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Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, begins tonight.  Unlike the secular New Year in January, Jewish New Year is celebratory but also contemplative.  It’s a serious holiday that requires participants to do a lot of soul-searching.  How did you live this past year?  Whom did you hurt?  What do you want to do differently this upcoming year?  Who needs an apology?  There’s 100% less champagne, and 100% more gut-twisting thinking.

And there is also beautiful ritual that weaves through the holiday into the following 10 days leading to Yom Kippur.  You get a little over a week and a half to contemplate who you are and who you want to be.  There’s a weight to that.

Lifehacker had a post about grief; how to help someone who is grieving.  It’s all good advice, mostly advice you already know.  But there was a part at the end that changed the way I see grief.  The therapist, Emily Adams,  interviewed in the article states:

She also said it’s important to remember that grief is a ritual. We get through it by participating in it. Yell on a mountain top, write a letter in the forest and bury it, cry in the sea. Let yourself express your loss so you don’t just have it sitting there inside you, unchanging … Your grief isn’t you. It’s just a part of your life.

Grief is a ritual.  We get through it by participating in it.  No one can grieve for you, and because the ritual is personal, no two expressions of grief look alike.

It’s not a thought that makes grief any easier, any more than knowing that the fasting on Yom Kippur is ritual makes your stomach growl less.  But it does allow for some space between the person and the feeling as well as an understanding of the point to the feeling; that we are trying to make sense and honour the space we’re in.

Maybe it just struck me because I read it before I’m about to enter multiple days of ritual, but it helped me to realize grief for what it is; something that is doing its hardest to help during a time period that only hurts.

I’m a middle child, and I’ve been lovingly teased my whole life about being a middle child.  But it didn’t occur to me until I read this article this summer that we don’t have a middle child in our family.  We have twins — two — and one is the oldest and one is the youngest.  The position I hold in my childhood family has been eliminated in our immediate one.

I don’t know many people with three children.  Most of our friends have somewhere between zero and two.

The article states: “The American Middle Child is now an endangered species. As the ideal number of children per family has shrunk to two — that’s not me speaking, it’s demographics — the middle child, in a very real sense, is disappearing.”  Today, two-thirds of women with children have one or two.  Not three or more.  Which means: “Middle children, the most populous birth-order demographic throughout most of human history, will soon be the tiniest.”

I don’t think birth order is the end-all-and-be-all, but I do think that where people fall in the family influences their personality a bit.  How can it not?  And if a position is eliminated, how does that affect the greater world?  I don’t think people should have more children just to keep middles around, but it is an interesting thing to think about.

Once you have a child, an oldest child exists.  Once you have a second, a youngest child exists.  But you have to keep going to create a middle.  We weren’t successful, maybe that’s why I’m drawn to thought-provoking articles like this.

Are you a middle child?  Do you think birth order means anything?

You know how there are people who can match the perfect wine to a meal?  That is not me.  I don’t drink wine, so I have no clue how to pair it.  But I am totally that way with books and my own brain.  I can’t do it for anyone else, but I am so good with holding books and then reading them at the right time.

Take, for instance, Us by David Nicholls.  I owned it for years, and I kept it by my bed for years because I didn’t want to forget to read it.  Every so often, I’d read the first page or two and think, “not yet.”

I read it while we were traveling through Scotland this summer.  Even though the family in the book exits the UK, they at least begin their travels in the UK.  Being away from home heightened my enjoyment of that book.  It was the best pairing I’ve done in a while between book and experience.

On the other hand, I’m planning to read Andrew Sean Greer’s Less while I’m at home.  It’s also a travel story, but instinct is telling me to read it from home, preferably in winter, though it technically could be enjoyed in any season.

I went back to the Crazy Rich Asians trilogy because they felt best consumed in summer, and it’s currently summer.  Though I just slammed shut and returned When Life Gives You Lululemons to the library when I was only a few pages in because I realized that it wouldn’t work for me in any location OR in any season even though I wanted to read the book.  I left a note to check back with my gut in a few months to see if I can find a place/time to read it, but… if not… I have to drop it.  There’s no life experience to pair it with that would work.

Can you read any book at any time, or do you hold certain books to read in a season or place?

Josh and I talk a lot about sleep, namely, that we should get more of it.  We’re not great at actually getting to bed when we say we’re going to get to bed, and then it takes me a long time to fall asleep.  So I’m getting about five or six hours per night.  That’s on a good night.

I’ve been looking up sleep information, and I found out about the Epworth Sleepiness Scale.  The good news is that I only scored a two, which is low.  But the bad news is that I am not sleepy during the day.  I’m not sleepy from my lack of sleep, so I can’t take a nap, let’s say, and grab sleep during daytime hours.  I’m not sleepy at night, AND I’m not sleepy during the day.

Which doesn’t mean that I’m not tired.  I am tired.  But I’m not sleepy.  I’m like a little yappy dog on high alert for any squirrels that may run by the window.  That dog may be exhausted, but it cannot let itself drift off into sleep because… SQUIRREL.

Anyway, I was researching my chronotype (none of which — by the way — take into account that your life may not fit your chronotype and you may not be able to do anything about it), and I think I’m somewhere between a wolf and a dolphin.  I’m a wolphin.

That will make more sense if you read this chart.

I don’t know this scientifically because the chronotype quiz seems to be down at the moment, but it’s what makes sense based on the descriptions.  I’m a wolphin living in a world where I need to do tasks on other people’s timetables.  I cannot roll out of bed at 7 am or hold meetings at 4 pm.  I can’t do yoga or exercise at 6 pm because I’m freakin’ making dinner at that time.

Anyway.

What is your chronotype, and are you also a hybrid that sounds like the stuff of nightmares?

My friends and I had fun debating this question at dinner last week, so I’m turning over the situation to you.  Ask the Salty Waitress had an interesting question, one that begins with a basic fact.  If you are ordering an entrée at a restaurant, they’re all mostly within the same price range.  So restaurant to restaurant, the prices obviously are higher or lower, but most entrées are within $10 of each other within the same restaurant.

But alcohol doesn’t follow that rule.  Alcohol is the one item in a restaurant that appears in a single section — the wine list — but can cost anywhere from $15 to $1000 (or more) for a single bottle of wine.

So Ask the Salty Waitress had a question about tipping when alcohol has been ordered, making the argument that whether the person ordered a $15 bottle of wine (and paid a $3 tip) or a $100 bottle of wine (and paid a $20 tip), the waitress did the same job of uncorking and pouring the wine.  They wanted to know if they could pay a single tip for the wine, let’s say $5, and call it a day.

The answer is a decent one, albeit with judgement hurled at the asker, but it doesn’t really answer the question.  By the waitress’s argument, no one should eat in her section unless they’re going to order a lot and tip big because a person doing otherwise is taking up a space that could be given to someone who will give her more money.  By that token, the answer should include that it’s not about the wine; it’s why isn’t the question asker ordering triple appetizers because if they don’t, they’re a cheapskate, too.

So her answer doesn’t really work.

The question has to do with the enormous cost range in this one menu item: alcohol.  We’re talking a few dollars difference in tip if you get the steak or the pasta dish, but there’s a huge difference in tip between the cheapest and most expensive bottle of wine.

My friend mentioned the New York Times once covered this, and I was able to find the article, but it’s a really confusing answer that involves different math applied to different situations.

So what’s your take on this?  I’m assuming that few of us ask for the $1000 bottle of wine from the New York Times article, so let’s go more with the $15 vs. $100 bottle of wine.