Cheetos, Chariots and Chets.

On the journey to Hebrew School I often felt nauseated. Some of the nausea might have had something to do with the fact that I hated Hebrew School, but most of it had to do with the vile chariot that transported me there. Twice a week after regular school from the age of 9 until dropping out at 12 I was transported over hill and freeway overpass to my synagogue to learn Hebrew, and apparently the woman who drove me had religious objections to cleaning her car. And, mind you, this is a complaint coming from the individual who proudly (hell yeah!) didn’t wash her car for over a year and a half. Verily I tell you, the amount of crushed Cheetos in her seat cushions could have fed all of Minnesota for about five years, or at least they COULD have had they not been rotting. Hell, I didn’t even know Cheetos were capable of rotting since until that point I hadn’t been entirely convinced that they were actually made out of food.

Shit man, this journey to Hebrew School was so educational. There was more learning going on in the backseat of this car than goes on on The Learning Channel. You know what else goes bad that I didn’t know goes bad? Water. Did you know water has an expiry date? Well it does, and this woman had cases of water in her backseat, and all were expired. And they smelled RANK.

To top it off, I quite vividly remember finding a half-eaten moldy sandwich in that seatback pocket where (in normal cars) you would find crumpled maps, expired coupons and McDonald’s Happy Meal toys from the late 80s, and I feel like the armrest was some sort of a time/space vortex of rotten food, because every time I opened it I would find different horrifically expired food items. Though the food was different each week, it clearly hadn’t just been rotting since my peek last week. Let me try to explain that better: one week I’d open it up and see a black sandwich. The next week I’d open it up and see a cupcake with such intense mold that it HAD to have been rotting for longer than a week. Meaning, either some funky time hole thing involving the Doctor was going on where this was food from the future being transported back in moldy state or something, or this crazy bitch was INTENTIONALLY putting rotten food in her car. Then again, I think I’m the even crazier bitch for opening this armrest every week.

Again though, I’m not squeamish about a bit of mess or dirt involving food. If you ask me whether or not I have ever eaten from the floor a Skittle that someone had quite clearly stepped on, I will answer, “I plead the Fifth.” With that in mind, imagine the level of filth this car must have reached if it grossed even me out.

If you are retarded enough that I still have to explain that this car smelled like shit, you should probably stop reading and just go sit in the corner right now. No, accept it as a given that this car smelled like shit, but specifically it smelled like the taste you would get from eating chocolate and lemon together, and then having acid reflux. The worst part of all of it was when we would turn on the air conditioning (a necessity in LA!), and then directly into our poor, innocent faces it would spew out flavored air conditioning. Specifically, ass-flavored.

I don’t normally get carsick, but I used to get so sick from hurtling down the freeway in what smelled like the men’s bathroom at a curry restaurant. Even though I hated Hebrew School, once we arrived at our brick temple I would leap out of the car and run up the stairs, not giving one solitary shit that my school uniform skirt was flying up and flashing everyone in my desperate bid to get away from the Manky Mercedes. I’d pause in the hallway and try to steady myself, feeling as though if the teacher asked me to read a Chet (the “Khhhh” noise) then I would have no choice but to violently vomit over everyone.

Once the car-induced nausea wore down and I remembered that I was, once again and like every week, the only jackass(besides my brother) wearing a school uniform, the other kind of nausea would set in.

This one time, this dude totally fell asleep in intro to hinduism

At some point we’re going to need a serious post about the fact that a member of staff just casually dropped an anti-Semitic remark like it ain’t no thang. I am, however, feeling a little ill (I wish I could claim that the shock of the remark on my Jew-soul gave me this cold, but unfortunately I’ve been sick for a couple days now), so instead I give you an edited version of a previous bit of writing I did.

I thought about it yesterday when I fell asleep during a lecture. In a normal lecture with the about 180 members of my program this wouldn’t be such a big deal, but this particular lecture was with 18 students only. When I woke up I thought maybe I’d gotten away with it, but when I made eye-contact with the lecturer she gave me a pretty undeniable glare.

With that I give you: THIS ONE TIME THIS DUDE TOTALLY FELL ASLEEP IN INTRO TO HINDUISM



Today during lecture--given by an Italian guy that I like to think of as Professor Mario Brothers--I noticed that my neighbor had fallen asleep on the shoulder of his other neighbor. She seemed slightly annoyed by it, but they were acquaintances so she wasn't too upset by it. I laughed, thankful for myself and amused at someone else's misfortune. I also liked that we were in the second row, the Splash Zone if you will, since you're so close to the professor that if he spits when he talks you will get wet. It's like the first few rows at Sea World or a Gallagher performance. Anyway, if you ask me (and you are asking me because this is my blog), to fall asleep within any professor's Splash Zone takes chutzpa to a new level. Instead of discretely dozing off in the back few rows of a huge lecture hall where the professor's weak eyes won't notice your closed ones, you choose to position yourself close enough to the professor that his lapel microphone can pick up your snoring.

Anyway, after a lengthy mental digression, my thoughts returned to the subject of the lecture. Well, actually my thoughts returned to their normal subject during that class--noting which words the professor has trouble pronouncing. But then something horrible happened. I sensed my neighbor shift in his seat. And then, horror of horrors, I noticed his head sleepily traveling from his other neighbor's shoulder towards me.

For any stranger reading this blog, you have to understand that I don't like being touched. It's not about germaphobia....I don't know if I have OCD or if I'm just weird, all I know is that I don't like being hugged, I don't even like handshakes, and I just generally do not like people who get too close to me. I usually make a genuine effort to forget about this problem when I'm around friends and family, but even with my own brother I would get very upset when he would fall asleep on my shoulder during car trips. So you can imagine how horrifying it was to see a stranger's head approaching and looking to do that very thing.

In fact, here's the theme from Jaws to provide a soundtrack for what I'll write next:


And so his head slowly advanced towards my shoulder. No no no, I prayed silently, please dear God....Buddha....Jesus....Krishna....whoever. Please for the love of all that is holy do not let him reach my shoulder. But my prayers fell on deaf ears. I had to come up with an escape and quickly, because I only had seconds left before his head made contact with my shoulder. Realizing that I was sitting in an aisle seat, I figured I could just lean out of my seat towards the aisle. Surely his head would stop its journey eventually, and I could just sort of huddle in my corner. And so I leaned out....and his head kept coming. So I leaned out more.....and his head kept coming. Eventually it got to the point where I was leaning so far out over my armrest that I resembled a damp towel on a clothesline....or like a fat, dead fish just kind of flopped out, with my fat bulging over the sides of the armrest. This was as far as I could go without flipping over my armrest. And trust me, I considered it. I wasn't sure if the armrest could hold my fat, but I just held on and prayed that the advancing head would stop.

But it didn't. The head finally landed on my shoulder. Actually at this point, because of my sort of weird crouched/reclined posture it landed on my hip/arm. But whatever, all that matters was that a stranger was now sleeping on me. There were a few minutes where I silently thought about what to do, if I had to wake him up or if I would just have to suffer through class, when suddenly and completely involuntarily my body, as if deciding to take matters into its own hands, just had a spasm. It was the sort of spasm that wasn't dramatic enough for the people around me to notice, but it was strong enough to wake up Sleeping Beauty, who suddenly bolted upright, snorted and said something like, "Huh? What?"

And then about two seconds later he had conked out once more. Thankfully he didn't use my shoulder as a pillow again, but I kept a wary eye on him for the rest of class just in case. It became apparent, however, that this guy was incapable of sleeping without a shoulder-pillow, because for the rest of class he would sort of doze off....his head would sort of drift backwards...and then BOOM! His whole body would seize--like literally the whole body would seize, and his arms and head would flail around--and he'd sit upright, completely startled and awake. And then within a few seconds the process would repeat itself. I spent a few minutes watching his cycle of falling asleep, then suddenly completely spazzing out, trying to stay awake, and falling asleep again, and I imagined he was probably thinking to himself, ZzzzZzzZzzzz *SNORT!* HUH??? Where am I? Oh shit, was I sleeping in class? Okay, I can't fall asleep again, I gotta stay awake....but....but maybe it'll help me concentrate if I just sorta tilt my head back and....zzZzzZzzzzZZZzzzz."

While this cycle took a few minutes for each revolution during the beginning of class, by the end of class it was happening every couple of seconds. Honestly, I even entertained the thought that he was having a seizure. But once I realized that he was indeed still just falling asleep and waking up repeatedly, I started laughing. In the middle of lecture. Which was about burning widows on pyres in Hinduism.

I looked around me and realized that no one in this 100 person lecture even noticed the guy who was having what looked like seizures every couple of seconds. If you ask me, not noticing stuff like that is a waste of coming to lecture.

/

I think I'm too immature to get to Heaven.

Well, the good news is that I did finally venture out of the library. This morning your favorite (yeah, I said it. What of it?) field anthropologist ended up attending mass, and in terms of having a meaningful experience I think I would have to call it an indisputable failure. And, as always, that was my own damn fault. True, it wasn’t as bad as the time I spent almost all of a Quaker meeting thinking about what would happen if someone were to fart (would they just stand up and claim it as divine inspiration?), but it wasn’t much better.

Usually when I venture into mass or any other service I tend to use it as an opportunity for a nice think, since I’m not much of a participant. Sometimes it turns into a great experience, as if it’s meditation for stuffy Republicans like me, but other times…like today…it’s basically an hour of me trying to block out inappropriate thoughts. And no, you filthy perverts, when I say “inappropriate thoughts” I don’t mean vulgar mental images. Today “inappropriate thoughts” means, “What is the worst song I could possibly start belting right now in the middle of mass?”

This is my version of a Koan, I guess.

Think about it. You are in a large church, surrounded by priests, people training for the priesthood, and the saintly people they know and love. It’s an incredibly important service, there’s a sacrament in it and everything, and my God is there a lot of solemn kneeling in prayer. You’ve given it a lot of thought and you’ve concluded that you’ll probably only be able to get a few bars in before one of the acolytes tackles you into submission—so which song is it? Which song is the most hideously inappropriate thing you could possibly imagine belting during the middle of mass?

What got me thinking about this was all the special clothing they put on for services. Observing the cassock and cotta-fest that is mass made me think of muumuus. Thinking of muumuus made me think of fat ladies. Thinking of fat ladies made me think of the busty black women who sing, “It’s Raining Men.” Which, obviously, gave me the urge to stand on top of my chair and start belting “It’s Raining Men.”

As soon as I became conscious of that thought I conceded defeat. Trying to have a proper think during today’s mass would be an exercise in futility, so I might as well devote the next hour or so to coming up with an even worse thought than singing “It’s Raining Men” instead of “Agnus Dei.”

I decided that “It’s Raining Men” clearly wasn’t beaten by such favorites as Tom Jones’ “Sex Bomb” or Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl,” but it was definitively trumped by anything produced by the Village People, particularly the YMCA. (Though, once the fog machine that is the thurible really gets going, what is the church if not a massive and cheesy bar mitzvah? Get some cheap DJ lighting in there to play on the fog and you got yourself a Jewish rite of passage.)

The ready-made ridiculous dance moves (and I don’t just mean the wacky arm movements—yes, I mean the embarrassing pelvic thrusting, too) that come with the territory made the YMCA a strong candidate, but thinking about bar mitzvahs made me consider the potential of music from other faiths. The obvious choice was the Islamic call to prayer, but that seemed less ridiculous and more dickish. Simply drowning out one statement of faith with another would be turning a bit of fantasy into a bit of jihad, and that just ain’t my style.  

What about the song “Chai”? 

We had to learn how to dance to this travesty in religious school. I have to imagine that Israeli dancing is probably the most offensive thing you could possibly do in a church; not because it’s offensive to the church in particular, but just because Israeli dancing is simply offensive in all contexts. I should probably provide full disclosure though: the fact that my uncoordinated ass was forced to dance in circles as a crucial part of my religious education from the age of 3 until I was 12 might have something to do with my dislike of Israeli dance. So maybe singing and dancing to “Chai” in the middle of mass is not objectively all that awful, when compared with the option of the YMCA.

But I don’t want to rule out all faith-related musical inappropriateness. Although, to be honest, the worst thing you could possibly sing in the middle of a mass in a high church setting probably comes from the Christian tradition itself: