Hypocrisy?

Spent the day arranging "alternative accommodations" for the (stultifying) teaching certification tests I have to take before I can impart my ~insights~ on The House on Mango Street, Angela's Ashes, Speak, rando contemporary gaymosexual teen lit, The Merchant of Venice, et fucking cetera, to my future students. (Calculated "diversity" shtick: it's what's for dinner!)

See, the Praxis II is only offered on Shabbos...even in Jerusalem! (And--rock 'em shock 'em, Israel!--the Jerusalem testing center doesn't have a website, a telephone number, or anything resembling a human being hanging out behind the desk.) I harassed "my cleric" (the Hillel rabbi) into writing me what essentially amounts to a doctor's note excusing me from Shabz testing, dropped the registration form in the mail, was assured by TFA that my five month delay in testing doesn't disqualify me from getting hired on time, spent the rest of the day indulging my own confusion about why I can't just suck it up, make everyone's life a little easier, and just take the fucking thing on Shabbos?

I can watch TV on Shabbos, I can flick the lights on and off till they induce an epileptic seizure, I can cook, I can clean, I can "do homework," I can do the Frug, et fucking cetera, but I can't take my Psych final this Shabbos, I can't stop being an enormous hypocrite long enough to spend ONE Shabbos morning waxing rhapsodic about my "philosophy of teaching" before I fuck off and eat swine chulent, spend the rest of the day hibernating, as per usual?

I can't. It feels too weird, too "off." I don't go to class on chagim, I generally save Friday nights for Hillel or the subsequent oneg, and I don't, can't do real-world things on Shabbos.* Is this my own heartfelt OTD way to be "zocher Shabbos"?**

Or am I just an enormous asshole?

*Or any other time, actually, but that's a different blog post, titled "100 Ways Adi Is A Useless Fuck."

**It's a thing.

FoMo Angst: The Soap Opera

I'm a little more embarrassed than I should be to admit this, considering I've just posted a canticle to Glee's gay-friendliness, but a recent* episode of Srugim has actually made me think about something aside from what a huge dick Nati is or how Yifat is the whiniest whiner who ever whined about her feelings on primetime, and that something is ~religion.~ I know, radical for a TV show about frum** singles in Jerusalem, right? But frumness isn't interesting to "normal people" without the expected under-the-covers peek at its salacious underside, which, though PG, is presented, as in Twilight, as anything but tame.

But this post isn't about how much I resent the "what's under your burka?" secular imagining of frum sexual liberation, or even about how much I appreciate (against my will) that this prurience is superimposed on a relatable framework, focusing on the very real yeshivish/Modern Orthodox divide instead of presented as a love-at-first-bite vampyre/human metaphor. This post is about what happens after you've gotten past the initial frum-girl-in-the-city hurdle (should I tell my chiloni boyfriend I keep Shabbos?) to the frum-girl-tastes-forbidden-fruit moment (she turns off a light on Shabbos) to the frum-girl-battles-with-what-frumness-means (she tells her boyfriend). The coming-out scene is pretty touching, actually.

"I'm frum!" she announces (tearfully, after ~symbolically~ hurtling herself, fully clothed, into the cold and turbulent ocean).

"You on your way out?" The Sensitive Chiloni Boyfriend asks.

"No," she responds. "No. I don't think so. I'm religious. I'm religious. Right? I'm still religious?" (Despite the flicking of lights, despite driving to the beach, despite wringing her wet hair on Shabbos, despite violations of negiyah and yichud, despite wearing pants--all those seemingly tiny restrictions that mark you, at least externally, as legit, as Frum or as Not, all those quotidian violations that, when performed intentionally or regularly, amount to A Very Big Deal). And he answers something like "Your torment means you are."

Wow.

Sensitive Chiloni Boyfriend got something right. If she weren't frum in her heart--and yes, I'm sorry for the mawkish Torah Guidance construction--she wouldn't care about something as small and dumb as turning off a light on Saturday, she wouldn't care that biting your nails on Shabbos is actually a violation of the holy Sabbath day, she wouldn't care that she was ~living a lie~ emotionally when she was already "acting secular."

One of the signs, to me, that I've well and truly cast aside a halachic lifestyle, is that I don't think about the "small" (to me) issurim anymore. I blithely flick the lights off when I leave on Shabbos without suffering "robot arm"--that weird paralytic is-this-really-me sensation that used to plague me for days afterwards. I don't think twice about inviting people over for a Shabbos lunch that was cooked on Shabbos. And despite my scrupulous bracha beforehand--some things are sacred!--I barely even feel a twinge when I shove fourteen slices of sausage pizza into my face at four AM during finals week. Strangely enough, I am (often) living my life instead of overthinking it. What once was ritualized, ~special~ for its heady transgressiveness, is now commonplace, routine.

My roommates, the enablers, wanted ~my first time~ eating crab to be special. We made a day of it, took an out-of-the-way trip to Lexington Market. Pictures were snapped, applause rippled through the midday quiet, I was clapped on the back and asked, numerous times, "how do you feel?" (Stuffed.) It was like a reverse Bat Mitzvah--my induction into (Normal) Personhood.

Ditto bacon--there's a massively unflattering picture of me posing with the ~salty strip of sin~ halfway to my mouth, my roommate's boyfriend looking mock-scandalized in the background. Ritualized violation, celebrated, festooned with myriad why-is-this-night-different signifiers, supposedly marking my introduction to Normal Society. A blockbuster debut, complete with the necessary frippery; what has been called the "consummation" of Formodoxy,*** rather than its lived-out-ness, its normalization. A celebration--an overdetermination--a mediation that proves, in fact, how far you have yet to go.

But my "coming out" is over. No rituals necessary when I feel like eating scallops or going out on Friday night. That's the goal, isn't it, for us FoMos****? The moment when you're no longer "wandering" off the derech, but find yourself on a neatly laid path, all its hairpin curves and thorny twistings finally clear, Your Future spread out ahead of you, existential confusion about Who You Are (Religiously) past. I've reached The Comfort Zone; am I having fun yet?

You'll find, FoMos, that as long as you care about Judaism, as long as you think it's relevant not just to Who You Used To Be but to Who You Want to Be (and to the current whistle-stop en route to that someday: Who You Are), there will always be a mediation. You will always see some aspect of your Off-the-Derechness, your Formodoxy, in light of the fact that you used to be frum, are still the Jewiest Jew who ever Jewed down the mellah. Whether it's teaching my not-Jewish best friend how to sing Mashiach Mashiach Mashiach, whether it's having an ~ironic~ Christmas party meant specifically to cartoonize my understanding of What It Means To Be Secular, my Formodoxy is constantly mediated, filtered, either by my own feelings of badassery and omgztransgression, or by the subsequent el-oh-el effect: the need to live my life in a constant state of ironic detachment, the need to satirize my own emotions, to caricaturize my own experiences. That constant and purposeful mediation--that so-there, or more to the point, that dafka--indicates not an apathy but a caring-too-much, a purposeful overdetermination.

It's not robot-arm torment. It's not omg-what-did-I-just-do sadness. It's not take-that-Hashem rebellion. It's what happens when OTD-ness ceases to be A Big Deal and you're left thinking What Next? If there's one thing the Ortho framework likes to hammer in, it's that Judaism is a journey, a lifestyle, a vivid and dynamic exploration or celebration. There's never a "phew, done" moment, never a pocket of time to rest on your laurels or park yourself for a moment on the side of the road, wiping your brow and declaring I'm Not Taking Another Step.

I'm officially OTD. I'm living it, not celebrating it. So where do I go from here?

Because I live my entire life inside tildes, (i.e., ~ironically,~ but aware of how dumb I am) my What Next manifests itself as 21st-century self-consciously-ironic hipster Formodoxy. It's a fear of looking too closely at what my choices mean for my family and for my future. It's a fear of going to Pardes next semester and feeling like the party's over when I've barely started exploring all the things that are now open to me. (It's a sign of how OTD I am that I view Orthodoxy as a series of endless restrictions, rather than its own set of doors, leading somewhere rich and mysterious.) It's a fear of being abandoned at some desolate off-the-derech outpost when my meager FoMo community returns to ~the fold.~ It's a girls-just-want-to-have-fun expression of some existential malaise. It's not a substitution for Chanukah or Christmas envy or some confused Chrismikuh-inspired melange of the two. For me, having a Christmas party, complete with eggnog and a Hannukah bush (confused secular pronunciation, plz, no foreign gutturals here), is a riotous, confused, self-consciously ~ironic~ celebration of what it means to be Jewish and not frum. It's a reminder to myself to turn it back into a big deal before I disappear.

*I mean, recent in the two-years-late Israeli-TV-on-American-DVD sense.

**In the way that secular people imagine frum people, which is to say: not actually frum.

***Formerly Modern Orthodox. It's a thing.

****We need to think of a new name. It's hard to rally around a movement that seems to take its title from a portmanteau of "fauxhawk" and "homosexual."

But I'm A Cheerleader

Okay, sorry for the recent Glee overload; the series is going on hiatus til April, so consider this my Last Word on the pop-sugar mess till then. It's a quickie anyway, culled from the teaser snippet posted on Hulu.

Scene: the gang travels the hallway, gossiping at the top of their lungs about the scandalous Quinn/Finn/Puck* pregnancy clusterfuck. ~Clever new technology~ bisects, trisects the screen as the gang texts and calls each other even though they're all in the same place and, um, they're not even friends? But this is A BIG THING and it's BRINGING THEM TOGETHER. They're chatting about OMG THE DRAMZ when Mercedes asks Santana why she isn't mad that Quinn, like, snaked her man. In an answer meant to make the old people in the audience feel bad about ~the state of today's youth,~ Santana rolls her eyes and lets Mercedes know that--duh--"Sex isn't like, dating!," at which Brittany helpfully adds "Cause then like, Santana and I would be dating." Thirty seconds of silence, and then the gang resumes their frenetic (and guaranteed to fail) plans for keeping Rachel in the dark about the tragic fertile threesome. The bi/experimenting cheerleaders are never mentioned again (for the remaining ten seconds of the clip), and I stared at the screen in shock.

Hold up, Glee, did you just do something RIGHT? Did you just present lesbian sex as, like, normal, necessitating neither a corny coming-out scene or a mention of flannel/combat boots/similar stereotypes that encapsulate its intrinsic non-mainstream weirdness? Are you cool with cheerleaders kissing girls (and liking it) without marketing it to the boys as a fetishistic spectacle? Did you just normalize that shit without mentioning cherry chapstick or Girls Gone Wild? Did you just deal with minorities without (offensively) dramatizing their minority status, or reducing it to a slack slapstick one-liner?

I mean, if you did, it's probably because they're bi, and like, that's cool, cause they're hot cheerleaders and they still "sext" with Puck, the deadbeat baritone pool-cleaning hottie,** so it's not like they're like, actually lesbos, cause that would be weird and gross, but still. Still. The fact that you haven't (yet) exploited the "bi = skanky"/"bi = hot" trope gives me some tentative hope for your future as a show that represents minorities instead of caricaturing them. If you just leave it at that--yeah, the cheerleaders fuck sometimes, whatever--you will have done the gay movement a solid because you will have moved past stereotype and into an embrace of the fact that sexuality is a spectrum, a range, peopled both with mascara-wearing soprano twinks (stereotype) AND otherwise-mainstream (female) cheerleaders (shocker!!1!one!) And despite your many heinous missteps, Glee, anything that presents teh gayz in a humanizing light is all good in my book.

(...Don't worry, dear readers, I'm sure my characteristic vitriol will return in sesquipedalian spades when the episode actually airs. )

*Why do the popular kids always have stupid names?

**I see my future career writing teen mag boilerplate, and it is bleak.

Glee

Aw, Glee, what happened to you? You were so cute in the beginning, with your whole "Popular-did-this-better-but-ok-that-waterboarding-line-in-the-pilot-was-classic" cool kids v. misfits theme, but seriously, your whole "edgy" exploitation of minorities is started to grate.

I could take it when you riffed on the ~strong black womyn~ archetype--Mercedes as Sasha Fierce--and it was kinda funny when you LOL'd at those silly femme gays--Kurt as Sasha Fierce--and your cute little "All Azns look the same" bit kinda made me smile cause my freshman year roommate was Chinese and like, I'm totally in on the joke, but really? The mentally disabled? Is that even ethical? It'd be one thing if you mainstreamed actors with mild mental disabilities as running characters, but featuring them as edgy one-offs that don't advance the plot line or even serve any other function aside from furthering your own self-congratulatory envelope-pushing is a move as cynical as Sue Sylvester's cruel inclusion of Becky on the Cheerios. Like her, you pull this shit to prove a (completely unnecessary) point. (Where's Becky now? How's she doing on the whole light-speed acrobatics you demand, Sue?)

+ 5 for Artie's "Dancing With Myself" solo, - 1,000,000 for your omg-able-bodied-Glee-members-in-wheelchairs! number. It's insulting enough that the actor who plays Artie is able-bodied--you couldn't find an actor who was actually in a wheelchair?--though I respect that even in his dream sequences, Artie does not leave his chair or stand up, a choice that reflects the sobering reality: Wheelchairs are not artistic props. They don't exist to make choreography interesting. Artie's confinement to his wheelchair is tragic, and your terpsichorean after-school-special on ~respecting differences~ hasn't imparted any sustained lessons on how to treat disabilities respectfully when you turn your cloying (but ~hilarious~) focus on omgzthedeaf.

A deaf choir! Lollerpopz! Is it fair to use the disabled to promote a count-your-blessings moment for high school kids who are going through a hellish bullying that--unlike a permanent disability--will eventually let up? And was the condescending let-us-show-you-how-it's-done "solidarity" of the able-bodied Glee kids supposed to warm our hearts? "The deaf kids don't sing too good, let's sing over them, touching our hands to our hearts because man we are good people for putting up with these disabled people's delusions of talent? We might be cannon fodder for high school war games, but at least we're able-bodied! At least we got talent! And in our deep sensitivity, we're downright adminicular!"

Really, Glee? Could you get more patronizing?

Ditto your racist omgz-all-poor-black-girls-are-booty-poppin-juvenile-delinquents-with-dumb-names-they-probably-don't-even-know-the-meanings-of-because-duh-who-would-name-their-kid-Aphasia storyline, neatly recycled from Bring It On. You couldn't find a different song for the underprivileged mostly-black girls' troupe to do? It had to be Bootylicious? You had to maintain the long-standing, obscene, and politically fraught obsession with black female sexuality, focusing specifically on their gyrating butts? HAVE YOU NOT HEARD OF THE HOTTENTOT VENUS? Your political decisions do not exist in a vacuum, Glee. Do your research before you deign to enlighten us with your ~edgy~ decisions. And don't insult our intelligence by promising an honest exploration of controversial issues when you're just calculating the best way to squeeze out the omg-did-they-just-say-that-on-Primetime?! effect from thousands* of viewers who expected better.

*Or, uh, me.

Civil Twilight

Oh man, distracted by the insane-o amounts of food in my family's industrial-size fridge, I totally forgot to blog about my raison d'etre/primo A1 source of heart-poundin' palm-sweatin' hormonal raillery. Possibly because New Moon wasn't pure comedy gold like its lugubrious predecessor, possibly because there's mlawach in the freezer and all is well with the world, but still, last week's Girls' Night Out (to be followed by at least three more--hopefully drunk--viewings during finals) had its momentous spikes and dips.

So! New Moon.

It was raining pretty hard when we got the shuttle, which contributed nicely to the meteorologically angsty theme (Welcome to Forks, where the sun don't shine!). We arrived early, fought the demon robot cashier at Giant's self-checkout, where I bought my weight in off-brand Raisinets and malt balls, and settled in for a glorious evening. Unfortunately, Edward's absence for the majority of the movie compounded Melissa Rosenberg's apparent restraint with the cheesetastic ~romantic~ boilerplate. The hilarious wretchery was largely confined to shots of a half-naked, superbuff underage werewolf running through the rain and crying about his feelings, rather than the deliciously painful Dazzlepants/Bella stichomythy that so gloriously characterized the first film. ("And so the lion fell in love with the lamb." "What a stupid lamb." "What a sick, masochistic lion." "WHAT A DELIGHTFULLY SHITTY SCRIPT! GIVE ME MORE!") Stephenie Meyers' writing veers between boringly bad and hilariously bad, and that translated well, this time around, into the overblown near porn-y shots of Jacob shucking off his clothes and letting the rain drip suggestively down every hollow and declivity of his terrifyingly muscular (and generically tattooed) werewolf bod.

The plot is ludicrous, but straightforward--Sparkle Vamp leaves Boring Girl for some trite Peter Parker-ish reason. She cries a lot, and then starts flirting with a really buff werewolf who can build motorcycles. She notices that every time she does something really dumb--hitching a ride with a rapist, riding a motorcycle on a dirt road ON A CLIFF without a helmet; jumping off same cliff--her beloved SparkleMonster appears in hilariously low-tech hologram form to warn her against being so dumb. Sparklepants' creepy psychic sister has a vision of BoringGirl flinging herself off the cliff, everyone thinks she's dead, Edward realizes his life isn't worth living without his twiggy boring cipher, he asks the Catholic Church to kill him, she goes to Italy to save him, he takes off his shirt for no apparent reason, blahblah in the end he asks her to marry him, they decide that at some point she'll find a way to be turned into a fancy Dazzlemonster like him, and there's a hilarious montage of the two of them running barefoot through the forest, their hair flying, skin coruscating like go-go dancers in a gay bar circa 1987, a butterfly flitting unconcerned through the air...

Best emetic ever.

Laura Mulvey's groundbreaking 1973 article, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, posited that the celluloid female presence disrupted the narrative flow, breaking up the action with moments of "to-be-looked-at-ness," in which the diva shed her furs and leaned suggestively against a piano or broke out in song or lit a cigarette and made the men forget the plot and go crazy with lines like "What's a sweet young thing like you doing in a dive like this?" I'd argue that in the Twilight universe, the reverse is true--the male gaze is replaced by the dizzy-fourteen-year-old's gaze, and rather than stopping the action, Edward's face launches a thousand idiotic "plot"lines. Nothing happens when he's not on screen, a point driven home during a hilarious tick-tocking montage in which the camera revolves around Bella, sitting in a chair from September to January, the only changes in scenery coming through the open window. So things only really heat up when Bella races to Rome to prove to her Sparklebaby that she's still alive. Unfortunately, that happens in the last twenty minutes of the movie.

Ugh.

I'm pretty sure that ninety percent of the theater--the three frat boys (inexplicably) sitting in front of us included--was there purely for the lulz. And I'm equally sure that ninety percent of the actors are barely restraining their giggles under their sparkly Kabuki makeup. It's got pretty trappings--a solid soundtrack, cool cinematography--but the (self-aggrandizingly named) ~Twilight Saga~ is, at its sugary heart, a comedy for the ages. Which means that if you bring the tequila, I will sit through it again and again and again.

My brother thinks this is a dumb idea for a blog post. It's a wonder I get anything accomplished in this hurtful milieu.

Happy Thanksgiving to my three readers!

So I'm currently in Dallas, ensconced in the warm bosom of my loving family. This means doing the whole Shabbos thing, lights out by midnight, rereading the teen classics I was too embarrassed to take to college, eating my weight in sunflower-seed-shells. (I don't like the seeds themselves--too much effort--but the shells are coated with an addictive combo of seed-dust and salt. Mmm.) It also means I'm sharing a bathroom with my brother.

It could be worse. He's surprisingly fastidious for a seventeen-year-old boy*, yelled at me for rearranging his (three varieties of) deodorant, not putting the caps back on his aftershave, getting water in the toothpaste. He's a stereotypical consumer, too--all Axe and Old Spice. Have y'all ever bothered to read the fine print on grooming products? There's such a disconnect between what's marketed to dudes and what's marketed to the ~ladies.~ My brother's bodywash comes in varieties like "Cool Blast" and "Power Stick," bearing taglines like "Lean, Mean, Clean Machine." My bodywash--marketed towards the fairer sex-- extols the virtues of aloe and shea butter, "for a more touchable you." So the boys get to be "powerful" and "mean," and I get (presumably male) creepos desperate to make me their next (silky smooth!) flesh blanket. Delights! The same goes for shampoo--the only shampoo I ever see marketed towards dudes is Head & Shoulders and similar, which, interestingly enough, is the only shampoo I ever see in dudes' showers, though that might just mean everyone I know has scalp flakes, not necessarily a hook-line-sinker hard-on for the beauty industrial complex. In contrast, lady shampoo is all about hair you can run your fingers through! Hair that is soft but strong (like you!) Hair that brings all them boys to the yard! And it always smells like flowers or fruit--both delicate and easily bruised.

This isn't even a post about advertising--CBA to tackle Axe adverts** or the Dove commercials that intersperse scrubbing bubbles with close-ups of disturbingly vaginal fruit segments--but a (perhaps obvious) comment on how ridiculously gendered even our showers become. (To be fair, there are some gender-neutral bodywashes with copy like "Fancy scrubbing bubbles makes you smell clean. Hurray!" but I don't know anyone who actually uses them except, maybe, my dad.) IDK. Maybe it makes sense--Nada Surf reminds us that popularity hinges on personal hygiene--and the shower is all about Stage One of the grooming-to-get-laid process. I just hate that even our bodywash conspires to give the dudes the power (or in this case, the ICY POWER BLAST!) and keep the ladies ~soft, touchable, and firm.~ And I'm the first to admit my complicity--I'm a sucker for beauty products that smell like candy--but I've done my part, this weekend, to buck the status quo. I currently smell like a Lean, Mean, Clean Machine, and fully expect the ladies to come a'flockin' any minute now. One at a time, sweet young things, everyone will get their turn. My, my, isn't your skin touchable?

*Or as he likes to leer, ~legal + lethal~ in two weeks. If the bloodbath that went down at the Shabbos table was any indication, the first thing he'll do when he turns eighteen is go vote for some reactionary. (It's a Christian to the lions scenario up in the Elbaz house. Guess which friendly neighborhood liberal becomes feral-feline fodder? The massacre ended with my brother calling me a "raging bitch" and my dad asking me where I got my superiority complex. NOTHING IS GOOD.)

**I have momentarily become British! Or pretentious. Whichevs.

Fa la la la la la la la ugh

I paid $5.30 for a super-big* latte at Starbucks today.

Surely this is exorbitant, even for gingerbread-flavored commercial holiday cheer? Or am I mired in the halcyon days of auld lang syne, where fancy lattes stayed at four bucks, or half an hour behind the Hillel desk?**

*I refuse to adopt the pretentious Starbucks monikers. You can take my money, but you cannae take my freedom (of speech)!
**Unlike kids today, I know the value of hard work!