Showers, Cell phones, Shoes, and Passover

I am spastic today.

This came as sort of a weird realization at about 8:27am when I finished up my attempt at working out and scrambled to the shower and was back in my room by 8:34. That's a 7 minute shower, including walking and water temperature adjusting time. I think perhaps I missed my calling and should have joined the army. I would have been the first to die, but I would have been the most efficient at showering.

Speaking of calling, I get a new cell phone in 12 days. This is awesome because I went from "my cell phone is ok" to "I hate this piece of shit and would like to melt it with a blow torch but I need it since I don't actually have a landline and I will be the first to admit that being disconnected from the outside world for any length of time freaks me out even though I didn't even have a cell phone until 5 years ago and managed to survive until then." The hatred is deep and it's real. But this does mean that I get to be all bouncy and do all kinds of research on new fun phones. And yes, I get bouncy when doing research. It's the utter geek in me. The Thespian has a bunch of websites he keeps forgetting to forward to me about cell phones and what people's real opinions of them are. Oh, and if you have a cell that you are absolutely in love with, let me know! Opinions are very welcome.

Unless you are Miss Yankee. I say this because she did not approve of any of the 4 pairs of shoes I got this weekend. Yes, I said 4. What? You know what? You can take that disdain and overall negativity and go elsewhere because HERE we love shoes. They are great things. What warranted me getting 4 pairs, you ask? Well, 2 of my shoes were very much on my way out and were falling apart, so I had to replace them. Then, I needed (yes, needed...shuttup) a pair of red heels to go with a couple of outfits that would be more complete with said red heels. And then I found a cute pair of canvass sneakers reminiscent of a pair I had in 5th grade. Oh, and to jump back, Miss Yankee also does not get a say in my cell phone purchasing because she refused to pay for the phone insurance and then dropped her phone in the toilet. Yes, the toilet.

And now for the social commentary section. So, I attended the same Passover seder my family generally attends at our good friends' house. Nothing super unusual happened. By super unusual, I mean outside of the usual chaos. For those of you not at all familiar with Passover, the seder is basically a meal that goes in a special order, complete with reading text at the table. Every year we read the same text and discuss the same story (the whole Jews leaving Egypt and wandering in the desert for 40 years before being allowed into the Promised Land. You may remember this from The Ten Commandments or The Prince of Egypt). There are about 20 pages of text that goes something like this:

Rabbi Whoziwhatzit says that there were 20 plagues because he could not count.
Rabbi Whogamawhozit, son of Unpronounceable, says that there were 400 plagues because his calculator was broken.
Rabbi Whatizname, son of Whogamawhozit, friend of Whoziwhatzit, and overall swell guy, claims that the plagues didn't happen and that they were all in our head and was stoned to death over this blasphemous proclamation. We do not speak of him anymore.

Personally, I have a hard time swallowing a lot of this stuff as absolute truth anyway, but I think a large part of it is because I'm an English major and we read into stuff naturally. So, yeah, maybe life sucked for the Egyptians for a while and then the Jews escaped persecution (the first of many times to come) but if the text says 10 plagues, can't we all just agree that since we weren't there and don't know for sure, it's supposed to be the kind of thing where 10 really shitty things happened? I mean, if 10 things happened 10 fold, then yes, that is 100 things that happened, but still...just...let it be. The Rabbis didn't have an answer and I doubt we will have one ourselves.

Kaiser Wilhelm III will probably disagree with me on this. From what I can tell, he and his father like to debate every aspect of the story of the Exodus which is more than fine. I enjoy watching them debate it. I enjoy making snarky sarcastic remarks to help them with said debating. What I find utterly hysterical, however, is when we go around the table and read out loud. We all take a paragraph so that no one is stuck reading it all. You have your typical boring readers (like my father) who read everything as though there is no inflection and Ben Stein is your own personal storytelling hero. Then you have the overly dramatic readers who over emphasize things ("Thus said the LORD") that don't really make sense being emphasized. And then you have the "new" readers. The new readers are my favorite because they cause little scenarios like this:

Seder leader: New Reader, your turn.
New Reader: And...then...Aaron...d-well...dwelled? in the land of the ancestors but sawjurned-
SL: Sojourned.
NR: Saw-jurned.
SL: Sojourned.
NR: Saw-JURNED.
SL: Sojourned.
NR: SAW-jun-ed.
SL: Lived.
Kaiser Wilhelm III: No! They didn't live there! It says that they sojourned but did not stay to settle.
NR: Sojourned.
NR: Saw-journed until the time of the...

Or this one:
NR: Mount See-nay-
SL: Mount Sinai.
NR: See-nay?
SL: The mountain. The big one.

Between this and The New Reader's insistence that he is not a slave and shouldn't be forced to help out with anything, it was quite the amusing meal.