Angelina, the clothes blender, and Jefferson: some small things in my life

• I bought a trenchcoat, because Angelina Jolie looks so good in them. The first day I wore it, the repeated rubbing from the strap of my heavy shoulder bag popped off the upper left button. (A girl's gotta work, and New Yorkers don't have cars in which to stow the materials of life and toil). On a related note, why must Angelina insist on carrying her now-enormous children, two at a time, for the cameras? And how do her skeletal arms not break under the strain of Pax and Zahara?
  
  
• I have recently taught the vocabulary word "prodigal" to approximately seven SAT students, and have discovered that my "Christian" students (all Asian -- this is, after all, New York) are totally unfamiliar with the actual contents of the Bible. Prodigal son? Nothing. Sodom? Never heard of it. (No point even getting into how maybe the moral of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah ought to be "Don't hand off your daughters to gang rapists!" or even just "Rape is bad!" rather than "Gay people are bad", even if that were appropriate discussion with a tutor, which it isn't). I had suspected the informational bankruptcy of church youth groups when an SAT essay topic about sacrifice came up in a class I was teaching, and some students asked if they could write about Jesus. I said certainly, although such an example should contain the same level of detail and rigor as any other argumentative example: references to specific incidents related in the Bible, specific parables, books of the Bible, etc. None of the essays I received back had a level of detail greater than "Jesus was nice and 100% good and he died for us" (even in essays in which the student had shown him or herself capable of better by also writing detail-laden examples about, say, World War II, or The Great Gatsby). When an atheist knows more than you do about your religion ... read more! Of course that is my prescription for many ailments, both societal and individual. Please enjoy this article about the Jefferson Bible, the historical life of Jesus, and the suppressed Gospel of Thomas.
  
  
• I am considering getting a tattoo that says "Read More."
  
  
• I have become less thin in the last six weeks, as Army food really wasn't bad at all, and downing Gatorade was a requirement just to stay upright. A pencil skirt that used to ride up around my ribcage now stays snugly in place across ... what do you call them ... hips? Previous readers who have rudely suggested I "eat a sandwich" will be pleased.
  
  
• I've been meaning to ask about this for years: how can a cab driver charge you for tolls on top of the $45 "flat rate" for a ride from JFK to Manhattan? Doesn't that defy the very idea of a flat rate? Have I been taken for a $4 ride (well, a $49 ride including a $4 swindle), repeatedly?
  
  
• I bought a beautiful pressed tin, embossed jewelry box in Bahrain, from a vendor who told me he'd imported it from Kashmir. I paid a nice sum for it and substantially repacked my suitcase to get the thing home. Two days after returning to the States, I was in Chinatown ... and guess what they were selling? A friend told me my jewelry box was more special because I had actually brought it back from somewhere. I'm not sure if believing this violates my antipathy for superstition.
  
  
• In eight days, I will cease to be the only "Jennifer Dziura," by virtue of my brother's marriage to his fiancee Jennifer. She even shares the middle initial "L." You know how weird it is to hear my Mom say "Jennifer and Brian" and have her not mean me? Jen 2.0 is totally nice and normal and genial, though, so I can't even say anything bad about her stealing my name. In fact, once you take a full-time job in a domestic violence shelter, I'm not sure anyone can ever say anything bad about you again.
  
  
• I have a splendid device in my house -- it's a Wonder Washer, AS SEEN ON TV (tm)! It's basically a giant blender for clothes. It washes delicates. No one ever talks about this, but what do other ladies DO in New York? I drop off my sheets and towels and jeans and socks and a few other things to the laundry-by-the-pound place, where they are returned to me clean and folded, but for years I have been carting my delicates to the laundromat, washing them myself, bringing them back wet (sometimes carrying baskets or bags of wet laundry several blocks) and hanging them up. Which means I have been known to buy new bras rather than wash the old ones. The Wonder Washer doesn't solve all my problems -- it has no drainage system and doesn't really rinse -- but it has cut down on laundry quandaries by at least 50%, which is well worth $40.
  
  
• The mother of one of my Korean students has gotten me hooked on roasted corn iced tea! When I first tried it, at my student's house, I just assumed it was something herbal. When my student's mother offered me some teabags to take home, I asked what it was. Corn! Who knew? It's freaking delicious.