The blog will be hankering down some...

I just want to give my blog readers a heads up that the blog will be hankering down.

Tomorrow, yours truly ventures back into the world of books and learning. She will make the trek twice a week to the hallowed halls of Brooklyn College to learn the ins and outs of business and marketing. Your blogwriter has been out of college for more than a decade, unless you count the school in the Army (US Army, that is). This still, was completed in October of 1999, so yeah, it's still about a decade. This time, my financial barriers are out of the way. I will finish. I will get me a ed-juh-muh-Kay-shun. Most importantly, I want that paper that says BACHELORS DEGREE.

So, since I doubt my readers want to be bored with blogposts about accounting principles and the various styles of management, I will be blogging less.

Guest posts are always welcomed! My Email address is in my profile.

Shidduch dates VS. regular dates

I just saw a comment here on the blog on my recent discussion of the shidduch date and the guy who just asked the same question OVER and OVER again. You know, these guys are almost as bad as the secular men who ask dirty questions. Either way, it's a meat market. Each one is just a different kind of meat market from the other.

New Hadag Nachash video!

They just put up this new video where they collaborate with a group named Shabak S. They really like to collaborate with other artists. One of the reasons why I love this group so much is the mindset is so different from a US group. They collaborate because they love the art of the music. As an artist (sort of) I can really appreciate that. In the US, the labels really take over and it becomes almost pure business and the art is lost.

Something Ironic from a shidduch date

Somehow it just crossed my mind about something interesting that happened on a date I had. I met up with this guy outside the front of a local kosher restaurant. Next door to the restaurant was a place labeled kosher, however, no one considers it to be reliably backed. This guy wanted to go in there to eat. He didn't want to trust my judgement. In the end, he decided I wasn't worried enough about the kashrus of the reliably backed restaurant and he said that I wasn't on his level.

Isn't it ironic?

Obnoxious questions don't a shidduch make...

Friday afternoon while I was on my way to where I was going for Shabbos, I got a
shidduch call from shadchan. She gave the guy my number and he called me
immediately. (Incidentally, what is with people arranging a shidduch within two
hours of Shabbos, seems innappropriate to me.)

When this guy called me, he wanted to know everything right there on the phone.
Excuse my ignorance, but isn't a guy supposed to check my references instead of
ask me questions? Furthermore, he kept asking me REPEATEDLY what families I eat
by in my own neighborhood and I told him, I go away for Shabbos.

Is there some rule that if people in your own neighborhood don't host meals for
people that I'm not observant or something? Someone thinks that he wants to see
if I know how to prepare for Shabbos. However, it seems to me that the answers
to these questions don't indicate anything. I know conversion candidates and
"BT's" who eat by people but, don't keep anything at home and don't know how to
make a Shabbos. The only way someone knows how to make Shabbos, is if they host
people themself. The bulk of Shabbos preparation comes with the cooking.

Water is thicker than blood....

When I have to tell people that my blood relatives have mostly stopped talking, people think this happened as a result of my conversion to Judaism. Actually, it's the reverse. I grew up in a happy home. Yes, my parents were divorced but, I had my mother, my grandmother, an aunt who lived around the corner and a father who lived not too far away. My mother's sister had five kids and so, I had these cousins I was sort of close to, as well.

My mother was REALLY big on holidays. When Xmas came around we *had* to decorate the house. We didn't just put up a tree. We put lights around our front window. We put these window stickies up on the window for our door to the outside (the side door was ours and the landlord who lived upstairs used the front door.) Whenever, any holiday came around, we were off to her sister's house. During the week, we were off to her sister's house. My grandmother used to say that her car knew the way to her other daughter's house. Even non-family holidays, my mother was big on them. If it was Valentine's Day, we just *had* to wear red and get valentines for our classmates and green was mandatory on St. Patrick's day.

However, something happened... first my grandmother got sick, then my mother got sick and eventually passed away. Two of the five cousins have died. My aunt and my sister stopped talking. I went off to college. When I transferred to a local public college from my private college in the sticks, I found that the family had really disbanned itself. My grandmother eventually passed on but, no one told me about it. Apparently, they expected me to call my mother's cemetary periodically to see if my grandmother had been checked in.

The interesting thing is that when I think about how close my family was at one time, I don't think I would have converted if I still had that family. I wouldn't have wanted to give up all those family gatherings. When I ask why I had to lose my mother which set in motion the whole family falling apart, I think that maybe it's because I was supposed to convert to Judaism. So, here I am, Jewish, as I find that water (my Jewish friends) is thicker than blood (relatives).

Message from the Jews to the rest of the world