This Is How You Remind Me of What I Really Am - part 1

Disclaimer: I do not know what the lyrics to that song are about, I have never listened to it deliberately, and I have not heard it in years.

When I was in high school, whenever we drove out of town to an NCSY Shabbaton (youth group Shabbat event), it was on the radio. I came to think of it as the theme song of our trips. We frequently drove several hours, and so heard it over and over and over, passing from one radio zone into the next.

Personally I am not a pop music girl -- quaero mihi similes, et adiungor pravis - and these were about the only occasions on which I was compelled to listen to hours of it on end.

So a  decade or so later here I am in a hareidi neighborhood of Jerusalem on Chol HaMoed, and the not-so-religious-and-in-fact-downright-peculiar neighbors are playing very loud American pop music in their sukkah; and we are sitting in our sukkah wondering when they are going to stop blasting that awful noise -- and I start feeling extremely inspired. And suddenly I realize: to me, that awful noise is the music of Driving to an NCSY Shabbaton, and as such it arouses within me extremely strong teenaged emotions of the yay we are Jewish and life is awesome! variety.

And this - of all things - is how you remind me of what I really am.