remembering when as a kid in the professional-class Philly suburbs I looked up to the Jews

they were the people who took their kids seriously and had at least one room of their house lined with books they had actually read and would talk about, I firmly remember that was the terms I saw them in

and – this was the mid-late ‘90s – I was like “maybe I should convert”??

but then I looked into it and they had a pretty serious program (which I never thought to compare to my home-religion’s “RCIA”, though I was aware this was an era that established religions were scrabbling for followers, through newspaper Doonesbury strips about the pastor dealing with his “seeker-sensitive” flock)

and I was like “it’d be obnoxious to go to all that effort to fake belief in something I don’t actually believe, I should maybe look for a Jewish authority in the idiom I actually care about, like a psychotherapist or a magazine editor”

and then forgot about it though in retrospect @slatestarscratchpad was totally who I was waiting for, but at this point we should each found our own religions before we try to convert each other

but not before I wrote an article about this in the first issue of my proto-blog webmag “The Thorn”, which I posted on an iname site and set all our high school library computers (donated as some deal where they ran a crippled browser w/ads that we immediately learned to redirect to emulated Zombies Ate My Neighbors) as homepage

this before even Julia Allison-era Gawker, early 2000s oversharing as the net idiom, because this is my curse, I do everything when it becomes clear it’s the next thing to do instead of waiting to time it

the first issue also had a review of Amy Sohn’s Run Catch Kiss because I’ve always been like this