Cleaning Up – Literally!

Alright folks, I have a little bit of a confession here, at least for those of you that don’t know me in real life.  I am not the best housekeeper.  I try, but stuff usually gets away from me.  I could blame it on being a teacher and thereby having a lot of things that I need to hold onto, not to mention that time to clean and organize is hard to come by, particularly during the school year.  Believe me people, teachers do not work a 40 hour week.  We work waaay more than that.  *steps off soapbox* Anyway, the point is that it’s usually tough for me to find time to clean and by the time I get around to it, the task is overwhelming, meaning I usually throw in the rag (pun intended) before I even start.  However, today, I am deciding that I am going to turn that around.  In trying to find an app to manage my chore list, I stumbled across Home Routines (http://www.homeroutines.com).  Although I usually try to avoid paying $3.99 for an app (yeah, I’m cheap, I know), this one looked to be worth the effort.  So today I was looking for the login to manage my account online and I actually started reading the Home Routines site.  There, I saw the mention of the app integrating well with the FlyLady system, which piqued my curiosity.  So I moseyed on over to the FlyLady website (http://www.flylady.net) to see what it was all about.  Reading about her system definitely was interesting.  The short version is that you start small, with little changes, and then build on those routines every day.  It’s primarily based in decluttering first, because you can’t clean clutter, and then working on developing routines to keep your house clean from there, which actually makes a lot of sense.  It also emphasizes, as FlyLady says a lot, that your house didn’t get this way in a day and it’s not going to get fixed in a day.  Basically the whole thing really made sense to me, so I signed up (don’t worry, it’s free!).  I figured I would do the initial 31 Day Challenge and then decide if I want to continue from there.  What can it hurt, right?  I’ll try to blog my impressions and progress over the 31 days, although I can’t make any definitive promises.  I’ll do my best peeps!  Stay tuned for my progress as I start Day 1 tomorrow!

Inspiration

This is definitely something I need to remember.  To get a different outcome, you have to take a different action.

Chassidics and Culture…An Interesting Conversation

I had a rather interesting discussion with a colleague of mine yesterday at work so I was marinating on it and decided to share it with you, along with my perspectives.  You need a bit of background first, though.  My husband decided a couple of weeks ago that he wanted to wear a kippah every day because it reminds him that Hashem is watching him at all times.  He actually says that he feels he’s been a better person since he started wearing it.  It makes me very proud to see him wearing it and I believe I see a difference in him.

Anyway, I was saying that to a colleague the other day (I don’t remember how the discussion started) who just happens to be Jewish as well and she had quite a vehement response.  She told me that she was offended by people like Chassidics, who separate themselves and go to great lengths to make themselves different from everyone else.  I asked why and she said that she believed that people who don’t come to terms with society as it is now and who go to such a length to separate themselves are basically living with their heads in their…well you get the point.  I probed some more and she said that Jews have been separated and marginalized and hated for so long that we don’t need to be doing it to ourselves.  I don’t disagree with her on that, but I think religion is a very personal thing and if that’s the way that you believe your religion is observed, then so be it. (To which her response was, “and I am personally offended by them”, which I thought was a pretty funny response.)

Now, I have been covering my hair most of the time since I got married, but I don’t keep Kosher (I plan to discuss my rationale on this later) and I’m usually busy on Saturdays, so Shabbos usually falls by the wayside; I don’t look very different from anyone else…I don’t wear all black, I don’t wear skirts all the time, I don’t cover everything all the time…I do the best I can, but hey…I do the things that make sense to me but I keep up with culture as much as I can.  I will be honest, I think the super-religious do take things a bit too far.  Shabbos came about as a result of the fact that people used to have to work very, very, very hard, even to do the simplest things.  Building a fire to heat food alone was a major chore and getting the food was a mission and a half.  Now, life is much easier.  Heating food doesn’t involve much more than pushing a button, flushing a toilet is easy and most of us push buttons to get on elevators without a second thought.  I have never understood why pushing a button is considered work…the Tanakh says that on the 7th day, Hashem rested.  Rested…not didn’t do a darn thing.  I don’t disagree with resting, we all need that every so often, but the super observant I just don’t understand, especially not with the way modern life is.

However, I’m a big believer in individuality, and I don’t believe that we should do things just because that’s what everyone else does.  If that were true, I would have been drunk a lot more in college and probably have done some drugs by now.  As a note – I can count the number of times I’ve been drunk on one hand and I have never put drugs into my body.  The Modern Orthodox frankly make more sense to me (except for a few things, which I will discuss later) but someone who is looking will still notice that they’re different from everyone else.  Then again, so do goth kids and they are much more noticeable than the Modern Orthodox.  I don’t see much difference between them dressing differently due to religious reasons versus people who dress differently for much more superficial reasons.  What this comes down to is that while I don’t understand the Ultra-Orthodox and I usually roll my eyes at the extent to which they take things, I don’t take the time to get particularly offended at the way they live.  If they want to live separately from everyone else, dress all in black, wear big black hats and peyos all the time, so be it.  I wish they would get with the times a little bit, but hey, if it works for them, it works for them.