Biblical Win-Win

I had an epiphany a while back, but life ensued and I was not able to type it up. It's kind of random, but whatevs. 

In the Torah, there is that bit that if you see the donkey of someone you hate struggling with its burden, you are supposed to help the hated one, even if your best bud who is standing next to him could use a hand. 

Sometimes the Torah gives us the means to be the most annoying. 

If you can't stand someone (and we assume the feeling is mutual), the one thing they do not want from you is a favor. It makes them choke to be beholden to someone they don't like. 

Let us say (and I am totally not speaking from experience, cough cough) there is a shadchan who drives you mad. Your profile needs constant editing (according to her), your pictures are no good (according to her), and for all that nitpicking, her shidduch suggestions are waaaaay off base. 

It would aggravate me to no end if she would end up being my shadchan.

So: Help out the guy with whom you have a feud. Because that'll make him want to explode. Win-win.  

TGIF

There were two articles printed this past Monday that I found engrossing. 

• "Are You Stuck in the Jail of Regret?" by Elizabeth Grace Saunders, which doesn't only apply to time management; and
• "It's Never Going to Be Perfect, So Just Get It Done" by Tim Herrera, which features my favorite quote from Voltaire. 

Crybaby

I am not usually a crier. I'm keenly experience emotions, so I should be crier, except my mother had that European shame of overt displays of feeling (she would have been a crier too, if not for that programming). Even when she died, I did not weep excessively. 

Then, when I became pregnant with Ben, oh boy. I was bawling constantly. It took me until Ma's first yartzheit, when I was with child, to cry. I cried when there was the slightest hint of tension. I cried in the shower, just for the heck of it.

Then, when he was born—hooooooeeeeee. I cried some more. I was happy, ecstatic, but still very, very weepy. My sister reassured Han that this was normal. 

It's the hormones, yes. But I wasn't irrational. I wasn't hysterical. I just needed a box of tissues. 

Randi Hutter Epstein in "Stop Calling Women Hormonal" explains the purpose of hormones, and that blaming them is not really fair to women or to the hormones. 

I recall an episode of "Everybody Loves Raymond" when Ray is about to enter the house but sees through the window Debra crying on the couch. He believes she's miserable, but she calmly explains that sometimes she just needs a good cry. 

 

Then there was another episode when he believes she has PMS, and she attacks him "like a monkey tearing into a cupcake" for blaming the hormones. When Marie walks in on their argument, she actually slaps her beloved son in defense of her not-so-beloved daughter-in-law.  

So, yeah, just because I'm crying doesn't mean I don't have a point.