Shalom Y'all

One reason that I was excited to marry Matt was because I would get to change my name to a name that sounded Jewish. I had this fantasy that I would pretend to be Jewish, and then take off work on all of the Jewish holidays (which is really just a reincarnation of a Saved by the Bell plot, I believe).

To celebrate my fake Jewish heritage, then, I began to embrace all things Jewish.

To nobody's surprise, I began with food. My former roommate Cris and I became big fans of Savannah's Jewish Food Festival, appropriately titled the Shalom Y'all festival. I'm not joking. That's really the name. They sell tshirts, even.


The festival was this weekend, so I joined Cris and friends to enjoy a beautiful afternoon in Forsyth Park, and to feast on Jewish delicacies. Adventurous eater that I am, I inhaled a footlong hot dog. It was. . .amazing.

And I picked up some kosher dog treats for the pup.

A few years ago, when Cris and I attended the festival, I picked up this literary masterpiece. Noshy Boy. It's Jewish didactic children's literature at its finest. I'm obsessed with this book, and if more people knew about Noshy Boy, I'd be him for Halloween.

Nosh: (verb) to snack

Noshy Boy has a very similar plot to one of my other favorites, The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Noshy Boy loves to snack, and he snacks himself fat. He learns, through the course of the work, to enjoy healthier foods and snacks only in moderation. It's a coming of age piece, really. A real bildungsroman.

I think I had this happen to me once. . .

Well, today I picked up another in the series, Shluffy Girl.

Shluffy (adjective) sleepy, tired

Shluffy Girl has her own vice: sleeping too much. "Nap time is Shluffy Girl's favorite time of the day. But for Shluffy Girl, nap time is almost all the time." Shluffy Girl sleeps all the time, and it begins to cause problems. . .

She falls asleep on the bus and misses her stop.

[Hot damn, if this didn't happen to me when I was in the tenth grade! I fell asleep lying down in the seat, missed my stop, and woke up going down the highway. It was a debacle, a horribly embarrassing experience. As we learned a few weeks ago on 60 Minutes, this also happened to Andy Rooney. You know something's seriously wrong with you when you start having stuff in common with Andy Rooney.]

Eventually, Shluffy Girl learns to find a balance between life and her true love, sleep.

I feel like I've met her somewhere.

Oh dammit.