'clocks and traffic'

last night, roxy and i went to a passover seder. im reasonably sure she will write about her experiences — it was her first one without her family and we ended up at the closest one we could find, which happened to be with students at standford.

as a christian, attending jewish ceremonies with her has always been overwhelming. i know she feels the same when attending church with me, but i dont regard the two experiences as equal.

you might not believe in jesus, but presbyterians have made the ceremony as accessible as possible. jewish ceremonies, on the other hand, are steeped in tradition. much of which revolves around reading hebrew. which i cant.

last night we ('we', as in, all but me) sang a lot of songs. none of which i could sing. sure, the book we were singing out of have phoenetic translations of the hebrew, so i could follow. but there were no notes or indications of tune. you just had to know it.

like i said, overwhelming.

it wasnt bad; i went last year to r's grandparents for it, so i wasnt a total newbie.

but seeing her there and experiencing it without her family made me realize, yet again, how different we are. how easy it has been the last 5.5 years to gloss over the differences. distance makes it easy to romanticize relationships.

after seder, we launched into a 30 minute conversation about raising children and religion. should we ever head down that road, things will be much stickier than i used to think. r has become, it seems, more invested (for lack of a better word) in her heritage. not a bad thing, but quite shocking to hear this: 'if we break up, i would want to date a jewish boy.'

in this 30 minute convo, i feel like we almost rationized ourselves into a breakup based on theoretical children raised in theoretical ways. but its still frightening. and the overall worry is still there at the back of my brain.

i guess i just didnt realize how many obstacles we were going to have to work through.

* * *

10 friendly pickup lines
got this through a comic blog, cause of the batman/superman connection. 1/2 of these lines would make me think the girl is helpless/stupid (sure, it might make my day to be the 'hero' but still) and the other couple are so fantastic ill never hear them.

100 rules for nasa project managers
most of these are easy to think 'duh' about, but as i keep being reminded, the 'real' world is always less than ideal circumstances. and if it is ideal, youre doing something wrong.

google's da vinci code quest
google, you have rendered me speechless once again.

* * *

get ready for comic awesomeness
this could be a good reason why im a comic book nerd.

spider-man ddr video
and this might be why im a video game nerd. this is a level of ddr. played facing the othre way. while miming/dancing peter parker turning into spiderman. seriously. im in nerd-awe.