![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Night Before
Dec. 18th, 2011 07:34 pmDid some of our first bout of last-minute Christmas shopping today. I got stuff for Cal and for my Dad (which I won't be able to post 'til I get back, typically), while Steve pursued the perfect present for his Dad, only to have it not work out. I didn't get my hair trimmed after all, because my feet were killing me (I'm breaking in my winter boots). Etc. Now we're in the midst of packing, with Cal--who knows something is up--acting like a total ass throughout. Aladdin, questionable thought its content may be, ought to help with that.
Meanwhile, I got Michael Wex's texts on Yiddish, Born to Kvetch and Just Say Nu, both of which are intensely funny and really, really interesting. More to say about that later in my second Yiddish post, I guess, but for now I'll just note that the first book, which leads with a joke, then goes into an exegesis about how Yiddish essentially is a dybbuk language possessing German from the inside-out, designed passive-aggressively so that Jews could say anti-Christian things to German Christians who could understand everything they said in such a way that they still wouldn't get how much they were being insulted...yeah, it explains a lot. (At one point, he explains that [one assumes some] devout Jews study the Torah on Christmas Eve but not on Christmas, because when you study the Torah on a person's birthday it means you wish them well. Instead, they usually spend Christmas either playing cards or making toilet paper for the rest of the year. "They do something insulting, they do it at home, and they don't go out, mostly because Jews have traditionally been afraid to go out on Christmas.")
Anyhow. I'm not an easy traveller at the best of times, so this is going to be interesting. Still: New York at Christmas, right? Should be fun. KGB will be, at any rate; seeing my friends, etc. But I feel disconsolate and behind, in and between the laughing about other people's cultural pain.
Meanwhile, I got Michael Wex's texts on Yiddish, Born to Kvetch and Just Say Nu, both of which are intensely funny and really, really interesting. More to say about that later in my second Yiddish post, I guess, but for now I'll just note that the first book, which leads with a joke, then goes into an exegesis about how Yiddish essentially is a dybbuk language possessing German from the inside-out, designed passive-aggressively so that Jews could say anti-Christian things to German Christians who could understand everything they said in such a way that they still wouldn't get how much they were being insulted...yeah, it explains a lot. (At one point, he explains that [one assumes some] devout Jews study the Torah on Christmas Eve but not on Christmas, because when you study the Torah on a person's birthday it means you wish them well. Instead, they usually spend Christmas either playing cards or making toilet paper for the rest of the year. "They do something insulting, they do it at home, and they don't go out, mostly because Jews have traditionally been afraid to go out on Christmas.")
Anyhow. I'm not an easy traveller at the best of times, so this is going to be interesting. Still: New York at Christmas, right? Should be fun. KGB will be, at any rate; seeing my friends, etc. But I feel disconsolate and behind, in and between the laughing about other people's cultural pain.
