why i am modern orthodox

i have many friends who are bt who will say that they always feel most comfortable with bts or people who are not frum. i think that often this is the case. no matter where we go we feel  most at home with the those who share the  values we have grown  up with even if we have changed alot since back then.
i grew up modern orhodox and even though i had  a ten year stint as being more yeshivish i returned to my more modern orthodox roots. why is this you ask? well first and foremost i do not have a new york accent so everyone always assumed i was bt. very annoying. and then i  did not get married before i was twenty five which is another reason i cant blend into the yeshiva world. i always felt like someone was watching me when i was in the yeshivish scene and it wasnt that i felt i was being watched by g-d. when i am in the modern orthodox world i am considered one of the crowd. no one doubts that i am religious. i dont feel like im being "watched" all of the time. i feel like i can be myself. i enjoy yiddishkeit but i also enjoy secular culture. i dont think that it is a contradiction.

living in a plastic surgery world

if you ever bother to read women's magazines like allure or glamour you will see lots of articles on cosmetic surgery. from the sound  of these articles it would seem that everyone and there aunt its having plastic surgery. i suppose that this is because it is more affordable these days. the more i read about cosmetic surgery the more it enforces the fact that i do not desire it. i understand if someone is disfigured that they want to have it, but if its purely cosmetic, im not sure why someone willingly goes under the knife.
when i was a kid i had elderly relatives who looked their ages. they could not have had cosmetic surgery even if they wanted it because they couldn't afford it. my grandmother who was shot in the nose in a pogrom when she was a child did have a bit of plastic surgery, but plastic surgery is not what it is now so she still looked somewhat disfigured from it. and you know what? even though i noticed it and i thought her nose looked like a hamantashen, it didn't make me love her less. there had even been a time when she was younger that she could have had more cosmetic surgery to fix it but she didn't. she was married by then and my grandfather told her that he loved her and thought she was beautiful just the way she was. okay , maybe they would have had a hard time affording the cosmetic surgery at the time, but i do believe this is what my grandfather had felt at the time. they had met and married years after she had been shot in the face in that pogrom.
beauty is in  the eye of the beholder. its important to make one's self  as presentable as possible, but even those who do plastic surgery are not always happy. happiness comes from the inside. with all of joan rivers' plastic surgeries, she is always having more. when does it end?

shabbos plans

every friday i hear the same question. "so what are you doing for shabbos?" sounds innocuous , right.? well sort of . the thing is as much as i like to go away for shabbos and visit friends, my most favorite thing is staying home for shabbos . this doesn't mean that i stay in my apartment like a hermit, just means i get to stay home and sleep in my own bed. i have friends over for a meal or go out for meals. i usually go to shul and later in the day sit on the benches on ocean parkway. i always make time for reading and a nice sized nap. if i go away for shabbos im on somebody else's schedule. for meals im at somebody else's mercy. usually when i go out for a meal when im home in brooklyn it doesn't matter what is on the menu. if the food is not plentiful i know that when i go home i will be able to refuel with my own food.
even if when i go away to a good friends for shabbos i still feel like i have lost  my weekend. even if i have a good time. when i go away for shabbos i lose that time of the week when im in charge of the day's agenda.

shomer shabbos

in brooklyn you really learn something new everyday. today i was at kosher delight on avenue j and  someone asked for a shomer shabbos as part of their order. i for one was baffled. we were at kosher delight.for heaven's sake! well... i had to find out what this meant so i asked the woman who placed the order what that meant. apparently this means that  a  jewish person puts the burger on the grill. sephardim are makpid on this.

its always fun to learn about a new chumrah one has never heard of ,but this one really floored me.i wonder if there is an extra charge for this? if so this is ingenious. i wonder how many kosher establishments provide this feature. 

true romance

we live in a culture that worships youth. the media mostly portrays young people as being the only age group that experiences true love. while i do believe that a young person is just as capable of love as an older person, i believe that true love is the love that has withstood the test of time. if you still love someone after parenting, various types of loss , wrinkles, possible illnesses , success as well as failure, you have really found true love. this is why i love the leonard cohen video of dance me to the end of love that i have just posted. elderly couples dancing together in front of their wedding photos is true romance. they love each other with every fiber of their beings . after fifty -sixty years of marriage they know exactly why they cherish each other.

Leonard Cohen - Dance Me to the End of Love [OFFICIAL VIDEO]: PG-13 rating

change

sometimes life involves so much change that its hard to change even when one knows its necessary. i kept seeing the new blogger templates, but i kept resisting the change because i so like holding on to what works. im trying this new template out. im not sure if i like it because the raindrops kind of look like tears and im not trying to create a mood of sadness in my blog. i tried out another template with a picture in the background but i found it distracting to read my posts. ive settled on this template for now until another day when i have the patience to fuss around with it again.