I have nothing against the common practice of transliterating Hebrew words into the Roman alphabet -- in fact, I rather like it. Sure, it's confusing sometimes (how do you spell our winter Festival of Lights, anyway?), but it also allows those who don't read Hebrew fluently to join in communal prayers and to enjoy the sound of what I have always considered one of the most beautiful languages in the world.

Then there are the less noble benefits, for those of us with a tendency to pun across languages. Yes, yes, we know that the Torah does not open with a reference to ursine excretion and that "sotah water" does not come in regular, diet, and Code Red. We mean no harm. But sometimes we just can't help ourselves.

It wasn't so bad when the little newspaper article on a Very Orthodox Jewish day school referred to its curriculum as including "hulachah." That, my husband pointed out instantly, was merely a reference to the ancient and well-respected tradition of teaching Jewish law through interpretative dance. (Since my next words were "Moses received the Torah at Sinai, and passed it down to Joshua," you will just have to imagine the accompanying full-body gestures.) The real problem was that another element of the school's teaching -- according to this article -- was "Gmorra."

D'you think they offer Sodom the year before, or the year after?

(Or, a series of long-overdue announcements. MT needs an "alternate title" option for those of us who read Shakespeare too frequently at a formative age. Anyway:)

D. and I have bought a new house, and although it will be a month until we move, I can already feel myself going into Moving Mode. That chair across the room -- do we need it? Do we want it? Where shall we put it? I'm already primed for it: this past summer I went through a good part of my old house, on the way to putting it on the market, and I even managed to weed through my bookshelves (now it's possible to avoid stacking most of the books) and some of my files (they now fit in the file cabinet, as opposed to big piles on the floor). Oddly enough, there were things I clearly didn't need anymore -- things I hadn't touched since I moved in -- heck, things I hadn't touched since midway through grad school. So I disposed of nine bags of trash and six bags of clothing and five bags of books and One Ring to rule them all, which just goes to show that I need to be in Moving Mode every three years or so, even though I despise moving.

Of course, Moving Mode is applicable to other sorts of things which, similarly, I have not touched since midway through grad school. One of them is my single-minded determination to get a tenure-track job and then tenure. Well, I got the first part down -- I've been in my present job three years. The problem is, I don't like it there. I love hanging out at conferences, I enjoy teaching in other venues, the city itself is just dandy, and I actually like all my departmental colleagues as people, but I cannot and will not fit in with that department, and to some extent with that university (for which my department is combination flagship and red-headed stepchild). I thought I could make it work -- it was the best job in my year! And, heck, they wanted to hire me, which showed their amazing perspicacity! -- but three of my favorite colleagues left after my first year, and almost every hire, decision, and group prayer (don't ask) since then has reinforced my sense of Not Belonging.

So I don't much like my job, and at this point (thanks to a third-year review process which was long, drawn-out and probably actionable were I so inclined) my job doesn't much like me either. Since I had been toying with the idea of finding another job for easily the past year, the latter revelation came as a rude shock followed by relief. So I am taking one last year at Boondoggle U.,* to be followed by a graceful exit. And I know what a proper academic would do at this point: publish herself silly, apply for all reasonable tenure-track jobs across the country (didn't I already do this?), maybe piece together some sort of existence adjuncting on an unwanted-course-by-unwanted-course basis. The thing is, I may be a scholar -- my department temporarily made me doubt that, which is one of the things I hold against it -- but I am not a proper academic.

As this is my blog (and I hope this might help someone with similar questions), I will offer a quick self-assessment: I enjoy research, and I'm good at writing, but what I really love is telling people about stuff -- giving a talk, teaching a class, writing for (gasp) laypeople in a less-than-formal style. Also, I managed to write myself into a corner I didn't want to keep exploring research-wise.** I could be an academic -- I may still be -- and I could go back to freelance writing about Really Boring Things, but I am probably best suited to be a teacher. It should also be noted that I love synagogues (and occasional churches) even better than classrooms as teaching ground, and then there's that strange worship-organizing tic which (after close to a decade, not counting BBYO) should really be looked into -- but going to rabbi school, while constantly tempting and a very real probability for the future, is not a viable option for the immediate present due to assorted personal reasons. (We just bought a house, actually. On purpose.)

Ideally, I would like to do what this blog does on a much finer and deeper level:*** to be an educator and occasional minor organizer concentrating on history, religion, and mostly (but not exclusively) things Jewish. This makes for a lovely ideal but a really lousy job description. I live in a community with a decent-sized Jewish population and a great many non-Jews who are interested in religion -- and almost all of them would love me to come in and give a talk at their institution. Some of them would love me to teach a class, or a few classes, for adults or high-schoolers. The remuneration for these experiences ranges from nil to roughly what I could get for adjuncting a single academic course at a cash-strapped university, but what worries me more is whether it's possible to piece them together into a satisfying career. I've accepted some of these gigs anyway -- resume-building is more important than money this year, plus the whole point of shifting careers is to do something I Really Like -- but I do hope to run across something more complete sooner or later. We'll see. First I have to get through this here move.

Meanwhile, making this announcement frees me to post the (hopefully) amusing notes about academia that have dropped out of this weblog for fear they'd turn into venom-dripping screeds. (There is a place for those, but not from me, not right now.****) It may also allow me to indulge in graceful valedictory remarks -- not, for example, any phrase beginning with "so" and ending with "suckers." Or I could just keep piffling on as usual. At any rate, my department knows I am leaving, so anyone who knows me professionally need not fear spilling secrets. And I'm looking forward to discovering what sorts of career advice I can get from the blogosphere.*****

Right after I pull together my fall syllabi, of course, and confront my office voicemail, and attend our usual day-long department meeting. If I need to maintain an air of joie de vivre, I need only reflect that this should be my last day-long department meeting. And that I am in full-on Moving Mode.

* -- It is inadvisable to contemplate what role the ENTIRE WALL OF BOOKS in my office played in this decision, except to say that I can only do Moving Mode for so long before curling up in a ball and demanding ice cream.
** -- Which was stupid. This year my favorite bit in Sayers's Gaudy Night is the line about how one only makes fundamental mistakes about things one doesn't much care about in the first place, even if one has persuaded oneself otherwise.
*** -- And, y'know, with rather less public griping about sniffly noses. Not that reading Torah on pseudoephedrin in my usual bad-cold baritone wasn't interesting and all.
**** -- And while I am not above inventing rude limericks, I am definitely above writing them down.
***** -- Just for the record, I do not plan to take up any sort of career which could ever be featured on email spam. So Nigerian investment banking is Right Out.

Lessons Of Married Life, #2569: as soon as one of you gets an identifiable cold or similar illness, the other person needs to go to the butcher (or wherever you get your soup chicken) ASAP. And the grocery store (or wherever you get your OJ, jello, and other comfort foods, not to mention any other soup ingredients you may be out of, or if you are a vegetarian get whatever your equivalent soup stock is and then ignore the rest of this post). Because it's good to have the chicken soup made and the pantry stocked before the second person starts getting ill. I have never particularly believed that marriage is about Sharing Everything -- just most things -- but clearly germs fall in the same inevitably-shared category as ice cream and my husband's shirts. Except, y'know, about a million times less fun. Boy, there's nothing quite like knowing from experience that in 24 hours your sore throat should have escalated into hacking up a lung, is there?*

So I was going to blog about the existence of God, but in view of my sore throat, I figure chicken soup will do as well.** I learned to make chicken soup not directly from my mother, but from my Bubbie, her mother, and at a considerable geographic remove: in my first venture at cooking away from the family home, I wanted to feed my Oxford housemates chicken soup, and so I emailed Aunt Miriam to open an email window so that Bubbie could type the instructions. I no longer have that message, just the index card onto which I transferred the recipe part of it, and it instructs me to use 8 lbs of chicken per 4 carrots, 2 onions, a couple stalks of celery, and 2 quarts of water (can this be right?), plus salt and pepper and basil and a bay leaf. You dump these ingredients into a large pot (water last), simmer for 3 hours or so, then strain the solids out (reserving chicken and carrots for later) and put the soup overnight in the fridge so the fat will congeal and be skimmed off the next day.

I don't think I ever precisely used this recipe (I doubt Bubbie did either); there are various notes scribbled in the margins (proportions for a four-quart pot; the admonition "add dill"), but I see no sign of "oh, throw in a couple peeled cloves of garlic, why don't you?" or "unfortunately, it really does taste better if you leave the skin on" or even "just add water to the top of the ingredients," all of which are things I might say if I were trying to explain chicken soup to my hypothetical granddaughter. There is also a sad dearth of explanation about the chicken pieces, which ought definitely to be kosher (for purely gustatory reasons) and should ideally be mostly if not exclusively legs and thighs (because dark meat has more flavor). But as systems go, it worked well enough -- until just recently.

It started last week with a conversation with my mother-in-law about Rosh Hashanah -- more specifically, about which dishes she wants to make when she visits us for Rosh Hashanah. At some point before we got off into kashrut issues*** we started chatting about chicken soup, and it turns out that her method has only one major difference from mine: she leaves all the soup ingredients in the soup while it refrigerates overnight and fishes them out after skimming fat off the top. You leave a little more fat in that way, she admits, but it tastes a lot better. Well, the next day my husband came down with the sore throat and averred that he could do with some chicken soup, and I toddled off to the little kosher butcher shop around the corner. I don't actually buy all my kosher meat from a butcher -- the local Trader Joe's has much more sensible hours -- but for large quantities of soup chicken, the butcher shop is clearly the place to go. And the butcher's wife (because I never manage to just order food there, I always have advisory consultations) agreed with my mother-in-law and suggested chucking the onions in whole (I have always quartered them) to minimize dissolution.

What the heck, I thought to myself (I have very boring thoughts), and left the chicken and vegetables in the soup overnight. Then I pulled one bowl of it out the next afternoon and skimmed it, only to discover that the real work of chicken soup -- separating the bits of chicken you want from the much larger number of bits you don't want -- had merely been delayed and would now have to be conducted while everything was coated with cold, half-jelled soup. There is probably a Proper Way to deal with this, something like heating it all back up again so it can be strained and then cooled and then skimmed again and then finally prepared, but I couldn't cope with washing any more pots or bowls, so I just dove in and scooped through the soup in search of any stray bits of chicken skin or onion (yep, should've left them whole). And, sure enough, I wound up with a nice golden soup full of chunks of chicken and carrot (and noodles, of course), and only a few tiny pieces of chicken bone, and it tasted even more delicious than the pre-strained version. I felt vaguely disloyal to my grandmother, but D. claimed that it made him feel a lot better.

Of course, I woke up the next morning feeling like crud warmed over, but I'm pretty sure that had nothing to do with the soup. The thing is, there's another bowl of it in the fridge. It's probably astonishingly chicken-y by now, but it's also going to be a pain and a half to fix. Last night we ordered pizza because neither of us could cope with it. Fortunately, my husband says he's starting to get over his cold. What the heck, it's his family custom.

If anyone needs me, I'll be in bed waiting for someone to bring me chicken soup. And throat lozenges.

* -- Oh, wait. There's the part where we both have to read Torah tomorrow. I heart extra-strength sugar-free Cepacol throat lozenges.
** -- This may be the story of my life. Or at least my blog.
*** -- The issue in question being whether I can convince her not to worry about treifing my kitchen, because at worst it'll be a great excuse to buy myself one of those little blowtorches I've wanted forever. Muahahahahahahaha. I mean, shanah tovah.

There's not much to do on the tenth of Av, is there? I mean, if you're really into the Nine Days you avoid meat till noon, and if you're me you avoid inessential laundry until noon because you always avoid inessential laundry, but otherwise not so much. I should, of course, be assembling a syllabus and/or revising an article, but instead I am using the morning to catch up on blogging. Here is what I have been doing instead of blogging:

- Putting my house in order so it could go on the market. In addition to the usual sorting and cleaning and boxing and replacing random light fixtures with the new ones I bought last summer, I am now competent in the fine domestic arts of applying wood stain, using a skillsaw, and reassuring my husband that I am not going to cut off any body parts while using the skillsaw.
- Looking at new houses which would actually have enough space for both of us plus a vegetable garden out back and be walkable to shul. This is an interesting sociological exercise, because the number of houses where the kitchens have two dishwashers increases sharply within about a one-mile area (farther from the Conservative and nearer the Orthodox synagogues) -- and while I have nothing against two dishwashers, I am reluctant to be the block apikorsus, since it would seriously interfere with my campaign to bribe the neighbors with baked goods.
- Avoiding my office voicemail. This is self-explanatory this time of summer.
- Figuring out that just because I can wear my wedding and engagement rings together all the time doesn't mean I should -- apparently my skin is not used to rings, or I should be taking them off and carefully drying them every blessed time I wash my hands (shyaah!), or something. The redness seems to be going away, though. Yay Neosporin.
- Trying to sort out why I persist in believing in a God with some passing interest in justice despite convincing evidence to the contrary. Have concluded that phrasing the question in this way is missing the point in several different dimensions. (This is probably a separate post, isn't it?)
- Sympathizing with people throughout history who have attempted to draw up diagrams of the Jerusalem Temple (any version), because having tried to create the sand-castle version of Ezekiel's Temple,* it -- well, lacked something. OK, majesty. And whatever Ezekiel was on at the time inspiration. And a balcony in the Ezrat Nashim, although I'm sure both the seagulls and my cheerfully digging husband** appreciated my animadversions about historical precedents for the mechitzah. At any rate, the pseudo-Temple obligingly crumpled into the waves several hours later, which is about as close to a seasonally appropriate beach activity as one could wish.
- Trying to figure out how to describe my next career. I have never been able to seriously introduce myself as a professor in any case ("I, uh, teach at Boondoggle U."), but what sorts of goofy questions does one get after introducing oneself as a "Jewish educator"? (I realize that there are goofy questions with any job description; I just happen to be familiar with the professorial ones.) This is also a separate post, but only once I get it a little more sorted out.
- In only semi-related news, making fun of Jewish history textbooks on a high-school-plus level. I am currently soliciting recommendations for volumes that (a) are not hideously boring, (b) do not present a retrospective reading of mainline American Ashkenazic Zionist rabbinic Judaism as the One True Way*** and (b) occasionally recognize the existence of Jewish women between Esther and Golda Meir.**** Bonus points if said volume avoids anachronistic references to "Jews" prior to approximately the Persian Empire.
- Slightly overdoing it for my maternal grandmother's Yahrzeit. Parts of commemoration she would have appreciated: sponsoring morning minyan breakfast, making her salmon-cake recipe later in week. Parts of commemoration almost definitely for my own benefit: leading everything except shacharit Because I Can. Oh, fine, another separate post.
- Reading Torah and so forth. Since I am too lazy to check, is there any other weekday Torah reading (that is, the one you'd normally read Sat. afternoon/Mon./Thurs.) in which those three aliyot actually go on longer than the first aliyah of following Shabbat morning's reading? Because Va'etchanan is... strange that way.
- Getting my car registered for another two years, buying a bathing suit that looks good on me, and switching over a lot of necessary things like voter registration because I'm officially in a different county.
- Trying to convince myself that I have not wasted the summer. Er. Probably.

* -- We were at an appropriate beach, you see, but we only had the Gideon Bible in the hotel room. Next time I should remember to bring one of the chumashes with diagrams. And possibly more little tower-shaped molds for all the inner chambers in the courtyard..
** -- He is a digger; I am a builder. Since builders need raw material, this works out fairly well; I only had a brief urge to tell him he had to find his own straw.
*** -- I have nothing against mainline American Ashkenazic Zionist rabbinic Judaism, by the way -- it's more or less what I practice -- but take, for instance, the Karaites. They should be mentioned as something a little more important than "some weird people Saadia Gaon wrote against."
**** -- For instance, just hypothetically you understand, the index of names should contain non-Biblical female figures other than -- wait for it -- "and [Queen] Isabella of Spain."