A very meta-LJ post

[chanaleh]

It finally occurred to me to have a look at the Site Map.

There I serendipitously encountered, listed under "Fun Stuff" (always a promising heading), the following bits of amusement:

• The LiveJournal Song!


• LiveJournal Dating! [Those familiar with JDate will join me in instantly pegging this feature as LJDate.]

Yowza.

Comments

[dragonfriek.livejournal.com]

hee hee.
LiveJournal.com is not responsible for verifying that anybody you find or who finds you using this service isn't entirely psycho. (In all likelihood, they are.)

truth in advertising?

[cos]

Funny, I have just LJdated for the first time, and I didn't even know they had LJdating! She found me on LJ and friended me, I had no idea who she was so I emailed her and asked. She told me I was insightful and cute, we got to talking, and I spent a day with her on my way to Kentucky on my road trip last week.

about JDATE

[adamosity.livejournal.com]

My mother (who wouldn't know what the internet was if it hit her in the face) started dropping hints about jdate. It turns out my cousin in Kentucky (that's scary enough, don't you think?) found someone on it in Louisville.

My thoughts were along the lines of this:

1) You weren't meant to be a matchmaker, mom! Trust me!
2) I've looked at it--something about a meet and greet in Hawaii (which would cost more than my car to go to?)
3) Most of the people were attractive and intelligent, but had the passion of a dead frong. They seemed, umm, really dull. (of course, I didn't see your thing, so..)

I'm ready for a honest Jewish date system:
Do you give guilt trips? (never, rarely, sometimes, often, daily)
Do you eat at kosher delis?
Do you spend (a tiny bit, some, a lot, tons) over your salary?
What is the Hebrew or Yiddish word you last used? No, schmuck doesn't count!

You get the idea...
adam

p.s. i remember birdhouse in your soul when it was new. god, i feel old right about now.

[millarose.livejournal.com]

I came across your journal and thought i'd say helloo :-)

Re: about JDATE

[cos]

Coincidentally, my date that I mentioned in the comment above, that came about because of LJ, was on my way driving to Louisville. Where I met someone who I am not dating.

This has nothing to do with the subject of your post...

[sanpaku.livejournal.com]

...but I thought I'd mention that I wandered across your LJ when doing an interest-search for "Conservative Judaism," and then from there to your FAQ on your Web site. A lot of what you wrote hit home to me. In no particular order: my wife is a JBC and so is another very close friend of mine (oh my could I tell you some stories); we lived in Boston until a few months ago, when we left after despairing of finding all the 20 to 30ish young Conservative Jews who went to shul; I have bounced around a bit of the Boston publishing world for a while; I'm really into services, Haftorah, etc.; my wife is a singer; etc. So your journal looks neat and I confess to being jealous of your community and your shul (we belong to the Providence version of Temple Beth Bingo at the moment) so I would like to add you to my friendslist if that's OK. I don't write about Jewish things in my journal nearly as much as I think about them (my friends IRL who read it aren't Jewish), and most of what is in there is pointless, but feel free to stop on by.

Re: This has nothing to do with the subject of your post...

[chanaleh.livejournal.com]

Hey! How cool. Wish to God you'd found us (meaning my shul :-) before you moved away to Providence, though, 'cause it sounds like you might have really liked it. Lots of young families (and BTW I looked at your baby pix and what a doll), lots of interesting people under (as well as over) 40, a fair number of writerly types.

I don't write about Jewish things in my journal quite as often as I think about them, either, just because it's such a constant background force in my life that it hardly bears narrating ;-) But you remind me that maybe I should make more of an effort -- for that very reason.

And coincidentally, I just posted to jbcs recently with a link to my conversion FAQ essay.

Keep in touch!

Re: This has nothing to do with the subject of your post...

[sanpaku.livejournal.com]

I wish we'd found out about it, too. We were happy with our shul, Temple Reyim in West Newton, mostly for the service, but it was an older crowd. The thing that kept us from searching for different shuls in Boston was really that I felt it was time to try to find a shul that we could walk to on shabbos, and we had a whole house in West Roxbury, so finding something with as much space, but closer to central Boston, was just impossibly expensive. This was part of the larger problem with Boston for us, which was that the whole driving/finding stuff to do/meeting up with people equation just never worked out. The idea of courting death by driving to shul in Brookline or Brighton for a half an hour didn't appeal to me on shabbos.

The one benefit of our Temple Beth Bingo is that I can easily walk there, but otherwise it's the same basic problem -- the Providence shul with all the vitality is on the East Side, and we couldn't afford to live within walking distance in a reasonable place. For other life issues (ease of getting around, places to go, and so on) we are doing much better here, but this is one piece of the puzzle that has not quite dropped into place.

Of course, now that we moved here, we found out the shul is planning to move at some point. As usual, all the Conservative Jews moved out of the inner suburbs and left the shul behind; even the rabbi lives a good 25 minute drive away. They need to do something -- weekend before last they had 12 people at shabbos services. On the other hand there are plenty of chances to work on improving my davening and lehning skills! :-)

So much more interesting to write in LJ than to do work...