Scattershooting

Okay, this cold thing has gotta stop... I feel like my face has been sandblasted from here into next month, and I suspect that tomorrow's snow is not going to improve my temperament one little bit...

I made the mistake, a few months back, of getting The Lovely Wife(tm) to read the first Sandman collection (Preludes & Nocturnes), and now she's addicted. This of course means that I've had to go and get the rest of the collections for her. I was planning on just getting one book at a time as she read 'em, but Vertigo is reprinting the collections with new covers. Not that I'm such a stickler, but if I'm gonna shell out the bucks for a full set, I want 'em to look the same. So yesterday, I went out and got all the ones we diddn't have (except one, which I think I have floating around storage someplace). Between the complete Sandman, the Lucifer spin-off series, 1602, and my Astro City collection, I've spent more on comics in the last five months than I ever have in my entire life previously (it's gonna get worse, too: someday, I'm gonna introduce TLW to Elfquest... ah, well, we need a new bookshelf anyway).

Josh makes some of his usual erudite thoughts on the topic of marriage. I think, however, that there's a major point missed in his analysis. The "Dear Abby" reader looks to marriage as a means "to ensure that the distance between us won't tear up (sic) apart"... you've got your major problem right there. Marriage is not a means to ensure anything. It's a commitment, a promise that you will let the other person be a part of everything you do, and a promise to reciprocate. It's also a crapshoot (note: TLW hates that metaphor). I don't know that it's wrong to commit before a personality-altering experience (if getting hitched ain't a severely personality-altering experience in its own right, I don't know what is), but if you don't see the commitment has being a valuable commodity by itself, regardless of how you change, then you ain't got no business talking tachliss¹.

More parsha thoughts: Why are we told of Moshe and Pharaoh's negotiations to let the Jews go to the wilderness (Ex. 8:21-25)? Was the final offer (the Jews could go a little way off, sacrifice and return) a legitimate offer? What if Pharaoh had stuck to his word? Perhaps this passage simply indicates just how unreasonable Pharaoh was (since one could argue that he had a legitimate "beef:" the Israelites were essential to the Egyptian economy, and letting them go would be political suicide). By showing that Pharaoh refused to even consider a reasonable alternative, we are able to reject any compassionate interpretation of his later actions.

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¹tachliss: Yiddish: lit. "purpose." In certain circles, dating for "Tachliss" means seriously sizing the other person up as a marriage partner.