Not sheepish, but individ-ewe-al
cjwatson and I have just finished watching through S1 of The Owl House . Very, very slowly because we rarely have time to watch TV coinciding with times when the rest of the household aren't also trying to watch TV. I liked it a lot! The Owl House is yet another in the genre of human goes to monster school. It's just much better written than most of them! It's the right level of zany and silly…
So next/this year I'm assigned to Wimbledon , a kind of apprenticeship or internship where hopefully I will learn how to actually do the job of a rabbi as a whole, rather than individual pieces of it. They have asked me to write an article introducing myself for their magazine. And I'm really struggling to write something not boring; what I have reads like a list of the places I've lived, worked…
Recently er past several months read : A guide for the perplexed , by Dara Horn, Pub 2014 WW Norton & Co, ISBN 978-0393348880 The long way to a small angry planet , by Becky Chambers, (c) Becky Chambers 2014, Pub 2015 Hodder & Stoughton, ISBN 978-1-473-61981-4 Twilight Robbery , by Frances Hardinge, Pub 2018 Macmillan Children's Books, ISBN 978-1509842346 So we've actually been studying the real…
Not quite my first full day off since March but not far off it either. I aten't dead but I have badly run out of time for keeping in touch with people. Anyway the headline is, I have sort of finished my third year of rabbinic training although like every year there's this weird limbo between the end of teaching in mid-May and the actual end of the year first week in July. I visited a Hindu temple…
There's been a rant I have been meaning to turn into an essay for a while, but Ken White (Popehat) has done it better, so I direct you to his really well-written and referenced (though US-centric) article: The Fashionable Notion of 'Free Speech Culture' Is Justifying State Censorship, Ironically . Criticism. Is. Not. Censorship, and “Free speech culture” has a natural tendency to discount the…
I want to talk about the education privilege meme that's been doing the rounds. On the one hand I love old-school memes that encourage lots of cool people on my d-roll to talk about their experiences growing up. But at the same time, I'm kind of frowning at this particular iteration. First up, I hesitated to fill out this meme because I hardly need a checklist to tell me I have so much…
My mother died in March. That feels like basically the only thing that happened this year, but of course it's not. Theoretically you stay in full mourning for a parent for a whole year (which hasn't ended yet); I haven't quite managed that, as done properly it's really quite intense, no social gatherings or live music for example, but it has definitely been the major theme in my life. And helping…
Content note: mentions antisemitic murders and police violence. I personally am completely safe, I'm only talking about dealing with news. It's around midday Yom Kippur. I'm leading the morning service with a tiny community in the southwest corner of England. There's a slight hiatus as this congregation only have two Torah scrolls, so we have to roll through from the first reading in Exodus to the…
One advantage of my unexpected free month was that I started reading books again. Not a lot but 6 complete novels and a longfic in 6 weeks, which is more than I have for years. Let me catch up with some brief reviews: Since term properly, properly finished on 6 July, I have read: Circe by Madeline Miller 2018, Pub 2018 Bloomsbury, ISBN 9781526612519 Coconut Unlimited by Nikesh Shukla (c) Nikesh…
This weekend one of my oldest friends got married, and my partners celebrated their 20 th anniversary with a Jewish blessing and wedding canopy. So I had a lovely lovely time, and also I'm very much reminded that there's a crowd of (mostly somewhat connected) people I've been friends with for most of 30 years and I should make more active effort to actually spend time with them because they are…
This week P'tite Soeur organized a family trip to London. All four siblings and Dad, which is quite a feat of logistics even if we didn't manage to also include partners. We met up late morning at the V&A . At first I couldn't find my sister because she'd texted me that she was in the sculpture gallery on the first floor but the sculpture gallery is on the ground and second floors, but I wandered…
It's been a full and emotional couple of months, friends. The main thing to report is that I was supposed to be in Israel as of a week ago, but Israel bombed Iran and Iran retaliated and the go/no-go date for my summer programme was right in the middle of the 11 days when Israel was in full lockdown due to lots of missile attacks, so they really had to cancel it. I have a whoooooole lot of…
I missed my anniversary of moving to DW – this has been my online home since 3 May 2009, a slightly astonishing 16 years. Anyway, the 3weeks4dreamwidth annual fest is ongoing, and I am not doing any particular posting challenges or anything, but I generally think having more content here is good. Some people don't agree, they really dislike those times in early January and April-May when…
As posted under lock, my mother died on 11 March. She had been seriously ill for a long time, but on a level where she was able to power through with her considerable willpower. And then she more or less speed-ran the last stages of illness and decline in just a few weeks. She had the sort of funeral that you earn by being deeply involved in all aspects of the community, and then my family sat…
My extremely awesome girlfriend managed to get us tickets for the stage production of Ballet Shoes , a book we both imprinted on. Which meant we actually managed to do the thing I'm always hoping for of a proper date-date Friday night on a weekend when I'm doing community work Saturday. I stayed in my lovely flat after class, which is really simplifying everything compared to last year when I was…
I was very interested in Jude Doyle's TERFs, Trans Mascs and Two Steve Feminism , and even more so in sbqr 's thinky response . I don't strongly care about Doyle's beef with Moira Donegan, but everything else he says about comparing the discrimination he experiences as a trans man with how he was treated as a mildly well known feminist presumed-woman is interesting. As is the 'Two Steves' model,…
I read and was very impressed by this review by lannamichaels . And I mentioned it to jack who proceeded to buy me the book for my birthday. And really, Finn and Ezra's bar mitzvah time loop is just as delightful as lannamichaels says. Finn and Ezra's bar mitzvah time loop by Joshua S Levy. (c) 2024 Joshua S Levy; pub Katherine Tegen Books (Harper Collins). ISBN 978-0-06-324824-3. My impression of…
So my OSOs decided it was past time for me to watch Die Hard (1988) . I came back from my first service leading of 2025, and headed straight to my partners' to warm up and recuperate. And we watched the film, my first time and everybody else rewatching a well-loved favourite. There's no point writing a review of one of the most famous films of the 20 th century, but I can say that my life is…
What can I tell you about this year? I've been a rabbinic student for all of it, the course is going really well, but it's also eating my life. Significant events I travelled abroad for the first time since the pandemic began, a school trip to Paris. I bought a flat in Hendon, and got it set up, and moved into it. And then had to deal with emergency bathroom replacement, and with one thing and…
Christmas eve: spent a quiet day with jack . Started our Christmas dinner at around 3 pm, didn't actually take much over 2 hours to make the trimmings of roast dinner. These days we don't bother with substituting the roast part with anything vegetarian, we just have piles of roast potatoes and parsnips and Yorkshire puddings and cheese, some cooked and some just for eating. Christmas day we…
I think the idea is something like, five things in your bag that say something about you: Two sets of keys, because I live half my time with my husband in Cambridge and half my time in a flat in North London near my course. My home-home keys are on a Golem keyring which my husband bought me some years ago; I was a bit nervous about deliberately bringing a Golem into the house but it turned out not…
10 years (and one month) ago some friends of ours, themselves a married couple, asked me and jack out. At the time we had no clear expectations for what 'going out' was going to mean, but we fell in love very intensely and rapidly and were thinking long term thoughts probably sooner than would be standard. Though there isn't really any 'standard' for a couple dating another couple. A few months…
Most of the stuff that's in my head is Jewish-related, which isn't surprising because I'm a rabbinic student. But wise people have observed that it's good for community building to post links to other content, so here are a few things I've read recently that are worth reading. Two pieces on "race science" (note the extremely scary scare quotes). If you're not aware I was a genetics researcher /…
So I really sensibly added a lot of new people via a friending meme, and then disappeared for several weeks because I was right in the middle of my busiest season as a trainee rabbi. So far nobody has unfriended me for being inactive, but it does feel a bit unfair that I've been learning about the lives of all kinds of fascinating new people but not posting anything about my own life in return.…
Hello, welcome everybody from the friending meme! I realize I haven't actually created an About Me post in at least a decade, so I should give some background. I'm a cis woman aged 45. I spent my childhood in SE England and I'm now back here, having travelled around quite a lot in my 20s. From my teens to mid 40s, I was trying to build a career as a cancer researcher, which is the reason for…