Itinerantdaughter's Blog

For the record, this list is a FRACTION of the length it could have been, based solely on reading The Unspeakable.

1. We both pepper our speech with Yiddishisms

2. We both would like to live at Downton Abbey (although are slightly worried we’d be awkward around the servants)

3. We both eat to live, rather than live to eat

4. We both have an anti-sentimental streak that occasionally borders on political incorrectness

5. We both believe that “excellence comes not from overcoming limitations but from embracing them.”

6. We both immediately give up when we find something difficult (and are embarrassed about this habit)

7. We both desired to do the Bohemian NYC struggling writer thing even though we knew it was a cliche

8. We both dated mostly to “collect experiences”

9. We are both mildly disdainful of Lori Gottlieb

10. Neither of us ever learned how to properly chop an onion

ID:

AL: I just threw up on this email.

ID: You’ve been doing it wrong this whole time. And you know what that means? Your love is a MISTAKE.

AL: I’ve been caressing at 1.33 inches per second! I feel like such a failure.

ID: Rightly so!  Other things you are doing incorrectly: tying your shoes, making pasta, playing rock-paper-scissors.  I could go on, but I don’t have all afternoon.

“But Bruchy knew, as anyone with any sense did, that this was certainly not a book for boys.  Boys were to keep their minds pure and spend their days with Torah study.  Girls were not required to study Torah.  He who teaches his daughter Torah, the sages said, teaches her foolishness.  Girls, we were told, didn’t have the urges and temptations that boys did.  Girls were allowed to gaze at boys, but boys were not allowed to gaze back.  Some said that women possessed loftier souls than men and therefore didn’t need to study Torah, weren’t obligated with as many commandments, were allowed to study English literature and history and even a little art and science, too, because their souls were so lofty that those subjects couldn’t hurt them, or not nearly as much as they could boys.”

~All Who Go Do Not Return, by Shulem Deen

Other things best left to women:

Politics (all of ’em)

Managing large amounts of money/running corporations

Determining how much space each individual ass deserves on subway benches