Since our tribe marks the passage of time on flimsy calendars provided for free by local Jewish mortuaries – and since those calendars start in September, we Jews miss out a ritual the rest of the Gregorian-loving world enjoys each year: Calendar shopping.
I found a few at my local bookstore that promised to teach me a new word each day. A new word everyday! The only thing my Jewish calendar teaches me is what time the sun goes down on Fridays. That won’t do!
As our people are never the intended audience for such ambitious collections, I felt it was incumbent upon myself to create a Jewish version of the word-a-day calendar. Of course, I’m lazy, so it’ll have to be a word-a-month calendar. Oh, and I made all these words up, so don’t, you know, use them in a job interview.
Herein, your Jewish Word-A-Month Calendar for 2011:
Thursday, December 9, 2010
Monday, December 6, 2010
Loved to Death
Sitting at my desk at my Jewish communal day job, I took a nice juicy bite of an apple. Too big a bite, my mother would say. A small bit of it evaded the search-and-smash mission of my teeth and headed down my windpipe.
Spastic coughing began, and, within seconds two well-meaning Jewish women raced toward my cubicle.
The first woman held water in one hand and held the other hand aloft, asking if I needed a good back-pounding.
The second woman insisted that what I needed was a chest-pounding. She also advised me to stand up.
No, insisted the first. Stay seated and accept the back-pounding.
On the contrary, said the first, being seated isn’t helping. If I can’t stand, then I should at least put my head between my knees (while still, somehow, getting blows to the chest).
While the two women debated the best way to prop me up and pummel me, the tiny bit of apple worked its way back up. I swallowed it, down the right pipe this time, thanked both women and smiled.
Like a modern-day Sir Isaac Newton, that apple gave me radical insight into forces greater than people had previously understood: Jews, I realized at that moment, are extremely annoying.
Spastic coughing began, and, within seconds two well-meaning Jewish women raced toward my cubicle.
The first woman held water in one hand and held the other hand aloft, asking if I needed a good back-pounding.
The second woman insisted that what I needed was a chest-pounding. She also advised me to stand up.
No, insisted the first. Stay seated and accept the back-pounding.
On the contrary, said the first, being seated isn’t helping. If I can’t stand, then I should at least put my head between my knees (while still, somehow, getting blows to the chest).
While the two women debated the best way to prop me up and pummel me, the tiny bit of apple worked its way back up. I swallowed it, down the right pipe this time, thanked both women and smiled.
Like a modern-day Sir Isaac Newton, that apple gave me radical insight into forces greater than people had previously understood: Jews, I realized at that moment, are extremely annoying.
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