Beckettesque moment, plus chametz

Subtitled, "I can't do this anymore.  I did it some more."

Out of habit more than hope, I checked the Big Giant Pseudology Association's job board, and saw a newly advertised position at a fancy name-brand school.  Most of my job-hunting energy these days is oriented toward non-academic work of various kinds, so I just don't have the strength to deal with the one-year VAP bullshit anymore.  But this job is multi-year, and is in a nice place, so...

My point is that I dashed off an entire application for it in approximately ten minutes.  And then went back to other, more promising stuff.

In other news, I am deeply relieved that Passover is over, because I ran out of potato vodka on the last night, I'm TIRED of matzo,* and I could make myself breakfast tacos this morning.  I am also happy to be drinking lovely wine this evening, although that has nothing to do here or there with Passover.  Because, you know, wine.

* Did you know that Blogger considers 'matzo' the standard spelling?  I tried typing 'matzah,' and it complained of a spelling error.  Apparently, if Blogger were Jewish, it would be Orthodox.

RBOC: Mired in the semester

• This semester may never actually end.  CBU actually lists the due date for grades as December 26.  Fucking seriously, CBU?
• I just finished grading the papers for my little topics course.  On to the two intro courses' worth.  Oy.
• Two more weeks of classes before the exam period even starts.  Seriously, FML.
• On the plus side, I'm still wringing the occasional tenure-track job posting to apply to out of this semester's listings.  This seems more exciting than it really is only because I've already begun to steel myself to give up on the tenure track and apply to more contract jobs.
• Three weeks away, and I'm already dreading going to visit the folks in Hometown.  At least I'm only going for a single week.
• This should be the place in the post in which I complain about having to teach a truly pointless January term course, thus rendering my winter break almost non-existent.  But, since that will at least occupy some of my mind and make me wake up at normal hours so I can work, it may well be a blessing in disguise.
• The wretched Christmas shopping season is upon us, complete with that goddamn music in every place of retail business, including my local bar.  I grit my teeth.
• Which reminds me: when people here in Cornstate ask you this or that about "the holidays" coming up, and you explain that you don't actually celebrate that holiday, they think you're setting them up for a punchline.
• Then, when you explain that you're a Jew, they think you're using some kind of profanity in a sick self-deprecation bit gone wrong.  It terrifies me to see South Park come to life in any degree.
  

Chad gadya

You win some, you lose some.  I'm not doing so poorly this year, but I struck out on one count: this year is the first one ever in which I have no Seder to go to for Passover.  Kind of a bummer, I must admit.

There aren't many Jews in Cornstate, and the ones I've run into so far are, frankly, not my cup of tea.  I learned last year that going to a Seder with people I don't know and don't much care for isn't really fun.  Since I haven't met anyone I trust to do a Seder the way I'd enjoy it, and since just about anyone who might host or attend a Seder lives at least forty-five minutes down the road from me in one direction or another, and since today was a huge snowstorm anyway, I bagged the effort.  Better alone than in bad company, right?

Sigh.  Guess I'll just have to party by myself this year.

Diversis sermonibus pertemptatum finitimus

• I've paid off the last of my lingering credit card debt.  The monkey is off my back!  (For now, anyway.)
• The big IRS portion of my tax refund arrived.  Ahhhhh.  Knock on wood, I can actually start to amass some savings to see me through the summer.
• I just picked up Madhur Jaffrey's Quick and Easy Indian Cooking.  I'm excited about experimenting with new recipes, especially ones that don't require a huge amount of effort after the workday.  (I'm going to politely ignore the amount of fat that some of the recipes include, for the moment.)
• Speaking of cooking fat, I was searching for a recipe for chopped chicken liver, which led me to a recipe for schmaltz.  Shudder.  It's entirely possible that I will try that someday just for the tinkery challenge of it – especially with my increasingly greasy and well-seasoned cast iron pan – but it makes me mildly ill just to look at the pictures of the ingredients in process.  I really don't understand how my Ashkenazi ancestors ever lived past the age of 50 in the pre-modern era.
• I sometimes wonder what it felt like to be one of those first proto-Ashkenazim who emigrated so far north of the Mediterranean that they could no longer acquire olive oil for pareve cooking. 
  "Well, the only fat we can even get out here in the boonies is butter.  How are we supposed to cook meat without oil?"
  "I dunno.  You think we could maybe just render animal fat into cooking grease?"
  "Oh, yeeeeccccccch!  That's gross, man!*  But....I guess I don't have any better ideas.  Go get the meat pan — and, uh, maybe some onions just to make this seem a little less nasty."
• Some geeky anti-MOOC brilliance here.  It makes me wish more people tried to formulate ideas in Yoda's (apparently native?) grammar and syntax.  Seem smarter and more insightful, it makes things.

*Get it?  Get it?  Okay, it's not the best Judeo-German pun ever, but whatever.  It's no worse than half the jokes that Freud published.

RBOC: Who by fire?

There's just no way for me to enjoy 99% of all synagogue services I have ever attended, at least since I stopped believing in God in my early teens.  And yet I end up going sometimes, usually out of one social obligation or another than any spiritual curiosity of my own.  So it was this year that I got suckered into going to Rosh Hashanah services at CBU: I feel more sense of tradition about the dinner than about the religion, and I just didn't have the beytsim to stop by for the food and then bug out before the evening service.  After which, of course, the tiny congregation's leaders said to me, "We'll see you tomorrow morning, right?"  Sigh.

• The congregation is so tiny that it includes faculty, staff, and students from CBU.  I feel somehow exposed and thrown off by associating in this way with my students.
• No brisket for Erev Rosh Hashanah dinner?  WTF?
• Fucking tuna fish as the protein of choice?  What the shit?
• There's just no way not to be a little intimidated by the newness of people in a new congregation.  Especially when your Hebrew is really shaky/non-existent.  I completely chickened out of going up to the front to participate, more out of Hebrew-language stage fright than my philosophical disagreements with organized religion.
• One of the more dispiriting things about going to a new congregation isn't so much the unfamiliarity of the faces, but the unfamiliarity of the tunes.  I hate it when I can just about remember the tune to a prayer, only to find that everyone else has some other (usually lame) tune that they all use.
• Speaking of tunes: Seriously, cantor?  You accompany yourself on a guitar?  On a fucking guitar?  Who the fuck do you think you are, Reverend Lovejoy?  I don't like it a damn bit; the aesthetics are all wrong.  Just like there's no crying in baseball, there's no strumming in services.
• Holy crap, he has the guitar because he only knows how to play and sing in major scales.  You know what this shit sounds like in a major key?  Anglicanism.
• Ditto this English-language bullshit.  Yeah, sure, I'm pretty much illiterate in Hebrew, but at least Hebrew sounds like prayer to me.  We sound that much more insane when we intone prayers in English.  If nothing else, harmonic-minor tunes in Hebrew inspire a sense of contemplation and ontological reflection for me.
• It's incredibly anxious to be in a little congregation for these things, since you perforce feel  more a part of things, even if you'd like to just hang back by the wall in anonymity.  When you grapple with your feelings about personal engagement with religion, it's awfully confusing and unsettling to be thrown into communal engagement with ritual practice.
• I dislike the people who are more religious than I.
• I dislike the people who are less religious than I once was.
• I really dislike the smug senior who can't shut up about his semester abroad in Israel.  No, I really don't want to hear anymore about it.  No, I am not impressed with you.  No, I do not give a flying fuck.  No, I really don't give a flying fuck.
• I've identified for years as a Jewish atheist, but now I may have to amend that to Conservative Jewish atheist.  This Reform Judaism business is such a weak cup of coffee that I don't even feel anything against which to rebel properly.  Clearly, I have serious identity issues to work on.
• I find it deeply depressing to read the language of most of these services.  Declaring our group fealty to an especially fickle and schizophrenic Invisible Patriarchal Ideal in the Sky just rubs me the wrong way, even if the leader of the prayer is hippie-dippie enough to re-word some of the language to refer to the deity in the feminine.  Once in a while, though, the language strikes a contemplative chord with me — like the following:

On Rosh Hashanah will be inscribed and on Yom Kippur will be sealed how many will pass from the earth and how many will be created; who will live and who will die; who will die at his predestined time and who before his time; who by water and who by fire, who by sword, who by beast, who by famine, who by thirst, who by storm, who by plague, who by strangulation, and who by stoning. Who will rest and who will wander, who will live in harmony and who will be harried, who will enjoy tranquillity and who will suffer, who will be impoverished and who will be enriched, who will be degraded and who will be exalted.

And then I realize that Leonard Cohen said it better in his rewrite.  And then I start thinking that I should write a service based on Leonard Cohen songs.  Because I would totally freak out with excitement if I could come to services and hear/see something like this: