One of the occupational hazzards of blogging is that it seems new and exciting ideas for posts are always popping into one's head at the most inopportune moments. Caught in traffic (without a dictaphone handy) and miles from a keyboard or in the shower rushing to get ready for an important meeting or on the treadmill at the gym, the most profound essays will crowd my brain just begging to be translated into bits and bytes.
Well, I've found a way to stem the flow. Spend a week entering someone else's (several someone elses's) spectacularly unprofitable stock trades (hundreds of them), real estate tax and mortgage payments, business expenses, charitable contributions and W-2 information into the computer for translation to the magical Form 1040. I find my brain to be stripped of all creative impluses. Numb. Someone should have suggested to the powers-that-be that scheduling a war during tax season was cruel and unusual punishment for tax preparers who would like to be paying attention, let alone creating commentary.
Ah, well. It's almost over. And once my house is cleaned and my gefilte fish is chopped, mixed, formed and boiled, once the last cup of wine has been drained and the afikomen eaten -- in other words, once the Passover Seder is over, I expect to return to some modicum of normalcy. In the meantime, I thank those of you who are still here for bearing with me.
This Shabbat, the last one before the beginning of Passover, is called Shabbat Hagadol, which means "the great Sabbath." I've been browsing around trying to find out why, but the explanations I'm finding simply do not have the ring of truth about them and, well, my usual investigative demon is asleep at the switch. I may follow this up over the next week or so if I find anything interesting (or if anyone emails me something that doesn't have to do with Egyptian kids killing their parents because they wouldn't let the Jews go -- gimme a break).
In the meantime,
Shabbat Hagadol Shalom.
