Happy New Year!!

On Monday and Tuesday I celebrated my new year. While I did have quite a bit of wine at dinner, it didn't involve the drunken bachanalia one usually associates with New Year's. No, the Jewish New Year is celebrated by eating more than one human can possibly ever digest, drinking the most hiddeous wine ever created (except in my family - there is the French side you know..), eating apples and honey (read as spilling honey all over the table cloth and somehow getting it in my hair) for a sweet new year, and of course the oh-so-fun looking inward self examination. That's right, who needs drunken revelry when you can examine all of the ways in which you didn't necessarily live up to your own goals and ideals of what a good person is? Not only is it heaps of fun, but you definitely don't wake up next to some mystery person/alien/bizarre sex toy the next morning. Unless of course you live in Long Island, but as that's a scary thought to ponder anyway, we'll just leave that one alone.

Thus begins the time period between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, oddly named as The Days of Awe [insert weird theme music here]. Days of what? Awe you say? How about calling a spade a spade...let's get honest here, isn't something like Days of Guilt a little more appropriate?

See, we don't have absolution or anything. We do fast on Yom Kippur, but it certainly doesn't cleanse us of sin or anything...it just makes us really fucking hungry, reminds us that we're human, and then we pig out on kugel and bagels and shit. No, no absolution; no easy way out. We basically have to acknowledge that we fucked up, and just live with it.

It sounds worse than it is though. See, in Judaism there is no perfect (unless you're a Jewish mother and have a son); no human in any stories of the torah is infallible. We strive to be the best we can, but we're all human and therefore we make a gigantic pigsty of everything we attempt. Our intentions are good though, for the most part. So this time is about looking at the ways in which we've fallen short of our goals of who we want to be. Its about honest evaluation, both good and bad, of the chages that have happened in the last year, and then kind of deciding where we want to go from here. Its like a rest area on the highway of life; so maybe there were a few wrong turns, you got a little lost...okay. But where do you want to go now? And it makes a hell of a lot of sense, really.

My friend, NinjaLady, used to say to me often "You have to know where you've been to know where you are to know where you're going." As I grow older, I understand more and more exactly what she was saying.

So now begins my time of introspection. Who am I? Who was I at this time last year? Who do I want to be at this time next year?

The answer is definitely not late, which is what I will be if I continue this post. So I will leave you with this cliff hanger, to perhaps come up with your own creative answers (you just can't make TV references or I won't get them at all).