l'chaim to life

i have a married friend who used to comment about how she thought how much more awful it is for someone with children to pass away young than for an unattached person to have an untimely death. needless to say this thought didnt go over well with me. i believe that every person's life is equally important and there is no issue of one person's life being more valuable because they were lucky enough to have had a spouse and children. perhaps if the single and childless one had lived longer they may have had a spouse and a child. furthermore, the one who dies young who has been married has gotten the opportunity to have a spouse. the one who dies young with children has had children. im not invalidating the fact that someone who passes away and leaves small children behind does not leave many suffering. all i want to say is dont do the freakin' comparisons. all scenarios are sad. and of course i do have a friend who did die young and did leave behind a husband and young children. and yes i do think this is most sad, i just dont think that its not as sad for someone to die young without ever having gotten married, without having a child, without having great love in their life. someone single may have touched others greatly through other venues , through friendship, tzadakah,chesed, and being there for one's family. when we speak of the holocaust we dont say "well six million died , but two million were single, so it was really only a great loss of four million jews" chas v'shalom!
i had a friend years ago who had told me she wouldnt have gotten health insurance unless she had children. i remember being horrified with her attitude . i remember asking her why she wouldnt have thought it important to obtain health insurance just for herself? why wasnt she important? and what would she have done had something dreadful happened to her and she had needed health insurance, but didnt have it? what then ?
i have elderly relatives who have never married , and they dont have kids. i am who i am today because of them . and i dont mean that i am single because of them. i mean that i am who i am because they have added so much to my life. they didnt have kids, so they were there for me. i have a great aunt who passed away when was three who i to this day remember . she never had a biological child to remember her, but all these years later i remember her and how much fun i had playing with her. no one knows how many lives have been touched by one seemingly simple individual.
every life is important and valuable . every life that leaves this world is an equal loss, because once they pass away the world is a different place. we all are important and we all have the ability to make this world a better place. who are we to be so cavalier as to decide whose life is more important? who are we to play g-d?

jellyfish

i saw the movie jellyfish on friday. though it is a little slow moving i did like it. after seeing it once i would like to see it a second time so i can catch all of the nuances i may have missed. the movie has a few different stories going on at once. one story is about a waitress who breaks up with her boyfriend , finds a little girl at the beach and gets fired. the next story is about a couple who gets married (our waitress is at work here) and the wife breaks her leg at their wedding. this couple seems so real i almost felt embarrassed witnessing their dialogue. the other main story is about a Filipino woman who is working in israel as an assistant to older women. even though she does not speak hebrew, her employers ( children of the elderly women) somehow think she's a good caretaker for their mothers. they are right. these two are guests at the wedding . some of the most wicked humor is employed in this story. the elderly charge tries to communicate in german to the Filipino woman because she doesnt understand hebrew. she of course just speaks hebrew and german. the Filipino woman just speaks english and Filipino.i know if i try to speak french , i start speaking hebrew because thats the first language i think of when i think of a foreign language. these scenes were hilarious!!
the heaviness of this movie was tempered by humor and supernatural special effects. the eyes of the little girl who is found at the beach are so expressive that they beckon one to a time of one's innocence. they sent the waitress batya back to confront her childhood demons. at some point i thought that this child was really batya as a child.
the picture painted of the Filipino woman and her employer seemed quite realistic. much better than the picture of foreign workers displayed in the movie james' journey to jerusalem(a disappointing movie which i do not recommend.)
the ending is magical. im tempted to give it away, but i wont.
this is another movie that shows the human side of israel. this is so important. its important to remember the strife. its important to realize that those enduring this strife are individuals full of love and life and emotion just like you and me!!

shared custody

its bad enough when i have a relationship which breaks up, but to be honest, its no walk in the park when this happens to my friends. especially friends who break up who used to be part of my chevra. who gets the friends? even a relatively reasonable couple who breaks up can make this transition difficult for the friends. like who do you hang with saturday night when each calls you up separately and wants t0 get together? of course there are always those who were friends with one party or the other to begin with and will stay friends with their pre-relationship friend. what happens when you were equally close to either party? then what? i abide by the policy of whoever calls me up first. of course this is always difficult because the second party might call me up with more appealing plans. previously it wouldnt have made a difference because if the second caller had a better plan we could have all done the second plan as a group. now its more complex . thats why i abide by my rule. otherwise things can get sticky. this gets easier, but it takes time. of course i do realize that its worst for the couple who has broken up. im just saying that the friends are like kids who now have to contend with a broken family of friends. and that ain't easy either.

fyi

very important news here:

1. dunkin donuts has punch cards now. buy any 5 hot drinks , get the 6th free. i figured this out when i spied a hole puncher near the cash register. i figured that meant punch cards were in the vicinity.
2. april 29th is ben and jerry's free cone day. 12pm-8pm
3. april 30th is baskin robbins 31cents a cone day 5pm-10 pm
4. oh and pesach precedes these great events april 19th at candle lighting time-april 27th at havdalah .
5. happy spring!!

knit (or crochet) for peace

there's a book ive glanced at several times at barnes and noble called knitting for peace. it lists charitable organizations one can knit for. its includes knitting for soldiers. its a cute book. being more of a crocheter than a knitter,i did not read the whole book. i think that the concept is more true than one might expect. but not for the reasons the book knitting for peace had intended. i often crochet on the train. you would not believe how many people of all ethnic backgrounds and economic backgrounds start talking to you. they ask you about what you are making. how long you have been crocheting.they share anecdotes about their own projects. i genuinely enjoy chatting with diverse sorts of individuals. i find it enriches my life. once i was on the train and this woman who i thought was from india started chatting with me about my crochet project and telling me how her mother used to crochet lace. at some point during the conversation she turned to her right and started speaking to her friend who was wearing a burka about my project. then continued speaking to me. more women than men approach me while im crocheting , but sometimes men are intrigued and start chatting about it. the cutest observers are little kids who become mesmorized by the repetitive motion of my crochet hook . it brings people together in a quiet way. a non-political way. people who might never have reason to interact. i enjoy crocheting for the social interactions it creates, just as much as for the craft itself. and through these seemingly mundane social yarns a more peaceful world can be created.

letting go

this week the weirdest thing happened at work. someone was fired. i work at a job where no one gets fired. in fact the management even prides themselves in this. well , this tuesday they broke their record. they fired someone . and unfortunately, they will be getting away with it. my co-worker had been in a car accident and injured her back. she finally came back to work last week, and as of this tuesday , she was let go. fortunately or unfortunately for me i had no warning that this was going to occur. perhaps i could have stopped it had i known. or perhaps not. my supervisor told my co-worker that since she was injured it didnt seem like she would be able to do the work and that she didnt think that she ever would be able to . my co-worker did try to fight back , but my supervisor being the clod that she is didnt listen. the thing is even if this woman would not have been able to fully uphold her duties she could have helped out otherwise in the office . im not sure whether my supervisor just fired her on a whim or if it was coming from the higher ups. i will investigate further on a day my supervisor isnt at work. the worst of it is that the woman who was fired was the only person in years who actually got together with my supervisor socially after work. no one else had the stomach to. so much for tl. but this doesnt surprise me . i just really feel bad for my co-worker because she doesnt have family to lean on. her mom is older and she cant live with her. her father is deceased. she is single. and she is injured. it will be very hard to find a new job in her condition. i know that the way she was fired is illegal ,and i told my friend this. she doesnt want to fight it because if she would be able to come back to work my supervisor would make her life miserable. i couldnt refute her,because i know it would be true. my supervisor could make someones life miserable.

monsey madness

one experience i have not endured lately is a monsey bus excursion. i would say i miss it as much as one misses having a tooth filed...as in not at all. its the easiest way for me to get from mid-manhattan to monsey.or so i delude myself. the ride to monsey from the diamond district on erev shabbos isnt so bad now that the only passengers are allowed to put up the famed mechitzah(which is a sheet) and not the driver. on friday afternoons i had found that the mechitzah wasnt usually up. i dont mind if the bus has a men's side and a women's side, what i object to is the actual mechitzah itself . on motzei shabbat however, the mechitzah is usually up. when the mechitzah is up i make sure to get a window seat so i dont get hit in the head with someone's suitcase. when people walk down the bus aisle with a mechitzah up, they dont realize that there is someone on the other side of the partition and they will hit you in the head with a suitcase if they are holding one. another one of my pet peeves is when a man stands in the aisle of the bus on his side of the mechitzah and you are sitting in an aisle seat and the chassid in the aisle is suddenly sitting on your shoulder because if you cant see that someone is on the othere side of the mechitzah then they must not be. apparently negiah doesnt apply if its through a sheet/mechitzah !!?