Limes with Orange

This Week in Review

Breaking News: That neighbourhood Primal Grounds that I was so excited about has turned out to be a bust. It's in the local tennis club and is as depressing as every fleabitten motel I've ever stayed in while driving across country through hick towns in the northern states.

Adventures in Film: Pre-screened my latest film at a Media Crit Night for feedback from other artists with CSIF, EMMEDIA and Quickdraw Animation. I've realized that I need to stop being shy about asking my friends in filmmaking about my work, because I'm at a stage where it's easier for me to hear feedback from people I know than from people I don't know.

The Culture Corner: Had a fun filled weekend attending Tank Standing Buffalo's art show and my sister's bellydancing recital!

Journeys with Judaism: Tattoos. Frowned upon by Jewish tradition. Obviously not frowned upon by me. So I did a little research and thought over a few things...

The oft quoted passage, Leviticus 19:28, says "You shall not make gashes in your flesh for the dead, or incise any marks on yourselves: I am the Lord." I would argue first of all that a tattoo is not an incision. That would be cutting. (Even ear piercing would be closer to being an "incision" and yet that's okay.) And secondly, I believe it is only referring to marking yourself with the name of God. Then what about Isaiah 44:5? "One shall say, 'I am the Lord's,' and another shall use the name of Jacob, and another shall mark his arm 'of the Lord' and adopt the name of Israel." Mark his arm? Sounds like a tattoo to me. And this tattoo even refers to the Lord. Sounds like there's room for interpretation on this one as far as I'm concerned, because it seems to me that the only thing being objected to is tattooing yourself with some variation of "I am God"... which I have no intention of doing.

Maimonides sees tattooing as an act of idolatry, which would explain the prohibition if true. But my tattoos are not acts of idolatry, they simply tell the story of my personal journey. So shouldn't tattoos be considered on a case by case basis, depending on the reason behind them and the images in the tattoo?

Then there is the argument that we are created b'tzelem Elokim (in the image of God) and that our bodies are to be viewed as a precious gift on loan from God, to be entrusted into our care and are not our personal property to do with as we choose. But we make choices for our bodies every day, from whether we smoke or drink to what shampoo we use. Whose to say what is the best way to care for this gift? I believe my tattoos are actually helping to make my "gift" more personal.

This is a much bigger debate that I'm prepared to go into here, but I would like to take a moment to point out that it's an urban legend that you can't be buried in a Jewish cemetery if you have tattoos. And one last link on the subject: Tattoo Jew, the movie.

Life with Emma: Methinks it was a bad decision to play Emma's DVD on my computer monitor. Now she watches over my shoulder whenever I'm on the computer and it's a little unnerving!

Quest for Quotes: Marsha Ellen Meidow recently posted this quote by Anais Nin on her Facebook profile and I think it's amazing... "I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman."

Labels: highlights, judaism, tattoos

It's been a crazy week. I started both my Introduction to Judaism course and my Animation course. Intro to Judaism is only one hour a week but it lasts all year long. The Experimental Animation course is three hours a week but only lasts for 10 weeks. But that 10 weeks of overlap is going to be kind of killer for me. Plus I have a grant deadline on February 15th and I need to send my completed script to Sundance by February 6th. So be warned, blog posts will probably be few and far between for the next few weeks.

For now, I'll leave you with a quote by Carl Jung that a friend of mine just passed along to me: "I would much rather be a whole person than a good person."

Labels: film, judaism, quotes

I've decided to put together a list of things I want to accomplish in 2009. I suppose most folks would call these resolutions, given the time of year, but I'm a list maker by nature so to me this is just another list:

1. Breakthrough my "neurotic procrastination" and make a "guerrilla" film from start to finish by the end of February. (You can thank Scientific American Mind for providing me with my self-diagnosis of "neurotic procrastinator"; as for the "guerrilla" part… I've realized that I've become obsessed with permissions and copyrights, not a completely bad thing but I think that sometimes I just use that as an excuse to continue procrastinating.)

2. Add a short workout to my morning routine. (It's a two-hour long routine anyway, so what's another 15 or 20 minutes?)

3. Get a vermicomposter (for all of those banana peels I'm left with after making my protein shakes)… Corollary: Try not to be grossed out by the fact that it means I'll have worms living in my apartment.

4. Try to complete sleep restriction therapy and get a handle on my insomnia.

5. Learn more about Judaism. (I mentioned my interest in Judaism a bit in my post "I Believe…" and followed up a smidge in "A Piece of the Pi", but it's not something I feel like discussing in depth on my blog.)

6. Get a tattoo to memorialize my cat Tobi. (The design that I've come up with incorporates the Egyptian goddess Bast; I'll post a pic of it once I get inked.)

7. Learn some animation techniques.

8. Finish writing current draft of my feature film screenplay and submit it to Sundance to apply to their Screenwriter's Lab. (I have more film goals for myself for the year, but I'm trying to have this list reflect that I do try to have a balanced life… try.)

I did think about some of these things from a "resolution" standpoint, the types of ways that we try to "improve" ourselves: lose weight, quit smoking, etc. I remember this book that I read that talked about how many of us focus on "packaging" and "marketing" ourselves but spend far too little time on "product development"… so I thought about whether I'm addressing "product development," i.e. improving myself as a person on the inside. While I suppose starting to work out and compost could be seen as improvements, I think they're still more external.

Internally, in terms of character or personality, I suppose I would like to be more patient. And while it may not look like I'm addressing that with my list, I think that reducing my insomnia would increase my patience as a direct result of increasing the amount of truly restorative sleep I get (which is practically nil at the moment). So, since it addresses both health and character, I guess I should put that "resolution" at the top of the list.

I start courses on both Judaism and animation next week, so I'm getting going on those ideas. And I just bought a hip-hop workout DVD that I put in this morning (and realized just how long it's been since I took a dance class… yikes!). I'm already working on my guerrilla film and plan on doing some recording for the vocal track on Friday. So that just leaves my vermicomposter, tattoo, insomnia and screenplay. The vermicomposter and tattoo should be simple enough, but the other two are rather more daunting. Then again… I don't need to do it all right away, right? So maybe I'll just keep on with what I'm doing now and address those two when I've adjusted to my new routines and finished this little film.

Am I procrastinating by leaving these bigger goals for later? Maybe. But the fact is those courses that I want to take start now and I can't change that. And I can only do so much. Am I now just justifying myself? Possibly. But it's my blog so I can justify if I want to (hmm, "justify" may rhyme with "cry" but the extra syllables kinda mess up my play on words… oh well).

Labels: education, film, health, judaism, philosophy, tattoos, writing

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