Oy.
The Bat Mitzvah is over and we’re all recovering but the girl made it through. And all in all, the mother (my sister) made it through with acceptable levels of hysteria not at all out of line with the magnitude of the event (you GO, sis!), though I told her in no uncertain terms that when the girl gets married she is to HIRE flunkies to set up chairs and tables. Our spirits are willing but our backs fatigue and, dear sister, after nine hundred chairs have been placed around tables is NOT the time to decide that the tables really ought to be moved back just a bit. And if you are having a party in a park it is NOT cute to decorate the tables with thousands of tiny silk flowers unless you think litter is a higher art form. But who knows? Maybe in a thousand years little futuristic children will fly in with their jet packs and make cunning wreathes out of them.
They overspent on the dance floor. All eighty thirteen year olds crammed themselves onto six square inches of floor and bounced up and down in a solid hormonal teenberg for hours. They could have used one of the five thousand yellow paper napkins for a dance floor and everyone would have been just as happy.
There were things about the Bat Mitzvah itself I found very moving and things I found hard to bear. She obviously worked very hard to learn everything and I admire the focus and effort it required, but as a non-religious person it mostly seemed like a lot of effort for little purpose. I do understand the drive. There is something very appealing about being part of a line of connecting generations past to generations yet unborn; about feeling part of and responsible to a broad and established community. But what do you do when you don’t believe an ounce of what that broad and established community is based on? Do you fake caring about it in order to get the goodies it offers? I have craved the connection but can’t bring myself to give even the smallest lipservice to the trappings. (Well, no that’s not entirely true. I do put on a Passover seder every year, though I’ve written my own Haggadah which is carefully stripped of nearly every mention of religion and I did come up and do the Aliyah at the Bat Mitzvah for my beautiful neice.) But, I can’t bring myself to actually become part of any religious organization because it would be dishonest. Like grinning into a TV camera and raving about how much I love Kibbles ‘n Bits so I can be in the commercial when I don’t have a dog. Unfortunately, it is the religion part that defines the community and sets it apart from other communities. Nothing like “us vs. them” to keep you focused on which team you’re on.
Is Judaism the only religion where non-religious people feel perfectly justified in going through all the motions without having a shred of personal belief? I know so many Jews who are quite frank in telling me they don’t believe in God, and yet they belong to the temple and have no problem going through the rituals. Is this common in other religions?
The drive back to the hotel turned into a lengthy exploration of North Atlanta byways where every road name was some variation of “Old Peach Bridge Ferry Parkway.” But we were accompanied on the road by an incredible crescent moon with a gleaming jewel of a planet suspended from it’s lower point and eventually the roads led to a familiar hotel.
I fell into bed and slept like a log. Except this particular log was dislodged from the top of a steep and rugged hill and it tossed and tumbled for quite some time before finally coming to rest.
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My sisters have long given up trying to get me to read romance genre novels with assurances that “this one is different.” I’ve never read a one that was different. It’s not that the writing is worse than other popular genres. It’s the stories. Or should I say story. Because there’s really only one: Muscle-bound he-man with secret pain that can only be cured by the heroine’s magic twat. Go ahead. Prove me wrong.
by Daniel Gilbert. It’s about the uniquely human ability to imagine the future and our capacity (or lack thereof) to predict how much we will like it when we get there. So far, it falls right in line with the theme of my new show, 
