The Boykis wedding torte. I hear it was delicious.And the Aladdin cake topper, which I struggled valiantly for, since certain family members thought it was "too terrorist."

Chaviva is getting married today.  This is a big deal, for a number of reasons, including the fact that she has been undergoing an arduous journey in converting to Judaism, one that finally came full circle several months ago with her Orthodox conversion.

As  a fellow Jew and one that has been married for almost two years, I feel completely qualified to give marriage advice. This whole episode is making me extremely sentimental remembering our own Jewish wedding which satisfied almost none of the requirements of a Jewish wedding and only some of the requirements of a Russian wedding.

But, regardless, I think we’ve had a pretty solid marriage so far.

So, here are my tips for marriage to newlyweds.

1. Compromise. If you can’t compromise, wait it out.  Then throw it away.
2. Build a home together. Then destroy it and become minimalist.
3. Go to experiences that unite you.
4. Go to experiences that may make you parapalegic.
5. Marry Russian.
6. Maintain sanity in the household.
7. And screw yourself over every once in a while.

Mazal tov to the newlyweds.

Mr. B owns a bunch of t-shirts that I HATE because they make him look like an antisocial programmer and he LOVES because they make him look like an antisocial programmer.  They are all around six to seven years vintage. I’ve been quietly throwing most of them away, but one was left, this one:

If you have to ask, you aren’t cool enough.

Anyway, so as we were moving stuff, I quietly managed to throw out this shirt.  Or so I thought.  As we were walking out the door yesterday, Mr. B said, “I know you threw out my shirt.  Don’t think I didn’t notice it in the trash.  So I put it on top of the trash bag.  To remind myself.”  And indeed, there it was.

“That shirt is older than our marriage and college careers put together,” I said.

“I was going to get really angry and throw out some of your clothes.  And tell  you to watch out for missing stuff.  But since I’m all white now from living in Bethesda for so long and have become a minimalist, I won’t, because I just look at it as responsibly downsizing my household possessions.”

Thanks, Bethesda.  I owe you one.

Bardak.

Mr. B and I are moving to Pentagon City . I’m pretty sad, because I love our apartment and the fact that we were 20 minutes away from DC but could eat breakfast on our balcony facing the woods.We’re moving because it doesn’t serve the right purpose for us anymore.

What I love most about it is that we lived the first two years of married life here, instead of communal-Soviet-style with our parents in the same one-bedroom apartment that was built during the Khruschev administration, like my parents and Mr. B’s parents did.  We lived sans parental interference and, in doing so, established a pretty solid foundation for decision-making in our marriage which will last us for years to come.

What is hard right now, though, is the clutter.  Oh, the clutter.

I knew that we’d be moving eventually, so I tried to keep the apartment as sparse as possible, free of crap.  Unfortunately, I’ve somehow failed, because we’ve been packing for two days now, mercilessly throwing stuff away left and right, with no end in sight.

“We’re hoarders,” Mr. B said.

Hoarders who still own unusually large bears named Luke that they’ve had since they were 11. Also paintings that they bought at flea markets for $5 and can’t get rid of.

The hardest thing for me is to let go of  are things I’m emotionally attached to, or things that people have given me as presents that I HATE, but that I can’t throw away because, what if they ask about them?

On the one hand, I’m extremely flexible (because if I wasn’t, I would probably be going insane over the fact that we have spent maybe a total of 10-15 weekends in DC over the past two years in our traverse between my parents and Mr. B’s. )  This is probably because I have Mongol blood.  But, on the other, how can I ever, ever, ever give up any of my books?

Tips? Thoughts? Sanity?

1. Shuttle Launch

I stalk/read Rubinary.com pretty frequently, because it’s cool to see how other Russian-speaking couples live and also blog about it. I always tell Mr. B that he should co-blog with me, but he always tells me that, if we’re going to blog together, he’ll just blog about his normal topics.  So I back down for the sake of your sanity.   Also, Mr. Rubinary has the same name as Mr. B.  Also, they take awesome photographs of their awesome apartment and I am very frequently jealous.  So, when I read their latest post, I couldn’t help but be extremely excited for them.   What I really want to commend them on, aside from wishing them a big mazal tov, is how methodical they are about the whole thing,

On the other hand we were planning it for a while now, and everything worked out almost as planned. During the Spring of 2009 we made a decision. We went to see a doctor to make sure everything is OK.

Seeing as Mr. B is also a Man of Science, Mom, I’d urge you to expect a similar process.  Like the shuttle launch, this stuff has to be done in sequence.  And, like the next shuttle launch, this process will be starting approximately never and demand more and more government funding.  Take that analogy as you will.

2.  The Olympics

I had no blogging topic today, so I outsourced it.  Because, remember, I am lazy.

And within minutes, I had help:

And,

So, thank you, Twitter, for making me even lazier.   Fortunately, I’ve already written about the topic, so I don’t even need to do that.

3. Elsewhere

On a more serious note, at Walrus, I am writing lots of nasty, nasty things about Russia, like why Russia hates its black community and how Moscow is a pretty crappy city.

I spent this Saturday morning being told I was the byproduct of a silent Holocaust, so my weekend went really well.

It started when our friends had a baby, which, amongst other things, caused my mom to shift into overdrive:

Our friends just had a very cute baby girl and they invited us to the Hebrew naming ceremony at an Orthodox-ish synagogue.  I immediately sensed that this would be a bad experience from the minute we walked in and I was separated from Mr. B and told to go to the right-hand side with all of the other confused and equally Godless Russian women from our friends’ families.

In Orthodox synagogues, women are separated from men by a mechitza, which is,

the physical divider placed between the men’s and women’s sections in Orthodox synagogues and at religious celebrations. The idea behind this is twofold. First, mingling of the genders is generally frowned upon, as this leads to frivolity, which itself may lead to promiscuity. Secondly, even if the sexes are separated, they should not be able to interact to a high degree during a religious service, lest this lead to gazing and impure thoughts. Due to these restrictions, mechitzot are usually opaque (at least looking from the men’s side to the women’s side).

Who am I to criticize this practice? Obviously it works for some people and the way they celebrate God.  People who think that it’s the woman’s fault if a man gets distracted during services.   If only us women were less sexxxy during services.

I don’t have a problem with the separation, per se.  If it’s equal.  Separate, but equal.  Like, if the male rabbi preaches to the males and a female rabbi preaches to females. Or at least if there is as much seating on the women’s side as there is on the men’s. Obviously, this did not happen, and I spent the whole service straining a bit to hear what the rabbi was saying during the parsha before the naming ceremony was underway because he wasn’t really intent on talking to us wymyn as he was on telling the men that there is a second Holocaust going on, and that that particular Holocaust is intermarriage.

I’ve heard this kind of rhetoric in the Jewish community tons of times before and it wasn’t really new to me, but I could hear Mr. B raising his eyebrows all the way on the other side of the men’s section.    I just  couldn’t wait to text my mom and dad and tell them they were the next Hitler and Goebbels.

The service went on for maybe an hour, during which my friend came with her daughter  and all the women, bored senseless by the service which wasn’t explained to them and which was going on forever, crowded around and started fussing with her, and as a result, were thoroughly shushed like kindergartners by the rabbi.   Then,the rabbi stopped and asked if the mother was present, and our friend said she was. Obviously the mom couldn’t go on the men’s side during the ceremony, so he asked her to come up to the mechitza and say the baby’s name over the mechitza so that the men (not womenz!) could bless the baby.  Then, the men on the other side, from what I could see, started performing the hora and through a slit in the mechitzah glanced at the baby, blessing her. It looked something like this:

It’s one of the most bizarre things I’ve experienced in my life, aside from that time Mr. B and I were in Jerusalem and we thought an Arab was trying to shank us but all he really wanted were some cigarettes. That a mother and father are not allowed to be present together and the mother, the one that gave life to the baby was sidelined and portrayed simply as a vessel for more Jews to come through the chute as opposed to a human being, bummed me out worse than that time I wrote about depressing Russian baby songs.  At the end of the dancing, the rabbi asked the mom to hold the baby up to his ear to hear what she was telling him, and what it turned out that she was telling him was for her mom and dad to bring her to services every week from now on.  What an astute baby.

After the dancing subsided and we wimminz were settled down, the prayers continued.  And continued.  For another hour, with the rabbi breaking off to entice us areligious Russian Jews to come to services to “find out what being a Jew is” and to really, really stop mixing meat and milk or we would all go to a hell that would probably include, amongst other things, mechitzot for all.  I’m guessing he didn’t know that I already know what “being a Jew is” for me and- pro tip – it doesn’t include being treated like a baby machine (which actually would be a pretty cool idea to patent.)

After the second hour was over, I stood outside with some other girls as we waited for our husbands to come out.  Unfortunately,  the congregation’s men had jumped on them like white on rice and were proselytizing in full force.   Obviously, we weren’t even good enough to be proselytized at, which is kind of sad, because I was kind of looking forward to discussing the merits of separate-but-equal hell in Hebrew with them.

As we sat down in the car, Mr. B and I looked at each other, and neither of us said anything.  On the way to the restaurant, we got into a huge fight, the tension from the synagogue escalating the initial small problem.  All of the stress and anger we’d both experienced at the synagogue came out, and at the end we realized it, apologized, and relaxed.

I looked at Mr. B.  “Let’s have kids just so they don’t go to that synagogue, “  I said.  “I’m with you, half-breed,” said Mr. B, and we walked, hand-in-hand to the restaurant.