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 \u2013 this was the mid-late \u201890s \u2013 I was like \u201cmaybe I should convert\u201d??
but then I looked into it and they had a pretty serious program (which I never thought to compare to my home-religion\u2019s \u201cRCIA\u201d, 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 \u201cseeker-sensitive\u201d flock)
and I was like \u201cit\u2019d be obnoxious to go to all that effort to fake belief in something I don\u2019t actually believe, I should maybe look for a Jewish authority in the idiom I actually care about, like a psychotherapist or a magazine editor\u201d
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 \u201cThe Thorn\u201d, 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\u2019s the next thing to do instead of waiting to time it
the first issue also had a review of Amy Sohn\u2019s Run Catch Kiss because I\u2019ve always been like this