Limes with Orange

I went and got a couple of my tattoos touched up yesterday afternoon. And I remembered that I had promised to post the genesis of my most recent tattoo:


The tattoo is a tribal sun with the Hebrew letters for Truth in the centre. I had long decided that I wanted some sort of tribal sun on the small of my back, but I needed to decide what I wanted it to represent and what design elements to add to it to make it personal to me.

Around this time, my mother was updating my astrological chart after we ordered my official birth certificate which I needed to apply for my Métis card, and discovered that the time on my certificate was slightly different than the time that my mother had previously used for my chart.

Anyway, it turns out that I have a whole bunch of planets in Virgo in my ninth house, which apparently has to do with our search for meaning, and having four planets in that house meant my search was central in my life. I read some more and I thought about things, one of them being the common themes that I have seen emerging in my scripts: "What is real?" And as everything connected in my brain, I realized that my particular search for meaning is a search for Truth. Which is when I decided to have the word Truth tattooed in Hebrew in the middle of the sun.

Now this is when things got a little freaky. Because my mother had recently told me the story of when she was young and studying acting in New York and feeling rather alone and vulnerable. Her friend Jeremiah (Hebrew scholar, drama critic and mentor) suggested that she needed a protective word, a word in Hebrew where she could visualize the letters surrounding her in a circle of protection. My mother's word was amet, spelled with the letters aleph, mem and tav, which are the first, middle, and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet.

So there I was, surfing the internet, looking for the Hebrew word for Truth and I discovered that it's amet… my mother's protective word from the beginning of her artistic career. So I thought it was even more perfect to use in a tattoo that I want to represent the future of my artistic career. Truth.

Labels: judaism, philosophy, tattoos

I just found out that there's an online Jewish Dating Service that seems to work much like Lavalife, except it's specifically for Jewish singles. When I was growing up, my mother started the process to convert to Judaism. She was studying with a Rabbi and learning Hebrew, we were going to synagogue and observing Jewish traditions in the home. My mother never ended up converting but after years of being raised in the only faith that ever made sense to me, I think it would be ideal to meet a nice Jewish boy. (I keep intending to finish what my mother started, but I haven't connected with the Jewish community here in Calgary so I'm a little intimidated to start the conversion process. But I digress…)

But back to jsingles.com: I'm not sure how many members there are, and I can't find any place on the site where they mention that. Maybe they'll add that feature once there are more members. But there are certainly no other members in this area at the moment, but again maybe it's just too new (or maybe I just need to move back to Toronto). In any case, I'll be interested to see how the community grows.

Labels: dating, judaism, odds and ends

"Schlemiel! Schlimazel! Hasenpfeffer Incorporated!"

Did you know that schlemiel and schlimazel are both actual Yiddish words? I came across them while I was writing my previous post (My Latest Spiel).

Schlemiel : an inept clumsy person; a bungler; a dolt
Schlimazel : a chronically unlucky person

The difference between a schlemiel and a schlimazel is best described through the aphorism, "The schlemiel spills his soup on the schlimazel."

A little bit about Yiddish:

Yiddish is a language that is used by Ashkenazi Jews, and is related to German (but also has many Slavic, Hebrew, and Aramaic loan words). It is written using the Hebrew script. Before the Shoah, there were estimated to be 11 million fluent Yiddish speakers, and today Yiddish is experiencing a revival in America (Ladino is the Spanish equivalent of Yiddish for Sephardic Jews). In America, a hybrid of Yiddish and English has developed called "Yinglish" or "Ameridish." It is also sometimes called "frumspeak," since it is often associated with the Yeshivas and orthodox Jews living in New York City.

Yiddish is, above all, the paradigmatic "Jewish" language — the insider's way of communicating to fellow Jews about day-to-day things (talk about God and faith is reserved for Lashon Hakkodesh — the holy tongue of Hebrew). It is at once sarcastic and dark, yet it is ultimately full of vigor, hope, and charm. In it you can hear the pathos of Jewish suffering but also the omnipresent faith that the Jew's future will triumph in hope.

(from hebrew4christians.com)

There are so many good, fun Yiddish words... too many to choose from. But choose I have. Here are a mere handful of the Yiddish words that pepper my vocabulary (with an emphasis on the many varied words that describe different types of unfortunate folk):

Chutzpah : ballsiness, guts, daring, audacity, effrontery
Kvell : feel delighted and proud
Kvetch : to complain habitually, gripe; as a noun, a person who always complains
Mensch : an upright man; a decent human being
Meshuggeneh : crazy, insane
Mitsve : a good deed
Nebbish : an insignificant, awkward person; a nerd
Nudnik : an obnoxious person; a pest
Oy vey : interjection of grief, pain, or horror
Putz : an idiot, a jerk (literally, a diminutive form of 'penis')
Schlub : a clumsy, stupid, or unattractive person
Schmuck : a contemptible or foolish person; a jerk (also means 'penis', but not a diminutive form... so, colloquially speaking, I guess that a putz would be a "little prick" while a schmuck is a "big prick" )

Labels: judaism, language

Now that I've figured out how to embed video in my blog, I've just got to share this advertisement for Koolanoo, the world's first Jewish social network. Not only is it very slick in a James Bond or Alias kind of way, but it's also funny... and a little dark.

Not necessarily what the goyim would expect from a Jewish Dating site (a little Yiddish goes a long way), but I loved it.

Labels: dating, judaism