לע"נ רוזה פרקס

I rode my first segregated bus on Friday.

Having resigned from doing anything that might be termed "following the news" (and certainly The News From Israel), I didn't know that Egged ran such lines, and I certainy did not know that the separate buses carried no indication that they are separate (other than a six year old fellow passenger who pointed out to me my mistake) . (That's probably the most annoying thing about the situation, actually...)
Naomi Ragen is, predictably, strident to the point of annoying on the subject. (http://www.jewishsf.com/content/2-0-/module/displaystory/story_id/23380/format/html/displaystory.html)

Rather than whine about it myself I will only point out that:
1- The Honor System must be pretty strong for Egged to run an entire line where women punch their own card as they enter a driver-less door.
2- The Honor System is apparently not strong enough to prevent the necessity of having signs reminding passengers that the puncher is property of Egged and Egged alone, thus taking or tampering with it is stealng (followed by an quote aboiut harchaah min hagezel from the sefer hachinuch).
3- Alternatively, perhaps, some passengers being dishonorable is still more profitable (for Egged) than entire communities not riding Egged at all.

yay, israel!
despite a few days of really feeling the absurdity of most-everything here (plus feeling God's anger in the second-day-of-sukkos-rain?), i am finally, as i usually am on visits to the holy land, quite happy to be here. plus, we got to sing for hours with a bunch of people who play intruments in a sukkah. what more could you ask.

but, here's a question (n a long question - i'm wordy in the tired way right now - but bear with me...):

the posters in meah shearim. you know, the ones that take 5 minutes to read for all the "me-az heyotenu legoy...ledaavonenu harabim kamu... anshei beliyaal...laharos...velachen hatsibur mevukash...hatsilu...nishmot benechem...etc." and maybe for 2-3 words, or, in extreme cases, on sentence, mention exactly which satanic threat they are railing against this time. i love reading them as sociological artifacts (and maybe as mussar, too?), often to the point of boring my travel companions as i read every word in my pitifully non-fluent hebrew (sorry oren!). but as a means of communication/centralized idea-shaping, they're just wierd.
where i come from, the goal in making public flyer-type-things is to have a clear message that people can/will pick up even as they rush past the sign on their way to the the store before they have to pick up their kid from cheder, or whatever. so why make a sign that is impossible to skim? (the posters in question often contain bolded phrases, actually, apparently for emphasis, but the specifics of the complaint are almost always buried in the smallest print.)
have the publishers just not thought about maximizing the efficiency of their medium? or is the point sometimes not the specifics of the particular affront to the Torah Way of Life, but the general feeling of "on-guard, the atheists are coming!"?
(possible example to support the latter possibility: apparently Uri Lupoliansky has fallen out of favor in some circles for being to nice to the a-charedi elements of Jerusalem society. posters are up with his name in bold bring that bash him clearly and repeatedly, and assert that "this" is not the first or second, but the third time he has betrayed the Torah community. as to the specifics of "this" - well, there are only vague allusions about "vehayah machanecha kadosh," etc... the point is to be mad a UL in general, not to oppose a specific policy. this brings up a third possible reason for vagueness: especially when it comes to "tsniut," maybe infractins are better left unspecified, lest the posters themselves be a source of contamination...)


ps - for those who may or may not ever read what i write, i am sorry that after a long busy-doing-other-things period, this is all i can come up with for "interesting." maybe i'll fix that shortly...
until then, may our collective fate regarding water, and such, be sealed for the best over the next few days...

the test of my vanity

my mother got a dress that i don't so much like for free from her friend. nor do i like the color that that would mean the whole "wedding party"* wears. but, in theroy i think this is all stupid and something one should absolutely not care about, nevermind spend money on, to make "your special day**" special.

* i should stop using these words, i know...

** one more wedding related story: yesterday, i had a 2:30 bridal appointent and walked out of the store with a serously on sale and also quite nice (leaniyut daati) dress by 4. remarkable. beli ayin hara (it still needs alterations, like, err, sleeves...)
the lady who helped fit me kept saying "think to yourself, 'is this how i see myself looking on my special day?'" she said it at least three times in an hour to me, and in the robotized voice that makes it sound like she doesn't even remeber what it means (to the extent that it means anything). what a job.

jewish

my realty company has been confused as to how much i owe them. we've played a bit of phone tag and today and agent named moshe they left me a message that they've fied everything, ending with "have a good yontif and gmar tov."
new york.

if i had a penny...

for every time someone told me (implausibly, yes), "you could be a model" ...

people have a funny relationship to height, especially on women, and it's natural that as a result we have a funny relationship to ourselves. shmuli wonders aloud about it. what follows is not a specific response to his specific wonderings, hence its being here, not there, but i had the following to say about the articles he sends us to:

the suggestion that different social patterns for tall and short women has to do with hormones is not immediately plausible to me. the easier explanation, i believe, is social:

taller women, especially if they are tall their whole life, are treated differently than average height women.

a - they are generally better at sports by virtue of their height, but less good at looking cute in an age-appropriate way (it's hard to dress like a cute third grade girl when you can't buy children's clothes or shoes anymore due to your size), which is a lot of how traditional feminine values start getting instilled, i think - people see cute little girls and treat them all girly.

b- in general, strangers tend to expect tall children of both genders to behave and think as maturely as their heights suggest, and this carries over well past the time when height stops being an actual indicator of age. (most girls stop growing in early high school, yet i would consistently hear that i looked older "because you're tall" until i was almost 20.) this expectation of intellectual maturity may carry over into ambitions in non-maternal directions.

c- tall men, i believe, tend to be more "successful" than their shorter, though equivalently qualified, counterparts, at least by some meaures. (i'm actually not sure if this is statistically ot only anecdotally supported.) i see no reason to assume that the same would not be true of tall women - the theory seems to be that people respond to stature by giving it authority/power, at least sometimes. if tall women have more options in terms of non-maternal success than shorter women, maybe that explains their relative "ambitiousness."

one way to compare the hormone vs. social hypotheses might be (depending on what the hormones invovled actually do) to compare women who are tall from childbirth (more likely to experience -a- and -b-) vs. women who are tall b/c they keep growing longer than their peers (have a non-average puberty experience, more likely to be linked to hormones?).

another support for the socialization side is that i like chocolate as much as any woman ;)