Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
Anonymous:
Please, would you yassify your stede a little bit? Thanks in advance <3
I don’t think I’ve ever written this down before. This is the story of the first time I played a shofar (as I remember it, not as it happened).
So it’s the mid 90s and I’m in primary school (‘elementary’, my dear yanks). We were doing Religious Education and learning about Judaism, I think for the first time. The teacher didn’t really know anything about Judaism that wasn’t written in the book, so he kept asking me, since I was the Only Jewish Kid In The Class (only jewish kid in the school in fact, except my sister). I wasn’t very religious, but I was doing my best to make up reasonable sounding answers. Anyway, the school had somehow got hold of a shofar. (If anyone’s religious education wasn’t up to the stellar standards of mine, the shofar is the ram’s horn that’s blown like a trumpet as part of the ceremony of certain jewish holy days). The shofar was passed around the class, and of course, hygene be damned, everyone tried to play it. But it’s not an easy instrument to play, there’s more to it than just blowing. So everyone is puffing and wheezing and red in the face, and the best anyone can get out of this thing is a pitiful squeak. But we’ve all just seen the guy on the VHS tape with the hat and odd hairstyle blowing it, and we heard the tooting noise come out of the tinny little speakers of the TV on the wheely cart, so we know this isn’t right. Is our shofar broken or something? Is it blocked up?
Finally the shofar gets around to me, and I am psyched all the way up. I haven’t played a shofar before, but I’m determined to get some kind of noise out of this damn thing, because my heritage is looking silly right now. The burden of upholding the dignity of Judaism itself falls upon my narrow shoulders. So, I take the biggest breath I possibly can, and put the shofar to my lips. Everyone’s looking at me, because I’m The Only Jewish Kid In The Class. And the thing that nobody in the room (including me) is thinking about, is the fact that I’m also The Only Trumpet-Player Kid In The Class.
I only know one way to blow into an instrument. It happens to be the right way. And I do it, just as hard as I possibly can.
If you haven’t heard a shofar played properly in person, it’s not easy to describe. Recordings don’t capture it at all. Maybe it’s just because you usually hear it in a context of fasting and extreme reverence, but nonetheless a shofar blast (and that’s what they call it, a “blast”) is an amazing sound. The shofar sounds like raw naked power, it sounds like righteous fury. It sounds like more noise than a single human could ever make, yet it has a property like a human voice, like a bellow, a howl, like a newly bereaved mother splitting her lungs with blood and thunder. It’s a BIG sound, in the sense that it’s very loud, but also in the sense that it seems to fill whatever space it’s in, to come from all directions at once. It makes sense that the ancients gave it religious significance. When you hear the shofar’s call, the story of the Walls of Jerico tumbling down doesn’t seem that crazy.
So, it’s not possible to play a shofar quietly, and I’m giving the thing everything I’ve got in a little red brick classroom in southeast london. I can feel the room resonate and shake, hear the single-glazed windows rattle in their frames. I’m having a great time - this is the loudest noise I’ve ever made in my short life! And it’s in school! And I’m allowed to do it! So I keep going as hard as I can until my little lungs give out. I remember surfacing, out of breath and grinning, and listening as the antique cast-iron pipes throughout the building slowly stopped reverberating over the slack-jawed silence of the room.
The kids of course have seen enough TV to know exactly what happened. The Shofar knew I was Jewish. Obviously it’s not going to unleash that kind of unearthly sonic firepower for just anyone. Shofars only work for Jews. And the teacher is like “…That doesn’t sound right… but I don’t know enough about Judaism to dispute it?”. I didn’t offer any other explanations, because why would you demystify your Mystic Jew Powers?
And I’m writing this because I just realised that there were perhaps 30 kids in that class, and there just aren’t very many jews in southeast london to set them right, so it’s quite possible that there’s at least one 25 year old adult out there who still believes that the Shofar is a Holy Sacred Artefact which will Sound its Mighty Voice for none other than God’s Own Chosen People. And that cracks me up.
You know that feeling when someone casually brings up one of your special interests and you’re trying to act super normal about it but really you’re about to vibrate out of your fucking skin
So we’re building this database at my work that’s supposed to solve a lot of our problems. And a person who for purposes of this story will be Coworker # 1 says to me, “We gotta think of a good name for this thing, like, we should name it after something cool from the Marvel movies.”
Now you have to understand that I’m a fanfic writer who has literally memorized like 60% of the dialogue from MCU phases 1-3 for writing purposes, sporting an actual Captain America tattoo on my shoulder and basically giving off big Phil Coulson vibes in social settings –
– but for career purposes desperately trying to appear as a boring corporate drone at work.
“Oh yeah, we could call it JARVIS or something,” I say, as casually as possible.
A while later, I’m in a meeting where we’re talking about how we’re gonna start using Jarvis for one of our processes. “That’s a funny name,” Coworker # 2 says. “Where’d that come from?”
“Oh, [Lasrina] named it that! After the computer from Iron Man!” says Coworker # 1.
“Is it a computer?” says Coworker # 3. “I thought I remembered him having a butler named Jarvis or something.”
My brain briefly short-circuits.
“Technically in the comics Jarvis was Tony Stark’s butler but when they released the Iron Man movies they changed the character to a computer but then in the Agent Carter TV series they retconned in a character named Edwin Jarvis who was Tony Stark’s father’s butler who the Jarvis AI is named after ALTHOUGH the official explanation from the extras in the first Iron Man movie is that JARVIS the AI is an acronym for ‘Just A Rather Very Intelligent System,’” is what comes out of my mouth.
There is a brief pause.
“I LIKE THE MARVEL MOVIES A NORMAL AMOUNT,” I say, out loud, in my work meeting.
Anyway, yeah, OP and anyone else who’s wondering, that was a very long way of saying that you are not alone.
Anonymous:
i have a semi-funny story? fact? occurrence? about happy holidays vs merry christmas. i have a few speech impediments but the most obvious ones are R lisps (cant pronounce Rs) and S lisps (cant pronounce Ss). so when the holiday season comes around, naturally, i say 'happy holidays' since there are no Rs and a single S which i can say fast enough that not many people notice. whenever i say happy holidays at work and someone gets all pissy about it, i pause everything im doing and say merry christmas and, of course, it does not sound at all how its supposed to. so i go 'wait hold on, lemme try again' and i will make them wait a full minute+ as i try to garble out a phrase. it gets even more funny (for me) when my stutter kicks in and it takes me 10 seconds to even START the word 'merry.' and its like, what are they gonna say? 'stop trying to say the thing i WANTED you to say?''nvm just say happy holidays?' they think if they comment on it, it'll make me feel bad, so theyre trapped until i decide they've learned their lesson. ive been doing this for the past 3 years at multiple jobs and i have no intention of stopping.
I love when people credit artists. This is French circus artist and choreographer Yoann Bourgeois, probably in Tentatives d'approche d'un point de suspension at hangar Y in Meudon a few days ago. Most of his work is an exploration of balance and equilibrium, he has several variations around the stairs/trampoline thing (fugue-trampoline, this one, cavale, l'art de la fugue…)
- never lose track of keys\etc. (knack for finding shiny things)
in this economy? absolutely
if i had a cowgirl gf i would be drinking straight from the tap every day. to save money and for no other reasons. she could even help scramble the birdgirl’s eggs
I am sorry but sheep produce wool.
She grows the cotton. She’s very talented.
piggirl gf who eats the corpses of your victims
You just can’t get content like this anywhere else
When I was a kid, I was really enamored a handful of local radio stations–the DJs were hilarious and really nice and would play songs for you, but my favorite thing was this thing one of them did called the 5:20 Primal Scream.
Every day at 5:20 he would take a random caller and let them shriek their head off on the air. No opinions or venting or anything like that, just wordless screaming. Often these were people in traffic or just getting off work. And you got some really adorable people being all “YRAERGH” and then giggling and feeling better after
And I remember one guy who just went “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA” for like half a minute and the DJ was like “holy crap you’re like some kind of tornado siren”. I think about that guy sometimes.
And I think about that DJ. I hope he’s doing okay.
