How I met a nice Jewish man.
One of the people who left a comment yesterday was surprised that I’d met and married a Jewish man while living in the middle of the “Bible Belt”. In reality, I’m not quite in the midst of the “Bible Belt” (although there are days when it feels like I am). I live just close enough to the Big City that my community has a good cross section of just about every religion represented in the US today. The town I live in has Catholic, Methodist, Lutheran, Baptist, Unitarian, Greek Orthodox and Mennonite churches. There are several Quaker meetinghouses, along with an offshoot called Schwenkfelters that you probably haven’t heard of unless you live in my area. We have a mosque in the center of my town, and there are several Korean churches that have their signs in Korean so I’m not sure what religion they are except that they are probably Christian since they also have crosses on their signs. And yes, there are also several synagogues in the area.
My ex-husband had a sister the same age as my younger sister, and for a while through high school they were close friends. I knew the ex (let’s call him The Engineer) from the time I was fourteen or so, though he didn’t really know me as anything other than the sister of a friend of his sister’s. But everybody knew whom The Engineer was when he was in high school.
The Engineer founded an ecology club in high school that applied for and got state funds and did actual clean ups and awareness campaigns in the school district. They sponsored large Earth Day activities, and brought a local polluter to the attention of authorities. The Engineer was (at the time) the youngest person ever named to a planning commission in our state. He was always in the papers, and it was hard to go to our high school and not know who he was.
It wasn’t until we were both in college that The Engineer noticed me, though. I was working part-time at a local bank to earn money while going to college. He banked there. I was coming off a really bad five year relationship at the time (yes, I dated the same guy from when I was fourteen until I was nineteen, but that’s a nightmare for another entry), and The Engineer’s long term girlfriend of several years had just broken up with him by telling him that she was engaged to be married to someone else.
He liked what he saw through the bars at the bank counter (yes, banks still had barred counters in those days) and got my number from his sister to ask me out. Within two weeks of our first date, we were talking about getting married.
His being Jewish was pretty much a non-issue, except for my father (who wisely never said a peep to me about it, but evidently spoke plenty to my mother about it). As things fell out, he became a non-practicing Jew, and I never embraced any religious beliefs, so the conflicts that eventually developed in our marriage never really stemmed from the different religious backgrounds we came from.
All of which is a long explanation to a short comment.
Aww!
Well, not all men are scum. lol
Sorry, I don’t have anything insightful to say here.
Hugs,
cur
…man, that’s a rough conclusion to come to. Funny how often we tend to look everywhere else for blame first.
i don’t think you’re *too* hard on the Prof, but then, i don’t know him. If you think you have been unfairly hard on him in here, then that is probably the case.
It’s not up to me to intrude on your self-assessment (so, sorry, and I feel all presumptuous), but I just wanted to encourage you not to be too hard on yourself. You never came across as man-bashing to me. You have a few issues, but they’re specific, and I never thought you hated the sex or even the Professor. And, good golly, if you can’t vent in your anonymous diary, where -can- you vent?
I have read some diaries that seem to do a lot of male bashing, but I wouldn’t count you among them. However, there aren’t THAT many like that – like you said.
I think we all do it once in a while. Just like we all have our moments of boss-bashing, women-bashing and neighbor-bashing and family member-bashing… etc. 🙂
actually, i haven’t read any entries where you were bashing the prof. i must’ve missed out on something.
i’d have to check my records to see where i might’ve bashed men in general, but i try to avoid bashing my boy here…..i go elsewhere, and i don’t bash him there. there’s always two sides.
at any rate, i have noticed many diaries where women vent about their men problems and vice versa. sadly, it occurs all too often with women, but they make up a large percentage of the diarists.
Alright everybody I admit it. It was me, as anyone can see on the other board where my post is written out in all its paranoia attached firmly to my name.
The fact that I’d just been reading an entry entitle Ugh!!! Men Suck!!! and before that a 4 paragraph tirade on another diary of how ALL men are horrible and treat the writer like crap which had a link to a third entry on another diary that went on in the same vein had colored my thinking a little.
Then when the ladies on my favorite board got into the subject (with very little hostility I hasten to add) I made my ill-advised comment.
I should have known that my friend would see this as referring to herself since it’s on the board where she is the gracious hostess, and refers to DD where she has a diary, but I am saying now for the record that she is not one of those male-bashing people to whom I was referring. She does not bash the prof here by simply expressing her irritation with his occasional behavior, and certainly never pretends to be perfect.
So, I apologize salamander for even making it seem like I was referring to you.
Whoa, Shay. Deep breaths. It’s OK.
All you did was say something that ulitmately made me reevaluate how I’m looking at things and reacting to them. A little mind-set jogging is a good thing. I didn’t mention you by name because it didn’t matter who said it. What mattered was my reaction to it. Which I hope will end up causing me to make a positive change. This is a good thing.
To everybody else … Shay is one of the good guys. I hope you are all lucky enough to have a "Shay" in your list of friends.