If You Belonged Here

I'll Be Beggin' the Question of Ye, Lassies

Short and sweet today, people:

Do you have a favorite accent? What accent do you think is the sexiest? The funniest?

Pandora Lost Her Groove

It's gone, baby, gone.

Actually, it's been gone since about the beginning of March but I just now realized it's truly missing.  Not having my groove is seriously effecting my social life because quite frankly, what's a goddess without her groove?  She's just ordinary and I, Pandora, am anything but ordinary.

I think it starting slipping away sometime after my friend's birthday. That's when I hit a relapse with the ex.  

Did you know that it was possible to have someone break up with you more than once after the initial breakup?  

I've been dumped three times by the same guy within the same month. He's the first guy to ever completely mess with my emotions and my normally grounded mind.  I still don't even think he fully realizes how much of an idiot he was about everything.  Plus, the more I analyze the situation, the more I realize that he wasn't that much different from any other guy.  Oh, it doesn't make him a bad person, it just doesn't make him the right person for me.    

On top of that, San Diego and schoolwork were doing a number on me.  I needed to escape and leave everyone and everything- at least for a bit.  I impulsively decided to go back home to the mountains for spring break.  I took my daddy's credit card and booked some of the last remaining seats on the cheapest flights I could find.

No Cabo San Lucas and no body shots on the pier for me.  I wanted my cat, a glass of wine, and to watch musicals with my mother while it snowed.  The mountains are my happy place where nothing changes.  I know that my favorite lesbian bakery will always be making paninis and that my candy store will always sell gummy cola bottles that I can mix with sour worms. 

I went all Eat, Pray, Love these past few weeks.  I indulged in home-cooked meals, had serious conversations with my closest friends, and loved every moment I spent with my mother and father.  It was sort of a mini mid-life crisis, and I'm still in the middle of it.  

Maybe it's just more of a funk.  

To me having a dream that WWIII was happening on American soil complete with terrorist attacks was a clear sign not to get on an airplane or to be back in San Diego.  It didn't help my anxiety that I drank three cups of coffee before the flight.  Not even Ben Gibbard or Devendra Banhart settled me.  Nonetheless, I'm back down south, but I really don't want to be here.   

I need my groove and ENFP self back.  I'm nothing without either one of those.  For my first week back, I didn't even want to see anyone outside of my roommates.  Instead, I stayed home, did homework, and somehow managed to get sick.  

I'm ready to have my groove back. I'm just going to need a little help and support on the way.  I'm not even sure where to start.       

So, folks:  

Help me find my groove?

Do you think you know where it's gone?

What can I do to get it back and reach full goddess potential?

Maybe an all-girl dance party complete with demon alcohol and a killer playlist  (ahem Dol...)?

 

Foreskin's Lament

 A good laugh does wonders for our souls and if that good laugh comes to me as a result of another man's fanatically religious and obviously painful upbringing, well then, so be it.

Reading Foreskin's Lament by Shalom Auslander is nothing short of a crash course in fanaticism and its undesirable affects on the brain. Speaking of the brain, I've racked mine trying to write something that does this memoir justice and the truth is, it's not going to happen. A girl can't do justice to a book so wonderfully well written and easy to read, yet so far from her realm of understanding.

It is safe to say that fanaticism is something I was never taught, religiously or otherwise, and for that I am thankful.

I grew up eating bacon (traif, I now know) on Sunday mornings without the thought that it was the delicious result of a slaughtered pig ever crossing my mind. My grandmother took me to church on occasion, so long as I wore tights and chewed a piece of Trident to keep quiet until it was time to be released for the children's service. I didn't mind going because there were always doughnuts and orange juice afterward. 

Not to mention the fact that my mother would give me a one-dollar bill for the offering plate,  which I stole each time and used to buy candy at the pharmacy downtown.

I've never considered whether or not my parents are religious people. I suppose I always just assumed as much. After all, my Dad kept a sonogram photo of his and my mother's first baby, who didn't live, tucked in the pages of a massive Bible in his desk drawer. He told me one time that an image in the sonogram looked to him like the hand of God and so, I assumed that God was one he firmly believed in. Because my mother is married to the man, I went ahead and assumed she believed, too.

The thought that, "I was sick. I was diseased. I was a criminal. I was a Sodomite, an Amorite, a Hittite, a Sinite, a Givite. I was Cain. I was Esau. I was Lot's wife," has never crossed my mind. In fact, I'm not even sure what 80% of those words mean and the degree to which I'm not afraid of God being angry with me for Slim Jim consumption is likely as foreign to Mr. Auslander as those words are to me.

Throughout each chapter of Foreskin's Lament we get a glimpse of the ways Shalom Auslander's parents' belief in and practice of Judaism affected not only his mind as a child but, more interestingly, the ways those beliefs and practices are unshakable to him as an adult.  

The man has clearly mastered two things in his life: fearing God and writing about it.

I can imagine the frustration that must come along with a constant internal dialogue, but what I cannot imagine, for the love of all that is holy, is the fear. Fear of eating Cheetos, fear of loved ones dying, fear of a parent, fear of the act of circumcision. Fear of publishing stories about fear.

Auslander writes about a walk in the woods with his dogs and his wife, Orli, as she explains to him that the story of the old lady and the foreskin "sounds like bullshit." He calls for the dogs, worried that someone may be getting an early jump on hunting season, noting that without their orange safety vests they look like deer and writes, "If I could get one of those vests to protect us from God, I wouldn't even be thinking of circumcising our son."

I hate to say that I'm quite happy, for one, that orange God safety vests don't exist because if they did, my favorite book wouldn't.