dichroic | a poem and some mental holiday prep

Trapped in the Office

My body sits, desk-bound, eight hours a day;
The paycheck, though, is meant to rent my brain
To ponder on their problems, find a way

Around, across or through, accomodate
Opposing viewpoints, make the complex plain -
And yet my body sits, eight hours a day.

Who was it thought that butt in chair would pay,
Mind focus tighter with the clay constrained,
And ponder on their problems, find the way?

I think they’re wrong. If I could run astray,
I’d rest or wander, nevermore restrained
to sit, congealing, eight hours every day.

With body chained, I think mind too is stayed –
With body freed, mind has the breadth to range
and pondering on problems, find new ways

And new solutions, bringing untold gain.
Are we but cowering, afraid of change
When we stay in a cube eight hours a day?
Let’s ponder on this bondage, find new ways!

Maybe not my best, but my poetry muscles are creaky, and it feels good to exercise them a bit.

Now that I’m back in the US. I’m thinking of trying to keep Passover this year – a thing I haven’t tried for a decade at least, and I’m not sure I’ve ever made it all the way through. Some of my reason is about reclaiming a bit of me I’ve strayed from, some of it is residual guilt, and some is purely physical – I’ve gained some weight since last fall, for no reason I can figure out, and I want it to go away. (As always, pretzels are one likely culprit; We’re also drinking more wine these days. I don’t mind having wine with dinner 3-4 times a week, but I don’t think we need to finish the bottle!) In the past, maintaining at a set weight has been standard for me, so unless something has changed in my body, I feel like it should be possible to get to where I want to be and stay there. I may, of course, be vastly deluded.

I don’t think keeping the holiday will be horribly difficult except for the pretzel thing – mayne I can get salted matzah. Breakfasts may be a bit tricky (I tend to have an orange and a granola bar) but my supermarket seems to have a lot of fruit-and-nut bars and snacks these days.I’m certainly not going to be overly conscientious about it; I will not be checking ingredients for corn syrup or malto-dextrin. The hard decision is what to do about kitinyot’ basically, Sephardic Jews eat rice and legumes (beans, lentils, peanuts, etc) during the holidays while Ashkenazic Jews (which I am) don’t. The reason given is that they can be easily confused with grains, and may be stored with them and thus get cross-contaminated. My feeling is that it was mostly that rice and beans were just not that big a deal to my ancestors – not a big enough part of their diet for the constraint to hurt much. I think the the Sephardic Jews probably allowed them because they used those incredients a lot more.

My gut feeling is that Passover is just not meant to be that hard – I think it’s supposed to be a joyous feast, not an ordeal, and that we restrict ourselves from foods our ancestors didn’t have as a memory, not a challenge. (My ancestors fleeing Egypt didn’t have potatoes or kiwis or sparkling water, either, yet those foods are perfectly kosher l’Pesach.) SO I will probably be eating rice and beans and peanuts during the holiday.

(Also, for those who prefer arguing from authority over arguing from logic (which may not include anyone likely to read this), my mom’s rabbi says he thinks they’re OK, too.)

Mirrored from Dichroic Reflections.