It's not the Sabbath, I've done nothing to be congratulated for and we're not Jewish.
But you already know that as much as you knew that we were not cooking meth and trafficking cocaine when we watched every season of Breaking Bad and Narcos back to back. We also never traveled back and forth through time from 18th Century Scotland to the post WWII years during our Outlander phase.
Maybe it's a consequence of the age of binging and not having to wait a week for the next episode of our favorite show, or maybe we're just dull and delusional people trying to identify with something we're not.
But in our house, that shit feels real.
After blowing through Unorthodox, we started the Israeli show, Shtisel, and now nothing in our home is more important than kissing the mezuzah.
Of course, this is very offensive. Appropriators never feel like they are disrespecting the culture they are fetishizing or failing to represent with little to no or even a negative understanding of that culture, and yet they keep fucking doing it bless them and their mother, Kris Jenner.
But Jaime and I are the descendants of the passive oppressors who invented appropriation.
If transported through the stones of Craigh Na Dun to the 1980s, we would not have been in Pablo Escobar's inner circle nor the terrified citizens of Medellin. We would have been the douchebags vacationing in Miami snorting cocaine off the rattan dresser in our two star motel room.
Our hair would have been the only remarkable thing about us because if two people have hair made just for the 80s, it's these guys.
We probably wouldn't have been the Conquistadors or SS Officers or Slave Masters, but we would have profited off the horror somehow because we're in that comfortable middle who's appalled by the atrocities we consider over and done while blind to the ways in which we still benefit from their legacies. It's only fun to imagine you're part of a marginalized group when there's no danger to yourself in it.
So, we will continue to revel in how badass Hasidic men look when they're smoking cigarettes and stress about how often their tzitzit tassels must fall into the toilet. We'll feel sorry for women who are pregnant and don't want to be and wonder how on Earth they sleep in pantyhose.
We'll react to the actors until Jaime finally notices that I've stopped reading the subtitles to him because I'm sound asleep and turns off the computer.
But while we're sleeping, people in other homes in other parts of the world are really praying, really loving and really remembering things we can only dream about.
I just wish someone would make a show that reflected me and my life. You know?
