Bye Tumblr; and more Hanukkah

[juushika]

There's something invigorating and optimistic in the Tumblr exodus—a feeling helped along by nostalgia which I've been trying to rein in (not only can you never return to the good old days, there are no good old days, not really), but which has been counteracting the low-grade anxiety that always comes with thinking about social media & the role it plays in my life. (Agoraphobia/anxiety I think makes me especially vulnerable to the dangers of parasocial relationships and the dopamine hits that come from microblogging platforms—it's easy for me to expend my limited social energy in ways that don't provide adequate returns. It's still a double-edged thing, because mindless/more passive distraction has value. Thus the answer to the perennial question, how2socialize?, forever evades me.) Tumblr dying doesn't fix anything, but it may be an improvement, and it's certainly hilarious to watch it all fall down.

My visits home for Hanukkah have been low key, mostly in positive ways, excepting one overlapping visit from a goyim family friend—still low key, but it did prompt a "the story of Hanukkah from a poorly-educated non-observant Jew" moment which illustrated all the complicated feelings I've had about cultural Jewish identity after the death of one's Jewish parent. Everything secondhand, everything imperfect; and the light in the window to show the world that we are still here is particularly bittersweet given that we are not all here. The cancer in my family is BRCA-related, which particularly affects Ashkenazi Jews, so these things, death of a Jewish parent, Jewish diseases, Jewish holiday, feel pointedly entwined. This is not how I wanted the universe to validate our identity.

Devon has been working to give this Hanukkah positive associations despite everything by reviving the one small present for each night tradition that I grew up with, albeit gifts of better quality that the famously shitty things my grandparents used to pick out. So far, most of them have been the mini Overwatch pachimari (Pachilantern, Pachiking, Pachilover, and Gingermari), to add to my growing collection of soft nerd items.

Excepting literal apocalypse, Devon's last day of undergrad is tomorrow (now today, Friday). He has a potential job available if he wants it, and has been working there very-part-time in these last few weeks of school. It's not all perfect; no fulfilled fantasy, yet, of moving to Canada, Sweden, the moon; to distant places where the live I've had until now stops being real. But he's almost free—we are almost free—and that's so huge that I haven't yet internalized it. Taking advantage of the increasing financial freedom to indulge in stupid presents is, however, concrete & comprehensible. And working! I don't know how I could survive any of this without him.

Comments

[thobari]

a potential positive hanukkah offering from my own experience, this year: a friend invited me to light candles with them, tonight. i remember speaking with you a bit about having complicated feelings about my jewish heritage - that it's a thing i never grew up practicing, because of my own father's distance from it, and that side of the family intentionally distancing themselves from him - and that the only jewish thing about me feels like my crohn's, which is historically ashkenazi. but i told a friend about that tonight, who was over for dinner. they live nearby and invited me over afterwards, and they let me light candles with them. because i had missed the first night of hanukkah, they sang an extra verse for me. and we chatted until the flames burned out, while also talking about potentially doing shabbat together in the future.

i feel like my jewish ancestry is something i've missed out on - culturally more than religiously, because i know i'm not a person who could believe in that sort of thing. so it's been nice to experience it through friends, now that i'm older.

i'm so glad that you have devon, for so many reasons. while i know that very little can go wrong when tomorrow is the last day of undergrad for him, i still hope everything goes well!

[juushika]

I've gone back and forth on being Jewish "enough" so many times; because my family's full of bad Jews, even the "full" Jews!, but I know that was hugely influenced by assimilation; and I felt like I didn't have a right to this identity, because it's not visible, because it's a limited part of my life, but BRCA has made my family's Jewish ancestry real and unquestionable--if it's in our DNA and in our cancer then of course we have the right to claim it.

And that's a personal, individual reclamation, but at the same time I've seen so many Jews go through it, I've seen Jews of maternal ancestry trying to overcome conflict with their local Jewish communities, I've seen non-practicing Jews struggle to adopt to active practice as way of resisting fascism. And it's all the same struggle with and against assimilation that I've been going through.

Every small success in that struggle gives me so much hope. Anyway, long essay about things you already know just to say that this is so good & I'm so glad you shared it. It sounds so healing and peaceful. And I'm glad you have that person in your life, no matter how many shabbats you decide to attend. I'm considering attending a synagogue/recognizing more holidays when I'm in the place to do so, and I have no idea if I'll be able to follow through on that, but every bit of it counts.