Monday, September 28, 2009

Playing Fast and Loose - plus bonus superkugel!

It’s commonly known as the Day of Atonement, the most serious holy day of the Jewish calendar.  Of course, every day is holy, you might say, and several of them are extra-holy, but YK is the one that pulls the fewest punches.  You’re supposed to have spent the prior 39 days getting ready for it, apologizing in the most inconvenient ways to anyone you may have injured, setting up a personal work plan for being a better person, listening to the unearthly wails of the shofars and mumbling along with extra prayers that are extra personal.  We think of what may befall us, the fates that await us depending on our behavior and the myriad circumstances over which we have no control.

And then the day comes and, as is commonly known, we fast.  No food from sundown till sundown, and if you’re hard core you might even build a primitive shack in your backyard before finally sitting down for supper so that in a few days you can dine therein for the festival of sukkot, which is joyous and amusing and a much-appreciated counterpart to YK.  Which is today.  And I’m not really doing much for it.  So here’s my rationalization.

There are times when I just can’t face going to services, for personal or even financial reasons (it’s the one time in the year every congregation asks for a fee to attend services).  This year, those things are not issues for me.  But I’d been out of town lately and a lot of work has piled up on my desk, and I had an important meeting to attend, and all kinds of other reasons to imagine myself too important and indispensible to take off half a day (since that’s all I work on mondays), so I was going to the office regardless of the condition of my immortal soul or whatever it is we’re burnishing today.

On the other hand, Kelly has had pneumonia for nearly a month now and she’s exhausted just from the effort of breathing.  Zach has been getting into our bed and thrashing around keeping us awake, and Jesse is more than a handful for anybody - cheerful and imperturbable, but the personification of the unstoppable force and the immovable object bound together into one supercharged conundrum all on his own.  This morning Kel didn’t feel well enough even to go in for her half-day of work, and then didn’t feel well enough to have me go in for mine.  So there were no services, nor any important meeting at work, this YK day.  It was just me taking Z to pre-school on the shuttlebus he loves so much (but which makes a 20 minute dropoff take more like 90), and then wrangling J around the house and to the playground and back via the produce market I always visit on mondays.  Not very Yom-Kipperistic, overall - except for the fasting.

The fasting is an interesting component to the whole YK deal.  It’s tempting to think of it as mortification of the flesh, but that’s not it; mortification implies punishment for inherent corruption and YK is really about just the opposite, encouragement of inherent virtue.  The errors to be corrected through the YK process cannot be physically beaten away.  The heart cannot soar if the body is downcast and broken.  Neither is the goal “purification,” though that does get closer.  It’s not like food infects the spirit, rendering it incapable of improvement.  Truly, some great meals are very spiritual, and one of the most spiritual events in the Jewish calendar takes place around a supper table.  The point, I think, is that we’re supposed to be too busy to eat.  There’s prayer at night straight through till sleeping time, and those meditations are supposed to be the last - and only - things in our minds as we drift off, so they occupy our dreams and remain with us when we awaken - to join the community, borborygmous and clear-headed, undistracted by superfluous thoughts or activities, to continue our joint and individual jouneys of the day.  There are series of prayers all day long, with torah readings and meditations; the introduction of a snack-break would disrupt the metaphysical structure of the process and retard the steady inculcation of numinous potential in the celebrants.  Food is fine, for the rest of the year.  This day, the attention should be elsewhere, where the important work remains to be done.

I, of course, forsook that important work for my important meeting.  Then I blew off the meeting for the fragile welfare of my family.  However, I did keep the fast.  No food has passed my lips since supper last night and I’m really starting to notice, you know?  It’s a lot easier to keep the fast when you’re surrounded by others who are doing the same, when your day is full of carefully-scripted activities, and when temptation is kept far from your lips.  I, on the other hand, have been feeding Jesse, cleaning the kitchen, cooking a kugel for tonight’s break-fast party, and even cut a dozen kiwis into quarters and wrapped halves together in plastic wrap as a snack for Z’s preschool class.  Food’s been everywhere, and where there has not been food there has been work of the most quotidian sort.  It has been a challenging YK, for sure.

But at least I have labored throughout the day on the thing that’s really most important - not soulfulness, not my vocation, but the family that sustains me and gives me both the strength and the reason to persevere.  The fasting has help me keep the significance of that work foremost in my mind, as it typically is not.  And now Jesse is up from his nap (he’s taken to denuding himself in his crib but at least this time there was no soiling of linens) and it’s time for me to get Kel out of her therapeutic steamy shower so I can go pick Zach up from school.  We do have a good party to go to soon, and my kugel is succulent and ready to be served.  It’s not the YK the sages expected me to have, but it was a good one nonetheless.

Break Fast Kugel

Boil about 8-10 ounces of broad noodles till soft, then stir in 2/3s cup of butter till absorbed.  Beat three eggs; then add the zest of one lemon, and 1/2 a cup of sugar.  Separately, mix 8 oz of sour cream and 8 oz of marscapone with about a teaspoon of cinnamon and two grated apples; stir all this into the egg mixture.  Add in half a cup of raisins which have been soaked in rum and then gently heated to make them absorb the liquor (together with the rum in which they had been soaking).  Finally, add the juice of half a lemon and mix it all well into the noodles.

Pour half the noodles into a buttered baking dish, then spread fruit jam over it (I used strawberry and heated it a bit to make it easier to spread); add the rest of the noodles and top with corn flakes.  Sprinkle sugar over the corn flakes, spray with a mist of water to dissolve the granules, and then bake at 350 for an hour.  I have yet to cut into it, but why should it be bad?  After all, I’m all atoned up and morally clear.  It’s a perfect time to clog my arteries! 

Thursday, September 24, 2009

Going Potty

There are things one’s body instinctively rejects, that run so contrary to the appropriate order of the universe that the very thought of them can cause visceral contrary reaction - a mental, if not physical, gag reflex.  Sewage-drinking, necrophilia, the eyeball scene from Chien Andalou.... and, of course, drowning. 

As an advanced culture, we’ve not progressed past Torquemada when it comes to sowing horror and anguish in those we wish to hurt - we strap our enemies to boards and pour water up their noses, instilling in them an overwhelming fear of our righteous wrath.  Noses and water just don’t mix.  So the netipot thing just beggars my internal sense of propriety on the most fundamental level.  What’s weirder yet is how much I love it.  Just because there’s a disconnect doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. 

This was one of the many bizarritudes to which I became exposed during my years in L.A. after college.  I think Kel first introduced the notion of sinus irrigation to me from her work managing a metaphysical bookstore in West Hollywood, along with body-flossing and zen druidism - but at the time it was nothing more to me than an ayurvedic novelty, a fun fact for parties.  “Did you know that Indians pour water in one nostril and out the other - on purpose?” It was to giggle.  Back then it was, anyway. 

I’m not sure of the trigger but something set Kel off a few years ago.  She’d had allergies for years, the occasional bout of the sneezies, the sort of low-grade nasal irritation that each of us occasionally endures.  But this time she hit up the ubernet and got herself a netipot to deal with it. 

It arrived in a too-large box, as is typical, but when we unwrapped it, it was hardly big enough to hold a cup of water.  Its body was a hollow egg, open at the top; an elongated spout extended from one end like the trunk of a tiny trumpeting elephant.  It seemed entirely normal, so far as objects go, though subtly different from any teapot, cup, pitcher, or other such implement I’d ever seen. 

Kelly started using the pot and immediately lauded its praises to me.  “It feels great!  Cleared me out!  I can breathe!  It’s a whole new world!” Such enthusiasm typically raises caution flags for me, but Kel is not given to overenthusiasm as a general rule - so I took my caution with a grain of salt. 

“Grain of salt”: or maybe try a teaspoon.  Kosher salt, not tablegrain, dissolved in a teacup of warm water and then used to fill the pre-warmed netipot.  Press the tip of the spout against one nosehole, lean forward, incline your head to one side and pour in the brine.  Warm water replicating your body’s own salinity fills the sinus behind your eyes and then sneaks out the other side, down an exit-hole, which is, of course, your other nostril.  Pour in half the pot, then cover the in-hole and blow the remaining salt water out the other side.  Repeat, reversing nostrils.  It’s that simple. 

I thought for a moment when I first netipotted that I would choke myself but, because I was leaning forward, no water went awry.  It felt good - warm and clean, swirling up where I’d never had such sensations before.  Blowing it out upon completion of the process, it felt like I’d rinsed years’ worth of grime out of the inside of my head, the equivalent of dusting out and washing the windows in a heavily-used workshop.  I could breathe more easily, see more clearly; my brain felt more comfortable and seemed to be working more smoothly.  Half a cup of saltwater up each nostril and the world felt like a different place - one I liked better than I had before.  It was an absolute shock, and I loved it. 

Since that time we’ve shared the secret of the neti pot with a select few folk.  Some have embraced it enthusiastically, some were okay with it but not much more than that, and some didn’t want to have anything to do with it at all.  I guess I understand their essential discomfort with the whole crazy thing. It’s not just counterintuitive - it’s freaking weird.  But “freaking weird” isn’t synonymous with “bad idea.” I’d like to think I’m a case in point on that one.  I, with my squeaky-clean sinuses and a teapot stuck out of my nostril.  Sure, I wouldn’t have come up with the idea on my own, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea.  Anybody doesn’t think so - it’s your loss, snotface.  But anytime you want to see what life is like with a head full of freshness, I’d be happy to set you up.  It’s only really weird the first time.  Which is more than I can say for myself. 

Saturday, September 19, 2009

Storm Surges, Part 5, finally: The Big Grey Toy

It was one of those days I can’t imagine having again: we were home from college, unemployed, living with parents and completely at liberty.  The world lay pregnant and generous before us, Barry’s decrepit but reliable vee-dub bus was at our beck and call, and nothing but a total lack of funds inhibited our plunder of the glistening satsuma that is the Los Angeles basin.  The only question we really had to confront was, exactly where would this freedom lead us?

On, and there was the gullywasher.  It was coming in from the north, inland over the Grapevine, then the San Gabriels, and then the Santa Susana mountains and on into L..A. proper.  These storms rolled through town at least a couple times a year.  They snarled traffic and filled up the network of arroyo seco flood channels that trace ancient riverbeds through the city’s concrete matrix.  It was going to make getting around in town rather a bother.  We’d have to take the heavy weather into account in any plans we made.

How it happened, how we decided, I wish I recalled.  I’m imagining that imp-on-steroids grin Barry used to have, the flash in his eye when a plan came together.  Maybe it was all my harebrained scheme after all.  But one way or another we loaded out in that rickety bus and headed north on I-5 up past Pyramid Lake.

We were out near Gorman, I think, when the first raindrops hit our dusty windshield.  Barry pulled over as several more struck their targets.  Then the sky yawned and tumbled down on us in fat froglike drops that fell thick and fast, a cavalcade of percussive pings hurtling down from the stratosphere to smack with clear sharp sounds off the roof of the bus.  Rain blotted the light from the air and drowned out conversation.  We weren’t talking anyway.  We were listening to the storm, windows cracked an inch or two, our skin tingling with the hydroionic flux.

Within ten minutes it was over; the furious front of the storm had passed us to the south.  Only desultory trailing cells remained to rain on us.  It was as if a physical pressure had been removed from the atmosphere, like coming back up to the surface after spelunking.  It was time to move on.  We strapped back in, revved up the hamster wheel, and started back whence we had come.

In no time at all, we found the rain coming down hard again, as we drove just a little faster than the storm and rode on up underneath it.  The highway was awash and the rain hitting it splashed up to our headlights; the van rumbled from the raindrops that pitched themselves madly against us.  It was almost too much to drive through, but then suddenly it eased up again down to a moderate rainfall, then mere precursor drops, till the skies were merely grey and the road, still dry.

We’d reached Santa Clarita, I think, and we pulled over again.  Again, within moments, those same swollen raindrops returned to us, pelting down, splashing high, sheets and curtains of nearly solid water whipping through grey air that was somehow both vague and edgy with rain.  Ten minutes on, the torrent was substantially spent.

We cranked the ignition and the tunes and headed off up the tailpipes of that storm yet again, forced our way through its fury on a southbound road, and pulled over again in the sere city of Sylmar to get drenched yet anew, the storm now perceptibly weakening but still impressive at its most intense, scudding overhead for a quarter of an hour of serious deluge before it got past us again.

Over our heads now the rain was merely rain, coming down on a shabby suburb of no distinction, washing clean the dirt that yet dirt remained.  We were parked at a meaningless roadside in a rainstorm; there was nothing special about it, no reason to stay there - so we got back into gear and started again on the homeward highway.  But by now the storm had broken up; no more gradual build to windshield-crushing intensity, but instead, just ordinary storm cells, some heavy, some less so, none of them remotely like what we’d experienced up in the mountains.  The storm had devolved into a drippy mess of duck weather.  We were driving, not just homeward, but home.

It was late afternoon, and we’d been toying with this storm for hours.  It was time to call it a day.  Barry dropped me off at his place, where I’d left my car; I drove myself back home alone.  In doing so, through clammy streets in sputtering traffic, I bade farewell to the storm.  By now it felt like an old friend from whom I’d slowly grown apart.  I was breaking up with a breaking-up storm.  It felt almost poetic.

And with those final words the entire internet heaves a collective sigh of relief: I’m done with the Storm Surge series.  Finally, I can get back to blogging the important stuff, like what I stick up my nose or defaced traffic signs I know and love.  Meantime, it’s Rosh Hashona, and mine has been good.  Tomorrow I hit the Tut exhibit and next week will find my delicates skewered once again.  Thanks for listening in and keep dry till next time.  Or, if this was the last time, get good and wet.  I guess it doesn’t make any difference anymore.