where to eat?

just check this list on OU.org of OU restaurants with Sukkot

that feeling

dale earnhardt believes that his father (dale earnhardt Sr.) helped saved him from a car crash

for those who don't know, Sr. died 3 years ago.

"I had my ... PR man ... by the collar screaming at him to find the guy that pulled me out of the car," recalls Earnhardt. "He was like, 'Nobody helped you get out,' and I was like, 'That's strange because I swear somebody ... had me underneath ... my arms and was carrying me out of the car.' I mean, I swear to God."

just pee on a stick

*every* day i'm convinced that i'm pregnant.  whole multitude of reasons, of course.  today it was slight nausea and bloatedness, which are obviously the main signs.  other brilliant "symptoms" i have displayed thus far:
back pain
crankiness
sensitive chest area
a 'feeling'
more nausea

my (other newly married female) friends tell me that i'm not the only one.  suddenly we're all having late periods, weight gain, and weird cravings.

what a way to spend an evening:

Remove Overcap. Simply hold the test stick by the Thumb Grip and place
the Absorbent Tip in your urine stream for 5 seconds. Lay the test
stick down on a flat surface with the Result Window on the clear side
facing up. You may soon see a pink color moving across the Clear Top to
indicate that the test is working. Read your result at 3 minutes.
Follow the complete instructions inside box.

First Response Pregnancy Test Results

Pregnant - Two Pink Lines in the Result Window . One line may be lighter than the other.

Not Pregnant - One Pink Line in the Result Window

today i thought "if i were just pregnant, the guessing would be over..."

bloggity bloggity bloggity

so many movies.

mystic river
kill bill 1
calendar girls
master and commander
kill bill 2
soul plane
sweet sweetback's baadasssss song
yellow submarine
thin man
mean girls

and there will be more coming soon.

any requests?

i'm out...

Gmar Chatima Tova

as if i wouldn't know

voicemail, 9/21/04, 4:47 PM
"Hey, honey, it's Avraham"

so cute

get cracking

Starbucks has been reticent to certify the Frappiccino mix, because it does not perceive a demand to have it certified as Kosher. If people contacted Starbucks asking them to make the Frappiccino mix kosher, there is a good chance that they will certify their mix.

commuter

i work in battery park and live in washington heights (approximately).

so i take the 1/9 one stop, switch to the 2/3 up to 96th, then switch back to the 1/9.

yesterday i got on the 1 at 96th, which was running slow due to idiotic people holding the doors and delaying it in each station.

at 137th they announce that they're running express to 168th, then to dyckman, then to 242.

i get to 168th and have no interest in switchng to the A.  so like a smarty i go out to the bus.
i can't find the bus.

i walked home.

/spoiled girl who thinks 20 blocks is a long walk

lever-pull

nothing like watching the blue meanies fall before sergeant pepper's mighty band...

you're such a lovely audience!
  achshav kulam byachad

free the lobsters! 2

oh, happy lobster, happy edward! (hint: click on the lobster breaking out of it's tank)

ah, vacation

you'd have to appreciate that after my mother dropped a glass plate on Shabbat morning and cleaned up rather thoroughly, no one had any problems until i stepped on the, yes, one shard that was ever found.

as this is a time of introspection, i can assure you that i hear God loud and clear as he's shouting "wear shoes when there's broken glass on the floor, dammit!"

Sightings

Sightings  3/10/05

Samurai Soteriology
-- David L. Simmons

With Hollywood still buzzing about the recent 77th Academy Awards ceremony, this is a good time to consider one of the most influential forces shaping our attitudes about religion: the movies.  My favorite movie from the past year was ignored at the Oscars: Quentin Tarantino's second "volume" of his epic tale of bloody, inexorable revenge, Kill Bill.  Taken together, the Kill Bill movies demonstrate some bona-fide Zen Buddhist doctrine, and can be read as a filmic meditation on the Zen koan that provides the philosophical keynote for the plot: "If you meet the Buddha, kill him."

If it seems outrageous to suggest that Tarantino might have anything to teach us about Zen, recall that in the West knowledge of East Asia and its religions has always been inseparable from mythmaking about them: every Japanese Pavilion has its Mikado, and the Beat Generation that brought Buddhism into the cultural mainstream was informed as much by Hermann Hesse's novel Siddhartha as by the groundbreaking scholarship of D. T. Suzuki.

Moreover, the introduction to the United States of both Zen Buddhism (at the World's Parliament of Religions) and the film industry (with the demonstration of Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope) occurred the same year, 1893.  The first movies filmed in Hollywood were westerns, and they were a decisive influence on the samurai films of Akira Kurosawa (an admirer of John Ford), which in turn provided the model for the "spaghetti westerns" of Sergio Leone.  The Kill Bill movies pay homage to this historical interweaving of eastern and western film and religion.

The koan about "killing the Buddha," which can be heard in the beginning of Kill Bill: Volume 1 via the voiceover of the Japanese actor Sonny Chiba, is attributed to Rinzai (Ch. "Lin-Chi"), a ninth-century Chinese monk who developed a school of Buddhism that focused on "sudden enlightenment."  In order to rid his disciples' minds of the attachments that prevent enlightenment, Rinzai prescribed meditation on a "saying" (the koan) designed to break the habits of mind that caused these attachments.  If the disciple persisted in these habits, Rinzai was also known verbally and physically to attack the recalcitrant monk.  Indeed, his violence became as legendary as his koans.

Rinzai's techniques lie at the heart of the samurai code, the "Way of the Warrior," that has become famous through movies about hit men, such as Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai and Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai.  The connection between Zen and the "flying swordsman" kung-fu movies from which Tarantino liberally borrows is also evident in the films of King Hu, the director of the aptly titled Touch of Zen who is credited with inventing the genre in the 1960s.

How are we to understand Rinzai's admonition to kill the Buddha as a training tool to achieve enlightenment?  In Zen Keys, an introductory "guide to Zen practice," the Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh explains: "For the [student] who has only devotion, this declaration is terribly confusing.  But its effect depends on the mentality and capacity of the one who hears.  If the student is strong, she will have the capacity to liberate herself from all authority and realize ultimate reality in herself."

In Kill Bill, the character who embodies these Zen principles is The Bride, an assassin played by Uma Thurman (who happens to be, in real life, the daughter of Robert Thurman, a renowned scholar of Tibetan Buddhism).  Her weapon of choice is a hand-crafted samurai sword, and it is in the context of a religious ceremony, in which the sword smith bestows the weapon upon its wielder, that Rinzai's koan is repeated.  By the end of the Kill Bill cycle, the sanguinary Bride (whose given name is revealed to be Latin for "she who blesses") achieves a salvation of sorts, liberating herself from all worldly authority by following the Zen warrior code.

Perhaps Tarantino's references to Rinzai's school of Zen Buddhism should be understood in the same light as the fictive "Ezekiel 25:17" speech Samuel L. Jackson's character recites in Pulp Fiction: it's just "something cool" he once heard in a movie.  On the other hand, the religious aspects of Tarantino's films are too often overlooked.  Kill Bill is the work of a master storyteller in a powerful medium, and a tale of a warrior's spiritual journey that is as convincing a representation of "samurai soteriology" as anything I know of on film.

David L. Simmons is a Ph.D. candidate in Religion and Literature at the University of Chicago Divinity School and a Martin Marty Center dissertation fellow.

----------

The March Religion and Culture Web Forum, featuring "Martin Buber's Land of Two Peoples" by Paul Mendes-Flohr, is now available at  http://marty-center.uchicago.edu/webforum/index.shtml.

----------

Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

25

happy birthday, me!

sing women

one more hour and we'll all be free!
one more hour, come and join with me.
we'll sing and dance through the sky with our spirits so high
and we'll show them all it's true, come and say good riddance too...

Beslan

internal Shabbat email from the OU:

In light of the tragedy that has befallen the people of Beslan (Russia), Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), on behalf of North American Jewry, is opening a mailbox to extend support in their time of need. Through special emergency funds all of us can demonstrate our caring and concern for the victims of the senseless terrorist school attack.   As a people, we have seen terror attacks on our own soil and in Israel, and know well the suffering that terror inflicts on a society. In solidarity with the people of Beslan - a small city of 30,000 in the Southern Russian Republic of North Ossetia - JDC has opened a non-sectarian "JDC-Russian Victims of Terror Assistance" Mailbox (see address below) to assist the victims. Please share this information with members of your community who may be interested in supporting this effort. funds raised will be used to provide emergency trauma relief by Israeli experts, many of whom have been active in past disaster responses organized by JDC. Contributions can be made by credit card via JDC's website: www.jdc.org or via phone: 212-687-6200 ext. 889 or by check payable to: 
"JDC-Russian Victims of Terror Assistance" Box 321

847A Second Avenue
New York, NY 10017

my friday

at midnight last night i managed to step on the one shard of glass left on the floor from a glass that broke at 6:30 in the morning.  i soaked my foot for an hour, then poked at it with a needle.  then i lay down on my bed and had avraham poke at it with a needle - almost.  i freaked out, flipped over, and went to sleep.

at 9:30 this morning we headed out to the ER.

we got back at 3.

i now have a hole in my foot.  which means there's probably no more glass in there.

         right?

hair

to answer very quickly, i don't cover my hair in our apartment.  Check up: Rashi, Tosfos ...  avraham could tell you more, if you want to know.  essentially i'm with the Rishonim here.

and being as that includes a chatzeir, i'm very looking forward to having a yard.

please read this

i hear people, most often frum Jews, say  that they hate Arabs, that all Arabs are murderers, dogs, pigs.  please - read this and think about what these Muslims are saying.

END TERRORISM

/peace out

feck

makes CRAP espresso

on the bright side, they were filming Law & Order outside of my bulding.  streets crammed, but interesting.

vanity pic

Caption: I AM A DIRTY HIPPIE

and i haven't changed much since i was five.

things to know about stern college

if you get in trouble, they will try to make you incirminate yourself

they will threaten to kick you out

they will try to play all of you off of each other

even if you are over 21, they will contact your parents

they're scared of lawyers

what to do with them?

REFUSE TO SPEAK until they tell you what they are charging you with.

if they will not tell you, leave, and don't come back without a lawyer.

make sure you talk to your parents before they do.

party!!!!!

woot!

party was awesome, pictures coming soon.  i think i have a new vanity picture of me and avs.  yay avs!  such fun.  poeple i haven't seen in a long time, such as mer, charlotte, yoel, bryan, shira, eily, noa and B-sh, mia!!!, sara, ...  the list goes on and on.

avraham's impressed with the amount of consumption that went on.  i'm happy to see that marriage doesn't mean you can't have a rocking time at your place with all of our friends.  yay friends!

so happy birthday to avs, me, bryan, and mia (in that order), good bye to benyomin, who will we miss dearly (and ari and elliot, by extension), and see you guys soon in Jerusalme.

r' jungreis

from http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0904/rebbetzin_convention2.php3:
Following the heart string pulling tale of "i'm a child of the holocaust", she states "How different the world might have been if a man like President George W. Bush had been at the helm in those days of darkness. "

is it just me, or did she say that the Bush is a better man than FDR?  she's talking morality, not policy.

she continues, "Following 9/11 it was President Bush's valor and commitment to do battle against the forces of terror and evil that has ensured the safety and security of our nation."

um, yeah, they hit NYC and DC.  he got pissed.  why does that mean he'd have cared about a bunch of Jews in Europe?  (as avraham says, i can't see how invading iraq in 1938 would have helped very much.)

"More than HOPE, our president is determined to TRIUMPH over evil, and continues to labor, not only for a secure safe world, but for an America in which timeless values prevail"

ahhhhhhhhh.  right.  i forgot.  FDR wanted EVIL to triumph.

/was stuck on 34th street for an hour last night waiting for bush to drive by.  stupid republicans.

: )

happy birthday avraham!

free the lobsters

run little lobster!  run!

notice

party on sunday. if you weren't invited and should have been, drop me an email.