cellio | interviewed by dsrtao

The interview meme is back. If you want me to ask you questions, post and say so (and then you answer them in your journal).

1. Your four favorite blogging topics are food, gaming, Judaism, and work. Does this represent a fair division of your life? Would you change the relative proportions, if you could?

Heh. I hadn't actually noticed that that's how my entries have played out. I sort of stopped at "I talk about Judaism a lot, and oh some other stuff too". But by post-count it's not that unbalanced, actually.

Ok, let's see. Judaism consumes a fair bit of my attention, and it infuses everything else about my life. How much time do I spend on it? That's not a question that can be answered, because it's not an hours-per-week kind of thing, any more than one could ask someone "how much time do you spend being a vegetarian" or "how much time do you spend being a geek" or some such. It's just a state of being.

Judaism comes to bear on many decisions. Someone proposed going to such-and-such restaurant; is there food I can eat there? We'd like to have people over for gaming; how does it interact with Shabbat? I'm considering a business transaction; does it fit with Jewish ethics? And on and on and on.

I like writing (and reading) about food, because I'm always on the lookout for new things to try. I like to be able to feed my friends well, and because I experiment sometimes it seems useful to record what I did and how well it worked -- and I enjoy such entries from other people, so maybe others benefit from those posts from me too. Food entries also, often, generate discussion, giving me more ideas for future meals.

Lately, I guess gaming has become a bigger hobby than the SCA by time spent. It's not that the SCA isn't important, but there's just a lot less going on than there used to be (for me, yes, and absolutely as well, locally). The last weekly-or-better SCA commitment I had was to a choir that I dropped out of in the fall. Some of that time went to Jewish things (e.g. classes); some went to gaming; some went to electronic communication.

Gaming-wise, the big thing going on is a D&D game that meets every couple weeks on average. This game, in fact, was the initial prod to my signing up with LiveJournal; the GM had proposed a game journal. We do in fact have a game journal, mostly filled with my work, but I'm glad I started my own journal too.

I enjoy many other games in somewhat limited doses; a big games day every couple months is cool, a random evening playing shorter games is fun, and I think I would really really hate going to a convention like Origins where you have four straight days of gaming.

Work is, well, work -- the single biggest chunk of my week not counting sleep (or maybe counting sleep, now that I think about it), but often not comment-worthy. I have recently found myself thinking about career as opposed to work, because the company I work for has been growing and I have kind of an unusual job. Oh, and in the spring one's thoughts turn to interns. :-) (I'm looking for an intern who groks Java and can write English. I wonder if I'll succeed.)

So overall, I guess you're right that Judaism, work, gaming, and food are the things in my life that get the most attention right now, probably in that order. I'm pretty happy with that. I'd like to be doing more music; some of that falls under "Judaism", actually, but not all of it. (In another interview that's queued up, I'll talk more about music.)

2. There are lots of similarities between being a technical documentation author and being a rabbi arguing over the mishnah. Do you like this analogy? How does it make you feel?

Not only do I like this analogy, but I used it in my application to the para-rabbinic program last year. :-) Here are the essay and resume I submitted. (The essay was a reply to a specific set of questions, which I probably have archived somewhere. They also required a resume showing both professional and religious background.)

3. You get the chance to make a major manufacturer or producer of goods and services introduce one new thing that you really want. It has to be currently physically possible (i.e. no teleport booths, no fusion reactors) and it will be priced realistically. What do you want?

I started to think about things that would make the world in general a better place, but I ended up thinking about things that would specifically make my life easier. I think the latter was the intent of the question.

Ok, I have something that I believe is physically possible, but my knowledge of the domain is pretty limited, so if I'm wrong about that someone please tell me and I'll choose something else.

First, let me lay out some problems I face in daily life:

I wear bifocals, but spend a lot of my time reading (paper or monitor). When I'm doing that I'm using only a small portion of the lenses in my glasses, which limits the viewing area somewhat. I have previously experimented with reading glasses that are separate from my regular glasses, but carrying around a spare is a PITA.
There's a lot of uncertainty in a new prescription -- it's hard for me to adjust (and I might not succeed), or maybe it's just hard to correctly specify the prescription in the first place because my eyes don't cooperate in exams. Either way, the result is that I put off prescription upgrades longer than I should, and meanwhile the correction I'm getting isn't as good as it theoretically could be. The last two pairs of glasses I bought didn't work out at all. (I'm currently trying again.)
I'm sensitive to light. Photogray glasses take too long to react; separate sunglasses yield the carrying-things-around problem; clip-ons don't work so well on thicker lenses.

Ok, where is all of this leading? Programmable eyeglasses. Wouldn't it be great if I could wear a device that, at the touch of a control, would go all-bifocal (for computer work), or all-distance (for walks in the park), or conventional distance/bifocal split (for driving)? And at the touch of another control, you could adjust tint for brightness? And, most importantly, by manipulating some other controls (a software interface via USB, perhaps) you could manipulate the prescription somewhat, refocusing to account for the small changes in one's visual acuity that occur over the span of years?

I'm not looking for Geordie LeForge's tech here; while I imagine that it would also be possible to pile on weird stuff like infra-red vision, I really don't care. I don't know enough about optics and plastics, so I don't know if what I've described could be done and, if so, at what price. I would certainly pay a four-digit number of dollars for that solution, though, and possibly more. (This would, for instance, bring me more quality of life than a new car does.) Hell, I'd pay that even for one that didn't do the light-adjusting thing; I only threw that in because I expect it to be easy.

4. What's the biggest threat to your continued happiness?

Long-term (decades), I think it's the vision thing. I am doing everything reasonable to protect my vision, of course, but these things do change over time. How well will I see when I'm 70, compared to now? I don't know. But so much of my life is bound up in visual things that I would feel a real loss if I could no longer, say, read for extended periods or use a computer or drive. Yeah, there are things that can be done to mitigate, but for some things audio just sucks, ok? I write differently than I speak, and I absorb differently from written and aural sources.

Now I don't think real problems are likely here; I have the convenience of access to someone who's a quarter-century ahead of me on this particular track and he's doing ok so far. (All my vision problems are inherited.) But it's a risk and thus a potential threat.

I just now realized that you might have been asking me for the most likely threat to my continued happiness, rather than the most devastating. I don't have a good answer there; I'm blessed with good interpersonal relations, a financial safety net, and overall health, and natural disasters and major accidents are pretty rare.

5. How many fences around fences do you feel comfortable drawing? As a Reform Jew, you have a duty to interpret for yourself. For example, we separate milk and meat because we are commanded not to boil a kid in it's mother's milk. The first fence is extending that to not cooking any meat in any milk. The second fence is to prohibit eating meat and milk at the same meal. The third fence extends this to not eating chicken (considered meat) with cheese even though chickens are in no way mammals, chicken eggs can be eaten with cheese, and fish can be eaten with cheese. Feel free to go with other rules, if you'd like.

That's an excellent question, and it's not going to boil down to a number.

The purpose of a fence is to prevent accidental transgression. So, speaking personally, I have to weigh the likelihood of the transgression that's being protected as part of the evaluation, and also the severity. I'm not sure that turning on an electric light on Shabbat is really forbidden, but turning on lights is habitual and if it is a transgression it's a pretty serious one, so I have trained myself to not do that, just in case. On the other hand, I don't in general pay attention to the laws of muktzah, which say that, for example, you don't handle a lamp lest you accidentally use it in a way counter to Shabbat. (Or any electrical device. Or a pencil. Or money.) If the thing is in my way I have no problem picking it up and moving it; I don't think I'll get distracted and use it in the process.

Kashrut has a whole set of practical concerns, which is why I didn't address that one directly. In addition to what I consider to be right or wrong for myself, I have to consider the impact of my decisions on other people. I would like to be able to cook for friends who care about certain details that I don't, personally, care about, for example. There can be societal reasons for observing a fence.

In some cases, an observer would conclude that I'm keeping a fence but, actually, I'm doing something else. Deep in my heart I do not really believe that I need separate (non-porous) utensils for meat and milk, but I find that paying attention to that helps me be more mindful of food and kashrut in general. So I do it, and I make my husband honor it as a condition of doing stuff in the kitchen. And I suppose it might be required, but that's not the only consideration.

The farther away from the original goal you get, the more skeptical I get of fences. But as I said, probability and severity can enter into the decision too.

I don't know if I really answered your question, but I'm going to stop and post this now because otherwise it won't happen before Shabbat is over. Please feel free to ask clarifying questions.

Monica

interviewed by dsrtao

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