Punk Pesach

In This Issue:

• Punk Pesach: How to have the most irreverent seder ever plus a downloadable haggadah ().
• Worst Date Ever: A short review of a completely repulsive evening. It’s relatable! Unfortunately.
• Eternal Flame: On “functional morbidity” and embracing the creep.

Punk Pesach

2017 has been a wild ride so far, and we’ve only wrapped Q1. With this in mind, when a friend and I started text-shouting OI OI OI back and forth one morning last month, somehow Punk Pesach seemed like a natural fit. Passover is my favorite holiday to host- something about insane standards and high stress dinners appeal to me- except this year I vowed we would ‘take it easy’ and make it into something fun. So in order to take it easy and go light on myself, I agreed to host 9 people in my studio apartment, make dinner and create an abbreviated haggadah for us to use.

For those of you not familiar with Passover, here’s a really quick run-down: It’s a roughly week-long festival, during the first 2 nights you celebrate by attending seders, which are typically super long (and sometimes kind of dull), before you can have dinner and be merry, you read the story of Passover from a haggadah, which is like a little guidebook for the seder. Seder just means order- so read this book, do it in order, et voila, you have pesach-ed.

This year I think was my favorite year ever for Pesach, I was delighted that everyone got into the round robin reading of our super short seder, especially those of my friends who created a character for their reading. To any concerned grandmas out there- we all went to a super respectable Social Justice seder the next night, so don’t worry to much about us. Worry a little bit- but not too much.

Below is the abbreviated Haggadah I created for the occasion, feel free to snag it for yourself! All content (hand lettering, illustrations, storytelling) was created by me, except for the prayers, because I’m not 1000 years old. It prints double sided and folds in half, and cost about 2 bucks at Fedex for 15 copies, so it’s economical too!

Worst Date Ever

 

 

Eternal Flame

One of the very best parts of the last year of my life has been embracing all the weird stuff that makes me, well, me. I’ve always heard that happens as you get older- I have to say, it’s certainly just less exhausting, and way more fun just to be myself. I’ve tried to fit into a lot of molds throughout my 20s that just weren’t for me. I think this week I’ve really reached peak ‘Grace’ though.

The first part of that was a routine trip to Powell’s last weekend, where I picked up “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes and Other Lessons From The Crematory”. If you’re into dark/funny memoirs, I highly recommend this book. In particular, I read a phrase that completely struck me- Caitlin Doughty describes her childhood as “functionally morbid”, and I thought, “Me too!”. She goes on to describe that term as being generally a normal, happy go lucky person who has some um.. different interests. I started drawing my name in bones as soon as I could spell it, and by 4th grade I had read every scary story/paranormal book in the school library. My teachers were so concerned that they called a meeting with my dad about it. I couldn’t help it- the stories scared the heck out of me, but I was hooked.

In addition to this completely fascinating memoir, I was also introduced to the podcast “My Favorite Murder”, which is 2 comedians, Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark discussing their favorite true crime stories. I’ve been completely immersed (and maybe sleeping with an extra light on). If you’ve got a slightly morbid sense of humor and a love of being scared, you should definitely check it out.

One of the things I really appreciate about the book and the podcast is the frank and open discussion of anxiety. I guess when the main subject matter is as taboo as it is, anxiety is small potatoes, but I really appreciate that there are successful interesting women out there talking about dealing with anxiety in a high profile way.

So I guess I feel like it’s all coming full circle this year- and there are more people like me out there in the world than I assumed. Functionally morbid kids unite!