As this week's guest blogger, I will now take it upon myself to answer the question, "Why am I here?"

Not "here," like "on earth," in which case the answer would, I fear, be sadly free of altruistic purpose and meaning-gathering.

I mean, like, on Jewcy.

I would like to begin answering this question by posting this image of me strangling Jewcy editor Michael Weiss in 1998.

(This was part of a poorly-produced humorous video sketch conceived by the staff of our campus humor magazine. I believe it was a parody of Jerry Bruckheimer films).

So, we've covered the "personal connection" angle. If you're wondering, I totally didn't sleep with your editor (more on my sex life later).

My first post for Jewcy featured an Orthodox comic, Yisrael Campbell, who performed on Monday at my comedy show in Brooklyn.

"Is it hot in here, or am I just dressed for 17th century Poland?"

This reminds me very much of Sassy magazine (in the news lately due to the publication of the book How Sassy Changed My Life: A Love Letter to the Greatest Teen Magazine of All Time), from which, somewhere around 1994, I first learned of the existence of Jews who were actually, well, kind of Jewish.

Of course, I also learned a lot from Sassy about anorexia, and 'zines, and punk music I would never be cool enough to listen to. But sometime around my sophomore year of high school, Sassy published an article about Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn. I was terribly surprised! In the evangelical Christian stronghold of Virginia Beach, I had always thought of Jews as friendly atheists.

I grew up in a family I liked to call "third-generation atheist." (Really, though, I think we were just lazy).

In a town ruled by Pat Robertson, in which blonde teenagers held hands around the flagpole (at public school) to lead morning prayers and ask Jesus to supply them with additional touchdowns at imminent sporting events, Jews were, well ... the boys I could reasonably go on dates with. They often had cool parents who read books, which my parents didn't, so much. "Jewish," to me, just meant "not Christian," which meant "not crazy." I was totally shocked, therefore, to read in Sassy that some Jews followed strict religious guidelines (unrelated to shellfish), that women could not do all the things men could do, and that, apparently, Brooklyn was totally full of Jews who pretty much kept to themselves. This did not so much jibe with my image of my boyfriend's parents, Mr. and Mrs. Edelstein, who let me come as my boyfriend's date to their daughter's bat mitzvah and then later as my boyfriend's date on a family field trip to an old Virginia slave plantation, where we crawled off into the woods to attempt to have sex, which sounds much more perverse now than it did in 1993.

I discussed this (not the slave plantation part, actually) with my BFF and former Jewcy guest editor Molly Crabapple, who had the entirely opposite experience of having grown up in Far Rockaway, attending largely Jewish elementary and middle schools. "The Jews in the rest of the country just aren't that Jewish," I said. "As a young person in the 'burbs, it was impossible to understand how anyone could dislike anyone else for being Jewish. All the Jews I knew seemed exactly like the Middle Americans portrayed on TV."

"That's what my boyfriend says about Ohio," she said, the boyfriend being a big blond hunk of a man (the appropriate word being shaygetz, as she learned in the comments to this post).

Anyway, I'm here for your entertainment. And that's a little backstory.