aha!

i have not posted anything in a very long time and i have to say that it feels great! i have been working on my MA thesis and expect to get my degree in english in january. i have been working on several new pieces of writing and have been submitting work for publication. i am waiting for my recertification to go through so i may resume teaching again. i am back to doing all of the things i love. i run, i work out, i wear jeans. i listen to great music. i have an amazing haircut that i love AND i don't hide it from the rest of the world.
i expect that i'll be barely updating as i am working diligently to finish my thesis, especially since my outline is almost complete. i am also considering starting a new blog when i've completed my MA to coincide with this new and fresh start in my life. it took a long time of getting away from all that i love in order to get back there and so i no longer consider myself to be "lost" in bec's world. however, i am lucky to feel as if the world is mine. i'm off to claim it for my own.
-bec

bowing to the god of the coffee

it's amazing what we had to go through in order to get to this point.
fifteen years of living and getting by in order to have a cousins' reunion last night at adam's cousins' house, and we couldn't have gotten to that point without anything before it happening. see, it's true. there IS a reason for everything.
his cousins are absolutely amazing and i get the distinct impression that we'll be getting together again and again and again. and his cousin n makes really good coffee. in a PERCOLATOR! we have a mr. coffee and i just want to say, that mr. coffee can make my coffee *any* time. i actually believe that there is no god, only mr. coffee. unless, of course, mr. coffee created god and he's floating in my cup, swirled with soy milk, cocoa and a packet of equal. or maybe mr. coffee is god, and i enjoy his creation daily.
if mr. coffee is actually god, things around here would have to change.
for example, the daily order of prayers would definitely take a direct hit. first off, instead of facing east to pray, we would just face the coffee machine, which in my house, does not face east. daily prayer upon awaking would be "i thank you, coffee god, for the coffee goodness you are soon to pour into my cup."
the final redemption would just be the act of recycling the coffee grounds (i put them in my garden) and putting the used cans into the recycling bin. (i'm living green these days.)
probably the nicest thing about the coffee god, or mr. coffee (formally) would be the knowledge that the only punishment he could possibly mete out (if you believe such a thing) would be either a system short or a lack of coffee in the brewing stage. i mean, he wouldn't cause things like mass death or famine or anything. what would be the point?

no longer checking my brain at the door

i have never said "baruch hashem (thank god)" with much conviction when someone inquired as to my well-being. mostly because it was so unlike me to say it and i felt like a big phony. and that phoniness was mostly because i don't think it was something that i ever believed. so months ago, when my huge shabbos candelabra that previously held maybe seven candles (it's been a long time since i've seen or used it) fell off of the fridge, missing my head by inches, and lay bent and broken on my kitchen floor, i also didn't thank god, and instead said something to the effect of "fuck." while other people would have been inclined to offer thanks to the deity that they weren't hurt, i felt more like "well, if god really didn't want a person to get hurt, why make it fall in the first place?" now, in high school, this logic would have warranted a "duh" at least, but theologically speaking, maybe some higher up on the religious scale would just offer me a smile and a nod and a condescending pat on the head.
so then, this gets me thinking.
the holocaust and various pogroms, right? so there are some people who are religious, some not so much. some people who were religious emerged with a greater sense of spirituality. some had nothing left. others later embraced religion. i'm thinking about the god-thanking phenomenon.
what is up with thanking god for daily survival, or for surviving the whole ghastly ordeal? who can muster that? i would be (and i'm not trying to sound vile to those who had family in the camps, so please forgive me if this comes out wrong) totally unable to thank god. if god was giving you the ability to survive, then why wasn't he giving everyone that ability? why wasn't he killing the nazis? why wasn't he ending the war? was he on a fucking vacation??????? i mean, seriously.
sometimes i joke around about how if i ever met this god-dude, i'd find it difficult not to kick his ass. but the more i think about it, the more i feel that it's no longer a joke and that i generally think he's a jerk. kind of like the way i feel about the wizard who ultimately reveals himself not-quite-by-choice to dorothy and her friends. i lately have started to think that he's just a great big fraud, if he exists at all.
strangely, i'm not upset by this revelation, or certainly not as upset as i should be. every day this week my newspaper has been tainted with stories of religious jews gone bad. sounds like the ultimate fetish film, right? i've been reading about our darlings in deal, nj and monsey and israel (shhh....) who dealt in money laundering and organ trafficking. then there have been the religious jews vacationing in my neck of the woods who have refused to vacate a building deemed inhabitable, despite repeated warnings from engineers, despite the fire department ruling the place a fire hazard, etc. (the list actually does go on.) and of course, we all know of madoff's (not-so-little) scheme.
so please, someone please tell me, where are the jews who are supposed to be setting an example? because, i, for one, don't want to be associated with people like this. but hey, thank god, because i'm sure it could have been worse.

an excerpt of my mind

i am calling them the leftovers.
they are the women in the picture that i was just looking at-all sitting around at drinking cocktails, looking used, with the beginnings of wrinkles and mid-thirties skin. they are smiling, their extra upper arms hanging out of flimsy tops meant for the college set and if you look closely, you can see a stab of panic in their eyes. i feel like a voyeur if i gaze too long, despite their status as women in a picture. i knew one of these women when we were girls, but we stopped being friends because of a mutual case of dislike. in this picture, she becomes one of the leftovers. in real life, she's tried to contact me.
about eight or nine years ago, i ran into her at a bar. i was with adam and L, and we were going to see j's band play in sheepshead bay. we had the fortune (at that time it was a fortune, now i would lose my mind) to have a bottle of liquid acid. i was given ten drops and spent most of the evening talking about tootsie rolls and purple. oh, and brown and tuesdays. anyway, she was there and it's possible that she saw me and L and adam and i had to leave because i couldn't risk her ruining fourteen hours of my upcoming trip.
so gone i was and quite literally, gone i was.

how does your garden grow?

after saving my tomato plants from blight a few weeks back by covering the soil with newspaper and removing the bad leaves, i panicked, thinking the plants were ruined. ten plants is a lot of tomato ruin. but somehow, i managed to keep them alive, fertilizing them with coffee grounds and coffee, and now they are actually flowering. and you know what that means....! so far i'm having the same luck with my cucumbers. my peppers and eggplant plants are showing a bit of leaf damage. again, i'm thinking that it's something in the soil. but they are beginning to show signs of possible flowering. my lettuces are looking like lettuces, except for the new lettuce sprouts which are looking like new lettuce sprouts. my basil is basiling, my parsely is parselying and my cilantro is cilantroing. my roses have bloomed and have been deadheaded. everything is being organically fertilized with recycled material and i'm making the path in my garden with recycled bricks. i'm trying to decide whether to pot my sage and chocolate mint or to put it in the ground. the begonias are awesome and the dusty miller plants are growing new leaves. i'm still waiting for all of my shady perennials that i started from seed to bloom, but so far they are holding their own.
my experiences gardening have given me a high that i haven't had in such a long time. during the fall, in the late stages of pregnancy, i was outside digging up the side yard in preparation for spring planting. there's nothing as amazing as seeing plants that were just seeds, become seedlings and then real plants. in some ways it's more rewarding than writing. the work that it takes to make a few sentences into a paragraph in a chapter in a novel and then the work that it takes to actually find a publisher is rewarding, sure, but it doesn't pay off the same way that growing your own plants pays off. i mean, i worked my butt off digging up land that was rocky and hard. my neighbors wished me luck and were doubtful that anything would grow. but i was determined and i believed in what i was doing.
maybe in some ways, the act of gardening is filled with lessons for life. i know that with my garden, the more i put into it, the more i'll get out of it. i also know that if i cease to have faith in its ability to produce, surely it won't. i also know that if i try one method to remove the undesirable insects or weeds and it doesn't work, that i need to find another way that works and that is good for me. i'm learning that not all gardens are the same. some have more acidic soil, some don't have enough ladybugs, others need more worms. i've even found that within the same garden there can be inconsistencies. simple things like drainage and amount of shade can drastically alter the success of one part of the garden from the other. no two gardens are exactly alike, even if they contain the exact same plants. there are always variables, some known and others unknown, that will cause different outcomes.
from the time that adam and i talked longingly of living upstate, back before we had kids, i'd always envisioned having a garden of my own. i never imagined just how therapeutic it would be or how many times a day i'd find myself making excuses to leave whatever i was doing for a few minutes to go and walk through my plantings, taking inventory, pulling a few weeds, renewing my faith in the ability of nature to produce. standing amidst my plants, i am at peace. i walk away with clarity, the most i've had in a while. i walk away renewed, filled with creativity. there's something so gratifying about knowing that even if i do my best, success is not always up to me. you know what? i'm okay with that.

things get progressively worse in bec's world

it's easy to believe certain things under certain circumstances that are otherwise almost impossible to believe under an entirely different set of circumstances. for example, a few months ago, i may have said that i was glad that i made aliyah and gladder still that i came back and really believed that i was speaking the truth. i was, back then. in april, adam was offered the "position of a lifetime" job and accepted it, and sat waiting for his paperwork to be processed, only to work for a week and a half (plus overtime and a sunday) before finding out that there was a glitch which, we found out this past week, turned out not to be another delay in him working, but a budget cut completely eliminating his position for this year and next. (they are actually still trying to figure out how to pay him for the work that he did.) now, the very same bec who had been glad that we had at least gone over and had that opportunity, is now truly upset with some major guilt issues.
had we not made aliyah, adam would still have his teaching position and we would still have our savings. along the way there were all of these financial pitfalls...the scamming landlord, the swindling shipping company, expenses that came up that we didn't expect.... now we're down to almost nothing. (oh! how the mighty have fallen!) adam has been applying to tons of jobs and we're both still in disbelief over how his job just fell through.
so, i considered pole dancing.
alas, i'm not at all trained in pole dancing yet, so i can't imagine that i would do very well as a pole dancer, unless i was going to provide the much needed comic relief for the watchers of the pole dancers. maybe next year that will be an option.
as a painful and unplanned tangent, i am sitting by my open window and in the distance of the night, i'm listening to someone playing the bagpipes. there's something both strangely haunting and vaguely comforting about the sound of piping coming from a bag made of the skin of any random farm animal. i'd like to consider that a sign that maybe things will turn around quickly and adam will be offered a job that will get us through the next few months until he can get back into teaching.
if i was (you know, insert "god forbid" here) in the position that i'd have to somehow fight for my life, i'd like to think that i would fight as hard as i could without giving up. i've often wondered if i was alive during the holocaust, would i have walked blindly to my death or would i have fought, in any way possible to stay alive. while our financial situation is nothing in comparison, i have decided that it's not going to win. we'll beat this financial devastation!
bec and adam will rise again!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

random question

what's the deal with god?