Kosher Eucharist / יוקאריסט כשר

This post includes a soundtrack. Press play and read on:

Sometimes I worry about my esteemed co-blogger and travesty fiancé. In attacking entire groups of people - an admirable pursuit I in no way intend to disparage - he sometimes overreaches. When he should be focusing his considerable energies towards hating the player, he sometimes slips over into hating the game.

Take his latest post. Hippies deserve to be verbally destroyed, yea, unto the tenth generation, but I detect a note of animosity directed not merely at their inexplicable affection for hand instruments louder, cheaper and more African than a Ladysmith Black Mambazo bootleg or life on the streets of Kinshasa, but at their drug of choice. I feel this is unfair. Weed didn’t make hippies, Vietnam made hippies, and the statute of limitations for revenge has not yet expired - I recommend burying Hanoi with an airdrop of those Vietnamese-origin disposable chopsticks with absolutely inscrutable English instructions on the sleeve. (”What’s that, Mr. Nguyen? You’re stuck under a collapsed statue of Ho Chi Minh? Save yourself! Taking chopstick and hold to as you were a pencil! Now you can pick-up any thing!”) Every society has its Lotophagi - and of course, the real reason we hate hippies is that they’re lazy even about being lazy, whereas we have whittled malingering into a fine art - and if hippies didn’t have weed and Phish tours, they’d have Miller and Smokey and the Bandit.

But the Goy and I have always had a certain difference of opinion regarding the hierarchy of drugs. We are of course both devotees of the sauce, but while Chris ranks it as his third-favorite rush (right under getting a blowjob from someone you don’t respect and the violent death of Communists), alcohol for me occupies a place somewhat below uppers and far, far above any drug whose effects include falling into something that can apparently be termed only “the K-hole.” This led to a difference of priorities in recreational activities. Occasionally we would “share” a drug experience, such as the time we did coke in the company of our friendly dormitory cocaine dealer and that ubiquitous cocaine-session archetype, the nameless blond chick who leaves no impression on you beyond her surprisingly deep well of knowledge concerning blow - but generally, if the day’s program called for smoking, snorting, or ebullient declarations of love for people that didn’t truly deserve it (weddings notwithstanding), we parted ways.

Thus, while young Cortés was off repeatedly invading his nationalist Mexican paramour’s Tenochtitlan in an elevator maintenance shack on the roof of the engineering building, and collecting hickeys which made Montezuma’s revenge look downright Christian, I was usually to be found engaged in my traditional pastime of putting anything I could find with the suffix “-drine” up my nose and really effusively describing the merits of Charles Mingus albums. He would spend an evening in the drinking martinis in a Garden District hotel bar in the company of a buxom young Jewess, I would spend an evening smoking ganja that reportedly “tasted like blueberry” (it didn’t) in a shed behind some dude’s house in the company of a semi-catatonic Azeri and a backwards hatted Atlantan Jew who kept trying to convince me Neil Peart was God (he didn’t).

I don’t regret it.

But that brings me, in a roundabout way, to my main point. I love weed. Not in a hippie way; I don’t love weed because I love Jerry, blacklights, African liberation colors, incense sticks or Day-Glo tapestries, I love weed because it gets me fucked up. I feel this is somehow purer - drugs should be taken because drugs are fun to take, not because the man with dreadlocks told you to.

But honestly. I loved it the first time I hacked and wheezed through a lungful of smoke, which had been delivered unto me by a small glass pipe named, as I recall, Frodo Baggins - any committed ganja smoker will confirm that stoners have an eerily universal tendency to name their smoking implements after Lord of the Rings characters, which I assume is because there exists a certain class of stoner who, bedecked in afro, erratic chin fuzz, khaki shorts and (more often than not) a Star of David on a twisted hemp rope, looks more Hobbity than Frodo-under-Merry-under-Pippin-under-Sam’s-just-a-little-too-loving-gaze in Return of the King. This also may be why you’ll meet a million pipes named after Hobbits but never one named after Elves - stoners have many qualities, but ethereal beauty is rarely among them. But that first encounter was downright magical. I had been warned that “nobody ever gets stoned the first time they smoke,” and about ten minutes after I had smoked I was complaining that nothing had happened and weed was vastly overrated, which was precisely the moment when my field of vision suddenly tilted 45 degrees to the right and the giggles set in. That started a series of cannabinoidal misadventures over the years which have included both the closest I’ve ever come to a profound religious experience (lying in bed awestruck by the depth of Lee Perry’s production on Heart of the Congos) and at least three times when I’ve smoked so much I woke up the next morning high, which always strikes me as a victory of cosmic import (probably because I’m high).

But I admit that weed can lead to serious problems. Not of the anti-drug PSA variety, because frankly those are about as effective and about as likely as Gallic valor, but of marijuana-induced idiocy. I’d like to think I avoid this treacherous pitfall, but its effects can be devastating. Observe this quotation, gleaned from the Wikipedia entry on Half Baked, which I was reading for a perfectly legitimate reason:

There is a humorous feature on the “Fully Baked Edition” DVD called “Five Minutes With The Guy On The Couch”. This feature allows you to literally smoke with the guy on the couch. The five minute clip depicts a stationary camera filming him as he sleeps on the couch, and as clouds of smoke waft in and out of the scene, the guy turns over several times, farts, scratches his head, removes his socks, and at the end of the scene, he rolls over and falls off of the couch. This feature is reminiscent of the old videos in which a stationary camera films a burning log in a fireplace, which is intended for people who do not have a fireplace, to put on their television sets, giving the impression that there is a fireplace in the room. The effect of this bonus feature is that as you smoke with your friends, you can look over and see the guy on the couch, as if he were really at your house.

And how many rips from your little friend Samwise Gamgee did it take you to arrive at such a lofty plateau of overexplanation, nameless Wikipedia stoner? The idea that somewhere out there exists a group of people who actually sat down and smoked weed with a televised representation of a minor and unresponsive fictional character from an unassuming stoner movie - the idea that there exists a group of people who would want the Guy on the Couch “really at their house” - terrifies me almost enough to make me cast my Rizzlas and my Trojan Ganja Reggae Box Set to the curb.

But I stay strong. And I stay high.

And if Goyeleh isn’t willing to accept that about me, then I just don’t see how this sham marriage is going to work.

It’s that time of year again, when Jews all over the world come together to celebrate their liberation from the clutches of the Egyptians, the day the Lord fulfilled his promise and redeemed his people Israel - something which I understand both parties have come to regret. Barely a few days after the parting of the Red Sea, the Lord was slinging around words like “stiff-necked,” and the Israelites were saddled with five whole lengthy scrolls of rules in a cultural milieu where laws usually fit easily onto one medium-sized obelisk. But Pesach is a holiday all about telling and recounting, so I decided that I would honor that tradition by recounting facets of Pesach here in the Holy Land and worldwide as they occur to me, the facets that conspire to make Pesach the beloved festival of freedom it is. Who knows one?!

The Cleaning: There are two major schools of thought when it comes to Passover cleaning: there’s the school that gives the floors a good sweep, locks up the plates, pots and pans, buys some paper plates and plastic forks, and goes and does something meaningful with its life; then there’s the school that throws out any food item or utensil ever suspected of having come into contact with leaven or legume, including ovens, sinks and children, and attacks with Lysol and Q-tips the devious chametz hiding, ready for unwitting consumption, in the cracks between the ceilings and floors. As with most things, I belong to a third school: the school that motivates itself to perform a thorough house cleaning through the use of amphetamines. By the end of thirty-some straight hours of awake, jittery and obsessively thorough housecleaning, your fingertips bleeding from the combined action of the rough side of the sponge and the bleach, you will rest content in the knowledge that you have performed a mitzvah - because you have actually heard the voice of God in your head commending you for it. Obviously, this school is not for everyone; I recommend that the faint-hearted among you use a sponge without a rough side.

The Haggadah: Meaning, literally, “telling,” the Haggadah differs from most Jewish texts in that is widely open to interpretation, since the “Maggid” only demands that the story of the Exodus be told. This is something of a curse. The Official Haggadah Text that has accreted over the years takes only about a paragraph to actually detail the Exodus, filling the rest of the space with stultifying diversionary excerpts from the minutes of various rabbinic powwows, including a theoretically lighthearted story ending with a student rushing in to inform several sages, who had stayed up all night discussing the holiday, that the time had arrived to recite the morning Shema - proof less of said sages’ devotion to Jewish law than of my own contention that sense of humor is inversely proportional to religiosity (the Jewlarious Theorem).

Much worse, however, is that this openness to interpretation leaves the Haggadah susceptible to attempts to ramrod modern political/cultural agendas down its already sufficiently lengthy throat. Admittedly, the entire purpose of the Passover seder is to give Jews worldwide a potent, if symbolic, reminder of the bitter suffering of slavery - but being forced to sit through a heartfelt soliloquy about how transgendered individuals are enslaved even today by traditional Judaism’s refusal to sanctify their choice of tackle is crueler than any taskmaster’s whip.

Some of you out there right now are getting your dander up and preparing to launch into a diatribe regarding the importance of keeping religion relevant in our modern world and denouncing people like me who endeavor to siphon joy out of faith. Please don’t. I have suffered enough from you people’s love of meandering “Reb Shlomo stories,” niggunim and quinoa. As a secular traditionalist, I am firmly of the opinion that religion is to be approached with dignity and solemnity, just frequently enough to give one’s children sufficient cultural grounding to prevent them from becoming neo-Nazis, Scientologists or JVoices writers. Joy should never enter into the equation. Joy is for puppies, stimulant use, Stevie Wonder albums, the births of (planned) first children and, very rarely, sex.

The Food: In demanding greater observance of the separation of synagogue and joy, I actually hew to a venerable Jewish tradition of tempering celebration with suffering. Passover takes a festive family-and-friends holiday and removes bread - along with (at least for non-kitniyot-consuming Ashkenazim, otherwise known as “suckers”) a list of foods that multiplies yearly with such blinding rapidity that one suspects the rabbis of attempt to hasten redemption with a week-long Yom Kippur. Passover food, with an exception I will touch on later, is dreadful. Like many facets of Judaism, it doesn’t have to be dreadful, but the iron first of tradition has made it so. You see, come Pesach, the world’s Jews are gripped by a curiously potent chametz-substitution fever, which results in a glut of leaven-free imitation food products. For some reason, everyone is compelled to buy each and every one of these products to tide them over the week-long holiday, even if they don’t regularly eat their leavened counterparts. This is why you’ll see people who eat a total of three chocolate chip cookies over the course of an entire year loaded down with six boxes of inedible chocolate macaroons. This is why we have nightmarish facsimiles of food we could all stand to spend a week without foisted upon us, like any concoction whose name contains the words “potato flour” and “pizza.” I can only imagine the thought process involved in such purchases: “Well, I haven’t eaten cereal in the morning since high school, but Passover is a whole week long! Shit! I gotta get me some of these K-for-P cornflakes!” People. It’s not fucking Ramadan. It lasts a week. Shut the fuck up, put down the matzah-based formed noodle product, remember that tequila remains kosher for Passover, and eat a fucking salad.

The Matzah: The humble matzah is the aforementioned exception to the rule of dreadful Passover food. Matzah gets an undeservedly bad rap, often by Jews whose shtetl-weakened digestive system shuts down like an Israeli labor union at the mere sight of unleavened bread (these same Jews also think “bread of affliction” jokes are hilarious), but it tastes good, provides a pleasing tactile experience, and serves as an excellent platform for the consumption of the shit your seder hosts spoon onto your plate (also known as “quinoa”). And matzah is imbued with great symbolic import. As a Jew, matzah serves to evoke the deeply-rooted Jewish collective memory of successive persecutions and liberations, and as a born American, of course, much of my identity has been defined by big-ass crackers.

But like everything else, matzah is not idiot-proof. As the food most identified with the entire Passover experience, its consumption often replaces any other observance of the holiday by clueless American Jews. I once witnessed in Tulane’s cafeteria, which provided matzah during Passover despite being distinctly non-kosher, a Jewish student extolling the virtues of the meal he was eating: matzah which had been covered with tomato sauce, a layer of melted cheese, and a healthy sprinkling of ground beef. Being the sucker for punishment I am, I mildly mentioned that this was somewhat inconsistent, whereupon he informed me “I don’t keep kosher, but I keep kosher for Passover.” Tucking into a ham sandwich, I replied that I also kept kosher, but not kosher for Judaism. (Okay, that last part isn’t strictly true - I’m a vegetarian.)

The Wine: The fruit of the vine is Passover’s saving grace, which is somewhat out of character for me to admit. For several reasons, I’m not an avid consumer of wine: first, unlike vodka, wine is tainted by thousands of years of accumulated pretension and therefore its taste cannot be shamelessly masked with apple juice or coffee liqueur; second, it encourages the continued existence of the sort of people who drink wine, i.e. the sort of people who feel that the word “bouquet” can be used to refer to anything other than “a bunch of flowers,” people who have trained their senses of smell and palates to the point where they actually detect scents and flavors which do not, per se, exist; third, it gives the French the impression they’re doing us some kind of favor, and a Frenchman with an impression, much like Monet, is insufferable indeed. But wine deserves its central portion of the Passover seder, because the requirement to drink four man-sized cups of the stuff is what turns the seder from “rushed, distracted retelling of the Passover story” to “rushed, slurred retelling of the Passover story,” which is a vitally important distinction. If you’re willing to fully commit yourself, by the time you get to Motzi you should be more plastered than charoset on korech.

The Dosim: If you’re unlucky enough to have actualized the traditional Passover wish of “Next year in Jerusalem!”, as I have, you know that the arrival of Passover in Jerusalem means the arrival of the dosim. The Suburban East Coast American Right-Wing Modern Orthodox Jew (dos americanus), a parasitic life form found inhabiting dens worth not less than $750,000 in heavily Jewish towns along America’s Eastern Seaboard, particularly in the New York metro area, and easily distinguished by its prominent white collar, has a curious and complex mating ritual. Twice a year, at Sukkot and Pesach times, especially during Pesach, the dos will migrate from its natural habitat to its historical breeding grounds, otherwise known as the city of Jerusalem. Once there, the dos will seek out other members of its species, congregating in upscale hotels (the Crowne Plaza, the Sheraton), unthreatening kosher l’mehadrin steak houses with menus in English, and the Ben Yehuda and Emek Refaim pedestrian areas. When the male dos sights a potential mate, he will let out the species’ distinct mating call (”I work in investment banking!”) and use his bulging billfold to fend off competing males drawn by his cry. If the female dos finds favor in the mating call and, more crucially, the thickness of the billfold, she will hike up her floor-length denim skirt and present her swollen rump for mating. The social unit (or “troop”) celebrates the successful attraction of a mate by coming together to turn up their long Litvak noses at the perceived crudeness and primitiveness of their Israeli hosts. Observing this time-honored, evolutionarily hard-wired ritual play itself out on the streets of the Holy City makes putting up with all of Jerusalem’s host of other problems almost worth it.

If God had bestowed upon the season of our liberation any single one of these exciting aspects of holiday observance, it would have been enough for us. Or at least for me.

For some reason, every travel guide to Israel, every (rightfully) gushing online review of its culinary life by a returning tourist, must include in its required segment on falafel and shawarma the caveat “Israelis know how to eat falafel and shawarma without spilling a drop, but you’ll be dripping techina all over your shirt and wind up with half your sandwich on the street.” Or something like that.

This is untrue. The simple, fundamental truth is that if you can’t eat a techina-laden falafel without spilling it all over yourself and everyone around you, it’s not because you’re not a native-born Israeli, it’s because you lack the necessary social skills to function in public, you fucking baby. You’re probably one of those bastards who slurps from spoons, or gets that throat-clicking noise action going when you chew, and I hate you for it. When I had my first falafel in Israel, I didn’t spill it all over myself. Even the Goy managed to eat his first Israeli falafel with dignity, panache and a hummus-free T-shirt, and if you know us, you know that our activities rarely wind up with dignity and T-shirts intact. If you finish a falafel with hummus flecking your cheeks and techina on your shirt, this is the Lord’s way of telling you that you’re a bad person. Just give up now.

And don’t ever let me catch you at my fucking falafel stand ordering in English. I don’t even know how that’s possible given that most of the relevant words are the same in both languages, but somehow, you people manage. If you can get through the Amidah three times a day - dosim, I’m looking at you - you can handle ordering a sandwich in the language of your people.

There. I said it. And I feel a lot better now.

Some of you may remember my fortuitous invention of a thrilling new mixed drink, the Ashkenazi. I remember it like it was last week, and every day since then.

Anyway, tireless dynamo of creative energy that I am, especially when it comes to getting screwed up, I’ve created a sister drink to the Ashkenazi, a combination of flavors and liquors so incredibly girly and delicious it makes your disappearing chest hair sing Cyndi Lauper tunes.

Beloved readers, I introduce to you: the Sephardi.

Here’s how it works:

Fill glass with ice
Float:
1 part chocolate liqueur
1 part vodka
1 part coffee liqueur
2 - 3 parts vanilla Al ha-Boker milk (regular milk will probably do in a pinch)

Pour carefully to get that layered effect going, because not only does it have to be girly, it has to be pretty. Then stir it up a little and drink it.

The Sephardi! Because as we all know, all a Sephardi is is an Ashkenazi with a little chocolate mixed in.

Also, drink carefully, because while there may not appear to be a lot of booze in there, just one will get you quite well-toasted. Mmmm…you’re welcome.

A close friend, who shall remain nameless, just sent me some pictures of some very interesting plants he certainly has not been cultivating in any way, shape or form, plants which are certainly in no way to be found growing anywhere within his home.

I mean, I’ve always had a little bit of an affection for the greener of the Lord’s creations, but there’s something about this particular plant that I find somewhat alluring…I can’t quite put my finger on it. I find the symmetry of those seven-pointed leaves somehow soothing, and in the back of my mind I swear a Mighty Diamonds song starts to play…

My friend just says it’s a kind of ficus. Personally, I think it’s great he’s found such a healthy, productive habit, one that helps everyone breathe a little better.

Because, y’know, plants convert carbon dioxide into oxygen.

I’m going to attempt to tie together several fairly disparate threads in this post, so bear with me.

After my most enjoyable weekend, I decided that there was no reason I should not have the materials to make simple mixed drinks on hand at all times, because man cannot live on screwdrivers alone. So I invested some of my paltry wages in the optimistically-named “Perfect” vodka and “Stock” coffee liqueur, notable mostly for costing 1/6 as much as Kahlua while still remaining somewhat drinkable - the bottle crows “In the Tradition of Perfection” (perfection is apparently a common achievement in the world of budget liquor, which I guess makes sense if you’re not shooting high in the first place) and informs the drinker that “Distillerie Stock maintains 20 distilleries throughout the world and is recognized in over 100 countries as ‘Producers of the World’s Finest Liqueurs, Vermouths and Brandies’.” I would tell them that “20 distilleries” translates to “inconsistent product,” but to their credit, after partaking of enough of the fruits of their labor, I didn’t care anymore.

Anyway, the point is, White Russians are delicious, even when made with bottom-shelf booze. Which brings me to a rant. The White Russian has been utterly ruined by The Big Lebowski. Say you’re in a bar. You want to order a White Russian, which is perfectly understandable because the White Russian is wonderful, but suddenly, you stop short and realize that you can no longer unironically ask for the drink, because a veritable legion of twenty-somethings has decided that the most effective way to attract mates is shouting “And stay the fuck out of my beach community!” at the top of their lungs. I mean, shit, I like The Big Lebowski — I own The Big Lebowski — but as much as I may identify with the lackadaisical title character, I don’t structure my social discourse around it (arguably, this is because I don’t leave the house enough to have constructed a consistent social discourse, but I digress). Chris and I discussed this at length during his time here. Ever since the movie clamped its hands around the necks of the English-speaking world’s young adults in a pop culture death grip, you can’t sidle up to a bar and say “Gimme a White Russian” without running a terrifying risk of having someday yell “SHOMER FUCKING SHABBOS!!” in your ear.

No, no, that just won’t do at all.

The upshot of all this is that the White Russian has now become a drinking-at-home sort of drink, and drinking at home is optimal because it offers both all the fun of a bar (drinking) without any of the collateral unpleasantness that is part and parcel of the bar experience (other people). So it was in the course of fixing a White Russian this evening that I stumbled upon a most epic and fortuitous discovery. You see, I had previously made a run for more milk, and as I have done several times before, I failed to really pay attention to what I was buying (because milk is milk, right?) and wound up getting the Tnuvah “Al Ha-Boker” milk, a fairly new product “specially formulated for morning cereal,” which is Hebrew for “it’s thicker than normal milk and it tastes like vanilla.” I think I keep doing this because the packaging is yellow and I’m attracted to bright colors. Anyway, still oblivious to my mistaken purchase, I mixed up the White Russian and took a sip.

It was wonderful.

Imagine it. Vanilla milk. Coffee liqueur. Vodka. On the rocks. It’s like drinking a Frappuccino, except it gets you drunk and it doesn’t make you feel vaguely unclean afterwards. I think this means that I’ve inadvertently invented a new drink. I’m going to call it the “Ashkenazi.”

Delicious! I’ve had two already!

My other recent discovery is eggplant. Eggplant is as ubiquitous in Israel as suicidal driving, and it comes in almost as many interesting variants, but I’ve always steadfastly avoided it. I blame this, like most things, on my mother. My mother is an excellent cook, but her upbringing in Iron Curtain deprivation has bestowed upon her some bizarre tastes in food, and one of her favorite dishes involves the hours-long baking of an innocent eggplant, after which she removes the skin and beats the hell out of the naked eggplant with a meat tenderizer until nothing is left except a steaming gray pile of pulpy Soviet baba ganoush which makes the house smell like the gym socks of Novgorod.

It’s not her fault, she grew up deprived of Freedom, Justice and Liberty.

So understandably, coming from this background of childhood eggplant abuse, I wasn’t much into all things auberginal. But I’ve given them another chance, partly because they’re all over the goddamn place, partly because 5 million Jews can’t be wrong, except about minor issues like the intentions of struggling German artists. And I have been pleasantly surprised. Fried eggplant slices? Tasty. Sabich loaded with hummus and amba? Mind-expanding. Eggplant stewed with garlic, olive oil and tomatoes? Better than most women. Harry, my spiritual advisor in matters of food, claims eggplant is the caviar of the Jews. I’m inclined to believe him.

So what have we learned today? To be bold in your accidental experimentation, and to not let your mother’s follies stop you from living your adult life to the fullest - something every Jewish boy should take to heart.

Several days ago…

Chris: …fucking, “due process,” or some Dago shit like that. Anyway, I’m probably gonna drop acid this weekend.

Mike: Lucky bastard.

Chris: Is it tacky to blog about?

Mike: No, it’ll make us seem edgy.

Chris: Hardcore? EXTREME?!

Mike: Sure.

Later…

Mike: Did you do the acid?

Chris: No, I was too hung over. It’s in the freezer.

Later…

Chris: OH G-D, THE SUN! I CAN TASTE THE SUN!

No, it was nothing like that, as a disquietingly large number of our readers probably know. I did, however, do the following:

- Make a list of things I said that I thought would be funny upon sober reflection, which reads:

“Are you an ominous knothole?” <- good penmanship

Fluorescent lights = Ghost labia

You’re a shoe.

- Put Ofra Haza’s recording of “Hatikvah” on loop and draw a detailed family tree of the Tudors.

- Sneak away from my sitter and go to the laundry room, because “it would be funny to go to the laundry room, because it’s so obvious.”

- Play Super Nintendo games, and perform better than I generally do sober.

- Angrily defend my choice of “Spanish Bombs” as my favorite Clash song. To no one in particular.

- Call Mikeleh here, be mistaken for an Australian by his roommate, and have a lengthy discussion about the future of KE. So, if it turns out that tomorrow is “Mystical Iguana Day,” I apologize.

I was going to make this post into a lengthy manifesto of unhealthy activities, but then I realized that I still haven’t written me and Chris’ life stories on the Kosher Eucharist About Us page (AKA, “Mommy, What’s a Kosher Eucharist?”), and I didn’t want to wind up repeating myself. But don’t worry, even if I save for later the unveiling of our rich history of self-abuse, drug use, sinning against the Lord in thought, word, and deed, saturated fat-rich diets and unabashed daily tune-ins to the Lifetime channel (”Alright, it’s been two weeks, it’s really time to go to anthroplogy…” “But ‘She Was 15 and Pregnant and Fought Alone Against a Baby For Sale with Another Woman’s Husband’ is on! It’s got Valerie Bertinelli and Angela Lansbury as the Queen Mother, and they totally make out to give the set-upon people of London the courage they need to overcome the Blitz!” “You know, who the fuck cares about australopithecus?”), I have plenty of current unhealthy material.

For example, before I decided to write this post, I spent the better part of an hour lying in bed in the dark listening to Mad Professor’s dub version of Massive Attack’s Protection and staring glassy-eyed at the ceiling. Considering that by all accounts these should be the best years of my life, and that according to the Israeli Defense Forces I am a flawless and virile physical specimen, I should probably be spending my nights on the town, jitterbugging and lindyhopping with the skirts or whatever the fuck it is the kids are doing these days, but instead I listen to dubbed-out trip-hop alone in the dark until I discorporate.

And trading in a social life for a strenuous, if sedentary, program of aural improvement isn’t my only unhealthy activity. I’m also getting into the spirit of the approaching holiday season the best way I know how: eating fried, filled,and powdered-sugared dough pastries. Because nothing can fill a void in the soul, or at least a void in your pants’ waistband, like delicious holiday treats (Chris, for example, likes to commemorate the birth of his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ by chugging cartons of eggnog), I’ve become a sufganiyah connoisseur. Haaretz has the full strawberry jelly on this most arterially-damaging of holiday delicacies.

My favorite, without a doubt, is the vanilla cream kind, followed by caramel. There are few pleasures in the world akin to that that of biting down on a hot, fresh, firm-yet-pliable sufganiyah, powdered sugar spraying onto your clothes and facial hair, and being rewarded upon reaching the center with a burst of creamy delicious vanilla goodness.

I’ve been bringing them into the office on more than one morning, but Harry and Ben insisted that I stop, because Harry and Ben are married men, and married men tend to live with the kind of women who exert strict controls over the consumption of scrumptious holiday treats. Such is the territory, I reckon.

So that’s my unhealthy habit of late, although I think I have to stop soon, because as always I worry about keeping my girlish figure. But don’t worry - the sufganiyah’s seasonal nature doesn’t mean that I’ll be out of a vice come post-Chanukah time. I think I’ll even get a head start. It’s time to eat a Krembo, drink a few screwdrivers, and go to bed. I hear that I’m low-class and Israeli, so I guess I might as well start living up to that lofty appellation.

Actually, in a brief aside since we’re on the topic of Israeli sweets and I mentioned the Krembo, I learned this about that distinguished snack’s history today from Wikipedia:

The forerunner of the Krembo was created about 200 years ago in Denmark, where it is a most popular sweet. In Denmark it is rather misguidingly known as a flødebolle (cream bun). It is also sometimes known as a negerbolle (negro bun) or negerkys (negro kiss), though these latter names are becoming less common, most likely due to higher social awareness of racial issues. Denmark also has a variation of the Krembo, which is slightly shorter in the height, but about twice as big in the width. Due to its shape it is known as a bøf (hamburger).

The Krembo was subsequently manufactured in various Northern European countries under names like Nigger in the United Kingdom, Negerkuss (negro kiss) in Germany and many other countries, or some variant thereof. In Flanders, it is called Negerinnentet (negress titties). However these names were later on changed to more neutral terms. In Austria, they are called Schwedenbomben (Swedish bombs). It is also similar to the South American candy, Alfajor, and the American Mallomar. In Finland a similar candy is manufactured by Brunberg Oy. Its name was changed in 1998 from Neekerinsuukko, Negro’s kiss, to Brunbergin suukko (Brunberg’s kiss). Released by Ghandour in Lebanon, Krembo were originaly called ras el abd (slave’s head), but have since been changed to Tarboush (Fez).

Okay. Sure, I’m not surprised that a country like Lebanon would come up with a name like “Slave’s Head” for an innocent children’s candy (this is the country, after all, that brought you Hizbullah and has to live with the unique ignominy of having been controlled by both France AND Syria, which is sort of like being double-stuffed by two sloppy drunk members of the loser frat), but Moses and all the prophets, Negress titties? “Oh, bless his little heart, Dierick really loves those Negress titties.”

I’m surprised it’s not called “Neshikat Kushi” in Hebrew, given Israel’s oft-amusing disregard for even the most basic of racial sensitivities.

I’ve never been much of a drinker. Considering what I’ve seen so far in my life, especially my life in Israel, this is an affliction shared by a lot of Jews (Chasidim and American yeshiva students nonwithstanding), and one I’ve never been able to get past. Most of my experiences with drinking to excess have ended poorly, like the infamous incident towards the beginning of freshman year wherein Chris and I went to a party in full makeup, and I proceeded to get intoxicated to a point where I thought it sounded reasonable to mix cheap whiskey roughly 50/50 with grenadine, making a sticky red cheap whiskey-flavored syrup approximately the color, consistency and flavor of Hunter S. Thompson’s blood. Note to impressionable readers: this is in no way reasonable, and I paid for it during the night, when I got up, leaned over the side of the bed and expelled a diluvial proportion of pink, grenadine-enhanced vomit, which left a massive and permanent stain on the floor (Chris and I named him Geoffrey).

However, I also have a faulty memory, which I will attribute to the drugs (with whom I formed a much more cozy relationship than I did with their legal, liquid cousin). So it was that I found myself several days ago in the company of a perpetually unwise friend of mine and a bottle of arak, preparing to drink a small celebratory toast to our Israeli media debut (which is a story not worth going into).

I should briefly interject that arak, the regional favorite of the Middle East and the greater Mediterranean, is a potent, foul-smelling concoction flavored with anise (compare to the Greek ouzo, the Turkish raki and the French pastis). Nearly undrinkable straight up, upon being mixed with water or ice it takes on a mysterious milky hue and becomes almost palatable. I like it, anyway. Traditionally, however, it’s meant to be slowly slipped as an accompaniment to a selection of salads and spreads, not rapidly guzzled.

But then, I was never one for tradition.

Somehow, and the fact that my normally domineering self-control was pushed so readily aside disturbs me, that celebratory toast turned into the entire bottle, in the space of about half an hour. And that’s when I did something I’ve never done before. I blacked out.

I woke up past midnight in bed, fully clothed, and entirely confused as to what exactly had transpired. So I called my drinking “buddy,” who informed me that I had gone to the bathroom and then announced I was going to sleep, which is, so he says, exactly what happened. He then left on a mission to buy a coat at the mall, but instead fell asleep on the bus and woke up at the last stop in Gilo. I also had a message from another friend thanking me for allowing her to come over and use the Internet. I had no memory of this transpiring, but I checked my cell phone text messages and I had indeed affirmed that she could come over. She says when she came, nobody answered the knock, whereupon she walked in and saw me passed out, and proceeded to use the Internet for the next four or so hours. She claims I got up several times to use the bathroom but paid her absolutely no mind.

Of course, the idea that I would suffer complete temporary amnesia bothers me, as I like to be in control of my mental faculties, such as they are. But what bothers me even more is that this is the first time I’ve ever blacked out, and I seem to have done absolutely nothing to take advantage of that situation. I didn’t make any embarrassing phone calls revealing my undying love for anybody, I didn’t rob a liquor store, I didn’t drive at 200 km/h the wrong way through a residential neighborhood, and (to my knowledge, anyway) I didn’t impregnate anybody. The only result of my binge drinking was a crippling headache and a terrible fire in my belly.

That is so lame.

And unless ten years from now I meet a child who has my nose, loves reggae and has a birthday nine months after mid-November 2006, I will never forgive myself.