meh

It’s Friday: Matt has class all day, and Nick left for school and things nearly an hour ago. This term, Fridays are the only day I have the house to myself, a kind of unfettered alone time when I can clean quickly and enjoy, for a precious few hours, a mostly pristine living space. I’ve been trying to finish all the necessary work ahead of time in order to truly enjoy Fridays, but the post-grad school-acceptance buzz of this week left me feeling a bit unfocused yesterday: the only productive thing I managed to accomplish was buying groceries on the way home from school and work.

Today I am going to try to balance my compulsion to clean and do housework with stitching and goofing off. I mean–I, for one, have a much better time stitching and goofing off in a clean workspace, but I think if I put off the laundry until Sunday I won’t feel very upset, and it will mean I can putter, tidy and relax today and nap and do schoolwork tomorrow.

Last night I discovered the amazing-ness of ModCloth. Check it out, go on. I’ve been allowing myself to fully realize the extent of my affinity (it’s practically a fetish, really) for textiles and vintage styles. Unfortunately for me, I covet just about every dress on this site. I’ve already been trying to figure out how to procure a real sewing machine, as well as researching how to resize vintage dress patterns so I can (attempt) to make my own clothing. But the knowledge of that site … it’s unfair!! It will be a long time before I’m a good enough seamstress to make a dress that even remotely resembles any of those …

sigh.

The mailman just rang the buzzer. Instead of Matt’s new stethoscope (which will be coming today) the guy had not one, but TWO boxes addressed in my mom’s handwriting. The larger one was quite heavy, and for the minute it took me to haul it up four flights to the apartment, I was a bit hopeful that it might turn out to be my SEWING MACHINE. But it wasn’t: the smaller box contained a late Christmas gift from my brother’s family. And that big, heavy box contained all of my sefarim (sefer=book, pl. sefarim) from my brief days as an Orthodox Jew, as well as the two handmade baby quilts I used as a child.

Most of the books mean nothing to me. My personalized siddur (prayer book) has resided everywhere I have since my first year at college, and I resigned myself years ago to the fact that I would never see my Tanach (Torah, Prophets, and Hagiographia) again after I lent it to an Israel-bound friend for what I had thought would be a year upon my return from Israel. However, I have always thought my set of Mesorah Chumash (chumash=Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) was pretty sweet. When the book is open, each page is divided into two columns. Pages on the right have the Hebrew text of both the Torah and a line-by-line commentary by Rashi. On the facing left hand page is a line by line English translation of both the Torah and Rashi’s commentary. The reason this is so awesome is that normally the commentary is in tiny print underneath the Hebrew text. Rashi’s commentary isn’t even written in actual Hebrew, it’s a special Sephardic cursive, which makes it that much harder to read. The Mesorah edition was one of the first to make Rashi’s commentary more accessible to … people like me, lol.

The thing I love most about Jewish books is their quality. The Mesorah sefarim have leather covers with gilded letters. The pages are of a an extremely high quality, and the edges are gilded as well. The Jewish tradition instills in its followers an extremely high regard for books, particularly those containing God’s name. If a sefer ever falls, the person who picks it up kisses it. Orthodox Jews also kiss sefarim when they have finished using them. Sefarim should never be on the ground, nor should they be beneath secular books in a pile. When the books deteriorate into complete unreadability, they are buried instead of thrown out.

There’s even more to Jewish care of books than what I’ve described, but what I’ve written should suffice.