You shall love your neighbor as yourself, it's not exactly unclear

[dorchadas]

I've been going to bed late and getting up early, so I'm extremely tired. But time keeps moving forward.

This morning I successfully set the כונה kavanah ("intention") for a prayer as part of Mishkan's morning minyan, and I picked הריני מקבל על Hareini Mekabel Alai, the prayer for "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." I talked about how that's such a simple statement but people keep trying to find a way around it or some way to get out of it, much like with "Black Lives Matter" or with another similar statement I've seen elsewhere, "Women are human." You should love your neighbor as yourself, even if they mow the lawn at 6:30 a.m. on Shabbat, or glare at you when you go out to get the mail, or are Christian or Muslim, or are black. The statement is clear. Then I led the singing, and now Mishkan knows that I can sing, and that might be trouble in the future. I suspect this won't be the last prayer I lead.

I saw an amazing quote on Facebook someone shared from tyree.kimber that ran:

ME, A CYBERPUNK FAN IN THE 90S: Why do they think we'll only talk in weird slang in the future?
ME NOW: Bae, spill the tea on these K-pop stans. When Tik-Tok zoomers yeet the alt-Right it's heart reaccs only.

...and I immediately burst into laughter because I understood every part of that second quote. I shared it and then several people were like "wtf are they saying" which just made me laugh harder. As uriany said, "Null sweat, chummer."

Hamburger patties from Green Fire Farm LLC, with sautéed Swiss chard from Gray Farms and Collards from Wild Coyote Farms, along with leftover crimini mushrooms from River Valley Ranch and broccoli greens from Wild Coyote Farm from last week. The egg and broccoli are both store-bought, and not visible is the non-farmer's-market-but-local spicy hummus from the Middle Eastery Grocery Store in Andersonville.

בשר בחלב basar b'chalav (lit. "milk and meat") means that cheeseburgers are right out, so I have to find other topping for hamburgers. Eggs are my go-to now, lightly fried with the yolk still mostly liquid. It's especially great if you're eating an actual hamburger and you bite into the egg and the yolk spills out everywhere , but while I had bread from Bennison's Bakery leftover from last week, I'm not sure whether there's dairy used to make it and so I couldn't use it for buns. Though I just realized I have pita in the freezer that doesn't have dairy among the listed ingredients from the Middle Eastery Grocery Store...next time.

I fried the hamburger on a pan, which is not the prescribed method but the egg helped make it juicy anyway. I was going to cook the greens in the hamburger juices but then they'd be meat-adjacent only, so I cooked them in a separate pan and cooked the egg in the juices instead. Yum.

A Lost Larson chocolate croissant, captured at the golden hour thanks to waiting an hour between (meat) dinner and (milk) dessert in accordance with the Zohar. Many Jews do six hours, some do three, and some do one. I'm in the latter group.

In Hiroshima City, there is a bakery chain called Saint Marc Cafe that had a store right next to the bus center, and almost every time we went into the city we'd stop in and get a chocolate croissant--チョコクロ choco kuro--and in that spirit, when I saw this I had to try it. It's even more chocolately than the choco cros of Japan, since there's chocolate in the dough here. It was less buttery but more chocolately, and while I miss choco cros, this is a good substitute.


I'm seeing sashagee tonight! And other than that, my upcoming plans are fluid. Yesterday lisekatevans and I went on a walk along the Lakefront when it was technically closed, but just like all the other times it's been closed no one cared, not even the group of bike cops we saw go by. We sat on the path, watched the swollen lake lap over the lowest tier and walked on the nearly-swamped pier, and chatted for an hour. Other than the asshole screaming obscenities at several passersby for daring to come close to him during the Plague Year (outdoors, in the lake breeze, when we know that shouting is far more likely to spread respiratory illnesses ), it was incredibly peaceful. Since being outdoors is pretty safe, I feel like I'll be spending more time at the lake this year than I ever have in the past.

I didn't get to go to Mishkan's meditation, but that walk was healing too.

Comments

[symbioid]

LOL I kinda had to share the cyberpunk quote (anonymously on FB) it was too good. If that's not ok - please let me know.

[dorchadas]

No problem at all! It's so perfect.

hooray for this post of nice things

[corvi]

Religious singing, yay.

Chocolate croissant, yay. I haven't seen one with a chocolate dough before, just the French-style pain au chocolate where regular dough is wrapped around a couple lumps of chocolate and baked.

Re: hooray for this post of nice things

[dorchadas]

That's exactly how all the Saint Marc croissants I had were as well! I think this is the first choco dough croissant I've had, which is why I had to try it.

[prixmium]

I really appreciate your commentary about "love your neighbor as yourself."

In a more realistic sense, recently we have had some new rental-house neighbors move in across the street. My father is having a lot of trouble with just accepting them and minding his own business. I am really impressed with his level of tolerance for a lot of things despite a lot of ingrained American Southern Christian traditional values stuff that makes it impossible for him to consider a different point of view on the acceptability of, say, homosexuality or being transgender. My dad is a pastor, and I respect him, but he is very much a product of our region and his time.

The woman across the street does make it kind of difficult to appreciate her as a neighbor. She is a white woman with Black mixed-race children, and you can't help but feel bad for them because most of her parenting seems to be sending them into the yard to play and yelling at them when they don't do what she wants them to do. They really need more instructive attention, even though right now they're at ages where their behavior is completely normal kid-stuff. I just can't help but agree that they seem a bit neglected-by-mistake/ignorance. And the woman constantly has a flow of different men in and out of the house, and again my tendency is not to judge people if they choose to have loose or open relationships, and I don't know what the relationships with these men even are, but it really concerns me when people with young children have a great number of different adults who appear to not have a clear established authority or lack thereof in the house.

But my dad's issue is, like, their hip hop and R&B blaring when a car pulls up in the driveway. And I have tried to tell him that this is really no different from him playing his guitar on the front porch, but he seems to associate that genre of music with a "lifestyle" he disapproves of.

But I want to see those kids' lives come to good, even if their mother lives in ways that I don't think are very good for them.

[dorchadas]

That's exactly the kind of situation where it gets harder and it's not really clear what to do about it, if anything.

Your father's issue reminds me of a local ramen place called Furious Spoon, which opened a place near me and a lot of the Yelp reviews were about them playing hip hop and not about the quality of their food. I distinctly remember a review using the phrase "they play the rap," which, well...