Art Glass Pumpkins

art glass pumpkins

Wonderful Australian Talking Cats! I wish I could find out more about this. Were they touring and making a promotional stop at this store? Were they artists in residence? Were they the security team? Ca. 1885. Source.

Small brass bound coopered naval rum cask. Full size grog barrels of this form were to be found on board ship to hold rum and was rationed out to the crew. This example was probably made to be presented to the ship’s captain or the wardroom, England, 1800 -1830

judío por elección (part 4)

(part 1. part 2. part 2.5. part 3.)

I thought I was ready to meet the Rabbi, but I was wrong.

I have severe social anxiety. I believed I'd prepped to introduce myself on the Zoom call for our Intro to Judaism class. Turned out I kept turning the mic off when it should have been on, and vice versa. I stumbled my way through a basic intro in extremely broken Spanish.

I glanced at my wife, and they whispered: "You're way too loud on the mic, and you can speak in English. He speaks it."

Even thought that's my native language, I was now so discombobulated by having to reset my brain that I said some bullshit that probably didn't make sense, which is a great way of impressing the guy who's responsible for your conversion. It took me ten minutes of silently crying in front of my (thankfully, camera-less) computer to recover.

Fortunately, the Rabbi is extremely decent and has probably heard way worse than me. He politely switched between Spanish and English throughout the first class to make sure I understood certain points.

Our homework is to study some topics related to the biet dim's questions (monotheism and ethics) and present our findings to him next class. He says he wants to learn how each of us researches and records information, which is an excellent thing to learn. And he told us which portion of the Torah is being read.

We'll have to show him our scriptures next time to see if he thinks they're appropriate translations. We're converting Conservative and some of our books came from different practices. He's also made it clear that everybody converting will talk to the biet dim of Europe in their own native tongue, which is great for me, sure, but also important to my Spanish-speaking friends.

When my wife said that they were nonbinary and I was trans, the Rabbi didn't bat an eye, but we didn't get to talk much about it in detail. But, afterward, another person in the group hopped onto the shul's group chat to talk about being trans and Jewish and shared some English resources with us.

There was another trans person there the whole time!

I think the anxiety is down to a manageable level now. Homework, I can do. I'm looking forward to having coffee in the morning and reading and studying with my wife instead of doomscrolling.

It feels good to be able to do something instead of wallowing, or crying uncontrollably. (It's also morally neutral to cry uncontrollably. That's what the 'uncontrollable' part means.) To be able to know what kinds of things I'm looking for in my books instead of staring at the huge stack and not knowing where to start.

And I hope the Rabbi is as kind as he seems and that he won't hold my stumbling against me.