Deep Thoughts, With Chaviva E.

As I sit here, watching television, nursing a stomach thing slash head cold thing, unable to consume anything but fluids and crackers, I'm beginning to notice how un-Jewish and uber-treyfy commercials are.

Now, don't get me wrong. I don't expect lots of Manischewitz commercials or odes to kashruth. The Hebrew National commercials are hilarious enough for me. But the amount of fast-food and dining out restaurant commercials that advertise shrimp and bacon double whoppers as big as your head slowly has begun to shock me. Every commercial highlights bacon-wrapped shrimp or bacon double whatsits or scallops or ... you get the drift. I never realized how pervasive seafood and bacon burgers were until, well, I was really going kosher. For years I've not eaten shellfish or pork or beef/dairy. It's only in the past year or few months that I'd started keeping kosher in the home, only eating kosher meat, really going the whole 613 yards. So it isn't like I was salivating over shrimp last year, or even five years ago. But it's just now that I'm realizing how pervasive the shrimp consumption really is!

What accounts for this odd realization?

It's almost like how you wake up one day and suddenly, everything is green. That happened last week. Suddenly, the entire world was blossoming and green was the primo color. How weird. Does the brain delay such realizations? Or are we just not prepared for such things visually? Maybe we're mentally aware that everyone else in the world eats treyf or that things have gone green because it's spring, but our eyes haven't caught up with our brains?

Spring has Sprung

I'm up to my knees in the Golden Calf right now. I've been digging up images online to show the undergraduate class on Wednesday when I'll be teaching my first college course, if only for a day! Yes, I'll be the teacher. Teaching. A class. This is what dreams are made of folks. So I can't help but dig up my November 4 post where a group of Christians prayed at the Golden Bull on Wall Street for the economy. I wonder how that's working out this time around? Tomorrow at 9 a.m. at the Andover Theological Seminary in Newton Centre, Mass., I'll be giving a talk on the same topic. I'll be wedged between a Yale student and a Harvard student. Hopefully I can represent?

But the real point here, is to tell everyone that Spring really is in the air. I'm the kind of person who has never, ever had a green thumb. I killed a cactus, I killed a bamboo plant, I even killed the Wandering Jew that my mom bought me. My mother, who has a knack for growing things, no longer gives me plants because I have a murderous thumb. On a whim not that long ago, though, I bought a little Gardens of Babylon kit. It's one of those little boxes that you find on the spinny rack at the front of Borders or Barnes and Noble mixed in with your own mini putting green or beach scene. I once bought a mini sno-globe kit, even. But this was a whim purchase, knowing my history with greenery. Much to my surprise, though, over the past three weeks, this little garden has blossomed into something beautiful. When I'm having a cruddy day, I simply look down at my magical mini Gardens of Babylon and I get a hint of new, blossoming things. It's a good feeling. And hopefully I'm not jinxing myself by writing of my successes here. Check out the goods: