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March 30, 2006

I call all athletic shoes tennis shoes, and I pronounce it tenna shoes. Deal with it.

I can't believe I'm about to say this, but I'm really annoyed that I need new shoes.

Normally, I fit every single stereotype about women and shoes. I hate buying clothes, and I could wear jeans and a sweatshirt every cold day for the rest of my life and a t-shirt and long skirt every warm day for the rest of my life without complaint. But shoes... I really love them. The only bad things about buying shoes are the cost and finding clothes to go with them. I could go broke on shoes.

But I really love my tennis shoes. They're totally my style (not too cheesy), totally my colors (neutral, tans, greys), totally fit my needs (they're called "country walking" shoes, which is the only kind of physical activity I would ever do voluntarily), and when I got them, they were the most comfortable shoes I had ever worn. I bought them in the summer of 2003 after I got shin splints working out in the tennis shoes I had been wearing for the previous four years. I felt like I was walking on air. I love pretty shoes, but I have worn them more than 75% of the time ever since.

Last fall when we started thinking about going on Birthright Israel, I realized I was probably going to need new shoes, especially since I wasn't planning on getting hiking boots. But when I went to the New Balance website, I saw that they didn't make this style anymore. The only "country walking" shoes they make are these, which are so hiking boot-ish. And brown. I really hate shoes that come up that high, so I decided that I could make it around Israel in the shoes I already had. And then we didn't even get to go, so it was moot. This spring, I've applied to Birthright again, but I didn't even bother looking for new shoes. I just figured I'd stick with these. No problem.

But... Lately my arches have been hurting really badly. In fact, I've been having some serious arthritic pain in ankles, toes, and arches. And I don't feel like I'm walking on fluffy clouds anymore. And then last week in Minnesota, I was tying them and one of the laces snapped off. Since then, I've had to tie my left shoelace in a knot with tiny two-inch pieces of shoelace. We looked for new laces today and couldn't find any that wouldn't look completely ridiculous.

So I think I have to buy new tennis shoes. I LOVE these shoes. I mean, I loved my Airwalks in 8th grade, and I loved my silver Sauconys in 10th grade (before Saucony was cool, yo), and I liked my turquoise Sauconys after that (they were already cool and pretty much over by then). But I LOVE these New Balance shoes. A lot.

This exact same thing happened with my conditioner last month. Turns out they've changed the scent, and now the conditioner I've used for the last 10 years is no more. I had to scour the web and buy myself a 9 month supply so that I could have that long to try out new conditioners gradually before I have to go cold turkey and make the switch.

I think the moral is that I'm weird and obsessive and get attached to things I know, so when I like something, I should buy 37 of it so I'm guaranteed never to run out.

Anyone know where I could find some old New Balance country walking 745s from 2003 online?

Posted to Miscellaneous at 05:24 PM | Comments (3)

March 29, 2006

Link-o-Rama. Worship me and my crazy web-scouring skills.

Today I'm coming to you from Not My Laptop. This is because last night, our computer died a sad, painful, prolonged death. Actually, it technically isn't dead, just severely under the weather. All day yesterday, it was wheezing and emiting a high pitched screech, so we turned it off last night (we don't turn that sucker off ever, and I refuse to apologize for eating up all that electricity). This morning it stayed on for a half hour before turning off and refusing to turn back on for several hours. After a great deal of experimenting, I realized it was likely an issue with the fan, which Lauren confirmed after talking to someone who had the same problem with his computer of the same model.

Anyway, long story short, I spent today trying to back up our stuff onto DVDs in between "cooling off periods", nearly freaked out when the computer literally blew a puff of dust out the side fan that looked like a miniature explosion, and talked to Toshiba tech support on the phone. Now I'm using Lauren's evil work computer until we can get ours fixed in a few weeks.

That's all that's new in my life, so I'll entertain with links. It's been awhile, so I have a lot this time.

  • I wrote recently about my love for the BSC, and since then, I've been introduced to some wonderful related sites. The first is BSC Headquarters, given to me by Kathy and apparently known to the entire rest of the world. Tiff is blogging her way through the series and living my dream at a public library that carries EVERY SINGLE BSC book. I also stumbled upon the BSC Companion, which may as well be the official guide to the series and a LiveJournal community for trading BSC books. I'm getting a little obsessed.

  • I don't do yoga (ha!), but I so want this endless yoga mat bag. You can buy as many segments as you want and just keep zipping them on. They do mention that you can also use it for things like posters and tripods and other things that I don't carry around, so maybe I'll be able to find a use for it someday...

  • The president of the Oglala Sioux tribe in South Dakota offered space on their land for a Planned Parenthood location in response to the ban on abortion. I'm so impressed by that, and I can't even express how that offer affects me. Planned Parenthood of MN and the Dakotas has responded by saying they appreciate the offer but instead intend to stay open in South Dakota and fight the fight. I'm also impressed by that. And as long as we're talking about this bullshit, this cartoon is floating around my entire social circle, and I love it. I assume those are the real numbers, and I love it. I don't speak out about a lot of political issues, but this one matters, and I'll keep linking to interesting and relevent articles until I'm ok with the outcome.

  • When I was home in Minnesota, I saw this hilarious one-woman show called So Kiss Me Already Herschel Gertz. I think it's best appreciated by those who went to Jewish summer camp, but anyone should really find it pretty funny. She's about to go on tour with the show (although I don't know exactly where), so watch for it in your area. Definitely worth seeing.

  • One of the websites I visit daily is called Strange New Products. I don't usually find a lot there worth clicking on, but recently there have been quite a few funny ones. First there was Purplos, which are purple cocktail weenies. PURPLE. Honey flavored. I have nothing more to say about that. Then last week there was The Pit Stop, a portable urinal designed for truckers. It's not the only product like this I've seen on the web, but it's certainly the most market-specific one I've seen... And then finally, today, there was the iBuzz, which attaches to your iPod to give you some very personal, very adult fun to the beat of your favorite music. I'm sure every lesbian in the country is buying one and putting multiple versions of Melissa Ferrick's Drive right onto their iPods this very moment.

  • When I was in college, Hot or Not (which I refuse to link to) was huge. Maybe it still is. I don't know. But now there's the much funnier I Was So 80's, where you can go to vote on how 80's a picture is. I love it.

  • Lately I've read several articles about homosexuality, religion, and various ways that these things are related recently. The big theme lately seems to be editorials about how legalizing gay marriage will lead to the legalization of polygamy. I really don't want to go into my feelings about polygamy and its legalization, but I do want to share this Slate article in response to all these alarmist articles. It's not necessarily the exact same stuff I would say in response, but I appreciate that it was written.

  • Also, as long as we're talking gay + religion, this article about a gay man being excommunicated from the Mormon church because of his legal same-sex wedding in Massachusetts intrigued me.

  • More crazy products! If you're single but want to feel like you have a significant other, now you can order products to allow your dog to fill that role in your life -- to an extent, please. My favorite is the wine glass. I seriously want to buy my parents' dog that wine glass.

  • Finally, to conclude my crazy product links, an ice cream lock. You can lock up your pint with a combination so that no one else can eat it. Unfortunately, I believe it's possible that Lauren is going to purchase this to keep me out of her ice cream, because if it's ice cream, I'll eat it. I'm totally serious. I can name my favorite flavors, but I can't name a flavor in existence that I WON'T eat.

    Ok, I'm done. Time for some ice cream. With magic shell. Yum.

    Posted to Links at 09:18 PM | Comments (0)

    March 28, 2006

    Huh.

    Um, I'm going to Massachusetts this weekend.

    I'm not really up to going into all the details of why we're going there. I'll just say that it's spur-of-the-moment, probably unnecessary, and something I'm pretty excited about. And it's too late to change our minds, because I just booked the really cheap plane tickets.

    Now I just have to find a hotel and a car and start mapping out all the things we want to find and then... we're going to Massachusetts. By way of Connecticut. I've never been to the Northeast. Wow.

    We could go see the Nields on Saturday night.

    Wow.

    Posted to Miscellaneous at 02:03 PM | Comments (3)

    March 24, 2006

    Feel free to send your contributions...

    I have this fantasy that I just can't let go of...

    In this fantasy, I own EVERY SINGLE Baby-Sitters Club book, numbers 1 through 131, plus all 12 super specials. I sit down one Friday afternoon, pick up Kristy's Great Idea, and start reading. I don't stop reading, except to sleep and to get myself a little ice cream, until I've finished The Fire at Mary Anne's House. I figure out in advance where the super specials fit into the series using my old trick of looking at the beginning to see which books are listed as already published at that point.

    And maybe, just maybe, I even read the Baby-Sitters Club Friends Forever series.

    This dream will probably never be realized. It seems that it's nearly impossible to find the older books, and although I don't remember giving my permission for this, my collection of the first 63 books seems to have disappeared from my parents' house. But I'm dying to reread them. I'm dying to find out what happened that caused Dawn to move back to California, what made some Jewish girl named Abby join the club, and why Mallory went to boarding school.

    I started reading the BSC books in 1987, when they were first published. My baubie worked at Target for awhile, and she got them for me as soon as they came out. This continued on long after my peers had moved on to R.L. Stine books, because as with most things in my life, I just plain Could Not Let Go. Most people my age stopped reading somewhere around 39, Poor Mallory. Not me. I kept on going until my sources had dried up and I had no way of acquiring the books. And until my senior year of college, I could list the titles of the first 44 books IN ORDER, from memory.

    And now, 13 years after I stopped reading, I'm still tortured by my curiosity about the fate of my five favorite girls (I was never much of a fan of Mallory or Jessi's). Too bad there aren't any used bookstores around here where we can go to try and scrounge them up...

    Posted to Books at 09:30 PM | Comments (5)

    March 23, 2006

    great, something thrilling to dwell on at the airport tomorrow...

    I promised a more meaningful entry when I got home tomorrow, but it turns out that this really IS the time for introspection and I feel like getting some of it out right now.

    First of all, I would like to point out that try very hard to avoid any sort of melodramatic, emotional, soul-searching stuff on this site. I occasionally get into some mental health related business and I sometimes allude to things I'm dealing with, but usually, I try to stay away from spilling my guts to everyone. After all, that's why I have a psychologist in Minnesota who charges me $120 an hour (she's worth every penny, I swear).

    It's time, however, that I share with you one of my Very Big Issues. It's such a big issue, in fact, that I've managed to completely avoid bringing it up in therapy. This could be because I rarely get to see my therapist, what with her being in another state and all, or it could be because it's Just That Big and I'm scared to tackle it. It's the kind of issue that, by its very nature, prevents me from dealing with it. A vicious circle. So what is this issue?

    I'm terrified of success.

    I know that sounds ridiculous. Who's terrified of success? Failure, of course, but success?? And isn't fear of success the same as the fear of failure, but disguised? Valid questions, I suppose, but you'll just have to trust me. It's different than a fear of failure. And of course it's crazy and convoluted. I'm not the type of person to go for a simple thing like fear of failure. I've been crazy since I was at least 7; I've had time to perfect my craziness and find things to torture me that most people would consider reasons to lock a person away.

    Anyway. Fear of success. This has been an ongoing issue for quite some time now, but in the last year, I've managed to completely avoid any situations where I might either fail OR succeed, thereby dulling my awareness that this issue plagues me. So I was completely blown out of the water earlier this week when I was offered an interview for a job that I really really want. Actually, it didn't even take being offered the interview for me to panic -- I began to panic several days before that, when someone from the search committee called to confirm that they had gotten my application and would be contacting me in the next week.

    It took approximately 24 hours after that phone call for me to decide that maybe I don't really want to work with Jewish youth, or Judaism at all. Maybe what I actually want to do is go to law school. Or maybe I should consider counseling psychology after all. Or maybe I should get that masters in social justice education.

    I've been doing well lately, so after a brief freak out in front of my mom, I put all that aside and reminded myself that I've been interested in the rabbinate for a full year now, and that I need to give this a chance. However, that afternoon I got the interview offer, and the next thing I knew, I was on the LSAT website trying to find out what kind of things I'd need to learn to take the test and looking at the websites of law programs in the Twin Cities.

    Um, what?

    Since then, I've managed to calm down. The interview came with, essentially, a homework assignment, and I've been plugging away at that. It's reenergized me about this career option, and I'm much more excited about it than I even was when I initially applied. In fact, I'm having a blast and dusting off my old RA skills. Even a conversation with Carly last night about this fear of success wasn't able to derail me. And this afternoon, I finished two of the four "assignments" I needed to get done to send to them. I'm proud of that.

    But if you think I didn't also go check out Princeton Review's a Day in the Life of an Attorney page tonight, you don't know me at all.

    Posted to Hardly Working & Mental Health at 12:23 AM | Comments (3)

    March 22, 2006

    Dar Williams is the right music choice for today's mood

    My horoscope for this week begins, "It's the Introspection Season, Capricorn." Since when do I, of all people, need permission or prompting to be introspective?

    Being home this week has been absolutely what I needed right now. I think I'm probably about 100 times crazier than I was when I arrived, but instead of feeling dead on my feet, I feel like life has been breathed back into me. The question is whether this is because I'm with my family in a familiar place or because I'm away from Oberlin and have purpose in my life. A week ago, that question wouldn't have mattered because all future plans would have included both of those things. Now that's less certain, but then again, that uncertainty may be part of what has enlivened me.

    Wow, I sound like I'm talking in code. Let's just say I feel crazy, but better.

    I've spent this entire week doing nothing but going to Home Depot and granite suppliers and visiting family, and it's been good. I have a lot to think about, and more to say, but right now, my wife is finally home, and I have a whole two hours to myself before I go out to dinner with my grandparents, so I'm going to go chill out a little bit before I get thrown back to the wolves in Oberlin tomorrow. I promise an update that makes more sense once I'm back there.

    Posted to Mental Health & Minnesota at 03:27 PM | Comments (1)

    March 16, 2006

    I'm feeling a little talky... Can you tell?

    Tomorrow morning Lauren leaves for ACPA and I head home for a week. I'm less than thrilled that we're going to be apart for a week, but I suppose at least I'll get to see my parents' new house and meet some new people and see Becky her new baby and be home in Minnesota... land of a billion inches of snow in the middle of fricking MARCH.

    I haven't been clicking on stupid links as much lately, but luckily, my favorite message board keeps me in the amusing links. I do also have a few other favorite sources, and I did remember to visit some of my favorite news sources a couple times. So here we go.

  • Someone shared that an American company that sells their products in France has started tagging their items with this funny stuff. Eventually, someone revealed that the company was Tom Bihn, maker of laptop cases and bags. I'm very very tempted to order one. We need a laptop case anyway, and I wouldn't mind supporting them.

  • Some libraries in Missouri have pulled (sort of) a children's book about gay penguins. More than my annoyance with the complaints about this book is my amusement that a kids' book was written about gay penguins, and even more so, the fact that this article about it concludes by saying, "Early last year, after 'And Tango Makes Three' was written the penguin couple broke up. For a brief period Roy lived with a female penguin."

  • This one doesn't require much explanation. This is a live-action reenactment of the Simpsons credits.

  • I doubt most of you have been following this story, but earlier this year, the University of St. Thomas, where Lauren and I did our graduate work, started making headlines because two straight faculty members who are in a long-term relationship, but are not married, were not allowed to room together on a school trip. They took it to the press, and it's become the a major issue of contention throughout the school. For an Obie, that may not seem like a big deal, but we're talking about a school where most students, staff, and faculty would have to look up the meaning of the word "protest." I was thrilled to read last week that this has led to a button campaign and faculty senate votes, with a large contingent supporting a change in this policy. What I'm less thrilled about, however, is the way that this has come about. It really saddens me that a lesbian couple on the faculty faced the exact same issue less than year prior, but that they were not in a position of enough security to raise the same ruckus that this straight couple has. Gay employees at St. Thomas have so much to lose by making a fuss -- not to mention that they probably wouldn't have been able to get much support from other students, staff, and faculty -- that this issue has had to wait until a straight couple could get behind it. Either way, I'm glad to see ANYONE raising a serious discussion about this there. But of course, if you knew me a year ago, you know that I have no great hidden love for St. Thomas...

  • As long as we're discussing Catholic/LGBT relations, I'm a little blown away by the Catholic church in Massachussetts choosing to completely remove itself from all involvement with adoption to avoid dealing with the state's human rights laws. Based on personal relationships in my life, I've always associated Catholicism with a very positive view on adoption, and that's something I've always been impressed with. I'm shocked that they'd choose to stop supporting adoption completely over chancing a child being placed with a gay couple. Wow.

  • On a much lighter note, I must own this Slanket! It's a blanket with sleeves! No more freezing arms when sitting with a blanket while typing or reading! Too bad it's so damn ugly...

  • I've been saying for a few years that the weather in Minnesota is changing significantly. Winters are not like I remember, and I can't imagine that there will ever again in my lifetinme be a winter like the one that gave us the Halloween Blizzard of '91. Other people, especially those from outside MN, like to argue with me, but now I have the backing of climatologists, who say that Minnesota's winter identity is truly changing.

  • Want to know if you're an optimist, if you're traditional, and if you have a good sex life? Find out by drawing a pig. For the record, I'm optimistic, traditional, remember dates, am emotional and naive, secure, stubborn, and... I'll leave you in the dark about my sex life.

  • Normally I can't stand iPod accessories, but this one caught my eye. I'm a little embarrassed that I even have an iPod, so this is ideal. It's a case that looks like a book. Too bad it would still be pretty obvious to have earphones sticking out of a book.

  • I could go on and on, but I think I'll end with this one. The Shock Absorber sports bra website wants you to choose your cup size and your level of activity so that you can see what your breasts do on their own, in a normal bra, and in their bra during physical activity. The bouncing boobs are literally hypnotic. I dare you to look away. I will have to admit that I'm pretty convinced that I need a shock absorber, though.

    Posted to Links at 11:55 AM | Comments (5)

    March 13, 2006

    my brain takes longer to recover than my body

    It's been almost a week, and I'm happy to report that I seem to be fully recovered. There are still certain foods that turn my stomach (why, peanut butter, why?), but my temperature is back to normal, nothing aches, and the nausea has totally disappeared. I can even eat things other than plain rice and saltines. It was quite a nasty bug, but I have a feeling no one really wants details, so I'll leave it at that.

    It does appear that in my week of lying on the couch moaning, I missed six whole days of beautiful weather. It was in the 50s and 60s the whole time. Today I'm enjoying one last day of these temperatures with the curtains and windows wide open despite the rain and grey skies, because tomorrow the high is 37. Yuck.

    Also in the past week:

  • my parents moved
  • my baby brother turned 18
  • the Feldman Family Birthday Extravaganza began
  • I discovered that the conditioner I've been using for 9 years has been discontinued
  • we bought the RENT DVD and watched the documentary, which was much better than the movie itself
  • we realized that Lauren is on call during Drag Ball
  • we cleaned the apartment from top to bottom

    This last item is because starting today, in less than an hour, potential Oberlin RD candidates will be touring our apartment. I forgot how much I hate this, but at least it's better than at Ramsgate, where they would just show up at your door with no warning to have people look around. There are scheduled times when the candidates will be here.

    Tonight Purim begins, and we aren't doing anything for it. Tomorrow is Lauren's birthday. Friday morning Lauren leaves for ACPA and I go home for a week. These things are not related, but I felt like sharing them. I have nothing else to say, but it's nice to be able to babble for no reason at all.

    Posted to Miscellaneous at 11:58 AM | Comments (1)

    March 08, 2006

    death, I welcome you

    I'm siiiiiiiiiiiiick.

    I don't know how this happened. Lauren got sick last week, but usually when I catch something from her, I get it immediately. And on top of that, we seem to be suffering from very different things. It appears that I have the flu, while she has a chest/sinus thing going on.

    It came on out of nowhere. I started feeling a little crappy yesterday, but by this morning, I still felt ok, and when I get sick I usually wake up feeling awful. Then suddenly today around noon, I fell apart. I started crying, I felt nauseous, and my whole body started to ache. Within an hour and a half, I had a nasty fever to go with it -- and I never get a fever.

    This is the first time in the last three hours that I've managed to sit up long enough to check my email. I HATE being sick. Please kill me?

    Posted to Miscellaneous at 04:59 PM | Comments (1)

    March 07, 2006

    25 IS old, I don't care what you say

    It's funny how easy it is to forget that I'm aging. I've accepted that kids I babysat when they were FIVE are on facebook, but other than that, I'm not confronted on a daily basis with reminders that time is passing.

    Today I got an email newsletter for my childhood summer camp. It was a lot of the same, "sign up and have a great time!" kind of stuff, but there was a section thrown in that is either new or that I've never noticed before. It was a list of engagements, marriages, and new children of former staff members. Out of the 32 people on that list, I personally know/knew 26 of them. Four of my former counselors were on that list, but most of them are people who were my age or a few years older.

    The biggie for me was seeing that my very first OZO (junior counselor) from 1991 has a new baby girl. I guess that if she was 17 that summer, she would be 32 now, so it only makes sense that she could have a child, but it still blows me away. She's eternally 17 in my mind.

    There were other notable things in this newsletter. They've added a low ropes course, which cracks me up. Ropes courses are for fancy camps, with air conditioning and swimming pools. Of course, the new dining hall DOES have a/c now, too... And there's also now a family week at the end of the summer. I still maintain that it would be great for a big group of us who used to go to rent a cabin and go to that, but no one but me is interested.

    Still, no matter how weirded out I am by the changes to the camp and by seeing my peers grow up, every time I get a newsletter or see pictures from camp, I want to go back so badly that my bones ache. That place was torture, but it was a really wonderful kind of torture. As great as Camp JRF sounds, I can't help but hope that my kids end up going to Herzl. I can't help but hope that someday, I can work with them again.

    Even if the kids I'm working with are my peers' children.

    Posted to Jew-mania at 05:37 PM | Comments (0)

    March 05, 2006

    I bet you didn't expect an entry like this from me.

    One of the top headlines in the Star Tribune for most of the day today has been Kirby Puckett's stroke. I've been checking regularly for any updates, although there really haven't been many. For the most part, the stories have been more about people's reactions and prayers.

    I'm not big on praying for people, but I gotta admit that I'm keeping him in my thoughts. I can't speak for any other kids growing up in Minnesota around the same time I did, but Kirby Puckett was a pretty major part of my childhood. I was almost 7 during the 1987 World Series, and almost 11 during the 1991 series, and Kirby Puckett was a total star in my eyes. I was always into baseball, but I've never been interested in knowing players' names or stats. I knew that the Twins had Kent Hrbek, Chuck Knoblauch, Greg Gagne, Gene Larkin, and Rick Aguilera, but I just didn't care. Kirby Puckett, though, was another story. He was my baseball hero.

    I couldn't tell you, for the life of me, what his stats were, what part he played in the series wins, or even his number. But I loved to watch him every time. I loved his homeruns. I loved him in the outfield. I loved how they said his name. If you don't believe me, I can dig out the cassette tape I made in first grade when I was home with the chicken pox during the World Series. In the middle of a tape of songs about Barbie and not scratching my pox was an entire song about my love for the Twins, especially Kirrrrrrrrrrrby Puckett!

    He's the only professional athlete I've ever cared about. I was devastated when that sexual harrassment case came up a few years ago (in fact, it's completely verboten to bring that up in our household). He's my childhood sports hero, and the reason I collected baseball cards and loved Twins games all through elementary and middle school. He's only 44, and I really and truly hope he's able to make it through this stroke and surgery and recover fully. I'm sure he's got a lot of people pulling for him, but it sure couldn't hurt to add me to the list.

    Posted to Minnesota & Nostalgia at 11:30 PM | Comments (1)

    March 03, 2006

    from Matzo-ball-shaped soap to looking like boys...

    This has been a pretty slow week, interesting-link-wise. Either that or I've been frozen under the pressure of providing interesting reading for my millions of readers.

  • I read an article last week about a state senator here in Ohio who is proposing legislation to keep Republicans from adopting. I think it's hilarious, and while I would normally be the first person to speak out against using the legislative system to make satirical political statements, I have to admit that this is no more ridiculous than the legislation it mocks. I approve.

  • Send someone a Monk-e-mail. I sent Lauren one of the monkey wearing a rugby shirt and speaking with a British accent. It went over well, except for the fact that she opened it at work. Oops.

  • Upload your picture and find out which celebrities you look like. No matter which picture I uploaded of myself, my top match was ALWAYS Chester Bennington (who I'd never heard of before this) at 74%. I even got different pictures of the same guy depending on which picture of myself I chose. I've always worried that I actually look like a boy, and I guess now I have confirmation. Oh well. Lauren got Ricki Lake, but since she gets that all the time from people, it was no great shock.

  • Too lazy to count how many licks to the center of a Tootsie Pop? This Lick-O-Meter will count for you. Honestly, this entire website amused me, and there are about a million things I want from there, including the Tiki Tissue Box and the Shlomo's Matzo Ball Soap.

  • A year and a half after our wedding, I finally came upon some Jewish same-sex wedding ceremony resources. We had adapt our own seven wedding blessings and deal with a rabbi who didn't put much energy into creating a meaningful ceremony... And NOW we find these resources!

  • Cockeyed.com is putting together a real height/weight chart. People are sending in their pictures, along with their height and weight, and they're putting together a table of what each height/weight combo looks like. I don't know why this fascinates me, but it does. Maybe it's because all the crappy novels I read describe the characters' height and weight, and I can never picture what that looks like.

  • I've found my dream couch. I've wanted an extra deep couch for a long time. Too bad this one is a sectional, because I think the three pieces would move apart every time someone sat down. And then there's the little issue of this couch costing over $3000. But whatever.

  • Finally, something no one but me and Carly will care about. On an episode of Popuar, April Tuna tells Emory to meet in her in the janitor's closet because she plans to get some of what sounded a lot like "fruitash". That made up word cracked both of us up, and Carly managed to actually say it five or six times in the day and a half following watching that episode. This week I learned that it is not, in fact, a made up word. It was actually the word frottage, meaning, "The act of rubbing against the body of another person, as in a crowd, to attain sexual gratification." Dirty, dirty April Tuna. I love it.

    Now you all have proof that I spend too much time looking at complete trash online each week. And this is just the stuff that I didn't bookmark!

    Posted to Links at 01:35 PM | Comments (5)

    March 01, 2006

    she helped make me like this, so I guess it's ok that she helps fix it

    My mommy makes everything better. Is that a normal statement for a married 25-year-old to make?

    Last night I had a PMS-induced full-on breakdown about the direction of my life, my plans for the future, and the inevitability of having to give up one of two things that I cared a great deal about. I sat and stewed all day and then I cried and cried when we got in bed. I moaned about rabbinical school and Minneapolis and family and a career and children and what home means and plans. Although I managed to avoid the "I'm such a loser, I'm a drain on our resources" stuff I typically spew, I may as well have said it all. And everything was completely black or white -- Philadelphia or Minneapolis; rabbinical school or no career; go home now or never go home again; fulfillment in one area or fulfillment in another.

    As usual, though, talking to my mom helped me think clearly. It's not like she talked me through it or really said that much, but after talking to her, everything makes a million times more sense. I know what's right for me, I know that I have the power to make any combination of things happen that I choose, and I have the choice not to feel guilty about wanting to do things the best way for myself.

    Duh. Pretty simple, huh?

    I love my mommy.

    Posted to Hardly Working at 02:30 PM | Comments (0)

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