Weekend Report

Last weekend actually started on Thursday. Saying this makes me miss my college days, when every weekend started on Thursday. Sometimes even Wednesday.

Thursday was Emily's bachelorette party, orchestrated by yours truly. I took my obligations as maid of honor very seriously. First we met up at a chocolate lounge and told funny Emily stories over fondue, bonbons and champagne. Then we relocated to Howl at the Moon to drink copious amounts of alcohol and sing along with the dueling pianos. (Note: the pianos don't actually duel. Unless you're under the influence of some very strong drugs, and then they might. Or maybe they'll start dancing with purple wombats. I hate when that happens.)

While the party was a smashing success, I've already learned the hard way that my little anecdotes don't make good stories for people who weren't there. So I'll spare you. Suffice to say, the bride had a good time.

Shabbos was more social that I had anticipated. I ended up going over to my friend Gabe's for lunch, but I still managed to get in a few hours of good shluffy afterwards.

As soon as shabbos was out, I raced over to Emily's, and spent the next 24 hours in fully wedding mode. After making lists of everything that needed to be done the next morning, we watched a few episodes of Sex and the City, and actually got a good 6 hours of sleep.

The wedding itself was lovely, and Emily was a beautiful bride. There's no such thing as a wedding that goes off with a hitch, but all of our hitches were relatively minor so it didn't matter too much. I got to wear my Pretty Pretty Princess dress, which is now retired to spend the rest of my life in a closet. I also managed to make the groom teary-eyed, in a good way, during my speech.

All in all, a phenomenal weekend. Mazel tov to Emily and David Wheeler! I'll see you for Pesach, IYH, in the Holy Land.

To Blog or Not to Blog

When my life is very busy and my brain full of very important thoughts, my blogging tends to dwindle. When it seems like nothing much is happening in my life at all, I find plenty of things to blog about.

I haven't been blogging very much in the past few months. Since Pesach, to be precise. I know that this blog probably has not been the most interesting read since then, and I apologize to those who come here looking for entertainment. The truth is that the things I think about most are the things I can blog about least.

I am still trying to come to terms with losing Liz. Every day, I look at the picture of the two of us that I keep in my bedroom. She and her mother were in Chicago on a very, very cold winter day and I met them downtown. I think we're 19 in that picture. That was five years ago. I look at that picture every day, and I ask myself the same questions: Where are you now? Where did you go? And then the most painful question of all...why did you have to go?

This Sunday will mark 2 months since she passed away (I still have trouble writing those words, let alone saying them), and I'm still very much struggling to accept that I will never talk to her or see her again. Sometimes I forget that she's gone. I didn't realize until yesterday that I still had her email in my address book. The simple act of deleting that email address somehow took on tremendous significance, as though I were eliminating my connection to her. Irrational, I know. Even knowing it was silly, it still took all of my self-control not to close my office door, put my head in my hands and cry.

As I said, this Sunday will mark 2 months. This Sunday is also the wedding of my best friend from high school, Emily, and I am the maid of honor. It's very strange juxtaposing the two. It's a pretty strong reminder that life and love go on. Knowing it doesn't make it easy.

The bottom line is, don't let the blog inactivity fool you. I'm here, and my world is actually a whirlwind of activity and emotion these days. I just haven't really felt like sharing.

Ode to Technology

Background: I loved summer camp (overnight). The weeks I spent there every summer were some of the best in my entire childhood, and the friends I made were some of the truest friends I've ever had. I was so happy back then. But once the summer camp years ended, it was harder to keep in touch. We all went to different high schools in different parts of the Chicagoland area (translation: I lived in the city, and they all lived in various suburbs) and then different colleges.

Today I got an evite for an event I can't go to. Somehow, one of the girls I met my very first day of overnight camp at the age of 9 also got that evite...even though she didn't know the people who sent it. But she saw my name and recognized it, and sent me an email. I wrote back, and then excitedly signed online to tell one of my best friends (aka The Only Girl From Camp I'm Still In Touch With). She told me that another of our camp friends had emailed her a while ago, and forwarded me the email.

So now, thanks to the wonders of evite.com and AIM, I'm now able to be back in touch with two people that I have missed very much of the past eight years. Thanks, technology! (And an honorable mention to Al Gore for inventing the internet, without which none of this would have been possible)

Eeek!

* One week from Thursday is my best friend's bachelorette party (planned by Yours Truly)
* One week from Sunday is my best friend's wedding.
* Three and a half weeks from now, I will be unemployed. (This means I have three and a half weeks to finish everything I've been doing for the past two years)
* Four weeks from now, I'm going to DisneyWorld.
* 8 weeks from now, I take the GREs.
* 11 weeks from now, I leave the country for the better part of a year.
* Sometime in those 11 weeks, I apply to graduate school.

Starting to feel a little panicky...

Yet Another Reason Why I'm Proud of Being a Jew

Warning: Biased perspective. Deal with it. This is my world.

At the top of a Nytime.com article, there is a picture of a wounded man, his left leg a bloody mess, lying on the ground. Standing above him, with a hand placed gently on his head, is another man in uniform. The caption:
An Israeli soldier comforted a wounded Palestinian on Tuesday after a mortar explosion in Ganei Tal that killed three people.

Yes, that's right. An IDF soldier comforting a wounded Palestinian. If the roles were reversed, somehow I strongly doubt a Palestinian "soldier" (or should I call them "militants" like the Times does?) would have comforted a wounded Jew.

And while I'm on the subject of yesterday's attack, let's take a moment to admire the logic of Islamic Jihad. From the same NYtimes.com article:
"The dead were two Palestinians and a Chinese laborer, and the wounded were Palestinians from Khan Yunis, all sitting at a metal table in a greenhouse sorting fresh chives into bundles tied with rubber bands. Two were injured seriously, two moderately and one slightly. They were taken to an Israeli hospital in Beersheba for treatment.

Islamic Jihad took responsibility for the attack, calling it retaliation for the death of Palestinians, including one of its commanders, at the hands of Israeli forces."

Let's see if I've got this right: Islamic Jihad is retaliating for the death of Palestinians by killing more Palestinians (and non-Jewish workers)? And the ones that they only maimed...they're being taken care of by Israelis.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Way to go, Islamic Jihad! You sure showed us!

The Bush Dictionary

This weeks's Stupid Comment By A Stupid President:

Gitmo detainees are "people who hate America, people that have been trained in some instances to disassemble, that means not tell the truth."

Dissemble means to deceive. Disassemble means to take apart. Unless the dictionary editors have been lying and disassembling to us all along.