Let’s Hear it for Optimism

We heart Good4.

The young lass returned from seminary excited and eager to build her BNB. So far she’s only been turned down as too fresh out of sem. She frowns. I snicker. We’re all waiting for her to land.

Still, there’s nothing like a fresh face to bring optimism and joy to an enterprise growing dull with familiarity. She intends to marry the first guy she dates, which is to say, she intends the first guy she dates to be the right guy to marry. Or, the way she puts it, “I want to go out with my husband already!”

“You mean you want a date?”

“No, I don’t want to date. Dating is yucky. I want to meet my husband.”

“How do you know what dating is like?”

Incredulous stare.

“Okay fine. But when you say it like that it sounds like you’re anticipating an arranged marriage.”

Then there was the time the Pater pointed out that she had put her age down on her shidduch profile. “You’ll have to update it every year if you leave it like that. Change it to your birth-year.”

Good4 considered this idea briefly and then discarded it. “Nah, I won’t be needing this for that long.”

We can hope and pray.

From the Also4 Files

Also4 is probably the only forever-learning yeshiva guy who has a bone to pick with the bais yaakov system. The problem is that the teachers occasionally shoot off at the mouth (for lack of a better description, all due respect intended, etc), and there are wide-eyed, impressionable young ladies who actually take everything they say quite literally. (I’m not mocking: I was part of that group to an extent.) These students then take a line carelessly tossed off by someone older and wiser and solemnly incorporate into their understanding of the world in general and their husbands in particular. This means that Also4 has to field formally posed interview questions like:

“What if you had a sheila to ask but you were feeling lazy and didn’t want to ask it?”

Also4 replied, “The same thing as if I didn’t feel like getting up for shacharis or learning a full seder.”

Oy. I had to cover my face when I heard that. Also4, if you ever get convicted, keep your mouth shut and don’t waive your right to an attorney.

I agree with him, by the way. It’s amazing the sorts of things people try to feed us aidel maidels, as if we’re the most naive, gullible things on the planet. Which is why I burst out laughing when he related the following conversation:

Her: “Do you smoke?”

Him: (proudly) “No, of course not. I’ve never touched a cigarette in my life.”

Her: (disappointed) “Oh. So you’re not a serious learner then.”

I don’t know which enterprising young man started the rumor that all serious learners smoke, but he should be given some sort of prize for chutzpa and then hanged immediately. Yes, I’ve heard it. No, I’m not falling for it.

Thankfully, I date here in the good ol’ US of A, where we at least put up a facade of not interrogating each other.