1. Link to the person who tagged you.
2. Post the rules on your blog.
3. Write six random things about yourself.
4. Tag six people at the end of your post and link to them.
5. Let each person know they’ve been tagged and leave a comment on their blog.
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up

Aaaaah, Lordy, once again, I am a taggee. This thing has been going 'round like a bad winter flu. Nothin' to do but to take my medicine and complete it...especially since there's a beer in my future at this weekend's Po' Boy Preservation Fest.

Hmmm, random, random...

1) I went to the Shirin Neshat exhibit at Tulane recently and had to leave partway through the viewing of one of the showings. The gallery is showing four films of hers based on this book. I found myself getting sick to my stomach trying to watch a short film of hers called Zarin, about a prostitute who suddenly discovers that she is in a world where the men have no faces. The woman in the film was painfully skinny, on the edge of skeletal, and something about that made me sad, angry, and upset. She was wasting away from the harshness of her world, and it just really got to me.

2) My kid is getting into board games, and it's a kick for me. In fact, I need to get back to a game of Battleship in progress...

He seems to really enjoy chess lately as well, though I can't play that worth a damn. He works on it on the computer, with Dan advising him on which moves are better than others. I think the little guy just likes to take the pieces when he can, and the winning is secondary...at least, right now, it is...

3) I've started worrying about how much Hebrew my son will actually be learning as a secular Jew. He asked me the other day what a bar mitzvah was, which is a step in the right direction, and he loves the songs and prayers he's learning at religious school - but, when I see how little the kids in the grade level ahead of him know of the language, it worries me. The kids don't even know how to spell "shalom" in Hebrew. Which leads to...

4) ...my deepest, darkest feelings about sending him to the secular Jewish day school in the area. I went to a Jewish day school in Houston for nine years and hated. Every. Second. Of. It. Mainly because of my classmates, most of whom seemed bent on making my life hell. Somehow, though, I absorbed a lot of what Judaism was about despite it all, and I got much more Hebrew out of it than I thought I did. Sending my son to the JDS here is out of the question for us monetarily speaking, but I still worry...

5) I'm kind of thankful now that I didn't go further than a few courses at the Jewish Theological Seminary down a path to becoming a cantor. I love to sing, but I think I'd go nuts from the straddling of immediate family issues and congregational issues, since these days, cantors tend to be trained as "rabbis who sing". As a result, I admire our new rabbi even more, a mother of two young children who is my age. More power to her...she is traveling down a rarely-traveled road. Rabbi Sharon Brous in an essay entitled "Holy Guilt Trip":

What I didn't know at the time was that deciding to become a rabbi for a woman means deciding to become a woman rabbi, itself a distateful oxymoron in much of the religious world, and an inescapable source of angst even in the liberal Jewish world. I quickly learned that there actually was something worse than being an ignorant, illiterate, High Holy Day Jew who didn't know that salad dressing had to be kosher. My very being - as a strong, serious, spirited woman in love with Judaism - posed an existential threat to the Jewish people, and my passion for Torah and tradition only added insult to injury.

6) Not that there is no historical precedent for learned Jewish women. It just so happens that my mother, when she converted to Judaism, chose Beruriah as her Hebrew name.

Fine, I'm done.

NEXT!

Pat of Hurricane Radio
The Mosquito Coast's swampwoman
Kelly of Good Children
Doctor Daisy up in Wisconsin
Alli, when she returns from the Nether Lands
Professore Dr Michael Homan