Monica

The poll is here.

Do you have any big regrets?

Yes.

Oh, that's probably not the question you really wanted to ask. Ok, I can elaborate. :-)

The only time that I initiated a breakup of a romantic relationship, it played out badly and I feel that this was largely my fault. I'm not certain what specifically I could have done better, but I'm sure I could have handled it better in some way. The other person got hurt pretty badly (though he tried not to let it show), which was certainly no one's intent, and the friendship has never been the same. (It wasn't a hostile breakup; it was more of a "this isn't going to work" situation.)

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Somehow you are on my read list.... do you know how you got there because I don't remember...

I don't know. As far as I know we don't know each other in real life, and we don't appear to have friends in common right now. Maybe we did and you saw me on a "friends of friends" list, or maybe you surfed randomly or via similar interests?

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How far is your shul from where you are and how long does it take you to walk there?

Approximately 1 mile (less as the mole digs, but that's not an accurate measure of surface distance -- it just means don't trust maps in Pittsburgh). It takes me about 20 minutes to walk there on average. I can rush it in 15 minutes or so, but I rarely feel the need to rush on Shabbat.

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Would you mind telling your conversion story (the long version)?

I don't mind. Let me try to figure out the best way to bridge the gap between the short summary and the longer version that, among things, manifested in approximately 150 pages of journal at the time. This may take a few days.

Actually, here's an oddball question (which is not, itself, an answer to your question, but more of a tangent): I could post that journal over a similar span of time in a different LJ ("reruns"?). It would take about a year altogether. (I think there's value in not just reading it all at once. I can't just post the entire thing as-is anyway, as I have to edit out people's real names and stuff like that.) Would this be at all interesting to anyone? Don't worry; I'm not using this as a way to blow off your question.

I'll also entertain more-specific questions by email, if that helps any. The hardest thing about trying to tell a big story is figuring out the parts that would be seen as interesting and significant to others.

Another member of the "friends of ruth" mailing list (converts et al) turns out to be local. We exchanged some email last spring and then I was a klutz and lost her email address. She just got back in touch this week. We've never met, so she's going to come for dinner tonight after services. This worked out well, as it turns out that her husband and daughter are out of town this weekend so she would have been spending it alone otherwise.

She does have to sit through my cantorial pretensions, but she's ok with that. At least it makes identifying each other easy; she'll find me. :-) (She was, as it turns out, at Temple Sinai last week, not that either of us knew to look for the other. Her home congregation is Rodef.)

I enjoy putting actual faces and people with email addresses. I'm looking forward to it.

Hmm, last night there was a short discussion on the topic of responsibilities of board members. (Themes included the idea that you're always a board member, even in the check-out line at Giant Eagle, and what you do reflects on the congregation, and you're the eyes and ears of the board, and stuff like that. Those in the SCA can substitute "peer" for "board member" and recognize the ideas.) In light of that, I wonder if there are any PR-type issues with a trustee of one congregation playing a minor-but-public leadership role in a different congregation. *I* don't think so (if anything I think it brings honor to my congregation, not dishonor), but I wonder if anyone else would have issues with this. We've seen already that I do not really understand the synagogue-operations mindset.