2:00 A.M., Thursday night

I'm half asleep. There's a scuffling from downstairs. Eventually, Itta, freshly home from her restaurant, trudges upstairs.

ITTA: Sorry, I ate your leftover falafel.
ME: I was planning to take it for lunch tomorrow!
ITTA: You should've gotten food for me!
ME: You work at a restaurant!
ITTA: I can't eat restaurant food all the time!
ME: But my leftovers were from a restaurant!
ITTA: Okay, I'll make you sandwiches to take for lunch.
ME: You so don't have to. It's two o'clock in the morning.
ITTA: It's fine.
ME: You really don't have to.
ME (thinking): jackpotjackpotjackpot
ITTA: It's fine.

ITTA proceeds downstairs and makes two sandwiches. I return to sleep.

And that, my friends, is what is known in the vernacular as a win-win situation.

See 1/20 at The Hester

Just a little note that the movie I wrote, 1/20, is screening this Saturday night in New York City! Go here to buy tickets -- it's at The Hester, this little underground kosher speakeasy that my wife happens to run, and that happens to have been recently featured in the New Yorker and GrubStreet and a whole bunch of other places.

It'll be interesting, and fun, and different. And I'll be onhand, probably to incoherently answer any questions that you may have, and stare at my shoes. And eat kohlrabi pickles with spicy hummus. Which, you probably didn't know, but is one of my biggest talents.

G-d Dialogue

Internal dialogue while bringing cereal back to my desk.

ME: I already have a spoon at my desk! Thank G-d I remembered to leave it there before.
ME (smarmy): You know, it really isn't G-d's fault. You kinda got that one on your own.
ME: Yeah, but people are always blaming G-d for stupid things when they go down, and it isn't really G-d's fault at all; it's their own. So why not thank G-d for something that isn't necessarily G-d's direct doing for a change?
ME: Ah, but G-d created the universe and everything in it, and therefore, nothing that happens is an accident. So one way or another, G-d really manipulated you to leave a clean spoon at your desk earlier...right?
ME (undeterred): Thank G-d there was soy milk in the refrigerator. I hate it when they're all out.

THE END.

(Well, the end of the dialogue. The beginning of my very late breakfast.)

Kosher Zombies & Vampires

Are zombies kosher? Or, more specifically, can zombies keep kosher? Asks a friend, the amazing comic writer Ashley-Jane Nicolaus:

Long story short, a friend of mine moved to a new place next to a really really old Jewish cemetery - so that got us thinking, if the zombie apocalypse were to happen, are brains kosher? Inquiring minds need to know...

I'm no kosher expert, but a few decades of eschewing the swine have prepped me with a little background knowledge. Not to mention thoroughly geeking out with random books of Jewish law.

So here's the deal.

You can actually eat the brains of a kosher animal. Well, some kosher animals. My mother-in-law (who, I should note, is a native Australian) LOVES cracking open fish skulls & sucking the brains out. (I'm a vegetarian & i think she does it to psyche me out. It doesn't work.)

But that's not what you want to know. If you want to know about zombies, you want to know about REAL HUMAN BRAINS. Well, humans -- or any part thereof -- is not permissible to eat, regardless of whether you're talking about kosher-keeping humans or non. (You really wish that whoever started the blood libel rumors had Google access to give them a clue.) In order for any animal to be kosher, it has to have cloven hooves and chew its cud. So basically, if you're a kosher zombie, you are screwed.

One additional consideration: Kosher vampires are screwed as well. In the process of making meat kosher, the animal's body has to be completely drained of blood. So you know how, on Buffy, when Angel and Spike became good guys (or impotent), they had to drink the blood of animals? (Just kidding. You don't actually need to know that.)* Animal blood is out, too. I suppose there's a case to be made that, when a life is at stake,** Jewish laws such as kashrut don't apply. Then again, zombies and vampires aren't technically alive, are they?

If you're curious for more, you should probably check out Are Dragons Kosher?
__________
* -- I believe a similar thing happened in Twilight, but I've mostly blacked it out.
** -- Notice how I avoided a pun about stakes? Joss Whedon is rolling over in his grave.***
***-- Apologies. I know Joss Whedon is not dead.

The Jewish Authors' Oscars

Last night the Jewish Book Council hosted their annual National Jewish Book Awards, and they were kind enough to invite me. I wasn't a famous author or a famous book-buyer, but they let me in anyway.

At first my (a) shyness and (b) authory anti-social tendencies and (c) not knowing anybody-ness got the best of me. There was a (parenthetically: really fascinating) exhibit about Thomas Mann and German publishing, and the reception was mostly being held in one room ("mostly" meaning that the drinks table was in there, and therefore, so were all the guests) but spilled over into a second room that was ideal retreating space. I gave it an honorable go, checking out people's name tags to see if I recognized anyone. The first I spied was the illustrator of a book that I kind of slammed last year. Then I saw Alicia Susskin Ostriker, whose book of poetry >The Book of Seventy I'd read last week, but what would I say? I always appreciate when people tell me that, but then there's the deadening lack of conversation that's like, where do we go from here?

Rabbi Joseph Telushkin whizzed by. I worked with him last year on a G-dcast episode, but he was moving too fast to interrupt, although I made a mad dash of it. So I retreated to the exhibit, where I made small talk with two gentlemen who spoke about Thomas Mann like they went to grade school with him, that familiar. After spending about five minutes (that's long, in the context of a conversation, anyway) trying to explain what my book was about, and failing, I threw the question back at him: "So what do you do?" "Oh," he replied offhandedly, "I'm an acquisitions editor." He smirked. And my stomach hit the ground.

I'd kind of composed myself by the time dinner began. I saw Rabbi Telushkin again, and actually spoke to him. Randomly, he asked me where I lived. "Crown Heights," I told him, to which he raised an eyebrow -- he's working on a book about Lubavitch. He started to grill me about my Chabad connections (I'm not, my wife is, her family is about as Lubavitch as the town of Lubavitch), and, the way that these things go, he used to live with my grandparents-in-law and wrote a book in their house.

The M.C. for the evening came on mic and called for everyone to take their seats. Rabbi Telushkin, who was in the middle of a sentence -- he speaks in these long, fluid paragraphs, each like a train with a hundred cars -- ignored him. Then the M.C. said something about a "welcoming word from Rabbi Joseph Telushkin" and I broke him off, don't you have to go? He shrugged and did something with his hands. Carolyn Hessel, who's the director of the Jewish Book Council and maybe the most important person ever to hold a book in her hands, gave a much-too-polite word. The rabbi grinned at me. I scattered.

Remember how I thought I wouldn't know what to say to someone whose book I read? I slid into an empty seat at the table. There was one person I knew, a sometimes-editor of mine, and one person I knew but didn't realise I knew, since we had one of those email-only correspondences (a writing/editing one, not a sketchy Internet one) -- and then there was the person whose seat I slid next to, who was Dalia Sofer. Who might have written one of the best books I've ever read. Who is probably as close to a rock star as the literary world can offer. Who was introduced to me, and whom, upon meeting, I shrunk about 25 or 30 percent and told, in as natural and un-awkward a voice as I could muster (it was still incredibly awkward and incredibly unnatural) that, geez, The Septembers of Shiraz was pretty technically proficient. Or something. Graciously, she talked to me until I'd un-awkward-ized. And it was simply really cool, in the middle of a room where I was surrounded by people with amazing ideas, to have a straight-up conversation about writing that was pretense-free and unencumbered by all our fancy clothes (my invitation said "casual," I dressed casual-but-formalish, and I was still underdressed) and the weight of all the potential in the room.

I could tell you more about the food, or the people, or the books. I wish I could tell you more about the awards ceremony -- the speeches people made, and how incredible it was to take an arbitrary topic, like landlords in mid-20th century Chicago, and listen as an author gripped the microphone and talked about how it was her father's passion and she never understood what it was all about until she researched this 400-page book about it. For someone like me, to whom reading anything but novels (stories, action, making up stuff) is hard, if not impossible, the night was nearly revolutionary.

Oh, The Nonprofits You'll Go To

My wife and kid are out of town. Which means that I end up staying out past 6:30 p.m., my daughter's bedtime, and wreaking havoc on the town. To me, blotting out how much I miss them by consuming maddening quantities of alcohol is an expression of love.

So that was how I ended up telling the erstwhile Frum Satire to meet me at a bar in midtown for the most random of convocations, which I'd been invited to by a well-meaning friend: a happy hour for Jewish professionals for the explicit purpose of social networking.

I arrived before Frum, and slipped in unobtrusively, figuring there'd be someone I knew, or at least someone who thought I looked interesting enough to talk to. I was stopped at the door and asked what I was doing there, and whether I was invited -- it was a networking event, but strictly for Jewish professionals -- "that is," I was told, "people in JCC's, nonprofit organizations, that sort of thing." "Oh, dude, I'm totally that," I said, thinking I could brush past, get my nametag, and score some free falafel-based snacks.

But I wasn't so fast.

"Oh, that's interesting!" she deflected me again. "Who are you affiliated with?"

At this point, I name-dropped MJL -- which caused everyone to smile a bit ("I use that site all the time!") and gush over us. (Forgive my immodesty, but: Score!) At this point, I had a bit of an existential moment, realizing for the first time that day -- because I sometimes forget -- that I look like such a hardcore Jew with my beard and payos, and they might have thought I was just stopping by to eat their nosh. Which, after all, I was. What they didn't realize was, i was

I was pretty freely admitted. But then my pocket began vibrating. It was Frum calling. He was right around the corner.

So we had a twenty-second debate. Stay or go? We were by far the least well-dressed people there (-1). We were both artists (-1), and therefore had no grounding or no interest to these people (-2). Except, possibly, that they might want to book us to do a show (+2). And maybe invite us to more events (+1). With more free food (+5)...

This obviously took longer than twenty seconds. What really broke up the argument was when an Israeli in a t-shirt and painter's cap came up to me, started calling me tzadik, which basically means "saint," and asking whether he could get me a "kos plasteek." Frum and the person we were talking to, who was involved in several Zionist organizations but apparently didn't speak Hebrew, looked at us, baffled, for a translation.

"He asked if I want a beer in a plastic cup," I told them.

Because, in my experience -- and in all seriousness -- no one treats Orthodox Jews better than totally 100% secular Israelis. Calling me a saint was totally ironic, of course -- secular Israelis do this often, and it always is -- but it was an even higher compliment than if he'd meant it literally. It means that he considers us close enough to make a joke, and he considers me good-natured enough to take it well. Which, of course, I did.

I explained back at him in my bad Hebrew, and then translating for everyone else in bad English, that you don't need to worry about drinking cold beverages in a plastic cup; that they'll still be kosher. And then I asked him what he was drinking -- and what was he drinking from? It was a mojito. The ultimate Israeli drink: alcohol, soda, and fresh chopped-up mint. And he was drinking it from a Mason jar.

That settled it: we were staying.

It was a good time, even if the food wasn't kosher. Inside, we really did meet some pretty cool folks. Someone who was in charge of the Meira chapter of Hadassah, whose slogan on their cards was "We're not JUST your grandma's hadassah!" The person who runs Limmud NY, who I'd been email-harassing for a year to have me come speak, but who was actually very nice and not offended at all in person. And the guy who runs a travel blog called YeahThatsKosher.com. And then the awesome Sarah Chandler showed up, webmaster of the equally awesome JewSchool. She told me, "I wasn't going to show up, but I figured there was some reason I needed to go."

Yeah, I said to her. I know exactly what you mean.