Religion

Those of you who had some semblance of a religious education, or failing that those of you who have seen the movie 'The Prince of Egypt' will be familiar with the concept of Passover (Pesach).

Basically, it's all about the Jews leaving slavery blah blah blah. The whole Exodus thing. They even gave it its own book of the Torah.

That's why I find the amount of preparation we're undertaking for Passover (and I only use the shoddy English translation because I can't be bothered working out the HTML code for Hebrew lettering) mildly ironic.

The house has to be massively cleaned, people are coming for the festivities, so we have to rotate the furniture for three rooms to make everything fit, and we have to get all KlP (Kosher lePesach - Kosher for Passover. It's like Kosher, but more anal).

And note that this is for a festival about the delivery from slavery and resultingly from HARD WORK AND OPPRESSION. To quote whichever edition of the Haggadah we have at home 'Tonight we only recline'. Admittedly there's a preamble prefacing that statement, but the fundamental meaning is the same. It's about not panicking or engaging in manual labour as you move the sofas and various musical instruments (with the exception of the piano, because that would just be stupid) from the living room into the kitchen, the extendable tables into the dining room along with chairs, and then having to do place settings for 20 people at four in the afternoon when you've just gotten home from school and people are arriving at six and everything still needs to be cooked and your mother is contemplating a nervous breakdown... but I digress.

But of course I forgot one important fact. The Haggadah is meant to be read by a man (coming from an all female family, I tend to forget that). It's the women who go about preparing the house for passover, burning the Chametz (leavened products made from grains, which aren't allowed in the house during Passover. We tend not to bother with that - toast is too awesome a food), preparing the food, and generally panicking if anything goes wrong. Which it will.

And this is because of all the western religions, Judaism is one of the most misogynistic (first place goes to the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ and Latter Day Saints i.e. the Mormon sect who practice polygamy).

So I'd just like to say: thanks mum and dad for picking a religion which was bound to turn me to atheism.