(no subject)

"There is risk in taking a shower, risk in eating seafood, risk in leaving your car unlocked, and risk in talking to strangers. We hear about these risks all the time, seemingly constantly. But there are also rewards too: being clean, eating tasty food, ease of access and the fact that real people are more interesting than abstract free-floating anxieties. I just figure every so often someone should tell the good stories."

I find dealing with risk to be very difficult.  It's not purely that I'm afraid of $bad_outcome; it's that I feel, for some reason, that it is my job and duty to stay on top of all the possible risks and consequences associated with, well, anything I do at all.  It gets very tiring, and it doesn't necessarily lead to better outcomes.  I think my attitude comes from looking at people and thinking "wow, they really screwed up, and if they'd been more careful, they could have avoided that or at least softened the blow, or at the very least, known what they were getting themselves into."  It seems like I think that thought a lot, but now that it comes down to it, I can't think of a single concrete example.  The best I can do is this:  when I was three, I met a man in a wheelchair.  He'd become paralyzed in a skiing accident.  That was the first time I'd heard of skiing. I guess in my mind, from there on out, the aim was not to screw up in any way.  Everything was a potential risk or  something that could screw things up forever.  And it wasn't just a matter of avoiding risky things; I have/had the same anxiety about not meeting age-appropriate milestones (yes, I'm intentionally speaking about myself like a child) on time. The irony is that the anxiety itself  becomes paralyzing--probably even more than the loss of (use of) his legs paralyzed the man I met when I was three. He still did stuff.

frustration

I hate the lack of self-empowerment in [my family's version of, at least] observant Orthodox Judaism. Case in point:

We need more vanilla extract.  I notice a new brand of it in the store, and this brand is both less expensive and, it seems, higher-quality than the other familiar brands.  (It contains cane sugar rather than corn syrup as a sweetener.)  Sweet! I jot down the name of the brand, their website, and the unfamiliar hechsher on the label so that I can investigate before buying it.

Google tells me that the vanilla is made by a smallish company in Colorado.  Not surprisingly, the hechsher is the symbol of the Denver Va'ad Hakashrus (kosher supervision board.) The agency is Orthodox.  It was started by a rabbi who is now a well-known and respected leader in Baltimore.The person running it studied in a prestigious, far-right Orthodox yeshiva.  You would THINK that this research would be enough to deem the stuff OK to bring into the house.  (Especially given that the official party line is that if someone is, to the best of anyone's knowlege, fully Sabbath-observant, you may trust their kashrut.) Nope--my mother doesn't trust that.  She needs to hear from her friend or from the Baltimore kosher supervision board that this supervision mark is good enough.

I'm not entirely sure how much of this is my mother's personal neurosis/lack of self-empowerment and how much of it is Orthodoxy itself. Some of it is definitely Orthodoxy, though.