My Rosh Hashanah Rant

Three things:

1.) I've been procrastinating writing this blog entry by watching military documentaries for the past four hours (don't ask) (don't tell) (HAHA!) (but not really, that's a sad policy) (but god I'm clever) and OOF. If I decide to join the Marines, it's your responsibility to remind me that I find socializing in humid weather taxing and recently quit a Jillian Michaels On Demand home workout after three minutes to order Greek and watch shit on Hulu. Thank you.

2.) I hate doing this, but I need you to do me a favor and vote for us for Express Night Out's Best Blog. To do so, just click here, scroll down almost to the very bottom, click 2birds1blog for "best blog (non food)" and hit vote. Done. Then perhaps ask a friend to do the same. Promise them sexual favors and delicious spiced meats for doing so. Then when they're done voting and want to cash-in on your promises, simply say "PSYCH!", pat them on the back once and walk away. What will I give you for doing this? Sexual favors and delicious spiced meats. PSYCH! And now I'm walking away. See how easy that was?

Actually, we'll do a giveaway next week, but I need you to tell me what you want first. 2b1b shit? Jäger shit? Some random shit I find laying around my apartment? A comical picture of me from middle school? I'm open, so vote, come back, leave a comment telling me what you'd like and we'll do it next week. (Another reason I probably shouldn't join the Marines: I'm too lazy to think of my own blog giveaways.) Oh, and since I know there's nothing the 2b1b Army loves more than helping me only to fuck someone else over (bless your hearts), we're up against our blog nemesis, The Prince of Petworth. BOOM. Revenge and a giveaway; what more could you want? XOXOXOXO.

3.) I got an email earlier tonight from a reader asking if I was ever going to write about my issue with Rosh Hashanah. And YEP. Sure will. Right now. That's all it takes; one single person asking for it. Because I will rant about Rosh Hashanah to literally anyone who will listen. And frankly, actually listening is a non-issue. Sometimes I line up my Larry Hagman action figures and walk around my apartment just bitching and moaning and making points with animated hand gestures. And now, despite it actually not being that funny or interesting, you fine people will get that pleasure too. So, here we go.

Diane McBlogger: God I love that woman. My mom is one of my all-time favorite people and I love her very dearly. HOWEVER, she is the reason why Rosh Hashanah season gets my modest, ankle-length skirt in a twist.

As I've discussed, we McBloggers are an interfaith family. My mom is Jewish, my dad is Catholic and my sister and I lost interest at the beginning of this sentence. My entire life, our family has only celebrated four religious holidays: Easter, Passover, Hanukkah and Christmas. That's it. That's the ballgame. And I use the term "celebrate" loosely because I really mean we get drunk, watch "Mystery Science Theater 3000" and eat a brisket.

Now, my mom's interest in Judaism comes and goes. And you know what? That's fine. Mozel tov to you and yours. If one day you feel like being a Super Jew and the next you want to host a pig roast with Jesus and Rush Limbaugh—good for you. I pray to Kelly Cutrone, who am I to judge? What I don't appreciate, however, is when her feigning interest in religion affects my life and my schedule. Because if you're going to make the conscious decision to raise your kids all, "Ohhhh, here's a pupu platter of religions! Take want you want and leave what you don't! There is no right and wrong! Come as you are and leave as you were; we're not trying to change you, just educate you," and all that hippie bruhaha, I think it's hypocritical to force me to participate years later just because all of a sudden it's important to you. And yet that's exactly what happened in September of 2006.

I was a Senior in college in September of '06 and much to my chagrin, I was forced to take web design. If you couldn't already tell from how primitive this blog is despite my background in graphic design, I loathe web design. I think it's boring, confusing, and involves wayyyy too much thinking for my liking. Which is exactly why I chose to be a print design major. But our department head, in all of his infinite wisdom and glory, decided to make my graduating print design class take web design so we would be more "marketable" after graduation. Asshole.

Web Design was basically a semester long project where we had to design two versions of a website for a local band; one using HTML, JavaScript, CSS blah blah technical blah and one using Flash. (SPOILER! I didn't do it. My friend Stephanie did mine for me and I say a little prayer for her and her health every night because Christ knows I didn't know what the fuck I was doing. The extent of my coding knowledge is mostly Live Journal based and is limited to bold, italics, underlines, strike outs and my pièce de résistance:

SCROLLING MARQUEES!!!!1

Pretty much all of us outsourced our websites, which looking back made sense at the time, but now that I'm paying off my student loans in one-liners and handjobs, I kind of want to set myself on fire.)

Flash forward to a phone call I got from my mom the first week of September:

D: Meg, I need you to come home for Rosh Hashanah dinner next Tuesday night.

M: Rosh-a-what-now?

D: Rosh Hashanah.

M: Oh. No offense, but...why?

D: Because Rosh Hashanah is the Jewish New Year and it's important that you're here for it.

Let's time out right there: no it's not. I mean, yes, Rosh Hashanah is the Jewish New Year, but it really didn't matter if I was home for it or not. The Jews managed to survive 5,771 Rosh Hashanahs with out me up until that point, I'm sure one more wouldn't have brought on any plagues or frog showers. That being said, who was I to turn down free brisket and facetime with Evie? So, I agreed to go.

Unfortunately, part of my web design project was to create a photo gallery of our band with original photography from live shows. And when was my band's next show before our photo galleries were due? You guessed it: Rosh Hashanah. I figured my mom would be cool about it though because, you know, we had been to Disney Land more times than we'd even discussed Rosh Hashanah and school comes first, right? Wrong.

[Ring, ring!] D: Hello?

M: Hey, it's Meg.

D: Hi honey, what's up?

M: Listen, I've got some bad news—I can't come home for Rosh Hashanah dinner anymore. The photo gallery for my band's website is due soon and I need to go to their show at the Black Cat that night to take pictures. Sorry!

D: Well, I'm sorry too. Because you have to come home for dinner.

M: What? Wait, seriously?

D: Yes. Seriously.

M: But, why?

D: Because it's Rosh Hashanah.

M: So?? I don't even know what that is! This is like you telling me I have to come home for Fluggityfark.

D: Meghan, you know what Rosh Hashanah is. We celebrate it every year.

M: WHAT?! We have never celebrated Rosh Hashanah in my entire 22 years of my being on this Earth. EVER.

D: Meghan, we always celebrate Rosh Hashanah. You're just not remembering and I'm not having this conversation with you anymore. It's important to me that you be there and that's final.

Now, time the fuck out right there. This still boggles my mind. We had seriously never celebrated Rosh Hashanah before and I can't believe she told me otherwise to try to get me to come. Because had my mom just been like, "Hey-o feelin' kind of Jewy, it's important to me that you come home so we can celebrate Rosh Hashanah as a family," that would have been one thing. But to try to implant these false memories in my mind of Rosh Hashanahs past to guilt me into coming is just so manipulative and ultimately, well, Jewish.

And then the truth came out:

M: This is absurd. We have never celebrated Rosh Hashanah before and I can't go because I have something to do for school. They're not going to have another show until after my gallery is due and if I don't get those pictures, I'm going to be totally fucked.

D: Well, I'm sorry, but I already told your sister she didn't have to go because she got tickets to see Mos Def that night and at least one of you has to be there.

...Allow me repeat that: I had to go because Rebecca was going to a MOS. DEF. CONCERT. My already shitty project in the class that I was struggling the most in was now in serious jeopardy because Rebecca felt it necessary to go to a fucking MOS. DEF. CONCERT. I'm aware that older siblings sometimes get preferential treatment, but at that point I was 22 and she was 27; we were grown-ass adults. To let her go to a god damn Mos Def concert and not let me do something for school was just lunacy and borderline reckless. Plus, who gave a shit if neither of us were there?? Who was going to judge?? The only people at that dinner were my parents, my aunt, the cat and a bottle of red. Which part of that cast would have been like, "Ohhhh, the McBlogger girls didn't show up for Rosh Hashanah dinner. What values, these kids!" (Evie, obviously, but still.)

I brought this up to Becca when she was over for dinner the other week and her only response was, "Oh. Hah. Yeah. That was a good show," then went right back to chopping something.

WHAT?!!?!?!? For all the trouble it caused me, that had better have been the best god damn show she's seen in her entire life. Mos Def himself should have showered her in Cristal and performed a one-man rendition of his guest episode of "House" in Latin before sexing up her and everyone else in the audience. "That was a good show." Christ.

In the end, I obviously went to dinner, I'm sure it was delicious, my website sucked, I got a C in the class, and according to Mos Def's Twitter, he just saw Salt and has to say that that ending was the worst he's seen yet, which is saying something because he watched The Last Airbender. SO, GOOD. We're all comedians and we're all winners.

And you know what the most infuriating part of this entire situation is? OUR FAMILY NEVER CELEBRATED ROSH HASHANAH AGAIN!!!1 After all of that! I didn't even know it was Rosh Hashanah season until Chris proposed we do a post about our Rosh Hashanah New Year's resolutions the other week and I freaked out. I was like, "WAIT, IS IT ROSH HASHANAH?" "...Yes." "AND MY MOM ISN'T HAVING A DINNER?!" "Uh...I guess not?" [Drops phone, falls to knees, raises fists in the air] "GOD DAMN YOU, MOS DEF!!!!!!"

So, I've decided that from now on, I am forcing my family to observe Rosh Hashanah, whether we're feeling Jewish that year or not. Just based on principle. Because if it was magically important that year (when I was BUSY) (with something ACADEMIC), it should be important EVERY year. Diane McBlogger should personally provide me with a free hot meal, at her residence, transportation fees covered and Rebecca's presence mandatory. And at said dinner, we will listen to local DC band Deleted Scenes' EP on repeat, pass around my grades from that ill-fated semester and each family member must look me dead in the eye, apologize, give me three compliments—in alphabetical order—and at least two of them have to be based on my physical appearance and have nothing to do with my personality or "wonderful" sense of humor.

Happy fucking New Year.

You Fucking Freak: A Memoir

Before we get to what I'm sure is a hilarious Tulane Chris post, I have a few administrative matters to discuss:

1.) I just got back from Andrew of the Great Juno Debate's ironic Apex College Night Birthday Outing (no pun intended) and I learned something very important about myself tonight: I can not dance to house/techno music. But like, at all. It's like I can't mathematically figure out how my body should move to that beat. Every now and then they'd play a hip-hop song at a normal pace and I'd be like, "Ooo. Yep. I can handle this." But then it would start to speed up and be like thump, thump, thump THUMPTHUMPTHUMP—ASYMMETRICAL HAIRCUTS! SCREAMING! LASERS! CARTILAGE PIERCINGS! GAHHHHHHH!!!1 and I'd lose it. I think I did the robot a few times. Not trying to be funny, mind you, but because it honestly just felt like the right thing to do.

2.) At one point I looked down at the floor, saw something, and thought to myself, "Huh, I guess someone stepped on a french fry." In retrospect, it's highly possible, if not probable, that that was semen.

3.) Thanks to your votes, we won WTOP's Best Local Blog! Hollerrrrr! To show our appreciation, we're doing a giveaway today with our good friends at Jägershop.com! If you'd like to win a brand-new, badass Jäger Tap Machine, just leave a comment in today's post by midnight and I'll think of some highly scientific way to pick a winner and announce it tomorrow morning. Again, the cut-off time is midnight, so kindly do not enter past that time. (Yes Kevin Yang, that means you.) Good luck!

4.) BONUS ROUND! We actually owe you guys another giveaway because we ended up winning Washingtonian magazine's Best Blog in their 2010 Best Of issue as well! We didn't announce it or do a giveaway up until now because they never actually notified us that we won, didn't invite us to their party and spelled my name wrong in the magazine. It was like the "You look like you've lost weight" of wins. That being said, we're obviously still completely honored and to show our gratitude, we're also giving away a 2birds1blog logo tee to another lucky reader from today's comments section. So, again, leave a comment with your name for a chance to win some sweet free shit from Jägershop.com and the all-new 2birds1blog merch store. Thanks guys! We love you.

5.) How dare I almost forget—it's T.G.I. Hagman!

As of July 23, 2010 at 2:25am, Larry Hagman is...alive! And totally excited to read Chris' post, I'm sure. Enjoy and thank you so much again for all of your love and support.

- Meg

So, I’m sitting here in my underpants, drinking Carlo Rossi chianti out of a chipped mug and watching a made for TV movie starring Tori Spelling. It sounds like the countdown to a bathtub suicide, but for some of us, it spells contentment. Then Meg calls.

“So, no pressure, but we won the WTOP contest. So, no pressure but we’ll get a lot of publicity tomorrow so… I guess what I’m saying is no pressure but could you please try not to… I don’t know how to say this but SUCK? Could you not? Suck? No pressure. I mean I think you’re wonderful but some of the readers are tired of…rambling, obscenity-laced discussions of things some people might technically find incredibly boring.”

“Is it the rambling, the obscenity, or the boring?”

“The boring. Rambling obscenity is your medium. Work with it. Work in it. Be it. Just try not to advocate genocide this time. I’m still getting emails.”

“I… I’ll try.”

So NOT boring and NOT genocide. Tall order, but we grow the most when we’re challenged. So, I scrapped the post I’d been working on about Princess Diana, which was shaping up nicely but was hardly WTOP material, and went back to the one wellspring that has always served me well: my wacky upbringing. (A P.S. to my six faithful readers: Remember the dwarves amok at Long John Silver’s? Mom brought them up on her own accord tonight on the phone, very casually, “Oh do you remember the So-and-Sos?” Who will ever forget?)

All my life, with varying degrees of politeness, people have been telling me I’m weird. The educational system uses codewords like “gifted” and “creative,” but it’s the same thing. To be fair, I was weird. I was a moderately odd child, and it’s only gotten worse. I’m told that as a pre-kindergartener, I used to go tell the principal that aliens came down in little ships and spoke to me. (To be fair, neither my parents nor the principal could prove they didn’t.) In some areas of the country, this would have led to a therapist demanding to be shown, on the doll, where the aliens spoke to me, but in the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and Don’t Make a Fuss Because the Neighbors Will See” Belt, I was thankfully left alone.

I stayed weird through middle school. In sixth grade I spoke in an English accent because I thought it made me seem cool, one of the most monumental errors of judgement ever seen outside a government office. In seventh grade I became, through no direct fault of my own, “the kid whose parents have a cage full of turtles in the front yard,” and my only clear memory of eighth grade is saying, “Oh, don’t kill yourself, you should at least lose your virginity first.” (It won’t get me hired on any hotlines, but it worked.)

High school was a brief golden age for me. By a bizarre fluke, our school was terrible in sports and academics but had a crackerjack theatre department, so the theatre kids got the screwing-around privileges usually reserved for jocks. Weird was cool, oddly enough, but even in this climate I managed to shine. I was neither especially talented nor particularly attractive, so I played the usual third-string dads, teachers, and fatherly teachers, except for two parts: Scrooge; and Renfield, Dracula’s insect-eating mind-slave. Imagine that teenager. “Well, what can Chris do? Be an old man a hundred years ago, or a homicidally insane old man a hundred years ago?” Keywords: Victorian England; cannibalism. I was also apparently the only person who didn’t realize I was gay:

“I’m going to college to explore myself.”

“You’ve spent the last six years exploring yourself. I bet you spend college exploring other dudes.”

Well, yes, but in my defense I also experimented with drugs. As my nom de guerre Tulane Chris indicates, I went to college in New Orleans, as did the weird kid from every other high school in the country. Open-till-dawn bars, voodoo, and the phrase “oh, it’s just an alligator, leave it alone and it’ll leave you alone” don’t inspire a lust for conformity. Add the cachet that comes from “well I don’t know about you but I was an internally displaced person and the UN actually counted me as such in its yearly statistics and you should have seen Mid-City before the hurricane but the Marigny was lucky because…” and you get a square peg indeed. I had one really illuminating conversation about eccentricity in college. A friend said, “It’s always so awkward when you have to out yourself as weird.” This friend would later gain fame as “the girl who, not content with extant plagues, made up diseases and told us she had them,” but she made a good point. Even if you try to conceal it around new people, you’ll slip, and everyone will know. One passing reference to the year when you were twenty and had an irrational fear of nuclear weapons so strong that whenever a plane flew low overhead while you were asleep you hid in the bathroom because you thought the bathroom was relatively protected despite the fact that the Cold War had been over for fifteen years, and suddenly you’re “weird.”

So now, as a so-called adult, I lead a fairly quiet life on more or less my own terms. I may spend days on end eating dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets and obsessively re-reading books about the Mitford sisters, but I have my own apartment and, for the first time in my life, no one comes in to tell me I'm being weird.

Except, of course, when they do. My landlord gave me about 36 hours’ notice that an “appraiser” was coming to look at the apartment. I was especially busy that week and didn’t have time to tidy up, so the appraiser saw my habitat as it generally is:

-Mess, everywhere

-Mardi Gras beads, everywhere

-A “Christmas Angel” doll that a friend sent me because one of her legal aid clients bought it for her because it looks exactly like my friend

-Twenty pictures of pugs cut from calendars arranged in a large grid on the wall

-An orange electric wok in the hallway (because there’s not room in the kitchen)

-A drawing Giant Camel made me of a narwhal leaping over the Eiffel Tower

-A bottle of holy water in the bathroom, because Mom made me take it when I went to college and I’ve had it ever since and WHAT do you do with such a thing and it usually gets packed with my toiletries

-A two-foot-high plush pug I won at Dave and Buster’s

-A garden gnome holding a panda

-A pile of salt I spilled on the carpet that I haven't gotten around to borrowing a vacuum to clean up

-etc.

This sounds like I’m bragging, “oh look how wacky I am,” but keep in mind that I expected no visitors and was actually annoyed by having someone in my house. This is how things are when I’m home alone.

Any doubt I had that I would be known to posterity, if at all, as an eccentric was finally laid to rest in June. I only keep in touch with two friends from high school, and this June one moved onto a goat farm where the farmer anoints the goats before slaughter, because “goats are people too.” The other married an inmate live on the radio.

“What’s he in for?”

“Oh, some gun thing. You don’t really want to know.”

She’s right about me not wanting to know, but aren’t a huge number of crimes technically “some gun thing?”

Anyway, I’ve gotten used to my apparent eccentricity. It may have ruined a few dates, but it’s gotten me second dates when my other charms fell short. It’s never gotten me a job, but it’s kept me a job – no one wants to fire the guy who comes into the break room with circles under his eyes not because (or not ONLY because) he’s hung over, but because his mother called him at midnight to talk about lepers. It’s lost me a few friends, but it’s won me some hilarious enemies. It may not be useful, but it’s mine.

Speaking of lepers, and to work blue for our new readers, here’s my favorite joke:

“What did the leper say to the prostitute?”

“Keep the tip.”

See you Monday!