Abacaxi Mamão

After, ahem, 20 (?) months of complete radio silence, you may have noticed that I am back!

Why?

1. For awhile now, I have been feeling the need for a creative outlet other than long Facebook posts.


2. I was looking back over some of my favorite old blog posts recently, and saw Part 2 of this series ("My Life in Talmud Torah") and that someone had asked, back in 2009, if I would ever publish Part 3. In October 2009, I wrote, "There will be a Part 3 (eventually). Have no fear!" But in 2019, I no longer remembered that I had written and saved Part 3 only six days later. There it was, in my "drafts" folder, along with 149 (!) other saved drafts of blog posts. 149! Surely it was time to hit publish on that Part 3 and to see what other genius lurked in that tremendous pile of drafted posts! (There were also 524 published posts, and it seemed a shame to write 524 posts in a blog and then just give it up, cold turkey, in 2017 after publishing a series of incredibly boring posts about the experience of having coxsackie as an adult. Is that how I want to be remembered as a blogger?! No!)


3. Someone asked me what I believe and the only (or at least best) answer I have is this blog! It is here where I have written the best, deepest, truest things in which I believe. And, at this point, a lot of it feels old, dated, and incredibly young (looking back at my 25-year-old self from the ripe old age of 39), but a lot of it still reads true to me. And that is a beautiful thing!

Labels: life, meta

Labels: meta

Make that fifteen seconds.

Labels: meta, teaching, Torah (broadly defined)

It seems unlikely that I will be able to write Part 2 of this this week. Hopefully next week.

Labels: meta, Rosh Hashanah

Although I am a woman, not a man, and I learned a little Spanish in high school (not French), this rang resoundingly true. Except for the last panel!

Hat tip to BZ and mazal tov on his recent marriage! (And move to a new city and starting grad school!)

Labels: fun 'n games, meta

I just changed this blog to "full feed," for you feed-reader junkies out there. Enjoy!

Labels: meta

why the Mechon Mamre parallel Hebrew-English Tanakh website looks like this (see below, click to enlarge) on my Mac in Firefox now?

I don't think I changed any settings. What happened and how can I fix it?

This is how it looks in Safari, but I use Firefox almost exclusively, so all that helps me know is that it's a Firefox issue, not a computer-wide issue.

Other Hebrew looks normal in Firefox, and when I copy and paste from the funny characters into, say, a blog post, it comes out fine.

Does it have anything to do with this? I feel like it must somehow be reading this as a page of Hebrew instead of a page of English, but I don't know how to fix that.

Thanks, blogosphere!

On a related note, if anyone can give me a good workaround for using Word for Mac (2004) with Hebrew text, please share! I can paste into TextEdit or a gmail message without reversing all the words in the Hebrew, but when I copy and paste from a Hebrew website either directly into Word for Mac (2004) or from TextEdit or a gmail message, the Hebrew words appear in the wrong order. I would hate to have to buy Windows just to get around this problem. Plus, I would have to buy Windows and the Windows version of Microsoft Word, which would really be irritating. I love my Mac, but due to all the learning I am doing these days, I am writing more and more in Word using Hebrew text, and I need to be able to do that. Thoughts?

I was disappointed that none of my astute and well-versed blog readers had an answer to my kinah query. Oh, well. It probably isn't online anywhere, and the only way to get it electronically would be to type it out or scan it and find some Hebrew OCR software.

Labels: how to, meta

From yesterday's New York Times: "In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop"

In other news, I've been thinking and talking over a lot of really complicated stuff, including things that take considerable intellectual brainpower and things that take considerable emotional heartpower, so I have had less time and energy to blog lately. I sincerely hope that many positive things--both for myself and for the world at large, one day (if I may be so egotistical to suggest that what is good for me may eventually benefit others)--will come out of all of this thinking one day, and possibly even before then, that I will find the time and energy to blog more regularly. When I am busy ruminating over Important Things, somehow blogging the light fluffy stuff seems silly and blogging the Important Things seems a little bit inadvisable from a privacy perspective.

Labels: links, meta

Two days ago was the third anniversary of this blog. I was thinking about that this morning, and how I was in Brazil the last time we had a Purim meshulash. That year, like this year, Purim was on a Friday, with Easter the following Sunday. I remember because I was surprised by how big a deal Easter was in Brazil--much more than it is around here.

Labels: meta

Jack's Shack linked to me! I am famous! I never aspired to be part of the self-defined "Jewish blogosphere" of which Jack's Shack is so much a part, but when someone in that world notices little old me, it does make me happy. So, thank you!

There was a typo in my name blog title, but, as someone pointed out to me, that's what you get for picking two Portuguese words as the name of your blog. (Just to clarify, my name is ALG and my blog's name is Abacaxi Mamao.)

Labels: meta

This is not some sort of self-deprecating comment about my own blog.

I just thought this was funny, especially in light of NaBloPoMo, wherein people post daily in November. In my experience, the quality of posting does not go up or remain static when people post daily. It goes down; the relationship between quality and quantity is inverse. If you want to create a daily writing exercise, do it in your own time. Don't clutter up my RSS feed. NaBloPoMo makes me take more people off of my blog reading list than anything else.

The exception to this inverse relationship rule is for truly wonderful writers, where the quality of their posts remains fairly uniform and I am delighted to have more of their writing to read. But for the average-quality blog writer, who has mostly okay posts with a few brilliant flashes of insight every once in awhile that keep me coming back, daily posting does not endear them to me.

In my ideal world, people would only post when they had something interesting to say or something controversial to discuss, and their posts would be clear, articulate, and literate. Sometimes even short! I realize that by posting today (and most other days that I post), I am negating my own ideal vision, although I do think that this blog has headed more in that direction as time goes on--better and less frequent writing. (I used to clutter it up with more irrelevant stuff.) Oh, well. Continue on...

P.S. What sort of bug would bite me twice on the inside of my elbow in November?! I've been wearing long sleeves--how did it even get to me?

Labels: meta

From Monday's New York Times: "Politeness and Authority at a Hilltop College in Minnesota"

Whenever I write and hit "publish post" on an intensely personal post, as I did yesterday, I question the wisdom of what I do here. It makes me want to run away and hide, a little bit, sometimes. It sort of makes me feel naked, even though I sit here, covered collar-bone to toe.

I think that this was the first thing I posted that made me feel that way. This and this and this and this and this also made me feel that way, more or less. These are also, not coincidentally, among my favorite posts, whether people respond favorably or not. But, like the young women in the article, sometimes I wonder, "Who will love [me] if [I'm] like that?" and "Who am I to write about all of my secret worries, fears, and problems on the Internet?" and "Who cares?" and "Will someone I want to date read this and run 1000 miles away?" And then there are all the things that I really want to write about, but don't, because of those questions. Things that I know would make posts as good as these or better, things that I know people would relate to, but things that touch such an inner part of me that I almost never write or speak of them at all.

At what point am I going to realize that anyone who dates me seriously is going to find out about all of this stuff, and if that isn't part of he loves about me, he isn't for me, anyway? At what point am I going to accept that writing about what matters to me--to the inside of me--is what makes me happier than almost anything else in the world, and that what other people think of me should pale in comparison to that which makes me happier than almost anything else in the world? ("Almost" because, gosh darn it, it's hard to top a hug from a three-year-old--or anyone--or really fine chocolate, or an interesting sugya in Gemara.)

I love to write. I don't ever remember not loving to write, since I first became adept enough to fill notebooks up on my own when I was seven. Somehow, writing makes me feel more me. I read someone something I had written in my (private) journal the other day, because it was something I had to express, and I knew, with full certainty, that there was no way it would come out of my mouth better than it had come out on paper, as a first draft, while riding the subway to work in the morning.

I don't know why words and thoughts and feelings come out differently, and so much better, on paper than in speech. Maybe it's because I've had much more practice writing than speaking, in many ways. I mean, I've had a journal since I was nine, and done a lot of other writing as well (both for school and pleasure), and so much of our talking life is taken up by the mundane details of work and eating and "What shall we do?" and "Is the washing machine fixed?" and not the details of what makes us keep going and doing this stuff, day after day after day, and what stops us in our tracks on some days.

Labels: life, meta

This story, about the discovery that homo erectus apparently did not descend from homo habilus, but existed concurrently, broke over a week ago, but I didn't get a chance to read it until just now.

I wasn't terribly surprised. When I did some brief research on evolution to try fortify myself with specific facts in discussing, with P-Life, why observant Jews should not dismiss evolution, there were already hints that some scientists felt that way. It seemed to be a growing trend, as more and more fossils were found and classified as either homo habilus or homo erectus. Scientists still agree that one or the other of them evolved into homo sapiens, i.e., us. I really, really don't understand why some people read this news story and immediately felt justified in saying, "See, evolution isn't right after all!" Anyway, I don't want to get into that discussion again.

What I thought was interesting in this AP article were these lines:

That caused researchers to re-examine the 30 other erectus skulls they have and the dozens of partial fossils. They realized that the females of that species are much smaller than the males -- something different from modern man, but similar to other animals, said Anton. Scientists hadn't looked carefully enough before to see that there was a distinct difference in males and females.

Difference in size between males and females seem to be related to monogamy, the researchers said. Primates that have same-sized males and females, such as gibbons, tend to be more monogamous. Species that are not monogamous, such as gorillas and baboons, have much bigger males.

Among modern humans, men and women are of roughly the same size. Although the average male is, of course, taller and heavier than the average female, there is some overlap in the middle of the spectrum.

I'm not entirely sure why I feel this way, I think there's something nice about monogamy being more pervasive in species in which males and females are closer in size. I guess that I associate monogamous societies as ones in which men and women have more equality, and so the fact that males and females are also closer in size where monogamy exists jibes nicely. It just seems fitting, somehow.


I'm sorry that I've been posting so irregularly. Since I started blogging, I have never had so many contiguous months with so few posts. In looking back over the past few months, I see that my blogging quantity, and possibly quality, declined precipitously starting in May. (Actually, June had some very nice posts, so perhaps I shouldn't leap to make that claim.) I attribute this to the news I got in May of my grandmother's very short life expectancy, followed by my last visit to see her at the end of May, and her subsequent death at the end of June, followed by going to the funeral and shiva. (I wrote this post in mid-May, when it became fully apparent that my grandmother did not have long to live. I wanted to thank her, while she was still alive, for at least some of the things that I've received from her. Likewise, this post had been languishing in the draft box since Pesach, and I finally polished it up and published it because I knew that it would be weird to publish it after my grandmother died, when I would be consumed with sadness and thoughts about the entirety of her life, and not necessarily little details about yom tov in her house over the past few years. Finally, this was, in many ways, meant to be a tribute to my grandparents for the incredibly mind-expanding summers that they provided for us. I wanted my grandmother to know how I felt, and, in fact, my mother read this post to her on one of her last "good" days, a week before she passed away.)

Oh, yes. And then there was the subway incident, which took place the day after I returned from visiting my grandmother for the last time. July and August were particularly strenuous months at work. And the moving...oh, the moving! I am still nomadic, but hope to be settled into my new home sometime this week.

So, what I'm trying to say is, "I am still here and I am still thinking interesting things once in a rare while, I just don't have the energy to sit down and write thoughtful posts right now." I hope you will forgive me and remain loyal readers (all three of you!).

Labels: gender, meta, science/health/environment

Wow!

I would like to thank the Academy, my mother, my father, my sisters, my brother, and the other 7-10 readers of this blog, including BZ who nominated me, for their great support.

I apparently made it past the first round of the JIB awards for "Best Personal blog." Thanks, everyone! There is no way I will make it past the next round to win the award, which is why I was so, um, insistent that people vote for me in this first round. I won't be as annoying about the second round, since if I have no chance of winning, I don't want to bother people. Go read someone else's blog who might have a chance of winning and vote for them!

If you're too lazy to click over there and scroll down, I've copied and pasted the results of the top two finalists for all four groups of best personal blogs, which will clearly illustrate why I won't win the final round (just look at the numbers that people in other categories got). I included the third place person in my group (Group C) to illustrate the importance of thanking my mother, father, sisters, and brother. Without them, I would not have gotten this far! (Please pardon me while I wipe away the tears of joy that well up as I stand here, accepting my finalist status in the JIB awards.)

Vote for Best Personal Blog - First Round Group A
	Treppenwitz	37.12 % (85)
	mentalblog.com	19.21 % (44)
Total votes: 229

Vote for Best Personal Blog - First Round Group B Seraphic Secret 38.21 % (94) Letters of Thought 13.82 % (34) Total votes: 246

Vote for Best Personal Blog - First Round Group C The 90th Minute 24.27 % (50) Abacaxi Mamao 23.30 % (48) The Balaboosteh 21.84 % (45) Total votes: 206

Vote for Best Personal Blog - First Round Group D
	Aidel Maidel	45.60 % (88)
	Point of Pinchas	17.10 % (33)
Total votes: 193

If you still want to vote for me after seeing those numbers, the next round of voting starts on Wednesday, May 9.

I haven't been in a finalist in anything since the 6th grade pillo-pollo championships, and, trust me, that had nothing to do with my own personal athletic prowess.

Labels: meta

BZ was kind enough to nominate me for a third close-to-annual Jewish and Israeli Blog Awards award, in the category of "Best Personal Blog."

If you care about me or my well-being at all, you will vote for me in the first round, which opened this past Sunday and closes next Sunday, April 29. I'm in Group C in the category of "Best Personal Blog." Vote here. Now! (It is quick and easy. You don't need to register or anything.)

If you're coming from the JIB website and have never been here before, welcome! You can read what I consider some of my better posts by looking at the posts listed under "Best Posts" in the right sidebar there. You can also browse by labels, which I think are a fairly good representation of what gets a lot of press in this blog and what doesn't.


Ha, ha, ha! Just kidding! Not about the voting. You should totally do that. The "ha, ha, ha" was in reference to "if you care about me or my well-being at all." Don't worry. I'll still be your friend if you don't vote for me. Maybe just not your bestest friend or even your good friend, more like your "I like you enough to hang out with you if I don't have anything else to do" friend.


Other blogs you should check out and consider voting for are:

• Orthonomics in the category of Best Overall: need I say more?
• Mah Rabu in the category of Best Jewish Religious Blog: BZ is an awesome chavruta and an awesome blogger. QUAD! He'll never let you down. On a more serious note, BZ's posts often push me to think about things that I wouldn't otherwise think about. (Vote here for BZ.)
  
• Curious Jew in the category of Best Overall and Best Small Blog: a young, thoughtful woman whose posts I don't have time to read most of the time, but when I do, I always enjoy them
• Zackary Sholem Berger in the category of Best Overall: another blog I read infrequently but always enjoy when I do read. I used to read it more regularly, and I enjoyed it then, too.
• Yutopia in the category of Best Small Blog: always thoughtful, always interesting
• JDaters Anonymous in the category of Best Humor Blog: another wonderful person and wonderful blogger

There are lots of other wonderful bloggers on the list, but I don't have time to mention all of them right now. If I have more time later today or tomorrow, I will add to this list. In the meantime, you can vote for me here (Best Personal Blog, Group C), and for all of them here.

Man, this self-promotion stuff is hard.

Vote for me here.

And have a great day!

Labels: links, meta

Information about the third annual Jewish and Israeli Blog awards is here.

Their website says:

The "Jewish and Israel Blog Awards" are the J-blogosphere's informal annual award contest. The aim of the contest is to direct new readers towards Jewish, Israeli, and pro-Israel blogs. The JIBs begin with nominations, then a semifinal and final round. Good-natured rivalry and campaigning are associated with this event.

Nominations end tonight.

Those who have already been nominated in at least some of the categories are listed here.

Labels: meta

What, on earth, would make anyone think that I blog about cats? Have I ever blogged about cats? I am allergic to cats. I sometimes start sneezing as soon as I walk into a room that has a cat in it.

Before I realized how allergic I was, I was at my parents' and the cat was in bed with me at night, and I had difficulty breathing. Another time, my brother's cat slept on my neck, and I woke up with a red, itchy face and neck. (Washing it off immediately with soap and water and then taking some benadryl made life bearable.)

So, no thanks, I don't want to join the cat bloggers network!

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Cat Bloggers
Date: Jan 29, 2007 8:00 AM
Subject: Invitation to Join Cat Bloggers
To: abacaximamao@gmail.com

Dear blog author:

We recently came across your site, abacaximamao.blogspot.com, while searching for bloggers who blog about Cat issues.

A small group of us have started a new site called Cat Bloggers. Our intent is to bring Cat bloggers closer together, and make a positive contribution to the Internet community.

Would you be interested in joining Cat Bloggers? Please take a few minutes to have a look at what we are trying to do, and if you are interested, there is a sign up page to get the ball rolling. We would greatly appreciate your support in this endeavour.

If you do not feel that your blog would be a good fit for Cat Bloggers, but enjoy this subject area, come visit us and one of our member bloggers. You can also check our FAQ Section to learn more about Cat Bloggers.

We look forward to hearing from you and seeing you on Cat Bloggers.

Craig Cantin
Cat Bloggers
info@cat-bloggers.com

Please note: you will receive this email no more than twice. If you do not respond to this email, we will send out a second and final email in approximately 3 weeks time. If you respond, by joining or by declining the invitation, we will not intentionally send this invite a second time.

You can join or visit Cat Bloggers at any time, but we do not believe in spam, and will not intentionally send this invite more than twice. If you have any concerns regarding our anti-spam policy, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Labels: meta

As you may have noticed, I made some changes to my blog recently. The main change is that I'm now using the newer form of Blogger, and can thus have labels (or "tags," if you want to call them that instead). Both deciding which labels to use (rejected a general "Jewish" tag, decided to have separate "parsha" tag, decided to conflate "science/environment/health" into one tag instead of keeping them separate) and going back and tagging old posts were wonderfully self-reflective exercises. Seeing how various topics intersect was also interesting. How often do I write about gender + Torah vs. gender + history or gender + science/environment/health?

I'm sure I missed some tags that belong on old posts, but my list of tags, from most-used to least-used, currently looks like this:

Labels

• life (45)
• gender (41)
• New York (35)
• Torah (broadly defined) (34)
• travel (18)
• links (17)
• childhood (13)
• science/health/environment (13)
• Israel (12)
• books/reading (12)
• words (12)
• meta (11)
• Brazil (9)
• In Memoriam (9)
• mental health (8)
• history (5)
• parsha (5)
• chocolate (2)

Most of them are self-explanatory, I think, but I thought I would take the opportunity to explain a few that might not be.

1. life = mostly self-reflective musings about my life or the nature of life
2. links = posts that mostly consist of links to other blogs, newspaper articles, or websites
3. childhood = about my childhood or about childhood in general (what can I say? it's something in which I am interested)
4. books/reading vs. words. This merits an explanation. Books/reading is about things that I'm reading or have read or about buying books compulsively. Words is about cool words that I've discovered or about linguistics or the nature of a particular word or set of words. This distinction makes complete and utter sense to me, although I can see how it might not to others. There are two distinct things that I love: reading (books) and words.
5. meta = posts about this blog or about blogging in general
6. mental health. I thought that I blogged a lot more about mental health issues than I do. Likewise, I thought I blogged a lot less about New York than I do.
7. chocolate. I can't believe I've only blogged about chocolate twice! That's ridiculous! In my defense, though, there's probably generally less controversy about chocolate than about some of the other things I blog about, and maybe less nuance as well. Of course, you can get into fierce debates about milk vs. dark chocolate (dark, of course), and about what percentage of cacao is acceptable (65-82% is my happiest range). Except for the child/slave labor stuff, though, it's not too controversial.

To remedy this dire chocolate situation, here is some recent news about chocolate:

• It's the single-biggest specialty-food export from New York City, and food manufacturing is "'by far the most stable major manufacturing sector'" in the city, so that's really saying something.
• It can be very, very expensive ($2,000/pound) but people buy it anyway.
• The continuing problem of child labor in the production of chocolate: "Children as young as 9 are taken from their homes to work in the cacao fields, with frequent whippings, no schooling and no family contact."
• There is one fair-trade chocolate company that has been in the news lately. (I feel no need to mention them by name and thus provide free advertising.) I will, however, mention Equal Exchange fair trade chocolate bars, which are both delicious and hechshered. Yum!
  

I realize that this will only get me up to three posts with chocolate tags, but one has to start somewhere, doesn't one?

If there are labels/tags that you would like to see that I don't currently use, feel free to let me know.

Labels: chocolate, meta

Still!

Some statistics about how people have reached my blog recently. (The percentages are "of the last 100 visitors who reached abacaximamao through a search engine.")

Num

Perc.

Search Term

5	20.00%	drew gilpin faust jewish
3	12.00%	is drew faust a jewish
2	8.00%	drew gilpin faust jew
1	4.00%	numbers rabbah and longing
1	4.00%	catholic drew gilpin faust harvard
1	4.00%	drew gilpin faust, israel
1	4.00%	posman's books discounts
1	4.00%	drew gilpin faust israel
1	4.00%	rav moshe feinstein on ocd
1	4.00%	faust jewish
1	4.00%	drew faust jewish
1	4.00%	drew gilpin faust, jews
1	4.00%	drew gilpin faust
1	4.00%	statistics on sibling abuse

Apparently, one person also wants to know if she's Catholic. (I have no idea, sorry.)

It's crazy. I had about 170 unique visitors on Monday, which is the most I've ever had in one day (by a lot). Between this issue of Drew Faust's religion and my new fame through JOFA, I'm positively glowing!

I feel like I should capitalize on this somehow. Do you think I can turn this into a money maker? Perhaps something to offset the several hundred dollars that I spent at the dentist yesterday morning, since I had one small filling and don't have dental insurance? (Cursed be he who decided that dental insurance was not a necessary employment benefit. Cursed, I say! Of course I'm not going to let my teeth rot, but I hate to dig into my carefully-hoarded and somewhat meager savings to pay for a teeny tiny cavity in my mouth. I've thought about buying dental insurance, but it's apparently not worth it if you only get one filling every year or two, as I do.)

Labels: meta

First AM New York, then JewSchool, now TailRank.com!

I've never heard of TailRank, but there I am, right under my esteemed fellow alum Matthew Yglesias. I'm not sure why my post, cleverly titled, "Drew Gilpin Faust presumed president of Harvard; Charles W. Eliot rolls over in grave," comes up as untitled, though. Maybe that's a failing of this particular Blogger template (or of my own limited somewhat technical skills).



I am so not caught up on trying to get more people to read my blog. I write it because I enjoy writing it, and if anyone else enjoys reading it, that's great, but (I try to convince myself) that's not why I do it. I have about ten regular daily readers, which is peanuts compared to any other blogger you've ever heard of. Still, I treasure those ten readers very dearly, and am pleased when someone else notices my work.

A lot of people got to this page over the weekend by Googling "'Drew Gilpin Faust' Jewish" or some variation thereof (including "Drew Faust is Jewish" and "is Drew Faust Jewish"). Well, as it turns out, she isn't Jewish, so there are only 610 hits at last check, and mine is the first. (If you're here solely to find out if Dr. Drew Gilpin Faust is Jewish, let me repeat: She is not. Her husband, Charles Rosenberg, presumably is, though!)

But isn't that strange? Why are they Googling that? Are they wondering if she's both female and Jewish? Good Lord, that would have both Charles William Eliot (who wouldn't let Radcliffe College quite be an official part of Harvard University) and Abbott Lawrence Lowell (who followed him as president and instituted the unofficial Jewish quota at Harvard) rolling over in their graves!

Labels: meta