mabool

It's pouring rain here today, off and on, but not just light rain ... a deluge, in fact -- mabool, as we say in the Hebrew-English. That's the language that comprises a certain group of Hebrew words never said in English, which even people who don't know Hebrew use in the middle of their English sentences: words like mirpesset (balcony); machsan (storage room); dood [shemesh] ([solar] water heater); hamsin - Arabic, actually, or sharav in proper Hebrew (heat wave, basically; hot & dry climatic condition); freier (sucker, fool); and of course the ever-popular (what else would we eat?) shipood (shishkebab). Okay, now that I think about it, mabool may be a little higher up in the linguistic food chain, and not casually used by your average oleh hadash, but it was a good excuse to get the Hebriglish out of my head.

In any case, it may serve as a metaphor for my current state of the jobhunt, as it were, psychologically at least. I have just come from yet another interview where I believe I killed, and it may very well be that I was so impressive there because I am (perhaps inadvisably) confident about the other job I'm waiting to hear about. This one today is the first place they've actually asked for the phone number of my reference (ex-boss). So now, in my (perhaps overly optimistic) mind, I might even have TWO job offers! Mabool!

Why am I sharing this with you? Why am I not prudently keeping my own counsel like a two-months' pregnant woman who fears she will miscarry and then have to inform a bunch of people about something she'd rather keep private? Why am I not superstitiously clamming up and knocking on wood, lest I "open my mouth to Satan" as they say in Hebrew (is that like 'spitting in the wind'?)?

I will tell you why: It is because I am not superstitious. Faith is different than superstition. Faith, in my interpretation, means I trust that what will be will be and it will work out fine in the end, and that being open and vulnerable is not what will influence that event, not in any bad way at least. I choose to be as authentic here as I can possibly be, a certain degree of family-necessitated censorship notwithstanding. I think this makes more interesting reading, by the way, because when you get to the end of this chapter, you won't be able to put the book down; you will feel compelled to know what happens next.

As am I.