Holiday Season

As I've mentioned before, I am a secular-ish Jew married to an atheist recovering from Lutheranism. Due to our religious and familial backgrounds, we get to have an interesting December (December's are also made more interesting by finals at school, but in a less fun way).

Our December holiday season began with Hanukah, the Jewish Festival of Lights. Hanukah is not a 'holy day' unlike the other widely celebrated Jewish holidays throughout the year. What's also neat about it is that my father's family first heard about it in the early 1950's when they immigrated out of Iran. Since my parent's are divorced, we get two family Hanukah celebrations. The first with my mother's family is referred to as the "Present Orgy," and involves latkas (potato pancakes) and sufganiot (donuts, often jelly filled). This year, my three year old cousin got a mound of toys and a *pink toothbrush,* guess which gift she liked best, named, and carried around all night.

All my life our Hanukah celebration with my dad has been a subdued affair, in the Israeli tradition he gives us money and we often get a pizza delivered and play dreidel and just hang out. This year was different. My dad's new girlfriend had kids young and is now a young grandmother to a whole brood. This year we trekked out to her home in Chesterworld for Hanukah with her, her kids and her grandkids. It was fun, and more reminiscent of Hanukah with my grandma, which made me feel very, very old. (Best part, one of her daughters is married to a man who went to high school with *A HAD A CRUSH ON* my mom... that makes my dad feel old).

The next holiday celebration was last night as we sat up with my mom and her husband to welcome the sun on the Solstice. A pair of tickets to Wicked magically appeared in our laps so we saw that (it was great!) and then went over to see my mom. We arrived around 11:30, made hot coco and adjourned to the living room where we sat and ate popcorn covered in chocolate/sugar/nuts/sugar/etc and drank coco and chatted. It was lovely. This is the first year we have gone out of our way to celebrate the winter Solstice with my mom and step-dad, but then again, this is the first year that I have had a step-dad, so I guess it works out.

In a few days we will brave the wilds of Illinois and make the long journey to the Frozen North to celebrate Christmas. We will spend Christmas eve with a dear friend in the process of conversion to Judaism, at which point I believe she will be introduced to the age old Jewish tradition of eating Chinese food on Christmas. Then in the morning we will drive out to the middle of nowhere to see my in-laws after they get home from church. We will eat ham (yuck!) and then open presents and stay the night.

December holidays end with new years eve, which this year we believe we will celebrate with at a friend's potluck. The new year begins with a luncheon at my uncle-in-laws house back in the Frozen North (how we will get to both event's we are still working on, it will most likely involve waking up at 8 am January 1st and driving up).


With all of this, you would think we were Pastafarians! Happy holidays!

On Why You Need Your Ears

Ears are so amazing, and I admit, I have taken mine for granted. After years of not giving my ears the love and respect they deserved, going so far as to get a stupid piercing at a mall when I was 13 that I have since let close-up, my ears have decided to take a hiatus from usefulness.

While in the frozen nothern wastelands, visiting Boybee's parents, I caught a nasty little virus. I tried to sleep it off and drink lots of fluids, but alas, healthy is not the word I would use to describe a graduate student's schedule during finals. After spending a week voiceless, a few days ago I could speak again, but strangely, I can't hear. I also have a hacking cough, but that isn't too strange.

Right now, I can hear my breath going through my nose and down into my lungs, but I can't hear what people say when they speak to me, especially on my right side. 

Oh, ears, I promise if you come back to functionality, I'll treat you right! I'll clean you regularly with cutips and try not to get over-excited and poke too far back. I'll even get you pierced in a new and nice way, maybe even to cover up that old scar. You would like that, right? Please ears, if you're reading this, I miss you.

Santa, the Boogey Man, and the Tooth Fairy

Fictional characters are great. I love mythic heroes and villains, stories and fairytales give you a sense of wonder and make for excellent social commentary. That being said, I'm not sure how down I am with mythic characters that we encourage and trick children into believing they exist. I am begining to see a fine, but important line in all of this though- it's all about parental intent.

I find the tooth fairy to be innocuous. In the beginning it helps a child deal with what is rather frightening and strange - your bones are falling out of your mouth, that is enough to scar the crap out of anyone, especially a little kid. At six, finding a quarter under your pillow is pretty much the coolest thing ever. After a few teeth, you figure it out and maybe start negotiating a better exchange rate with Mom and Dad, it's a game. By making the event special and by reinforcing the 'growing-up' aspects of tooth loss and the responsibility of money, parents can alleviates fears and instill budding capitalist individuality that is in many ways required for success in middle-class America.

I guess Santa Claus and the Boogey Man started out as ways of bribing and scaring children into good behavior. The boogey man has largely fallen out of favor - not worth the psych bills for PTSD in later life. But Santa has thrived.

I was never taught to believe in Santa Claus. We received seven small and useful gifts from my parents, one each night of Hanukah, and then at the big family party (nicknamed the Family Present Orgy) we would get one bigger present. Small presents were usually socks and underwear, sometimes books, during my tween years I was sure to get at least one set of burt's bees chapsticks. Big presents were often less practical, a new CD player or jewelry (in Persian culture, a man's masculinity is partially wrapped up in the ornamentation of his daughters, mentally and physically, my getting a degree and having a good set of pearls is my dad's version of owning a motorcycle). Consumerism is rampant, but at least in our family, we accepted it at face-value.

Santa Claus seems to have been co-opted by a generation of children whose parents bought them stuff to show them love or neglected to buy them stuff or show them love, who want to coddle their children and relive their childhoods. Worse, Santa has been honed by generations of marketing wizzes to represent everything crass and commercial about the winter holidays. Boybee's first step in realizing that Jesus was a fairytale was realizing that Santa was a fairytale - not exactly his parent's intent. There is a joy in having presents 'miraculously' appear over night, but that's about all the magic there is in it. I can't count on all of my appendages the number of stupid Santa movies that come out every single year, and come on, kids aren't that dumb. I see Santa as being a problem, while being fine with the Tooth Fairy mainly because, when a kids figures out that the Tooth Fairy isn't real it can stay playful and fun and the parents can be in on the game, when a kid finds out that Santa isn't real it seems so traumatic with parents refusing to admit the truth... it's all creepy from an outsiders perspective. Both represent and encourage aspects of Capitalism, both require parents to sneak around and pretend that their actions are really those of a a ficgtious super-natural character, but the difference between the embracing a loss that signals growth (and a good venue to encourage savings) and the whole hearted embrace of consumption and encouraging a sense of entitlement seem very different to me.

Dressers are a finite comodity

We ended our trip up north by taking one of the many extra dressers from my mother-in-law's basement. We now have two full size dressers and two half dressers for our cloths, as well as two plastic-rolly drawer thingys from target for fabric (this doesn't even take into account the two closets, the free standing hanger organizer and multiple rubber-made totes...). Hopefully this will be enough for all of our stuff. I don't doubt that we will pitch about half of our things next time we move, but I have a feeling that it'll be a while, and by that time we will have near doubled what we had when we first moved in. Such is the way of life.

Also, my couch is fixed!

Boybee and I just returned from celebrating the ruination of this great land/genocide in the frozen north with his progenitors. All in all, we had a good time. We are both fighting a nasty flu-like bug so we slept a lot more than I would have liked. The best part was how no one called me a "false idol" and no one cried, unlike the last few times we've visited. They're making a sincere effort, I think it's because they know that there are going to be grandchildren in the near future.

This was my first ever Thanksgiving away from home, and I gotta say, I like the happy, boisterous, young, full house with *delicious* food version here better than the quiet, small, cold space with dry turkey and box stuffing (although I admit, I've never had better gravy).

My Post-Post-Structuralist Family

So this morning I woke up to my phone ringing - it's my ex-step-mother! This is my dad's second wife (not the third who we hate), they were together for a time when I was a small child. She has a son who was raised as my brother and who I consider my brother - my dad still has visitation with him, although not legally. So my dad and step-mom break up because step-mom doesn't like men, whoops!

So, she calls me and asks me, do you have a tattoo? (I do!) and then she asks where I got it. Knowing that I would have done my homework and gone to a safe/reputable place (which I did). It was just so strange dishing about area ink joints with my lesbian ex-step-mother and realizing that I was experiencing the Modern Family in action.

My Fainting Couch

Many moons ago my mom bought this pretty brown fainting couch for our family living room (she wanted something that she could put book cases behind). Boybee and I got this couch when it was decided that it didn't fit in mom's new house. I like it a lot. It's perfect for reading and doing homework and I have recently dubbed it my new office (after the third ginormous paper of the week, I needed a change of scenery from the actual office, and this is why I have a laptop).

The Couch-Office

It turns out that my fainting couch has become a new fort for my cats. They've torn off the cloth that covers the bottom and crawl around inside the thing for fun. This just happened the other day and neither Boybee nor I has had the time to get a staple gun and fix the darned thing. In the mean time we have taken to diving under the couch and pulling the cats out while they wrassle. Oy.

The Culprit

On Having Babies

I am, at the moment, childless. At 21, with both my husband and me still in graduate school, and without good sources of steady income, I am not at the point in my life where I feel I could adequately provide for another person. That knowledge doesn't stop me from really, really wanting one. It of course doesn't help that my chosen profession keeps me around babies much of the time.

Boybee and I have decided that we can begin a family or at least begin trying to begin a family in about a year from now. Note the "can," this shouldn't be taken as a "will." I will finish with my degree in May of 2009, and Boybee will hopefully be gainfully employed by Sept. 2008, meaning that a new addition to our family in June of 2009 wouldn't be that difficult to manage. I could easily take those few months directly after receiving my degree to recover and deal with an infant before starting a full time job. Since having finishing my degree with an infant would be a pain in the butt, Nov. of next year is the absolute earliest I would ever try to conceive.

I have two competing ideas about motherhood and its desirability. On the one hand, I want a baby. I really want a baby. I want to have a baby with Boybee, ideally one that has his pretty eyes with my 20/20 vision. I like infants a lot, and would love to have one of my own. On the other hand, I also really like being able to go hang out with my friends whenever I want until the wee hours of the morning. I like being able to schedule my day based on my whims and my own concepts of what needs to be done and when. Babies severely limit one's personal freedom - especially with regards to time management.

When one is heterosexually partnered, healthy and in love, it can be really hard not to have babies. Thank God for medical birth control that takes care of itself!

Etiquette: It only works if everyone is on the same page

A friend with severe food sensitivities recently mentioned how difficult it was for her to be a dinner guest. She can't have peanuts, almonds, caffeine, most cheeses, not even chocolate, and countless other delicious foods, many of which she loves because if she does, even in small amounts she ends up with horrible, multi-day migraine headaches. She is not "allergic" or morally opposed to eating these foods, nor is she just being picky, so what does she do to not offend her host/ess or get sick?

It is situations like these that make me wish for a more socially isolated and restricted time. A time when one knew only a few people and would always only know those few people so everyone had to be nice and play by the rules and everyone knew the rules. In a modern world, with the internet and facebook and ease of migration, how do we know what the rules are? Will turning down an offer seem rude or well manured? Will sending a graduation/birth/wedding announcement be seen as politely informative or present grubbing? The whole thing is stuck in a weird gray area.

Luckily for us, we have such great minds as Rabbi Hillel and Emanuel Kant; the so called golden rule - "Do on to others as you would have done to you," and it's lovely sisters, "Do not do to others that which you find repugnant" and the Categorical Imperative, "Act according to the maxim that you would have be universal law." You might be asking, what does a pre-modern biblical scholar and a deontological ethicist's idea on morality have to to do with etiquette. That's a good question. Without launching into a big full ethics debate, I will condense it down to this - etiquette is a social construction that gives us rules to follow and the best rules are ones that don't hurt or offend others. Since we are all people, the best we can do is to treat others the same as we would like to be treated (and part of that includes making sure we know what someone else thinks will be 'nice' if we want to be treated 'nicely').

Back to the dinner party problem, gusts and host/esses have certain social obligations to each other in order for each to be treated well.

If you're allergic or sensitive to certain foods/have ethical or religious food taboos, it is your duty as a guest to make that clear ahead of time to the host/ess and as a host/ess it is your duty to ask your guests if there are foods they can't or wont eat (for any reasons) ahead of time.

The big thing my in-laws knew about Judaism was that Jews don't eat pork, so they asked multiple times before I first ate dinner with them if I ate pork (I do, but gosh do I think ham is the nastiest edible meat I have ever tasted!). Since I simply do not particularly enjoy ham, but have no objection other than my own tastes to it, I think it would be rude to lead them to believe that I don't eat pork (bacon, sausage, etc are all delicious). If they serve me ham, I take the smallest serving and then dig in to the potatoes, bread, vedgies, casserole, and other side dishes. By eating a bit of the ham, which does not make me ill in any way, I keep from insulting my hosts (were I to refuse the ham, that would be rude). The trick is eating a bit, and letting them believe if they would like that you ate more of the offending food than you actually did. By letting your dislike slide, you keep from making anyone uncomfortable - I hate to feel like a bad hostess so why should I make my mother-in-law feel that way? This all goes out the window if the food will make you ill.

If a food will make you physically ill, or if you find eating the food morally/ethically questionable, or if you keep a religious taboo against eating the food, then as a guest you are under obligation to tell your host ahead of time. If the host serves the food (and this is only rude if there are no other foods served, if it is a few dishes out of many it is perfectly acceptable, the number of dishes that cater to a specific guest is a function of how weird the food restriction is and how many other guests there are, if you are vegan and have celiac disease, expect one dish that you can eat and be thankful, if you are a vegetarian who can't have olives or bacon, then expect more dishes) then as a guest you are expected to not mention it publicly and eat what you can without making a scene. If there is no food present which you can safely/ethically eat *and* you let the host know ahead of time, then you are in a bind - the polite thing to do is to be gracious and drink your water, going back to that making him/her feel uncomfortable and then perhaps speaking to the host privately.

Cast of Characters

This is me. Just so you know, I wear leather and fur, but I don't buy it new (the suede and shearling coat came from Rock Star Rags, 2 dollars).

This is my husband in the scarf and hat set I made for him last winter. He is also a graduate student, as well as a web site starter-upper. We were married by a dear friend June, 22, 2007. He is also referred to as Boybee.

This is Sisko, our one and a half year old, orange tabby, domestic short hair cat. Yes, he is named for Capt. Benjamin Sisko of Deep Space 9. Yes, we are big dorks. Friends of ours found Sisko outside of our apartment late one night when he was 5 months old. He loves to be carried around like a baby and have his belly rubbed; sometimes we wonder if he is actually a cat.

This is Feanor, also known as Feh-Feh, our one year old, flame point siamese cat. We got him at the Humane Society when he was 5 months old since Sisko needed a brother and I love having multiple cats (I want a third but the Husband and the Landlord wont permit it). Feh loves having his belly scratched and is too lazy to be chased around the house. (BTW, points to those who know where his name comes from).

This is Nirvana, our one year old ball python. We got her after Boybee fell in love with a friend's ball python, and I knew that I had to give in and become a snake-owner. I have since come to appreciate and enjoy having her around, letting her coil around your arm is incredibly relaxing. I use she/her pronouns, but her actual sex is unknown to us, I just like not being the only girl in the house.

Other characters include my assorted family and friends who will introduced as necessary.

Maiden Voyage... or something

This is my first official blog post. Now, to be clear, I have a livejournal account (shock and horror!) which I have used for about four years now mainly to stay in touch with my mom, the LJ Queen. I still intend to post the minutia of my daily life to that account, but I'd like this blog to be a forum for me to talk about the really important stuff like how there is a new knitting shop in my neighborhood, new recipes (with a recent celiac diagnosis in the family, there will b a lot of these), and my thoughts on our shared world or at least my experience of it.

I hereby promise not to rant obnoxiously, to post pictures of my two beautiful cat children and my gorgeous snake, and to be aware that no one in their right mind will actually read this (except for my husband, Hi Honey!).