As of my beginning writing this, it’s about 4 pm, Monday the fifth of October. I promised to begin regular blogging again today, but my connection is not cooperating.

I am a big fan of burrito places. My favorite restaurant chain in the world is Chipotle; I could eat there every single day if I though I could afford/get away with it; it is my great cross that I cannot do either. I have gone through stretches where I’ve eaten there or at Qdoba – effectively the exactly same restaurant – daily. The food is exquisite, the service excellent, the prices reasonable. In fact, as a testament to the considerateness of the staff, I have a small story to tell. On two or three separate instances, I have been stopped in the middle of my order  — chicken burrito, pinto beans, hot sauce, sour cream and cheese – and informed that the pinto beans are cooked with bacon grease. Baffled, I say “That’s ok,” and they shrug and move on. It’s only on getting to my seat that it hits me: they thought I was Jewish.

Now, this is not an entirely unexpected phenomenon; I have the Italian features of my dad with my mom’s pale English skin. The result is sort of broadly Mediterranean, and I’ve been mistaken for Greek and Middle Eastern alongside Jewish. But I’m certainly not furiously Jewy; I’m ambiguous enough that such a leap certainly wouldn’t have been warranted were it not for one little thing: my hat.

Since 2005 or 2006 I’ve been in possession of a broad knit skullcap, having first realized they looked good on me after my mom purchased me a cheap Jamaican hat while she was on a Caribbean cruise. I upgraded to one with a more muted and less pan-African color scheme during my whole Judaism phase. I liked having a religious signifier which, if imprecise, certainly made clear to the casual onlooker that I took this part of my life seriously and served as a reminder to myself as to who I was and what I was trying to do, even as it advertised my own religious confusion.

To some extent, though, I really liked that ambiguity. I was intoxicated at the thought that, as I biked through the Fan the people I passed would think “check out that big Jewish guy.” It seemed like I was sneaking into another camp and passing for a member, partaking, if surreptitiously and in shallow breaths, of another culture and way of being. I was mistaken at least once for Muslim, but by and large I was assumed to be a Jew (once by a ridiculously gorgeous waitress; it was all I could to not run with it), and that gave me a great deal of satisfaction. Not that I was ashamed of my Christianity, but I was dealing with grave doubts and I was, I suppose, trying on this other identity. I eventually built up something of a reputation as “the Catholic in the yarmulke.” It was all in the hat.

But, to speak honestly, I’m a natural and studied contrarian. I like straddling the middle and moving through identities. I’m a conservative with liberals, and a liberal with conservatives. With anarchists I am a statist, while statists find me maddeningly anarchical. With protesters I decry protest, while I prod those who believe everything is great. I’m no patriot, but I love my country. I’m no pacifist, but I’m opposed to war. I’m a linguistic purist who embraces change. I’m a prude who curses. I’m a moralist who sins. I’m a collectivist to libertarians, a socialist to followers of the free market, a know-it-all to teachers and a believer in the face of doubt. Not to say I don’t have things I believe in, but to me one of the great strengths of Catholicism is its ability to weave between ideology, and thus allowing me to assume a number of ideological aliases for the sake of argument. I live in ambiguity. It is, I suppose, my natural milieu.

I think it was easier to embrace that ambiguity, though, in Richmond; while I lived on a university campus which roiled in its diverse population, there weren’t any entrenched ethnic or religious communities. In inhabiting that middle zone, I wasn’t encroaching on anybody; I could listen to Hasidic reggae and Buddhist rap and go to the Muslim film festival and dream about being crucified and at most I would Irish up the blood of some university kids. 0I live now, however, in New York City, in a largely Puerto Rican neighborhood, not far from a large Hasidic colony, in walking distance to five Catholic churches, two synagogues and at least one mosque. This is a place of strictly delineated ethnic and religious identities. I’m not sure this is a place where ambiguity can thrive.

I suppose the time of experimentation is over.