from the desk of stinkpot

this blog is like the pony express – it takes about two weeks for news to get communicated.

for instance, i’m finally going to post some photos i took from the passover seder christina and i crashed at the beginning of april. aside from getting to see our friends and pigging out on unleavened bread, i desperately needed to recharge my jewish street cred. said cred peaked around day 4 of my life, when my mother – who had birthed me in a hospital named “long island jewish” and who had ordered kosher hospital meals because “they probably cleaned the food more” – was visited by a moyel looking for a family with the last name of david. it’s a shame she didn’t let the man handle my baggage; bar-mitzvah’s are such lucrative passages into manhood. instead, i ate a squat sandwich when i turned 13.

still, i guess i lucked out: my mother tells me that back when dad was growing up in the philippines, circumcision itself was the rite of passage. that’s a potentially ambiguous statement, meaning either: 1) filipinos addressed 8-day-old newborns as “sir”; 2) adolescent boys wore skirts to their 13th birthdays. (resolution: trick question – both are correct. for some reason, filipinos call everyone sir; and, well, i don’t have the stomach to even go into #2. google philippines and “tuli” if you’ve got ample genital fortitude.) even today, however, i imagine most adolescent boys in the philippines would do well to keep their legs crossed. the medical clinic down the street from my grandmother’s house had a bright yellow sign in their windowfront: “circumcisions: 700 pesos! [$14]“. scary.

yikes, that was some grisly tangent i flew off on. here’re some seder pictures whose hues i dig.

ok, those photos do a pretty lousy job of explaining the passover meal. which is a shame, since our hosts went through the trouble of photocopying the haggadah, singing honorifics for insane prophets, and cooking enough for all the chosen people in cambridge. still, people make for more interesting subjects than matzo.

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