A Farewell to Black?

Don’t get me wrong – I like black. I like the way I look in black. Black simplifies my wardrobe marvelously. But the whole black situation is completely out of control. A non-Jewish neighbor of mine wears black and black every single day.  She’s an arteest, though, and is trying to look weird. (Though even I could do a better job, honestly.) One day I cleaned out my drawers and realized that 2 out of the 5 t-shirts I’ve been rotating all summer are black. Another one is white.  Half the things in my closet follow this zebra pattern.  I decided it was time to give color a chance.

I thought I’d try a week without black. Well, excepting skirts. A person can’t go cold turkey. Black skirts are very practical and also comprise about 75% of my skirt wardrobe – 100% of my casual skirt wardrobe ever since I learned how to change a tire while wearing my khaki-colored one. (That wasn’t my brightest moment.) I had to do some archaeological work on my closet to find something to wear, which inevitably led to me throwing out an awful lot of stuff I didn’t even know I was saving, let alone why, or even how I came to own it. (A long pink skirt? I did not buy that. Nor will I wear it, crusade against black or not.) This left my closet looking a bit emptier than usual.  Refilling it should have struck any woman as an irresistible challenge, but somehow Cannery Row by Steinbeck proved even more irresistible. And then there was something by Wodehouse, and Mccaughrean, and Pratchett… And don’t forget the spinach to plant and beans to pick and running to do.

The next logical step was a bit more daring. No little black suit on dates. It always seemed stupid to me – getting dressed up for a black-tie dinner when there never is one. There are very few things that feel stupider than finding yourself in middle of Flatbush restaurant, sitting at a table in your nicest black suit when your 8th grade Home Ec teacher is at the next one over in her Sunday finery and studiously ignoring you, and the jeans-clad Israeli waitress is eying your date and rating him on a scale between 1 and 7. Well, there are other reasons why that feels stupid, but the suit is part of it. You can look formal and well turned out without a little black suit. Or any suit, for that matter. NMF #6 (or was it 7?) never wore a suit until after her BFF proposed.  (But then again, she was prone to edgy behavior.) My favorite evening was the time I sat in a lounge dominated by high school girls running around in their summer pajamas. While there are very good reasons for me to be dressed more nicely, I still felt as over dressed as if I’d gone to a pool party wearing a burka.

Of course, any revolution in dressing requires a trip to Herald Square for a wardrobe adjustment. The Dangerous Book for Boys had to be set aside. You wouldn’t believe how difficult it is. (Both: setting aside the book and shopping for color.) I’m not going to go into a shopping harangue, but I left a lot of nice stuff on the rack for the simple sin of being available in only black or white. The highlight of the expedition was drawing a graph on my TI-83 representing the best use of my coupons. The difference between best use and easiest use was nearly $30, btw. Be careful with your coupons. That’s the best advice I can give about anything related to shopping and colorful clothing and what to wear on dates. Now if you wanted book recommendations, running tips, or home-grown cholent beans…

Don’t We All Wonder?

Michelle here has interviewed real live men and women and compiled a list of what they do and don’t like in their dating partners. This cutting-edge research can be found right here.

Oh the Irony

I was at the BeyondBT/SerandEz shabbaton, for reasons I still don’t completely understand.

For any of you who were wondering what kind of bizarre people blog – having met them, I can say that they are people just like you and me. In fact, one them looks just like me, and some of them look just like some of you. There seems to be a disproportionate amount of English majors among them, but otherwise, they’re mostly normal. The BT contingency were also normal folk, but I don’t think there were any English majors. You might meet them in the street and not be able to tell the difference between them and an FFB. Scary, isn’t it, when the religious status of a person’s lifetime is essential shidduch information.

Anyway, a friend of a blogging friend was trying to convince a fellow’s mother that I was just the girl for her boy. She began listing all my sterling virtues, and, running short a bit earlier than she’d intended, fell back on plain ol’ information about me. “…and she had a blog,” she enthused to the mother.

“A blog…?” asked the mother uncertainly. “Um, isn’t that bad for shidduchim?”

Now how did she know that? Someone must have blown my cover…

The Imp of the Perverse

I feel a bit daring putting that title up there. The last time I used it in a high school essay, I got a shocked question-exclamation mark in the margin in big red pen. I think the teacher mixed up “perverse” with a different word. “The Imp of the Perverse” is the title of a story by Edgar Allen Poe that I particularly like, because I’ve got such an imp on my shoulder constantly.

Which is why I feel a bit like a smoker – “Quitting is easy! I’ve done it four times already.” Each time you make and break a public declaration to quit, you feel slightly sillier, until it’s just intolerable. Therefore, I have determined to quit quitting blogging.

I mean, it’s not like blogging is a vice. Most people don’t think there’s anything wrong with it – I’ve asked loads of bloggers, and they all agree.

I’ve never been very good at definite dos and don’ts. Whenever ‘they’ told me I had to do something, I immediately found it utterly distasteful to do so. When ‘they’ told me I mustn’t do something, I immediately felt an irresistible temptation to do it. You can imagine I was the darling of my bais Yaakov high school.

So I won’t put blogging off limits because I can’t resist thumbing my nose at myself. Here’s my blog. I can put stuff on it – or I can not. I can put stuff frequently – or not. In short bursts, or in long, drawn out periods. The options are mind-boggling. Perhaps I’ll just go read a book to avoid the boggling. Or maybe not.

It puts a strain on the reader, I know. If you don’t have a feed reader, you never know when to check back for updates. That’s why, when I was blogging, I went for daily posts. You always knew there would be something. But that was too much of a strain, so I decided to quit. That also proved a bit of a strain, so now I’m just going to dabble. It’s not the grand, supernova exit I was aiming for, but clearly I’ve failed at that long ago. Some of us were just not made for elegance.

There’s another note for the shidduch resume. “Not good at grand or elegant exits.” But for now we’ll leave off the “mulishly perverse” annotation.

Passing Around the Hat

The show is over, but did you appreciate the entertainment, folks? Paper or plastic, no metal please…

OK, this isn’t subway entertainment, but feel free to drop your donation in the box on the way out.

*curtains draw*

*usher bags the last of the litter*

*light flickers off*

*door closes*

*lock turns*

Websites for the Non-Existent

I am not endorsing these sites, just pointing them out, because these things only work when there’s critical mass involved.

There’s a bit of a dichotomy in Orthodox Judaism today. For the most part, yeshivos teach that a guy has to learn full time to be a good Jew, while bais yaakovs urge their students to marry kollel guys for a ticket into heaven. The result is a lot of pressure on both men and women to pursue a lifestyle they may be unsuited for or just don’t want.

This has led to a general belief that a guy has to learn for at least a few years after marriage or no decent girl will agree to date him, while girls believe they need to specify a minimum learning requirement to get a guy who isn’t a bum. Learning is considered the only barometer of religious observance.

So there are guys learning strictly for shidduch purposes, and girls asking for learners strictly for shidduch purposes, and the whole thing is a pretty big mess.

Two columns in the Jewish Press were recently deluged by letters after they printed letters from guys who complain that they’re ehrliche, but no girls want to look at them, because they have jobs. The avalanche of response was from girls who have always yearned for an ehrliche working boy, but were told that they didn’t exist. To which, the columnist concluded wryly, there are clearly both working boys and girls who want to meet them, but for some reason they’re not getting set up with each other.

That’s the idea behind http://torahmatch.com. It’s a site for these ehrliche guys and stay-at-home girls to post their info and request to get set up with each other.

It sounds likely enough to me, though I’d like to point out that ehrliche is in the eyes of the beholder. Don’t we all think we’re good Jews? And yet, the guys and girls may not agree on the ehrlichness of movies, sports, internet, missing minyan, and the myriad other details that make our lives interesting with controversy. That’s one thing I liked about this site: http://imeinkemach.com - they say to include your shopping list description of what ehrliche means to you, in all it’s unpolitically correct glory. Hey, let’s face it: those details have made and broken matches.

Credit to the Overland Park fan for the links.

Seeing Stars

It was one of those blank months where nobody on the planet seems interested in marrying you – one of those blank months that occur between the single weeks when around three people say they’re looking into you, but never get back to you, leading to blank months… yeah, you know what I mean.

I was walking to the train from a Manhattan lunch with my grandmother a month or so ago when I passed a woman handing out fliers on the corner. I always take a flier no matter what they’re selling because, as my grandmother points out, they have to stand there in the heat or cold until they’ve handed out every last one; it’s a small charity to get them one paper closer to home.

Unfortunately, this woman wasn’t handing out notice of a closeout sale around the corner or a brochure urging me to buy a Cingular phone. She was an astrologist handing out fliers advertising her own business.  So when I automatically reached out to take a sheet, she looked me in the eye and said, “Wait! I see something! Something about your love life!”

I was three steps beyond her by then, but I had to turn around. I mean, I didn’t have a love life, so anything she had to say on the matter would be entertaining, if not downright intriguing. So I stopped and listened to her tell me that everything had seemed to be going so great, and then he’d seemed too demanding, and I shouldn’t give up, I should try to understand him and not let him slip away, and even if he seemed distant I should understand that… he just has issues.

No wonder she’s standing on the corner handing out fliers.

I thanked her and said no, I wasn’t interested in a palm reading. She asked me if I was Jewish, which I answered affirmative, and then went on my way. (Now why would she care? Did she realize her error in offering a love-life diagnosis to an orthodox Jewish woman?)

Of course, before I had reached the station, the luring power of fortune telling was sucking me in. Sure, I didn’t have anything happening at the moment, but that was because there was this guy, and everything seemed to match up, and were going to go out, but then he was a bit demanding on a single point, and I’d let him slide, but maybe I should have just understood… that he has issues.

Yes, well. I let him slip away and here I am, a month or two later, still single. Just goes to show: always listen to your medium.

Halt the Crisis! Oh Wait, Never Mind.

Soon after I retired for the second time, someone sent me a clip from an MSN article on dating and marriage. I couldn’t access the article, but if you copy and past the words into a search engine, there’s a blog out there that posted the entire thing.

An excerpt or two or three:

“Once you can have faith in the fact that you’ll eventually meet someone — today, tomorrow, next month, whenever — you’ll naturally loosen up,” says Orbuch. “And guess what? That relaxed attitude is precisely what attracts guys.” Dudes don’t really dig the desperate thing, but they love a girl who’s comfy with herself.

…

And when you do meet a guy, ditch the “Is he The One?” mind-set. “When you put so much stress on whether or not he’s the right man or if you have a future together, you end up sucking the fun out of the moment,” says Orbuch.

But here’s the eye-catching line that leads the entire thing:

“According to the U.S. Census Bureau, about 90 percent of Americans will marry,” says Jean Elson, PhD, a sociologist at the University of New Hampshire.

Isn’t that nice? 90%. Sounds pretty successful! They put out medications when they have a 20% success rate, 50% in any clinical study is a Wow margin, and 80% is generally well beyond an average standard deviation. Can you imagine? 90% of Americans will marry! That’s pretty much everyone.

Wait! Hold it! What’s Jean Elson PhD’s problem? This isn’t good, this is a shidduch crisis number! 10% -does that sound familiar? [Hint: 10% of this year's graduating class of women will never...]

That was my first reaction. Then I started paying attention to the wording. The official Shidduch Crisis claim is that 10% of women will never marry. Whereas, according to MSN, 10% of Americans will not marry.

We can assume that (at least) 10% of Americans have mental, physical, or emotional issues that might prevent them from marrying, or just don’t want to. So 90% could very well cover everyone who is capable of/should marrying. In the Shidduch Crisis picture, 10% of women aren’t matched up if every man is. Meaning, for every guy who isn’t married, another girl is single, above and beyond the baseline 10%.

Oh shucks. I guess we still have a crisis on.