of sneezings and linkings

Obviously in order to write something I have to get really sick and crabby, spend three days soldiering on at my (currently worrisome) job, and finally give in to a morningful of bad dreams and a sinusful of junk--and stay home a bit. Here I am in Nachshon's apartment, considerably warmer than my house, downing tea and being tearfully irritable and making plans and sending emails.

I miss you, neglected blog.

Am working on an email and post about holiday giving. I decided that this year I am finally going down to extremely minimal gifts (books, homemade treats) and donating a big chunk of money to charity. Most of my thoughts on the subject will be in the email/post, but as I'm currently getting job-qualms I'm reminding myself that my commitment is to send off some generous checks even if it means that I need to take another part-time gig. It will be worth it.

The current job is at R.E.Load Bags, a small company making custom courier bags. We make backpacks and stuff too, but the real highlight is the fancy applique and embroidery we do--seriously gorgeous custom work. "Applique" and "embroidery" sound like dainty fireside amusements, but we do hardcore elaborate machine work, which involves manipulating the fabric, the stitch width, and the presser foot, all on a big heavy industrial machine. This is on heavy-duty Cordura fabric. I'm impressed on a daily basis. Check out the galleries of bags for sale and previous designs.

The problem is not anything about the work itself but just that we don't have enough of it. Too many cutter-hours scheduled. It takes a lot more time to sew a bag than to cut it out, even with all the doohickeys that our bags come with, so with two cutters and five stitchers we get hopelessly ahead. We finish the day's orders in the morning and then cast about sadly for things to measure and slice. I'm afraid that the bossman (a decent guy) is going to trim back our hours, and as the full-time person, mine might be the first to hit the cutting room floor. (Sorry.)

This job was supposed to be my solid seitan-and-potatoes until I find something Real. It is fine at four days a week but at three money gets tighter than ...something tight.

Ah well. Back to trawling for Real Job and writing up my little charity pledge'n'plea. Some places to look for fun web-based givin':

www.lighttounite
Click on a candle with a match, your cursor, to light it. Bristol Myers Squibb will donate a dollar to the National AIDS fund.

www.letssaythanks.com
Pick a postcard and a message (or write your own) and Xerox will print and send it to a serviceperson in Iraq. The art is great stuff drawn by kids, full of flags and eagles and bombers and hearts and "thanks"es.

www.charityusa.com
The old standby, sponsoring the Breast Cancer, Literacy, Child Health, Animal Rescue, Rainforest, Hunger, and other click-free-to-donate sites. Pros: you can do it every day. Cons: having to look at tons of ads.

proof

now the Feds will never hire me:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMvlOnVNSBI
(starring Ross.)

community blitz

Friday
critical mass, 6.00: hundreds of bikers in costumes take over the streets
kol tzedek potluck, 7.00: thirty liberal Jews talk about urban education
leigh's singalong, 9.00: rise up singing is plundered

Saturday
p'nai or services, 10.30: the usual, with amazing croissant-bread pudding
walk in the woods with michael, 2.00: talk about baking, family, love, drugs
tova and brian arrive, 2.53: hooray!
neighborhood jaunts, 3-6: saad's, dollarstore, real estate, co-op...
dumpster derby, 7.00 sharp!: trash vehicles careen illegally down pine street
curio theater catch-22, 8.00: heller's play, at calvary church
4834 walton's party, 9.00: "the night the DJ saved your life" (?)
haunted house acid masquerade, all night: monthly techno party with vegan cupcakes

Sunday
brunch, brunchtime: brunch
walkin' around, visitin'
MoveOn calling party, 6.00: dessert potluck and harassing voters
see my honey

Monday
work!

...this business is ridiculous.

now, someone bring me a beer

After a lovely ploughperson-themed lunch with Ross, I spent the afternoon hustling around the unseasonably and misleadingly warm canyons of downtown. It was cold when I got dressed, in a sort of classy apres-ski schoolmarm getup (plaid wool skirt, open-work sweater, knee-high biker boots) that I thought would suit well in all the major settings of the day's planned activities. Namely:

1. interview to be a cutter for custom messenger-bag company
2. submit applications for several waitressing gigs
3. "pick up supplies" from the pink-scrubs-clad gang at Planned Parenthood
4. withdraw all monies and close out my bank account at the Inaccessible Unhelpful Bank (TM)
5. buy new underwear at the excellent cheapo shops on Chestnut

I missed out on #4, because IUB closes at 4pm. You see what I mean about inaccessible? In any case, the outfit may have been part of the problem, because the combo of sweater and boots made me so overheated that I just couldn't muster the hustle. Banking notwithstanding, the day was by recent measure ridiculously productive.

The messenger-bag company peeps were, as imagined, way cooler than me but offering a job I could do in my sleep. Also interviewed (instant application gratification) at City Tavern, which despite its blandly historico-folksy name is actually in a Parks Service historical building, and features colonial-style fine dining, complete with knee-breech'd and mob-capp'd waitrons. Be still my beating heart! As a child I yearned to live in "olden days," which pragmatically translated into the wish to become Amish or (when told that that's pretty hard) maybe Hasidic. With the wisdom of age I see that perhaps City Tavern is route to wise moneymaking nostalgia.

So right, not only did I to-and-fro and interview like mad; I purchased and installed a washing machine. The old one up and choked about three months back, forcing a lot of Hazel-to-Baltimore laundromat porterage. Craigslist orchestrated a beautiful match for me, wedding our washables' future to the past of a $100 almost-new Whirlpool from nearby 47th and Kingsessing. ND and I took Mazal (the truck) over there and picked up the pretty li'l thing. Handing the nice lady a crisp fan of five twenties felt so proper, so neighborly, so industrious and connected. Good deeds done all around.

Later at home, ND went to bed and Jen Becky Leslie and myself went to work exhuming the old monster (o, the indescribable scum beneath!) and wresting it to the curb. We used tools. We clamped hoses. We padded the old washer's feet and slid it screeching to the porch. Then, with mounting delight, we whisked the shiny new much-lighter Whirlpool into the vacant kitchenslot and screwed everything back together. Plugged it in, threw the dirty dishtowels in with some bleach, and checked the hoses for leaks. Praise be! It works.

Maybe it's that I just got done reading Nicholson Baker's Mezzanine, which basically consists of lovingly rendered pickings-apart of minor daily sense experiences (tying shoelaces), which gave me such a fine sense of the many sensual and design qualities of the washers, and of the amazing human capacity for technological finesse. I appreciate not only the industrial designers' skills, but also, our nonskilled yet satisfyingly sufficient jiggling, shoving, wrenching, and heaving. What pleasure in making things fit together and work!

Alternately, or perhaps in combination, there is a truly empowering feeling (for me) as a woman to deal with big machines, set them up, make them go. We Could Do It!, you know? Just as we were riding down off the first ego-rush of hearing of UltraWash "intermittent agitation" action, and smelling its hot chloriney streak in the air, our boy-roommate Kevin came home. We told him to buy us a sixpack, and enjoyed the sudsy swishy satisfaction of quadruple-team girl-on-machine triumph.

More interviews tomorrow. Later, volunteer election phonebanking with MoveOn. I keep saying that maybe I'll go canvass for three weeks, not take some random job at a Time Like This. I keep saying I'm going to call one of the many organizations leaving daily pleading-yet-energizing ads on all the job boards. Why haven't I? Well, I'm trying to get a Real Job. Bears more consideration, wot wot.

For now I'm going to bask in the scent of Ecover detergent, and hang some towels to dry.

industrial abrasives

After several weeks of alternately manic and tragic coverletter-writing and resume-tweaking, the only response I've gotten is for an Accounts Payable (admin) gig with a small company (family owned! third generation!) that sells industrial abrasives to the industry.

Aside from the problem that I'm not entirely sure who "the industry" is, I find this particular kidney-punch from the universe uniquely poetic. Even with 2 1/2 years of post-Swarthmore friendlification and de-grumpifying, I'm sadly still deserving of the old family nickname "Rebuke-ula." The rather blunt and rather unkind aspects of the personality run rampant at moments like this: how can I have received no calls, no response, to my carefully crafted self-promotional excreta? Are employers so rude that they can't just click "Reply" and say thanks but no thanks?

Cooler heads remind me that it's only been a couple of weeks, and the decently responsible hiring manager waits to amass a generously-scaled batch of resumes before ladling out shortstack-sized portions of candidates onto the sizzling follow-up/interview griddle.

If my coverletters are as belabored as that atrocious paragraph, it's no effing wonder. Industrial abrasives: I was born for it.

business

Since the "cultural experience" of the mikveh, it's been a series of similarly unfathomable antics. No time to properly write at the moment: we're back in Jerusalem after a week of constant dashing-around, doing wedding prep, family management, political action, and friend-visits.

A brief schedule:

Monday
shopped for chuppah decorations etc., ate amazing hummus in the Old City, attended a war-victims (both sides!) benefit rock concert, drove at midnight through the lovely West Bank (and flew through all checkpoints due to, I think, having a beard and kippah in the car), got locked out of the moshav (Aviezer, like a kibbutz) that we were supposed to stay at, got let in by security patrol at the moment we were about to turn around and drive 40 mins back to Jerusalem...

Tuesday
slept in, drove to Tel Aviv, frolicked with the gorgeous tan people on the beach, visited a friend, went to see "The Slave" at the Gesher Theatre--a play based on an I. B. Singer novel about an enslaved Jew who converts a Polish woman, performed with great style and physicality by a company made up of Russian immigrants, drove to Haifa...

Wednesday
fussed with camping gear in Haifa, drove to Tuba-Zangariyya (a Bedouin town in the upper Galilee) to meet a group of traveling peace activists, found them not-there, drove into the Golan Heights to marvel at ex-Syrian bunkers and to go swim in a beautiful freezing waterfall/pool, back to Tuba-Zangariyya for an evening of 'listening circles' and huge gaggles of adorable munchkins (as our pal Eliyahu calls kids), over to Rosh Pina to stay with our friend Ohad, the far-out "sacred sexuality" rabbi/teacher/artist...

Thursday
beautiful breakfast in a breezy courtyard at Rosh Pina's cafe (with fascinating conversation by Ohad), dusty-brambly trek to Syrian-built swimming pool (fed by natural spring) in the Golan, visit to Tzfat for tastes of that city's intense Hassidic mysticism and of course dinner (from the same restaurant which provided me with amazing soup in January)--heard snatches of conversation all about the war aftermath, back to Rosh Pina to argue vehemently with Ohad about gender...

Friday
woke up at 6am to travel to Neve Ur (N's sister Irit's kibbutz in southern Galilee), grabbed her three sons (Yarden, 11, Snir, 9, Lotem, 6) and drove to the north end of the Dead Sea via the mostly-empty Jordan Valley and Jericho, swam/basked/coated ourselves in mud (just wait for the photo!), showered and ice-creamed, climbed up the desert mountainsides to Jerusalem, ate lunch with Sarit and Tomer, showered, set the kids to video mode, napped, Kabbalat Shabbated a little, had dinner, crashed out!...

Saturday
giant family party for the Shabbat before the wedding!

...more soon, but I've got to go shower as we have a meeting in Jerusalem in half an hour!

the naked truth about Orthodox men
by ND, as told to Rebecca, who types fast

It was Friday afternoon. We were getting ready for Shabbat, and our host Eliyahu turned to me and said, “do you want to go to the mikveh?” (ritual bath) There’s a common custom for Jewish men to go to the mikveh before Shabbat, which is a custom I observe when in Philadelphia. I responded with great enthusiasm. We hopped into the car and Eliyahu told me, “you’re in for a cultural experience.” We drove to Mea Shearim, a neighborhood famous for being the heart of Ultra-Orthodox Hasidic life in Jerusalem.

We walked into a building that looked like an apartment building, with no distinguishing features suggesting that it was a mikveh. A small corridor held the cashier, in a little booth. Behind him on the wall was a gold-plated chart with variety of prices. Eliyahu said, “get the 25 shekel ‘mikveh with sauna’.” I looked around at the grey painted walls, cracked ceilings, and fluorescent lights, all standing in stark contrast to the golden menu.

We walked up two flights of stairs and into the changing room. I looked around with amazement, realizing I had arrived at a huge place: there were benches and racks for hundreds of people. We took our clothes off and Eliyahu pointed towards a basket with black plastic flip-flops. “These are optional,” he said. I wasn’t sure what would be worse: who knows what kind of skin condition people might have here? Or, what could be on the floor? I decided to walk around barefoot. We went up another flight of stairs and opened the door.

We entered the shower section. From that point on, we were in a world of complete male nudity. Twenty or so men were standing in the showers; others were scrubbing themselves vigorously; others were sitting on plastic chairs chatting. One man was holding a bundle of fresh green carob branches, tied together, to use as a wet flogger. On the wall there was a selection of seaweed-looking and synthetic back scrubbers. We hung our towels and toiletries on a hook and Eliyahu waved me in toward another door. There were signs in Hebrew, which I paused to read. They included warnings (‘No Entry for Boys Under 14,’ ‘No Massage in the Sauna,’ ‘No Gatherings,’ ‘Behave Only in Appropriate Manners,’ ‘Eating and Drinking is Prohibited’) from the committee of rabbinic leaders. I later saw examples of violations of all these rules. I felt like the Big Rabbi Is Watching. Eliyahu said, “a few tight-ass folks think that exposing young boys to the sauna is inappropriate.” I grew more and more curious as to what lay ahead.

I walked through the sauna door. The steam was heavy and thick. My eyes were burning. We passed by the entrance to the first room. Eliyahu waved for me to move with him to the back room. I found myself standing in front of three tiers of marble seats, crowded with men sitting and lying down, many of whom were scrubbing and vigorously massaging each other with seaweedy brushes and frothy liquid soap. Between the anonymity of the steam and the massaging, there was a sense of men tending to each others’ bodies, in a physically pleasurable way.

In that setting of nudity, hairstyle became an important marker of identity and affiliation. Most men wore long beards and peyos (sidelocks, hair growing from the temples), with otherwise short hair, which marks them as Orthodox. Other men in the back room seemed to be in their twenties and had no facial hair and no peyos. I had the hunch that they might be secular young men who enjoyed the homoerotic environment. I was also looking to see if any men had tattoos, which are a big no-no among Jews who follow strict halacha (religious lifestyle law). I think I spotted a tattoo on the buttock of one of the young men, but I wasn’t sure. I was wondering what the response would be if an uncircumcised man showed up in this setting.

Considering the super-covered culture of Ultra-Orthodox Jews, the sauna felt surprisingly intimate to me. However I do know that because of the community’s gender segregation, signs of physical affection between men are common and acceptable. Eliyahu would pour cold water on my head every once in a while, to keep me comfortable in the heat. After a few minutes I went out to the showers. Men leaving the steam room looked as pink as roasted pigs. It was very funny to see all those guys shvitzing (sweating hard) with pink faces and pink butts.

I went over to the mikveh dunking pools. My mikveh in Philadelphia is a solitary contemplative space, with one person using a small pool by himself. However, this area was populated with dozens of men of all ages and body shapes, including young boys diving and playing around. It was also an opportunity to see the bare heads of people who always have their heads covered. By then I had lost track of Eliyahu but found him standing in the middle pool of three. I put my feet into the water and jumped right out because it was scorching hot. I moved to the lukewarm pool, the biggest of the three. The pool was crowded with seven or eight men. I stayed there briefly and then moved to the cold-water pool, where I planned to do my immersion.

Contrary to my expectation, it was hard to create a personal space in the water. My typical practice, inspired by the Ba’al Shem Tov (the founder of Hasidism), is to use this time to review the week and do other introspective reflections. Other men who were immersing were doing very quick in-and-out dunkings. In order to make my own space, I faced the wall and created an imaginary bubble of silence in the midst of a very noisy and energetic environment.

I went back to the dressing room and began putting on my special Shabbat clothes. Nearby, two young boys, about six and ten, were staring at me. Eventually the older one quietly asked, “ata Amerikai?” (“Are you American?”). In hindsight I realized that I had been talking with Eliyahu both in English with an American accent and Hebrew with an Israeli accent. My answer was that I am an Israeli who lives in America, and Eliyahu is an American who lives in Israel. I asked the boy whether he had visited America or had relatives living there. He said no. The young one kept on staring. Eliyahu and I got up and headed towards the door. In parting, I said, “Shabbat shalom” (“Peaceful sabbath,” a typical wish and greeting), to which the young one responded by sticking his tongue out at me. Surprised and entertained by his gesture, I stuck my tongue out myself. He stuck his tongue out even more. We left.

Eliyahu told me that because the word ‘shalom’ is one of the names of G!d, there is a custom not to say it in a place that has bathrooms and nudity. I think the little boy might have been responding to that. Rebecca thinks this is a typical kid moment.

The Ultra-Orthodox community might appear to outsiders to have a body-negating, highly shameful culture. Visiting this very popular institution revealed to me another face of this culture, and an opportunity to peek into the nude life of the Hasidic Ultra-Orthodox men of Mea Shearim. I wonder what the women do, and whether there is an institution in this community that allows women a public domain in which nudity is acceptable.