Bling Bling in the ATL

Girl fish came to live in my aquarium, oh, i don't know - last fall. She and boyfish didn't get along too well, and then they did. I liked her better for a while. She investigated the tank, looked at all the little glass rocks, found places to hide.

She lived in a little green compartment of the tank to keep her away from boyfish. Then me and BIB went away and girlfish and boyfish spent a week with BIB's boyfishes at our friends house.

For some reason after that, boyfish liked girlfish just fine. And he built bubblenests for her and after a while she got really fat with eggs.

BIB and Len said that girlfish was pregnant... but its hard to say that because fish eggs don't get fertilized until they are expelled into the bubblenest. If girlfish was pregnant, then she died of an etopic pregnancy. For some reason, she never laid her eggs in the bubblenest boyfish made.. just got heavier and fatter and heavier and fatter. And in the end... her side ruptured and she had a herniated egg sac hemmoraging out of her side. No fish blood... just her equilibrium seemed screwed. She still swam around, and then today I came back from the crisis center and she was dead in the water, all the eggs expelled on the acquarium floor around her.

I am projecting, I know, but boyfish looks sad and at a loss. Being a fish, he doesn't understand whats wrong.

Well, I guess I will bury girlfish in the backyard once it stops raining.

Rest in peace, girl fish.

...theres this guy acting really lame.

Whether its a party, online, pick-up volleyball, work, the park, the grocery store, there he is. Ever present and so obvious. Trying to, "help" me, "coach" me, "fix" me.

Pretending that I should let him control my decisions because its good for me, instead of just good for him. Confused about about the difference between what I want and what he wants.

Gods gift to troubled and imperfect woman, thats who he thinks he is. Acting out some internal script on human beings he mistakes for paper dolls.

What gives? Get a life! Who do you think you are? Whats your problem? Piss off! My cats catch lizards like you to bring home as presents, torture them on the living room floor and then eat them for breakfast. I've got a man and after I kick the crap out of you, he will probably want a piece of you too.

See, I'm not trying to fix you, coach you, treat you, heal you. I'll just show you how to stay out of my way so you don't get a beating because you pissed me off.

Just got back from synagogue. Good food. BIB came, much to his surprise. We took a different route than usual, approaching the building from another direction. Up until now, I'd only seen the very end of the building- and never realized what a huge complex it is. The synagogue and school form a sort of accidental, rambling, deconstructivist... thing, with faux-masonic add-ons, the occasional wall of stained glass, silo-like structures encased in stucco, extensive wooden ramps leading into play-pen kid spaces littered with fleets of empty tricycles.

BIB amused himself mightily on the quarter-mile walk past all of its ramparts, imagining himself in turns as the visionary Rabbi who ordered this or that addition, then as the commonsensical jew who tries to point out the folly of grafting any more fluted columns onto an undisguisable fall-out shelter.

After service, BIB had a chat with the Rabbi. The Rabbi revealed some interesting bits of history about the place. In the 1950's, the building was built by the Klu Klux Klan who, at some sort of peak, hoped to build a university which would be a beacon of white supremacist thought, and call it Lanier College. But.... they ran out of funding, Atlanta turned to desegregation and civil rights instead, and eventually the building was sold to Shearith Israel, masonic temple facade included.

And thats about it for today. I played sand-pit volleyball on Thursday, and you know.. I think I'm growing muscles in my feet. Damn Samoan genes. Arches and achilles heel feel really buff and weird. Either my feet are getting pumped up, or its ringworm. Time will tell. I'm gonna go again on Monday. I was pleased to see that after 10 years of not playing - I'm good! You can give me pretty much anything and I'll set it acceptably for a spike. I'm not that great at 2 man games - the strategy is much more about running to where the ball should be and hoping your teammate actually manages to put it there, whereas a 5 man game was always a lot more reacting to where the ball goes. But I'm sure practice can bring that about.

Dogwood festival tomorrow - rape crisis center and fire hula hoopers should be at Piedmont Park in full force. I'm gonna bring my volleyball and see if I can get some play in.

Its feeling a bit like the run-up to the Iraq war, with journalists and foreign diplomats leaking all over the place, telling us its war. Going through the motions of UN diplomacy, blowing up fears about missiles and nukes in Iran... I think we're going to war again. Certainly we can't expect that the Bush administration has learned anything from their mistakes in Iraq and Afghanistan. If theres one thing I've learned in 5 years, its that GWB will never fail to kick it up a notch and astonish with the destructive audacity of his bad ideas.

From the New Yorker:

One former defense official, who still deals with sensitive issues for the Bush Administration, told me that the military planning was premised on a belief that “a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government.” He added, “I was shocked when I heard it, and asked myself, ‘What are they smoking?’ ”

and this...

Speaking of President Bush, the House member said, “The most worrisome thing is that this guy has a messianic vision.”

Its not all scaremongering about Madman-In-Chief, although there is an extensive section on how the white house refuses to rule out the 'nuclear' option, and why, in the absence of intelligence (gee, ex covert spy Valerie Plame and company would come in handy right about now) they might need nukes. The rest of the article is pretty informative - tactical discussions with pentagon folks, regional politics, etc. Good article, peppered with testimonies like this from various well placed sources.

And if you're not all that interested in Iran, I'd recommend a read just for the fact that it'll get you good and pissed off. If you're anything like me, theres nothing like a maddening news article. And, according to Seed magazine, theres a good chance you, too, use the news for anger management...

"According to a separate study published in Human Communications Research, people intentionally seek out certain types of news stories in order to enter or sustain a certain emotional state, thereby using media's effects for their own purposes.

"There has been a lot of research about how people use the media to optimize their mood," said Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick, a co-author of the paper and assistant professor of communications at The Ohio State University. "Our idea was that often times you're not just trying to optimize your mood, you're trying to adjust it in preparation for anticipated situations."

More here. Fun stuff. I had no idea that the discipline of Political Psychology even existed. Maybe I should get a PhD in it.

So I met with the Rabbi and he was very nice even though its not exactly his mission to help Unitarian Universalists educate themselves about Judaism. He gave me a list of steps that I should take and added a few more.

So basically, in a short two weeks, my todo list has grown from...
1. Learn Hebrew, read the Torah, read some books.
to ....
2. Learn Hebrew, read the Torah, read some books, take a 3-month class in Dunwoody that meets once a week for $250.
to last, and hopefully finally...
3. Learn Hebrew, read the Torah, read some books, take a 3-month class in Dunwoody that meets once a week for $250, attend synagogue, AND - Rabbi insists - get BIB to do all of this as a couple.

I think the point where I force BIB to take a Judaism 101 class in Dunwoody for three months that meets once a week is the point where I can no longer humanly meet the requirements set before me. "I mean, whats next?" I asked BIB, "my first born child?" BIB fixed me with a look and nodded. "Yup. You're catching on."

But - to be honest the Rabbi's instinct was sound, though the content of his advice was off. If any actual learning takes place on my part, BIB's going to be involved one way or another. Best to do that openly, rather than after the fact, by accident. And - there is something in this for BIB. We were talking about why we can't do Passover with BIB being the only knowledgable Jew. I compared it to a conversation - BIB needs someone to hold up the other end. BIB agreed, and said that having Passover with a bunch of non-Jews is like having a conversation with a bunch of retards (not a PC statement for 8 different reasons, I know.) You respect them because they're people, but... the conversation doesn't really go anywhere. So maybe instead of Judaism 101 class in Dunwoody, substitute a Passover where BIB and I can have a proper conversation, get drunk, dork out. Or not. I don't know. But once we figure it out, we should do it and it'll be fun.

The Rabbi also gave me a 3CD set of the Shabbat prayers - which are pretty much essential for someone like me to ever actually participate in a service. I started listening to them today, and whoa..... flashback.

I'm 15, in my room in Saudi, memorizing Qu'ran for a test coming up. The AC is blasting AND the window is open, because thats how I like it. I've got surrealist paintings EBF has cut out of the Mansfield library books and sent to me tacked on the walls. My dad walks by and I am acutely aware of how weird it must be for my parents that their teenage daughter's room either sounds like:

1. PJ Harvey screaming about how she's going to cut a mans legs off or...
2. an Imam

And that dichotomy is pretty much a good description of

1. how I feel on the inside: (I might as well be dead... but I could kill you instead)
   
2. how I sound on the outside: (Bismillah arrrahman arrraheem... )
   

Took me a minute to back off of that lovely childhood memory, and I still have a lump in my throat and a pit in my stomach. Had to remind myself: while Hebrew and Arabic may sound similar, memorizing Qu'ran as a class requirement in a religious police state is different than voluntarily seeking out knowledge for fun in Atlanta.

I think that I will have to keep that distinction in mind as I move forward. This has got to be fun and worthwhile for me, (and BIB) or no good can come of it.