kosher is as kosher does

You may think slamming my finger in the car door a few days ago is not very interesting. But that's because it wasn't your finger. It was my finger, my dumbass experience, my consequences. For me, that's interesting. The day it happened I was a bit traumatized and couldn't think about anything else. I went home from work early, avoiding the traffic that would have doubled the length of the journey, and pretty much just lay down for the rest of the day. The next day I was much better, but still couldn't use the finger to type or write or anything else. It got quite swollen, and I discovered that it needed to be lanced. I pricked it with a sewing needle just under the side of the nail, and a gusher of accumulated blood was released. That was brilliant, because with the pressure of the fluid gone, the finger hardly hurt anyore. Since then, I've been soaking it in salt water a lot, and the pale pink liquid keeps draining out a little every day. I was worried about my bruised nail, but it doesn't look half as bad now I managed to get rid of the majority of the blood under there. The extent of the damage remains to be seen, and will I guess become evident as it grows out. It doesn't hurt now to press on my nail, but it does feel very weird and semi-numb.

And here's the moral of the story, as I see it -- message to Squarepeg from the Universe, as it were: moaning, complaining, bitching, sulking about my circumstances is just an invitation to the universe to show me things can definitely be worse. I was so pissed off at going to work on Sunday morning (i.e. "monday morning blues"), that I needed to learn that the situation as is was great compared to what else it could be. The old rabbi's lesson of the animals in the apartment, once again.

Or, as Qui-Gon Jinn (Liam Neeson) said to Anakin Skywalker in part one of the Star Wars triple trilogy (which I just saw for the first time, with ms. squarepeg today), Your focus determines your reality. Do we EVER learn that lesson? [Sigh.]

So Pesach is upon us, this Wednesday evening. All the married women at work go on about how they have to get to the Pesach cleaning. At Pesach, people don't just say, "Hag sameach" [Happy holiday], as they do at other holidays. At Pesach, they frequently add, "and kosher" -- may your holiday be not only happy but also kosher. (So it seems that being kosher at this time of the year is more important than usual.) And this essentially means neither eating nor having in your house any products that could be related to bread, yeast, flour, and more stuff than I can keep track of.

As you already know, I'm a lousy Jew and even lousier with any kind of history, but what I gather is that when the Jews fled from Pharaoh and made their way out of Egypt, they had no time to let bread dough rise. Because of this, we traditionally eat matza, an unleavened product, and no bread. But why flour, generally, is forbidden, I have no idea. Not to mention beer.

In any case, tradition/religion demands that every single household thing and every single nook and cranny be cleaned and purged of any vestige of hametz -- the forbidden food items or even their dust. In other parts of the world, perhaps in simpler times, this was known as 'spring cleaning.' Or maybe that's just what secret Jews called it, once upon a time, when their WASPy neighbors expressed wonder at the sudden concerted efforts to move and clean everything in the house.

Naturally, I pay no attention to all this. It's difficult to find the forbidden products during Pesach, so I make sure to stock up beforehand. I bought three great loaves of bread yesterday, and checked that the beer supply hadn't fallen too low. In a symbolic gesture, though, I cleaned my stove really thoroughly this morning, even soaking the iron parts that cover the burners, which I haven't done for at least a year. It's really quite satisfying, I must grudgingly admit.

My in-laws will be coming here for the "seder" -- not that we'll really do a seder, just another token effort -- and bringing both the requisite gefilte fish and the main meat course. I'll be doing the chicken soup with matza balls, salad, and the dessert: cheesecake with hametz crust.

Yeah, yeah, I know: I'm going straight to hell.