observances

Okay, some folks spent the first part of the last week packing away all their regular dishes, getting rid of their leavened stuff, and generally working very hard.

I bought five pounds of matzah and started cooking.

We don't have a first-night or second-night or last-night seder: we have a Friday-night seder. It's complicated and even longer than the traditional one, largely joking but entirely and deeply serious as well, and including almost everything anyone has ever done in a seder, and most of it done collectively, and not by the single seder leader (we decided that the second hand washing could be done by a representative). Our Haggadah is a many-generations Xerox of a cut-and-paste job with many sources originally compiled in the mid seventies. It has chunks of dated feminist haggadahs, recolutionary haggadahs, Orthodox haggadahs. Every year Israel (that's the guy who originally did it) and I plan to make a new, reworked, edited one with all the mistakes and repetitions removed. Years ago, when we first started doing this, we offered to skip parts to make it shorter for the non Jews in attendance but nobody wanted to skimp on anything. So it gets longer every year and the kids (unfortunately the youngest is about to turn sixteen. Has the entire concept of grandchildren been lost to posterity? Don't answer that. The one that's really old enough to produce them shouldn't until he's at least settled at med school, don't you think?) insist on the repetition of every story. Which is how it's supposed to be, but some of these stories are pretty idionsyncratic (the "next year in San Francisco" story, for example: did I see that one young man's eyes light up when Ty said "refusenik is a much nicer word than commie fag" and Israel said the person in the story was a commie fag but that was not the point?).

One reason this is like this is that we break the food rules. There's matzah and stuff available from the beginning and the matzah ball soup is served just before seder starts. Nobody's starving and cranky. The only limit on how long we go is stamina, and since nobody has to go to work in the morning we can all stay and help clean.

So I'm wasting time I should be spending cleaning my house and getting ready for the next observance: today's ritual quarterly wine tasting, to which the nice fellow invited everybody he could get his hands on and Moher and Rosemary are actually coming. After that it's tomorrow's Easter something in Oakland with the Jenkinses and Moher and a bunch of people I don't know, probably classical-music oriented East Bay liberal Christians, which is either really really fun or really really awkward.

Then, I'm not sure, but I think I return to being a hermit.

I got seven hundred words done on the rewrite of the John Brown terrorism story, and it's going much better now -- I decided, again, not to start in medias res. I don't know why people so often give that advice -- it almost never works for me.

Today's earworm: the bridging theme from "Everything is Illuminated" -- the sort of slow staccato accordion and brass tune that plays when the car is moving and when the potato is brought and stuff like that.

Also the cat, who has apparently decided he's in heat, because he's rubbing himself against the printer in a really suggestive way . . .