasn't married according to him. My parents finally met my husband for the first (and so far only) time at my PhD graduation, which coincidentally was on our first wedding anniversary.

About a month after I graduated (in May 2010) I moved to the south and bought a house here. And since moving here a year ago I haven't had all that much to blog about- the drama has died down (for now), I hardly ever talk to my father and almost never talk to my mother anymore, and I can't really go to family events anymore because they are 10-12 hours away from where I live (and it's not like B is invited to them anyway). Although I promised one of my Charedi cousins that I will come back up for her wedding whenever that happens (she is around 18 now). I suspect when we start having kids there will be more drama then.

So that's basically the current state of things.

Post script: On Thanksgiving in 2011 I called my mom for the first time in 3 years and both my parents came to visit on new years day 2012. To be continued!

Zucchini flower harvest

2011-07-10T12:22:00.006-04:00

Before the zucchinis come the zucchini flowers- first come the males, and later the females which are attached to the zucchinis. You don't want to cut the female ones off, but as long as you leave enough male flowers on the plant so that the female ones can get fertilized, you can have 2 crops of food from the zucchini plant- first the (male) flowers and later the zucchinis.

Right now the female flowers aren't even blooming, but there are a few tiny zucchinis attached to them. And there are more male flowers than I can count, and tons more coming. So I cut a few off today to make beer battered zucchini flowers.

Ingredients for batter: For every 12 Zucchini flowers (stamen's removed) 1/2 of a 12 oz Beer (or 3/4th a cup, use either lager or pilsner for beer, can substitute soda water) 1/2 tsp kosher salt, 1 cup and 2 tbs all purpose flour

combine flour and salt, whisk in beer (but not too much wisking or the batter will go flat), drench each zucchini flour in the mixture and shake off the extra

Meanwhile heat up about an inch of veggie oil on a small pan (I use cast iron) over medium heat. When oil is hot but not smoking, put in zucchini flowers

Fry about 2 minutes on each side until golden brown

Remove using a slotted spoon and dry on paper towel. Sprinkle with sea salt or more kosher salt and eat immediately

Gender divide in OTD blogs

2011-07-02T07:30:00.009-04:00

So during my interview with that professor who studies blogs, at some point we got to talking about the gender divide in OTD blogs.

This is based on my own observations, and I'm not saying it's true across the board, but anecdotally I find that men who write OTD blogs tend to write more about arguments against religion, or current events, or things that are not personal to them, while women tend to write more about their own personal stories. The notable exception being in the past the now defunct blog Lubabnomore, and now Unpious but I bet if someone analyzed the gender of the authors and the content, the overall patterns would be similar. I'm not saying men NEVER talk about personal experiences, but looking at overall patterns of posts, there is a definite gender divide.

Actually, now that I think about this, in general I find this applies to all Jewish blogs. And maybe all blogs entirely, but I've seen many non-jewish blogs written by men who write about personal experiences (daddy bloggers for one) and I also follow intellectual blogs written by women- for instance Sociological Images is one of my favorite blogs and had been run entirely by two women up until very recently. But look at the jewish blogs- look at the type of posts written in Dov Bear vs. the types of posts in In the pink (both jewish blogs, the first by men the second by a woman). You'll find the same thing- intellectual arguments vs. personal experiences.

As a sociologist who studies gender I can give you several possible reasons for this. The obvious one most non-sociologists come up with is the "essentialist" biological argument that men and women are essentially different, their brains are wired differently, with men focused more on intellectual arguments and women focusing more on personal life.

But I think it's more the gender roles we grew up with. Especially in the orthodox jewish community- the OJ community tends to have very traditional gender roles. In part because the religion itself puts such an emphasis on gender differences (in the types of mitzvahs one can/is obligated to do), and when you create divisions like that you have to create justifications for those divisions. And the OJ community definitely has its justifications.

Other forms of Judaism such as Reform, Reconstructionist and Conservative Judaism have specifically dealt with the gender inequalities in the religion to varying extents. In fact, I might argue that some more religious forms of conservative judaism and modern orthodoxy are ONLY separated by the gender role differences, and other than the way they approach women and gender (mixed seating, allowing women to do more than they could in MO), the religions are pretty much exactly the same. Therefore modern orthodoxy has an inherent interest in upholding traditional gender norms, since that is the very thing that distinguishes them from conservative Judaism, that is where the break occurred between conservative judaism and modern orthodoxy, so to give up on that would be to give up on what makes them a unique faction of judaism.

(Caveat: This is based on my limited exposure to conservative jewish views, and I'm sure someone who knows more about CJ views can challenge me on this point and that there are more intellectual differences I don't know about. But I went to many many conservative jewish services during my long gradual journey "Off the derech" and it always struck me that really the only major difference between that and the services I grew up with was mixed seating and female cantors- and maybe some different tunes for a few prayers).

One traditional gender role is that men are not supposed to talk about their emotions, especially stuff that might be hurtful to them. We start teaching men this at a very young age- "Big boys don't cry" ever heard that dudes? Men are not allowed to cry, and I think are not really taught the language of expressing emotions, which can restrict their ability to face those emotions head on. Now this is a general gender role, but within the Jewish community I think the blustery non-emotional douchy type of guy is fairly common. Frum satire calls a subset of this type of man- the type who also like gadgets- "Hockers." Not that all jewish guys are hockers, but the hocker type guys (and the guys who are not hockers but have similar gender expectations- the socially conservative jewish dudes), create an atmosphere in which guys expressing emotion is frowned upon.

As an OTD blogger who writes about my personal experiences, I can tell you that the process of writing is often an emotional catharsis for me, that often brings up very painful emotions. I could imagine that this might prevent some men, who don't know exactly how to deal with those emotions and were taught that "real men" don't express such emotions, from writing about their personal experiences.

Anectodally again, I think part of the reason I had such a hard time dating jewish men is that I have very non-traditional views on gender. I like breaking pretty much every gender norm there is- for instance right now I am the breadwinner in my house, while my husband takes care of most of the housework things. And I think that's freaking awesome. I have always broken these norms, and whenever I was told I couldn't do something because I was a girl, I set out to do it. If I was told that girls did X, I would do the opposite of X. What can I say, I'm a contrarian.

For years before I met my husband I dated many many jewish men, and differences in ideas about gender came up again and again. I once had a jewish man freak out on me during a date because I offered to buy him a drink after he had paid for the first round, and "Women don't buy men drinks" (Needless to say there was no second date). Heck, part of the reason me and my ex fiance from way back in the day broke up was cause I wanted to go to grad school and be a professor (which requires lots of moving around to random places like my current home in the south), and he wanted to stay in the same place and for his career to be the "main" career in the relationship. He dumped me the day after I started sending out my grad school applications- maybe before then he didn't take me seriously. Later on he married a woman without many career ambitions.

I ran into these types of problems again and again while dating jewish guys, but I always knew plenty of non-jewish guys who had non traditional views on gender, like I did. I ended up marrying one of those. I can't imagine any one of the jewish dudes I dated happily doing laundry for me the way my husband does. Not that such men don't exist in the jewish community - I'm sure they do- but they seem to be rare and I never was lucky enough to find one to be in a relationship with.

So again, in my experience, jewish men in general seem to have stronger gender-related norms than the typical American man (and those are pretty strong to begin with). This translates into a culture that makes men less likely to express personal emotions. And even after escaping that culture, OTD men still often have those strong ideas about gender and masculinity- at least insofar as showing emotional weakness is seen as a sign of diminished masculinity.

On the other side, women are taught that intellectual arguments are the realm of men. In high school we learned the mishna, but not the gemarah (non jews: The gemarah is basically a recording of a bunch of rabbis arguing over the exact meanings of the mishna, the mishna is a recording of "oral jewish law" - AKA the traditions that didn't necessarily have a biblical source- that was written down around 1800ish years ago). The gemarah is where the intellectual debates took place, where you could learn the ways of arguing. I sometimes wonder if attending my dad's gemarah shiur for about 7 years led to my later academic career, since I honed a lot of my arguing skills in that shiur when quibbling with my dad and his friends over various arguments in the gemarah.

So men are taught the intellectual debates that followed the law. Women are taught the law with the debates, if that. In high school the only jewish laws I learned about in depth were laws related to cooking and keeping kosher. All the laws I needed for a future career as a jewish housewife. And this was at a high school that called itself "Modern" too. Apparently modern didn't really include the second wave of the feminist movement (The one that took place back in the 1970s).

Women also don't have the restrictions against expressing emotion since the wider orthodox Jewish culture sees women as more emotion- driven anyway, and their gender identity is not tied up with the idea of denying their emotion. Hence the gender divide in OTD Blogs.

So AMIRITE? I notice I just broke the norm I'm describing by having this whole post devoted to an intellectual discussion, but even within this more "Intellectual" post, looking back, I seem to have inserted a bunch of personal experiences in this post anyway.

I hope some male OTD bloggers will take this as a challenge to write more personal posts. When I read blogs I find the personal experiences a lot more compelling to read than the intellectual debates or the current events. I didn't become a sociologist because I'm NOT nosy about people's personal lives. :)

Visits from semi-relatives

2011-06-30T16:15:00.008-04:00

Just did an interview with a very nice professor who is currently doing a research project on blogs + transitions into and out of religion. She might be contacting some of ya'll in the future.

Meanwhile, talking to her made me realize I haven't posted any updates in a while, and last week I had a visit from a sort-of-relative (my cousin's wife's mother) from my side of the family, so I thought I'd post about that.

A couple of weeks ago my dad emailed me about this lady visiting.

Actually, let's go back before that. About a month ago it was my birthday and I got the following message from my dad:

Subject: Today's family BBQ pictures
Hi AE,
You were sent regards and well wishes from the various family members who asked about you. They remembered that your birthday is coming up Tuesday and send "Happy Birthday" greetings. Zaidi turns 85 tomorrow.
Regards,
Abba

Along with a whole bunch of pictures of my family's annual bbq. The bbq my family has had every memorial day since the year after I was born, in honor of my birthday on May 31 (and my grandfather's birthday the day before mine, and my cousins' whose birthdays are a few days later, but the party was always held at MY house by MY parents for MY birthday).

Apparently they are still having these BBQs but I am not invited to them. So about a month ago I get this bullshit email, which can be loosely translated as: "Here's some family pictures from a bbq you are no longer invited to which used to be held in your honor. Our family asked about you because I don't own up to the fact that you are not invited to these BBQs anymore, I just pretend like you can't make it. Then I send you the pictures to throw it in your face. I'm also oblivious to exactly how obnoxious sending you these pictures is."

Yes, yes, I'm sure he didn't mean it that way, but that kinda pissed me off, and I didn't respond at all. And right after he had made me slightly less pissed off in general by leaving a voicemail singing me happy birthday on my birthday.

Then like a week later I get this email:

Hi AE,

M, A's Mom, plans to travel to [your area] in the near future. She will be driving through [your area] and asked for your phone number. She will call to arrange a short visit to say hello. No special agenda. She is just being friendly.

Abba

A few days later M, my cousin's mother in law (so not really directly related to me) called to say she was going to be driving through my area of the south (on her way to her own house which is also in the south) and she was going to be stopping by. I haven't seen her since around 2003, when her daughter married my cousin. But those cousins lived right near my parents from 2003 until last year when they moved to Israel, and so she and my parents are pretty close since she went up to their area a lot.

This is the mother in law of my cousin who unexpectedly dropped by to try to convince me not to get married about 3 months before my wedding, so when my dad said she had no agenda, I was somewhat suspicious. I wrote back saying something like "So does she know I'm not religious and B isn't jewish? Just trying to figure out how awkward this visit is going to be"

And he wrote back this very mysterious response:

"Hi AE,
I saw M in NJ this weekend and she is prepared to see you. No surprises. Have a great visit. She is on my "good" list."

Now, it's this "good list" thing which is mysterious to me. Does this mean there are people on his 'bad' list? Is the bad list people who don't accept the fact that I'm married to a non jew? Or am I reading too much into this? But somehow reading this I got this vision of my dad defending me to random family members on a 'bad list' somewhere. I don't think that he would actually go so far as defending my decision, but I wonder if there are people being especially obnoxious to my parents about me?

Again, probably reading too much into things. But someday, when all this bullshit has blown over a bit, I would love to talk to my parents about what happened to them when I got married. Cause this talk of good lists and bad lists has me wondering.

Anyways, M came to visit last week and it was actually a pretty awesome visit. She was wearing pants and a low cut shirt with uncovered hair (although her husband recently passed away which might explain that) when she came to visit, which is hilarious to me- that entire side of my family (my dad's side, which this cousin is on) is full of people dressing up when they visit my parents to pretend like they are more religious than they are. Whenever this lady visited my parents she was dressed in full religious uniform, and her son in law (my cousin) has a non religious brother AND sister who both dress up all religiously when they visit my parents. AND I know for a fact that my parents act more religious around these cousins than they actually are! Like my dad is always hiding secular stuff away and saying all these dvar torah's and being extra stringent whenever they came over. We even used to have a joke about it- I would always make fun of him for doing something different when my cousin's were over by saying "as is our custom!" and he eventually started saying that too.

Anyways, it's all an elaborate show they put on- being more religiouser than thou or whatever- but she's actually much more modern than I thought, if she wears pants. She brought us 2 cupcakes and a housewarming present too- a really nice little cutting board made from a bunch of different types of fancy woods, and 2 fancy wooden spoons for cooking with. We gave her a tour of our house and then sat around chatting for a few hours before she went on her way- she was super nice and kept giving us advice about things and was all like "well I'm an old jewish lady I love giving advice to people, you can take it or leave it." Her deceased husband was an academic too, so we talked a bunch about that, and moving around to new places (which she has also done a lot due to being married to academic).

And she left with an open invite for me AND B to come visit her whenever we want. She lives about 5 hours away from us, so I'm sure we won't be taking her up on that in the near future, but the fact that someone I'm semi-related to has actually invited B to their house! This is a huge first.

In other news, after this visit I felt inspired to actually send my dad an update with what's been going on recently (Our dog Barkley just had to have a tumor removed- he has CPV, doggie genital warts. My dog is a slut! Also he will get tumors now for the rest of his live every once in a while, which sucks, but what are ya going to do). I hadn't really talked to my dad since around April on Erev Pesach. He let me know that my cousin in Israel (the daughter of the woman M who visited me) just had her 4th baby! And my cousin in NY (who is around 25 I think?) is about to pop with her 4th any moment! Oh and her sister who got married last year is having her first baby at any moment too, and her brother who got married a few years ago has a wife pregnant with #2. Man does my generation know how to breed. Especially those last 3 siblings who are all black hatters in a family that doesn't believe in using birth control.

Oh and the best news of all- my OTD brother, after 27 years of living at my parent's house, finally got his own apartment and is moving there this weekend! So I can finally go visit him, and crash at his place, since he doesn't live with my parents anymore! Really hoping I can gather up the funds for a trip up north in a few months or at the very least at some point within the next year. And there's a train right near his new place that goes to NYC...potential NYC OTD meetup???

In garden news, Zucchini Invasion!

When dreams come true

2011-06-22T06:53:00.008-04:00

Back when I lived in philly, one of my neighbor's had this great sunflower patch on that little bit of grass they have between the sidewalk and the street. I would walk past it almost every morning while I was walking Barkley, and daydream about growing my own sunflowers when I owned my own house.

Yesterday my sunflowers started blooming

Happy Summer!

From harvest to pizza

2011-06-12T07:31:00.007-04:00

B and I like to make our own pizza. We use the recipe from the Barbara Kingsolver book, Animal Vegetable Miracle (a book I highly recommend if you are into growing veggies at all- in fact this book may be partially responsible for the home grown veggie movement over the past few years).

Pizza Harvest from my garden: Red onions, sweet italian basil, rosemary, greek oregano

Peeled onions

Caramelizing Onions (To caramelize onions cook them in olive oil at a medium-low temperature for a long time until they get glassy and then start to brown a bit)

Pizza dough with oregano and rosemary inside.

Recipe
To make 1 12 inch pizza (enough for 2 people with leftovers or 3 people with no leftovers): in a large bowl combine 3/4th cup of warm (not boiling) water, 1.5 tsp of yeast, let those two ingredients sit for a minute and then add 1/2 tsp of salt, 1.5 tbs of olive oil, 1 and 1/4th cups of all purpose white flour, 1 cup of whole wheat flour.

Kneed dough by hand for around 5 minutes. Incorporate any cheeses or herbs you want to add to the dough (make sure to chop herbs finely). At a certain point you will be like "well this looks like dough, this is probably enough kneading." Knead at least 3 more minutes after that. Cover the bowl and leave to rise for at least 30-40 minutes.

Recipe can be doubled to make 2 12 inch pizzas. While the dough is rising do things like prepare toppings (in my case that's when the caramelizing of onions happened)

Recipe Continued: Preheat oven to 425

Roll out the dough in a roughly circular pattern and fold over the edges and press them into the dough to make a crust. Put some white flour on a 12 inch pizza pan (or a pizza stone, or you can use a regular cookie pan and have a square pizza). Transfer the rolled out dough to the pan. Add some kind of red sauce (we get "pizza sauce" they sell at the grocery store). If you haven't added any herbs to the dough you might want to add some rosemary, oregano and basil to the sauce (just a sprinkling). Cover sauce with layer of shredded mozzarella cheese. Add whatever toppings you want. This one is caramelized onions and basil on my half and pepperoni and prosciutto on B's half. I also like roasted red peppers and artichokes hearts and feta, prosciutto and pineapple, really the possibilities are endless.

Cook for 15-20 minutes or until crust is golden

enjoy!

I really find this recipe to be very easy. The only part that's kinda a pain in the ass is kneading the dough, and waiting around for it to rise. But this pizza is much better than any premade dough from the grocery store. We have most ingredients on hand since we keep yeast in the fridge- the only thing we need to buy special is the sauce, the cheese, and any toppings. It's not quite the same as store pizza, but it's close enough, plus the ability to completely personalize your toppings is awesome.

Meanwhile the peas have all been harvested, the plants torn out and put back in the soil as fertilizer (peas pants area great source of nitrogen). I planted 3 pepper plants where the peas have been, and some more dill and cilantro between the pepper plants

So now the back row has pepper plants and not much else, the middle row has 2 zucchinis, a basil plant and another zucchini, and the front row has a pepper plant, cilantro, another pepper, dill, and another pepper. There is going to be some awesome amount of grilled pepper and zucchini later this summer (This isn't even counting the 6 other pepper plants growing on the other side of the house).

Isn't dill pretty when it's growing? (There also a zucchini leaf in there). I should figure out someway to use this...usually I use dill in chicken soup but it's a bit warm for that.

Holocaust Shaming in the Jewish community

2011-06-06T13:56:00.009-04:00

Recently I was talking to someone on the facebook about circumcision and that anti-Semitic comic thing in San Francisco (Go check out failed messiah if you have no idea what I'm talking about). Anyways, this isn't a post about circumcision, so I'm not even going to go into what my actual opinion is since I don't want 10,000 jews jumping down my throat.

But anyways, one of my friends, actually one of my best friends (who is not Jewish but is into Judaism + married to a Jewish guy), in response to something I said, replied "It is beyond sad to me when family of survivors of the holocaust, whether or not they're religious, are quick to side against their people."

I got really really pissed off about this statement. So upset that I think I sent a semi-mean email to my bff that I hope she is not too pissed off about. But in writing this email I think I was able to articulate what it is that pissed me off so much, so I thought I would share some excerpts with you:

Holocaust shaming? Really? It's bad enough I get that crap from my own family. Just because my grandparents lived through the holocaust doesn't mean I can't criticize Jewish practices (any more than it means I have to be religious or marry a jewish person).

That statement about the family of holocaust survivors was really dismissive and really really pissed me off. It makes me feel like you are joining the Jewish conformity factory that always tries to pressure people to support israel/jews/the jewish community no matter what their personal opinion or personal experiences. Which is part of the reason Jewish Orthodox communities are so fucked up IMO- because they squash anyone who doesn't conform to the 'right' opinions (which is why I never fit in) and cover up anything that would make the community look bad (like child molesting). And holocaust shaming is one of the most frequent methods of squashing that they use.

It's probably years of getting shit from my community/parents about how I have to be religious /not marry B/ never buy a Volkswagen or visit Germany/ not trust non-jewish people/ etc. because of the holocaust that is making me overreact to this, and I know this is an overreaction, but please think twice before invoking the holocaust in any kind of argument, at least arguments you are having with me.

Anyways I don't have any hard feelings or anything, and I hope this doesn't upset you either, but I wanted to let you know how I felt about that, cause you bringing up the holocaust as an argument tactic did really upset me, even though I know you didn't mean it that way. In fact any time someone says my opinion or my actions SHOULD be some way because of something out of my control (like something that happened to my grandparents) it really upsets me, because I've spent the first 2/3rds of my life being told I SHOULD be a certain way that I wasn't or think a certain way that I didn't based on things completely out of my control (like gender, and the religion of my ancestors).

What say you readers? What has been your experience with Holocaust shaming? Maybe it's because I am a direct descendant of survivors (both my paternal grandparents were in the camps), but the shame was thick in the house I grew up in, and it was one of the most common reasons used as to why I had to act a certain way that I didn't want to. "Your great grandparents died so we could be jewish" "Why are you finishing what the nazi's began?" "Did your grandparents live through the camps so you can do what the nazi's would want?" Familiar anyone? Come to think about it, I got a WHOLE bunch of shit like that on this very blog, back when I was engaged to B.

Other than disowning people (or threatening to disown them), holocaust shaming seems like one of the main mechanisms of social control used by the Jewish community. But it may just be something from my particular household since we did grow up with the holocaust. Not that we grew up DURING the holocaust, but growing up with two survivor grandparents who love to tell stories about concentration camps means it is always present in your lives. In fact, here's a picture of a huge painting that used to hang in my grandparent's living room, painted by my grandfather:

That's what I grew up with. Literally hanging in my grandfather's living room, watching over us whenever we were there.

Personally my thoughts on this are...my ancestors died for religious freedom. They died for the freedom to practice Judaism. Yes, some would say those in the holocaust died whether or not they themselves were religious- but the reason they died is because THEIR ancestors kept practicing Judaism and didn't convert, even under enormous outside pressure over thousands of years. To me this is not a story about the importance of keeping Judaism per se alive, although it's been interpreted that way by many Jewish people. To me this struggle is about the importance of being able to practice any religion you want, or none at all. And yet now their deaths are used to try to pressure people who don't want to practice their religion, to keep practicing that religion. How messed up is that?

Progress!

2011-06-01T07:30:00.002-04:00

For the first time since I married B my birthday(yesterday) was acknowledged by all members of my immediate family!

Got a text message from my mom, and both my brothers. (After sending my mom a text message for her birthday a few weeks ago). My dad wrote on my facebook wall and left a voicemail singing happy birthday while we were out seeing Bridesmaids.

Last year I got an email 2 days after my birthday from my dad and nothing from my mom or youngest brother, and 2 years ago (right after I got married) I got nothing at all from all 3. (the middle brother-the otd one- always acknowledges my birthday)

So yeah, I guess I count this as progress.

Meanwhile, I'm 29, which is officially my idea of a 'grown up' age. I've graduated, I'm married, I have a job and I own a house. So when am I supposed to start feeling like a grown up?

Homecoming

2011-05-29T07:54:00.003-04:00

As I mentioned in my last post, I went to DC this past week. I took the train there and back- it was supposed to be around 7 hours but ended up being more like 9 hours each way. I got home at 3:45 in the morning on Wednesday morning. It's been a while since I've been awake at that hour. The true witching hour, when all the night's events have ended and the early risers are not yet awake.

Hanging out on the street in the small downtown area of my city at that hour ('downtown' is about 2 blocks wide and 5 blocks long), waiting for B to pick me up, it was warm and breezy and very Southern. There were crape myrtles everywhere by the train station and a sign saying the railroad track had originally been built by the confederate army during the civil war. It even smelled Southern- the smells I associate with visiting Atlanta and Florida in my youth. It smells like wet air and flowers and summer, and none of the horrible big city sewage smells they had in DC. And it felt much much safer than I would feel waiting for B outside the Philly* train station at 3:45 in the morning, even though it was completely deserted other than this southern working class dude talking on a cell phone with his deep accent and a giant palmetto bug the size of my hand walking along the sidewalk.

And it felt like like coming home, and being glad to be there, especially after 9 hours on a 7 hour train. You know that feeling. I associate that feeling with dorming in college. And not the way you think- it wasn't when I got back home to my parent's house. In college my parents would only let me dorm if I would go home every weekend for shabbas (since they knew I wouldn't keep shabbas at the dorms, as they already knew by that point that I wasn't too interested in religion). So every Friday afternoon I took the 2 hour train ride back to NJ and every Saturday night or Sunday morning my dad or my boyfriend at the time would drive me back into the city, where I lived in the Hunter College dorms in Manhattan on 25th street and 1st ave (I had a great view of the east river from my 10th floor tiny dorm room). And after a few months of this I would notice this huge feeling of relief, right when we were crossing the George Washington Bridge and the buildings of NYC were first in full view. That feeling of "I'm home! My own home, where I can do what I want, with no one to tell me what to do, where I don't have to keep up this religious charade." Later I felt that feeling in Philly too, when coming home from visiting my parents, or even when coming home from one of my many academic business trips, where I have to keep up a different type of charade (the "I'm collegial and friendly and totally normal, please network with me" charade).

Even though I've been out of town a few times this past year, it's been to visit friends or to visit my in-laws. This was my first business trip, my first trip out of town without B since moving here, and it was the strongest I have felt that homecoming reliefy feeling since moving down south...I guess after almost a year it is finally starting to feel like home. Even the civil war reminders don't bother me the way they used to. it's just one more weird quirk of being in the south. Of being home.

Welcome to the South ya'll

*now that I've been gone for almost a year I feel safe to say that I lived in Philly for 6 years, while I was going to grad school.

An OTD meetup!

2011-05-27T09:15:00.007-04:00

Earlier this week I was in DC for a Census workshop, and had the privilege of meeting Ms. Boxed Whine, another OTD blogger. She told me I was an 'old school' OTD blogger, which is funny, since I think of this as my *new* blog still (I've been blogging here for 4 years and at my 'old blog' for nearly 11 years).

I suppose many OTD blogs have come and go in the last 4 years (and I consider orthoprax bogs to be a subset of the OTD blogosphere), and mine is a lot less active now that my life is a lot less dramatic (in the religious realm) compared to when I first started dating B and when we were engaged. There's been some new blogs lately like Sitting on a fence and I hope other OTD blogs will be created too. Lurkers: come forth and tell your stories! And if you are a new OTD blogger trying to get more readers, let me know and I will spread the word!

Also I was thinking it would be nice to have an OTD/orthoprax blogroll, the way I have an atheist blogroll that is up on my sidebar. But I have no idea how to go about making such a thing. Anyone?

Meanwhile I have plans to visit NYC in August 2013 for the American Sociological Association Conference, and now that I've met one person in real life who came from this blog, I'm thinking it would be awesome to meet with more of you. And I know lots of you live in the NY area. So let's make a date for 2 years from now ya'll! :)

Happy anniversary to me and b!

2011-05-17T07:41:00.004-04:00

Today marks 2 years since B and I got married! Also, one year since I graduated, one year since my parent's met B, and one year since I last saw my parents.

We already celebrated our anniversary by going to see Bill Maher a few weeks ago (which was our gift to each other). But today I'm taking off from work, we're going out to Mellow Mushroom (fancy pizza chain) for lunch, and we have filet minons defrosting in the fridge for dinner. Maybe we will grill it on our new grill. :)

Last week my brother and his girlfriend and then my inlaws came to visit. It was awesome to have visitors cause we did a whole bunch of touristy stuff and tried out a whole bunch of new restaurants- so it was like a week of vacation without leaving home.

In garden news, my peas are flowering and one mini pea is starting to grow! My zucchini plants got pretty wiped out because of hard rains a few days after they got put in the ground, but one plant survived. I planted peppers and basil in the ground and some in pots. One of the pots I used was one that had no plants and was sitting on the side of the house (from the previous owner) but now that I've planted a pepper in it, a few morning glories are starting to grow too (not surprising,since the side of the house it came from has tons of morning glories- they're annuals, but they reseed themselves- and IIRC a bunch of the flowers were right over where this pot was sitting)). So I put that pot next to the deck railing so the morning glories can grow up the railing, and then after this year maybe they will reseed themselves into the ground under the deck, so I can have morning glories on BOTH sides of my house! :)

Back row- flowering peas
middle row- dead zucchini, basil, live zucchini
front row- pepper, cilantro, pepper, dill, pepper
around the edges- red onions

Advice to an OTDer who recently got engaged to a non jewish man

2011-05-07T07:33:00.007-04:00

Next week my (OTD) brother and his girlfriend are coming to visit for a couple of days, after which my in laws are supposed to visit. Which means...spring cleaning! I finished the semester on Thursday (Yay, I have officially survived my first year as a professor!), so yesterday me and B spent the whole day cleaning, and we have more cleaning plans for today and tomorrow. We also have plans for the farmer's market and a poker game tonight- now that I've been here almost a year I'm starting to have a social life! Thus far it only involves other professors, but some of them aren't sociology professors, so I think that counts. :)

Meanwhile, my brother is coming to visit, and I want to post on facebook about it. I'm facebook friends with his girlfriend (although this will be my first time meeting her in person). So I feel it would be rude to post about him visiting and not mention her. But, I'm now facebook friends with my dad. And even though I find it particularly freeing that my dad can see all my pictures and facebook updates that reflect my *real* personality (or as real as I'm willing to share with colleagues and former students- but quite a few pictures of me up there in tank tops, pants, etc.), my brother is not quite as open.

He still lives at home, and has figured out some kind of weird arrangement with my parents, a kind of "don't ask, don't tell" policy- in which he somehow drives to work on Saturdays and has convinced my parents to be ok with it (He was always better at manipulating them than I was). So he asked me not to mention his girlfriend on facebook where our dad can see- he tells me that my mother has 'inferred' that he will be traveling with a passenger (I can just imagine my mom trying to confront him without actually confronting him- such things usually involve lots of snarky comments on my mom's end) but he doesn't want them to 'know the details.'

For all the tzures (trouble) I've gone through after 'coming out' to my parents as off the derech, it is SO WORTH not having to sneak around like that anymore. Cause I used to be the same way- having secret boyfriends I wouldn't tell my parents about. Lying about what I was up to. Hiding my true self all the time. And that double life thing is so not for me. But it took a long time to switch from the mindset that I have to hide everything from my family, to the mindset that- I'm going to be myself, if they don't like that, that's their problem and not mine. I don't think I really got to that point until I was married to someone not jewish, and felt like I had nothing left to lose by being myself.

Which is why I admire Tova so much for announcing her recent engagement to her family the way I should have announced mine- as the awesome celebratory thing it is, rather than like some secret to be ashamed of. Not surprisingly, her family did not exactly react in the way that decent human beings should behave. She emailed me to ask my advice:

I wanted to ask you a bit of advice after reading an old post of Heshy's on your relationship and subsequent marriage. This past weekend, I happily accepted my boyfriend's marriage proposal to me. I knew much of my Jewish family wouldn't be glad about the news, but one person's reaction was truly shocking. He had informed my mother (who then informed me) that he was tearing his clothes in mourning. I do not know if he is also sitting shiva for me, but it's not as though I can ask him if he is.

The shocking bit is that I always envisioned my frum family members as reasonable, Modern Orthodox people (my mother herself left the religion her parents raised her with - a liberal branch of Protestant Christianity - to become a Jew) who would never sit shiva or publicly condemn their children for "going off the derech". Sure, they are upset about it, but I was sure they'd never mourn their child's happiness.

The funny thing is that no one tore any clothing "for" my sister when she married her now ex-husband, and he was and is (by everyone's account) an unsavory individual who doesn't hold a candle to my fiance. I was advised by a few others to send a condolence card to - or "sit shiva" with - the person who claimed to be tearing clothing, but I was worried that this would be seen as a challenge instead of revealing the absurdity of mourning a relative's engagement.

Have you any advice for me, considering your similar personal history? You are free to publish this letter in its entirety on your blog, as I would like to know what your readers have to say.

So what's my advice, as I'm a week away from my 2 year wedding anniversary? I guess...don't take it personally, expect the worst of people and you will hardly ever be shocked, remember who is good to you and keep in closer touch with those people, get financially independent and out of your parent's house as soon as humanly possible, and be prepared to find out a lot of views of your family members that you didn't want to know they have.

When I got engaged, I didn't go about it the same way. I called my parents as soon as we had posted it on facebook, and then slowly told other family members over time, as I encountered them. My parents told a few people too (although they were too ashamed to tell any of their friends and most of our family). So I didn't have the initial shocked reaction of people tearing their clothes or whatever after we got engaged.

What I did have was a long engagement (almost a year). During that year, I got a number of long letters from my dad trying to reason me out of getting married (using very misinterpreted statistics in some cases- by the way if you are trying to convince a sociologist who specializes in marriage and divorce not to get married, don't misquote statistics on marriage and divorce), my dad also tried to convince me to convince B to convert, there was the infamous phone call from my little brother telling me a rabbi said if me and B got married either he would convert, we would break up, or "B would die within a year" (as I said- it's our two year anniversary a week from Tuesday, take THAT stupid rabbi who is full of shit!), my mom wrote to say that if I went through with the wedding we couldn't have a relationship anymore (and she mostly kept to that), and a cousin "just happened to be in the neighborhood" (2 hours from where he lived) and stopped by to try to convince me not to get married. After I was married, my charedi grandfather told me I wasn't married according to him and tried to get me to find a nice jewish boy at a wedding we were at.

I too was very shocked at some of these reactions. My parents are 'modern' orthodox too (although they are right wing MO). My parents also both changed religious backgrounds around my age- my mom from charedi to modern orthodox, and my dad to modern orthodox after growing up more traditional/conservative kinda (My grandparents went to a conservative shul, kept a loose version of kosher and shabbas, and celebrated holidays- but they sent my dad to an orthodox yeshiva for high school which is when he became a BT). My parents are supposedly reasonable people who talked about black hatter/charedi people as "people who have gone off the deep end." My parents even had religious drama at their own wedding, cause my paternal grandparents wanted mixed dancing and my maternal grandparents said they wouldn't go to the wedding if they had that. I always thought of my family as religious, but also reasonable people. My dad has a PhD for pete's sake.

But when it came to me getting married to someone not jewish, all that reason went out the window. The same people who were supportive when my cousin, at the age of 20, married a 40something year old Breslover guy with no job (my parents flew to Israel for that wedding! They bought my cousin an expensive mattress set! And my cousin got divorced 6 months later after the guy went through all my cousin's savings and sold all their wedding gifts-including the mattress set- for money which we think went to support a drug habit) would not even attend their own daughter's wedding for fear someone might actually think they supported me and my decision to get married in any way. To a guy who actually is my age (well a year and a half younger than me) who is perfectly awesome in every way, just not jewish. They were cool with all my cousins' arranged marriages to virtual strangers, and they are cool with the fact that some of my cousins were told by their rabbis that it's against halacha to use birth control (so my 24 year old cousin is now pregnant with her 4th child!). But marrying a non jewish guy is worse than all of that. Clearly our morals are not the same.

Not to say things were all bad. But you shouldn't be surprised by horrible things your family might do or say to convince you not to get married. I actually found that the worst reactions came from family members closest to me (my parents, my brother, my grandfather). But I was also really pleasantly surprised by the support I got from some of my extended family members, like my grandmother, who once stopped talking to me for 2 years for dating someone who was a convert when I was around 18, but after I got married called me to tell me to call her more often. An uncle of mine who lives in Israel called the morning of our wedding to say "even if we don't always agree on every decision, you are always part of our family, and we love you and we wish you the best today." One of my cousins (actually, the same one who got married/divorced to the dude 20 years her senior) even got us a wedding present.

Ok, reading that, that's kinda a pathetic excuse for "support." The only family member on my side that truly supported us was my brother (the one visiting next week- not the crazy rabbi death one) who was a witness at our wedding. So I guess another piece of advice is to lower your expectations of your family, and maybe even what your wedding will be like. Growing up MO, I'm sure you went to tons of fancy weddings where lots of family members came and had a huge celebration. By marrying someone not jewish,you won't have that. Which doesn't mean you can't have something even better- I used the fact that my family was non supportive to have the small non-traditional wedding I wanted (~20 guests) and since it was so small, we could do exactly what we wanted,and only invited people we really loved- didn't have to invite people out of obligation. We also got to have great non kosher italian food.

But you won't have that big family wedding that you grew up seeing- at least not with your side of the family. You won't have the big traditional jewish wedding that we all saw over and over again growing up. Your parents will likely not give you any money for your wedding, so you will have to rely on what your fiance's family can give + your own savings.

Your relationship with most of your family members will probably change. Some will be supportive and some will not, and you will remember which is which, and that can't help but change your relationship with those people. Remember that even though you will probably 'lose' some family members, you still are gaining a whole new family- your fiance's family. :) And my in-laws are pretty awesome, which has helped me a lot. And even the family you 'lose' will probably not be lost- I still talk to my mom at least 2 or 3 times a year even though we supposedly don't have a relationship anymore.

What helps in keeping your sanity through all this? Apart from blogging about the crazyness (which helps, because whenever something crazy happens you can be like "this will make for a great blog post!" instead of "woe is me I'm surrounded by asshole zealots!"), As a sociologist,I try to approach everything like an ethnographer. An ethnographer does 'participant observation'- they go into a strange culture and try to figure out the social arrangements, the rituals, the internal logic of that culture, etc. But while the ethnographer is participating in the culture, they are also apart from the culture, an objective outside observer.

So from my ethnographer/sociologist stance, a relative tearing their clothes is a form of community pressure to promote endogamy (marrying within a group). Your relative was socialized (or brainwashed) to tear his clothes and/or sit shiva in reaction to news of a family member marrying someone not Jewish. There will also likely be an enormous amount of community pressure on your parents(if their MO community is anything like my parents') to not give approval of your wedding. These responses are methods of preservation of their culture by promoting within-group marriages. It's sort of like a survival instinct, but for a culture rather than a person. Jewish culture has survived for thousands of years despite people trying to kill us all the time. In order for that to have happened, the community must have developed very strong norms and social sanctions against assimilation/exogamy (Marrying outside a group). These are those strong norms in action.

This isn't about you, it's about the symbolic nature of what you are doing- leaving a religious community, signaling that you will probably not raise your (theoretical) children in that religious tradition and continue to socialize your descendants into their culture. The community therefore reacts to try to prevent that in order to preserve itself, in whatever insane way possible. And family members are one of the strongest 'policers' of community social norms (in this case the norm that you should marry within your group)in part because they are closer to you and therefore have a stronger influence (one of the functions of the family is to socialize members into community norms of behavior), and also have the most to lose (because they can lose community standing) if you violate community norms.

As for how you should react to this person, that's up to you and your relationship with them. With my little brother, I laughed at him when he told me that thing about our rabbi,and on our own year anniversary I made sure to send him a message mocking him for passing on that idiotic advice. But that's based on my relationship with him, where we frequently make fun of each other. Other people might not react as well to that.

The way I see it you have 4 options:
1. Make fun of him
2. Confront him in a serious way, saying he hurt your feelings
3. Confront him in an angry way, telling him he's being a ginourmous asshole who needs to get over himself
4. Ignore the whole thing, pretend like you never heard about it, and let things blow over.

I will say that now that I've been married a couple of years,and people have had time to get used to the idea (and the idea that no, we're not getting divorced so I can marry a jew) things have settled down some with my family. The absolute worst time was when I was engaged,and people were trying to convince me not to get married, and I was constantly defending my decision to get married. But after we got married (apart from that one thing with my grandfather) it's been mostly quiet, and I even talked to that insane brother for like an hour on the phone right before pesach.

Was it all worth it? Definitely. I get to live with my husband every day, we have our own family that we hope to build in the future when we are ready to start having kids, I've found out which of my family members will be there for me no matter what, and which are insane. I can finally be open with my family about my actual level of religiosity because I have nothing left to lose. For me just getting to be with B is worth it all. But looking back I do feel like my engagement was a battle with my family(and engagements can be stressful even if your family is completely supportive), so I wish you the best of luck!

Anyways this post has gotten insanely long and I have to go to the farmer's market, but congrats again to Tova, I hope this helps, and readers- please feel free to offer your own advice as well!

America, fuck yeah!

2011-05-02T07:37:00.003-04:00

In Fall 2001 I took the path train every day to get from NJ to college in NYC. There were two Path trains- the one I took to midtown, and the one to the World Trade Center. For months after 9/11 the Path train station had hundreds of missing persons signs, which no one would take down. I would read their descriptions while waiting for the train every morning. I can't help but think back to that time today.

It was the start of a dark decade. Being in NYC at the time was scary. People were scared. People were jackasses, and kept throwing bags of flour down the escalators at the subway stations. Other people panicked and said the flour was anthrax, and subway stations were shut down. I showed up late to my social statistics class at least 5 times that semester, since I had to walk across town to get another subway, or try to get a cab if I was really going to be late (but that cost upwards of $20, which I couldn't really afford).

I'm not normally happy to see anyone die. I hear young people were rioting on some college campuses when the news came out last night. These students were 8, 9, 10, 11 years old when 9/11 happened. They've lived half their lives under this shadow. I was 19 and it is a clear turning point to me. Before 9/11 I didn't read the news, things happened,but the 90s were a golden decade for the most part, the economy was booming, we weren't at constant war, and I was too young to remember the 80s. But since 9/11 things have not been good. People are too cynical. Conspiracy theories abound. No one trusts anyone, least of all the government.

I hope this marks another turning point in the mood of our country. When I was a kid I was proud of our country. Ronald Reagan told the Russian dude to tear down that wall, and he did. We went to war (the gulf war) and everyone hung up yellow ribbons on their trees to support the soldiers. My 3rd grade teacher took us on a walk around the neighborhood to see the ribbons. The war was over in a few months. Later that year the Soviet Union collapsed, and we all looked on in amazement as the map of the world changed.

Now people have a magnet, a picture of what support used to look like. The facade but not the ribbon itself. How symbolic. There's so much cynicism about the government, they are corrupt, they are constantly having sex scandals, they can't get anything good done, we're in two endless expensive wars, and up until now we had gone almost a decade not even able to find Osama Bin Laden. People don't have trust in the government anymore, and part of that has manifested in not wanting to give the government more money. Republicans are using this as an opportunity to cut government services to the poor and trying to cut services like family planning for women. This is incredibly shortsighted, but this generation has apparently not learned from the mistakes of the past (maybe because the quality of public education has become so dismal as the education system has also been starved of money and resources).

Anyways, I'm tired of living in this depressing country of cynics. I'm hoping this revives some of the sense of unity and sense of shared responsibility to each other that used to make this country so great. I feel better already.

Gardening update and a passover miracle

2011-04-28T13:14:00.006-04:00

It's been so long since I've updated and so much has grown since then!
Here are the peas and onions at 5 weeks and again at 7 weeks. The second picture was taken today, and there are also dill and cilantro seedlings sticking out of the ground (although they are hard to see). In about a week I'm going to plant some zucchini seedlings out there and the week after that 3 pepper seedlings will go back there too.

I recently repotted all the seedlings into larger containers with real (potting) soil. The seedlings grew pretty well the first few weeks (especially the zucchini seedlings, which I didn't even plant until about 4 weeks ago).

The cotyledons (The first set of leaves) had come up fine, but the first set of true leaves had started to peep out and then the plants kinda...stalled and didn't grow anymore. So last week I replanted the zucchini and a the red bell peppers into plastic cups with some potting soil in them (and holes cut in the bottom for drainage.) The true leaves on those peppers started growing like crazy (as you can see in the picture- the true leaves are the heart shaped leaves) so today I replanted the colored bell peppers in real dirt too (they had been growing in seed starting mix, which doesn't have a lot of nutrients- hence probably why they stalled after a while).
This time I put a bunch of seedlings into the same pots which will make it easier in a couple of weeks when I start to take them outside and inside for a week while I harden them off before planting them outside.

Meanwhile, on south side of the house I cleared out a big weed patch and planted dill, cilantro, 3 mammoth sunflowers (1 to block the view of our neighbor's front porch for each of our 3 windows), and a rosemary and oregano plant. Some peppers and basil will go out there in a few weeks too.

In this picture you can see the rosemary with a sunflower seedling on the top left. There's also dill seedlings growing there above the rosemary but they are pretty hard to see.

In passover news, on erev passover (day before passover) my dad called me while I was teaching a statistics class. So after class I called him back, and my mom picked up the phone. A passover miracle occurred! I talked to her for a whole 3 minutes before she made up an excuse to pass the phone to my dad. But I talked to my dad for a while, and then I talked to my youngest brother E for a while. The 3 of them were at a hotel for the first days of passover.

My brother E wants to be a professor and is going to be applying to Philosophy PhD programs in the Fall. It's funny, when I moved home for an uncomfortable summer between college and moving away to grad school (and out of my parents house for good) my mom said some mean thing about how I shouldn't talk to my youngest brother too much so I wouldn't be a bad influence on him "the way I was on my other brother" (who actually started eating non kosher meat before I did, so I think it was more the other way around- although we did go OTD at the same time and were very close at the time).

Anyways it seems like I did influence my youngest brother- to try to become a professor like me! And I got a text message from him yesterday saying he got an invitation from phi beta kappa and was that a good thing and should be join? (I answered "That's the most prestigious honors society in academia you should definitely join and congrats!"). I'm totally a GOOD influence! (I'm also in PBK).

It did sting a bit when my mom made up an excuse to hand off the phone to my dad after like 3 minutes on the phone. But at least I should be glad she answered my call at all? (she answered my dad's cell phone cause he was talking to someone on her cellphone) That was the first time I talked to her since I called my dad when my grandfather died in October, and she answered his phone then.

Oh and I almost forgot the actual passover miracle! So after I invited my brother to come visit whenever he put my dad back on the phone, and I figured, what the heck, I might as well invite him too. So I was like "hey if you ever are driving to Florida or something [my parents now have a condo in Florida that they inherited from my dead grandparents who lived there for about 20 years after they retired]. you should come visit us on the way. And my dad said that maybe he would drive down to Florida in December and visit us and my cousin's mom who lives in Atlanta on the way down.

So yeah! Possible actual visit to our house by my parents! (or at least my dad? Not clear). And classes are over for the semester, and finals are about to be taken starting tomorrow! And in a week and a half my brother and his new-ish girlfriend (they've been dating like 8 months, and I've never met her) are coming down to visit on his motorcycle. I don't know much about her but we are facebook friends, and she is on a roller derby tea, so from that I infer that she is awesome. Then after after that my inlaws are coming for a few days and I think we will do some of the touristy things around town with them. :)

Baggage

2011-04-06T18:47:00.004-04:00

Tova was posting about cleaning out her mother's basement and finding all sorts of old stuff and trying to figure out what to keep and what to get rid of.

After living in dorms for the last two years of college, I spend a couple of tense and uncomfortable months living with my parents over a summer before moving to my new apartment for grad school. When I made that move to my new grad school city, 2 hours away, my mother told me that I should bring whatever I wanted with me cause she was throwing everything else out (which she did- I left behind some artwork I had done in college and a pair of steel toe boots, and she threw them + the artwork away. I really felt the love in that family).

I threw away/donated/gave away 22 years worth of stuff when I moved out of my parents house that last time. I gave away clothes, books, and threw away years worth of letters, including some I had gotten from people over the summer as a child during the two summers I spent in Sternberg sleepaway camp (before I was kicked out, ha), old dolls (including some I had sewn and embroidered myself when I was very young- a skill I have absolutely no use for as an adult- which I wish I had kept), lots of clothes from my goth days, and pretty much all the decorations and posters and trappings of being an adolescent.

I decided I would keep all pictures, all yearbooks, the two glasses filled with stuff from my bat mitzvah and melted over with wax (assembled by some classmates) that was all the rage when I was getting bat mitzvad in 1994, some tickets and playbills, some stuff from ex boyfriends, and my diary from when I was on birthrite. I put these all in a box I labeled "big box o' nostalgic crap." When I was in grad school I left this box in my closet, except a few times when it came out and I looked over the stuff in there- sometimes when old friends were visiting, sometimes to show to new(ish) boyfriends about what my life was like back in the day.

I also kept a box of sefarim (religious books). I actually gave away a whole lot of sefarim when I made that move (most just went to my family's library), but I kept my tanach (old testament), the artscroll chumash (the torah) which I used in high school chumash class, that 5 volume blue version of the chumash, two machzorim which I had gotten as a bat mitzvah present and which had my name engraved on them, a couple of siddurs that I had used frequently as a child/teenager, a couple of books of tehillim and some benchers from my brother's bar mitzvah and from some weddings of friends.

In grad school those sefarim took up the bottom shelf of one of my (4) bookshelves, under a shelf that had lots of books on Buddhism, ancient Greek religion, Quakerism, lots of yoga stuff, and some philosophy of religion books from my "reading lots of stuff about religions" phase in college. When I moved to the South last summer I brought the sefarim with me. When I got here and I was unpacking the books, I decided these books didn't need to be out, they could stay in a box. I had put the big box o' nostalgic crap in one of the closets in one of the spare bedrooms (which we don't really use), so I decided to put the sefarim in there too- on the highest shelf (out of sight, out of mind)

Of course I strained my back, lifting a heavy box like that over my head. It hurt for weeks.

So as I moved into my new house here in the South, my old baggage was still causing me pain, even as I was trying to put it on the shelf.

How symbolic.

Weekend

2011-04-03T19:51:00.005-04:00

The past week has been crazy. In addition to my normal work load (teaching 3 classes this semester) we had to have our annual review documents in by Friday so I had to write a narrative about what I've been doing this year and update this ancient official computer program with all my yearly activities, I'm giving a guest lecture this week so I prepped an extra lesson last week, I'm getting peer reviewed in 2 of my classes this week so I worked extra hard on those lesson plans and had a meeting about that with the people reviewing me, and I had to edit the page proofs for one of my upcoming articles (and journal editors always give you like a week to finish them at this stage).

But the weekend was great. Yesterday we went to home depot and got lots of gardening supplies, some plants, and paint for the bathroom. A few months ago Max ate the plastic support holding up the wall mirror in our bathroom, and the mirror fell down. The mirror was fine but the wall was damaged. So we spackled the wall and fixed a spot next to that as well. The previous owners had left tons of cans of paint, and we figured we must have that color too. Well, it turns out we had every shade of beige except this one (which we figured out after testing several colors on the area behind the mirror), so for several months our bathroom was in limbo and we just propped the mirror up against the wall.

Yesterday using a box cutter I cut off a little piece of the wall behind the mirror- about 1.5 inches square. I stuck it in an envelope and wrote down the info on all the other paint the previous owners left behind (since they were all the same kind, we figured this had been that kind too). And we headed off to Home Depot, where this old painter guy who seemed kind of scatterbrained mixed us up a can of paint that matched it nearly-exactly.

So we came home, I painted, and then we used a studfinder to find some wooden beams and screwed in new metal mirror supports into those beams (the previous plastic supports were screwed into drywall which wasn't helping) and rehung the mirror. The paint is the tinyest shade darker, but it's so close you can't tell unless you know where to look. Bathroom accomplished!

Also today I put out a bunch of black mulch around some bushes out back where I pulled out a ton of ivy last summer (The mulch looks much nicer than bare dirt). In plant news, I picked up a strawberry plant that is already growing mini strawberries, a second rosemary plant (one is going to be potted and one is going in the ground when it gets warmer) and a baby oregano plant. Yesterday I started some zucchini and eggplant seeds.

Now there is nothing to do but make sure my plants get enough water (but not too much water) and make sure the pea vines climb up the trellis for about the next 3 weeks, until all chance of frost is gone. At that point I'll be hardening off and then planting bell pepper and basil seedlings and cilantro and dill seeds and one of the rosemary plants directly into the ground, and replanting other pepper and basil seedlings into containers for the north facing deck. I'll also be moving the oregano and lemon tree outside. About a month after that the zucchini and eggplant will go outside.

The lemon tree is growing lots of new baby leaves. It's been pretty cold this past week so the Crape myrtle outside hasn't put out any new growth since it's been planted, but it seems to be doing ok as far as I can tell. The peas are slowly growing and the onions seem to be loving this cold weather.

I think this place is going to pretty much be my gardening blog for the next few months.

Update

2011-03-28T17:17:00.004-04:00

Welp, me and my dad are now facebook friends. I friended him. But he seems to hardly every use it- seems mostly he just posts about his gemarah shiur on there. No facebook contact as of yet. Although we have had more contact in general the past few weeks- he called me on Purim to say hi for about 5 minutes, and he's been sending me some emails on stories about sociologists in the news (including one about my old statistics professor, who apparently is now involved in a supreme court case).

I figure, what's the worse that can happen? My dad might actually learn something about my personal life? It's not like I have any secrets at this point, and my facebook is pretty self-censored already, since I'm friends with lots of other family members and colleagues and former students.

In gardening news, my trees have arrived, my baby plants are growing, and my sugar snap pea shoots are sticking out of the ground (and I ate some of them- did you know pea shoots are delicious and taste just like peas, and you can cut them off when they get about 2 inches high, and the shoots will grow back?).

Baby lemon tree (next to a much older money tree)

The small ones are basil plants and the larger ones are bell pepper plants (5 colors- red, yellow, orange, white and purple)

baby Catawba Crape myrtle tree (and you can see some of my hostas poking out of the ground).

This weekend I start some zucchini indoors, and in about 3 weeks when all chance of frost is gone I will start transferring some of these baby basil and pepper plants to pots and eventually outside. The lemon tree doesn't go outside until it's been 50 degrees at night for at least a few weeks.

Bonus picture of me and max!

If I'm at home and posting on the internets, chances are I look just like I do in this picture. This is my interneting spot on the couch. And yes, there is usually some kind of animal involved (sometimes up to 3 at a time! Did I mention we have 3 cats and 2 dogs?)

sweet barking cheese

2011-03-18T20:30:00.002-04:00

my father has joined the facebook. I know this because he has friended his cousin, who I am friends with.

I bought some trees

2011-03-12T20:45:00.003-05:00

Catawba Crape Myrtle:

The one I got is only going to be like a foot tall though so prolly won't look like that for a few years. They bloom for 100 days of the year. They get to be about 12-15 feet tall

Since i was buying trees I also bought a baby Dwarf Meyer Lemon Tree

That one is going to live in a container on the porch in the summer and inside in the sun room during the winter. I'm really hoping I don't manage to kill this one, cause I am already planning out recipes in my head (meyer lemon + romano cheese + red onions also from the garden + pasta, meyer lemon cranberry walnut scones, meyer lemon bars).

Today we finally were able to finish digging out the stump which was where the crape myrtle is going to go. I've been occasionally going back there and digging at various times over the last week and today I spent like an hour digging and sawing random roots until I got the stump loose, at which point B was able to pull it out with his manly manliness.

Also today I planted sugar snap peas outside (after sprouting them indoors) and cleaned up like 8 feet of hardcore weeds in this corner near the shed, one of the last areas in the backyard I need to clean up. I was putting it off till it got warmer, but it will be in the 70s all weekend, so I'm going to go finish the crazy weed patch tomorrow and bag up all the clippings. In addition to the giant tree stump (which is heavy as hell, and I'm not sure what we're going to do with it now, but it looks pretty cool). B also sawed this skinny stump down, since the previous owners had left it sawed off at like 2 feet and it was a total eye sore. Also today I discovered some of my pepper seed planters had grown mold, so after consulting the internet I left the planters in the sun a few hours to try to dry them out, and I'm going to refrain from watering them for a while.

Spring break this week was lovely. I made significant progress on a research project, I lesson planned for next week, me and B went to dinner at the house of the other new assistant prof in my department, I did a TV interview with a reporter from the Polish Media, and I was in touch with my aunt and cousin (who are both awesome) since I had emailed them about my last week's TV appearance. My brother is also planning on coming to visit in May with his girlfriend (who I haven't met before) and we planned out that trip this week. Also did the taxes, organized a guest speaker event at my department for next week and all the gardening I've talked about earlier. Some of the flowers in the backyard have bloomed and turned out to be daffodils, white with orange centers. The hostas are on the brink of blooming, as are some of the trees and the wisteria that is hanging over the front porch.

Cowards way out

2011-03-09T12:22:00.003-05:00

This is the email I actually sent to my dad:

Hi Abba,

I'm sure this isn't my 15 minutes of fame...I would hope at some point my research gets media attention and THEN I'll get my 15 minutes. But this "local expert" thing is just part of my job, since I'm at the largest university in our metro area (big fish in small pond-ism?). :)

I actually just got a call from someone at *polish tv station*, and they are coming to interview me tomorrow for a tv news story on *issue related to my research*. I'm internationally famous! :) It only broadcasts in polish though, so not sure if I'll be able to get a clip this time.

-Abandoning Eden

The great vegetable garden experiment of o' eleven

2011-03-08T09:26:00.007-05:00

For several years now I've wanted a vegetable garden. When I lived in Philly my next door neighbor set up an awesome veggie garden in the front yard and I used to stare at her veggies with envy every time I left my house. For the last several summer's I've fulfilled my veggie gardening needs with a potted herb garden- I grew basil, parsley, sage and rosemary (no thyme). It is awesome to cook with fresh herbs you grew yourself and just picked out of the ground. Once I had a potted kumquat tree, but I killed that.

But while I was renting/a student it seemed stupid to go to the effort of setting up a raised bed garden, cause that seemed like a lot of effort (it's really not) and I was going to move in a few years anyways.

But now I'm a house owner! A few months ago a giant branch fell off our giant sycamore tree in the backyard when it snowed (one of our the two snows we got this winter, fingers crossed), and this past weekend we finally finished sawing up the branch so we could throw it out. But there were several really nice really thick branches from the base of the branch that seemed a waste just to throw out. So I figured that I could make my new raised bed garden using the branches from the tree as a border. The house actually came with a raised bed garden in the backyard, but the dogs live out there, and I don't want dog-pee flavored vegetables. Plus they would probably eat the veggies that grew above ground.

There's this spot on the side of my house that's probably not a great spot to plant veggies, since it's on the north side of the house (and therefore gets the least sun). But there's room there, and a trellis already built and planting stuff on the north side might actually be good in the south, since it can get so hot it might scorch the veggies, and it'll be a bit cooler on that side. It's an experiment. If my veggies turn our horrible I might go to the effort of getting rid of some bushes on the north side of the house for a proper veggie garden next year, and maybe grow some roses on the trellis where the veggie garden is.

So yesterday I dug up the ugly sharp and prickly small bush that was where my veggie garden is now (good riddance to that stupid bush, it's cut me several times and deserved to die!), put my sycamore branches together in a square, dug up the top layer of soil and then added a bunch more top soil + mushroom compost.

Also yesterday I went and bought a bunch of seeds, includes sugar snap peas, red onions, bell peppers (5 colors- red, orange, yellow, purple and white), zucchini, cilantro (woo! can't grow this in containers cause it just won't work, so glad to finally have some cilantro plants), dill, italian basil, and 3 kinds of sunflowers. Also a rosemary plant which will live inside for the new few weeks. I started the peas, peppers and basil seeds inside- the peppers and basil will grow inside for about 6-8 more weeks, and then some will go in the ground and some will go in pots that will live on the deck (On the north side of the house) and the peas will go in the ground in the raised bed garden as soon as they start sprouting. About half the onions are already planted (you can see them in the picture around the edges). According to the internet research I've done, onions and peas go in the ground about 6 weeks before the last frost, and the average last day of frost in my area is in early april.

I also got SO many onions (the seeds weren't actually seeds- they were transfers, and sold in groups of 50), that I've decided to start an onion experiment. One group of onions went into the new raised bed garden. One group went into the old raised bed garden (Hopefully the dogs will not dig those up, but as I said, it's an experiment). One group went into the ground randomly on the north side of the house, without much tilling- just dug a hole and threw some potting soil in there with the onion plants. I still have like 20 onion seeds left, so I planted those in some planter containers in the house, and those won't go out for another few weeks- possibly in the back garden if the dogs don't dig the other ones out, cause I'm not sure where else to plant them (can you plant onions in a container?). This experiment is also trying to determine when the best time to plant onions is, and I'm keeping careful records of when everything gets planted

My plan for my new raised bed garden is:
(started near the house)
Row of Peas
Row of 3 bell peppers
Row of 2 zucchini mounds, with basil, cilantro and dill in between
Row of 3 bell peppers
Row of onions (also rows of onions up the two sides)

Container garden on deck: Basil, Rosemary, Pepper plants, maybe some onions if those can live in containers?

Backyard old raised garden: Onions, and later in the summer sunflowers. Also also sunflowers in random spots around the house and the backyard, I love sunflowers! :)

Bonus picture: Max, the Winter Jasmine planted in the sinkhole, and the creek behind it (this was right after there was a huge storm so the creek was almost an actual creek instead of just a trickle of water!)

In other news...

2011-03-06T13:28:00.006-05:00

It's spring break so I have a minute to think and relax (hence the two blog posts!)! Yesterday I bought a winter jasmine bush at the farmer's market and planted it over the old sink hole.

It's very small now, but it will get as high as 4 feet tall and as much as 7 feet wide, and everywhere the branches touch the ground they will put down roots. All those roots are good for preventing erosion. In early spring it blooms with little yellow flowers. It'll fit right in with all the other bushes along the back fence, which this week I found out are Forsythia. I found that out from all the little yellow flowers blooming all over the place.

There are some sort of flower blooming all over the backyard, where the hostas usually are. I know they're not the hostas, cause those are started to peep out, and look very different. These might be buttercups. They haven't started blooming yet, but they are on the brink.

The little tree in the backyard has been putting forward flowers for the past few weeks as well:

Anyone know what type of tree this is?

Yesterday we finally finished getting rid of all the branches that came down when a giant branch fell off our huge old sycamore tree over Christmas while we were away. The branch brought down a bunch of vines, so we had to cut those off as high as we could reach. We also had to saw the branches down into 5 foot chunks so the garbage collectors will take them away. I still have to go tie those up and bring them out front, but it's raining right now.

We also started digging up this big stump. When we moved in we cut down a dead tree that was outside our window.

The tree was just to the right of the the bush in the foreground. But now I think it looks kinda bare, and the tree was also blocking the view from our bedroom windows to the neighbor's back porch, which we would like blocked again. So we're digging out the old stump, and once it's dug out we are probably going to plant a twilight crape myrtle, which after a few years of careful pruning should look something like this: .

They bloom for around 2 and a half months of the year, and I think it'll be nice to look at from our bedroom (the 6 box shaped windows are the ones to our bedroom).

Only before I order the tree, I'm going to make sure we can get out the stump. We worked on it for a while yesterday but eventually got tired and gave up for the day. Hopefully we will be able to get that out and order the new tree and plant it over spring break or soon after. I'm hoping it'll stop raining and we can also spend a couple of days trimming the weeds and tall grass with our new weed wacker, and cleaning up the yard with our new leaf blower, so that everything is nice and dead-leaf-free for when spring REALLY starts to hit in a few weeks. A few trees around here have started flowering, along with the forsythia, but it's really just beginning, and I'm really excited to see all the flowers on my property for the first time!

Daddy issues part 3

2011-03-06T10:12:00.007-05:00

So...I'm a professor. I was interviewed by the local news about a story related to my area of expertise as the "local expert." They also wrote up a news article quoting me extensively. This is something that happens fairly frequently when you're a professor at the largest university in a not-very-large metro area.

But it was my first time being on tv, so I was pretty excited about it (who wouldn't be? I'm the freaking local expert on tv! Woo!). So I sent out the video to some friends and family members. Including my dad, who I have not talked to since he sent an email about his getting a sefer torah a few months ago. At which point I thought of several snarky things to say, but just never wrote back to him.

SO this was his response:

Hi Abandoning Eden,

Wow! I'm impressed. You got your 15 seconds worth of fame. Andy Warhole used to say we get 15 minutes but now everything is reduced to a soundbite it seems.

I'll pass your clip along to the family. Incidentally, I will be sending you the DVD movie of the Sefer Torah dedication party we had in our house last December. I just finished it yesterady. You will see many familiar faces and I added a very cool musical sound track.

Best regards,

Abba

Spelling of 'Warhol' aside, this irritates me on SO many levels. First of all, when he's like "you got your 15 minutes of fame!" it seems SO dismissive to me. This is not my 15 minutes of fame. This is part of my job. I hope one day I get my 15 minutes of fame, and I hope it's not from some local evening news piece that interviewed me cause I teach a class related to a specific topic, I hope it's when some of my research gets national attention. And you know what, i do important research, and I bet some of it will eventually get media attention. But to my dad this interview in my first year as an assistant professor is as big as I'm ever going to get?

And second, AGAIN with the sefer torah religion thing. Like I get that this is a big deal to my dad, but can he just for ONCE send me a message that does not have religious content involved?

So last time I just ignored his email and never wrote back to him. B thinks this is the wrong strategy, he thinks I should be honest about how much it irritates me to get these types of emails, because if I don't they will keep sending them. B thinks my dad is trying to wear me down by constantly sending me religious comments.

So I drafted an email back, but I would love for the internet to weigh in...should I just not respond, my regular strategy? Or should I make an attempt at actually trying to communicate that his religious emails irritate the crap out of me. Also the dismissive thing.

Dear Abba,

I doubt this is my 15 minutes of fame..I would hope at least some of my research gets some media attention at some point. :) This is just par for the course when you're a professor at the biggest university in a metro area, and I'm betting this won't be the last time I'm interviewed as a local expert on something. :)

I know you're excited about your new sefer torah, but I don't want to see a video of how you spent the money that would have gone towards my wedding if I had married a Jew on a "family heirloom" that we all know is going to E. I think it would be better for both of us if you didn't mention religious things when you email me. You know I'm not religious. I don't want to talk about religion or your religious ceremonies with you. I don't want you to send me videos of your religious ceremonies, anymore than you wanted to see the video of my wedding, or pictures of my christmas tree. Let's just keep religion out of things entirely, because it just brings up hurt feelings. I'm not sure if you DO want to have a relationship with me, but relationships are usually built on commonalities, and sending me emails with religious content is not the way to go, since that is not something we have in common. Why don't you tell me about something else going on in your life?

-Abandoning Eden

What do you think? I feel like I'm kinda overreacting, but I also feel like I'm tired of my dad giving backhanded compliments like "this is your 15 minutes of fame" and I'm SUPER tired about getting emails about religious things.

Dispatch from the future

2011-01-09T10:23:00.008-05:00

I spent 4 years preparing to apply to graduate school, then another 6 years getting my degree and preparing to go on the academic job market. I also spent a good long while dreaming of what life would be like when I was married, and when I owned a house, and wondering where I would end up if I was lucky enough to get a job as a professor. Wondering what my "grown up" life would be like.

We moved here about 3 weeks before classes started, so I started going into work every day about a week after we moved. Then I spent the rest of the year with my head down just trying to get through the infamously bad first semester, dreaming of future semesters where the work load would never be as bad again. And it was bad. I would work through almost every single weekend, and was lucky if I had Sunday afternoon off. Every Monday I would wake up completely overwhelmed by the amount of work I had to do that week. I was prepping two new classes entirely from scratch. For my class on population studies I was writing approximately 15 pages a week, single spaced, for my lecture notes (or a 30 page double spaced paper's worth of material every week), and made 2 powerpoints to go along with it. For my other class, graduate level statistics, I was preparing a 3 hour powerpoint on statistics (usually 30-40 slides), and much of the material was stuff I hadn't really gone over since I took statistics myself about 6 years ago. And it turns out you have to know statistics really really well in order to know them well enough to teach to other people. I also had a number of "problem" students in both my classes last semester, which resulted in a lot of stress on my part, both because I dislike confrontation and because I had to learn how my school and department deals with a large range of issues.

This semester I'm teaching 2 sections of a class on the family, which I've taught 3 times already (so it's more a matter of editing my notes and updated material) and my other class is undergrad statistics, which is a matter of expanding my grad statistics notes and going a lot slower. So while my undergrad stats class still has significant prep involved, and while I'm stepping up to teach 3 classes a semester instead of 2 (they gave me a course release last semester to start me off), I'm thinking this semester will be a lot easier than last semester. Plus I don't have to learn all the administrative stuff you have to learn when you first start off in a university, since I learned it already last semester.

Meanwhile it's this odd feeling...like I spent a freakin decade trying to become a prof and dreaming about where I would end up, and last semester trying to get through that bad first semester, but now I'm through it, and tomorrow I start my second semester as an assistant professor..so now I've arrived. This is the thing I've been dreaming about for a decade, and I'm finally here. On the one hand it's a bit surreal to be living in the 'future'...like, what now? After so much time spent dreaming about a time in my life, the getting here is over, the beginning part is over, and now all I have left in front of me is the rest of my life. I feel kind of like a person who spends all their time and effort planning a wedding and doesn't think about what the marriage will be like. Not that I'm unhappy, just that I spend all this time focusing on applying to become a professor, I didn't really think about what a professor would be like. I mapped out my whole life up until applying for a professorship job, but now the map is useless cause I've gone over the edge of what's been mapped out.

And it hasn't really quite hit me before now that this can be and probably is permanent. That this job (unlike every other job I've had) is potentially a job I could stay at until I retire. I was so busy getting through that first semester and worrying about impressing my colleagues and worrying about just getting by and getting everything done that needed to be done that it never quite hit me that I could be here for the next 40 years or the rest of my life even. That even though I never thought I would end up in the south, I'm probably not going to ever move back to the northeast, because this is where I live now. And now that the whirlwind of the first semester is over (or has at least been temporarily paused until it starts over again tomorrow), it's starting to sink in a bit.

On the other hand it's a bit of a let down. A year ago I had this big blankness after graduation that could be anything. Now I'm in a job and a house where I could potentially stay for the rest of my life, and there's a pretty good chance of me doing that. So everything is kind of settled, and while I love my job, my colleagues are awesome, and my house is super awesome (and so is my husband which goes without saying) having everything settled is not nearly as exciting as my future being a big blank, if that make sense. But now that it's settled I can also look around a bit and start figuring out how I want to live the rest of my life.

It's a weird place to be.

O christmas tree O christmas tree, I have an awesome christmas tree!

2011-01-04T14:04:00.005-05:00

I'm supposed to be writing up a statistics syllabus right now, and am doing everything in my power to procrastinate. If there's anything more tedious than writing up a syllabus, it's writing up a syllabus for a statistics course. Or perhaps actually teaching the course...

So thought I would stop in and post a quick update. Sometime soon I want to post a longer blog post about piercings (putting this here to remind myself, since I keep having great ideas for blog posts for this blog and then forget them).

So here's a post about christmas and facebook and my secret life. This year we got a giant fake pre-lit christmas tree from my in-laws over thanksgiving. They are getting a bit older, and got themselves a smaller more manageable tree that they can drag up and down the stairs themselves. (We have yet to take our tree down- will probably do that this week- and I'm not looking forward to dragging it up to the attic myself)

I freakin love this tree. Last year we had a small table top tree, which was my first ever christmas tree. I don't know what it is, but having a lit up tree in the house just makes the house seem very homey and nice and warm feeling, especially in the dark depressingly long and dark nights of the winter.

We are building up our own collection of ornaments to go along with the tree. We don't have a lot yet, and we're specifically avoiding anything with a religious theme. I really want to get a flying spaghetti monster ornament like this one. In fact, I really want to buy or make a FSM tree topper like this one but alas money is a bit tight right now, so that may have to wait a bit. So this year we used one of the dog toys- a purple stuffed octopus- and we got a tiny christmas hat for it, and that was our tree topper.

These are my two favorite ornaments:

One is a blown glass ornament that I got at a music festival last year from a glass blower friend of mine. The other one is from new mexico or something like that, and has pictures of houses with windows that light up. In the top corner you can also see one of our dog ornaments that looks like our dogs.

So a few days ago I put up pictures of our christmas tree on facebook. Got lots of comments from my non-jewish friends and of course not a single one from my jewish friends. Radio silence.

Over christmas I put up a facebook status update about B's family's traditional christmas-even dinner of all appetizers, and I did have a comment from a still-frum friend from high school who said something about how that is a cool tradition and she has to incorporate it into one of her family holidays, like maybe for one of the nights of Chanukah. I thought that was really really cool of her, and it made me like her even more than I already like her. So few frum people from my former life would say something like that..be able to not judge that I'm celebrating christmas, and still find a way to connect to what I'm saying.

A couple of days ago I noticed a few of my friends were suddenly friends with this dude I went to middle school with who I was friends with way back in the day (I assume he has recently joined facebook). I mostly went to all-girls schools until college, but for 2 years- 7th and 8th grade- I went to a co-ed school because my parents got pissed off at the previous school we had gone to. While I was there I was friends with this guy. The summer after high school I went to live with my cousins in Israel for a couple of months, and he was on the same plane as me, and we hung out for pretty much the entire flight (which I was on by myself- he was with his mom). That was the last time I saw him.

So I friended him on facebook, and I immediately had this little moment of panic- like OH NO he is going to see that I posted a picture of a christmas tree! He's going to KNOW that I'm not religious!

It's funny really, cause who really gives a crap if he knows? I haven't seen this dude in like 15 years. I'm probably not going to talk to him very much on facebook if he accepts my friend request. If anything, I should be more worried about the dozens of relatives that I'm friends with on facebook, cause I might actually talk to those people again in the future.

I spent so many years keeping secret that I am not religious anymore, that it's like I have this automatic reflex to hide anything that doesn't make me seem religious. I agonized over posting the pictures in the first place.

I'm not ashamed of the fact that I celebrate christmas- I think it's a really awesome holiday. If B's family didn't celebrate it, I probably wouldn't have ever started celebrating it myself, but now that I've celebrated four christmases I think I would keep up the tradition no matter what- I love the tree, I love giving gifts to people, I love the lights, and I love the family time. I don't hate getting gifts either. :)

When I was a kid I always was so jealous of the people who celebrated christmas...not because I wanted presents or anything, but cause it was this huge cheery mid winter holiday, with beautiful lights everywhere, that almost every person celebrates, that pervades everything, and that seemed pretty awesome as a kid (actually, as an adult, it's still awesome) but I was always told that it wasn't for me, and that I couldn't participate. Even if I said I liked someone's christmas display, my mom would get this sour look on her face.

Well now I get to do what I want. But there's still that part of me that wants hide it, like it is shameful. I'm sure some smart ass frum commenter would say that it's my "jewish neshama" or some BS like that. In sociology we call this "Socialization" - that self internalized feeling of guilt you get when you break a norm. And I sure am breaking a huge frum norm by celebrating christmas. I used to get that same feeling when I ate non kosher food, and later when I started eating on kosher meat, and again when I first ate bacon, when I first ate shrimp, when I first ate crab, etc. The feelings all faded with time. Maybe the the weird twinge in my stomach that I get when posting facebook pictures of my decidedly non-frum life will fade with time as well.

letters I daydream about sending

2010-12-06T23:26:00.005-05:00

Dear Abba,

I wish I could say mazal tov on your recent acquisition of a sefer torah, but I wouldn't want to give the appearance of condoning your decision, especially when that decision further increases the social distance between us. I've learned from you that it's more important to express my disapproval of your religious decisions than it is to feel happy that someone in my family is happy.

I do love that you've decided to include the name of an Apikores on your Torah scroll. Also glad to see from your photos of the Torah dedication (that you felt the need to send me) that you're still friends with that sexist douchebag S, whose constant put downs directed at me as a teenager (based on my gender) definitely contributed to my complete disgust with your religion and the members of it. The irony is delightful on so many levels. I also like that comment about this being a "family heirloom"- you might as well say it's a gift for E, since we all know that 2/3rds of your children are not religious and will not raise their children in your religious tradition. Well, at least you found some good use for the money you would have spent on my wedding if I had married a Jew.

No Love,
Abandoning Eden

P.S. Please stop sending me dvar torahs, I could not care less how a book of mythology written 3000 years ago can be interpreted to apply to contemporary issues. In fact, I can do without the pictures of religious ceremonies too- I don't send you pictures of my Christmas tree, and I would appreciate the same courtesy from you.
---------------------------

This is probably why I haven't been writing back to my dad's emails in the past few months.

I'm the rabbi's rebel daughter...for reals

2010-12-05T10:15:00.006-05:00

When I was around 10 my dad started a gemarah shiur on Shabbas afternoons in our house as preparation for my bat mitzvah. A gemarah shiur is a group of people who get together to "learn" (basically read and talk about) a book of the talmud, and usually read it slowly, in this case a few pages a week, meeting for about 1-2 hours a week. After the shiur was over the guys would all walk over to the shul for shabbas mincha (afternoon prayers). At first it was me, my dad, my brother, and 2 orthodox jewish guys my dad's age who lived on our block. A few of their various kids (all boys) eventually joined the group, as did some other local guys, and my other brother.

The first couple of years we learned Gemarah Brachot (the first book of the Talmud), and my Bat Mitzvah was a siyum (religious celebration for finishing something) for completing that book. I attended the shiur for several years, until I was around 17 or 18 and one of my dad's jackass sexist friends basically drove me out of the group by calling me "princess" and making dismissive comments whenever I opened my mouth. I was the only woman in the group at that time, and as far as I know I am still the only woman member who was ever in that group.

About a decade ago my dad decided he wanted to be a rabbi. Not a pulpit rabbi (at first?) but he wanted to get a rabbi degree. So he took a bunch of online rabbi correspondence courses, went to israel to take some final exams, and he was made a rabbi by some big rabbi in Israel. This was around 6 or 7 years ago.

I think it was partially an ego thing, he's the kind of guy who likes buying fancy cars and gadgets (i-phones, motorcycles, kyacks) to show his status. I think this is fairly common among people who grew up working class/poor and came into money later in life, and my dad certainly fits that profile- his dad was a taxi driver and mechanic and his mom worked in a sweat shop, and he put himself through college and grad school by driving his dad's cab at night. Now he is a small business owner and makes a pretty decent living running a private practice.

The rabbi degree seemed to me like something similar, he wanted to be able to call himself rabbi and get the respect that came with that degree. He loves going around giving dvar torahs (short sermons on the torah) to people and having them listen to him as if he is saying something wise. And who can blame him? I mean, heck, I'm a professor, and I can say that having people listen to me both in class and in my office when they come asking for school/career advice is very rewarding- I like to think I give good advice, and that I'm helping people, and having my advice taken seriously and feeling as if I have helped people improve their future life chances, even if it's in a small way, is probably the best part of my job. Even if I feel as if the advice he gives is hokey and may not be in people's best interests and relies too much on a book from thousands of years ago, it's essentially the same type of thing.

But I think as me and my brother became less religious and more open about our lack-of-religiosity, and as I eventually went and married someone not jewish, this rabbi thing became something more for my dad. With his own children rejecting his religion, he started clinging to it even more tightly. In recent years, the shiur has grown. And instead of walking over to the area's shul after the shiur, he has Mincha in the basement. With him as Rabbi.

And today my (non-religious) brother texted me to say "parents in full jew mode...yay for having to pretend I'm religious for the sake of guests!!" Apparently my dad bought a sefer torah. A freakin sefer torah. Bought. These things cost like 20k+ (another status symbol?). And apparently it has my name on it. It say my dad's name and says "l'zechut yeledim" (For the merit of his children)and then my name and my two brother's names. Not B's name of course, ha. So a freakin sefer torah is dedicated to my merit. Great. (it's also dedicated to the memory of my grandfather).

So now my dad's basement has a Torah. It's a Shul. My brother joked about the tax write offs, which I've no doubt my dad is taking full advantage of. And I'm the rabbi's daughter, who nobody knows is married to someone not Jewish. Oh they know I have a PhD. And they know I'm a professor. They know all about my professional success. They probably know my parents and I don't get along too well, since I never visit. But they have no idea I'm married, no idea my husband isn't jewish, no idea he even exists. I'm the rabbi's secret rebel daughter. I'm the skeleton in my dad's closet. Ha!

Halloween: Bestest holiday evar!1!

2010-10-31T20:38:00.006-04:00

Today was Halloween and I got to actually celebrate it in a meaningful way for the first time in years!

As a child of course we did not celebrate Halloween, my parents would put out a bowl of candy and keep all the lights off in the house so it looked like no one was home.

When I got to college I started going to college Halloween parties, and for two glorious years I went to the Halloween parade- once while I still lived in NYC, and was able to walk back home after the parade, and again my first year of grad school, when me and a girl in my program from the midwest (and not the very populated area of the midwest) who had never been to NYC before went on a trip to NYC that weekend. The Halloween party is like nothing you have ever seen...all the freaks in the city come out to play, and as a card carrying member of the freaks, it's like a city suddenly full of my people. Plus they have awesome giant puppets of skeletons and stuff (if anyways watched the rally for sanity/fear on Saturday, the puppets are kinda like the stephen colbert puppet, only more scary stuff).

They year after that I had a Halloween costume party at my apartment in grad school, and dressed as a witch. I think the year after that me and Quiet Girl carved pumpkins. This one was mine:

But after that I didn't really celebrate the holiday for a few years- I was busy in grad school, didn't have many friends celebrating, and you don't get many trick or treaters when you live in an apartment.

Anyways now we live in a house, in a neighborhood full of kids, and B and I decided to dress up and sit on our porch and give out candy! I have this dress I bought in high school...well there's a backstory to that too, see in high school I was kinda the "freak" of the school (hence my card)- nothing too crazy, but I wore black a lot, and was basically as goth as one could be in a school with a strict dress code where you are not allowed to wear make up until you're a senior (and then only "natural" colors). When I was in high school this new store opened in the mall- Hot Topic- and somehow I managed to talk my dad into buying me a dress from that store for a Purim costume, along with an awesome set of black wings made with fluffy crazy feathers. This was back when hot topic sold a bunch of fancy dress up goth clothes...nowadays I think they are more of a punk/emo/t shirt place. Sadly I lost those wings when I moved out of my parents house- well not lost, I bet my mother hasn't thrown them out- but I left them behind because I didn't want them to get crushed in the move, and since I never had a car I never had a chance to get them back.

But i still have the dress! And I have a witches hat from when I had that Halloween party. And I have a bunch of jewelry from when I was goth(ish) in high school, and some old black lipstick, so my costume was born. B already had an old Halloween costume in a drawer somewhere.

We sat out front in our costumes and gave out candy to kids- and there were a LOT of kids, some very little kids came around 6ish, and then there was a lull, and then after dark there was a crazy amount of kids coming through! We got lots of compliments about our costumes, and one of our neighbors stopped in his tracks when he saw us and was like "dear lord!" before taking a bunch of pictures of us (And he says he will give us a print! Some of my neighbors are pretty cool- this guy is a retired professor from my school, and we've had a bbq with him and our next door neighbor who is also a retiree). We also met a lot more of our neighbors from our block and the surrounding neighborhood (I suspect some of the kids came from other neighborhoods though- some arrived in cars). B may have scandalized some of them- I bet they don't see a bunch of crossdressing nuns with beards down here- but most everyone laughed, because it's ok, because it's Halloween! And that's the beauty of this holiday, you can really let your freak flag fly, and for this one day a year, it's ok! With everyone!

It's a shame I never got to trick or treat as a kid- I really had fun giving out candy to kids this year, my first time involved in trick or treating. I guess I'll have to wait till we have our own kids to get to see the other side.

My version of a holiday season...

2010-09-30T20:18:00.002-04:00

I've been on a real jewish food kick lately- last weekend I made cholent with vegetarian kishka (the cholent was my mom's recipe, the kishka recipe I found by searching through imamother.com- a great forum to search for jewish food recipes). Today I'm having matza ball soup for dinner.

And just now I was really craving my grandmother's old rugaluch. They sometimes have rugaluch at the grocery store, but the pastry part is all wrong, it's like this croissant type thing. The type my grandmother made was like this cookie..almost like a hamentash dough type recipe, but less crumbly. She would make Cinnamon ones and chocolate ones and ones with jam and they were liked rolled up cookies almost. She would make dozens and dozens of them in all different flavors when we would go down on our once yearly trip to visit my grandparents for a week in florida, where they moved to when I was 3 or 4.

The recipe died with my grandmother in 2007; my parents later went through all the documents in that house when my grandfather moved back up to the northeast to live near my parents after my grandmother died. They didn't find it.

My dad is going to send my some of my grandfather's paintings when they pack up his small apartment in NJ near where my parents live. In addition to being a NYC cab driver, a radiator repair man, an author (of a memoir about the holocaust), a survivor of 10 different concentration camps, and an avid fisherman, he was a painter. It'll be nice to have some of his stuff to remember him by.

The condo in Florida is now my parent's vacation home, soon to be retirement home. Apparently they've redone the whole place because it was depressing my dad to be there when it reminded him of his mom all the time. Things change. The childhood I remember isn't there to go back and visit anymore, even if I wanted to.

Does anyone have a rugaluch recipe that might be like the one I'm describing? I'd love to try out a few and try to reproduce it.

Not going...

2010-09-21T13:39:00.003-04:00

Thanks for all your well wishes.

I've decided not to go to the funeral. I was never particularly close with this grandfather, since my whole life he lived in Florida and I saw him at most maybe once a year for a few days. He also has had no idea who I was for at least the last 3 years (he had severe dementia), and we never talked on the phone since I was a young child, and even then, I mostly talked to my grandmother and he would say hello at the very end of the conversation, and that's about it. I did attend her funeral because I felt like I had a personal connection with her. While I'm sad about my grandfather's death, I don't feel that I need to attend his funeral in order to get a sense of closure.

If anything, I know if I attend his funeral I will be angry about it, because my parents are not giving him a eulogy because it's Erev Sukkot, and because every single time I see my parents I end up feeling resentful and hurt by the end of the meeting. I would rather attend his unveiling in a year, and hopefully there will be some kind of eulogy at that point.

And all you people telling me to go to support my father...are you new to this blog? I've barely spoken to my father in years, by his choice (not mine) so why should I go for his sake? You can't stop talking to your children and then expect them to support you through difficult times. You can't tell someone they are no longer part of your family and then expect them to act like your family when times get tough.

My grandfather had been living with my parents for the last 3 years, and not once did I see him at their house. You know why? Cause my parents haven't invited me to their house in over 3 years. I'm not welcome there.

As for "he must really want me to be there if he offered to pay for B", well I moved the date of my wedding to a Sunday (rather than a Saturday which was more convenient for me and most of my guests) because I really wanted my parents to be there. They didn't show up to that either.

And yes, they did come to my PhD graduation- because my dad's parents (including my grandfather who just died) didn't come to his PhD graduation and he decided that he would come to mine even though we were barely talking. I think that was more about him not wanting to be like his parents than anything about me. Even then, they scheduled a flight that afternoon (which they didn't have to do at all- they could have taken a later flight or gone the next day, and it was a vacation, not even a business trip) so that they would only be there for the ceremony and about 20 minutes afterward, and then they high tailed it out of there.

But this is not about revenge on my dad, although I still am angry at him for many things. This is about my lack of connection with my grandfather. I don't feel like I would get anything out of attending his funeral other than a lot of stress, and having to work all weekend because of all the work I would miss. My job isn't the type of job you can just take a few days off from-if I don't work this week, I don't have lesson plans prepared for next week.

I went to my grandmother's funeral, in the same place, and I pretty much know what to expect. I'm glad I went to my grandmother's funeral, because my grandfather was very upset and I was able to help him out and hold his hand during the funeral. But now he is gone, and funerals are not for the dead- they are for the living. And in between my grandmother's funeral and my grandfather's funeral, all the living people I know who will be there have told me I'm no longer part of their family (my non-religious brother isn't going either), and have stopped talking to me or contacting me, except when people die (and my once yearly phone call from my dad on erev rosh hashana). So I don't feel particularly inclined to help make them feel better. Does that make me a bad person? I don't think so. I think it makes me someone who has been hurt on so many occasions of trying to get along with certain people, that I just can't show up and get hurt again.

My grandfather passed away today.

2010-09-20T17:29:00.005-04:00

I am completely in shock. While still adjusting to the news that he was dying that I got in a text message this morning, I got a call from my dad that my grandfather had passed away at around 3:45 this afternoon.

The funeral is in 2 days in Florida...I don't think I can go, cause I teach Tuesday night and Wednesday afternoon...but is that the kind of thing you cancel class for? Probably. But I don't know if I want to go anyways, because of that whole "horrible grandmother funeral experience" I talked about in my last post. And apparently at my grandfather's funeral they are not even having a eulogy, because it's erev sukkot or some BS like that? How can you have a funeral without a eulogy??? And if it's not a eulogy it's going to be jewish prayers and basically burying my grandfather and that's it. (and apparently my dad doesn't sit shiva either because it's sukkot??? so he's only sitting shiva for a few hours between the funeral + sukkot).

When my grandmother died I went to the funeral so I could be there for my grandfather. But now they are both dead, so I would be going for my dad...who just told me he is kinda relieved he's gone (my dad has been 100% responsible for his care since my grandmother died 3 years ago, and my grandfather had a severe case of dementia to boot. My dad has been taking anti-anxiety meds lately cause of all the stress related to taking care of him). So yeah, I don't know.

Mostly I'm just in shock. Still have no idea what I will do, but I should probably make a decision pretty soon since I would have to cancel class tomorrow and probably Wednesday as well (and book a flight for tomorrow).

My dad also said he would pay for both me and B to go down to the funeral...probably won't happen with the dogs and our lack of dog sitters, but I appreciate that he offered that.

ETA: Hmm, looking at flights, there is a 5:20am wednesday flight that would land in florida at 9:17am, and the funeral is at 10, about a half hour drive from the airport. Am I insane to consider teaching my Tuesday night class (the one that only meets once a week and is graduate level) from 6-9pm, waking up at 3:30am the next day to shower and do my hair and leave at 4:30- the airport being 20 minutes away and bound not to have any people in it at 5:00am on a Wednesday morning, giving me approximately half an hour to make that flight, then getting a taxi to the funeral and making it in the nick of time (if nothing gets delayed and it all goes well), only to return home later that day on another 4 hour fight (both of which include a connection) since my parents prolly wouldn't be cool with me staying there over night and flying back on sukkot morning if they are paying for tickets...and then possibly attending a 6pm dinner with the president of my school after landing around 5:20pm, thus attending all my Tuesday meetings, the dinner with the president, and only missing one day of my undergrad class (that meets twice a week). If I missed wednesday's class I would have to delay the quiz they were supposed to have next monday, since it's directly related to stuff we were supposed to do this week wednesday, and I might need to rearrange the midterm too...

Recieved via text from my dad this morning:

2010-09-20T11:03:00.004-04:00

Hi. Hope the holidays went well for you. On a sadder note I wanted to inform you about Sabba's condition. We hospitalized him erev yom kippur. After completing a CT scan of his abdominal area they found that he had gall bladder cancer which had spread to the liver. The doctors say that there is no effective treatment for this. He only has weeks, maybe a couple of days. He is in no pain. I'm hoping he can come back to his apartment for hospice care.

For the non yiddish speakers among you
Sabba= Grandfather (in this case my father's father)
Erev Yom Kippur- the day before yom kippur, last Friday.

So basically, my grandfather is dying. This is the guy who was married to my grandmother, whose death inspired this blog when my dad spent approximately 75% of the eulogy talking about how he has to honor his mother's memory by making sure his kids turn out to be religious jews. I had been running around for two days, making sure my brother's got on their correct planes at the correct time, dealing with random people like the rabbi and the funeral director, I canceled long standing plans to attend the funeral, and after all that I was incredibly hurt when my dad spent the whole eulogy basically shaming me (at that point I had been dating B for about 8 months, and my parents knew about him).

I don't know if I will go to his funeral if/when he dies. If it's in the middle of the semester, there's just no way I can feasibly go and keep up with my work load. Also, not sure if I would want to go after my experience at my grandmother's funeral. I suppose if he happens to die around fall break I might be able to go. I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

Busy like a bee, feeling kinda homesick.

2010-09-19T18:20:00.004-04:00

I've been working pretty hard and pretty long hours. I've finished the first 4 weeks of teaching, and while I feel I finally have a handle on the lesson planning aspect (I'm preparing 2 entirely new courses, one of which is graduate level statistics which is a bitch to prepare for), I haven't gotten much research done at all- but I keep becoming more and more efficient, and I've found a few shortcuts (like an awesome website at my university that has videos on pretty much every academic subject) so hopefully I will be able to fit some research in soon.

For about the past month we've been doing school- and neighborhood-related social activities nearly every weekend (new faculty events for 2 weekends in a row, a party that second weekend at a prof's house, a small gathering at another prof's house the weekend after that, and then a neighborhood block party last weekend- we also have a dinner at the school president's house this wednesday). This weekend I finally got to just veg for the whole weekend. Of course when I veg I get bored, and when I'm bored I get kinda lonely...while I didn't have a lot of close friends in the city I last lived in by the time I moved away (almost all my closest friends had graduated or just moved on before I did), I was only 2 hours from my "real" friends- my friends for life- the people I first met in high school and who more or less went OTD with me. I was also within 2 hours of several of the friends I made during grad school who had moved on. Now they are 10 hours away, and I've finding being 10 hours away from my friends a lot more lonely than being 2 hours away. The worst part is that my 3 closest friends in NJ (one of which is my brother) all live with their parents, who ~~probably~~ definitely would not welcome me for a sleepover, especially not with B, let alone our 2 dogs. They all used to come visit me cause I had a place everyone could crash at. But 10 hours is a little far for spur of the moment visits, and I'm really feeling that.

I also am far from my whole music scene, and the music here is not super great- I don't have any of my music friends who go to shows with me living close by (which is part of the reason I like going to shows so much- always seeing the same awesome people over and over again), and good music doesn't really come through the area that much-there's only a show I'd be interested in seeing maybe once a month or once every other month. In my old city I could go to shows by great bands at least 2-3 nights a week if I had the energy.

At least I have B though. When I first moved to grad school (that 2 hour move) I was completely on my own and didn't make any friends for about 5-6 months. Now I have B, and we go out to restaurants and such- we've been doing a brunch tour of our new city (we like brunch) and so far have tried out 4 different restaurants for brunch. We have a resturaunt guide and have basically decided we will slowly work our way through most/all the resturaunts in town. There's some pretty great food here, and we can afford to go out to eat fairly frequently now that I'm not a grad student anymore (our usual expenses haven't risen much at all- our mortgage + insurance + taxes is about 20$ more a month than our rent was before- but my salary has gone up)

But it would still be nice to have some friends beyond B...I've been kinda friendly with this one adjunct prof in my department, and me and B went to a gathering there on labor day, which we had a lot of fun at...but we are still colleagues, so there is still that professional distance thing I feel like is always there. I have no idea how I will meet any friend possibilities beyond my job though, as the only people I really come in contact with are my colleagues and my students. We've met a few of our neighbors at the block party- most seemed to be retirees or couples our age with kids, not a lot of other kid-less couples. Not that people with kids are uncool, just at a different phase of life than we are.

Anyways when I get homesick I cook comfort food, and I have a whole comfort food plan for the next week. Today I'm making my old favorite, baked mac and cheese (only fancier with 4 kinds of cheese including smoked goat cheese from the awesome farmer's market goat lady and lots of herbs) then I have a whole plan that involved grocery shopping, 3 days of eating a rotisserie chicken + brown rice for dinner, then using the rotisserie chicken carcass + some more chicken to make a ton of chicken soup (to mostly freeze, but also to eat that night). Might make some matza balls, if we can find matza meal at the local grocery store- but I doubt we will. I'm going to try to find some I can order online so that when we defrost some of the chicken soup later we can make matza ball soup with it.

While making the chicken soup I'm also going to make kishka from a very well reviewed veggie kishka recipe I found on imamother.com and soak some beans and defrost meat for cholent, and then next day I'm going to make cholent with my mom's old recipe (which includes a marrow bone that I also got at the farmer's market) with kishka in it. At some point I'm also going to make my mom's meatball recipe- possibly after the cholent.

We might not have spoken to each other since her and B met at my PhD graduation in May, but my mom's food still makes me feel better, and it's been so many years since I've had cholent (and kishke!)- probably 6 at least- that I have really been craving some lately.

I've had pretty much no contact with other jews or jewish culture anything here since moving here, and I'm a bit nostalgic for it. It's especially noticeable now during the high holidays when my facebook friend's list is exploding in talk about rosh hashana, yom kippur and sukkot, while in my real life things continue on perfectly normally. Even in grad school I went to a school with a huge orthodox population in it, so even though I never participated in anything (at least for my last 4 years of grad school) there were still jews around, doing visibly jewish things, like a comfort blanket. Now I gotta make my own jew...so chicken soup and cholent with kishka it is! :)

Sink Hole'd

2010-08-21T19:33:00.008-04:00

This week a contractor came to fill in our sink hole and finish off the fence. They are installing 2 gates-one on the side of the house to finish off the fence, one in a back corner where the fence was damaged by a fallen tree, which will give us access to the ravine/sometimes creek that we own part of, which we have named "Kitty ravine" after the feral cats that use it as a kitty highway. The gates won't be ready until at least Monday though.

I didn't think to take a picture of the hole, but it was anywhere from 1 to 3 feet deep at various points. To the left is a picture of it filled in with rocks. They took some old fencing that we found behind the shed and attached it to the bottom of the fence and laid it across the bottom of the sinkhole so that it formed a wall/floor. Then they filled that with these giant rocks pictured here. Then they covered the rocks with landscaping cloth and attached that to the fence, and covered the landscaping cloth with about 6 inches of dirt, which I promptly planted a bunch of grass in so that the dirt stays together. Sometime soon we'll go find a nursery and find a bush that has nice deep roots to plant at the edge of the fence there to keep the side of the hill more firmly together, and to prevent the dogs from digging at the edge of the fence.

In other news, we're pretty much settled in, everything's unpacked, we've started to get our bearings and know where stuff is. We've been slowly checking out various restaurants in the area, some of which have been quite excellent. I had new faculty orientation all week this week and met some pretty cool other new faculty members. We start classes on Monday. I'm excited! :) Although not fully prepared for all my classes next week- I still have to finish off my Wednesday Lecture (But Monday and Tuesday's are done).

Also I made grits:

Max is still settling in and still having accidents in the house unfortunately, although we are having longer and longer stretches of days between accidents. This morning we checked out the local dog park which is pretty awesome- the enclosed area is huge and half of it is woods. The people there were also pretty friendly. The only annoying part is that the park it's in is closed to traffic on weekends, so it's a bit of a hike to get there from the parking lot.

Barkley and Max are still trying to figure out who is going to be alpha dog. I think Max might be winning, although Barkley is not willing to concede just yet.

A new addition to our family!

2010-08-05T12:15:00.007-04:00

Is that Barkley looking into a funhouse mirror?

Nope, it's our new dog max! Max is an 8 month old Treeing Walker Coonhound (possibly a mix) that we adopted this morning. He is very skinny and came to us with 3 or 4 dog bites- he was staying in a house with 10 dogs, and apparently the other dogs (pointers) were beating him up a bit. He was also completely covered in red mud when we first met him- he's already had 2 baths this morning and doesn't seem to be terrified of water the way Barkley is, which is awesome. He's also a lot more chill than Barkley- in fact we've had no problems at all with him, but had a few problems when Barkley kept trying to hump him in the face. :) But we crated Barkley for a bit and now they are getting along and happily chewing on toys together. :)

This is Max's story as told by his foster mom:

I work at a Veterinary ER clinic in town. When Max came to us, he was the runt puppy in a litter of Walker Coonhounds. So runtish, that he weighed 2lbs at 6 weeks and his littermates topped the scales at 9lbs. We thought for sure he wouldn't make it, but I decided to try and foster him to get better. He did. I typically have all dogs neutered before going out to their new homes, but a gal I worked with had this great friend that was dying for a puppy. They swore they would have him neutered when he got old enough, and they had 3 young kids and 2 cats (which were indeed already altered), so I relented. When max was 10 weeks old, and 10lbs, he went to his new home. That lasted until about 2 months ago, when I caught wind that the fabulous family had been evicted, leaving poor Max alone inside. He was returned to me, intact, of course. They did love him but apparently ran thin on funds and then separated, so Max was more burden than he was worth. (lesson learned for me, though). Anyway, he is socialized with children - all 3 of theirs were very young, less than 6. He was around cats there and hes around our cats here. He does very well in the house - has had zero accidents while here, but he's always supervised. He is crate trained, and thats where he sleeps at night and stays when we're gone. He is socialized with other dogs - we have 10. He is a submissive boy, and definitely not a fight starter. His only behavioral problem that I know of is baying at the neighbors. When they are doing something noisy, he's all coonhound. FOR SURE. That said, I do believe he's mixed with either a beagle or some other stumpy creature. His color is lemon/white, which isnt standard for Walker Hounds, and his size is much smaller than a normal walker. Max is about 8 months old, so he wont be growing any more. He's topped out at about 40lbs. Id imagine he might fill in with a couple more pounds, but I'd be shocked if he reaches 50lbs. We just had him neutered, so he's ready to go!

Participate in a research study!

2010-08-03T12:03:00.001-04:00

Received via email:

My name is Sruly Bomzer and I am a 5^th year doctoral candidate in the CW Post Clinical Psychology Doctoral Program. I am currently in the initial stages of collecting data for my dissertation, which involves examining common childhood experiences of Jews raised in the Orthodox tradition (regardless of current affiliation). This study has been approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) of CW Post, and is being supervised by Jill Rathus, Ph.D. I am writing to you to request your help in disseminating the online survey that is my primary means of collecting data. The survey, available here (http://tinyurl.com/ODQStudy), is completely anonymous and takes no longer than 10-15 minutes to complete. I have followed your blog and believe that your readership represents an ideal sample of participants. Because this project is not funded, I cannot offer you any compensation, however any effort you could spare to inform you readers of my study would be greatly appreciated. If you have any questions regarding this research, feel free to contact me at srulystudy@gmail.com.

Thank You,

Sruly Bomzer

Southisms part 2

2010-07-29T07:54:00.003-04:00

Check out this awesome spider I found in my backyard! This lovely lady is a writin' spider (Supposedly if you mess up her web she will write your name in the new one, which is where the name comes from) AKA a black and yellow garden spider. There's actually two I've found so far, but this one is the bigger one- about 2 inches long. They are harmless to humans but like to kill mosquitoes, so she can definitely live here for now (every time I go out to the backyard if I don't douse myself in bug spray I get several bug bites- I'm working on pulling out all the crazy ivy back there so hopefully that'll cut down on all the bugs).

I'm not sure if I've mentioned this before, but B and I have different last names. Apart from being a professional feminist (I've published in 2 feminist journals, so I think I can claim that title) and changing my name being against my deeply held beliefs that people shouldn't have to do things a certain way because of their gender, and the thought of changing my own name seeming super weird (like I'd be giving up my identity), I've actually begun to get some name recognition in my field -when I go to conferences people look at my name tag AND THEY KNOW WHO I AM AND HAVE READ SOME OF MY WORK!! Holy crap! So I didn't want to have to start over with that...building an academic reputation is hard enough as it is. Also, changing your name is a super huge pain in the ass, and I don't generally do things that are a pain in the ass when I don't necessarily agree with them to begin with (although having the same name might be nice, so I'm ambivalent about the whole thing). So I didn't change my last name when we got married.

In the northeast this was never an issue, but since moving down south it's like I've moved back in time 50 years..apparently no one in the south has ever heard of a married couple having 2 different names. My mortgage guy asked us if "we were *really* married" which I found incredibly rude because I had just told him we were married like 2 seconds before. Our home insurance/car insurance agent has now been informed on FOUR separate occasions that we have different last names, and yet when we needed proof of car insurance to get our drivers license yesterday she faxed over proof of insurance for "Abandoning and B Eden." B had to sweet talk the DOT into letting him get a license since they require proof of insurance, and it was technically not in his name. Luckily I brought our marriage license with us, and they were able to verify it was him by that + his birthday (which was listed on the proof of insurance).

Other southism (or maybe a "not a huge city-ism?")- when I'm walking Barkley, everyone driving by in their cars waves at us while passing! It is actually kinda annoying, cause I like walking and getting wrapped up in my head, and now I feel like I have to pay attention to all the cars that are passing to see if they wave to me, so that none of my neighbors feel like I'm slighting them.

People down here seem super nice in general. On Tuesday 3 of my new colleagues showed up to help us empty the last of our moving pods, and one brought over a bunch of freshly baked bread and muffins from the local bakery- and I'm meeting up with her again on Saturday morning to go check out the local farmer's market. We haven't really met anyone so far other than those colleagues and 2 of our neighbors. I seem to have chosen a very academic neighborhood, as at least two of our neighbors on our block are professors at the university I will be a professor at. Speaking of which, next week Monday I will officially have started my new job as an assistant professor of sociology! Monday I'm rearranging furniture and getting my computer set up in my newly-painted sage green office. Tuesday I hit the ground running, cause classes will be starting in 3 weeks and this semester I'm teaching two entirely new courses that I've never taught before- and all I have right now is a rough draft of a syllabus for each course. I like to prepare my lectures a few weeks in advance so that I'm always a few weeks ahead of my students- so I want to get at least the first 3 weeks of class prepped before classes start.

Well, I live in the South now

2010-07-24T20:51:00.006-04:00

None of our furniture is here yet, but we made it down South a couple of days ago. Yesterday we went to target and I dug this patio out of our backyard (using a broom). The patio was about 3x bigger than it first appeared to be, so that turned out to be pretty awesome- the other 2/3rds of the patio was buried under a few inches of dirt and tons of vines (about 3 garbage bags worth of vines). I've discovered that yard work is fun and awesome, and I think it's my new favorite hobby- there's something so satisfying about making my yard look awesome, and I don't mind the work or the crazy amounts of sweat at all. After that (and after a shower) we went out to eat at this awesome hippie upscale southern pizza chain place called The Mellow Mushroom. I had the "Magical mystery tour" which had 2 kinds of mushrooms, spinach, feta, hot peppers and a pesto crust. I also had a bottemless cup of sweet tea. It was farking awesome. We also checked out the 'downtown' area of this place, which is actually a lot nicer than I thought it would be- I guess the hippie pizza place must be in the hipster neighborhood cause we walked around and there were all sorts of hipster stores.

Today we bought a "Chofa" (chaise lounge/sofa- basically like a 3 person sofa with the third person having a chaise lounge- it's not going to get delivered for 8 weeks, but I think it will look awesome- we are getting it in a sage green microfiber thing that we know the kitties don't like to scratch), met with a contractor about filling in the sink hole in our backyard and fixing the broken pipe that caused the sinkhole, went to target again and got a whole bunch of stuff for the house including a bunch of stuff for the yard and a desk for B, went shoe shopping (I threw out a lot of my busted up shoes when I moved- I keep comfy shoes way past when I should, and several of them had holes in the soles so when it rained my feet got soaked), went grocery shopping, spent about 2 hours raking out the path to the back patio that I cleared out yesterday, seeding the path with grass seed (most of it used to be covered by overgrown bushes/vines/yard waste so no grass was growing- but now the bushes are like 1/3rd their previous sizes due to the awesome landscaping people who came last week), bagged up all the yard waste from yesterday and today (6 garbage bags worth) and then chilled out in the jacuzzi for awhile.

Tomorrow I think I'm going to take it a little bit easier, since the moving pods arrive on Monday and that's going to be a crapload of work...at least we don't have to move in as much furniture as we moved out of our apartment, cause that would suck. Moving our old scratched up crappy couch to the curb required super human feats of strength from both me and B and took about half an hour to get out the door. This picture is from right around when it got totally stuck and I briefly gave up and paused to take a picture. During this picture B is trapped outside the apartment in the hallway (and trapped in the hallway, cause the door to the outside was blocked by that couch too.) Right after this picture came the super human strength part.

We also got rid of tons of Ikea furniture (come to think of it, we got rid of nearly all my old ikea furniture except my desk and bookcases- got rid of a coffee table, tv stand, bed, dresser and B's desk, all from ikea). Now that we have a new desk for B and a couch we are all set on furniture for a while, although we will get a new coffee table after we get the couch delivered and see how much space it takes up/how big a table we want. Eventually we will prolly get a new bedroom set too. Oh and a tv stand, and tons of outdoor furniture (we have a backyard and a side deck and a front porch, and I want places to sit in all those places!) and a grill, and definitely need a lawn mower within the next week or so cause the grass ain't getting any shorter...ahh moving/home ownership, you bleed the money right out of me...

I am so smart! S-M-R-T!

2010-07-18T06:43:00.018-04:00

Intelligence is a tricky thing. Some might say I have it. They would probably determine this based on evidence such as my ivy league doctorate. And if enough people give you admiration and respect for being a smart person, you might actually start to believe it. But I didn't always think of myself as a "smart" person. In fact, I spent many many years thinking I was stupider than most other people around me. Mostly because I can't speak Hebrew.

I'm bad at languages. I'm pretty good at some other stuff- I'm great at math, and I always did really well in english class too. In fact, I did pretty well in all my "secular" classes in school. But from a very early age, knowing the hebrew language matters a LOT in Jewish school, and I was never good at it.

I don't remember all of elementary school, but I remember spending a lot of time in the "resource room" AKA the special ed room. I got put there because I was bad at Hebrew, and was therefore doing terribly in my jewish studies classes. So I spent pretty much all of elementary school thinking of myself as belonging in the resource room classes, and therefore as a not-too-smart person.

In 7th grade my parents switched us to a different school cause the first school tried to argue that my little brother was autistic, and my parents decided they didn't like that. In the new school I got put in the 'stupid' track again after horribly failing a chumash exam [This was not the lowest of the 3 regular tracks, but a completely separate track that had a class size a third of the size of the other tracks and met in a special classroom area]. I still did fairly well in my secular classes, but being in the 'slow' track for half the day made me think of myself as a stupid person.

In middle school though I got some hints that I wasn't as stupid as I thought of myself. In 7th grade I took an IQ test, and the test showed that I had a 146 IQ, and my parents decided to send me and my brother (whose IQ was a few points higher than that) to a "genius" (non-jewish) camp in our neighborhood for the summer between 7th and 8th grade. The camp had academic type classes in the morning and sports in the afternoon So I spent a summer hanging out with geeky genius people and thinking of myself as pretty smart. That was nice. :)

So around 8th grade I started feeling really good about my intelligence level. Then I went to high school and again got stuck in all the lowest tracks for hebrew classes. I think I was the only person in my grade who was in the lowest track for hebrew studies and the highest track for secular studies, and for 2 years they arranged the schedule so that the higher and lower secular tracks were on completely different schedules- for those 2 years I just took all my classes at the lower track level.

Then we took the PSATs and I got a 1520, and tied for the highest score in the school. I was a semi-finalist for a merit scholarship and the principle started bragging about my PSAT score to parents of potential students and announced my score to everyone during the morning assembly after davening.

And then I nearly flunked out of high school because I failed three (hebrew studies) finals in my senior year. My school refused to give me a diploma until I retook 3 finals the summer after I was supposed to graduate.

By the time I got to college I no longer thought of myself as being of below average intelligence, but I didn't really think of myself as anything special. But I found that once I was able to CHOOSE the classes I wanted to take, and especially once I discovered sociology, that studying for class was actually enjoyable. I started to really like school. And because college was actually challenging (unlike high school, which was mostly boring) I started to study/work really hard, because I wasn't sure I could skate by the way I dd in most of my secular courses in high school. And then my first semester, once I had started putting in a serious effort, I shocked myself by getting straight As in all my classes and landing on the deans list.

After that, it's like my opinion of myself completely changed, and it because a self fulfilling prophecy. I got straight As throughout all of college, entered the college honors program, applied to grad school and got into 8 out of 9 schools I applied to (everywhere but Harvard, those bastards, although even there I made the short list). I really shone in college.

My parents seemed very surprised when I got into all those grad schools. I guess after all those years of me being in the stupid track, they didn't realize that I might be good at some stuff too. In fact my dad outright said to my face when I got into grad school "I thought your brother was the smart one." (He never failed all his hebrew classes the way I did).

Of course in grad school I was back to being 'average' again, since grad school is full of brilliant people and it's impossible to out-brilliant them all.

So now what? Well now I'm about to become a professor, and every once in a while I get the sinking feeling in my stomach that no, I can't really do this. I'm not really a smart person- I was in the freaking resource room for goodness sakes, I can't teach college students, let alone GRAD students!! I have some ideas that I think are innovative when it comes to teaching the grad class I'm going to be teaching this fall- but what if my ideas are not innovative and they're just STUPID and I'm just too STUPID to realize it?? There is actually a name for these feelings- it's called imposter syndrome and it's especially common among women in academia. Knowing what is it doesn't make my occasional panicky feeling any less panicky though.

I wonder how different my life would have been if being bad at languages only affected one thing- a language class. Would I have thought of myself as a smart person my entire life, and how would that have affected my self esteem, and my friendships? Cause I gotta tell you- thinking you are an idiot and being in the lowest track for everything does a number on you, and I do think that some of the social problems I had as a kid were due to extremely low self esteem on my part.

By social problems I mean I really had no friends until 7th grade, and then my only friend was another person in the "stupid" class until 9th grade when I began to come out of my shell a little more (weirdly enough, that friend made aliyah and is extremely religious now). And I think a large part of that was due to thinking of myself as a stupid person in a culture and family that valued education and intelligence highly, and therefore feeling bad about myself, and that no one would want to be friends with me, which became a self fulfilling prophecy of its own- at least for a while.

Even when I started making friends, it was only with other people who were on the low end of the social scale of the jewish community- the OTDers, the "yeshiva rebels," the kids with behavioral problems, the kids with mental illnesses, the kids who actually did have learning disabilities, the kids who had been kicked out of NCSY, the kids who didn't dress the way everyone else did. We made up a large mishmash of social misfits, and that's where I felt most comfortable. Now don't get me wrong, I am friends with these people to this day, and I love them to death, and as we grow older it becomes more and more apparent they are the most creative, interesting, awesome people around and I am thrilled that I ended up in this crowd. Many of them are now doing fantastically well for themselves, and I'm not the only one from that crowd with an ivy league PhD in an unusual subject.

But I wonder how things would have been if I had gone to public school instead of Jewish school, and hadn't been branded as 'special ed' would I have hung out with a different kind of crowd or would I still have been one of the 'freaks?' Would I have ended up being one of those people who got married right after high school and never had a career? Would I have dared to do something as different as becoming a Sociology professor? Would I have even gone OTD- as it was my association with this particular crowd that first opened up that possibility as being a possibility?

-------------------

Reading over this post, I wonder how much of my failure in regards to Hebrew language/Jewish studies courses has to do with the fact that I have absolutely no interest in the subject matter. And if thinking I'm "Bad" at languages is a remnant of those years. Cause when I'm interested in something, I will study the hell out of it, and spend hours looking up stuff online, and (in one case) get a freakin phd in the topic. If I cared about jewish studies I probably would have actually studied once in a while, in which case I might not have ended up in the highest track, but might not have been in the lowest track either. But because I had no interest in the topic, I didn't even bother- most of the reason I was failing all my jewish studies courses was from not handing in assignments and not studying for exams.

In fact, due to the juxtaposition of my publicly announced PSAT scores + being in the lowest track in school, my high school yearbook says that my future career will be a "counselor for underachievers." I sure showed them. :)

a NJ Yankee in the south

2010-07-12T18:58:00.003-04:00

We have arrived! We close on the house tomorrow morning! We have a walkthrough tomorrow morning right before the closing..was supposed to be tonight, but the previous owners "haven't quite moved their stuff out yet." Well they better finish in time for the closing, cause we are staying there tomorrow night! We have a bottle of champagne left over from my doctorate, and it is here with us waiting for the closing tomorrow. Then on Thursday we go back north, finish packing, and a week from Friday we come down for good!

Things about this state that are different from the north (so far):
1. All the sandwiches from room service come with mayonnaise on them
2. The ground all seems to be red clay. It's turning Barkley's feet funny colors since it just rained...
3. Steak and Shake! B's favorite fast food place from the midwest is also in the south! (but not in the northeast) Speaking of which, we're about to go to Steak and Shake for dinner and drive by the house on the way...not sure about my internet access over the next few days, the cable guy is scheduled to come by the new house tomorrow afternoon, but not sure how reliable they will be.

Wish us luck! Next time I blog we will be homeowners!!

letting go

2010-07-06T10:07:00.010-04:00

When I was a kid, my parents kinda treated me like a prison guard would. During most times, when I was behaving myself, we barely interacted at all. But when they caught me breaking one of the millions of rules...then there was drama, fighting, being grounded for months at a time.

When I was 15 my parents caught me breaking the rule of "no boyfriend before you are ready to get married," one of the myriad rules that I think they thought I would take for granted, but that I didn't. See, my parents grew up yeshivish, so they took a lot of things for granted, like dating for tachlis. Then they moved to a more modern orthodox community. For a while, when I was very young, they were more liberal and truly *modern* orthodox- my mom didn't cover her hair, and she and I wore pants. Then when I was around 10-14 years old, my parents gradually became more religious again, as did most of the town I grew up in. The town gradually became more yeshivish, and now is a mix of right wing modern orthodox and black hatters. My mom stopped wearing pants and started covering her hair, and all my pairs of pants mysteriously disappeared.

Meanwhile, I didn't know all these community rules that my parents took for granted from their childhood, and I frequently got punished for breaking rules I wasn't really clear on. Like the first night I went out with friends on a saturday night, my dad came driving up in a fury at 10pm because I had "stayed out too late." Only no one had ever told me I had a curfew, or what time it was. Not dating boys before I was 'ready to get married' was another one of these unspoken rules that I broke.

You could see why I would be confused...we lived in a mixed community of modern and less modern MO jews, and while I was friends with many of the more modern folks, who COULD do things like date and stay out past 10pm, my parents wanted me to follow a stricter set of rules- but never directly communicated that to me, because we never really talked and had normal conversations with each other. Something I only recently realized, having hung out with B's family and actually having normal conversations with them...that kind of talk just never happens with me and my parents- we just never sat around and chatted with each other the way B and his parents do.

So my parents once again took on their position as prison guard, and grounded me for 4 months. No tv, no computer, no phone no going out with friends, no going out at all- only going to school and going home and sitting in my room. Only I didn't know it was for 4 months, as far as I knew it was indefinite- cause that's what my dad basically said at the beginning, when he found out about my secret boyfriend, and he didn't relent on this until 4 months had passed.

During these 4 months I tried to kill myself once by eating a bunch of pills (I didn't take enough and just ended up falling asleep for 2 days) and I also started cutting shapes into the back of my hands with safety pins. My parents never even noticed.

Looking back, I see a pattern of mild neglect except in times of crisis. When we were kids, my brother was always getting in trouble at school, and there was always some kind of drama going on with him, so he was always getting lots of attention. My other brother had drama when his school said he might be autistic and my parents sent him to like 20 different specialists to prove to themselves that he wasn't (I think if this had happened 10 years later he might have been diagnosed as on the spectrum). While I guess my parents figured I could fend for myself since I wasn't getting in trouble. Mostly I was just an extra pair of hands to help out with chores- which my brothers were never asked to help with for some reason probably related to gender expectations.

It's probably why I read so many books as a child..I just spent a lot of my childhood alone, until i made some friends in high school. Whenever I did have friends, my parents seemed to take a hostile stance towards them, and had the attitude that my friends were bad influences leading me to be less religious. I hardly ever had people over at my house as a result.

As I got a little older I noticed when I could get attention from anyone in my family- which was when I was arguing with them. Arguments got attention. Throughout my college years my parents forced me to come home every shabbas, otherwise they would stop paying my tuition- they wanted to make sure I was keeping shabbas, and they never gave me any kind of financial help without some kind of religious string attached to it. So I would come home- at that point I was completely OTD and my parents knew it- and we would spend shabbas meals arguing. Arguing about religion mostly. For the first time, I felt like I actually had a relationship with my dad- cause we actually had conversations with each other, involving arguing about religion. My mom took all the arguing about religion very personally and whatever small relationship we had fell apart at that point.

Is it any wonder that I am now an intensely argumentative person? Me and B argue pretty frequently- not in a bad way, but we're both very argumentative, and very opinionated, and we have like these little debates about things all the time, and sometimes they get heated. We probably have several arguments every week. How much is that due to my parents teaching me that the only way to have a relationship with someone close to you is via arguing? I don't want to be like that...

I think back on stuff like this and wonder how much this has affected my life now. Yes, being argumentative has actually helped my career, but on a personal level being super argumentative is not very advantageous- I can definitely look back and see some past relationships that ended because I was just too argumentative all the time. Meanwhile, stuff like this makes me even more worried about the possibility of having kids, cause I'm sure my parents didn't think they were doing anything wrong, and yet I turned out all argumentative because of how they interacted with me...so what things am I going to do unconsciously that will fuck with my future kids? I read Tikunolam's tips on not fucking up your kids, and there are so many bad behaviors she points towards that I would never even have thought of...and that my parents always did to me.

I try not to be too angry at my parents for how they treated me throughout my life, but it's hard. I know the anger only really affects me (they don't even know about it) but this blog exists because the past still affects me, and I feel angry about it nearly every single day. How do I stop that?

Radio Silence

2010-07-02T12:20:00.005-04:00

Since B met my parents on my graduation day/1 year wedding anniversary (May 17th) I haven't heard a word or email or phone call from either of them. Not that this is unusual, as that's pretty much the way it's been since I got engaged to B- only hear from them every few months or so (usually when someone dies).

Also, in 10 days this will be our backyard! And Barkley's daytime home! :)

13 days till we close

2010-06-30T09:09:00.002-04:00

house picture o' the day:

The deck on the side of the house. The deck opens up onto the driveway, and we'll prolly be using this door as the entrance to our house instead of the actual front door. I'm thinking this may be a good place to hang out when grading papers. I'm also thinking some sort of porch swing may be in order...

Top 10 things I WILL miss when I move

2010-06-28T12:53:00.005-04:00

Two weeks from today we will be driving down south for the closing of our house (Which is 2 weeks from tomorrow!!!). Our mortgage has gotten it's final approval, so all we have to do now is wire an obscene amount of money over to our attorney for the downpayment and closing costs. After the closing we'll be coming back up north, spend about a week packing up whatever is left, cleaning our apartment, and loading up some pod things, and then we'll drive down one last time with all our pets.

We still have a pretty big list of things to do moving-wise, but many are things we can't even do yet (apparently you can't cancel your cable service in advance you have to wait till 2 weeks before you move cause comcast is a bunch of bastards). Mostly I've been sorting through things and putting lots of stuff out on the curb, and packing up the non-essentials. I finished packing the books yesterday- and we have about 20 boxes in total (but at least half of those go to my office). We also took apart my old bed frame and put that outside yesterday (it was gone within an hour). Today I started on the kitchen stuff that we don't use frequently.

Anyways, without further ado, 10 things I will miss about living here:

1. The music scene
The city I live in has a great music scene, and I've taken full advantage. Since moving here 6 years ago I've been to over 90 shows, the vast majority of which were small local bands in small local venues. For a few years when I was single I went to a show nearly every weekend.

2. My festival friends
This is related to the first- by participating in this music scene I've met a great many people, and I count many among my good friends. At a Phish show I went to the other week I ran into at least 20-30 people that I know. Down south there will still be music festivals, but I know that in the northeast if I went to any music festival that involves jam band music, I am guaranteed to run into someone I know- and usually someone I know and LIKE and who I have hung out with before. And at every festival I go up here, I have a built-in group of people I can camp with and have a great time with. Not so in the south. They have festivals there, yes, but I don't have a group of festival friends built up there. I can and likely will build up a new one, but that will take a few years- I've been hanging with my current group for 7 years, and I know them pretty well, and I'll miss them.

3. The sunflowers on my block
there are 3 places near my house that grow sunflowers, and I like walking to visit the sunflowers with barkley. It's a little thing, I know, and I can grow my own sunflowers, but these are just particular sunflowers that I have visited regularly for the last few years, and I'll miss them. Fortunately the heat wave we've been having brought on a few early blooms this year so I got to see them again before I leave

4. My officemate
Some people might see it as a good thing to move into an office by themselves, but I always work better when my office mate is around- having someone who can look over my shoulder makes me less likely to mess around on my computer when I should be working. Plus my officemate is super cool and is great to bounce ideas off of. And he's German, and his wife still lives in Germany so he goes to visit her quite often, and always brings me back German chocolate.

5. Food Trucks
My school's campus has an amazing assortment of food trucks where you can get incredible food for really cheap- including the standard egg sandwiches, but also chinese, vegetarian, crepes, indian food, korean food, japanese food, greek food, mexican food, and there is even a cupcake truck that only sells cupcakes. My favorite is the greek special from the vegetarian truck- feta cheese, olive and balsamic salad with a piece of spanakopita and 3 stuffed grape leaves. I also really like this egg truck where I get a egg white and cheese sandwich on whole wheat nearly every morning- and they already know my order when I get there.

6. Sidewalks
My neighborhoods has lots of sidewalks, my new neighborhood has none at all! But the streets are very quiet, so it prolly won't be so bad.

7. The crazy garden of the lady down the block.
My neighborhood is made up of old Victorian rowhouses, each of which has a small garden plot out front that's about 8 feet by 8 feet. One of my neighbors has filled her plot up with an incredible collection of flowers, that bloom during every season. Last year she started expanding the garden to those little strips of grass they have between the sidewalk and the street - she started planting more flowers up and down the street in front of some of the houses that have renters and/or are empty.

this isn't that garden, this is my neighbor's veggie garden.

8. being close to my friends
Actually, most of my close friends don't live in the same city as me anymore. But I'm only 2 hours from home, so I have lots of friends/my brother who come visit on a semi-regularly basis. It'll be a lot harder to visit when I'm 10 hours away instead of 2 hours away. :(

9.My local coffee shop
Best bagels in town! I lived less than a block from this place when I first moved here, and when I moved I purposefully moved within walking distance. They are the only place I've found that has GOOD bagels, and they usually run out of them by around 10am. When I first moved here it was a very small convenience store with great coffee and bagels, a few years ago it got bought by someone else, and now they have fancy pastries and fancier coffee instead of the convenience part. But it's still great. I usually walk barkley there, and they have a little hitching post with a bowl of water next to it for tying up your dog while you go inside.

10. being a student
yeah, i suppose it had to come to an end at some point. Counting Kindergarden and Pre-k, I've been a student for 24 years. It has it's drawbacks, but it also is pretty awesome- discounts on movies, being able to take off pretty much whenever, not working full time hours...yeah I'll miss it. Profs still have a pretty flexible schedule (other than classes and meetings) but as they say..you can work any 70 hours of the week.

discrimination against atheists

2010-06-24T11:10:00.004-04:00

It's weird how I switched from a religion with a major persecution complex to religious views that are actually discriminated against. As a jewish person I never suffered from clear discrimination. There is nothing I think I can't do due to me being jewish at this point in the US. Yes, my house got egged when I was a kid cause the neighbor kid next door was an anti semetic douche, but I never felt as if my opportunities were actually restricted due to my religious views.

Today in Philadelphia the boy scouts won the right to continue renting land from the city at the dirt cheap rate of $1 a year. The city was trying to kick them off their land (or start charging them real rent) because the Boy Scouts' policy on not accepting homosexuals violates municipal anti-discrimination laws. The jury decided this was an infringement on freedom of speech. I think the city has a right to rent or not rent to anyone they want, that they should have the right to not rent their land to private companies that violate their anti-discrimination laws, and I hope they appeal this decision.

But that's not really the point of this post. The point is, I think everyone knows that boy scouts don't let gay people in at this point. But in one of the article comments, someone mentioned that atheists and agnostics can't join the group either. That I hadn't previously known about. So I went over to wikipedia to check it out and found this:

The Boy Scouts of America's position is that atheists and agnostics cannot participate as Scouts (youth members) or Scouters (adult leaders) in its traditional Scouting programs. According to the Bylaws of the BSA, Declaration of Religious Principle:

"The Boy Scouts of America maintains that no member can grow into the best kind of citizen without recognizing an obligation to God. In the first part of the Scout Oath or Promise the member declares, ‘On my honor I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law.’ The recognition of God as the ruling and leading power in the universe and the grateful acknowledgment of His favors and blessings are necessary to the best type of citizenship and are wholesome precepts in the education of the growing members."[6]

During the membership application process and as a requirement to obtain membership, youths and adults are required to subscribe to the precepts of the Declaration of Religious Principle and to agree to abide by the Scout Oath and Law, which include the words, "do my duty to God" and "reverent". Youths are also required to repeat the Scout Oath and Law periodically after being accepted as Scouts. The BSA believes that atheists and agnostics are not appropriate role models of the Scout Oath and Law for boys, and thus will not accept such adults as leaders

So the rule is that gay people can't be LEADERS in the boy scouts. But apparently, atheists and agnostics can't be leaders OR scouts. So that seems even worse! But no one gives a crap about that part of the rules apparently, because people don't think about atheists as a discriminated-against group that merits protection?

I'm sure there are other examples things that you can't do if you're an atheist (that you can do when you're jewish). One example I can think of offhand is that one of the steps of alcoholics anonymous is that you have to accept a higher power (AKA god)- so atheists can't really take part in alcoholics anonymous (or they can, but not to the same extent- and I would be super uncomfortable joining that kind of program, presuming I needed that kind of help). I checked the internet, and apparently there are a few non-god-centric alcoholic support groups/programs, but they are extremely rare and it's hard to find meetings for them.

So two services that are not available to atheists: your kids can't join the boy scouts and it's harder to get help if you're an alcoholic. What other examples can you think of? FFTA in the comments.

In unsurprising news....

2010-06-10T07:12:00.002-04:00

A new study examined the brains of religious Pentecostal Christians and what happened to their brains when they heard a prayer spoken by a regular christian, a non-christian, and a "healer." (they were all actually just spoken by regular christians)

Meanwhile, when they were listening to prayers that they thought were spoken by regular people not much happened. But for the religious folks (but not the non-religious folks):

Parts of the prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortices, which play key roles in vigilance and skepticism when judging the truth and importance of what people say, were deactivated when the subjects listened to a supposed healer.

So when this group of people were told that someone with special spiritual powers (rabbi's anyone?) was saying something, the parts of their brain that are responsible for skepticism SHUT OFF. Now that explains a lot...like how my mother, who is one of the most skeptical people I know 95% of the time, just seems to have a giant hole in her skepticism when it comes to anything her rabbi says. She seems to have passed the skepticism on to me, but not the belief part. Maybe it's genetic- I just don't have the brain for religiosity.

Things I am soo looking forward to once we move:

2010-06-08T07:21:00.001-04:00

Top 10 things that will be awesome about our new house that are major annoyances in my life right now:

1. Central Air! These stupid window units don't do shit! Also Air conditioning in our bedroom! Right now we have a fan aimed at the bed. I can't sleep as well when something is blowing on me, but when it's not blowing directly on us, it's hot as balls. We can't have an AC in the bedroom cause there are bars on the window (although we can have AC in the living room and office cause we have those air conditioning bars on the windows in those rooms).

2. A washer and dryer without having to go outside! Right now we have to go outside to our backyard to get into the basement. When it snows we have to dig out the basement door to do laundry. Sometimes, if it snowed a few days ago, the door will be completely frozen over. Of course there is no back door to the house..we have to go out the front door and navigate the glass and trash filled alley to get there! And don't pay too close attention to what you're stepping on, cause you can easily bang your head on those air conditioning bars that stick out into the narrow alley!

3. Not having to dry my clothes 3x to get them dry! Not only do we have to go outside to do laundry, right now our bullshit washing machine doesn't actually spin during the spin cycle, so our clothes come out sopping wet and need to be dried 3x or else it stays damp forever and sometimes starts smelling like mildew. The landlord doesn't believe this happens cause once 2 years ago he did a cycle with 1 towel and "everything worked perfectly." So he basically refuses to replace it. I've been dealing with this bullshit for approximately 3 years, and it sucks. Especially since every time we want to put another dry cycle on, that's another trip down the alley to the backyard.

4. Not having to save up/go to the bank to get quarters for the washer and dryer! One wash cycle + 3 dry cycles @ 1.50 per cycle= $6 in quarters for every load of laundry. That's 24 goddamn quarters per load.

5. A dishwasher that actually washes the dishes! Ours can make them really hot, but won't clean anything. Also it occasionally leaks all over the kitchen floor for some mysterious reason.

6. A full sized modern refrigerator! Our is like 3/4th sized now and is really old so needs to be defrosted frequently or else the tiny freezer turns into a solid block of ice and paradoxically stops cooling all the rest of the food, which then spoils much quicker than is normal. This gets especially bad in the summers when the humidity in this city is unbearable.

7. Toilets that actually flush all the way the first time! Ours need to be flushed at least twice.

8. Not having to walk Barkley 6-9 times a day!! We will have a fenced in backyard so we can just let him out to pee! Is it weird that nearly every morning I day dream about being able to just get up to let Barkley out the back door? The back door which is (awesomely) right next to the master bedroom in our new house!

9. Being able to set up B's office right next to the living room! so we don't have to yell at each other back and forth all the time! Right now his office is all the way in the back of the house and the living room (where I hang out with my laptop) is all the way in the front of the house (There's a twisty hallway and a bedroom and bathroom in between), so we end up yelling back and forth and not hearing half the things we say. Which really annoys both of us. Especially B. :)

10. A driveway!!! Not having to wander around for half an hour looking for parking any time we come home after 8pm! Not having to wander around for at least 10 minutes the rest of the time! Being able to park right in front of our house all the time! Not having to move the car every 2 hours because of stupid parking rules!!

It's the little things, really...

purging the clothing from my orthodox jewish life...

2010-06-04T09:03:00.008-04:00

One of my favorite things about big moves is the chance to go through all your stuff, figure out what you want to get rid of, and then throwing out/donating all that stuff.

My favorite thing is the clothes. The past 2 days I've been going through all my clothes and separating it into 3 piles- donate, trash (for stuff horribly stained/torn) and keep. The donate pile is almost as big as the keep pile at this point.

When I first moved away to grad school I got rid of 22 years worth of junk/clothes that had been sitting around in a closet in my parent's house. During that move, 6 years ago, I was still in a pretty ambivalent place religious-wise. I was not keeping kosher/shabbas at all at that point, but was still occasionally attending some orthodox jewish events, like Friday night shabbas meals/onegs at my parent's shul. And I was moving from my parent's house, so I couldn't exactly just chuck out all my skirts without my parents being all weird about it. So I moved over a whole bunch of skirts. And suits. Skirt-suits to be exact. The type you wear to shul and not anywhere else.

When I teach I don't wear a suit (I usually wear a blazer and/or a nice shirt with some fancy pants). I have one nice pants suit for job interviews (even though I hope to never go on any of those again) and other fancier business-type occasions. I have my wedding dress to wear to fancier non-jewish occasions (one of the reasons I didn't get a traditional white poofy dress- so that I can wear it again!).

The only time I NEED to wear a skirt at all is at orthodox jewish events. The orthodox jewish events I go to nowadays are all weddings and funerals. At weddings over the past few years I've always worn the same blue skirt. At funerals I have a nice long black skirt.

Meanwhile I moved all these skirt-suits down here to grad school, and they've been sitting in the back of my closet the entire time I've been here, and I haven't worn them once. So those are all getting donated. Also going are nearly all of my skirts- lots of gothicy type skirts that I wore in high school when I was kinda goth-ish (as much as you can be in a high school that doesn't allow you to wear make up). Some hippie skirts that I don't wear anymore. And lots of a few-inches-below-the-knee and ankle-length skirts. Those are almost all black for some reason, so I basically have around 15 nearly-identical skirts. I almost wish I had some orthodox jewish friends in this city so that I could give them to someone who could use all this stuff.

The high heeled shoes I wore to shul with my skirt suits...those are also all going. I never wear heels at all nowadays, and if I do want to I think the one pair of nice black heels that I'm keeping and my navy blue heels (left over from my wedding) are enough for the amount of times I need to wear them (0-2x/year)

But yeah. This feels good. Especially getting rid of all those skirt-suits...it's been like weird baggage from my religious days taking up space in my closet. Before now I felt like I shouldn't get rid of them because they were expensive suits (although it was my parents who paid for them), so they have just sat in my closet, a reminder of my former life every time I got my clothes. And the skirts just sat there because I told myself that I might need to wear one at some point, and also I've been just too busy/lazy to go through them. But with the move, I finally have the excuse (and motivation) I need to donate it all.

It'll be really nice to not have that stuff around anymore.

I graduated. B met my parents. Everyone survived.

2010-05-18T09:04:00.006-04:00

So yesterday was somewhat momentous....I officially graduated with my PhD in sociology and demography, it was my one year anniversary with B, and B met my parents at graduation!

I wasn't actually there for most of the meeting. In the morning I walked over to campus (in my cool doctor robes, which was fun- lots of people I walked pasr said congrats!) and met up with all the other graduates, including a couple from my program. We all marched through the entire campus, to the football field, where all the parents and family people were waiting. My department's secretaries threw a bunch of confetti on me when I passed them. :)

Meanwhile, B and my parents and my brother met up in the audience, without me. I saw them when I marched past them into the football stadium...my brother sat between my parents and B. According to B they made some small talk, my mom barely looked at him the entire time, and only spoke directly to him once- when B said something about how lucky I am to have gotten a job in this terrible market, and my mom apparently was all "it's not luck, she had publications even when she was an undergrad and she's really smart!" So apparently my mom is proud of me after all. :) Just wish she would say something like that to me ever...it seems all we can do is snark at each other these days.

Meanwhile they made some small talk, B restrained himself from making any offensive jokes, and then we all met up for all of 20 minutes after the first graduation ceremony (because the second graduation was an hour after the first one and it took a while for us to find each other). My parents walked us to the second ceremony area where I was all "there are my inlaws!" when I saw them in the front row of the tent for the second ceremony (my in laws only came to the second smaller ceremony), and my mom made a face, so I didn't press for them to meet each other.

But anyways, it happened! My parents have met my husband after 3 and a half years of us being together and exactly a year after we got married! Nobody died! My brother's curse has not been fulfilled! I mentioned something about that curse to my parents and they were all "that rabbi was a charletan!" I was very proud of myself for just staying quiet and refraining from saying "and the other ones aren't?"

I probably shouldn't have brought up the curse thing at all, but I'm just so awkward around my parents now..we really have nothing to talk about, cause the only interaction we've had for the past 3 years is like them trying to convince me that I shouldn't be with my husband. I did show them pictures of my new house during our 20 minutes though and my parents told me they were proud of me, which was cool.

The second ceremony was even better, we got to hear about this astrophysics guy talk about the joy of research and then they called my name and gave me a fake diploma! The real one arrives in July or so...but as of yesterday my transcript now says I've been awarded a doctor of philosophy!! :) I finally got to send my transcript out to my new job so they can give me an official official contract (instead of a less official job offer letter), cause the job offer was contigent on me finishing my degree.

My in laws flew in for that second ceremony which was totally awesome of them. :) My in-laws and my brother and I also went to this southern restaurant for dinner on Sunday, since ever since I was down south a couple of weeks ago and my real estate agent took me out to local southern food places for lunch almost every day we were there, I have gotten crazy southern food cravings. I LOVE southern food! The food at this place was pretty good, but I had cheesy grits on the side and they just weren't the same as they are down south....they were like pureed so it was like smooth grits pudding, but I like the chunkier type of grits you get down south that have some texture to them. Oh well, I guess I will have to wait a couple more months until I can have real grits again...and then I can have them all the time, yay!

Anyways my parents aren't BFFs with B now, and I doubt they will come to visit us down south, at least not for a good long time (maybe till we have kids as everyone keeps saying, but that won't be for a few years yet), but the ice is broken! They have finally met each other! I no longer can say my parents have never met my husband! Yay!!

Almost here...

2010-05-14T14:16:00.002-04:00

So, on Monday it is mine and B's one year wedding anniversary. Which means that if B doesn't die or leave me by Monday, my brother's rabbi's prediction that within a year B will either convert, we will break up, or he will die, will be proven false.

Also, Monday is my graduation.

Also, my parents are coming to my graduation. As is B. As are my in-laws, but they won't be meeting my parents (there are two graduations, my parents are going to one and they are going to the other). But B will be meeting my parents. For the first time. My brother will be there too, and since he is a big scary guy used to dealing with criminals I am hoping that if my parents start doing something crazy (like trying to fulfill that rabbi's prediction) he will be there to intervene. Since I'll be off graduating and all.

Stay tuned...

We're buying a house!!

2010-05-09T10:50:00.004-04:00

I've been down in *southern state we are moving to for my job* for the past week looking at houses, and I found a house that is AWESOME, and we are now under contract to buy this house!! We will be closing on July 15th!! This house is great- and here's some pictures of its awesomeness:

Master bedroom suite

The other side of that room

Master bathroom- Shower

Master bathroom- crazy awesome bubble bath

Kitchen

sunroom

another bedroom that will probably be an office for now

living room

It also has a pretty big backyard that is mostly fenced- just need to add a gate at one end and it'll be great for Barkley to run around in.

I AM SO FREAKIN EXCITED!!!! I can't believe I get to own a house as awesome as this one!!! And we can actually afford it too, yay the south!!!

That's Dr. Abandoning Eden to you!

2010-04-23T18:33:00.002-04:00

I passed my defense!!! (With no revisions!!)

Home Purchasing (City + Ok house vs. Sticks + awesome house?)

2010-04-17T11:31:00.003-04:00

so...we are looking for a house, and I will probably be going down south in around 2 weeks to see a bunch of them in person. We contacted a realtor and a mortgage guy, and the realtor hooked us up with a listing website, and today we looked through a bunch of listings.

It seems our choices come down to:
1. fantastic large houses in far away 'out in the sticks' areas for low prices. These houses all are in good public school districts but although they are within city limits, they are more suburban/borderline rural areas. These houses feature large backyards, cool amenities (like 2 decks! 4 bedrooms! 2 car attached garages! newly remodeled kitchen!) plus all the basics we've decided on (which is a very long list, including fenced in yard, good school district, big kitchen with lots of storage, garage or carport, hardwood floors, 3+ bedrooms 2+ bathrooms). They are within our price range, and around the low-median end of our range. The commute to my job would be about 20 minutes each way.

2. Mediocre or more expensive smaller houses closer to the job. These are about a 5-10 minute commute, have smaller backyards, smaller houses, less nice houses, carports or detached garages instead of attached garage. They are more suburban/borderline urban and close to nice restaurants. They are at the higher end of our price range. They still have all the basics we want. Some do not come with appliances.

So far we've found 5 listings we like of the first kind of house and 3 of the second kind of house.

Home purchasing (shit just got real)

2010-04-16T10:53:00.007-04:00

I decided to take this week (mostly) off from work and take a well-deserved vacation. This entire semester, and especially the last couple of weeks, I've been working crazy long hours to finish my dissertation (like get to work before 10am, don't leave till almost 9pm kinda hours).

What have I done this week? Well, I caught up on a lot of on-demand TV, I visited the dog park a few times with Barkley, I dropped B off and picked him up from his new job, and I also emailed a bunch of people a bunch of things. One of those emails was to my new chair, asking her for recommendations for a 'buyers agent' for which to buy a house.

Yes, we are buying a house! Hopefully, if we can find something in time to move down there in July (If not we are going to rent). I emailed the buyers agent yesterday and plan to go on a trip down to our new area in a few weeks, check out a ton of houses, and pick a few that we like. B will probably not be coming with me due to said new job, but I'm going to take pictures of the places I really like and email them to him. Then we will hopefully put in a bid on our top choice, and do other stuff from afar.

Meanwhile, this guy emailed me back with some info on a mortgage company ahhh!!! Shit TOTALLY just got real. We also have to come up with a list of what we want in our dream house. So, readers, what things would you look for in a dream house? This is the list we have so far:

1. Large fenced in backyard for Barkley
2. Attached garage preferable, if not detached garage or carport (they have a lot of carports in the south apparently)
3. 3-4 bedrooms
4. 2+ bathrooms
5. Decently sized kitchen with lots of cabinet and counter space
6. hardwood floors preferred over carpets
7. NOT a 'fixer upper'
8. In a good public school district
9. Close to my new job but not *too* close so that I am running into my students every time I open the door (and not in a student neighborhood either).
10. Preferably a giant wrap around porch (or front/back porch of some kind)
11. preferably near a park or somewhere where it would be nice to walk with Barkley.
12. Central air conditioning

So readers, what other things should we be thinking about?

Summer Reading List!

2010-04-13T09:33:00.001-04:00

Well, it may only be April, but my summer began the minute I handed in my dissertation. This summer is going to be a big transitional one- I still have to defend and deposit at the end of April, I'm graduating next month, moving down south in July, and start my new professorship job on August 1st.

We're also considering going down south for a week or so in May and trying to find a house to buy (We're also going to look at rental places while we are there, but if we find a place we totally love we might put in a bid). In the Fall semester I'm also teaching two entirely new courses that I've never taught before, including grad statistics, which I'm trying not to be too nervous about, but which I'm somewhat intimidated about teaching- you mean I'm smart enough to teach OTHER grad students something? :)

So this summer's main activities will be: Packing up my house up north, looking for a place to live/possibly buying a house down south, prepping two new classes, and of course moving itself. Also a few fun things in the works; a music festival or two, a trip to D.C. with B my brother and his girlfriend, and a trip to NJ for a show and a hippie BBQ.

Meanwhile, now that I've handed in my dissertation, I have about 2 weeks of free time until I have to do any work again. And a couple of days ago I got a big shipment of books. And for the first time in almost a year, I have the TIME to read a book that ISN'T directly related to my dissertation/teaching!! :)

So here's what's on the summer reading list so far:

Unchosen: The hidden lives of Hasidic rebels by Hella Winston. This book has been reviewed by many OTD bloggers, so I figured I should finally check it out. I didn't realize it until I started reading it, but this book was actually originally a sociology dissertation! If you haven't heard about it yet, it's about Hasidic people who don't want to be religious and are either orthoprax to some degree, OTD to some degree, and some which leave the community entirely. I'm a few chapter in and it's a fascinating read so far.

Nolo's essential guide to buying your first home by a bunch of lawyers. Yeah, this one should be pretty self explanatory. I figured I might as well pick up at least one book on this instead of relying purely on the internets/random advice from friends which may or may not be good.

The new joys of Yiddish by Leo Rosten. I'm not planning on reading this book cover to cover as it's more like a dictionary, except with jokes and stories. This book came recommended by a friend of mine when I randomly made a comment about maybe taking a yiddish class one day. I've looked through it a bit, and there are tons of jewish jokes which I suspect might only be funny to Jews. But I find them freakin hilarious.

A Quaker book of wisdom, by Robert Lawrence Smith. I first got interested in Quakers when I lived in an area chock full of them, and our wedding ceremony last year ended up being a kind of hybrid Quaker ceremony. At Quaker wedding ceremonies the couple exchanges promises to each other (not vows, cause Quakers don't take vows) and sit together in (mostly) silence for an hour along with their guests, and anyone can talk if they feel moved to share something. At the end of the hour, all the guests sign a wedding license. We didn't do a whole hour- more like 10 minutes. But around 5-6 of our guests spoke during that part of our wedding ceremony, which was nice. Anyways I've read a bit about Quaker beliefs on the internet and I've liked what I've seen, and I've met a lot of Quakers, and the area I'm moving to ALSO has a lot of Quakers, so I thought it might be nice to know a little more about them. And this book came highly recommended by amazon.com

Finally, Guyland: The perilous world where boys become men by Michael Kimmel. Michael Kimmel is an awesome sociologist and I would say probably the foremost expert on masculinities studies. He also occasionally blogs over at the Huffington Post. I was fortunate to see him do an author-meets-critics at a conference a few weeks ago for this book, and it sounds fascinating and also essential for any gender studies person to read. I'm glad I finally will have the time to read it!

Daddy issues part 2

2010-04-10T08:51:00.004-04:00

Ok so yesterday I handed in my dissertation to my committee (yay!!) and I also sent a copy to my dad and was all "Hey, I submitted my dissertation today!! Yay!! I'm attached a copy in case you want to read it. My defense is in 2 weeks!"

This is the response I got:

"AE--

By all means celebrate this milestone! You can celebrate again when you've passed the defense, and again when it is submitted. -- J"

Oh wait, no, that wasn't my DAD that was my DISSERTATION ADVISER. Here it the email my actual dad sent me:

"Wow! Good luck. No promises but i will try to read it.

You're playing it close to the deadline since your graduation is May XX. They usually suggest revisions. Let's hope they are minor. Today we live in the world of word procesers."

I don't know, I may be overreacting here. But why does he have to be such a debbie downer? Like, my adviser is confident I will pass obviously (and he is the chair of my dissertation and the guy who actually has to sign off on whether I pass or not) but my dad has to give all these warnings about how I'm playing it too close.

Maybe, dad, I know WTF i'm doing, and I'm actually good at what I do? Ever consider that? Argh!!!!!

Am I overreacting? Should I say something to my dad or just let it go? When I got my professorship job I was also somewhat disappointed with his response and actually, come to think of it, when I first got into grad school he went on this whole rant about how I should be worried about how I will balance having children with a career. Because, like no women in the history of the world has ever had children and a successful career apparently?

Why does he have to give all these freakin warnings and try to stress me out? Why can't he just leave it at "congratulations!"? Why can't my dad be more like my adviser???

Dissertation accomplished!

2010-04-09T15:51:00.001-04:00

I submitted my dissertation to my committee today! All four wanted printed copies, for a total of 408 pages printed (204 pages printed double sided X 4).

I'm a little nervous about whether they will like it or not, but at the same time I suspect it might be totally awesome. It's hard to say.

Defense in two weeks. Wish me luck!

Transitions

2010-04-04T12:14:00.004-04:00

Entrance into grad school for me was entrance into complete financial independence, and with it a new found freedom to truly be myself. For the first time I was able to be completely open with my parents and family about the extent to which I was not religious/an atheist, and they couldn't do anything about it! Well, except eventually excommunicate me, which they did. But it didn't matter, cause I didn't depend on them anymore for health insurance or tuition! Over the past few years I've gladly friended my family members on facebook even though my religious status said "Flaming atheist"

Now that I am finishing up grad school and starting a job I see myself drawing inwards and becoming more secretive with my beliefs again in a way I maybe don't like so much. Yesterday I removed my religious status from facebook altogether. I don't know. I just don't want to move to a brand new place and have people judge me and dislike me because I'm a flaming atheist. And to a certain extent I don't think it's appropriate for a professor to have their religious beliefs up on facebook.

I've been thinking lately, what am I going to say to people about being Jewish when I move down south? I've been told that when you move down south you get asked a lot if you have found a church yet. How will I answer that? As the truth- no I'm not christian, I was raised jewish but now I'm an atheist who celebrates some jewish and some christian holidays in a not-very religious way, but doesn't attend a church of any kind? That's just TMI!

But then, do I mention anything about being jewish? When I barely identify as jewish? And it kinda seems nice to be able to move to a new place where no one knows my jewish background, and where I can finally not be known as a jewish person. To truly be able to escape my past. But then I feel like if I don't say I'm jewish, it means I'm ashamed of being jewish, and being secretive about my jewishness, and that doensn't bring up good associations either.

It just seems easier to change the subject. But then I'm back to being secretive again! How do you escape your roots without denying your roots? Or is that just impossible?