*sniff* Well, in the continuing saga of Naomi's Nose, I appear to have caught a cold. I am fighting it with massive infusions of vitamin C and denial, but looking on the bright side, this at least gives me a valid excuse for the redness, if not the peeling. (And let me tell you, finding things in my wardrobe which do not accentuate the red and which are cut high enough not to display my V-neck sunburn is getting more and more difficult. Yes, yes, I know you don't care, but indulge me.)

In more important news, Yom Kippur starts tonight at sundown and lasts until tomorrow evening, which means that it is time for my annual debate over Whether Or Not To Fast. I have issues aplenty (personal, social, religious, etc.) with this practice, so I pretty much have the fun of working it out for myself every year. Now, most people who have a reasonable level of Jewish literacy (i.e., you remember to wish Jewish friends "Happy Hanukkah" instead of "Merry Christmas") are vaguely aware that Yom Kippur is The Really Important Holiday When You Fast, Even If You Had A Bacon Cheeseburger For Lunch The Day Before. (It's usually translated as "Day of Atonement," which is (a) convenient and (b) mostly wrong. If you're curious and can wade through lots of little transliterated Hebrew phrases, check this page for a fuller explanation.) I'm not ignoring the atonement/forgiveness aspects of the holiday, which are considerable, but the nifty thing about most religious holidays in historically conscious traditions is that they're really, really overdetermined: each one commemorates half a dozen different historical events and/or ideas. Therefore, you pretty much have to pick something to focus on when you think about a given holiday each year. (I mentioned this to my officemate, noting that Epiphany -- for example -- is simultaneously supposed to commemorate the visit of the Three Kings, Jesus' baptism at the Jordan, and Jesus' miracle at the wedding at Cana -- and she pointed out that this only applies if you're in a liturgical or liturgically aware strand of Christianity. She has a good point, although even not-especially-liturgical Christian denominations tend to have lots of older hymns cluttering their hymnals which provide all the possible associations.)

At any rate, Yom Kippur commemorates an awful lot of things, but one of its strongest themes is that of commemoration itself, or more precisely, remembrance. We spend the best part of the afternoon in services designed around precisely that theme. There is the Yizkor or memorial prayer (with a little service around it); there are currently four recitations of it in the Jewish calendar, but it was originally said only on Yom Kippur. The idea is that close family members (technically parents, siblings, children, and spouses) recite this prayer in memory of their departed loved ones, although many modern Jewish communities will recite it as one, which strikes me as a logical enough response to the twentieth century. That same afternoon, there's a unique service usually called the "Martyrology." It originally focused on the Ten Sages killed by the Romans during the failed Bar Kokhba uprising in the 130s C.E. Almost immediately, it expanded to include other narratives of Jewish martyrdom, from the ur-stories in Maccabees to the medieval communities allegedly sanctifying the Divine Name by killing one another before the crusaders could reach them. Nowadays, we have lots of stuff about the Holocaust added on as well. But the proper name of the Martyrology service comes from the first words of its first prayer, one of the original ones about the Ten Sages: Eyleh ezkerah, "these things I remember." It's an amazing prayer. It begins Eyleh ezkerah v'nafshi alay eshfehah. "These things do I remember, and I pour out my soul." Or perhaps "my soul melts with sorrow." My Hebrew isn't good enough for me to decide between translations, but the next line is really amazing if you read it more or less literally: "for strangers have devoured us like unturned cakes." (The Reform prayerbook has "how the arrogant have devoured us," which isn't as...graphic.)

Eyleh ezkerah is my favorite service on Yom Kippur, and all these years I got stuck on the first line and never thought about the second. The connection between food and death is a strong one in many world religions (check out this article for a laugh), and certainly in Judaism, where the mourning period after a funeral features prescribed meals, traditional foods, and really frightening deli platters with whole smoked whitefish staring up at you with little beady eyes (okay, maybe that's just my family, but I'm still traumatized). There is also a less-well-known connection: when Jews fast on Yom Kippur, as I understand it, we are playing dead. You see, in addition to fasting, an extremely observant Jew will avoid bathing, wearing leather or jewelry, or having sex during the holiday. He (and, yes, this is gender-specific) will wear the kittel, a white garment which is otherwise worn pretty much for one's wedding and one's burial. Observant women will also wear white, the color of Jewish burial shrouds. Again, this is overdetermined: we are making the same preparations which Moses made for ascending Mount Sinai, for example (although it seems perfectly logical to me that he, too, was preparing for a sort of death). But entering into death for a day makes quite a lot of sense, especially this year. And while not showering would just make me feel vaguely uncomfortable all day, I can not eat. Not devour anything or anyone. Not do one of the customary things that goes along with living. It seems to fit my life better than attaching a flag to my car, but that's all about remembering too, isn't it?

These things do I remember, and I pour out my soul, for strangers have devoured us like unturned cakes.

It's time for some harmless entertainment, right? (Angel is not harmless. It sucks away my time.) Check out The Grand List of Comic Book Cliches, borrowed from the excellent weblog at /usr/bin/girl. My personal favorite: "Every rampage by a professor-turned-supervillain is caused by a college bureaucrat cutting the professor's funding." Look, an alternate career path of my very own! (Yes, somebody's been trying to write job applications this afternoon.)

LMU lost, but not too embarrassingly -- mostly because their defense is halfway decent. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of their offense. The game was a blast, though; I had a spare ticket, so my co-worker-with-the-tailgate came with me to the game (her in-laws use her tickets), and she was able to explain the details of various penalties and rules. I now know what a "touchback" is. (We failed to stick a lot of them.) I have also discovered that tailgates are potentially wonderful outdoor parties -- if I get a job at a football school and that pickup truck I want, I could really get into this -- and that it would have been a good idea to wear sunscreen while sitting on the sunny side of the stadium for three hours. Oh, well -- there's nothing in the next week or so that requires me to look devastatingly professional, which is just as well, since it's difficult to look devastatingly professional with a red nose.

Among the pre-game tributes to last week's victims were readings of the preamble to the Constitution and then the non-specific bits of the Declaration of Independence. I memorized the former years ago, when my mother wound up organizing lots of bicentennial events, but I don't know the latter especially well. It's funny: despite all the scholarship of the past decade arguing (convincingly, to my mind) that colonial America was largely unchurched and irreligious, and despite the better-known Deist sympathies of several of our founding fathers, the Declaration's last sentence notes that it is taking place "with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence." We don't have Saint Denis or Saint George to invoke as we roar into battle, but we do have a nice activist God On Our Side. Whatever the heck that means these days.

You want a saint to invoke? Today is the feast day of Thecla of Iconium, ostensibly a companion and defender of Paul of Tarsus. Her vita dates from about the fourth century and is included in the apocryphal Acts of Paul. In the legend, her ex-fiance and various other authoritative men tried to have her imprisoned or killed for becoming a Christian, but God repeatedly saved Thecla from certain death by fire (it rained) and by wild beasts (they licked her feet). Towards the end of her life, while she was living an eremitic life in a mountain cave, a group of men again tried to attack her, apparently intent on rape (there is some particularly unpleasant modern scholarship which makes fun of this on the grounds that nobody would want to rape an older woman), and God saved her once again. This time, an opening appeared in the rock of the cave just large enough for Thecla to pass through and then closed behind her. Her attackers only caught a piece of her veil. In some versions of the story, she reappeared in Rome and died shortly thereafter -- this is probably a conflation of two historical Theclas, since one of them was indeed buried in Rome -- but in most versions, she simply disappeared into the mountain. I suspect she didn't see any point in coming back out. She is, at any rate, venerated as a protomartyr. Perhaps we should consider adopting her as the patron saint of avoiding conflict and eschewing showy martyrdom.

Oops, I'm trying to stay away from geopolitical issues. Mostly. Anyway, we sang "America The Beautiful" and "The Star-Spangled Banner," and a collection was taken, and a prayer was offered that didn't address the game at all. I sang, and I said "Amen." And then they played ball.

On a lighter note, I have located a good Mexican restaurant in this town. The last one I tried to go to asked whether I wanted ranch dressing with my tortilla chips, and I went into culture shock. This one is located in a strip shopping center. My friends and I drove around the area for several minutes before we found it, and it has no ambiance whatsoever -- but the tamales and agua de horchata are delicious.

Testing. Mostly testing whether I can avoid giving in to acute narcissism.