Rose-Colored Glosses

Sincerity

2009-03-15T21:28:00.002-04:00

[I wrote this piece for my synagogue's occasional publication and thought I'd post it here too. The topic was prayer; other than that we had free reign. I didn't include this in the piece because I figured everyone at the synagogue would know it, but some of you might find it useful to know that in Hebrew the verb "to pray" is "l'hitpallel", which translates more literally as something like "to self-judge", so the Jewish sense of prayer is less of the petition and more of the self-examination through reminding oneself of Jewish ideals and obligations.]

During the reception after I became a Bat Mitzvah, amid the more generic greetings and congratulations, I received several versions of the following compliment: "You're so sincere when you pray!" This came primarily from members of the congregation who were around my parents' age. I didn't know how to respond.

The first thing that almost flew out of my mouth was, "Aren't you?" Fortunately I'd learned enough by then about social interaction rules to swallow my words. Still, I was disillusioned. I always tried to concentrate on what I was saying when I prayed, but if I had inadvertently shown myself to be more sincere than other people who'd presumably been developing their praying skills far longer than I, did that mean I'd hit the ceiling early? That whatever prayer-sincerity I'd developed was as much as I could ever hope to have? Had I beat the game? Was all the challenge gone from Judaism, just when it was supposed to be beginning?

The next thing I wanted to say was, "That's what you think." I was a bit of a perfectionist about my part of the Bat Mitzvah ceremony, and had devoted a good deal of time learning to chant the prayers and the parsha fluently and clearly with no mistakes. I loved doing it, but there was a big difference between polished presentation and actually meaning what I said. I had studied the meanings of the prayers, sure, but they weren't mine; I wasn't exactly pouring out the deepest yearnings of my heart as I progressed through the Shabbat morning liturgy. I didn't want to deceive people into thinking I was more sincere than I really was, but how should I have prayed so as not to deceive them? Should I have stood awkwardly with my head down, mumbling the words into my chest?

The third thing I didn't say was, "What difference does it make to you whether I'm sincere or not?" In Hebrew School we'd been taught to read and chant and understand the prayers, and had been encouraged in (and praised for) nothing but mastery of the text. Ours was a small Reform congregation in the San Francisco Bay Area, about as liberal as they come. No one ever told me I had to mean what I said, so it was strange to receive praise for a quality that had never before been presented to me as worthy of pursuing. Besides, when I led the prayers that morning, I was doing it for the sake of guiding the rest of the congregation through the service. I had always thought they would bring to it as much or as little sincerity as they felt. I wasn't doing it to inspire them by my example to new heights of sincerity. That wasn't my job, was it? Or was that what I should have been learning to do all along? It had never occurred to me before that the service leader is not only a bouncing ball on a Karaoke screen, but also the one who, like it or not, sets the tone for everyone else. Gosh, had all those people, professionals and grandparents and founding members, been influenced in their prayer-experience by an unintentionally faux-sincere 13-year-old kid? What was wrong with the world?

I eventually realized that I had probably misinterpreted my elders' compliments, and that they had likely meant something more like, "It's unusual for someone of your age to care enough about the liturgy to bother enunciating." Still, the unsettling realization stayed with me. My praying was polished, but insincere. I was a Bad Jew.

Ten years later I moved to New York to attend Drisha's Beit Midrash program, intending to land myself in rabbinical school the following year. Good rabbinical school candidates pray regularly, I figured, so once there I did my best to learn to pray with the Jews of Manhattan's Upper West Side. I followed my classmates to Ramath Orah, B'nai Jeshurun, and Hadar. I was a disaster. Gates of Prayer, the only siddur I had ever used, was nowhere to be found. Everyone here either davvened from Sim Shalom, which had paragraphs and paragraphs of liturgy I'd never seen before (but which everyone else seemed to know), or they used the Art Scroll siddur, which left me utterly lost. And the worst part was all that silence! I didn't understand the point of so much silent prayer. I wanted to sing the tunes I knew with the people around me. Why throw out all those pretty melodies and replace them with hurried whispering? At least when we sang or chanted together, I could put my voice behind the prayer and feel sincere. If I was singing along, that was proof enough that I must mean what I'm saying; I didn't have to examine more closely whether the words were actually coming from me rather than merely sliding through me. When the melodies went away, only my thoughts were left, and usually those thoughts were comprised of things like, "How is it we never learned this one?" or "What page are we on?" or "Am I doing it quickly enough?" I hated how the silent prayers exposed me to myself, called me out for the fake that I was, a creampuff who mostly liked to pray for the sake of the pretty music. I got more comfortable with the new liturgy over the course of the year and learned how to pace myself, but I still didn't feel as if all the prayers were mine. Some, like Yotzer, Ma'ariv Aravim, and the Nisim b'Chol Yom, I could totally get behind, because I already generally felt grateful for many aspects of my life, and I was comfortable thinking of God as the power that keeps the laws of physics working the way they do. There were other prayers, however, that remained inaccessible to me. The Kaddishes, for example, left me cold, as did the Kedusha and several other parts of the Amida. I just didn't know what to do with all that talk about God's greatness when it wasn't illustrated with some specific experience that I had had or could at least imagine having. It seemed sterile and remote.

When we prayed aloud, I could justify my actions to myself by saying I was doing it for the sake of bonding with the community or reinforcing a sense of shared identity, both of which I considered worthwhile. When we prayed silently, though, it was just me and the words, and if I didn't have a good sense of what the words themselves meant (I had learned not to trust the English translations, which always seemed to opt for poetry and inoffensiveness at the cost of accuracy), or if I understood them and disagreed, then I was just lying to myself, and what was the point of that?

Around this time I was dating a Christian. When I learned about how he prayed, I could hardly believe it. Kneel down and talk directly to God? Make up your own words? And God talks back?? It's not as if I'd never heard of the practice, but I didn't expect to ever meet anyone who actually did it, who actually believed in it. It was incomprehensible to me. If God exists at all, then surely God is the power behind the workings of the universe! How conceited to think that God is going to pay attention directly to me every time I decide to pray! But then the fellow challenged me to ask God whether or not I should go to rabbinical school, and to listen for an answer, and I have too much pride to turn down a challenge like that. So one afternoon I went out to find a secluded area where I would attempt to speak directly with God.

I walked until I found a likely spot on drying grass among some trees, but it was too out in the open. I went to where the trees were clustered more thickly, but there I couldn't see enough of the sky. I moved to another spot where I could see more sky, but there the buildings were visible, and I didn't think I could do this with visual reminders of civilization. I walked around for a while longer, but finally gave up and stood in an imperfect spot and closed my eyes. Then I tried to speak.

It was terrifying. Where could I begin? Anything I thought to say seemed, in light of the nature of my Interlocutor, not good enough. The question I had set out to ask suddenly appeared insignificant, and what's more, the very idea that I should try to engage God in conversation was, I felt sure, so unacceptable to God that God would refuse to answer just on principle, if there even was a God at all. What was I thinking, trying to do this without the help of other Jews around me, the Torah in its ark in front of me, and the book of approved words in my hands? I waited a moment more, hoping something miraculous would happen to take the pressure off. Nothing did, of course. In the stillness, feeling simultaneously shocked at my own audacity and foolish for halfway believing, I haltingly articulated a question. It wasn't polished, but it was certainly sincere.

After saying all I could think of to say (not that God wouldn't already have known all my thoughts before they were voiced, if there even was a God) I held still and concentrated hard, waiting to see if any non-Miriam-like ideas were going to enter my head. There was nothing. There was only the overwhelming sense that the universe really had no interest whatsoever in whether I go to rabbinical school or not, and that it was really just up to me. If I wanted to do it (and I definitely wanted to do it), I should go ahead and do it. I was convinced it was the right thing for me to do, but that had nothing to do with God's wishes. As far as I could tell, God didn't care. I was a little disappointed, but that disappointment was sweetened by the rush of post-fear relief I felt. Better yet, God, if there is one, had the chance to stop me and didn't, so at least I wasn't acting against some sort of Eminent Cosmic Disapproval.

Since this experience, I've tried the direct-prayer method only a few times more, all of which when I was so anguished that even gripping fear seemed like an improvement. I've never received anything more answer-like than the same old silence. It's cathartic, certainly, to have done something terrifying, and I have enjoyed the post-prayer relief as I would enjoy a post-exercise glow, but I don't think it's a good way for me to make the important decisions in my life. I've joked to my boyfriend that this proves God doesn't talk to me. He says I must be doing it wrong. But every time I work up the nerve to try again, it's just as terrifying and as silence-producing as it was the first time, so I don't do it often. Still, the experience has given me a glimpse of how I can transform my regular prayers into something more powerful and sincere. That sense of confronting God-if-there-is-one was never part of my prayer before, but when I work up the nerve to invoke it, it instantly puts everything else into sharp relief. I'm so gripped by the idea of God listening that God barely needs to listen at all; I can imagine how God would react if God existed and were listening, and so I can do the work myself that God would have done. It's somewhat like having an extra-strength version of my own conscience looming over me, reminding me of what really matters and what doesn't, what I ought to do and who I want to be. It's very effective. And even though I haven't received any recent remarks about how sincerely I pray, if someone did remark on it now, I think I could smile and accept the compliment.

CDD

2009-02-05T20:58:00.001-05:00

So I recently learned about a lifestyle called Christian Domestic Discipline. The basic idea is that a married couple agrees to live according to a system in which the husband makes and enforces the household rules, and if the wife disobeys, the husband beats the wife. This is intended to mirror the leadership/submission relationship between deity and church, a mirroring that Paul suggests in the NT, and so it is thought to be pleasing to God. It's also said to generate closeness between wife and husband, to emphasize their gender roles (her submissiveness and his assertiveness), to give the husband confidence and the wife security, and to strengthen the marriage. Regardless of all that, I think I should apologize to the Christians reading this for using the name of your religion in association with the practice. I don't think it's got the mark of divine approval on it, and I don't imagine anyone else reading this thinks so either.

I'm writing about it because, honestly, it scares me and I'm trying to overcome that fear by taking it apart, by working through it. Why does it scare me? First of all, it rocks my worldview. I would have thought that no one would choose such a life--that every human would prefer to answer to his or her own chosen system of rules rather than to someone else's, especially if enforced via beatings--but apparently there are women out there who encourage their husbands to adopt the lifestyle, not for the desire for pain, but rather, they say, for the results. Secondly, and more significantly, it scares me because I think I can understand the attraction. I know there are times when I've wanted to let go of the responsibility of steering my own life and instead allow myself to be carried. I can imagine the sense of being loved that would come from knowing my spouse pays attention to and cares about everything I do, even if only because he's policing me. Most compellingly for me, it might be nice to know that the world is a predictable machine and I'm entirely in charge of whether or not a bad thing happens to me--all I need do is follow a set of clearly defined rules, and if I follow them, all will go well for me (about which more later). I would gain clear direction, attention, and a sense that the world is just. I might even feel really good about myself if I think God is pleased by my lifestyle.

On the other hand, I'd be giving up some freedoms that are, I believe, dead wrong to give up. First of all I'd be failing to chart my own course in life and take responsibility for my decisions. I'm letting someone else--a human, not God--make the rules about what's right and wrong for me to do, and how I ought to be punished for disobedience. On a certain level, I'm agreeing not to challenge his leadership before having even heard what his rules are. Secondly, I'm trading in my right to be treated as an equal and in exchange receiving attention which I am probably confusing for love. Thirdly, rather than facing the injustice that exists in the world and trying to do something to remedy it, I am asking someone else to create for me the illusion of justice by setting him up as my master and having him diligently punish me whenever I disobey. It seems equivalent to choosing to remain a permanent child, and under the circumstances, I find this choice as morally problematic as the choice to remain a slave. Most adult humans have the capacity to improve the world by pursuing justice in whatever sphere they inhabit; if I never use my own capacity to right wrongs (agreeing instead to be led by my husband in all things), then I'm not contributing to the work of improving the world.

Now back to the thing about the world as a predictable machine. This is a common theme for me, so my apologies if you've heard this one already. I remember believing, when I was quite young, that my parents knew about everything bad that I did. If I lied to them or if I read a book while I was supposed to be going to sleep or if I ate in the living room instead of in the kitchen, or if I jumped up and down on their bed, I believed, they would know. This belief was partly because they *were* extremely watchful and usually did find out, and partly because for a long time, I overestimated my sneakiness. I was a kid. What did I know? But eventually I found that I *could* get away with things. This was disturbing, not because I didn't want to, e.g., jump on the bed (I most certainly did), but rather because my understanding of the world changed. If my parents weren't going to stop me, the borders of the world expanded beyond the horizon, frighteningly far. If they didn't always know to chastise me when I wasn't behaving well, who would? How far would I be allowed to drift before someone would save me from own childish lack of self-control? And if no one was going to stop *me* from behaving badly, who would stop everyone else from behaving badly? Was the world full of people who were out of control, running around like crazy, and eating in the living room? What would keep the universe from falling apart?

At some point I decided that it was ok that my parents couldn't see what I did, because God could, and did, and indeed was watching me at every moment, and would punish me for my misdeeds. I don't think this anymore (I tried, but God wasn't very consistent in punishing me either), but I still think that everything I do is recorded on the scroll of reality--that is, my deeds don't cease to have existed just because they aren't in the present anymore--and that it matters, somehow, in the grand scheme of things, what choices I make. Whether or not it's true, it seems self-evident to me, which is enough, at least for now.

Anyway, the point of all that backstory is to connect my disappointment (in discovering that I could get away with stuff) with the married lifestyle that establishes consistent, direct, and painful consequences for rule-breaking. I understand the sense of security it would offer, but I don't think it's a good thing to seek. Far better, I would say, is to participate in the work of buildling a world in which justice is fair, consistent, and ever-present. This is divine work, the role of a mature adult, a challenge to develop one's moral sense to the highest degree possible, which is, I believe, the sort of work we all ought to be doing. It's also the role given to the husband in the CDD system. It's as if the wife gives into the temptation to never have to face the ugly injustice of the world, while assigning her husband the job of maintaining the illusion for her, in exchange for which, she gives him power over her. It's not a temptation to which I am immune, but I consider the results to be morally problematic, and I think that's why it disturbs me so deeply.

Election Night

2008-11-15T18:53:00.003-05:00

[This is really old, and I've been sitting on it for a while intending to dress it up a bit, but now I have another post in mind, so I'm putting this one up in its unfinished state to make room for the next one.]

The Advocate hosted a party here in our own little apartment, and so the greenhouse was well-stuffed with eager guests chatting tensely while we sat around the TV, glued to CNN. We cheered when Ohio went blue, and Florida, and Virginia, because at that point it seemed like we could finally stand on the ice with both feet, sort of--and then PA was announced, to more cheers. I was still deluded enough to be worried about CA, but everyone else knew that that was it, that Obama would win. We nodded along, favorably impressed, as we watched McCain's concession speech, and then everyone in the room cried quietly as Obama gave his acceptance speech, except for me, because I was still too caught up with the prop 8 business to allow myself to fully be in the moment and enjoy it.

After a while we walked down (in pieces) to 5th ave near 6th st, ending up on the sidewalk outside Bar Reis, where there were already lots of other small groups of people standing around on the sidewalk cheering at anything that moved. I could already hear the cheering, coming through as ghostly wails, as well as plenty of car horns honking, even from my apartment door 5 blocks away, which was lucky because I was the last to leave and I wasn't sure at first which way to go to find the outdoor party. I found it easily by following the noise.

When I reached The Advocate and the others, they were standing in a little group facing the street, cheering at every vehicle that drove past, as were all the other little clumps of people (that were quickly morphing into one big clump of people, friends and strangers together). It was as if 5th ave had become an impromptu parade, with the cars and trucks (mostly taxis, black car-service cars, police cars, and garbage trucks at that hour--around 12:30 or 1 am) serving as floats and parade personalities. We'd scream at them as they went by, and they'd honk and wave out their windows and shout their joy. Someone dressed up his car specially, with Obama '08 written on it with some bright pink stuff I couldn't identify, but it reminded me of cake frosting. People in the back of this car stuck their heads out the windows and screamed as the car drove slowly by us. I might have been the only person there who hadn't been drinking (not that it made me any more inhibited in my expression of excitement than they were).

We sang This Land Is Your Land and If I Had a Hammer and then we couldn't think of anything else to sing, but we watched other Park Slope folks waving American flags (unprecedented) and singing patriotic songs of their own. I saw two of my neighbors there, one from next door and one an old schoolmate from Stanford who lives in the neighborhood now. We didn't converse, but we hugged and cheered. A stranger from inside Bar Reis came out and hugged us all. Some guys high-fived us as they went by. Others, more shy, just threw up their arms at us from a more comfortable distance and cheered "WHOOO!" We did the same back. I wished I'd brought my morris bells with me just so that I could make noise using something other than my voice. I was hoarse by the end of the night.

After a while the excitement level died a little where we were. I'd heard there was more of a gathering down at 5th and Union, and I wanted to see. So after we all walked back to the apartment, I got the bells and tied them on to my legs for the first time in what must be years and I ran back down to 5th and Union. I got nods and smiles and WHOOO!!s and high fives from everyone (truly, everyone) I passed, though this may have been because of the bells and may have been because of the politically-themed t-shirt I was wearing, and it may have been because I was a human. People were pretty willing to cheer regardless. I ran nearly all the way down to Union, just enjoying the feeling of exerting joyful energy and the ja-jinga ja-jinga sound of the bells as my heels hit the sidewalk.

Words from Rabbi Nachman, and an open invitation to you

2008-09-22T21:57:00.005-04:00

I heard this piece for the first time on Saturday night when the rabbi read it at our selichot service. If you can imagine a room full of Jews who've been spending the past several weeks reflecting on their shortcomings, on all the ways in which they've wronged others, all the irreversibly hurtful deeds they've done, all the harm they've spread around, and how on earth they are ever going to fix it all, while at the same time wondering how they're going to really truly forgive all those who have hurt them, how to process through and put behind them all the injuries they've suffered, then perhaps you can have an idea of why these words were so gratefully received.

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You have to judge every person generously. Even if you have reason to think that person is completely wicked, it's your job to look hard and seek out some bit of goodness, someplace in that person where he is not evil. When you find that bit of goodness and judge the person that way, you may really raise her up to goodness. Treating people this way allows them to be restored, to come to teshuvah.

This is why the psalmist says: "Just a little bit more and there will be no wicked one; you will look at his place and he will not be there" (Ps 37:10). He tells us to judge one and all so generously, so much on the good side, even if we think they're as sinful as can be. By looking for that "little bit," the place, however small, within them where there is no sin (and everyone, after all, has such a place) and by telling them, showing them, that that is who they are, we can help them change their lives.

Even the person you think (and he agrees!) is completely rotten—how is it possible that at some time in his life he has not done some good deed, some mitzvah? Your job is just to help him look for it, to seek it out, and then to judge him that way. Then indeed you will "look at his place" and find that the wicked one is no longer there—not because she has died or disappeared—but because, with your help, she will no longer be in the place where you first saw her. By seeking out that bit of goodness you allowed her to change; you helped teshuvah to take its course.

So now, my clever friend, now that you know how to treat the wicked and find some bit of good in them—now go do it for yourself as well! You know what I have taught you: "Take great care: be happy always! Stay far, far away from sadness and depression." I've said it to you more than once. I know what happens when you start examining yourself. "No goodness at all," you find. "Just full of sin." Watch out for Old Man Gloom, my friend, The one who wants to push you down. This is one of his best tricks. That's why I said:
"Now go do it for yourself as well." You too must have done some good for someone, sometime. Now go look for it! But you find it and discover that it too is full of holes. You know yourself too well to be fooled: "Even the good things I did," you say, "were all for the wrong reasons. Impure motives! Lousy deeds!" Then keep digging, I tell you, keep digging, because somewhere inside that now tarnished-looking mitzvah, somewhere within it there was indeed a little bit of good. That's all you need to find: just the smallest bit: a dot of goodness. That should be enough to give you back your life, to bring you back to joy. By seeking out that little bit even in yourself and judging yourself that way, you show yourself that that is who you are. You can change your whole life this way and bring yourself to teshuvah.

It's that first little dot of goodness that's the hardest one to find (or the hardest to admit you find!). The next ones will come a little easier, each one following another.

And you know what? These little dots of goodness in yourself—after a while you will find that you can sing them! Join them to one another and they become your niggun, your wordless melody. You fashion that niggun by rescuing your own good spirit from all that darkness and depression. The niggun brings you back to life, and then you can start to pray…

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...which leads me to this next thing. I've never done this before, but I think this year I really should. Is there anyone reading this who wants to talk about something that's unresolved between us, some way that I've wronged you, whether actively or (more likely) passively? Because if you, my dear reader, can think of something, then I can just about guarantee that it's on my mind already. I want to talk about it with you. I know it's more honorable to initiate it myself, only there are certain cases in which it would be helpful to have some indication of, I don't know, permission, I guess. It's not generally socially acceptable to reopen old pain, so there are many cases where I'm hesitant. But while I'm over here trying to screw up my courage, I hope you'll let me know.

Giggling

2008-08-03T21:06:00.002-04:00

As the previous thing suggests, I've been reading a bunch of Discworld novels lately. When he's setting the scene or adding flavor, Pratchett will often borrow elements from our own current culture and translate them so that they fit in a society that is powered mostly by magic, but which has only the most rudimentary technology. It's not the most important ingredient of the novels, but it happens often and it's entertaining.

So it's been in the back of my mind, too, that hunt for elements of our daily lives that can be twisted neatly into a magical-but-low-tech setting, and today, while I was riding home on the train, I started giggling because I'd suddenly imagined travellers on horseback approaching the entrance to a bridge and reading a sign saying, "Stop! Pay troll." It makes me wonder what Pratchett would do with EZ Pass.

Caught Reading

2008-07-30T14:39:00.005-04:00

Garth Wolkoff has an interesting idea for a blogging project, and I was in the right place at the right time. Neat. :)

Grammatical Hang-Up

2008-07-18T23:55:00.010-04:00

College Education. No Child Left.

Last Sunday I saw this ad for Thomas Edison State College as I rode the NJ Transit back from meeting with a new student. There were some high school kids occupying the spot where I needed to stand to get a good shot of the ad, so I did a fine job of embarrassing myself while I craned my body into their personal spaces trying to get all the text into the little screen on my camera phone. It took me several tries, and by the third attempt one of them (who clearly thought I was nuts to be so excited about photographing the thing) asked disgustedly if I just wanted him to take it for me. "Thanks, I got it this time," I said, and returned to my own seat. The silver-haired lady sitting next to me looked at me quizzically, and to her I felt obligated to explain why I was so keen to photograph the thing. I'd sorta hoped she would have spotted the error too (have we all forgotten the grammar we learned in school?), but she turned out to be German, just travelling in the US, so I forgave her and explained how the lack of a possessive apostrophe changes the meaning of the copy.

To whom do Jews bow?

2008-05-17T18:38:00.006-04:00

Lately I've been spending what some might call too much time reading LDS blogs. I find something validating about seeing people who grew up in the culture struggling openly and intelligently with the same issues that The Saint and I butt heads over--issues like who or what has final authority and how that authority is conferred, the social and moral implications tied to a person's gender, which laws are eternal and which have expiration dates, the nature of God, how a religion ought to be run, and the like. It gives me hope to know that not everyone in The Church defends those aspects that I find troubling; rather, that some are more likely to say, "Yeah, that's a problem, and I'm trying to figure out what to do about it, and here's something I've come up with."

Anyway, Mr. Nielson at Mormon Matters has a post about what Bruce R. McConkie believed regarding whether Mormons worship Jesus, and in it he refers to a verse in 1 Chronicles that (he suggests) can be used wrongly to conclude that King David's subjects worshiped their king rather than worshiping God alone. He calls this improper interpretation an example of word-offense, and he wants to be sure that it's avoided in interpreting McConkie's words too:

Now through word-offense, it might be easier and more fun to attack McConkie and simplify his full nuanced beliefs into something he never taught, but let’s keep in mind that, thanks to the Bible, this can be done to any Old Testament-believing religion:

1 Chr 29:20 states: "And David said to all the congregation, Now bless the Lord your God. And all the congregation blessed the Lord God of their fathers, and bowed down their heads, and worshiped the Lord, and the king."

Through word-offense, I can now make the claim that all Bible-believing Christians and all Jews believe that King David was a god and that he is to be worshiped. And thanks to the single use of the word “worship” for both King David and God, I can wreak some real havoc against any counter arguments about how they are worshiped in different senses of the word.

That raised my eyebrows. David's subjects, worshiping a person? So much is made, at least in Jewish Sunday schools around March, of how Jews should emulate Mordechai by bowing down to no one but God, that I thought surely there must be some mistake. So armed with my own triple combination of Lambdin, Jastrow, and Shilo, I went to check the Hebrew version of 1 Chron. 29:20.

There are two verbs that describe what the people are doing in 1 Chron. 29:20. First it says “vayikdu”, and then “vayishtakhavu”. In the KJV rendering of this verse, as we saw, these words are translated as “bowed down their heads” (a near-exact translation) and “worshiped” (not so much) respectively. Vayikdu comes from the root kuf-dalet-dalet, meaning “to bow”, and vayishtakhavu comes from the root shin-khet-hey, meaning “to bow low. So first the people are bowing a little bit, and then they’re bowing lower. Or perhaps some are bowing a little and others are bowing a lot depending on whether they are there just to show their support or whether they are crazy Solomon fans. Anyway, there's a mix.

Compare KJV with MAV
KJV: They...bowed down their heads, and worshiped the Lord, and the king.
MAV: They bowed and prostrated themselves before God and before the king.

Not too different, but the word "worshiped" in the KJV can be more exactly rendered as "prostrated themselves". Its a form of worship, sure, but in this case the distinction matters.

The other thing I found is that in this passage, David seems to be passing the kingship from himself to his son Solomon, so if any human is receiving worship here, it’s likely Solomon, and not David. Two verses later, we read,

…they again king-ified Solomon-ben-David, and they anointed him before God… (MAV)

So now we've got a better picture of why the Jews are apparently falling down and worshiping another person. David and Solomon seem to have been worried about whether the people would take kindly to the transfer of rulership, David having been so successful and Solomon being as young and inexperienced as he was (see 1 Chron. 29:1), but not only was this potential period of conflict avoided; the people went and overcompensated, as if to reassure father and son that everything was cool with them. So maybe we can forgive them for prostrating themselves before Solomon, if it was all a big social display done for the sake of banishing the king's fears of civil unrest? But still, it makes me kinda uncomfortable to see the people express their devotion to a person through bowing. Couldn't they have jumped about or shouted a three-syllable chant instead?

I checked for where else in Tanakh we hear about Jews bowing down, expecting it to be something only done before God, and maybe this is a sign of my not knowing Tanakh very well, but it turns out that Jews in Tanakh bow down to one another pretty often. Apparently, neither one of these bowing verbs implies an action that is only done in front of God. It’s God to whom Jews bow the most, but bowing is also used as a sign of love and reverence between people.

All the appearances in Tanakh of the first verb, the less extreme type of bowing: kuf-dalet-dalet
All the appearances of the second verb, the deeper bow: shin-khet-hey
(I really like online concordances.)

So while there are plenty of places where the bower is bowing to God, there are also many places where the bower is bowing to another person. Some of the most telling examples:

Gen 23:7, 12 Abraham bows to the descendants of Khet when they give him permission to bury Sarah in a prime location on their land.

Gen 33:3 Jacob bows down seven times to Esau during their reconciliation scene. Jacob’s household follows suit. Esau asks why, and Jacob explains that he is trying to find favor in Esau’s eyes.

Gen 48:12 In Egypt, after his big reveal, Joseph bows to his father Jacob in response to Jacob saying he never expected to see Joseph alive, much less with sons of his own.

Ex 18:7 Moses greets Jethro, his father-in-law, with a low bow.

1 Samuel 20:41, David, who has been in hiding from Saul, greets his beloved Jonathan with three low bows and many more tears.

So whatever this bowing means, it doesn’t seem to necessarily indicate the sort of worship that is reserved for God. It can be used as a way of worshiping God, but it isn’t always.

What, then, do we make of Mordechai's refusal to bow to Haman in Esther 3:2-5? He seems to be saying it's against his religion to bow to anyone but God, and while it's true that it's against his religion to worship any other god, e.g. Ba'al or Asherah, assuming he wasn't ignorant of his own history, he knew there was a precedent for Jews bowing to other people. Was he just fudging the truth to piss Haman off? It sure looks like it, but I don't think we're forced into that interpretation. Perhaps the social language had changed by then, and bowing to people had fallen out of fashion to such an extent that it had taken on an implication that the object of obeisance was divine. Or perhaps Mordechai just meant it was against his religion to bow down insincerely, and he'd be darned if he was going to make a show of reverence and love to a self-absorbed peacock like Haman.

I have to say, I'm sort of charmed by the idea of bowing way down to express love and devotion, especially between people who are social equals but who've been away from each other too long. Maybe we can start a trend, you and me.

I've Found a New Band Crush

2008-04-06T23:29:00.002-04:00

and its name is Baby Soda.

First of all, the name. Baby. Soda. Were they begotten of preexisting soda-related bands? Is there a band out there called Papa Pop? Did he mate with Ms. Fizz? On their myspace they say they sound like Prohibition, a tent revival, pots and pans, and Felix T. Cat's orchestra, and it's true, all of it.

Secondly, the people. Two of them I recognize from separate ensembles. One is the souped-up-washboard/drum-kit player who plays with Stephane Wrembel at Barbes, and wears thimbles on his fingers and is the highlight of every show I've seen him play. I spurn the lead guitarist guy and gaze at him all night. The other is the earth bow bass player from River Alexander & His Mad Jazz Hatters, who would be the show-stealer of that band if it weren't for how much I also like watching River on his guitarmonica and the fiddler on his fiddle. Both the bassist and the percussionist are great, is my point.

Thirdly, my mode of discovery. The name was tossed about at Frim Fram and similar events I've attended, and once you become aware of a new word or a new concept or a new band, you suddenly start recognizing it when people talk about it and it seems like everyone else discovered it at the same time you did, which is what happened in this case, and so I wondered, who are these people whom everyone is suddenly talking about? But I didn't go dance at their shows those weekends. I was too busy or too lazy or too tired or too stupid or something. Then I saw a video of them depicting some people I know dancing to them while they busked in Union Square's subway station. There were the Zig Zag Mini ad campaign posters behind them and there were the dancers I see at fram and there were the guys playing, and they were great, and they had an accordion, and they sang, but really most importantly, they were busking, and anyone who is that good and still goes out and busks has my affection. It's a public service, really. Besides, and more importantly, there's something totally romantic about busking, something like being a wandering minstrel, which everyone should really admit is the most romantic lifestyle anyone could pick, and one I'm sure I'll be living in my next life, if I haven't already lived it in a past one, and maybe regardless of whether or not I have already. So anyway, I saw them on YouTube busking, and then I forgot about them, but today I was on my way uptown, and I usually transfer from the R to the 4/5 at Atlantic/Pacific when I have to go to Grand Central on Sundays, because it reduces the number of transfers, because transfers and MTA and Sundays and being in bit of a hurry do not mix, but as it happened, I got off the R at Atlantic/Pacific and there was the N waiting right across the platform, so I figured what the heck, I'll transfer to the 4/5/6 at Union Square; it'll be at least as fast if not faster to go over the Manhattan Bridge on the N, provided we don't stall over the water, as we sometimes do. So I took the N, and I got out at Union Square, and the doors slid open, and suddenly there was this GREAT music, taking me right back to the Sacramento Dixieland Festival my parents used to take us to hear, only more down and gritty. I couldn't believe my luck, or the absurdity of my being on a schedule and needing to go and not being free to stay and listen. I climbed the stairs and got a good look at them--earth bow bass, no way, I thought that only existed in River Alexander's band (and come to think of it the bassist looks a little familiar), and banjo, and trumpet, and a bunch of other instruments I don't remember (I was in a hurry) and who ARE these people, they're great! Usually the already-established musicians hang vinyl-esque posters behind them proclaiming their names so that we can all hurry home and google them afterward, but there was no name here. Dangit. I kept walking past them to get to the uptown 4/5/6 platform. I went about 100 feet when I actually stopped dead in my tracks and thought to myself, this is ridiculous. You're letting this amazing band you clearly love go out of your life forever. This is New York! When do you suppose you're ever going to see them again? Chance like this doesn't happen twice, you idiot! Keep walking past them now and mourn their loss for the rest of your days!!

Well, I'm getting shockingly regret-averse in my --- age, so I went back and looked harder for a name or something. There was nothing except for the CDs they were selling. Brown lunch bags folded over with a single staple, with a CD inside. Cute. I walked up to them and knelt down in front of their stage area (feeling strangely worshipful, like being at an altar or something) to drop my $10 in and pick up a CD-in-a-bag, and dashed back to the 4/5/6 platform, and as I walked I examined the bag.

It took me a minute to find, but there it was, stamped faintly on the brown paper: "babysoda@gmail.com" I laughed. I guess sometimes coincidences do happen, even here. Now I know why everyone else was talking about them, anyway. And now I am listening to a great CD that claims it Cures Everything But the Blues, and I can't say for sure, but I think it might even cure them.

Oh yeah, and they are playing in four days at Barbes. Man I love this place.

Corresponding Like a Ninja

2008-02-23T02:23:00.002-05:00

Suddenly tonight I discovered Gmail chat's invisibility feature. Very clever, Gmail. Being all slick and quiet about it. How long has this been there without my noticing?

A Line-Storm Song

2008-02-22T15:56:00.003-05:00

Nearly ten years ago a friend of mine passed this poem along to me. I've been thinking of it lately. I'm not sure I want to add any commentary to it; I just want to pass it along and let you appreciate it on your own terms.

29. A Line-storm Song


THE LINE-STORM clouds fly tattered and swift,
The road is forlorn all day,
Where a myriad snowy quartz stones lift,
And the hoof-prints vanish away.
The roadside flowers, too wet for the bee,	5
Expend their bloom in vain.
Come over the hills and far with me,
And be my love in the rain.

The birds have less to say for themselves
In the wood-world’s torn despair	10
Than now these numberless years the elves,
Although they are no less there:
All song of the woods is crushed like some
Wild, easily shattered rose.
Come, be my love in the wet woods; come,	15
Where the boughs rain when it blows.

There is the gale to urge behind
And bruit our singing down,
And the shallow waters aflutter with wind
From which to gather your gown.	20
What matter if we go clear to the west,
And come not through dry-shod?
For wilding brooch shall wet your breast
The rain-fresh goldenrod.

Oh, never this whelming east wind swells	25
But it seems like the sea’s return
To the ancient lands where it left the shells
Before the age of the fern;
And it seems like the time when after doubt
Our love came back amain.	30
Oh, come forth into the storm and rout
And be my love in the rain.

And If You Believe That...

2008-02-18T16:19:00.003-05:00

Darnit, New York

2008-02-05T23:42:00.001-05:00

Why'd you have to like Clinton so much?

Looks like it's going to be a late night. I haven't felt this much patriotic tension since I watched the results come in for the '04 election back in Philly.

Sure, it's Park Slope, but it's still Brooklyn.

2008-02-03T22:38:00.000-05:00

My bedroom window overlooks a quiet street in a subdued, moms-and-strollers-ish neighborhood, and I can still hear the people screaming their post-game exultation.

Yet another thing on God will be showing up here at some point.

I LOVE MY JOB

2008-01-30T00:00:00.000-05:00

Traveling to most of my students' houses requires between one and three hours on trains (that's one way, not round trip--yeah, I do a lot of reading), but a week ago I started working with a student who is within walking distance of my apartment. First time in over a year I've had a student right here in Brooklyn.

If there's any quality that's common to all my students' parents, it's that they are all exceedingly wealthy, and they all care deeply about their child's education. So I meet a lot of people who have both good values and the means to act in accordance with those values. It's a nice business.

The students themselves are more varied, but most of them are taking their SATs, which means they are somewhere between 10th and 12th grade. In general, the girls seem to know who they are by this point, or at least they seem to have reached a stable state, while the boys seem to be on the brink of figuring it out. It's a sweet age. They all have an earnestness and an energy which is lovely to be around--they're privileged kids who've nevertheless been raised to work hard, and they do, and having never yet been burned by unassailable defeat, they are confident in their beliefs that they will one day conquer the world, if they can only master the skill of taking standardized tests.

On Sunday evening I called up a new student about whom my (fantastic, brilliant, awesome) manager had just written to me, and his mother answered. She started out by grilling me about my qualifications and success rate, which put me on my guard (I never know what to say to questions like that...how effective is my tutoring? Well, how hard is your child going to work?) but I answered her with a less flippant version of that and we moved on to logistics like day and time and place and duration of lesson. Then she told me something about why her son is so busy--he's on his high school's fencing team--and I mentioned that I'd taken some fencing classes in college, and from there the conversation leapt and bounded from fencing to California's schools to New York's CUNY system to bioethics to Jewish day schools to Californian vs. New York Judaism to interfaith marriages, and nearly an hour later, she told me she'd like to introduce me to a widowed (widowered?) friend of hers if only he weren't too old for me (twice my age, in fact), so I was saved from having to respond to that potentially awkward invitation, but at any rate, she seems to have decided I'll do, and I'll be meeting the fencer in a few days.

But I brought the Brooklyn student up for a reason. Today was my second meeting with him. Last week when we were talking about how to write an effective 25-minute essay, I assigned him the same prompt he'd already used to write his first essay, only this time I told him to argue the opposite viewpoint. The prompt was "Are things always what they seem?" and his first essay had taken the easy view, saying that things often aren't at all what they seem to be. This one, then, was harder, and he struggled with trying to find examples to support the idea that things are always what they seem, but he ended up finding some interesting examples and writing quite a sophisticated essay.

His handwriting, though, is rather chicken-scratchy, and I had to squint a bit to make out his words sometimes. One of the examples he chose was a chair: he argued that something that looks like a chair really is a chair (he's gonna love Plato), and if we're not sure we can trust our eyesight, we can certainly trust our sense of touch that will tell us it's a chair once we're sitting upon it. He then pointed out that this would not be the case if the chair had a trick seat, the kind that makes you fall through as soon as you put your weight on the seat. What he actually wrote, as best I can remember, was,

"An exception to this would be a gag chair, whose bottom would open up as soon as you sit down on it."

Only there's that handwriting of his, and in this case it made the second g of 'gag' look like a y.

It's a good thing he's got a sense of humor, because I was so seized by the visual that I just about lost it, forehead on the table and tears and everything.

Dueling Exegetes

2008-01-15T01:59:00.000-05:00

The Saint proposes that my interpretation of vs. 64-65 stems from a reading that is wrong on two counts.

1. Keyholders are always male.

His first point is that the word "key" is a technical term, and that only men hold keys, so every time the text refers to someone who holds keys of any power whatever, it must necessarily mean a man and not a woman holding those keys. Thus, when v. 64 says, "If any man have a wife, who holds the keys of this power..." the "who" refers not to the wife but to the man.

Go ahead and reread it that way with the new meaning in mind.

"If any man have a wife, who holds the keys of this power..."

Can't do it, can you? Neither can I. The "who" so forcibly makes me want to refer to the wife that it seems impossible that it could refer to the husband. It's like saying, "When he visited his girlfriend, who lives on Cherry Tree Lane..." and expecting the reader to understand that it's he and not his girlfriend who lives on Cherry Tree Lane. If they wanted to refer back to the guy, they could easily have used "and he" instead of "who".

Besides, even though the keyholders are male every other time the term "key" is used, we can still imagine that this instance is an exception to that rule. Remember that v. 61 tells us that wife #1 holds the power of granting or withholding consent, so it's she who can open or close the door separating her husband from his prospective additional wives.

2. Administration to one's husband means fidelity, not consent to polygamy.

The Saint's other correction is the more interesting one. He proposes that in v. 64, where it says that the wife should administer unto her husband, the emphasis goes on "unto her husband" rather than on "administer"; that is, instead of meaning that she's going and getting additional wives for him, it really means she's refraining from sleeping with other men. She administers unto him, and not unto others. This would make her commandment to believe/administer unto him refer not to the part in v. 61 where it says "and the first give her consent" but rather to the part in v. 63 where it teaches that her being with another man automatically constitutes adultery. Her transgression would become infidelity rather than rejection of polygamy, and the punishment for her infidelity, if not utter destruction, would be that her husband becomes free to take another wife.

Now, I agree that it's generally more plausible for one verse to refer to something in a previous verse than to refer to something that was mentioned briefly three verses ago, so the Saint does have proximity on his side, but on the other hand, "administration" should, because of the nature of the word, refer to action instead of inaction. No one would call standing still and doing nothing an act of administration, regardless of whether or not my very refraining has a positive effect upon you.

Besides, at the end of v. 65, we are virtually told how 'administration' is being used in this sense: "Sarah...administered unto Abraham according to the law when I commanded Abraham to take Hagar to wife." What does it mean to administer? It means to do what Sarah did when Abraham was commanded to take Hagar to wife. What was it Sarah did? She sent Hagar to Abraham.

But could it possibly mean, instead, that at the moment when Abraham was taking Hagar, Sarah happened to not be sleeping with anyone else? I don't see how. Sarah administered unto Abraham not only at the moment when Abraham took Hagar as a wife, but also because of God's commandment that he do so. That's the sense of the verse. Abraham couldn't have taken Hagar unless Sarah had given Hagar to him, and realizing this, and not wanting to get in the way of his obedience, Sarah administered to her husband by doing exactly that. (Although I should note that in Genesis's account, Abraham's sleeping with Hagar is Sarah's idea, not God's, and afterward she's pretty sorry she did it.)

And on top of that, there just isn't any other man present in the story to tempt Sarah away from Abraham, so it doesn't make any sense to be making such a big deal about her fidelity. She does have a little infidelity issue with the Pharaoh in Genesis 12, four chapters earlier, at Abraham's misguided (though understandable) behest, but I'm not sure that's significant, except that it makes her look even less like the sort of person you'd want to hold up as a paragon of fidelity.

Anyway, it seems clear to me that it was precisely by facilitating Abraham's acquisition of Hagar that Sarah was administering unto him; had she not facilitated it, he wouldn't have been able to impregnate Hagar, because it was up to Sarah to permit or prohibit it.

So those are his two points. If he were right, then the meaning of the text would indeed change dramatically--it would go from "she refused to assent to polygamy, so she loses her right to control whether he takes another wife" to something like "she was unfaithful to him, so he was no longer bound to be faithful to her" which actually would have been something I could have stomached.

Curiously, The Saint doesn't dispute my interpretation of the "Law of Sarah" as being a law that requires the husbands to obtain their additional wives as freely-given gifts from their first wives; I would have thought that'd be the weakest point in my interpretation, because the text is so vague regarding it, but I guess that point was obvious enough to him.

Incidentally, since asking him about it and hearing his answer, I've gone to visit Mormon.org (on Science Ninja's recommendation), where you can now sit down and have a real live chat with a real live missionary. I was passed around to a total of three different missionaries (as one person's shift ended, he or she passed me to the next) which meant I had to go through and explain the problem to each one of them (none of them had ever noticed the significance of this passage before...what gives??) and while their answers were as different as they were unsatisfying, none of them challenged my interpretation the way The Saint's did. Actually, none of them challenged it at all.

The first one, who really seemed to know what she was talking about, pointed out that if I did indeed know that the law came from God, I'd have an interesting decision before me about whether to follow it. I was just about to tell her that the source doesn't always matter, because I have my own standards regarding what sort of laws I'd be willing to obey (e.g. if God commanded me to torture puppies, I would not be into it), when she had to go.

The next one took the "No human can understand everything, but I know the Church is true" approach, which doesn't really help me, because I don't know that it's true, and even if I were absolutely sure about the rest, this issue would still strike me as Definitely Not From God, or at least not from the kind of god I'd want to worship.

The third insisted that the harder the commandment is to keep, the greater the blessing for keeping it, but honestly, I can't imagine any blessing so great that it would balance out the pain of sharing my husband with sister-wives. I told her that, and she said she wasn't really sure how to help me, but she recommended I pray to God for the answer. Oh well.

Kol hakavod, The Saint. Of all the answers I've heard, yours is the only one I'd find acceptable. If only it worked.

The Latest Stoker of My Wrath

2008-01-04T13:19:00.000-05:00

It is probably not healthy for me to be getting so angry over this, but nothing infuriates me like a bad law.

61 And again, as pertaining to the law of the priesthood—if any man espouse a virgin, and desire to espouse ^aanother, and the first give her consent, and if he espouse the second, and they are virgins, and have vowed to no other man, then is he justified; he cannot commit adultery for they are given unto him; for he cannot commit adultery with that that belongeth unto him and to no one else.

62 And if he have ^aten virgins given unto him by this law, he cannot commit adultery, for they belong to him, and they are given unto him; therefore is he justified.

63 But if one or either of the ten virgins, after she is espoused, shall be with another man, she has committed adultery, and shall be destroyed; for they are given unto him to ^amultiply and replenish the earth, according to my commandment, and to fulfil the promise which was given by my Father before the foundation of the world, and for their exaltation in the eternal worlds, that they may bear the souls of men; for herein is the work of my Father continued, that he may be ^bglorified.

64 And again, verily, verily, I say unto you, if any man have a wife, who holds the keys of this power, and he teaches unto her the law of my priesthood, as pertaining to these things, then shall she believe and administer unto him, or she shall be destroyed, saith the Lord your God; for I will destroy her; for I will magnify my name upon all those who receive and abide in my law.

65 Therefore, it shall be lawful in me, if she receive not this law, for him to receive all things whatsoever I, the Lord his God, will give unto him, because she did not believe and administer unto him according to my word; and she then becomes the transgressor; and he is exempt from the law of Sarah, who administered unto Abraham according to the law when I commanded Abraham to take ^aHagar to wife.

So first of all, he can have multiple wives as long as he hasn't vowed otherwise, but she may not have multiple husbands under any circumstances. And worse, once having heard about the "law of my priesthood as pertaining to these things" the first wife, the one who "holds the keys of this power" (i.e. who has final say over who else, if anyone, her husband marries), has the delectable choice of either willingly receiving this law, in which case she must be the designer of her own misery, or refusing it, in which case she is labeled a trangressor, and her husband is freed to design her misery himself.

It's been said that some women in polygynous marriages were quite content with their situation, but I'd feign contentment too if I thought the only alternative were to lose all negotiating power, period. First of all, if your partner's told you he or she wants someone else, and your primary goal is to hold onto that partner's love, the last thing you'll do is stand in the way. And secondly, if something bad is bound to happen to you, it's slightly less bad if you can decide to do it to yourself, thereby protecting your own sense of being in control. That's preferable to fighting it all the way and finding out, when you are utterly defeated, how truly powerless you are. It's not too different from quitting your job because you heard they're going to fire you, or from killing yourself because you know you're going to die anyway. It's a very human response, and justified, I think, but what a pity these women had no other options than to either accept it willingly or have it done to them unwillingly.

Well, they had children, maybe, and probably no source of independent income, but I hope that had I been in that situation, I'd have had the fortitude to get up and leave.

The Saint is diligently seeking an alternative interpretation of this passage. I don't see how there can be one, but I hope he finds it anyway.

Not in Miracles

2007-12-18T14:17:00.000-05:00

The story of the oven of Akhnai is one of Judaism's all-time greatest hits, so I figured it'd be a good one to present to my students in Monday School. While I was preparing the lesson, though, I found something that I'd never noticed before.

The story, found in Bava Metzia 59, tells of a dispute among a group of sages over whether a certain type of oven can transmit impurity. The question comes up because the oven is an innovation for its time. Most ovens are just simple one-piece deals, and it's clear from the law that because they fall into the Container category, they can transmit impurity. If a normal oven becomes impure, it has to be carefully cleaned before it can be used again. This is annoying for people who are trying to cook. But there's a loophole: if a container shatters, the resulting pieces are said to neither acquire nor transmit impurity, because they are not containers. So some fellow named Akhnai apparently thought up an oven that can't transmit impurity because it's not, technically, a container. He took a bunch of ceramic pieces, assembled them into an oven shape, filled the spaces with sand, and coated the whole thing with glaze. Each individual container-piece can't transmit impurity, and the oven was made of all the individual pieces, so the oven itself can't transmit impurity either. Voila! An everpure oven. Clever, huh?

But according to the rabbis, not clever enough. They ruled that the oven, although made of pieces that were by themselves always clean, was a thing different from its component parts. When put together, the pieces become a whole container, and this new container becomes susceptible to the dirtiness of whatever should happen to creep in and die.

But there was one sage who disagreed. Rabbi Eliezer said the oven is indeed everpure, just as Akhnai had intended. He tries to prove to three other rabbis that he's right, but instead of explaining his reasoning and citing proof-texts to support his claim, as he should have, he calls on the powers of heaven to convince his opponents. Apparently Rabbi Eliezer has a way with the laws of nature.

First he points to a carob tree. "If I'm right," he tells the guys, "let that carob tree show it." This is the equivalent of "If I'm wrong, may God strike me down right here," only more impressive, because the carob tree instantly uproots and launches itself one hundred cubits into the air. The other rabbis aren't impressed, though.

"The law is not in a carob tree," they tell him drily.

"Well then, if I'm right, let that river show it," says Rabbi Eliezer, and suddenly the river starts flowing backward, but the other rabbis just shake their heads.

"A river flowing backward is not a valid argument," they point out.

"Well if I'm right," says Rabbi Eliezer, who is apparently too frenzied at this point to notice that his method isn't working, "let the walls of the Beit Midrash show it!" One of the walls of the house of study immediately starts falling over.

"You stay out of this," Rabbi Joshua snaps, and the wall stops falling, but out of respect for Rabbi Eliezer, it doesn't go back upright either. ""Anyway," Rabbi Joshua says to Rabbi Eliezer, "the answer is not in a wall."

At his wits' end, Rabbi Eliezer cries out, "If I'm right, let heaven show it!"

And a voice calls down from heaven, "Why are you still arguing with Rabbi Eliezer? Don't you know he's always right?"

And Rabbi Joshua says to the heavenly voice, "Go to hell." Just kidding. He says, "Lo bashamayim hee," which means, "It is not in heaven." This is where everyone who knows their Tanakh starts laughing or groaning, because Rabbi Joshua is quoting a piece of Deuteronomy out of context. (I imagine it must have been, for them, like it would be for you or me to hear the punchline to that joke about the king sending his pages to sneak through the yellow fingers: it'd be the same experience of hearing a familiar, oft-repeated phrase reinterpreted in a new context, leading to a surprising answer that was not the original intention of the phrase. Remember, these guys had quotes from the Tanakh filling their collective consciousness; some of them had the whole thing committed to memory. For our part, we have corporate slogans filling our collective consciousness. How far we've come.)

The thing he's referring to in Deuteronomy is a bit where Moses is reminding the people that obeying the law is not so hard that they can't do it. "It is not in heaven," he tells them, "but rather, it's right here in front of you, well within your reach." The implication is that God wouldn't be asking us to do the impossible, so we should stop complaining about how hard it is to obey his law, and just start doing it. It's not so far from "Hard work never killed anyone," so I can imagine lots of school boys having a less-than-fond association with that quote.

"Rebbe, how am I ever going to learn all this? It's impossible!"

"Joshy, stop complaining. Lo bashamayim hee."

"Yeah, but maybe I'm still not tall enough to reach it."

So imagine how satisfying it must have been for those school boys to grow up and transform the quote from something that might have been used to say, "Get back to work," to something that means, "Now we're in charge."

And that's exactly how it's interpreted. In this story, the quote is used to prove that it's through the discussion and reasoning process, not through miraculous revelation, that we arrive at The Truth. We're in charge now. That doesn't mean we can go around changing (or casting away) the laws, willy-nilly, but it does mean the final decision rests in our hands. Liberal Jews are just crazy in love with this story, as you can imagine, because it lends official weight to the outlook they were going to adopt regardless. If the Talmud says we're justified, we really must be right!

I'm not sure the story is meant as a sincere suggestion that we ought to crown ourselves the New Lawmakers, though. After this exchange, Rabbi Jeremiah explains and defends Rabbi Joshua's position by quoting another passage, and I discovered today while I was preparing the lesson that this second quote isn't just taken out of context, as the first quote is; it's used to support a view that is the exact opposite of the view expressed in the original text. The result is not only a twisting of the passage's meaning but also a shocking departure from what I would have thought was a basic Jewish value.

Here's how it goes. After the Bat Kol, the heavenly voice, comes and speaks in defense of Rabbi Eliezer, and Rabbi Joshua responds with "lo bashamayim hee," the narrator of the story asks, "What did he mean by this?" and then quotes Rabbi Jeremiah for the answer: "We pay no attention to a Heavenly Voice, because [God Himself had] long since written in the Torah at Mount Sinai, 'acharei rabim l'hatot [after the majority must one incline].' " This is a quote from Exodus 23:2, which, when I read it on Monday, I discovered to be saying exactly the opposite--after the majority opinion you must NOT incline, even when you really think you should. The beginning of Exodus 23 is talking about the obligations of a witness who's testifying in court about a dispute, and it's listing reasons why the witness might be tempted to present a biased report of what happened. He might adjust it to agree with the majority opinion, for example, or perhaps to favor the poor and downtrodden. The text is reminding the witness not to do either one. Why? Because even more important than favoring the poor or agreeing with the majority is preserving the integrity of the court investigation process. Obviously! The piece that Rabbi Jeremiah quotes from Exodus, "acharei rabim l'hatot," isn't about bowing to the majority at all; it's about refusing to do so, for the sake of uncovering the truth. Doesn't the second view sound more like Judaism? And yet, Rabbi Joshua brazenly asserts that God has always told us to follow the majority. Ridiculous.

The thing is, I think he knew just how ridiculous he was being. I suspect the whole story is intended as a big joke. A joke with a lesson, but still a joke. And it's got the character of a joke, hasn't it? "There were four rabbis sitting and arguing" might as well be "Three guys walk into a bar." One is against the other three, and the proofs he brings are exaggerated and irrelevant, just the way they should be, if we're trying to tell a silly story. I suspect the schoolhouse wall's falling was was added later to explain how the real-life-wall in question got that way, because not only is it the odd one out (all the other examples are outdoor, natural things; this one is indoor and man-made) but also because it interrupts the story; it flows better without it. Anyway, without the schoolhouse wall incident, we have three events, which is also what you'd expect in a joke. And at the end of the story, we get two punchlines. First is the subversive reinterpretation of lo bashamayim hee, and second is the just-plain-ridiculous reinterpretation of acharei rabim l'hatot. The second quote seems, to me, like a big wink, a way of indicating just how facetiously they meant the first quote. I might have taken lo bashamayim hee seriously if it hadn't been for acharei rabim l'hatot.

But what becomes of this we're-in-charge outlook that we liberal Jews have treasured for so long? Do we admit it has no basis in the ancient texts? Do we acknowledge that what we're doing today isn't anything like what the rabbis were doing long ago? Do we still get to call ourselves Jews?

Let's go back for a minute to the story itself. The argument over the purity of the oven is not really about whether authority lies with us or with God; it's about whether the oven was or wasn't capable of transmitting impurity. It's true that it was made of broken pieces, but to argue that if each piece can't transmit impurity, then the resulting whole can't transmit impurity either is like arguing that if a single piece of trash can never be a heap by itself, then many pieces of trash will never comprise a heap either. When you put the broken pieces together and assemble them in an oven shape, you have a container, and so of course it can transmit impurity as well as any other container. (Rabbi Eliezer was wrong to argue that it can't, and he was even more wrong to think that he could prove it with miracles. The first is forgivable; the second is grounds for dismissal, and indeed, Rabbi Eliezer gets excommunicated for it.) The real struggle isn't between God and humans over who establishes the law; it's between miracles and reason over what establishes the truth. When reason wins, God isn't being dethroned at all. He's being strengthened. The Jewish idea of God is more reason than miracle, anyway.

So Rabbi Eliezer, for all the credibility his perfect record had given him, seems to have slipped up for once. And because he tried to prove his point with miracles instead of trying to explain it one step at a time, he never noticed his mistake. How, then, was he able to wreak miracles, to call upon the Bat Kol, for the sake of proving a spurious argument? Shouldn't his miracles only have worked if he was correct in his position? Apparently, being able to do miracles is not the same as being right. And we saw this elsewhere, too--Pharaoh's sorcerers achieve miracles right alongside Aaron and Moses, and we know how that turns out. We get warned elsewhere against being swayed by miracle-workers, too--it's understood that other people could have actual power to work miracles whether they were using those powers to convince people of the truth or to deceive them. We're taught to keep a good hold on the teachings we've been given, no matter how marvelous the idol-worshipers' miracles are. The point is, miracles don't prove anything. Judaism has its share of miracles, but it's really not a miracle-based religion. Miracles don't prove God's nature and they don't prove the nature of the law; that kind of thing is either self-evident or it isn't, but whether Akhnai's oven transmits impurity is a question whose answer can only be revealed through careful thought and discussion. A tree flying into the air, a river running backward, and a wall tilting are all impressive, but they have nothing to do with the nature of the oven, and even a Bat Kol doesn't trump logic. What's the lesson? Don't trust miracle-workers and heavenly voices. That's cheating. Figure it out for yourself. The answer is not so hard to find that it requires a prophet to find it. It is not in heaven. It is very near to you, in your own head, on your own bookshelf, and in your discussions with your peers, and you can figure it out.

So what about that earlier question, "Are we still Jews?" Well, I think it's clear from this that to say, "from now on I'm going to decide what the law is according to my own wishes" does not fall under a traditional definition of Judaism, but as long as we keep genuinely trying to seek the truth through reasonable methods, then yes, we're still doing what the sages before us did. As it happens, we're also doing what God wants, as the epilogue to the story shows. Sometime later, Rabbi Nathan asks Elijah the prophet what God was doing while Rabbi Eliezer and the other sages were arguing, and Elijah says, "He was laughing with joy and saying, "My children have defeated me, my children have defeated me!" Apparently, God doesn't want us to be swayed in our opinions by flying trees or heavenly voices or anything else but sparkling clear reasoning, and he was just pleased as could be to see that we'd finally reached the point where he no longer needed to reveal his teachings through miracles, the point where we were so wise and so learned that we could finally work together to figure out for ourselves what the law is, what we ought to do.* Either that or God could tell it was all a big joke, and it was just killing him.

*If that isn't what it means to become like elohim, knowing good from evil, I don't know what is.

Inside Out

2007-12-10T20:43:00.001-05:00

I stopped posting a year or so ago because my love life turned inside out, and it consumed my thoughts to the point that I didn't feel like anything else mattered enough to write about, but for the sake of other people's privacy, and my own, I didn't want to make any of it public. I gather from little snippets I've been reading that it's public now, at least in the circles that matter, and I think I'm ready to write about it, too. Besides, I've missed blogging.

The incompletes are still incomplete, and thesis continues to limp along, though sometimes it feels like one foot is moving forward and the other one is nailed to the floor. I have sudden inspirations and grand ideas that contradict one another, or realisations that I'm sure I can expound upon until I sit down and try, and after an hour of typing I realise I've wandered into the Wilderness of Digression because I don't really know how to talk about what I'm trying to talk about. I start worrying that I've lost my ability to write philosophy, if I ever had any to begin with, and to assuage my fears, I go and write long emails to people in which I argue in favor of or against some idea. It doesn't work, but it's led to some awfully interesting discussions.

I have two library books that are several months overdue. I've been holding onto them because I intend to use them for the papers, and I'm afraid that if I return them to the library, the librarians will unfold all the corners of pages I've got folded down as markers, but I've had them for so long that I'm not allowed to renew them anymore. I figure I should just buy them by now, but I haven't yet.

My room fluctuates from pin-neat to comfortably messy to uncomfortably messy. We are currently at the nadir of the cycle. I need to do laundry.

In addition to the tutoring job, which I still have and which I love more than any other job I've ever held, I took a job teaching at a nearby synagogue's Monday School, where I teach 4th- and 5th-graders about prayers and the Hebrew language and other Jew stuff. I took the job during the end of summer, when there was a lull in demand for my tutoring services at the same time as there was an increase in my expenditures, and the educational director wooed me with promises of gaining new tutees through my work as a classroom teacher (this has not come to pass). I'm not exactly sorry I took the job, as every experience is educational, but honestly, the primary lesson I take from this may well be that I should learn to stay out of classrooms, because classrooms have students, and students have parents, and parents have issues. I like most of the students, and I think they're into the stuff we learn, for the most part, but I like tutoring so much better that I'm pretty sure I won't be coming back.

The funny thing about that is that I wasn't planning to even be here in New York beyond the end of 2007. I was supposed to be done with the masters degree by now and off to California for the next chapter of my life, and I feel sort of vastly inadequate that I'm not, but on the other hand, my income is not negative for the first time in my life, and I have remarkable freedom here, and I've made some good friends, and on top of all that, it's New York, and I really do love this city, in spite of the little things that I don't love.

Today, while I was on my way to Monday School, I passed a young Chassidic boy who looked like he was the age of my students. He had posted himself on the corner, like they do, and he called out "Excuse me..." as I walked by. Figuring I knew what was coming, I turned around. "Are you Jewish?" he asked. Bingo.

Now, my hair was down, and I was wearing my black hat (vaguely newsboy-ish), and I'm half-Russian and currently pasty-white (it's Winter here), so it would have been harder for me to look any more Jewish than I did. I laughed. "Of course I am."

"Ok, well, do you have a menoyroh?"

"A what? Oh, a menorah! Yeah, I've got one." This is funny, because I made my own little cheapy menorah out of a cereal box and foil when I realised it was Chanukah and I didn't have one. I was proud of my creation, but when my mother heard I'd been reduced to such Dire Straits, she mailed me a real one overnight, which was awfully thoughtful of her, but what she didn't realise is that there's a value to having things in the apartment that are unimportant and disposable. The Advocate understands this, and was lamenting to me only yesterday about how she wants more space, but can't bear to get rid of anything. In her case, it's mostly furniture, but for me, even the possession of a Nice Menorah is a liability. Even now, as I type this, it's staring at me with all its guilt-infliction-power on. "You're not treating me with proper respect," it glowers. "I should be dusted and polished and displayed in the window, not set carelessly on the edge of this coffee table you picked up off the sidewalk without even washing. You are a Bad Housekeeper!" Soon, I tell it, and glance in the mirror at the cereal box menorah, whose candles are burning low in the window. Anyway, my menorah-tally is greater than 0, and I told the fellow on the corner as much.

"Well, we're giving out menoyros, but if you've got one...." He showed me his supply. They looked pretty high-quality for street-corner donations. "You lit already, right?"

"What, tonight??" It was a little before 3 in the afternoon, and the sun sets early these days, but not that early.

"No, no, the past six nights."

"Oh, sure, yeah."

"Good!" He looked pleased, but a little awkward. I'd taken away his usefulness, I guess.

"Well, thanks anyway," I told him. "Happy Chanukah."

It surprised me, how it stuck with me, how happy the encounter left me. I guess most 11-year-old boys I see aren't so eager to talk to strangers, much less to find out whether they can use a menoyroh, but it's more than that. Usually, the people peddling religion on the street corners have a message for me that is about as far from "Good for you, you're doing it right!" as it can possibly be, and, well, I guess I have a delicate ego, because I like approval, even when it comes from people who don't know anything about me except that I've been lighting my menorah. There's also a little bit of feeling like I'm finally part of the club, instead of one of the outsiders. It's validation. Brooklyn is a comfortable place to be Jewish.

Compare this to the little mini-experience I had yesterday afternoon, when I was foolish enough to venture into the wilds of Connecticut to meet a new student. As her father drove us from the train station to their house, we were doing the requisite small talk, and he asked me where I went to school. I gave him the whole list, starting with CUNY, then Stanford, and then Drisha and RRC. "I was going to be a rabbi for a while," I said, to explain the latter two.

"Now that's interesting," he said. "We're Catholic, but I've always been interested in the different sort of...philosophy...of Judaism, and the history, and why the Jews rejected Christ."

I didn't burst out laughing, but I sure wanted to. Instead, I carefully told him that there's lots of information addressing that question online, if he's interested in reading about it. Granted, I'm a little touchy about that topic these days, but still, the guy's in his 50s if he's a day, and if he's so interested, why has he not done any of his own reading about this? Rejected Christ, my carefully concealed horns.

Which brings me to the main thing I haven't talked about on here yet, and the reason I sort of stopped blogging almost a year ago. I'm romantically involved with someone who would never marry a Jew. His name is The Saint, and he sparkles and shines, but the religion thing is the cause of much angst for both of us, especially him, since he'd like to be married and raising children already. Still, we soldier on, I because I'm just that crazy about him, and he because I guess he hasn't met anyone else yet. Indigo remarked to me last week, quite accurately, that if she'd told me a year ago that a year from then I'd be completely wrapped up in studying the LDS religion, I'd have never believed her. And yet, I find it a little thrilling to think that I can't predict things after all, that I don't have my future all figured out, that life still has some surprises in store for me, that it can still turn my world inside out. It's almost like I'm four years old again, and there are still wonderful new things to discover. This time, of course, my heart is going along for the ride, and a lot of the time it's painful, but on the other hand, what a ride it is.

2007-12-10T08:52:00.000-05:00

Also, the colors changed. The outlook is still rosy, but I was tired of looking at all that pink.

Hezekiah's Prayer

2007-01-27T12:00:00.000-05:00

A couple more pages written on euthanasia and then my head runs away to think about something more palatable. That's the way it goes sometimes. Maybe I should have chosen an easier topic to write about, but I still think that this is the most important one out there, the one that reveals most sharply what medicine is for. Still, my mind is undisciplined and weak, and tends to wander. I should have taken classes in meditation back in Philly while I had the chance.

At the moment, though, I'm embracing my weakness. Prayer. What's it good for? The Saint and I were talking about a passage in II Chronicles 30, where King Hezekiah tries to get the people to start celebrating Passover again (they've lapsed), and they attempt it, but they still do it wrong and end up violating a pretty serious law.

30:18 For most of the people...had not purified themselves, yet they ate the paschal sacrifice in violation of what was written. Hezekiah prayed for them, saying, "The good Lord will provide atonement for
30:19 everyone who set his mind on worshiping God, the Lord God of his fathers, even if he is not purified for the sanctuary.
30:20 The Lord heard Hezekiah and healed the people.

Apparently, prayer is good for intervention. One thing is happening, someone righteous makes a plea to God for it to be otherwise, and God causes it to be otherwise. The people sin and deserve to be punished, Hezekiah intervenes and points out their good intentions, and God is persuaded to make an exception.

But see, why wouldn't God have done that on his own? Why does the story imply that it was only because Hezekiah intervened that God forgave the people? Didn't God know that their intentions were good without Hezekiah pointing it out? Would he really have schmeissed the people for their unwitting sin if Hezekiah hadn't stayed God's hand? If the best thing to do in that situation was to forgive the people, God would have had to know it and would have decided to do it without Hezekiah saying anything. On the other hand, if the best thing to do was to *not* forgive the people, then it's pretty surprising that God would have departed from doing what's best, forgiving them against his better judgement, just for Hezekiah's sake.

I suppose you could argue that the situation changed the moment Hezekiah put forward his plea, kinda like the electron you're observing changes because you're observing it. Hezekiah isn't outside of a closed system; he's in the system, affecting it, just as the scientist's presence alters the data he measures. If Hezekiah's a bad person and his people are all punished it won't much matter, but if he's a good person and his people suffer, God will have treated him unjustly. The people didn't deserve much mercy, maybe, but Hezekiah did, and because Hezekiah showed God that he really cared about them (which is the same as saying that Hezekiah really cared about them, since we're assuming God is omniscient--I mean, Hezekiah didn't have to pray it aloud; all he had to do was care), God relented for his sake. Possible, but it means the people didn't really deserve the mercy they received, and they only got it because H. was in good with God. That doesn't seem like the point of the story. No, the point of the story seems to be something more like "Even if you don't follow all the rules perfectly, do your best and God will forgive you for your shortcomings." So there's got to be some other explanation for what exactly Hezekiah's prayer *did*.

The only explanation that really seems to fit all the data, though, was that Hezekiah's prayer did nothing but prove his own excellent understanding of how God works. When Hezekiah prayed for mercy for his people, he wasn't petitioning. He wasn't saying, "Please forgive them, Lord, they don't know any better." Instead, he was affirming. He was saying, "God will forgive them, because that's just how he is." And he would have been right...but then we're back to where we started: how do we account for verse 20, where God seems to heal the people as a result of hearing Hezekiah's prayer?

I'm partial to the Jewish understanding of prayer (I'm sure you're all shocked), which explains it as self-judgement, or perhaps self-examination. Prayer is a good way for us to take an honest look at ourselves and see what needs fixing. This view happens to be compatible with the idea of God as something like Absolute Reality--coming closer to God means getting past your own filters and confronting the truth of things as they are, which is instrumental in deciding what needs to change. And creativity is an alternate path to divinity, because by bringing stuff into existence, you're participating in Reality's evolution and growth.

Anyway, prayer. If you affirm that something is the case and it wasn't beforehand but it becomes the case by virtue of your affirming it (and believing in your own affirmation), you're creating. (For example, I can affirm that I'm punctual, and if I can manage to trick myself into believing it in spite of overwhelming data to the contrary, I'll be more likely to become punctual, and then I'll start to build up supportive evidence to spur my belief along.) However, if you affirm that something is the case because you've discovered, in a moment of insight, that it is so, then you're acknowledging truth. Both can be types of prayer, I suppose, and both can be powerful for inner work. If I'm going to examine myself for the purpose of becoming a better person, then I've first got to confront what's there and then I've got to transform it, through sheer creative willpower, into something else.

Which one was Hezekiah doing? It looks like he thought he was doing the prayer-as-acknowledging-reality one, but then God reacted as if it had actually been an act of prayer-as-altering-reality. It doesn't help that the verb they use to describe God's hearing Hezekiah is vayyishma, from the root shin-mem-ayin, a.k.a. shama, the same root that you find in the central declaration of belief that begins "Hear, O Israel". This isn't a case of God hearing what Hezekiah said and happening to agree. It's hearing in a more powerful sense, the sort of hearing you do when you're paying attention, when you intend to obey. It's not quite so strong as heeding, but it's still listening...listening and reacting, as if God wasn't going to forgive the people at first, but then Hezekiah spoke up and God changed his mind.

So I don't really have a clever answer to this dilemma. Either God forgives us for falling short of perfection because he perceives our good intentions, but prayer has no effect whatsoever (but then whence that vayyishma?), or God forgives us when we're borderline-acceptable and someone really righteous prays on our behalf, but when there's no one like Hezekiah around, we're all screwed.

I suppose there's one more possibility: Hezekiah could have been praying in public, and his prayer might have affected all the people so powerfully that just hearing it boosted their merit enough to bring it out of the "No Credit" zone and into the "Pass" zone. I think that would conform to all our givens, both about the nature of God (just, merciful, and omniscient) and about the power of prayer (greater than nil), but that's a pretty marked departure from the story, and if that's what the authors meant, you'd think they would have said it.

Have you seen the SOTU Address yet?

2007-01-25T23:30:00.000-05:00

This is not a link blog, and it's not a political blog either, but in this case I can't resist. Not many videos can manage to be devastatingly cute and startlingly sad at the same time.

Well...except maybe the one about the kiwi.

17

2007-01-20T01:35:00.000-05:00

Back when The Advocate, PZ, JF, and I went to hear Andy Statman at Barbes, they played a song which I liked so much that I described it here. Triple meter, repeating pattern of accents, made me smile, etc. I thought it was called The Old Tin Can. When I got home that night, I played the CD The Advocate had purchased from the band as my birthday present, and it's great, but it's all him on the clarinet, so it didn't have that mandolin song on it.

But! A few days later, The Advocate received Andy Statman's other CD in the mail (she likes him too) and this one had almost all mandolin, so I was really hoping that song would be there, but I scanned down the list of tracks, and nothing about a tin can was there to be found. Lots of other familiar-looking American and Jewish folk tunes, something called 17 (whatever that meant), but no tin can. Sigh.

She played it, and I listened, and when we reached track #6, those familiar A Major chords came through the speakers. It was that song! But it wasn't supposed to be on the CD, was it? It was though, and its title had nothing to do with tin cans. It was called "17". 17? Was that their name for the song because they were too embarrassed to call it something as folky as The Old Tin Can? At any rate, I was delighted to have a recording of it available to me.

The following Monday, thanks to PZ's tip, I went with Rambam and his lady to hear Mr. Statman (if I'm talking about him this much, maybe I should be giving him a blogname) play live in the basement of a shul in the west village, where he apparently has gigs on Monday and Thursday nights. You walk down a street lined with sex shops, and then once you're past all the sex shops, you're on a quiet unassuming block with apartments and a synagogue on one corner, and a whiteboard easel stands on the sidewalk outside the door to the basement of the synagogue, and on the sign is written,

BLUEGRASS TONIGHT

just like that. It's adorable. Anyway, we went, and we heard them play again (same bassist, different drummer) and they were delightful again, though the audience was much more young-frummy-Jews-on-dates than the usual middle-aged hipster you see at Barbes.

They played much of what they did at Barbes, including 17, and afterward I asked the bassist why it had a number for a name, and why it wasn't called The Old Tin Can. "I have no idea why it's called 17," he said, "but as far as I know that's the only name it's got. I think maybe the tin can thing was a joke."

So I went to the front of the room where Andy was chatting and putting away his clarinet, and I asked him directly. "Oh, that one? I just like the number 17. It's always been a good number for me, and it shows up in interesting ways in my life." His answer completely threw me off, I suppose because I didn't expect someone whom I already think so much of to give me an entirely new reason to think well of him. He's a number geek too!

The funny thing is, I would never have chosen 17 to describe that piece. 17 is a fine number, what with the 7 in it to make it all fancy and the primeness to make it all extra-special, but I tend to like numbers that have lots of factors, especially multiples of 6. Maybe it has to do with growing up in a family that first had two children, and then later had three children. I like it when things come out evenly, and 6 is a good number because whether there are two or three people, six things can be divided evenly among them. Also, I like hexagons. They're nice to look at. I think it's also true that if you've got a bunch of circles all of the same size, and you make one your center and arrange the other circles in a ring around the central circle, you'll be able to fit exactly six in the ring around the central circle. I'll have to go try it with m&ms next time I have them.

Anyway, 6 is a good number, and it makes me happy to think about it. When I'm a certain age, I identify with the qualities I attribute to that number, so independent of all the other factors that life throws at you, the years I've spent telling people that I'm 6 and 12 (and to an even greater extent 18 and 24) have been charged with a bit more cheer than the years I've spent saying that I'm 13, 19, and 25. I'm not really a fan of 5s, and I don't much like primes. Not symmetrical enough. How can you evenly divide 13 cookies among any but 13 children? I'm not looking forward to 29, either, but 30'll be okay, since its round divisibility by 6 outweighs its pointy divisibility by 5. (36 is the ultimate, and by the way, happy birthday, Rob!)

The Advocate and I were talking about our respective favorite numbers, and it turns out she's the opposite of me. She loves primes above all, so she was particularly gratified to hear that Andy Statman had titled the song that she also loved with a prime number. I argued that it didn't sound much like a 17, because all the phrases ended so neatly, and 17 isn't a neat number like 18 or 24 are. She pointed out in response that the tune does indeed feel like a prime number because each phrase's end is not so much an end but a catapulting boost of energy propelling the music forward into the next phrase. It's energetic, and it has such energy because it's dynamic. It flits and bounces about in just the sort of way that a 17 would, because a 17, through its inability to be divided evenly, would always be shifting around trying to fill the spaces its unevenness would leave. There's something missing, and it's all over the place trying to fill that gap. The tune has the excitement of chlorine instead of the quiet stability of Argon, and that's why it sticks in my head. The Advocate really does have the kind of wisdom I hope to have some day...as it is, I often forget that for things to be dynamic, they also have to be imperfect.

If anyone wants to hear this little tune, leave me a comment and I'll send it to you.

Hammer/Nail Syndrome

2007-01-14T21:57:00.000-05:00

The birthday weekend finished off with a visit from Rambam and his lovely lady, and then a trek north to see Mr. Fodor & Co.
The Fodors and I went to dinner at a vegetarian soul food type place in Harlem, where Mr. and Mrs. Fodor sat across from each other and I got to sit across from (and gaze lovingly into the eyes of) the adorable Fodor Jr., who has the largest smile in the world.This was him a year and a half ago, as photographed by Mr. Fodor. He's got more hair and teeth now, but the smile is the same.

The place is vegetarian, as I said, but they are also serving soul food, which is apparently a hard thing, because soul food turns out to lose a lot of its punch if you only serve collard greens. As such, the place uses tofu and TVP and seitan and suchlike to make fake meat, including these slightly creepy fake shrimp things that were ornamenting the broccoli-and-fake-shrimp dish that I ordered. Not only does this fake shrimp perfectly capture that sick-sweet taste of rotting meat that made me dislike shrimp even before I gave it up for kashrut reasons, but the texture and consistency was disturbingly shrimp-like, too. Kinda springy, you know? And a little bit dense and unyielding? When you haven't eaten meat in a while, the sensation, even the mistaken sensation, of oh-my-god-this-used-to-be-alive is powerful, and not pleasantly so. I had a bite or two of one piece, and that was all for me.

Fortunately, Fodor Jr. had no such prejudices. "Dimp!" he demanded when he spotted some of what he'd been eating from his daddy's plate on my plate, too. "Shhhhrrrrimp," I said, and fed him a little slice. "Dimp!" he said again. Conversation from that point on was catch as catch could, because there's only so much I can do to concentrate on adult dialogue when a little voice in the background is going, "Dimp! Dimp! Dimp! Dimp!" with increasing desperation. I kept on feeding him shrimp, one little slice at a time, until there was none left on my plate ("No mo dimp," he remarked) while Mr. and Mrs. Fodor supplemented his meal with bits of beans, peas, and rice pinched from their plate and placed directly into his little fingers or his not-so-little mouth.

For dessert, the Fodors had bought two slices of cinnamon-raisin-banana bread, and they gave F. Jr. pinched-off bits of raisin and crust, which he also seemed to like. I had passed on the banana bread, but Mr. Fodor wanted me to taste it, to see what I was missing. "Here, try some," he said, and pinched off a little piece to place into my fingers, only he wasn't joking. I guess when you're a parent, everything begins to look like a kid.

Current Music: They, Jem

Z!

2007-01-12T13:45:00.000-05:00

I turned 26 yesterday, and for the first time in several years, I was able to celebrate it on the day itself.* This is not only because it was on Thursday, which everyone knows is the first night of the weekend, but more importantly because Andy Statman, my second-favorite mandolinist, was doing a live show that night at the Hotel D'Orsay, a little backroom performance space in the back of Barbes. Barbes, by the way, is the only bar I ever go to, and I go there not because of the drinks (I still don't drink, not even on my birthday, but I did enjoy a cup of delicious chocolate-vanilla-apple-mango-rooibos tea from the patisserie next door--yum), but because of the excellent musical acts that the proprietor brings into his "hotel" night after night.

I don't know how he does it, but I have never seen a show there that hasn't left me impressed. It helps that the fellow shares my taste for 30s-ish folky music and accordions. The place has had far more than the reasonable number of accordionists come through its door. Rob introduced me to the place, and to countless excellent bands who performed there, while I still lived in the upper west side, so one of the perks of moving in with The Advocate here in the slope was knowing I'd be so close to so much good music all the time. One Ring Zero, those writers of messed-up-pop that I think I mentioned here once before, were at one point such regular fixtures at Barbes that they have their portrait on the rear wall of the Hotel D'Orsay. It was also at Barbes that I heard River Alexander and his Mad Jazz Hatters, the fascinating washboardings of David Langlois, and bands like The Roulette Sisters, Life in a Blender, and Pinataland that people are always trying ineptly to describe with comparisons to other bands everyone's supposed to know well enough that they no longer need to be diminished with comparisons.

Anyway, last night I saw Andy Statman play in a trio with a bassist and a drummer, and it was wonderful. To begin with, he presents himself much more humbly than most of the musical artists who stand up and do shows in small places in New York. They tend to wear things meant to express their hippitude and individuality. He wears the uniform of the traditional Jew--dark trousers, white button-down shirt, tsitsit from the tallit katan peeking out from under the belt, a thick salt-and-pepper beard, and a black velvet kipah. In the same way, when he plays, there's no performative mannerism. It's just him, completely absorbed in playing. He gives the impression of losing himself so completely in the playing that when the song ends he suddenly remembers the audience's presence. When we break through the silence of our amazement and start applauding, he looks surprised that we liked it so much.

The first half was him playing on the clarinet. Most of these numbers seemed improvisatory, like very long doinas with occasional bits of pre-existing melodies sneaking in. It was heartwrenching to hear, in the way that it's hearwrenching to hear a chazzan's supplications when he davvens Hineni on Yom Kippur. I almost felt like I shouldn't have been there, like I was intruding on an intimate moment between him and God.

The show started a little after 10, and by a little after 11, I was beginning to wonder whether he'd ever pick up the mandolin. Just then, though, he did. It was smaller than the ones I'm used to seeing, and he slung the strap around one shoulder instead of diagonally across his back, so that when the tunes started getting more rhythmic and speeding up, I was worried that the instrument would vibrate out of his grip, but he held on tight, and so did we. This was the flipside of the first half, all the private pleading turned inside out and become public rejoicing. I tried to follow his picking pattern, but his fingers were moving too quickly for it to be discernible it, and I tried to follow the ornaments on the melodies, but they moved too quickly for my ears to follow, so I tried to follow the rhythms with my toes, but even that was out of my reach sometimes, and I loved that I couldn't keep up.

The drummer looked like he was having even more fun than I was, like he was playing with the noises he could make on every surface within arm's reach. At one point, he even drummed on the wingnuts that kept his cymbals in place to make a clokkier rimshot-ish sound. They played one song which was (I believe) called The Old Tin Can, a slightly folky tune in triple meter, with a repeating pattern of three accented notes on the last measure of every phrase, and whenever they reached those last three notes, the drummer found a new combination of sounds to accent them. It made me smile every time.

The room isn't spacious, and it was packed full, so now that the tempo had picked up, the temperature did too. Andy was probably getting warmer than the rest of us, with all his lightening-fast picking, and he asked the barstaff if they could turn on the AC for a few minutes. It came on with a barely audible hum. Several songs later, he played a few G chords and said, "Shall we do this one in G? That's what the air conditioner's on." He was right, it was humming a G, though I hadn't even thought to listen for its pitch until then. That seems like the mark of a true musician to me, to be so aware of all the sounds around you that even the music of the AC is on your radar. Apparently he lives in Flatbush, Brooklyn now. I wonder if he ignores the city sounds as the rest of us do, or if he can't help hearing an orchestra every time he steps outside.

Just in case they ever read this, thank you to PZ, JF, and The Advocate for their gifts and for being there to enjoy the evening with me.

*I would be remiss if I didn't mention that my birthday celebration actually began the night before, when Rob and I were letting tea and conversation stretch past midnight, and he quietly arranged for the very capable staff at the tea lounge to bring me a cupcake with a candle in it. Putting a candle in a cupcake doesn't usually take great ability, but in this case the cupcake less dense than usual, and the candle was a tea light, carved by hand until only the core was left. It was taller than it was wide, but only barely. The candle wouldn't stand up on its own in the softish icing, so they stuck a sparkly snowflake cookie into the icing to support the candle. So complete was their artistry that I thought the cookie was only there to be fancy and scatter the candlelight with its sparkles until after I blew out the candle and Rob pointed out how precarious the whole structure had been. Thank you, Rob, for making sure those birthday traditions were covered.

Current Music: Everyone Says I Love You, Pinataland

Dumbstruck

2006-12-18T15:25:00.001-05:00

Yesterday I left NY for another trip back west. I flew via Southwest from Islip this time, which meant getting myself to the airport was a good deal more complicated than usual. LIRR goes from Flatbush Ave., the closest station to my apartment, to Ronkonkoma, which is closeish to this particular airport, but LIRR's already infrequent service to Ronkonkoma (which, by the way, is nowhere near as interesting a place as its name suggests) was made even more infrequent because it was Sunday. I had to choose between a train that would put me in Rkk 50 minutes before the plane was scheduled to leave and one that would arrive almost 3 hours before. 50 minutes would have cut it too close, even for me, so I brought my notebooks with me (I'm still working on papers for this semester) and caught the stupid-early train. Once I reached the airport, I realised I'd forgotten my earplugs, and I knew that if I wanted to get any work done on the plane, I'd better find some. Oddly, none of the store clerks I asked seemed to have them. (Airport, right? You guys should be buying earplugs in bulk.) Sure, they all carried those damnable EarPlanes, the plastic ear-comfort things that only block 20 decibels of background noise and cost around $7 (that's 30.5¢ per decibel, for those of you keeping score), but nobody had the foam earplugs that you roll between your fingers and squish into your ears, the ones that deliver you into a world of blissful silence, so that all you can hear are the thoughts in your own head, which is really what I need if I'm going to come up with anything articulate about why Nozick's theory of justice is so very wrong.

Last time, flying out of Oakland, I'd gone into a newspaper/magazine store and found a pair of these foam earplugs with no difficulty at all. They were 95¢ and they worked like a charm (most productive plane flight I'd had to date (though it probably helped that I had a paper due the following day)), and I was hoping to find duplicates.

But as I said, I was getting nothing. I must have visited every single newsstand in Islip's airport, and I must have had the same conversation with every single store clerk. Hi, do you have foam earplugs? No, not the EarPlanes, thanks. Foam. No, not earbuds. Ear. Ppllugs. Foam earplugs. No, not Bose's Noise-cancelling headphones, I'm not that rich. Just earplugs. Please? But nobody had them. Cue the violins.

The fourth place I tried, though, suggested I check at a little shop I hadn't seen before, down toward the end of the terminal and in the opposite direction of my gate, around a corner and hidden from view until you stand right in front of it. I still had over an hour till boarding, so I ambled down.

Rather than bothering to look on my own, I asked the clerk directly whether he carried foam earplugs. "Rahhight behind you, ma'am," he said. (Okay, what is it with outer Long Island and Southerners? The taxi driver who took me to the airport, too...I haven't left New York already, have I?) I thanked him, turned around to look, and found...

Nothing. "Sir?"

"Earphones, right?"

Sigh. "No. Foammm...ear...plugs."

"Oh, I 'pollagize, ma'am, we're all out of those just today. And y'know the funny thing? We been all stocked up on them these last few months, and no one's been asking, and now the minute we run out, everyone's been asking for them, like all of the sudden they just can't get enough of ear plugs."

Maybe that's because when you've got them in stock, people can find them on the shelf and they don't have to ask, I managed to not say. "Is there anywhere else that might have some left?"

"Well now I could call downstairs for you and check with them if you like."

"That would be great."

He made the call and got his answer: no luck. While he was calling, I wandered over to a magazine rack, attracted by the name "Stephen Colbert" on the cover of GQ. I flipped through the pages trying to find the feature, and while I spent the next ten or fifteen minutes trying to find it (what the hell?), he made small talk with me.

"Was that your college?" he asked, referring to my sweatshirt. As I think both of you know, I own exactly one sweatshirt. It is old (almost 8 years), ratty, and has my college on it. It's also good for long flights in fiercely air-conditioned cabins.

"Yeah, that was mine. I'm no poser," I smiled. I still hadn't even found the table of contents. Damn glossy magazines with their damned endless advertisements.

"Well, you know, everyone's wearing college sweatshirts nowadays, since all those reality tv shows are all about kids in college."

"Oh really? I didn't know that." Okay, here was the table of contents...and no mention of Stephen! Was there another table of contents further in?

"..."

Oops, that was my cue to contribute to the conversation. "Um. Did you go to college around here?"

"Me? No, I went to the University of Lowalville, myself."

(Lowalville?) "Where's that?"

"Lowalville? That's Kentucky. That's where I"m from."

(Louisville!!) "Oh, Lowalville." Here was a second table of contents, after maybe ten more pages of rasor/cologne ads, but still no mention of where I'd find Stephen's piece. Undeterred, I resorted to going through the magazine page by page while Lowell here regaled me with stories about what U of L's rivals would do if you drove through their part of town with the wrong university's logo on your vehicle.

"...but I get around that," he continued. "Me, I just put stickers from both of them on my car, and then folks leave me alone no matter where I am."

"Well, that's a relief...but why not just not display any stickers at all?"

"Well, I guess I like to tell people where I'm from, you know?"

"Oh," I said, wondering how people would know if he's displaying both. I was over halfway through the magazine, and still no Stephen. Plenty of Will Ferrell, though, in case you're into that guy. I was beginning to think the name on the cover was a mistake, or that maybe GQ just put his name there to trick his fans into standing in airport newsstands making inane small talk with guys from Lowalville. I checked my phone: still an hour till boarding. I looked up at him. "Do you think you could help me with this?" I asked, figuring I already knew the answer. "It says on the cover that it has a bit on Stephen Colbert, and I'm not finding it."

He put down the t-shirt he was folding. "Sure, let's have a look. Stephen Col-berT, huh?"

"Yeah." I winced at the vocalised T. "He's got a TV show, 'The Colbert Report'?" I tried to educate without insulting. "He makes a point of not pronouncing the Ts. He says it's French." I could have been speaking French for all the difference it made.

"Col-berT, Col-berT, Col-berT..." he said, running his finger down the table of contents. Oh well.

Just then, a couple stormed into the shop. "Those snowglobes should come with a warning!" the man fumed.

Warning? Snowglobes? Colorful graphics began scrolling before my eyes:
-Warning: Gravity Works!
-Caution: This Snowglobe may not qualify as a thoughtful gift for your mother.
-Danger: Tacky!

"We bought one downstairs," said the lady, "and they wouldn't let us bring it through security! I had to leave it with my sister!"

"Oh, because of the liquid in the snowglobe?" I asked. "Because it's over 4 ounces?"

"There's a warning on everything else down there!" the guy went on. "Water, Pepsi, juice, everything. Why don't you put warnings on the snowglobes?"

Now I felt doubly bad for Lowell. Not only was he getting a thrashing he didn't deserve, but he clearly lacked the chops to dodge or parry. I was about to step in to defend him, to point out to Mr. and Mrs. Questionable Taste that when they say No Liquids, they mean no liquids, and that it's not this guy's responsibility to put warnings on everything, and that they should have thought about that before buying the snowglobe, but Lowell was already speaking...and he wasn't being defensive, either. His face looked soft and sympathetic, and his voice was gentle.

"Those folks did that to you?" he cooed. "Well, now I think TSA's gone a little too far." He shook his head in disapproval.

"Yeah! I mean, what are we gonna do with a snowglobe, anyway?" the wife demanded.

"Exactly!" said Lowell.

"This security crap gets crazier every day," her husband said.

"I'm awful sorry about that, folks," said Lowell.

"No, it's not your fault," said the wife.

All I could do was stare. In a few words, this boy who couldn't figure out why people never ask for what's already on the shelves had transformed the savage customers into a couple of mewing pussycats. I wouldn't ever have thought to do that, and if I had, I doubt I could have pulled it off. Was that what they meant by Southern Charm?

"Merry Christmas," he told them as they left.

"Same to you," said the husband. He was actually smiling.

I wanted to tell Lowell how amazed I was by his deft bit of dissatisfied-customer-wranglage, but when I searched his face for some flicker of smugness, anything to indicate that he knew what he'd done and knew he'd done it well, I saw nothing but the same, slightly blank, little-boy face he'd had on when I came in. Was he hiding it that well? Was it just so second-nature to him by now that he no longer rejoiced over little victories like these? Or could he possibly have been speaking sincerely?

I put the GQ away and told him I had to leave then. I didn't want to say what I was thinking, and I didn't trust myself to think of anything else to say. I haven't been so thoroughly humbled in a long time.

"Merry Christmas," he told me as I left.

"Merry Christmas to you too," I said.

Pilgrimage

2006-12-09T12:33:00.000-05:00

I haven't been watching The Colbert Report for too long--Graham and The Advocate turned me onto it several months ago, but I'm slow to pick up on new things sometimes--but the more I watch, and the more I read about Stephen Colbert, the more I've been itching to go to a taping. Luckily, tickets are free, and I happen to live an easy 45-minute train ride from the studio, but unluckily, there's been no ticket distribution via e-mail (the usual method) for a couple of months. I'm supposed to finish my program in May and then I'm thinking I'll be heading back west, and I have no idea how many more months they won't be distributing tickets, so I've been getting a wee bit nervous that I might leave the city before ever making it to a taping. However, an opportunity came up a couple of days ago. Normally I tutor on Thursdays, but both my afternoon and my evening students had cancelled this week, so on the assumption that this sort of chance might not come again for a long time, I seized it and rode the subway over to the studio in the afternoon to try my luck at standby. I arrived a little after 3, later than I'd intended, but I found the sidewalk absolutely deserted. I figured that boded well, so I tucked myself into the little alley to try to stay warm while I waited for 4 o'clock to come. I pulled out a piece by Nozick I was reading for Philosphy of Law and tried to focus on analysing it, which was hard, both because I was already excited and because it's tricky to write little margin notes while your fingers are covered in clumsy gloves, but it was too chilly to take the gloves off. A few minutes later, a young couple arrived and planted themselves on the sidewalk against the building. Fellow travellers. They looked excited, too. Then another couple showed up and tucked themselves into the alley with me.

Now, the night before, when I decided I was going to try my luck in the standby line, I spoke to Rob and he gave me some advice. He's the sort of person who either knows everything or does a decent job of faking it, and he's lived in the city most of his life, so when he said he knew a trick for getting into the show, I figured I could trust him. As it turned out, his "trick" was that many of the people who have tickets have more than they need, because someone might have had to back out or because they asked for four and their party only had two, or whatever. Okay, that's kind of like a trick, but from the mystery in his voice, I was expecting something like a secret door with a combination lock, whose code is known only to Rob and Stephen himself. "But you have to be friendly and talk to people," he cautioned, as if he thought I have no social skills. Thanks, Rob. ;) I told him I'd try, but I was still preparing myself to sit all the way in the back, if I got in at all, because honestly, who would give up a ticket to The Colbert Report?

So when the second couple sat down like six inches from me, I looked up from my reading and smiled, and we started chatting. They were a nice pair, and the male half was celebrating his birthday that day. After a few minutes, I asked them if they had more people joining them, trying not to let them hear the hope in my voice. "Oh, yeah, we've got two more friends joining us," she said. Oh well. "But I don't think it'll be a problem," she continued, "because it says in the e-mail that people can join you in line later."

"Oh, no, I'm sure it won't be a problem at all," I said. I was grateful for anything to focus on that would make it seem less like I'd been asking her for selfish purposes. I felt kinda crappy about trying to chat people up just so that they would give me something, anyway, and while I was disappointed that she didn't have extra tickets, I was also a little relieved.

We chatted a bit more, and soon the first couple joined in our conversation. It turned out they were on vacation from Southern California, and they'd been planning this trip to NY for several months, but they'd only gotten a response to their ticket request the week before, so it was pure luck that their trip coincided with the date of their tickets. Amazing.

I lamented to her over how long the ticketing webpage had had "sorry, no tickets until further notice" posted on it, and she said, "Oh, you don't have a ticket?"

"No, I'm just waiting on standby."

She glanced at her husband. "Because actually...we have one extra ticket." She showed me the printout of her e-mail, with the giant number 3 on it. "And it was supposed to be for my brother, but he can't make it, so...if you'd like to, you can use our third."

How do you do it, Rob? Teach me how you do it!

"Uh. Uh, wow. Are you sure?"

"Yeah, it's totally fine! I'm just glad it's going to be used!"

Remember, this couple was *first* in line. I'd just jumped from having no idea whether I'd make it in to being guaranteed the third-best seat in the house. I was practically exploding.

The only downside to this is that now, instead of being outside in the cold for another forty minutes, I would be outside in the cold for another two hours and forty minutes. I'd been counting on retiring to a library or a warm coffee shop or something while I passed the hours between getting my name on the standby list at 4 and checking to see if I got lucky at 6. Now, with an official ticket, I had to stay in line the whole time. Heat I can handle pretty reliably, but I'm a total wuss in the cold. Weather.com said it would be dropping to 35 F. by 6 pm, and that was before windchill. I certainly wasn't going to let a little cold come between me and the third best seat in the studio, but I was still not quite sure what I was going to do to keep myself from shattering to pieces.

My benefactors, Anna and James, had it far, far worse. She had a sweater and a peacoat, but neither scarf nor gloves nor hat, and he only had a t-shirt and a hoodie. As long as we were now bound together for the next few hours, I wasn't going to let them freeze. I offered to go visit a drug store and pick them up some gloves, but he refused. I think maybe he didn't like the idea of my buying him stuff as if he couldn't afford it. By 4:30, though, it had gotten even colder, so even though they were both soldiering on admirably by staying put, our facial muscles were starting to go stiff, and our once-easy, lively conversation was beginning to sound a bit robotic. I really wanted to return even a little bit of the favor they were doing me, so I offered again to find them some gloves. Anna said she would go, and James suggested I go with her, because "a woman, walking through New York alone...you never know." I managed not to laugh. I walk around the city alone all the time, both day and night, and as long as there are people around I always feel safe...and there are ALWAYS people around. I've never had any problems here, unless you count crazy people who want you to agree with them that whatever's happening in Washington is a sign that the end of the world is nigh. I forget, sometimes, that people who don't live here only hear scary things about the city.

Anyway, Anna and I walked a couple of blocks toward the closest Duane Reade I knew of, but she spotted a 99-cent store on the way that served all our needs: two scarves, two pairs of wool gloves, and a thermal shirt for James, all for around $11. Anna permitted me to treat them to coffee, though coffee here tends to be ridiculously cheap, unless you buy it at Starbucks. I wish I had thought of a way to do more for them. :/

I can't believe how lucky I was that we happened to be there on the same day. We passed the next hour and a half chatting about religion (they're born-again Christians), Israel, California, the cost of living, and fun things to do in New York. I didn't get a bit of reading done, and I enjoyed every minute of it. :) It was too cold to stand still--you had to stay in motion to keep your extremities from going numb--but in general, it seemed like the time passed quickly enough. The last 10 minutes before 6 pm were the worst, though--I was waiting as long as I could between time-checks, and still, only two minutes had passed each time I opened my phone.

A few minutes after 6, the man with the clipboard showed up and let in first the VIPs, and then the rest of us. James, Anna, and I received our blue cards, numbered 1, 2, and 3 (I still couldn't believe it), and we then had to pass through a bag check/metal detector screening gate on our way in, which is probably why the entrance process took so long. I hadn't expected the metal detector, and I wasn't sure what was going to happen to the various things I had tossed in my bag on my way out the door, but the thing I was most worried about holding onto turned out to be plastic, so everything was okay.

We waited in the garage-like holding area (tastefully decorated with a TV in the corner tuned to Comedy Central) for what felt like a half hour, though I'm sure it was much less. They'd asked us to turn off our cell phones, though, so I didn't know how much time was passing. At that point, I was so cold and so wound up with excitement that all I could to is sit in my chair and bounce, in an effort to both release nervous energy and warm myself up. I failed on both counts.

After a crew member came out and briefed us on what to do and how to do it (summary: be loud), the gates swung open and the fig newtons entered. They were playing "I Wanna Be Sedated" as we were ushered into the studio, (in!! the studio!!!) and led to our seats. Sure enough, James, Anna and I sat in the front row, right in front of the C-shaped desk. Sitting there and listening, I was surprised to find just how much I liked the song, until I realised that at that point, any loud song with a beat would have sounded good. I sat and stared at everything like a baby, but sadly, my vision is a little more myopic than a baby's, so I'm sure there are a lot of things that I missed.

The studio really is a lot smaller than it seems. It's very wide, but the seating only went six or so rows deep. While we were being seated, a guy came out and wiped down the C desk, which was when I realised it wasn't blue metal at all, as I'd always thought, but rather clear lucite. It can turn any color they want it to be, I guess, depending on the lighting they use. I also remembered that in interviews and articles I've read, they've talked about all the lines of the set being oriented around Stephen's head, as if he is the sun from which all truth emanates. You can certainly see this during the broadcasts (and their efforts would have been all in vain if you couldn't) but it was nice to be able to follow the paths of the lines at my own liesurely pace, instead of according to someone else's camera work.

After a few more songs, a warm-up comic came out and talked to us a little, made us feel welcome, informed us that there would be a brief question-and-answer segment during which we should ask questions that are original, funny, and unique, and that we should stand up when called on. Then he told us again to be as noisy as possible with our laughter and cheering. There were a few jokes in there, but few that I remember. He did one about how New Yorkers aren't rude, but just in a hurry--"I'm late for an audition that I'm clearly not going to get, stab, get out of my way"--that made me laugh because I've had those thoughts so often myself. I often take a route that's several blocks longer just to avoid going through midtown during the theater rush. (Best way to spot tourists? They're standing still.)

When everyone was ready, the comic introduced Stephen, and Stephen came running out from behind us, through the aisle separating the two sets of seats, with all the triumph of someone who'd just won a marathon. We all cheered like crazy, and he ran a down-and-back gauntlet of front-row high-fives. I got to high-five him twice, and his hands are startlingly soft. I wonder what it would be like to shake his hand, and I'm surprised the people on the show who do so don't get quizzical looks on their faces, as if to say, "How can you be in your early forties and have the hands of a baby?" Does he take special care of them because he knows they get so much camera time, or are they like that naturally?

Someone handed him a cordless mic, which he took, tossed behind his back and up in the air, and caught as it spun down. Then the question/answer part of the evening began.

Guy in the back [muffled]: Stephen!!

SC: I have no idea what you just said, but I *agree*. Rragghhnnn! Graoghgghgh! Welcome to the show, thank you for that spontaneous outpouring of joy. I can tell it wasn't prompted or coached in any way. I'm Stephen Colbert, welcome to the show. Do you have any questions [my hand shoots up] for me before we start, to humanise me in your eyes before I say these terrible things in character I saw her first.

[I stood.]

SC: Look at what she does, folks, she stands up. That's *breeding*.

[I curtsied.]

Me: I think it's awesome that you teach Sunday school, and I'd like to know how your relationship with religion would have been different, if you'd had the kind of education you're giving people now. [I sat down, and immediately realised I should have said "kids" instead of "people", but I figured he'd know what I meant. He might not have, as you'll see:]

SC: Huh.

[uproarious laughter from the rest of the audience...which was funny, because I hadn't meant it to be a funny question. I really wanted to know the answer.]

I have noooooo idea what kind of education I'm giving people now. In case you haven't noticed, I'm not an educator. I'm a comedian. I don't know...I don't know! I...I listened to a lot of comedians when I was younger, went to bed every night to Bill Cosby's "Wonderfulness", "Bill Cosby's A Very Funny Fellow...Right?"--anybody know that one? Yeah? [A few people do the

I-know-that-one clap] Uh, "Richard Nixon, A Fantasy", by David Frye? Oh, buuullshit if you clap for that, nobody knows that one. [pointing at one guy clapping] Not even you.

[turning to me again] So...I don't know. Why, are you a religious person?

Me: Yeah, I...was in rabbinical school for a year.

SC: You were??

Me: Yeah, for a year.

SC: So you were thinking of being a rabbi?

Me [wondering why else he thinks anyone would go to rabbinical school]: Ye-

SC: A rabb-ette? [winning smile to the crowd]

[crowd: uproarious laughter]

SC: Does anyone else have any questions?

(*sigh* It's not that he wasn't funny. It's just that I'd heard that one before. To his credit, though, when he said it, it seemed funny again. I was just hoping he'd have a real answer to the question, something other than "I don't know, but hey, do you guys like Bill Cosby?" When I learned he teaches Sunday school, I imagined that his religious education had influenced him in some lasting way, and that he cares so much about children having a certain type of religious education that he decided to do some of the educating himself. I thought maybe there was some element of religious education that he never got that he wanted to be sure to give to today's kids, or at least, today's Roman Catholic kids. I mean, he *chose* to teach Sunday school, and I assumed he'd have a reason for choosing to do so, so I thought he'd have worked through how he wanted to present religion to the kids, and I thought surely it would have something to do with how religion was presented to him. Maybe it was just the wrong situation to ask non-jokey questions, so he opted to skirt the issue...or maybe, as I suggested, I wasn't clear enough. After he "answered" it, I remember thinking, through my thin veil of disappointment, how polite he was to show interest, even if it were feigned, in my reason for asking. *That* is breeding.

OK, now back to the story.

SC [to a guy behind me]: Yes.

Guy behind me: Yeah, I'm working on my thesis, and I know I'm not a guest, but I was wondering if coming onto your show and being in the audience will give me the Colbert Report Bump (sic) and help me finish my thesis project.

SC: Ahahaha...yes. Because I think all that really matters is for me to say yes, is that right? I like your t-shirt, by the way. Usually they say Stewart/Colbert, but that one says Colbert/Stewart '08. Goooood man. Someone from over here? Yes.

A young Asian guy from across the aisle: [something like] Mr. colbert, I plan on growing a beard. What do you think about that?

SC: My question back to you is, *can* you grow a beard?

SC: Alright, we're ready to go, let's go ahead and do the show. But first, could I have some of that artificial love I heard when I first came in here tonight?

We gave it to him, and he started directing the applause like an orchestra conductor, using the mic as a baton. First loud, then quiet, then one side, then the other, then all of us big, then quiet again. When we'd finished:

SC: *That* is how Hitler took power.

He passed the mic to a staffer and ran up, clicked his heels in the air, and took a seat at the desk. The music came on again ("Saying Sorry" by Hawthorne Heights) while he sat down at his desk, went over some business with some of his staff, and arranged himself. When he was opening his water bottle, he screwed up his face with the effort of breaking the seal, and I thought how much more expressive his face is when he's opening a water bottle than anyone else's would have been. Was it because that's how he is normally, or because he knew he was being watched and he was playing to us? He nodded in my direction (!) and raised his bottle with a "to your health" sort of gesture before he took a drink. As I said, breeding.

When the music died down, we began.

Crew Guy: Stand by everybody!

SC: Let's do it! Oh, it is Go Time.

The Table of Contents was my first glimpse of him suddenly in character. His performance--the enunciation, the expressive faces, and the deeper vocal register he uses--combined with the lighting and the suspenseful music, was disconcerting in its complete disconnect from the person we saw when he was being the playful, jolly host. He holds his face differently, for one thing, and all his gestures become...not necessarily bigger, just weightier, I guess, as if he's become several times denser than the rest of us, or several times more tightly packed with energy. It's like he's humming, or there's an aura around him. He's larger than life, to the point that I almost felt like I was watching a cartoon. On the monitors, he looked normal, the same Stephen Colbert I'm used to seeing. In person, he looked huge and exaggerated. I kept going back and forth, like Grover with his "Near...Far!" bit, but between the two different Stephens. Normal...Freakish! Normal...Freakish! It was hypnotic.

When the camera's on him, though, his gaze is intense--it's like he stares with his whole body, deep into the camera's soul. You almost feel as if you're not there, as if it's just him and the camera. It was at this point that I finally realised why the studio audience always laughs at the written commentary half of The W0rd later than I do when I'm watching it at home. They forget to check the monitor screens sprinkled around the studio, because they're all transfixed by his face. Sitting there in the studio, I was honestly having a hard time concentrating on the jokes. As I said, he's hypnotic. Well, him, and I guess the lighting and makeup and set design, all that, but mostly him, the way he's exuding "I mean business." You just can't look away.

I'd been so captivated by his face that I didn't even notice Elizabeth de la Vega come onstage until other people started laughing, cheering, and pointing. Speaking of which, I thought it was awfully nice of one of the staff to escort her out and help her up the step. She might have needed the help, too--she looked a little wobbly on those heels.

I was actually feeling sorry for her when she first came out, because her presence is so much airier than Stephen's. With his cartoony bigness, I was sure this slightly nervous-looking lady sitting across the desk from him would be swallowed up, but he very kindly made room for her.

After their bit, he gave her a hearty handshake and said to her what looked (with my poor lip-reading abilities) like, "That was great!" He looked genuinely delighted. I was surprised, watching it when it was rebroadcast, that the hearty handshake made it into the broadcast. Not the words of congratulations, though.

During the break, he had her stand again for our thunderous applause, and he took a bow with her. Then he returned to the desk and mimed testing the gavel, finding it too quiet, and struggling to turn the volume up on it. OK Go's "Here It Goes Again" pumped through the speakers while Allison (head writer) and a bearded stage manager (I think) talked with Stephen at his desk. As they were finishing, he pulled out a pitchpipe, and he spent the rest of the break practicing his blow-pitchpipe-scream-blow-pitchpipe-again business. One of the cameramen was cracking up every time he did it, and Stephen did it again and again, bigger and sillier each time, as if just to crack the guy up.

We were counted in (backward from 10), we started cheering at 3, and Part II began. This was the Decemberists bit, which explains the pitchpipe. You can't hear it in the broadcast so much, but when they were showing the clip from "Charlene", the crowd was going absolutely nuts. Everyone loves Stephen and the Colberts. In case you were wondering, the pitchpipe was tuned to a high C. He hit a G above that.

During the next break, they played a song whose title I wish I knew. It was in G Minor, and it started with a straight thump-thump-thump beat and some guitar riff with a tricky little rhythm. When the singer comes in, he sings in falsetto. I wish I knew the name of the song because if I could tell you what it was, then you could imagine this scene more fully: when Allison came up to Stephen's desk, he mimed playing the song to her, and she mimed it back, and as far as I could tell, they spent the whole time playing the riff at each other on their air guitars and singing in silent falsetto, instead of actually doing any prep. I think this was one of my favorite moments, watching their strumming arms going sharply up and down, perfectly synched with the music, and both of them almost-cracking-up while they stared each other down. Toward the end of the song, he pulled out the pitchpipe once more, so that he was already deeply into practicing his scream by the time they started taping again.

I was disappointed that Stephen didn't do his high-tenning on his way over to the interview table--he just ran straight over--but as the camera swoops from one side of the studio to the other, you can see some people cheering and pumping their fists. The back of my head (black wavy hair, half pulled back with a silver barrette) is the last bit of audience you see before we zoom in toward Stephen, standing near the interview table. Fifteen milliseconds of obscurity. :)

I thought Dr. Collins did a great job, especially because he didn't look at all fazed by Stephen's aura. He managed to seem just as big, not to mention just as quick, maybe because he was so completely absorbed in the argument, or maybe because he's such a well-trained performer. I loved it when Stephen said "I wish we were all still shepherds," and they both turned to gesture toward the figurines simultaneously.

In the break after the interview, Stephen had Dr. Collins stand for applause again. He got a standing ovation. Then, Stephen went back over to the desk and Allison came out again. They and the bearded guy chatted while the music played, and in a minute or two we were counted in, we cheered, and Stephen recorded his goodbye speech. The one time he messed up in the entire night was here--he accidentally spoke to the wrong camera, cracked up, and they took it again. This time it was just right, and we all applauded again. Instead of the credits rolling on the monitors, though the camera guys panned across the audience so that we could wave at ourselves. Stephen stood up and thanked us for coming, and said he hopes to see us again a long time from now, at which point he hopes they still have a show. Heh. Then he walked out of the studio passing between us like a prophet ascending to heaven, his aura trailing out after him. It all zipped by--we couldn't have been in there more than 45 minutes before it was time to go.

I had briefly considered hanging around by the stage door and waiting to catch Stephen on his way out, mostly since I've heard that it's possible and that he's friendly, but James, Anna, and I were all pretty hungry, so we opted for having dinner in a nice warm restaurant instead. Maybe I'll try again in May.

2006-09-06T01:01:00.000-04:00

First day of the semester today, and the first class was Ethics with Professor Panache. I walked into class at 4:15 on the dot, and everyone else was already assembled around the table. I guess everyone but me believes in being early. His greeting was, "What? You again? It's like a breath of stale air. Well, go on, introduce yourself." God I love that guy.

After class he said he had something for me, a paper he wrote that I'd asked to read at the end of last semester but that he'd never gotten to me. He invited me back to his office, and I figured that would be as good a time as any to ask him to be my advisor. I followed after him all awkward and middle schooley, fueled by the fervor of having just announced my resignation from the stupid shoe store job and ready to rededicate myself to pure scholarship in ethics.

It took me a couple tries to ask him, but he knew what was coming and prodded it out of me...which, come to think of it, is exactly the sort of thing that makes me want him as my advisor. By the time I finally got it out, we had reached his office, and he offered me a chair. He sat in one himself, with his back to his desk. Then he said there was something he wanted me to see.

He took a deep breath and said that there's a possibility that a new program might be beginning sometime in the near future, perhaps, maybe, at CUNY: it'd be an ad-hoc Ph.D. program something like Stanford's design-your-own-major-o-matic. He swiveled back around to his desk and plucked a crisp letter off his piles of business, swiveled back around to me, and dropped it into my lap. (I told you he's Professor Panache!!!) He let me marvel at the delicate lines printed on its creamy woven paper. It was a letter from the university president, addressed to him and three other professors asking them to meet with him to help develop this program. Wow, I thought. And he was hesitant about telling me about it, he said, because it's so tentative, but he knows that I'd be interested in hearing about it because of my situation.

I told him how exciting it was to hear, because I'd just been looking at U.Penn's website a couple of days ago and thinking how much I wish CUNY's program could have the cache that U. Penn's does, with all their specialised classes and the ring of official impressiveness that the title, "Masters of Bioethics", can bring. It's a good bit shinier than CUNY's "Masters of Arts in Liberal Studies, and oh by the way bioethics was my subdivision, over there in the small print".

"You had the chance to go to U. Penn?" he asked. "Why didn't you?"

I immediately regretted saying anything, and muttered something about how I wanted to leave Philadelphia (true) and also how I wasn't sure I could afford it (technically true), and then besides, U. Penn was mostly focused on research (so I'd heard), while here at CUNY was Madame Firefly doing clinical ethics, which is just what I want to do.

"So why don't you ask Madame Firefly to be your advisor?" he asked.

Damn.

I like you better, and I think you like me and get me and I feel like you have time for me and are rooting for me in a way that I don't think she is, I thought to my hands. "I...I like the way you think." Smile?

"I guarantee you, Madame Firefly thinks the same way I do," he said.

"Do you really think so? I mean...well, I suppose you wouldn't say so if you didn't think so. It's only that..."

Really, it was the sweetest rejection I've ever received, what he told me next. "Now listen to me," he said. "Consider asking Madame Firefly, and I'll tell you why." He looked me dead in the eye. "I'm very serious about this. She's younger, and she's going to be around longer."

Aww, gee, Professor. He's in his seventies, maybe. Not exactly about to roll over and go stiff.

"However," he said, "if you ask her and she doesn't think it's a good idea because she's only doing the teaching part-time [the other part of her time she spends being a real live clinical ethicist at the hospital where she also teaches], then I'll understand, and I'll do it." It was nice of him to give me a shred of hope to cling to, wasn't it? Then he took up the paper he'd promised and wrote "To Miriam/From Professor Panache" on it. Even when he's rejecting me, he's sweet.

I think I'm going to make him my unofficial mentor even if he's not my official one. It's not just that he's always acted as if he has the time for me. It's also that he picks on me in class no matter what I say, and the effect is that it makes me feel like it's okay to be wrong, as long as I take risks. He intimidates me and inspires me in just the right sort of combination. I like his jokes, I love how he knows everything, and I feel like he has The Answers in the way that Socrates (the real one--that's not a blogname) did, or perhaps didn't, but that Madame Firefly either doesn't have them or doesn't relish having them the way he does. I know that she was his student, and must therefore know everything he saw fit to teach her, but I've never felt like her heart was open to seeing me the way his is.

So now I have yet another reason why I'm highly motivated to finish my thesis soon, whatever it turns out to be about: I have to finish it while Professor Panache is still around.

Aww, man.

At least we'll always have classes. :/

Losing Face

2006-08-31T22:39:00.000-04:00

I'm feeling a little sickish tonight, so no Thursday night swing dancing for me. Instead I will tell you a story. A month and a half ago, at another swing dance on another Thursday night, my purse was stolen. My fault for thinking it would be safe in the heap of people's bags that we so trustingly left to their own devices while we went off and danced. Good band, though.

Fortunately, I have wonderful friends and relations who take care of me, and with their gracious assistance I was able to collect a few necessary items--replacement keys, phone, and enough cash to hold me until my new cards arrived. The green Google shirt that Deluded found for me I have given up hope of ever replacing, but fortunately Graham found a blue one for me, and as he suggested, whenever I wish it were green I can just look at it and think yellow thoughts.

The last piece that had to be replaced, and the most generative of red tape, was my passport. My dear, sweet little passport. Oh, I can see it now, with its beat-up plastic-coated blue cover, heated into a permanent curvature from spending too long in my back pocket. It was filled with the visa stamps from every foreign country I'd visited until that point, a list that was modest but steadily growing. Israel was first, the summer after my Sophomore year at Stanford, thanks to Birthright and their pretty-good-if-a-bit-packaged program intended to make College Jews fall back in love with Judaism. It has just occurred to me how much money has been spent (by Hillel, Birthright, Drisha, RRC, and various other rich Jewish organisations) on trying to keep me involved in my religion. In this aspect I am an abominable tease.

Next summer was Italy, the last Family Trip my father, bless his heart, ever tried to organise. It was a lovely trip, Daddy, and I'm very glad we went, but when you have five adults and among them four opposing ideas of what comprises a good vacation, the atmosphere gets tense. I'll always remember walking through Pompeii in the thick fog that erupted (haha) into a thunderstorm. En route to Italy we passed through England, which is why my passport was stamped by Gatwick before the Italian government could leave their mark.

The following summer, my post-graduation Grand Tour à la Dvorana, brought two more stamps into the pages of my passport. First was Marseille, though we only passed through there en route to St. Rémy de Provence. Thank goodness it was the South of France we visited, because apparently only the Southerners speak slowly enough that I could communicate with them. Funny how that's a constant, the speed of speech descending with the latitude. I just remember noticing that after several years of diligently studying modern Hebrew in college to the point that I was very nearly fluent, could extemporise on complex topics and compose essays and read newspapers and had even tackled some poetry-writing, I forgot it all--yes, all--when I began to speak French again, a language I hadn't studied since high school. I could feel it drain from my head as those cushy cushy cognates came shlping back like iron filings to an electromagnet that has suddenly been turned on. So much for preparation for rabbinic school. Ever since, whenever I want the French word I think of the Hebrew one, and whenever I want the Hebrew one I think of the French one. If you ever see me trying to speak either French or Hebrew, watch for the screwed-up face of concentration and listen for the words that don't belong.

After that was a bit of a dry spell, foreign-country-visiting-wise. I suppose I was busy enough doing real live moving: I moved myself to New York, then to Philly, and then back to New York again. Just before the latest move, though, my passport gained one more UK border patrol stamp, a bit of official ink proving that I'd spent two lovely weeks in England and Scotland with an even lovelier fellow.

Now, all these stamps are in the hands of some heartless opportunistic thief...or more probably, buried under several tons of garbage at the city dump. Poor little passport. A moment of silence, please.

You know what I miss most about my passport? The picture. Not because it happened to catch my good side, nor because my hair was sitting down for once, but because the expression on my face was so...open. Happy twenty-year-old who places herself in the world's hands and trusts it to treat her kindly, or if not, then at least to let her charm or argue it into submission. It was nice to be able to open up my passport and glimpse the expression on that tiny picture and think, "That's me. That's who I am." I'm a little more guarded now, a little less certain of whether I'll ever really amount to anything. It all shows in my face. Have you ever noticed this about yourself? How your facial expression at rest changes, over time, depending on where you are in life? Looking through an old photo album whose photos my mother had thoughtfully and artistically arranged in chronological order, we moved from one page of young me dressed up in some costume to another page of young me dressed up in some other costume (my mother's sewing area was large and chaotic, a giant treasure chest for anyone who liked to play dress-up), and all three of us who were looking at the album made noises of surprise, because the face I gave to the camera changed so dramatically between one particular picture and the next. The younger me was off in her own world, completely content to let the camera catch her mid-thought. The older me had suddenly discovered that people were looking at her, and had become self-conscious. From that photo on I had started arranging my face in what I believed to be more attractive lines, but they weren't, because you could see the tension. I was maybe six and a half.

I still had that self-conscious tension in my face in the passport photo, but at that age it looks appropriate; it reads more like the awareness that you'd expect to see in the gaze of a twenty-year-old who knows that she is having her photo taken. Still, though, that was the face of a girl who really believed that all people are basically good and lovable and wonderful in their own ways, and would surely think the same of her once they saw her. I'm not sure when nor why it happened, but at some point I started believing that less, and I know it shows in my face. That was part of why it took me so long to get myself over to the drugstore photo booth to take new pictures. Sure, I check myself in the mirror every morning, but I'm a lot more forgiving than the camera is, and I didn't really want to have to admit to how much my recent developments had written themselves on my face.

Sure enough, the first shots I took were ghastly. My smile didn't look natural. It looked at once tentative and overcompensating, like it hadn't been practiced in ages and was trying to make up for it all at once. Fortunately, the clerk who was cutting the borders off the printouts also accidentally slit part of the photo itself, so I had an excuse to go back and try again. This time I was pickier. I wanted to okay the picture before she printed it out. I actually made her point and shoot four times before I approved what I saw on the screen of her camera. They still aren't wonderful--my left eyebrow is about an inch above my right, which seems to happen when I'm tense--but at least the smile is less assaulting (I practiced in the mirror the night before, tried to memorize how it feels to smile without looking fierce), and I made sure to wear a green shirt so that my skin would look less green in comparison. Evidently neon lights aren't the most flattering for the complexion.

Speaking about the passport-losing experience later to Mr. Fodor, I was surprised to hear him immediately pick out the thing that bothered me most. "And I'll bet you really liked your picture, didn't you? That's the worst!" He's a photographer, so he thinks about stuff like this. I tried, fumblingly, to explain how I feel like I don't have the same face anymore, but he met me practically the day I arrived in New York back in 2003, and perhaps he has noticed the change on his own. Either way, I didn't have to explain much, which was nice. "Well, you're at a different point in your life now," he said, which is the most optimistic take on it I'd heard yet. I liked the sound of it--a different point in my life. Not an irreversible wrong turn, but a different point. It makes it seem like there will be other, future points during which the tensionometer that is my left eyebrow will fall down a bit, and a smile will look more at home on my face than the look of concentration that is so often disconcertingly mistaken for annoyance.

What I'm saying is that I'm ready to move on to the next different point in my life, the one where I've finished my master's degree and I have a piece of paper with my name and the word Bioethics on it, and I get to leave New York, where the constant proximity to strangers makes me wonder how I could ever have thought myself an extrovert. I've hung the idea of moving back to the Bay Area, to live among people I know and love, like a carrot in front of my eyes, and in view of this, I've decided it's time to admit that working full time while going to school full time hasn't been producing good results where it matters (I have a steady paycheck, sure, but that's not where it matters), and if I'm here to go to school, I should do that instead of spending most of my energy juggling boxes and answering phones. I want to finish at the end of my two years, not have incompletes hanging over me. I want to finish and move back to the Bay Area. It's time. By the time I'm done, it'll be past time.

As such, I'm giving Dance Shoe Store their two weeks of notice very soon. Just as soon as I work up the nerve.

Blackbirds

2006-06-18T10:01:00.000-04:00

Link #1
and
Link #2

Either a game or an advertising campaign. Or both. Whichever it is, it looks interesting.

3^3

2006-06-08T09:17:00.000-04:00

Happy Cube-Day, Graham! With your help, the rain falls down.

Box

2006-05-29T08:38:00.000-04:00

It's the end of the semester, so of course that means I have monster papers to write. (Why else would I be blogging?) The Advocate has been gone this weekend, and I'm looking after her two kitty-cats, Bette and Lu. It's also just been changing over from Spastic Spring to Sticky Summer these past few days; this weekend has been the first taste of hot disgusting humidity we've had all year, and B. and L. don't seem to like it much. They handle it very differently, though. Bette, the older and more delicate of the girls, just sort of flopped herself down on the hardwood floor near the doorway, and has spent most of her time there. Lu, the younger and more intrepid, seems like she doesn't quite know what to do with herself, so she alternates between taking possession of whatever spot she doesn't already own (currently it's the last empty spot on the kitchen table) and demanding either food or recognition. Usually food. This girl is always hungry, and has a reputation for finishing her meals in a hurry so she can get some of Bette's, too. Bette is usually too conflict-averse to refuse, and when Lu comes to polish off her bowl, Bette goes off into a corner where she either pretends she was full anyway or quietly sulks.

I usually work in my room, but it's too warm in there now, so I've been sitting in the somewhat more ventilated kitchen, typing away, and every time I get up, Lu saves my seat for me by springing down and curling up on it herself. Then she gets annoyed when I want it back, but I'm not as good at resting on the table as she is, so we work something out and she pads huffily back to her spot on the table. Throughout all this, poor Bette is just lying in her floppy position on the floor, looking sort of sweetly dejected.

Actually, The Advocate and I have been a bit worried about Bette, because usually when she wants quiet time, she hides in a box on top of the cabinets over the refrigerator. It's pretty common to walk in, be loudly greeted by Lu who is in your face demanding supper before you have even been able to put your bag down, and look around for Bette, finally spotting the tips of her ears just peeking over the edge of her upstairs box. She loves that place. Or she did, anyway. It seems unlike her to lie all defeated-looking down here on the floor.

I finally took pity on her this morning and brought out a box from my room, which I placed in her new spot. It was a nice box, a good size for one curled-up lady cat, and I folded the flaps inside so they wouldn't swing up and down and intimidate her. She can be skittish that way. I presented it to her, and she did a lot of rubbing her cheek against it, but she wasn't sure if it was safe inside. I didn't want to force her into it, but I finally tilted it toward her and patted the inside, and curiosity got the better of her. She stepped in.

For a moment or two she sat erect in it, looking out on the rest of the apartment like a dignified ship captain navigating the treacherous Northern Wooden Flooring Sea, and then she curled up neatly and made herself at home.

By now, Lu had moved down from the table to repossess my chair, but she relinquished it to come see what the fuss was about. Bette raised her head. Lu gave her elder sister a thoughtful bit of face-grooming, which Bette tolerated for a while. Soon, though, Bette had had enough of all that interaction and hinted that it was time for Lu to be getting along. Lu, who doesn't take hints, or really anything that doesn't smell like food, ignored it. Bette finally gave Lu an unmistakable good-bye swat, and Lu, thinking it must be playtime, swatted back. Hard. Bette recoiled. Screw this, she sighed, and climbed out of the box, retreating to another morsel of floor, where she flopped down and looked defeated. Lu then climbed into the box and stuffed herself across its diagonal. She looked absurd, like Alice in the White Rabbit's house she's just outgrown.

"Lu," I said, "that was Bette's box."

Lu stared up at me defiantly. "What? She left. It's mine now."

"Okay, Lu," I said, and went back into my room to get another box. It wasn't as roomy as the first one, but at least Bette wouldn't be flinging herself onto the floor in woe.

When I returned carrying the replacement, Bette was already back in the first box. Lu had, apparently, voluntarily vacated it. Miraculous, I thought, but only until I found out why: she'd noticed that The Chair was empty. She was just sauntering toward it when she saw me coming, and suddenly it was a race to see who could claim the chair first. She won, of course, and when she'd settled herself comfortably on it, she lifted her head and gazed at back at me, daring me to displace her. "Okay, Lu," I sighed. "You win."

It's not a bad box, really. A bit cramped, but at least it's mine.

Missing the Mark

2006-04-13T00:34:00.000-04:00

They Might Be Giants, my most favorite Band-Next-Door, is doing music for Dunkin' Donuts commercials. There's something very does-not-compute about this. I mean, yeah, okay, I'm sure the pay is excellent and I'm happy for them that they landed the position, but the TMBG aesthetic and the Dunkin' Donuts image...they're like oil and a square peg. TMBG is for people who think they're clever, who are interested in information, who have a taste for the offbeat and who like to differentiate themselves from their surroundings. Dunkin' Donuts? In my head, Dunkin' Donuts is blue jeans and coca cola, only in pink and orange. There is nowhere I go on a regular basis that doesn't lead me to pass a Dunkin' Donuts. There is one on 5th and 9th, between my house and the train station; there's another near the 96th street station, near where I have some of my classes; there's another near Dance Shoe Store; and within a 2-block radius of my school, where I have the rest of my classes, there are three. Some people I know who can't stand Starbuck's find DD coffee addictively delicious. I don't drink coffee so I wouldn't know, but I can tell you not to bother with the baked goods. The bagels are rubbery, the donuts are unexciting (maybe they're better with coffee?), and the muffins smell funny. Kind of like fish. Who does that to a muffin? The first time I thought it was a fluke, but when the second one came out fishy also, I decided I didn't need to do any more investigation. My point is that there is nothing interesting about DD, not even if you try. When I read on the wiki that TMBG would be doing music for their new ad campaign, I wondered what kernel of interestingness they could possibly find and praise about this ubiquitous merchant of barely-passables.

Two of the commercials are on tmbw.net, and some more are viewable at the Hill/Holliday blog:

Doing Things (short version)

Pleather

Doing Things (long version)

Tree Climbing

Fishing

Packing

Visually, they're engaging ads, and I do think Flansburgh came up with some interesting stuff to sing about (or was that him following the company's orders? I'm curious to know whether the topic was given to him or whether he came up with a whole bunch of songlets, some of which they then chose to develop into spots), but I don't find the songs very catchy (and isn't that of paramount importance in an ad?) and some I find jarringly irrelevant to the product they're trying to sell. I can maybe accept the tree-climbing one, but the SUV-packing one just seems like it barely has any relation to the drink, and the pleather one is the worst. What is it about watching shorts-clad people shifting uncomfortably in their seats that's supposed to make me want iced coffee? I don't have pleather car seats. I'm not wearing shorts. And even if I did/were, I'd look for a towel to drape over the seat, not a cold beverage.

I'm glad TMBG has this opportunity for more exposure, or at least more revenue, through these ads, because then they can keep on making and giving away their excellent excellent podcasts, which I have been fully savoring to the last drop. I know ads don't have to be logical, but I really see no connection between the story presented in the ad and the necessity for refreshment from DD. I mean, I'm the most susceptible to TMBG music of anyone I know, and even I don't find myself wanting coffee and baked goods after seeing the ads, so I can't imagine this would be a very effective way to make other people buy their stuff. Maybe if Flansburgh wrote a song called "Our Muffins Don't Smell Like Fish Anymore".

Moving Target

2006-03-14T13:32:00.000-05:00

Last night I was up most of the night writing out a paper which I presented today. Easy little 5-page creampuff of a thing, but it was a long long night, because I had to write most of it out longhand (I still haven't done anything about my computer). I finished it and typed it out on the phil. department computers this morning, presented it in class around 9:45 (it went well, I think), felt all sleepy throughout the second hour of class, decided to go back home to Brooklyn to relax rather than pulling my usual trick of reading/napping in the library between my Tuesday morning and Tuesday evening classes. So I got home and walked by Park Slope's synagogue, where I saw the world's most purposeful-looking clown getting out of a van with "happy Purim!" decorating the windows (happy Purim, by the way). I was lowish on food so I went by C-Town and bought myself lunch (bread and strawberries) and came home to eat and put myself down for nap. Can you imagine the pure bliss, after all the icky cold of this year's winter, and after all the slow buildup of stress, of reclining on the couch on the sun-drenched deck, eating sweet strawberries for lunch, and not having to feel cold nor having to write a paper? There are cats, too--two sweetheart kittycats who add just the right mood of smooth furry laziness to the moment. It was incomprehensibly wonderful. I didn't even need music. But satisfaction is a moving target, or maybe I'm just too tired to rest, because the next thing I started thinking was not "time for a nap" but rather "time for a bike ride?" and then "I still haven't heard the Megillah read, I wonder if Purposeful Clown Synagogue has another reading this afternoon." So they have one at 4, and I think I'll stay for at least a half hour of it, before hopping on the train to go to my 5:30 class in the Upper East Side's Mt. Sinai Hospital to learn more wonderful things about bioethics, but first, a bike ride in the park's sun-drenched air.

--maybe it's just been so long since I pulled an all-nighter that my dopamine levels are going crazy? Nah, I think it's the weather. Clear blue sky, warm air, fluffy breeze...it's enough to make even the natives start smiling.

Happy spring!

Pick One.

2005-12-25T22:32:00.000-05:00

What's more important, doing the right thing or making the world better?

You'd like to never have to choose between the two, wouldn't you? But has the path to world-improvement ever complied with The Rules? Half the time the rules are wrong, and so they get in the way of doing what needs to be done for the Good of All Humanity. Think of unions fighting for laborers' rights, or Rosa Parks, or laws condoning slavery. Or heck, think of the Maccabees fighting the Seleucids (thank you, Eric). Assuming the Maccabees were right, you know.

But the other half of the time, the would-be-reformers think they have a really hot idea and it isn't until much later that their grandchildren realize how wrong they were, and that maybe they should have listened to the law all along instead of contorting it to fit their purposes. Think of the Salem Witch Trials, or of Our Friend Dubya, or think of the eugenics movement, which is the topic of the paper I'm taking a break from writing just now.* The eugenics movement, for those of you who haven't heard, started around 1890 with people here in the U.S. trying to keep survival-of-the-fittest-style evolution alive by mating the best people with each other. Later, they moved onto sterilising the worst people, but the movement found its ultimate expression in Nazi Germany with the Elimination of the Undesirables through mass murder.

The third half of the time, the law is right, AND breaking the law is the only way to help things get better, and that's the case that pulls the hardest. The first example I can find is that of using animals to do medical research so that maybe someday people won't die of terrible diseases. It's not illegal to give cancer to a rat, but it's still morally bad...or at least morally undesirable? The situation gets a lot sharper if you have to do all your testing on human subjects, so if you hate animals and want them to die anyway, just imagine the rats as sweet adorable little 6-year-old children with blonde hair and big blue eyes (thank you, Mr. Bobonich), and then maybe you too will feel the agony of the situation. Or another example might come from war. Nothing but being totally sacked by our military will stop that country's evil dictator from committing daily atrocities, so if we want to make the world better, we have to go to war against him, but come on, is it ever really Right to send our people to kill their people? Or how about this one, from Jarah: it's always wrong to torture someone, right? But what do you do if there's someone who knows where a bomb is hidden, and the only way to get them to talk in time enough to save the hundreds of people who will otherwise be killed when the bomb goes off is to torture this person into telling us the information? You have to imagine, I guess, that it's not due to a lack of creativity on our parts that we can't think of anything else to do other than test it on a human/declare war/torture the potential informant, but rather that this morally bad thing is the Only Hope to get out of this really terrible situation. And let's also say that you don't even know for sure whether doing this morally bad thing will fix the problem. Which would you rather do? The right thing, or the thing that could make the world better?

Professor Panache, who taught my British Moral Philosophy class, once sighed deeply and said that there are basically two kinds of people, the ones who say our main directive in life is to do the right thing and the ones who say our life's purpose is to make the world better. When he said that, I was surprised to find how instantly I knew that I'm a member of the first camp...I usually spend years wavering back and forth on questions like this before I can decide, but not in this case. Intuitively, I consider it to always be more important to do what's right. Anything else feels...selfish. Who am I to put aside the moral law of human interaction for the sake of my own dreams of how good things could be if only I could temporarily shove this pesky rule out of the way? Just because I want something doesn't mean I get to trample you to get it...even if what I want is something that will benefit many others. If the only way to get the guy to talk is to torture him, I'd let the bomb go off and let the people die. Or maybe I'm just morally squeamish that way.

So where do you stand, dear reader? Is it more important to do the right thing or to make the world better? I would love to have a response from every single person who reads this post. It can be your Hannukah present to me. :)

Speaking of Hannukah, I'm having my own little mini-Hannukah miracle here...as I type this, the two candles that I lit tonight are still flickering two hours past their 3-hour life expectancy. Most of the wax has melted away, and they've been in that just-about-to-go-out state (nothing left but tiny pieces of wick and small blue glows) for the past hour or so.

*Actually, the paper's about the Human Genome Project, and whether or not it's just another expression of the eugenicist agenda, but the work I've been doing for this paper has been inspiring me to think about broader topics.

Scuttling

2005-12-22T16:11:00.000-05:00

Let me begin by saying that I hate cockroaches. I hate them so much that even though I refuse to squash insects and spiders, I make exceptions for cockroaches. It began when I lived on the upper west side on a first-floor apartment, and had fairly frequent encounters with them. I'd be doing work in my room or making myself dinner in the kitchen or shuffling into the bathroom in the morning and there on the floor would be this shiny cockroach sitting there as if it owned the place. First I'd try to take them outside by coaxing them onto a folded sheet of paper and carrying the paper outside and shaking the cockroach off, but the cockroaches would spurn my efforts to be merciful. Once, I was trying to catch and take outside a cockroach I'd found in the entryway when I walked inside. When I tried to maneuver it into my makeshift paper trap, it ran into the coat closet. I opened the closet and it scuttled deeper inside into a dark shadowy corner, behind the empty cardboard boxes we inexplicably stored there. I flushed it out and it vanished. Where was it? I know I saw it leave the closet, but where could it have gone? The apartment wasn't that big.... I hesitantly decided it must have left through the front door I had forgotten to close, and made a cursory check in the outer hall. No cockroach. I gave up and closed the front door, only to find that it had been quietly hiding in the space between the open door and the floor. How do they do it? It's as if they know they're driving you mad, and they enjoy it! One evening, when I found one on the kitchen counter, I think I finally snapped. I guided it toward one of the burners of our stove and turned on the gas. Even now, two years later, and living in a place that is blessedly free of the things, there is still a special portion of my brain that I devote exclusively to hating cockroaches.

Now, I'm not usually a gloaty sort of person, but during the strike I really had something to gloat about. I watched lots and lots of people trying patiently, defeatedly, to hail a cab or make a carpool with the requisite four passengers, only to sit in parking lot traffic for hours as they tried to enter or leave Manhattan during the morning and evening sludge hours. Others walked the several miles to and from work in the just-under-freezing temperatures. Meanwhile, all the bicyclists were darting around in the negative spaces, passing the long lines of cars stopped at green lights because they're stuck in gridlock or whooshing by the surly pedestrians. I took the Manhattan Bridge home last night (the Brooklyn Bridge was too congested with pedestrians, and the police were making the bicyclists dismount and walk) and as I approached the bridge's onramp, I paused a moment to take in the sight: dozens of anonymous blinking silhouettes zipping out from the mouth of the bike path into the street where all the cars were stuck immobile, while just as many other blinking silhouettes were extricating themselves effortlessly from the traffic jam as the mouth of the bike path slurped them up.

It gave me the distinct, and shockingly pleasant, impression of being a cockroach. With lights. A smart cockroach with lights whose quick scuttly race will survive long after the humans, with their bloated modes of transportation, will have destroyed themselves.

Current Music: Impossible, TMBG

complaint department

2005-12-20T01:53:00.000-05:00

The TWU people extended the negotiation deadline till today at midnight, which at this point has come and gone, but still no reports of the threatened walkout of our city's circulatory system. Bit nerve-wracking, all this waiting and wondering if. On the other hand, the weather's been hovering right around freezing these past few days, and it's been sunny and dry, so it's fine for biking, and it's nice to have some more time to zip around on Mercury. Thanks to a new route I discovered from my apartment to the Brooklyn Bridge, I've almost got it to the point where biking and taking the subway to work take the same amount of time. If I could just push my speed up a little bit more, I wouldn't ever have to forego the pleasures of biking for the sake of getting to work closer to on time. Practice practice practice. And maybe a louder bell would help, too...I never thought I'd be all hostile toward people strolling across the bridge, but honestly, must you stand right in the middle of the bike lane to snap a picture of the view? And then refuse to budge when you hear me politely dinging behind you? Your side is right there, just south of the nice bright yellow line, with the universally recognized picture of a pedestrian stenciled at frequent intervals. What, you can't squeeze into the boundaries of the pedestrian lane and still walk seventeen abreast? My heart bleeds for you.

And as long as I'm lamenting over things about which no one else would possibly care, a few months ago I discovered that Duane Reade, the New York drugstore industry's answer to Starbucks, carries packages of peanut-butter-on-cracker sandwiches, bundled into minipacks of four sandwiches each and then sold at the inexplicable price of 99 cents per package of eight minipacks. That's 32 peanut-butter-cracker sandwiches at just over 3 cents each. Cheap, tasty, filling, moderately nutritious, and conveniently wrapped in snack-sized portions. And? They aren't there anymore! My favorite snack, discontinued without a trace.

Maybe I'll organize a protest.

[Update, c. 8 am: They *are* striking. Wish me luck navigating all the oblivious pedestrians on my way to class today.]

MTA, MIA

2005-12-15T02:19:00.000-05:00

Mayor Bloomberg says...
"The City is prepared for the worst case scenario with a robust contingency plan. A strike would be more than just illegal and inconvenient; it will threaten public safety and severely disrupt our City and its economy. Our contingency plan is designed to move as many people as possible using alternative means of transportation and to make sure that our streets remain passable for emergency vehicles. We will use ferries, carpools, and park and rides to move people around while lane reversals and HOV restrictions will keep traffic moving as best as possible. A strike would be incredibly inconvenient, but if New Yorkers work together and everyone pitches in, we would get through it."

It would indeed be incredibly inconvenient, especially because it comes in the middle of a fierce fierce cold spell, but in spite of that, I have to admit that I get a warm fuzzy feeling from his statement. Darn right it would severely disrupt the city and its economy. The subways are like death; they're the grand equalizer. I'm a student with a dumb retail job and you're a highly paid corporate lawyer and he's a janitor, and we all ride the subway. We all carry our metrocards, we all get antsy when we have to wait on the platform for more than 6 minutes, and we're all familiar with the buskers and beggars who work on our particular route. Don't be fooled by all the taxis clogging the streets; those are for the business people visiting from LA who can't be bothered to figure out The Map or are afraid to walk a few blocks. The subways are the city's circulation system, its lifeblood. Blood stops flowing, the city shuts down. What would we do without our trains? Some of us will walk to school or work, some will carpool, some (the braver ones) will bike, but the rest of us are going to humbly surrender and act like spineless out-of-towners for a day and catch taxis in exchange for submitting to baldfaced robbery. (The taxi fare estimate I heard was up to $10 for travel within a zone of approximately two square miles...the price of speed and central heating!) Apparently the taxicab drivers are drooling like wolves--no, like vultures--over all this fresh meat they'll be able to feast upon in a little less than 24 hours. Well, maybe I would be too.

But to separate for a moment from all the inconvenience, isn't it wonderfully humbling that New York is the kind of city that is so very dependent upon its trains? I mean, SEPTA was talking about severely cutting back on its service if voters didn't vote to give it more money, and people didn't care because SEPTA had screwed them all over so many times that they had become inured to it and just got into their cars without batting an eye. When CalTrain killed their weekend service, did people complain? And BART could shut down and much of the Bay Area might never know. But New York is a different story. People here have different opinions about the subways--some think it stinks, some find it romantic(guess which one is me)--but we all have active relationships with it, nurtured by our bidaily interactions. It's kind of charming to think we're all so inextricably connected to each other, that we all have such immediate common ground with anyone else who lives and works here, through the shared experience of riding the subway every day. Some people achieve a connection to their fellows with faith and a wafer; New Yorkers do it with stress and a metrocard.

As for the practical outcome, if they do strike, I'm hoping to bundle myself up like a sausage and bike to work on Friday, provided it doesn't rain/snow/sleet, as the weather report predicts it might. I figure if the roads are reasonably bikeable, all the other bikers will be out too, and it'll be a party on the Brooklyn Bridge's promenade and all up and down the west side greenway.

Read about Bloomberg's Robust Contingency Plan.

Still Breathing

2005-11-01T13:25:00.000-05:00

I caught a cold. Leave it to me to wait until the city air becomes all fragrant and sweet to lose my sense of smell. Hmph. (I have a few theories about that, by the way: one is that the companies that supply us all with halloween candy were going into crazy-production mode and the sugary scent was wafting out all over; the other is that we set our clocks so far back that we went right by 2 am of 10/30 and landed on 2 am on 4/1, and the city responded with a really great April Fool's Day joke.) Neither The Advocate nor I smelled the maple syrup, by the way, and her sense of smell is still in good working order, so possibility number three is that the emperor is naked.

Sick little girls aren't permitted to go to work and make other people sick, and as such, I am not at work this morning. I probably ought to spend my time researching for my next paper, or preparing for my next presentation, but I miss blogging, and I've let over a month go by without updating, so that's enough of an excuse to blow off work to blog for a while. Enough of an excuse for me, anyway. Oh, and if that isn't enough, Graham and his fellow masochists are beginning the annual ritual known as National Noggin-Wringing Month today, so I figure my writing can be a show of solidarity. (Yay, authors! Write write write!! Wra wra wra!) Maybe next year The Advocate will participate also. She has a good idea, but she just doesn't want to mess it up by writing it down, and I can sympathize with that fear (why do you think it takes me so darn long to write papers?) but I think she might gain more satisfaction from writing it than not writing it at all.

So many bloggable bits of news since last I posted. I finished up a few posts from the summer that had been languishing in the indefinite limbo of roughdraftiness, so now you can read about my trip to the Camden aquarium and about how I still can't think of the title to that one tune (and I still can't). Earth-shattering stuff, I know, but they were sitting there bothering me with their unfinishedness, and now they're done.

Remember how I said I work in a dance shoe store? We're open every day, including Sundays. On Sundays we're open from noon till 6. People don't quite believe that a small business like ours could be opened on Sundays, even in New York, and so on one particular Sunday, all day long, would-be dance shoe buyers were calling us to ask if we were open, and if so, until what hour. It became very repetitive:

Phone: Me! Me! Pay attention to me!
Employee: Hello, this is Dance Shoe Store?
[pause]
Employee: Yes.
[pause]
Employee: 6 o'clock.
[pause]
Employee: Thank you, good bye.

over and over again. So at one point after just taking my seventh (I counted) are-you-open-today phone call, I said to Luna, my co-worker, "Okay, next time I answer the phone I'm going to answer it with, 'Thank you for calling Dance Shoe Store. We are open today from noon till 6 pm. We are located at 123 Sesame St. in Manhattan, New York. If you would like to speak to a representative, please press one.' " Luna didn't respond with much more than a smile, that being her nature, but I suspect she was quietly disapproving, and maybe she was right, but I really wanted to see what would happen. Less than a minute later:

Phone: Me! Me!
Me: [pause, deep breath] Thank you for calling Dance Shoe Store. We are open today from 12 noon until 6 o'clock pm. We are located at 123 Sesame St. in Manhattan, New York. If you would like to speak to a representative, please press one.
Other end of phone: [garbled chatter] [beep]
Me (switching tones of voice): Hello, Dance Shoe Store?
Other end: Hello? Hello? Are you open today?
Me: We're open till 6 pm.
Other end: Okay, where are you located?

I don't know if that counts as a successful experiment or a failure, but it was definitely worth it.

I've also been wanting to write about this odd little compendium of experiences that I've been amassing since I left rabbinic school. First, as I already mentioned several months ago, I was tapped to officiate at my friends' wedding. That was ironic enough all by itself. Secondly, a few months after I agreed to officiate the wedding, my friend Rob, who recently became a father, asked me to perform his daughter's naming ceremony, and boy do I feel underqualified, but I said yes because he is my friend and I think it's important that his daughter have a naming ceremony, though I'm not sure I can justify that opinion yet beyond saying that when she's older, she might want to look at pictures of her naming ceremony in the photo album or something, and there ought to be pictures for her to see. Thirdly, I was sitting at Cuny's library's computer bank typing an e-mail after my British Moral Philosophy class, and some guy came up to the computer bank, sat down at the computer across from me, and blurted out, "How do I become Jewish?" I stammered out the name of West End Synagogue's rabbi, their phone number, and the free beginning Hebrew classes offered through Manhattan Jewish Experience. Apparently this guy is a Puerto Rican Roman Catholic, but his cousin is marrying into a Jewish family, and he wants to make his home welcoming to them (go him), so actually he's not sure if he wants to convert or if he just wants to learn a whole bunch of stuff about the religion, but he decided that the best way to do it would be to ask the random girl at the computer in Cuny's library. Now granted, I look nothing if not Jewish, especially in the hat and curls, but still! Random girl in the library! And apparently I'm the first person he's ever asked. I am not making this up.

It's just weird, because I really don't think there's anything intrinsic about me that exudes rabbi, and that it's only the fact that I was in rabbinic school that caused people to associate me with rabbinicality (which has maybe a little to do with why I'm doing something else now), and yet I keep on finding myself in situations where I have to do rabbi-type stuff. It's weird, the way it follows me around. This could either mean I really ought to go right back to rabbinic school because I'm clearly destined to be doing this kind of stuff for the rest of my life anyway and I might as well do it professionally so I can be really good at it, or it could mean that I'm going to have the opportunity to do this stuff anyway whether I go to school for it or not, so there's no need to go to school for it, and I can go ahead and leave school without having any fear of losing my chance to do that sort of stuff throughout life. Or, of course, it could mean that the rabbinical aura is just taking a while to dissipate. :)

The last thing I've had on my mind is a piece about justice and benevolence, but that one I think I'll put in a separate post.

Screaming Beacons

2005-09-12T00:36:00.000-04:00

I didn't know about the beacons. Everyone who's been living here must have seen them every year since 2002, but I only discovered them tonight, as I walked westward on my way home. It was around 11:30 pm and I saw a searchlight to the west, a bit fuzzy and indistinct, but streaming straight upward. I had my guesses, but a quick call to Rob confirmed my suspicions: it's a 9/11 memorial, two search lights (though they looked like one from my angle) shining up from where the twin towers stood. There was a guy sitting on his front steps and gazing out at them contemplatively while he smoked a cigarette, and I found the mood was contagious. I kept walking north and west toward the beacons, right past my apartment and on toward 5th ave, and then 4th, drifting around in search of a point where I could gaze at them without the intrusive halogen streetlamps dimming their announcement. I wanted to see them pop out against the night sky, searing blue-white against clouded velvet, but there were too many visual distractions between us for them to hit me at full strength. I was sure they'd be extinguished at midnight, and was at least hoping to see them as they winked out (and, if I was quick enough, to catch the ripple of darkness that would ascend from the horizon up to the stars as they did) but midnight came and passed, and then it was 12:03, and then 12:05 and they were still shouting upward, and no sign of needing to pause for breath. I turned around and walked back home, glancing at them occasionally over my shoulder. They were following me, just as the moon follows nighttime travellers. I can see them out my window as I type this, and I like to imagine them as candles, keeping watch over the city until dawn in solemn vigil.

Unstopping the Press

2005-09-05T00:49:00.000-04:00

Dear Carrie~, Beard Mutterer, and Anyone Else who Thought I was Going Back to Plan my Own Wedding,

Look, I know I'm not exactly the sort of blogger who runs to post every time her hair grows another inch, but give me a *little* credit here: just because I'm not posting doesn't mean I'm running off and eloping behind your backs. Honestly, you really think I'd let something like my own engagement go by without, at the very least, a post announcing my change of status? You know me better than that. An event that significant, and you know I'd be teasing out every detail and over-describing every plot point ("and then he began to roll up his trouser leg in preparation for kneeling down, although I didn't realize what was happening at the time, because I was busy admiring the trouser fabric, which was a lightweight chocolate-colored wool--an interesting choice for summertime, I remember thinking--and a bit wrinkled, but what do you expect from someone who's been on horseback all day?"), all to craft an overly lengthy play-by-play account, complete with too much background, too little action, excessive punctuation, and a whole mess of punchlines that don't punch. Now, do you see a long play-by-play account of the circumstances under which I was the happy recipient of a marriage proposal? I didn't think so. You may now safely conclude that I am not planning to be married in the immediate future.

In other news, I went to see a movie last night, I'm working part-time in a dance shoe store, and my hair has grown another inch.

Love,
Miriam

P.S. If I *were* engaged, and I wanted to keep it a secret, a. I probably wouldn't mention it on my blog, and b. I probably wouldn't tell you about it, even if you asked, because then it wouldn't be a secret anymore, would it?

The gleeful sensation of anticipation

2005-09-01T17:39:00.000-04:00

Not to be all vomitously Pollyannaish at you, but I'm very happy right now. I just came out of the first meeting of a class on the history of human rights, which looks awesome (I'm especially looking forward to the part where we talk about the cultural relativists v. the universalists, as that's my current pet topic) with a professor in the political science dept. who is tiny like an owl and has a gravelly voice and presides over her class with all the authority of Queen Elizabeth I. Even her name is excellent: her first name is the name of a stone but it also implies absolute insistance, and her last name is sort of like the word polit. It fits her perfectly. And on Tuesday I had two classes, one on British Moral Philosophy taught by a well-preserved relic who, at the beginning of class, gave (gave!) us all a copy of Leviathan with an introduction he wrote, which he warned us is all wrong, but (he explained) he didn't discover how wrong he was until after he was almost finished writing it, and by that time it would be a shame to waste all that work...but it just goes to show, he added, that it's possible to argue for a wrong position and still do it convincingly. He won my instant admiration. Oh yeah, and the other class I had on Tuesday is on the history of science from a sociological perspective, and the professor didn't impress me so much, but I can complain about him later. And the thing that excites me most of all is that I am going to begin very soon to tutor a student who is 7 years old and is behind in his reading skills (i.e. he's currently able to read books with one word per page, and this is an effort) and it'll be my job to excite him about reading. I seriously can't wait. I want to bring him Dr. Seuss, and maybe Go Dog Go, and some of the other books I remember loving when I was first learning to read. Soon I shall go and procure for myself a library card from the vast NY Public Library, whose main branch is like 7 blocks north of CUNY's graduate campus (leaping distance) to explore their children's section. And now I am going to a meet-your-colleagues party for the other students in the Masters of Arts in Liberal Studies program, and then tonight there's a swing dance. Oh! And I'm coming back to California for a quick weekend visit and some wedding planning on September 9th, and then coming back again for another (unrelated) wedding a month later. I get to see my California family!!

I shall have to work very hard to not burst.

No title.

2005-08-12T08:46:00.000-04:00

I'm still looking for the title of that common folky tune that's had me baffled since Sunday. I have made progress, though; I realized I was remembering about half of it wrong. Here's the corrected version, in sheet music form. Anyone recognize it now?

The reason I am allowing myself to be so plagued by this is that I have conscious awareness going spare, because I'm occupying myself with that most marvelously tedious activity, Packing. I am steadily putting away almost all my worldly possessions into the boxes I've been very conveniently finding cast off around the exterior of my apartment complex. The rest of the stuff I am putting up for adoption. My room is even more of an innavigable mess than usual. It's a good thing I don't own very much.

Jack-in-the-Pulpit has very graciously offered to transport my things and me to Brooklyn in his vehicle, and so on Sunday all the things that haven't been fedexed to my new address will be packed into his truck, after which we will have a merry ride to Park Slope together, probably spending the time discussing the ethics of using genetic engineering in the agricultural industry (on which he has deep convictions and can argue convincingly) and playing Hinky Pinky, no, I mean the rhyming game. Not only can he hold his own in word games and ethics debates, but he also swing dances, plays the flute, and sculpts, among other things, and he lives two doors down from me. It's been nice having a neighbor who is also a friend, and I wish I'd taken more frequent advantage of the proximity. I'd be sorry to leave Philadelphia for his sake, but he's moving also, to Eugene, so there you are. Or there I am.

Things I Do When I'm Bored

2005-08-08T14:30:00.000-04:00

I missed a train yesterday and had to wait an hour for the next one, so without a book or a stranger to pass the time, I thought I'd call some friends I hadn't spoken to in months, whose real-life last name is Lockett. They didn't answer, though, so I sang this into their answering machine:

Locketts, even speedier than
Rocketts; you can put 'em in your
Pocketts, and it'll cure the Strepto-
Coccus virus
Locketts, like electrical
Socketts; not even {curly
Brahcketts} can hold the power of
Locketts.

The train still hadn't come, so I started putting together the verse that would logically follow:

Latkes, cooking in the
Potkes, floating like a
Yacht does, when the oil is
Hot, cuz of physics
Latkes, with a couple double
Vodkas, and they're never gonna
Rot, cuz everybody gobbles
Latkes.

Shortly afterward the train came, and soon after that I met my friend Jack-in-the-Pulpit, who informed me that Streptococcus is a bacterium, not a virus. Drat.

As for the melody I used, I know it's something stupid like an ad jingle or a kid's jumprope song, but I can't for the life of me remember what it is. At the risk of taking myself too seriously, though, I've tried to devise a simple notation system so that you can get an idea of how it sounds.

The key is F Major, the meter is 4/4.
| is a measure line,
. is an eighth rest,
x is an eighth note, and
- means you should hold the previous note for another eighth beat.
The space in the middle of each measure is just there to make it easier to read.

Locketts, even speedier than
|f--- d---|..ff fdfg|

Rocketts; you can put 'em in your
|f--- c---|..cc ddcc|

Pocketts, and it'll cure the Strepto-
|c--- e---|.ccc ddcc|

Coccus virus
|c--- f---|.... g-f-|

Locketts, like electrical
|f--- d---|..ff fdf-|

Socketts; not even curly
|f--- c---|.ccc d-c-|

Brahcketts can hold the power of
|c--- e---|.ccc dde-|

Locketts.
|g--- f---|.... ....|

Latkes, cooking in the
|f--- d---|.... fdfg|

Potkes, floating like a
|f--- c---|.... ddcc|

Yacht does, when the oil is
|c--- e---|..cc ddc-|

Hot, cuz of physics
|c--- f---|..f- g-f-|

Latkes, with a couple double
|f--- d---|..ff fdfg|

Vodkas, and they're never gonna
|f--- c---|..cc ddcc|

Rot, cuz everybody gobbles
|c--- e---|..cc ddee|

Latkes.
|g--- f---|.... ....|

If you can figure out my notation system and you recognize the melody, and you tell me what song it's based on, I will write you an equally profound song based on your name. Oh the incentive.

Augmented Sixths and Diminished Retention

2005-08-05T00:47:00.000-04:00

I have a job!...ish. When I came back from Tokio tonight, I had an e-mail waiting for me saying that the NY tutoring agency with which I interviewed last week is taking me on as one of their tutors. At this point I guess it just depends on how many students are referred to me. Yeah...actually, I'm not quite sure how that part will work, but at least I have passed Stage One, and for that I am all grins and relief. It was kind of funny, though...for my interview I was asked to prepare a lesson "on anything", and so since music theory was the thing I've been tutoring most recently, and since it's so concrete and so darn cool, I put together (with Graham's patient guidance...it's good to have someone helping who both thinks clearly and is not inside my head) a little lesson on augmented 6th chords. The interview had three components--presenting that lesson, taking a practice SAT test, and submitting a writing sample, which I e-mailed him separately. Apparently, it was mainly the way I taught the lesson that convinced him to hire me, because he says my scores on the practice SAT test show that I'll need some work (but he also said that everyone needs work on that, which was nice, though not necessarily true), and he also said he still hasn't read my writing sample. What could have impressed him, then, if not the lesson on augmented sixths? The ironic thing is that I don't think that lesson actually stuck, because in his e-mail, he wrote,

"...you did an excellent job with the augmented fourth chords...".

Oh well. Maybe the people paying overly high hourly rates for lessons will be able to retain the material for over a week.

Current Music: Dance Me to the End of Love, Madeleine Peyroux
...quite possibly the most velvet swing song I've ever danced to at Tokio. I just wish I'd done it justice with my dancing. Instead, I snatched it from some anonymous filesharer when I got home tonight. I will send it to you if you wish. It smolders of Paris.

Damn.

2005-08-02T19:38:00.000-04:00

While school was in session, I had something requiring me to bike for a good twenty minutes (usually as quickly as possible because I was late), occasionally up hills, twice a day all week. I enjoy the feeling of generating my own endorphins on a regular basis without having to worry about what sort of other work I really ought to be doing instead, because, well, I can't not go to school, right? But now that it's summer and I don't have somewhere twenty minutes away where I need to be every morning, I've been biking up and down Forbidden Drive almost daily, as soon as I can forklift myself out the door and onto my bike. It's lovely, not just because Forbidden Drive is impossibly beautiful in a rainforesty sort of a way, but also because when I bike around the streets of Mt. Airy or Germantown, riddled as they are with traffic lights, stop signs, and archaeological excavation sites*, I don't often have the opportunity to go for long stretches without having to brake. On Forbidden Drive, however, even though parts of it are rocky and/or covered in gravel, much of it is packed dirt, which is lovely for biking, and for the most part, the "traffic" around me responds quickly and courteously to phrases like "on your left". Best of all, the hour and a quarter or so it takes me to bike from home into one entrance of the drive over to the other end and back the way I came is just right for one listen-through of my latest compilation of favorites on CD (yes, I still use a discman, because no, I don't have an iPod, please be quiet), which pound out exactly the sort of music that reminds me to ask whether I'm really exerting myself as much as I can. When you're peddling through quasi-rainforest and listening to (dare I admit it?) Belly of the Whale, Bahn Frei, Dragostei din Tei, or Harder Better Faster Stronger, even hauling yourself uphill can be fun and exciting.

I may have mentioned this before, but it bears repeating: I really like biking. My beloved vehicle, Mercury (who is almost a year old today, by the way) is small and black and low to the ground and transports me everywhere. There are gold reflectors on his pedals, and the helmet is bright yellow with a death-repelling (thank you, Talitha) rearview mirror on the side, and I imagine them to be golden winged sandals and hat, respectively, when I'm feeling fanciful. Sometimes I grow sappily amazed at the simplicity of it all: I just hop onto the seat and extend my leg, and forward I zip. A day or two ago, while I was riding down to Kelly Drive to bike into Center City, I was thinking to myself how I've really never been in a bike accident, nor even fallen from my bike and hurt myself. Considering how much biking I do, that must mean I'm a really good biker. Yay for me, I thought.

And now you know exactly what's coming, but I'm going to drag it out anyway.

Yesterday was Monday, which means I had rapper rehearsal, and was to meet Squirrel at 6:45 at her place, where she'd lock my bike up in her garage and we'd ride to rehearsal together, where we'd practice making interesting figures with flexible metal strips while working to keep our footwork synchronized. It's good fun. Today we were going to pull out the mat and work on flips. I'd been busy in the morning, so the bike ride was delayed, and it wasn't until 5:15 that I finally set out, with my rapper shoes, a bottle of water, and an extra shirt keeping my discman company in my backpack. I'd made it to the far end of the drive in record time--about four songs per five miles, so maybe 15 mph--and had already passed Valley Green Inn, the midpoint, and had covered around half of the final quarter, peddling to the beat and singing along to Are You Out There, because I didn't think there was anyone around to hear and think me odd. The next song was Scary Kisses, which is not my favorite song musically, but it's good at reminding me not to let my pace flag. Baby I want scary kisses/ I want hits and I want misses... Right before the bridge that takes you across the Wissahickon and spits you out on Kitchen's Lane, there's a hill which requires some concentration to negotiate, because it slopes down and curves to the right at the same time, and it's rather rough and rocky. The city park workers sprinkle coarse gravel on the road to try to fill in the divots of negative space created by the stubbornly protruding rocks, but usually that just results in making the already-rough surface rougher, besides giving bike tires less purchase. However, on the outside of the curve, just alongside the fence separating the road from the creek, there's a corridor perhaps six inches wide that tends to escape the rocky-protrusions-and-coarse-gravel fate and offers a precious ribbon of nice friendly packed earth. On the way uphill, I'm usually going pitifully slowly enough that it doesn't make much difference whether I get jolted by the rocks or not, but on the way down, I try to find the smoothest path possible so I don't have to brake too hard and don't put myself in danger of skidding. For this reason, the left edge of the road is prime real estate, but slightly risky, because here in the US, even bikers and walkers expect to pass oncoming traffic by the left shoulder. Fortunately, it's possible to see if anyone's coming around the curve and to make any necessary adjustments before picking up too much speed. The other two features that make this bit of road challenging to negotiate are the length and shape of the curve: it always feels like it takes just a little too long before the curve straightens out; and about halfway through, the road starts turning a bit more sharply to the right. If you're already on the rocky gravelly right side of the road or in the middle, as a good biker should be, and there's no one coming from the opposite direction, then you can allow yourself to drift leftward to the outside of the curve to make your own path less sharply curved *and* less riddled with rocks, and all this can be done with minimal braking, but you end up having to go over some of the roughest patch of the entire hill, which isn't comfortable for someone riding a suspension-free bike such as Mercury. However, if you're on the left already because you coveted early on the gravel-free ribbon, then you have a few choices: 1. follow the road and turn more sharply with it, but without braking, hoping the combination of your increasing speed, your decreasing radius, and the increasing gravel quotient won't make you fall (but you do this daily and you haven't fallen yet); 2. follow the road and turn more sharply with it, as above, but brake a little to slow your descent, and hope you won't skid and fall because of the combination of braking and going over gravel (but just stay low and keep balancing, and you'll be fine); or 3. give up, keep going at the radius you've already established, and crash into the wooden fencing (braking is optional).

So I was pounding away on the pedals, and the song was pounding away in my head. And if you give me safety/ In a short time I'll be driven crazy/ I would rather run and fall/ Than take no chance at all... I guess I usually stay a bit futher to the right than I was this time, because when I reached the point where I had to sharpen my turn, I had to sharpen it a little bit more than usual. Still, when my bike was suddenly tipping over to the right, I was so shocked that I could hardly believe what was happening until I found myself unbiked and leading myself with my right elbow down the chunky-gravel-strewn hill, until the friction between me and the bits of rock drew me to a sliding stop.

What what? Splayed out on the ground? C'mon, Miriam, you never fall! What are you doing down there?

There was a paradigmatically Mt. Airyish couple (think Berkeley, only more WASPy), out for an evening stroll and just about to come up the hill, who witnessed the whole thing. "I'm sure you're okay," the wife said after a moment, "but I just want to check anyway." I couldn't hear her very well, though...why not? Oh, the headphones. And if we break or if we bruise/ It won't be the worst of news/ We will just get up again/ Start over on the count of ten... Stupid song. I pushed myself gingerly away from the ground and unclipped my helmet to yank my headphones off.

"Actually," I said, "that kind of hurt." I straightened up and looked down at myself. My jeans and my faded black Department of Religious Studies t-shirt were both coated with grey dust, which I would have brushed off, but both my palms were scraped and stinging. The left hand was bleeding in a few spots, so that the blood and the dirt were combining to form a lovely paste. What's more, I felt like I had just ingested a mouthful of grit, and wanted to spit, but not in front of the nice couple. My right hip hurt and my right arm stung terribly. I lifted it and discovered a jagged stripe of glistening red running from halfway up my forearm almost to my shoulder. "Oh, you've got an abrasion," the husband said, not coming too close.

"Yeah." I brushed my jeans off a little with my right hand, the one that wasn't bleeding. "Sorry, I'm kind of a mess." More brushing. A cloud of dust was accumulating around me. "I'm like a chalk eraser." I looked at the arm again. Still bleeding, and starting to drip. I felt indecent, being gazed at while being so disgusting. Well, I was disgusted, anyway.

"Is there anything we can do?" the wife asked.

"You don't happen to have a paper towel, do you?"

"No, sorry," she shook her head, "but do you want some water?"

Aha. "Actually, I have some water of my own." I pulled the headphones, whose cord had now become well tangled with the helmet straps, off my neck and wriggled the backpack from my shoulders (struggling not to bleed on it) so I could stuff the helmet-headphone tangle inside and take out the water bottle. I realized the CD had been going all this time, and by now we'd moved beyond Scary Kisses to Elvis Costello, who was telling me about a girl who used to have a carefree mind of her own. I stopped the CD and produced the water bottle. The husband politely stood by while I tried to twist my right arm around so I could pour water on it with my left hand, but I finally gave in and let him do it. The result was that the blood-dust mixture was moistened, but that was about it. He tried again. No good; it would need scrubbing to be cleaned. I decided not to think about that yet.

"How far away do you live?" she asked. "Do you need a ride?"

"Not far," I said. "On Upsal. But I was going to be meeting a friend. I can probably make it to her house; I'm not hurt that badly. I should call to let her know I'll be late, though." I pulled out my phone from my left front pocket, careful not to wipe my left hand against my jeans and embed more dirt in the abrasion. I noticed the time then--it was 6:25. "Ah, crap. I'm gonna be late for my rehearsal."

"What do you play?" the guy asked.

I decided to answer the question he meant to ask instead of the question he asked. "It's a dance rehearsal," I said, and then grimaced at the resulting thought.

"Oh, you're gonna be sore," he said, beating me to it.

"Yeah." I made my phone call, and Badger (Squirrel's husband) said he'd come rescue me at Kitchen's Lane and Wissahickon with some towels and things for cleaning up cuts. It's funny how doing an action as habitual as placing a call on a cell phone can help reground you in reality. It was almost like being in charge of the situation again. While I spoke with Squirrel, the husband went over to examine Mercury.

"You might not be able to ride this," he said when I'd finished. He pointed to the sprung, hinged gear thingie connected to the center of the back wheel that folds the chain backward and keeps it taut. "This piece is bent, and I don't have the strength to fix it." I saw what he meant--it was mashed inward toward the wheel at an ugly angle. Poor Mercury! "Your chain came off, too, and I don't think you'll be able to get it back on as long as this gear isn't lined up." Panic began to creep up. What was I going to do without a bike? "You can still roll it, though, so you shouldn't have a problem taking it up to meet your friend. Do you know where you are? Are you able to get there?"

I could tell they were ready to move on and finish enjoying their walk, and didn't want to keep them. "I'm okay. I can definitely walk the bike up the hill, that's not a problem, and my friends will have bandages and things in the car. We know where we're meeting each other, so it'll be fine. Thanks so much for your help, it's really good of you to have stopped, blah blah blah." It was good of them, but I just wasn't feeling very socially apt at the moment and probably rambled a bit in my desire to get away and not be disgusting in front of strangers any longer. We exchanged names before parting. His was a good Scottish name that stuck in my head. I've forgotten what hers was, though.

I trudged over the bridge and up the hill to Wissahickon Ave, experimenting with various ways to push my bike without letting the handlebars coming into contact with my still-stinging palms. Badger showed up a few minutes after I reached the intersection, and instead of whisking me back to his place or straight on to the rehearsal spot (where I figured I would be doing my cleaning up while the rest of the team began practicing), he stopped the car and nursed me right there on the street, with his gauze, cotton rounds, water, towels, and large bottle of hydrogen peroxide. What, did Bactine never make it to the east coast? I mean, I'm not a wimp about pain, but hydrogen peroxide on a dirt-embedded abrasion is...let me see if I can describe it. First it just feels wet and soothing. Then it feels cool. then it feels cooler, almost icy. Then, as if that chilling represents the stripping away of whatever defenses remained standing between you and your pain sensors, the iciness intensifies and turns itself inside out and becomes fire, and within three seconds my entire arm was in flames. "OH MY GOD THAT HURTS SO MUCH," I remarked, but I held still anyway. Well, I held my arm still. The rest of me danced around waiting for the hydrogen peroxide to be dabbed off.

Badger was a very gentle nurse. After he'd done as much as he could, we loaded the bike onto his bike rack and he drove me back to his and Squirrel's place, where I was whisked up to the bathroom and received another round of nursing by Squirrel and Rabbit, another girl on the team who was also going to be riding to rehearsal in the Squirrelmobile. It was nearly 7 at this point, just past the time when we'd have had to leave to arrive at 7:30, and I felt bad about sabotaging the rehearsal, but Squirrel, who was leading rehearsal that evening, was in no hurry. She and Rabbit tended to me for another ten or fifteen minutes or so, with soap, water, more hydrogen peroxide, a couple of Tylenol and an Alleve (I'm not a fan of drugs, but she insisted), and finally Bacitraycin and oversized gauzy bandages. By the end of it, of course, my right arm looked much worse than it actually was.

Did you know, by the way, that pain can make you feel queasy? I didn't know this. At one point when Squirrel was dabbing at my still-dirty arm with a soapy towel, I looked on in the mirror and said, "I don't think the dirt's going to come out that way; it really needs to be rubbed." Squirrel, not wanting to hurt me, let me do it. I took the towel and rubbed determinedly. Owwwww. I stopped. I gradually realized I didn't feel so well. I put the towel down and hoped it would go away, really not wanting to further disgust Squirrel and Rabbit, after all they'd been doing for me. A wave of nausea crept up and magnified itself. I didn't know how to stop it. My head was firing off pinpricks, which is what happens (I have unfortunately discovered) before I black out. I commanded myself to not black out. "Hm," I said. "I feel kind of nauseous. Nauseated. I mean nauseated. Um. I think I might need to sit down." I sat--or rather, I was sat--on the seat and allowed my head to be placed between my knees. Squirrel told me it's perfectly normal to feel nauseated from the shock (Shock? When did I go into shock?) while Rabbit ran down to get me a cup for water. When she came back, I concentrated on reading the text on the mug while Squirrel finished bandaging my arm so I would have something to think about that wasn't what I was already thinking about. The mug seemed to be a souvenir from Haddonfield, or Hertfordshire, or something. I rambled about Bill Bryson's book, Mother Tongue, and what it says about how people from different parts of the English-speaking world spell and pronounce Hertfordshire, because I was trying to keep myself from blacking out, and it seemed as if the sound of my own voice would help, somehow.

When I was declared finished, we all piled into Squirrel's car and off we went to rapper practice, with Rabbit sitting in back with me to make sure I kept drinking water, at Squirrel's suggestion. I felt so loved. It was around 8:15, which meant we had a remarkably abbreviated rehearsal, but we still got to practice a bit of fooling technique and trade off being posts for flips and actually flipping. Squirrel required that I not flip this time, although it probably would have been fine, but she let me do everything but the actual flip (kicking up as far as possible until just reaching 11:45 or so, but not all the way to 12:00, nor down the other side) and she had us all practice being posts while she and another actually did flip. Gazelle, in whose barn we were rehearsing, stood over on the side and flinched a bit while the rest of us worked on it. Gazelle does not like flips, in much the way that tiggers do not like honey.

On the way back I discovered I could bike after all--it was just a bit squeakier, and Mercury will still need repairs, but he's serviceable for now--and I thanked Squirrel and Badger again and went off to go home, by way of a drug store (I had no bandages or Bacitraycin or anything like that of my own). By the time I'd paid and left, it was quite late, and biking back from the store, I passed two guys, also on bikes, who wanted to play Chicken with me. I didn't budge from my path, and so once I'd passed them, one of them decided it would be fun to chase me down. I tried to speed up, but I was already going uphill besides being exhausted from the events of the evening, and I had no reserves left. From my rearview mirror I could see that he was gaining on me, and I heard him say something like "Hey, come back here!" My fear and frustration and pain inflated like bubblegum out of my throat, and when the bubble popped, I found myself shouting back at him the first thing I could think of to say: "What are you doing?!?" Then I immediately felt inarticulate and stupid, but he dropped back anyway, and I rode the rest of the way home without incident. I wished Jarah had been there instead of off in Massachusetts, because it would have been awfully nice to come in and tell her the whole story.

*Potholes. Philadelphia's are many and longevitous. Squirrel, who grew up in this neighborhood, says the streets have only ever been repaved when there was a mayor running for reelection.

And now, a list.

Things that are now difficult:
1. Putting any article of clothing on my upper body. That includes a backpack.
2. Pondering, because my favorite pondering position is the one where I lean my chin on my knuckles and my elbows on my knees, and the right elbow really doesn't want to be leaned upon right now.
3. Showering. Did you know that to an abrased palm, hydrogen peroxide is indistinguishable from Infusium 23's shampoo? I didn't.
4. Going outside. It's hot and sticky here, and I can choose between going out with bandages visible all up and down my right arm and enduring the attention or going out in long sleeves covering the bandages and enduring the heat and stick...which suggests another answer to that most awesome of riddles: What's brown and sticky? Summer in Philadelphia.
5. Bending my right arm suddenly.
6. Biking. Remember the archaeological excavation sites? There's a colony of them between me and anywhere I want to go, and riding over the jounces on an unsuspended bike is really painful to my right arm. I don't know why, but I have to remove my right hand from the handlebar and steer with my left to avoid the jolts, which is of course bad, because when does a biker need the strongest connection to her bike if not when she's going over joltroad?
7. Getting up the nerve to go back and bike Forbidden Drive again. This is the worst one of all. And I just know that the longer I wait, the harder it's going to be.

Quiet. Like a Fish.

2005-07-29T19:29:00.000-04:00

To celebrate the whole student-on-summer-vacation thing, Rambam and I took a trip to the newly-opened Adventure Aquarium in Camden, NJ. It's probably been ten years since I last visited an aquarium, but when I was younger, we--my family and I--used to go to Monterey's on special occasions, and to San Francisco's all the time. While Rambam and I were planning this one, we were reminiscing about our favorite parts of the SF aquarium. (He used to live there, so he can do that.) I could still remember standing next to Maimone as we peered over the metal bars to look down into the sunken pools where the crocodilians lounged, and him explaining to me how to tell the difference between an alligator and a crocodile (an alligator's snout is broader, and when it closes its mouth, you can't see any of the lower teeth). In that same area, if memory serves, was the giant boa constrictor and the dainty two-headed snake, and in the next hall was the luminescent fish whose light you could see if you pressed a button. I remember liking the seahorses, too. The Monterey Bay Aquarium has its own set of memories--the immense two-story kelp forest with all the schools of fish darting in and out, the stingrays zipping around and around in a shallow basin with all the children gathering around to stroke their backs but carefully avoiding the poisoned barbs on their tails, the chamber of jellyfish with their otherworldly beauty, and I think there was a spot directly connected to the bay itself, where you could stand and watch fish swimming around amid the periodic frothy deposits of fresh waves, with only a pane of glass separating you and them. (I think it was also at the Monterey Bay Aquarium that I stood next to my father amid a dense crowd of people, all of us gawking at an octopus, and I proudly--and loudly--told my dad to look at all the testicles. Of course I realized my mistake a split second after the word escaped my mouth, but the entire crowd had already burst into laughter. That memory I didn't share with Rambam.) Anyway, there was something remarkably organic about the whole experience, as if the glass and the walls and the little explanatory text placards would disappear if you didn't keep an eye on them, and suddenly it would just be you and the fish all together in the water, each utterly vulnerable to the other. I liked those aquariums.

I liked Camden's aquarium too. Camden's seemed a bit less organic and a bit more like it was the Broadway show of aquariums, but if they were putting on a show, it was a good one, with plenty of showstopping moments that made me start in surprise and delight. I expected seahorses, for example, but I didn't expect the seadragons. For a moment I didn't even realize they were living, because they were surrounded by leafy plants that resembled their own...appendages (what are those things, anyway?) and I didn't expect to have to look for motion from the vegetation, but once I switched to interpreting it as an animal rather than as a plant, I was entranced.

Other things I didn't expect included the eels, with their disconcerting habit of hanging out in crevices with their front portion sticking out and their mouths open, as if they had such an extreme sense of entitlement that they just expected dinner to swim right in. I was also surprised by the seals and the penguins in their outdoor playgrounds. It was mercilessly hot that day, but I forgot the heat while I watched the seals rolling off rocks and slipping into their cool watery playground and imagined how good it would feel to hop the fence and do the same.

One of the most dramatic parts was the giant two-stories-high chamber with movie-theater-style seating and surround-walls where you can practically watch an entire ecosystem swim around in their choreographed marine ballet, complete with a sea turtle prima ballerina, some supporting stingrays, a corps de ballet of flickering tuna, and two diver stagehands swimming around in the background keeping everything flowing smoothly.

At the last minute, when we thought we'd seen everything, we discovered the wing of the aquarium on the other side of the cafeteria, where they keep the hippos, the sharks, and the jellyfish. I had no idea hippos were so playful. One of them was quite a performer, and seemed to enjoy propelling herself out of the water and hurtling back into it with a mighty splash, just for the effect it created in her audience. It was also fun to watch them swim round in circles with their bellies skimming the inside of the glass walls. They really are remarkably balletically graceful in the water, but of course on land it's all lumber and waddle. I have to admit, I feel a kinship with them--when I'm on the dance floor I (usually) manage to keep my balance and move in time to the music and stuff, but off the dance floor I'm pretty embarrassingly clumsy. Maybe I'll adopt the hippo as my totem animal.

I realize I owe a great deal of my enjoyment and fascination to the Rambam's catalystic contagious enthusiasm. I think I would forget how much I like communing with interesting fish without someone else there to remind me by openly and unselfconsciously enjoying it himself.

By far the most frustrating part of the day is that one of the pieces of music they piped into the aquarium (oh yes, the aquarium had a soundtrack...I told you it felt like a show) sounded nigglingly familiar, in a John Williamsy sort of way, but I couldn't place it at all. We even asked at the gift shop, but not only do they not sell the CDs of the aquarium soundtrack, but they couldn't even tell us what the music was. Someday I'll figure it out, I suppose, but in the meantime I'm adding it to the list.

Current Music: WQXR is playing something by Mozart.

Guess who's moving to Park Slope?

2005-07-20T23:00:00.000-04:00

My new roommate as of 8/15/2005, whom I shall call The Advocate, wrote me this afternoon to offer me the room she's renting. Yessssss. After several weeks of searching, I'm very very happy to have secured the place I wanted most, where I'll be living with the only person who wrote an ad in such a way that I instantly liked her. I'll probably write something else later about why I like her so much already and why I'm so excited to be moving to Park Slope, but now is not that time. Now is the time for something different.

I'm going to be leaving RRC temporarily, or perhaps permanently, to pursue a masters degree in bioethics at CUNY's graduate center, which is why I'm moving to Brooklyn in--egad--three weeks. Yikes, that's very soon. I guess I should think about collecting boxes and starting to pack.

Why leave RRC? Ultimately, I want to be in a position in which I can act as a guide for people who are in morally muddy situations as they try to figure out what they ought to do. This is exactly the sort of thing I've really been thinking I'd be able to do as a rabbi. The funny thing is that while I really love the Reconstructionist theology and it makes oodles of sense to me--far more sense than any theology offered by any other denomination of Judaism--the manner in which it's being implemented now (as opposed to thirty years ago) is so post-modern and post-halachic and post-realist that they practically don't believe in right answers any longer, but I do. Today's Reconstructionist tends to view the world as a tangled mess upon which it is her job to superimpose her own vision of order and meaning, whereas I tend to go around digging through the tangled mess in hopes of finding its inherent order and meaning. Jarah said once that mine is a much more religious approach because I'm asserting some sort of faith in the idea that there *is* order and meaning already there, whereas Today's Reconstructionist takes it as a given that there isn't any, and never was. Maybe she's right, and maybe my whole truth-truth-truth worldview ultimately rests upon blind faith born of an emotional attachment to an idea that I just don't want to relinquish. To be honest, even trying to consider the idea of there being no objective reality at all makes my shoulders stiffen with anxiety. Maybe Today's Reconstructionist is more evolved than I am, and in fact the only truth is that there is none. I can't exactly disprove the notion. It's just that it doesn't make any sense to me, where as my objective-reality-based worldview does. Make sense to me, I mean. So RRC and I are taking temporary, or perhaps permanent, leave of each other because of philosophical differences.

So why bioethics? Well, I haven't met a bioethical issue yet that hasn't slurped me in with its intoxicating combination of a need for rasor-sharp religiophilosophical distinctions and life-and-death urgency. It's applied philosophy at its best. I don't mean to suggest that I have all the answers, but I do think (believe (hope)) that I have the capacity to understand the weight of the various sides of each issue, and that I'll be able to contribute, eventually, sophisticated suggestions about how to proceed in specific cases. Obviously, this sort of work is attractive to someone who believes in right answers even in the trickiest of situations, or at least in the existence of a best answer that becomes visible to the diligent and creative searcher. I don't know if I'm mentally capable of finding them, but at any rate I've learned enough about the movement that I now realize I wouldn't really be called upon, even, to search for them if I were working as a Reconstructionist rabbi.

My latest hero is a lady named Nancy Dubler who taught a course at Drisha's Winter Week of Learning last December. She's in charge of the ethics program at a hospital in the Bronx, and she wrote a book called Bioethics Mediation about the sort of clinical one-case-at-a-time kind of work that I think I'd like to do, in which you go into a hospital room and meet the patient and the family, or if the patient's comatose, you just meet the family, and you learn what's going on and why nobody can agree upon what to do, and you try to lend clarity to the situation and give some sound advice. Of course in this process there is also going to be some counseling involved, especially when family members disagree over who has the clearest understanding of the patient's best interests, which is why the book was called Bioethics Mediation. Dubler has her J.D. from Harvard, so she can give official legal advice as well as being a sensitive counselor, and it makes me wonder whether I should be looking at law schools while I'm at CUNY. It's certainly been suggested before, by family and friends as well as near-strangers who have heard me stubbornly arguing a point, but I never really took it seriously. I tend to think of law school as insurmountably difficult, but I'd be willing to be wrong.

So now you know. Next step is to compose a letter to RRC's e-mail announcement list and let them know I won't be back next year. That's going to be a delicate task.

Current Music: Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto

My Plate Runneth Over

2005-07-15T02:08:00.000-04:00

Hi.

I've stated from time to time that this blog is more for my own amusement than anyone else's, which is a useful way of reminding myself not to get all show-off-ish, nor to to beat myself up for not posting, but I guess I'm momentarily going to act counter to that mission statement for the sake of making a public service announcement.

I'm not dead. Not even a little bit. I just have a whole lot of stuff on my plate right now, most notably the search for a new place to live and the other search for a job to allow me to keep the place once I find it. (Yes, it's true, I have to leave my beloved Jarah, and it makes me all teary.) And of course, once I find an ad that holds potential, I have to compose an informative, concise, friendly e-mail carefully crafted to respond directly to the poster's original ad, convincing them of why they want me for their employee/roommate, all without sounding like I'm trying to hard (aye, there's the rub). So after long hours of doing that, I've usually had enough of sitting at a computer and reading and writing, and I'm remarkably unready to remain seated and write a long bloggy post in classic (i.e. expansive and overly detailed) Miriam style.

So that's what I'm doing and that's why I've not been posting about my wonderful awesome fantastic blissful trip to the UK with Graham, nor even about anything else. Besides, Graham went on a blogblitz and threw all the pictures and all the stories, and even all the limericks, up onto his blog within a day or two of his returning home (and mad props to him for that) so I figure almost everyone who knows about my blog knew about his long before, or at least knows about it now, and reads it, so I didn't think I'd need to worry about people wondering whether I arrived back safely from the UK.

Except today, at Tokio, I saw the King of Prussia for the first time since returning from the trip, and for a guy who's usually remarkably chill and laid back, he seemed particularly excited to see me. Why? Because in spite of the rational side of his head telling him it was ridiculous, he thought maybe I'd perished in the bombings. (He was "bummed", he said. For the sake of my own fragile ego I am pretending he was demonstrating his skill with understatement.) Not only that, but he'd also already made it through the five-stage grief process, he said, and now he had to go and undo all his hard work...only to have to go through it all over again when I move away. Apparently the ungrieving process is 5-fold too, because even by the end of the night, he was still in denial that I hadn't died.

What made it even worse for me was that I'd been thinking about calling or e-mailing him to find out why he wasn't out dancing the Thursday before, when Graham was here in Philly and we both went to Tokio, but I never actually called him. If I had, I could have saved him a lot of grief, and realizing this, I felt terrible. And he doesn't read this, because he's vaguely antiblog or something, which I understand because I was that way too for a long time, but I just want to throw this up there in case there's someone else out there who does read this and is currently sitting shiva for me or whatever. Once more: I'm not dead. I'm just busy. Thank you for caring.

Current Music: Too Darn Hot (still in my head from being played at Tokio tonight)

Aww.

2005-05-08T11:38:00.000-04:00

My apartment complex has a large courtyard surrounded on three sides by buildings. The fourth side is opened to the street. The courtyard is basically one giant lawn divided up by concrete paths leading from the street to the various buildings, and there are two children who regularly ride their bikes around the paths. I'm on the fourth floor, but these children--especially the girl--has a powerful pair of lungs, and when I'm working at my computer I get to hear every one of her little announcements, her bossy remarks to the other kid, her demands on her parents (one of whom is always out there with her), and whatever else she shouts out for the benefit of the rest of the apartment-dwellers. This is what I overheard this morning.

Kid: Mommy!
...
Kid: Moooooommy!!
Mom (peevishly): What?
Kid: I love you!

Current Music: Noah Built the Ark (Talitha's version) (in my head)

Catablogging

2005-04-28T14:32:00.001-04:00

The rabbinate is kind of an unusual pursuit, and sometimes, after spending a lot of time around rabbis-to-be, I can forget how the rest of the world sees, or doesn't see, us. That's one of the reasons why I make sure to go out and do things I like that are unrelated to rabbinical school whenever I can. It's good to get out of my little niche-ish RRC community. Of course, leaving that one to shove myself into the equally niche-ish Philly dance scene is arguably not much of an improvement, but whatever, I like dancing, and at least there, I'm surrounded by people who come from all different religious backgrounds. Of course, when strangers meet and they want to be social, they usually start by expressing polite curiosity about the other person, and sooner or later the question of what I do is going to surface. And then I have to share. As gentle as I try to be, it's always a little awkward, because most people have no idea what to do with the words "I'm a rabbinical student." They almost always react in one of the following ways.

1. Women can do that?

2. Oh, I met this woman rabbi once, do you know her?

3. I have this Jewish friend...

4. Oh, so you're Jewish?

5. [pause] Wow. [backing away] That's a...big commitment. [Meaning: "Oh, so you're celibate?"]

6. I think God is.../I think organized religion is.../In my church, we.../I'm an atheist because...

7. Where's your beard, hahahaha.

8. Hey, a dancing rabbi, hahahaha.

9. Is that why you have those little side curls?

10. Medical school?

I seeeeeeee you. :)

2005-04-14T15:32:00.000-04:00

*waves to the nice morris dancers*

Hi, new people. Thanks for visiting. Have fun at Neffa? Feel free to leave a comment telling me who you are, what you dance, whether we've met in real life, etc. I'm a curious girl.

Maybe I should do a morris post in honor of the new link...but considering I missed rapper practice this week and the last show I danced in was the end of March, I might have to dredge up an old story instead of offering a recent one.

Also, Outside Caperers, I was tickled to see my remark on your testimonial page. If I had known I was going to be quoted, I would have been more effusive. But as long as I'm here (there?) I would like to mention that that was the first time I used the kicks-my-vestigial-coccyx phrase in writing. (If I remember correctly, I made it up just for you guys. You're that cool.)

According to Google, it's the only time anyone has used the phrase on a website, ever. But what does Google know.

Milk!

2005-04-06T23:25:00.000-04:00

The true sign that it's finally Spring is not that I can bike to school in the morning without gloves, nor that I can bike home at 4:30 without squinting into the sun, nor even that I have to start putting on sunscreen again. No, the true sign of spring is that I can bike to the drug store wearing only my thinnest t-shirt and light cotton trousers, at 9:30 pm, and not freeze. Yay for not freezing!! After this long awful disgusting winter, it is a fantastic feeling to realize that even though it's already completely dark, it's still 69 degrees F. Wow, what a beautiful day.

I just bought the audio version of A Short History of Nearly Everything, on The Wizard's strong recommendation, and he was absolutely right. Bill Bryson totally deadpans some of the funniest lines, which, I think, is part of why I like it so much. The Wizard had mentioned to me that the description of the universe's size is particularly funny, but even with that warning, it snuck up on me and caught me offguard, and I still laughed. It's curious adjusting to reading with my ears. I have to focus more than I usually do when I read with my eyes, because the words come at me linearly, and it takes a little more effort to reread a missed word.

The reason I was going out to the drug store at 9:30 pm is that I am burning a copy of it for the King of Prussia, who often drives me home from swing dances, and who likes listening to audio books, and who just had a birthday a few days ago. For some reason I couldn't convince iTunes to burn an mp3 cd, which was kinda surprising (Are my settings wrong? Is it an embedded anti-copyright-violation precaution? I am mystified) so instead, I had to burn 5 audio cds, which are much more cumbersome to handle when you're trying to drive and dj at the same time, but I don't know how else to do it. Anyway, I ran out of blank cds partway through and had to buy more.

So, I bike to the Walgreens in downtown Germantown, and I lock my bike up to a bus stop sign growing slanted out of the sidewalk (heliotropic?) and this portly middle-aged guy dressed in a 70s paisley polyester button-down shirt and some heavy gold jewelry (tacky, but not threatening) who seems to be trying to hawk something whose name I can't quite distinguish (Acky?), glances over at my bike and offers to put it in his van and drive me somewhere. Nice of him to offer, but I tell him I'm just going in for a few minutes and then I'm biking home. So I go in and get my CDRs and come back out. He's still there, seated in his metal folding chair just outside the automatic doors, and when I reemerge, he looks up and asks if I'm ready to put my bike in his van yet.

Me: No thanks, I'm just biking home.
Him: Where do you live?
Me (intentionally ambiguous): Just about a mile away. Near the train station. [There are lots of train stations around here.]
Him: A *mile*!
Me: It's not that far.
Him: Well, you should come talk to me sometime.
Me: ...what was it you were selling earlier?
Him: Selling? Oh, I'm a taxi driver. [Me, to myself: Taxi!! Not Acky!] That's my taxicab 'round the corner. I'm selling rides, is what I'm selling.
Me: Oh.
Him: You should come talk to me sometime, baby! We could go have a couple drinks or something.
Me (grinning): Thanks. I don't drink.
Him (not missing a beat): Milk!

It's amazing how uncreepy someone becomes, just by being witty. I did not go have a couple of milks with him, but I did have something to laugh about while I rode home wearing a t-shirt at 9:35 pm.

Aha, and one more unrelated thing: Nesheekah just called, and I am going to see They Might Be Giants with her and her sweetie at the Stone Pony on May 13th. Yay!

Current Music: Tommy the Canexican, Eddie From Ohio

Poisson d'Avril and the Ultimate Self-Parody

2005-04-01T14:30:00.000-05:00

For anyone who hasn't done it yet, go check out Google's homepage, and click on the new link that doesn't look familiar. I was looking forward to finding out what they were going to do this year, and I am not disappointed. The FAQs are the best part.

Current Music: The Cause, Raceway4

The Orientation Song, or, The Twelve Theses

2005-03-23T18:38:00.000-05:00

There's something remarkably satisfying about writing songs. I don't really know what it is. Maybe it has to do with constantly absorbing all this delicious music and lyrics (Scott Joplin, TMBG, Veggie Tales, Gilbert & Sullivan, various klezmery songs, and other stuff that makes me think, "Man, that's such a great piece; I wish I could write something like that,") and then actually sitting down and doing it. Anyway, it's very exciting. So this week I'm getting my excitement fix from writing a song to sing at RRC's Purim party on Friday. To be honest, it's also exciting because it's another chance to make fun of RRC. Long boring explanations of the jokes are below the lyrics.

For the tune, try to imagine something like "Alma Mahler" by Tom Lehrer, except mine's much longer, there's a little vamp between each chorus and the next verse, adn my verses are usually four lines long and his are eight, so for my four-line verses, I only use the first four lines of his verse, and then go straight to the chorus. When there's eight lines in a verse, I make something up that fits the chord structure. Actually, I don't really know how to describe the melody short of uploading a finale file, which I don't have. Besides, the music isn't very interesting. It's enough to know that it's in triple time, and that the AABB rhyme scheme is reflected in the melody. Just make up your own melody as you read it, and you probably won't be far off.

The preamble will go something like this:
When I first came to RRC, we had an excellent orientation program that told us all about what life was going to be like here. Unfortunately, it didn't tell us everything, and those of you who've been hanging out with me know that occasionally I would do something and then be told, "Oh, you're not supposed to do that here." Which is fine. But at this point, I've acquired a nice little list of these tacit expectations, which I would like to bestow upon next year's students during their orientation, so that they don't have to go through the same learning process that I did. And in an effort to make it as palatable as possible, I've made it into a song.

[At this point I will "turn" my accordion "on", by playing the tune that a PC plays when it starts up.]

Oh, RRC is the place for me
With all due respect to the other three
I grew up Reform, but I'm past all that now
Now I am much more Post-Modern than thou.

Student rabbis, taking our classes in Ziegelman Hall
Student rabbis, individuals, all.

Now, maybe you davven from Sim Shalom
Or maybe Rav Art Scroll makes you feel at home
But we like our Kol Haneshamah very meutsch
Cuz ours comes straight from the finger of Teutsch

Student rabbis, stretching our spirits and growing our minds
Student rabbis, davven below the line.

The way that we talk here is lots of fun
We never offend or exclude anyone
But I secretly wish it could all be abandoned,
Cuz it's more convoluted than Thomas O. Lambdin

Student rabbis, talking gets awkward in Ziegelman Hall
Student rabbis, nobody gets it at all

As soon as you get here, they'll all come and say,
"Wouldn't you like to join Weaver's Way?
The food's all organic, the community's tight,
And everyone knows what you're eating tonight."

Student rabbis, shopping for groceries and shooting the breeze
Student rabbis, publicly purchasing cheese.

If you don't have anything more than a thin coat,
Then you'll freeze your face off in winter in Wyncote
But if there's a blizzard, you won't have to drive
You'll hear that the school is closed (once you arrive).

Student rabbis--Philly might not be the place we'd have chosen
Student rabbis: wipers won't work when they're frozen.

[quote of Jingle Bells during vamp]

The drivers in Philly are really high-class
They'll let you go first, right after they pass
But if they run red lights, I hope you won't mind,
Cuz locals round here are red-green colorblind

Student rabbis, too frightened to drive to Ziegelman Hall
Student rabbis, lucky to get there at all.

[quote of "Beep-beep, beep-beep, yeah!" from Baby, You Can Drive My Car during vamp]

Now twice a year, there's a giant Shabbat
And everyone's there, except if they're not
We sing and we davven without inhibition
Then stuff ourselves full for the sake of tradition
And after the dinner, we'll all sing together
Gail will thank all the folks she remembers
And then, as we bentsch, at the top of our lungs,
We'll shout for Moshiach--with our cheeks in our tongues

Student rabbis, welcoming Shabbes and feeling renewed
Student rabbis, everyone label your food.

Falling in love is a beautiful thing
You radiate light like a holy being
But when you refer to her, let "Partner" be your term
Partner...
A word that has all the romance of a law firm

Student rabbis' boyfriends and girlfriends no longer exist
Student rabbis, sweeties are getting pissed.

So a rabbi's expected to come with a partner
But finding true love's getting harder and harder
Who has the time to look for a mate
By sifting through all of the creeps on J-Date?
He has to be single, he has to be Jewish
He ought to be younger than forty-two-ish
And of those who are left, he can't turn and flee
The minute he hears you're a rabbi-to-be

Student rabbis, whadaya MEAN, I'm not girlfriend material?
Student rabbis suddenly lose their appeal.

It might just be simpler to date someone here
We've been getting to know them for most of the year
There aren't many guys here, but hey, that's okay
Because most of the girls prefer girls anyway.

Student rabbis come out of the closet and dance a hora
Silly rabbis, closets are for the Torah.

The Jewish religion is always evolving
A problem appears, so of course it needs solving
The reason that ours is so totally happenin'
Is we're on a mission to reconstruct Kaplan!

Student rabbis, whatever happened to the Age of Reason?
Student rabbis, reason was so last season.

Now, maybe there's someone who's feeling offended
And if so, I'm sorry. It wasn't intended.
What some find amusing makes others irate
Some people get angry at an orange fabric gate.
Because things go according to Process, you see
Process, you see, with a capital P
And if you don't follow this recommendation,
They'll put you on non-academic probation.

Student rabbis, watching their asses in Ziegelman Hall
Student rabbis, individuals all
Fine individuals, all.

[exaggerated plagal cadence]

Explanations

1. The name of the one building that makes up RRC is Ziegelman Hall. Mr. Ziegelman apparently made a very generous donation.

2. The Reconstructionist movement is in this funny paradoxical position. On one hand, it rejects the idea that God chose the Jews because it finds the idea that we have exclusive access to God to be offensively superioristic, and incompatible with our enlightened post-modern understanding that there are many ways to reach God, and that your way might be right for you and mine right for me, and neither one wrong. On the other hand, if we go around saying that no one has any more access to God than anyone else, and that, furthermore, you're wrong to think otherwise, then we're right back to being all superioristic, at least with regard to people who disagree about the chosenness issue. I actually have a huge problem with this aspect of the movement, and I don't really know how to fix it.

3. Davven is Jewspeak for worship. Conservative Jews usually davven from Sim Shalom, which means "establish peace" and is practically to prayer books as V-I is to cadences. Almost everyone has had some exposure to it, and some people have never seen anything else. Another widely-used siddur (prayer book) is the Art Scroll, which is the authoritative version for the Orthodox community. It's a little less user-friendly than Sim Shalom (there's less white space, and prayers don't start at the top of the page, so you kind of have to know exactly where things are, and if you get lost, there's no hope), but it's much more complete, and people who are used to it usually carry theirs around so they won't ever have to use anything else, because they find it so much better than the others. It has all the liturgy in its original version, with no omissions, and it also has commentaries telling which dead rabbi said what about this or that, instructions telling when to stand, when to sit, what to do if you messed up, what to concentrate particularly hard on during which section, stuff like that. Very pious. The book is so informative that it's used not only for davvening but is also consulted when people are trying to remember information about the liturgy for other purposes. Art Scroll is, I believe, the name of the publishing company, but the question, "What does Art Scroll say?" gets asked so often that people jokingly refer to it as Rabbi Arthur Scroll. Kol Haneshamah is the name of the prayer book published by the Jewish Reconstructionist Federation and distributed to its members. This prayer book is special because all the liturgy that used to have "offensive" language has been replaced. That includes chosenness, statments that the well-being of Israel is more important than the well-being of the rest of the world, things implying that enemies of the Jews should be violently smushed, statements that when the Messiah comes, the dead will be resurrected, and petitions for the speedy arrival of the sort of Messiah who will make this world go away and create a better one (Reconstructionists endorse a this-worldly salvation in which God works through people to fix all the existing problems and make everything perfect, not an other-worldly salvation in which we ascend to a heavenly version of our current habitat.) In addition, there are neat little tidbits--commentaries, poems, explanations, and other thought-provoking pieces--that accompany almost all the prayers and blessings. These are presented kind of like footnotes, on the lower half of the page, which is divided by a little horizontal line, thus the reference to davvening "below the line". Some of these tidbits were collected by the editors from lots of different sources, and some were written by the editors themselves. One of my instructors, Rabbi Teutsch, was one of the editors, and his initials appear all over the prayerbook. Some people have a problem with the idea that anyone should be so presumptious as to assume that they can write stuff and put it on the same page as the liturgy that Jews have been repeating for over a thousand years, which is generally taken as originating, albeit indirectly, from God's own hand, but that's what Reconstructionism is all about.

4. RRC has its own language. It's polite and respectful, but it's beyond that. It's the language of inclusivity, and that means gender, age, religion, sexual orientation, and everything else you can think of. RRCspeak is also the language of non-judgement and respect. People are really serious about it here. Sometimes, though, if you're not well-practiced in that style of speech, you have difficulty getting your point across without having to double back four or five times. Once at a meeting, someone was trying to "raise a concern" (translation: make a complaint) about something some other people were doing, and you could tell she was very passionate about getting her point across, but she was trying so hard to follow the tacit rules of RRCspeak, speaking with so many euphemisms and generalities rather than saying anything specific and possibly offensive, that not a single one of us could figure it out, and the girl facilitating the meeting had to stop her in the middle and get her to start over.

5. One of my classes is Biblical Hebrew, and the text for that class is Introduction to Biblical Hebrew, by Thomas O. Lambdin, who was my teacher's teacher. Sometimes the textbook goes so deeply into the subtleties of the grammatical rules and exceptions of the language, especially regarding the rules for how to vocalize (add vowels to) the words, that it just gets laughably impossible. Then our teacher delights in reminding us that Lambdin's book was the first of its kind, and that nobody before him explained everything so clearly, *and* that it was written for college freshmen.

6. When I first arrived, I was totally bombarded with the current students who lived in Mt. Airy (my neighborhood) suggesting that I join the local co-op, Weaver's Way. Everything's organic, they said, and you only have to work a few hours a month, and the choices are excellent, and everyone else at RRC shops there too, so it's always very social. I'm not usually attracted to co-ops, but in this case, all that member-devotion and heavy recruitment made it sound like some sort of cult, and I, cultophobe that I am, was totally repelled.

7. Remember Snow Jew? That was the day the school was closed at almost the last minute. Some people weren't ever notified, so they had to drive an hour through a fresh dumping of snow to go to school so they could turn around and go home. They weren't happy.

8. I think my friend Tanya explained the Philadelphia driver philosophy best: "Me first." They also have a disconcerting habit of acting as if the light is still green even when it's well into infrared. Apparently, if you're running a red light, it's okay as long as you honk. ??

9. RRC invites everyone linked to the school to its biannual Shabbat gatherings, and the expectation from Above is that unless you have a really really good excuse, you come. A little under half the community showed up for the spring Shabbat, which was last weekend. Presumably, the rest of them had really good excuses. There's a lot of volunteer time and effort put into planning the event, especially by Gail, who also does things like warmly welcoming everyone, thanking them all, and making transitions smooth. Gail always makes a point of publicly acknowledging everyone who performed any sort of service whatsoever for the event, no matter how trivial and forgettable, but every so often, in her effort to remember all the micro-contributions, she neglects to acknowledge some of the really major ones. That happened last weekend, when she forgot to acknowledge the girl who led the entire Torah service on Saturday morning. Oops.

9a. This all-RRC Shabbat is a two-part event. It begins with an evening service to celebrate the arrival of Shabbat, and is followed by a morning service the next day. Both services are followed by a vegetarian potluck meal, at which everyone eats too much. (So much of Judaism is about getting together and eating. Why? There are so many things to do socially besides eat.) After the meals, we sing traditional songs and bentsch (that's Yiddish for sing/chant the Birkat Hamazon, the blessing after meals). Bentsching takes 10 or 15 minutes; it's a long sequence of blessings. For some reason, even though the references to messiah-as-saviour-who-will-usher-in-another-world is removed from Kol Haneshamah, the Reconstructionist bentscher (little booklet that has the text to the after-meal blessings, as well as the words to a few songs) keeps the messiah references in its version of Birkat Hamazon. Now, some Orthodox Jews tend to be really excited about hastening the messiah's arrival in whatever way they can, and when they get to the part in B. Hamazon that petitions God to speedily bring the Messiah, they tend to all shout out, "Moshiach!!" in unison. It works with the rhythm of the prayer. Lots of the RRC kids have adopted that habit, and while it could be that they're just kind of doing it for the sake of irony (they're postmodern like that), it also seems that many of them are kind of attracted to the idea that instead of it being up to us to do the impossible, Moshiach is going to come down and make it all better. Maybe it takes the pressure off. So anyway, it might be that they're pretending to mean something they don't really mean, but it might also be that they're pretending to not mean something that they really do mean.

10. There are a wealth of food allergies among the various people who are invited to the community-wide Shabbat thingies. Nuts, onions, lactose, wheat, cilantro, etc. Everyone is supposed to write little notes telling the ingredients of each dish they bring, so no one eats the wrong thing unknowingly. The mandate to label ingredients gets emphasized so heavily that we all grow weary of the constant reminders.

11. Back to the RRCspeak thing, we don't use terms like "husband" or "wife" because it's not fair to people in same-sex relationships who aren't legally allowed to marry. Nor do we say "boyfriend" or "girlfriend" because if one person is gender-specific in any given conversation, someone else might feel obligated to be gender-specific too, and maybe they aren't comfortable being open about the fact that they're not heterosexual. So, we say "partner" instead. The flaw in this method is that "partner" usually implies long-term commitment, so there's no way to talk about a love interest to whom you haven't made a commitment yet. It's "partner" or nothing, and the pressure to hurry up and commit to someone, rather than just date to explore, is quite heavy. Apparently, rabbis without partners are frequently rabbis without jobs. Synagogues don't want their rabbis to be seen as available by the congregants.

12. In an effort to find a partner while also taking courses and holding down a job or two, many of the girls (and RRC's student body is mostly female) use J-Date, a Jewish online dating service, which has produced some successes, but countless creepy stories about desperate 45-year-old Jewish guys who lie about their age, among other things, in order to score hot dates. They use it anyway, though, because apparently it's worth the creepth quotient to avoid the heartache of meeting someone great and then finding out that 1. he flat-out refuses to be the husband of a rabbi (and you can't really blame him, because it's not an easy life, being as constantly publicly visible as a rabbi's family is) or 2. he's the wrong religion. Did I mention? We can partner ourselves with whichever gender we please, as long as the person's Jewish. Rabbinical students who "are in committed relationships with" someone non-Jewish aren't ordained. For that matter, prospective students in committed relationships with someone non-Jewish aren't accepted into the school until they fix that, whether through conversion or separation.

13. The Torah, that big strip of goatskin rolled onto two wooden scrolls and then upholstered and bedecked, is usually kept in Aron Hakodesh, which is usually translated as "the holy ark". That's Biblical Hebrew. In Modern Hebrew, though, the word "aron" is used to mean "closet" or "wardrobe", which is sensible, because the thing where the Torah is kept *is* very much like a wardrobe, only it's a wardtorah.

13a. Remember those old commercials for Trix, with the rabbit trying to get the Trix from the kids, and never succeeding? Remember the line, "Silly rabbit! Trix are for kids!"? You do? Good.

14. Reconstructionism has changed a lot since Mordechai Kaplan created it back in the 20s. Then, it was supposed to be Judaism for ethical, deeply rational Jews who were patriotic U.S. citizens, and who weren't interested in that supernatural/supersticious crap. Then, the reconstructionist (note the lowercase r) was someone who had fallen away from practicing his religion, but still believed in Truth, Justice, and the American Way, and needed to be brought back without having his intelligence insulted. This Reconstructionism appeals to me. That whole rationality thing. Currently, though, it is much more influenced by the New Age movement...there's oodles of meditation, mysticism, overfeminism, and fuzzy-wuzzy spirituality stuff which kind of leaves me standing around wondering what to do. The original idea was that Judaism was irrelevant to the Modern Man, and Kaplan and friends were out to reconstruct it to make it relevant and meaningful again. Now, though, Kaplan seems to be irrelevant to the post-modern Reconstructionist, so in certain areas (particularly theology) he tends to get alternately reinterpreted or just ignored by the people here.

15. Remember Mephisto's Gate, and how upset people were about it? One of the reasons why they were so upset is because I hadn't honored the Process, which at RRC means I didn't go around and respectfully ask everyone in a position of importance how they would feel about my proposed act before going ahead and doing it. If someone had had a concern, we would have scheduled a meeting so we could deliberate over it, and then attempted to reach a decision by means of the Values-Based Decision-Making Process...although first, we'd probably have had to give voice to what our values are with regard to this proposition, and whether they're being threatened by it or not. Yay RRC.

16. Whether or not a student is ordained depends both on whether he passes his classes and on whether the faculty approve of his behavior in interpersonal situations, whether in classes, at Shabbat meals, at work, or anywhere else. If you do something socially questionable that someone on faculty hears about, and if the faculty member thinks that act indicates that you're "unfit for the rabbinate", you can be placed on non-academic probation, in which they watch you closely to see if you do anything else that might indicate your not being fit for the rabbinate. There's no established way to find out why you were placed on non-academic probation, nor is there an established way to free yourself of that state...it seems to be left to the whim of your Review Committee (the people who are examining you) to decide whether you've redeemed yourself.

I still love that city.

2005-03-09T00:49:00.000-05:00

I've been meaning to post about this site for a long time. I think it's completely awesome. Now, whenever you happen to be out on your own and you overhear strangers having a conversation so unbelievably hilarious you want to tell everyone about it, but you can't, you have a forum on which to share the mirth. Provided you hear it in New York, of course.

Don't bother reading the comments, though. They're pretty homogenous in their inanity.

Current Music: A Year After My Wedding, Klezmer Conservatory Band

Opus II, or, Not So Interesting As The Other Thing

2005-03-01T10:13:00.000-05:00

RRC is having a snow day today. They told us just in time, too--almost 25 whole minutes before davvening began at 8:05. Growf. Anyway, Jarah and I spent our free time this morning very constructively, playing in the snow. Check out our Snow Jew. Those are Jarah's 1337 4R7 5ki11z on the facial sculpture, and the earlocks were her brilliant idea, too. Photos are courtesy of Spun Sugar, who got all dressed and came outside in the cold with her digital camera for us.

Current Music: Keep Walking (and other Veggie Tales songs)

Epilogue

2005-02-24T15:34:00.000-05:00

I went to talk to Mme. D.S. today, and as it turned out, she wasn't so much of one as I'd been led to believe. Not this time, anyway. She had someone else in her office when I arrived, and so I was waiting outside for a few minutes until she called out and asked me if I was waiting to see her. I smoothed out my face and in I went.

I carefully told her that I'd heard she was upset yesterday, and that I wanted to talk with her about it. "Ah, so were you the...the..." "Culprit?" I offered. "...the adventurous student?" she finished. I nodded. "Well, I was quite upset, although I'm not now, and you don't have to worry about being in trouble--we're not going to punish you, we're not going to throw you out of the school (I guess I must have looked pretty scared)--but I do want to bring some issues to your attention." She went on to explain the concerns that had come up among her and five or six other RRC employees, which turned out to be exactly the three that I mentioned yesterday: 1. I was there after hours (and could have let somebody else in?); 2. I might have fallen (I told her I spent most of the time lying down flat on the balcony, rather than teetering on a stolen ladder, but that didn't seem to eliminate her belief that I might have been putting myself in danger...I suppose faith as strong as hers should be commended); 3. someone else might drive by and Think Something about Those Crazy Reconstructionists (and crazy we are, but I submit that more evidence of insanity can be found in this overreaction to a few pieces of cloth than in the appearance of the cloth itself)...and 4. it might have been a scary extremist political statement (that's right, I'm actually a member of the Orange Order. Damn Catholics.) Anyway, Mme. D.S. turns out to be in charge of the safety of the people who work here, or something, so as she put it, it's her job to consider all the scary illogical possibilities and protect against them. I have to give her credit; she was completely fair and reasonable while she explained all this silliness to me. In the end she told me to consider all these concerns they have, and to check it out with someone in authority before considering doing something like this again. She almost choked when she got to the word "again", but she got it out. I was struck with newfound respect. Finally she seemed to be finished, and I hesitantly asked if she still had the fabric, and if so, if I could have it back. "Sure, it's right behind you," she said, and so it was. With the help of Glitter and her ever-hospitable SUV, it is now residing in my room. If I don't find any better use for it, maybe I'll hang it outside my bedroom window after the snowstorm stops.

Oh, and one more thing, and then I'll shut up about the gates: I am going to submit the following article to RRC's student publication/journal/thing.

MEPHISTO'S GATE

Wyncote, PA--Early in the morning on Wednesday, February 23rd, everyone entering RRC was greeted with a chilling sight. There was a large yellow-orange arch framing the main entrance of the school, and hanging from the top of the arch was an apron of fabric of the same yellow-orange hue. It appeared to be mysteriously suspended from the balcony above, as if by some devilry.

Coincidentally, similar arches sprung up all over Manhattan's Central Park less than two weeks ago. Experts have reassured the public that these should be viewed as isolated incidents, and that there is no need yet to be concerned about the possibility of epidemic.

Meanwhile, members of the RRC community are struggling to make sense of this harrowing experience. As one student said, "Should I find this offensive?"

An administrator pinpointed other possible ramifications. "In times like these, we need to be careful. If someone were to drive by the school and notice the orange fabric, they might start thinking that there are people here who like the color orange. That would seriously compromise the security of this institution, not to mention the safety of the American Jewish population as a whole," she reasoned.

Efforts are currently underway to discover the perpetrator of this act and bring him or her to justice. Unfortunately, the energy and resources required for this investigation have forced the administration to again postpone its current project, to rediscover its sense of humor.

Current Music: You know, whenever I'm trying to focus on what I'm writing and on really making it work, I tend to be just fine without music.

Purim Katan

2005-02-23T14:39:00.000-05:00

Okay, so I've just conceived and carried out my most interesting prank yet. After hearing all sorts of stuff about Christo's Gates and feeling kind of taken with the concept of giving art to the public for them to enjoy like that, and after wishing for the millionth time that I could be in New York instead of being in stupid Philadelphia, where your 300-year-old Elite Social Club excommunicates you for ever deigning to have a conversation with a stranger, I decided to make a christogate for RRC. RRC has a stoop-ish-type thing in the front of the building (yes, *the* building--it used to be two, but then the library and the main building were joined, so now the college is comprised of a grand total of one building) with two flattish steps leading up to a white platform, upon which rest two cylindrical white columns, ornamented at their bases by ponderous planters containing a few remnants of plant material. The columns support a little balcony, with a waist-high wrought-iron railing, that protrudes from the second floor of the building. Apparently, nobody ever uses this balcony, although it looks accessible and welcoming from the exterior. You can kind of tell, from this picture, what I'm talking about.

Yep, that's the extent of our "campus". The balcony's hard to distinguish, but that small white blob in the center of the building is the becolumned stoop leading to the front door.

Anyway, I was feeling mischievous and creative and restless, and wishing I could be around the christogates, so in honor of Purim Katan, I decided to bring the gates to RRC by installing one at the entryway. I planned to have it visible for the first time on Wednesday morning, which was the first day of normal classes after a long weekend. (I was hoping it would be more noticeable if people were looking at it after several days of not looking at it.) Glitter was supposed to help me, but she decided on Monday that she's been reprimanded too many times for too many stupid things, and for some reason she was *sure* that someone would become angry about the appearance of a christogate, and she didn't want any more black marks on her record, so she bowed out. That made my plans more complicated...you see, Glitter drives an SUV. I have a bike. Jarah was into the idea, but was too busy to help, so I was on my own. Thus, my original idea of using three wooden beams bought from Home Depot, nailed into the appropriate shape, and spray-painted "saffron", fell to pieces. Instead, I had to do what I could with whatever I could carry in my backpack while I biked.

So, yesterday (Tuesday), the last day of our long weekend, I found a jewel of a fabric store in Germantown called Gaffney Fabrics, where I purchased six yards of bright yellow-orange wonder fabric (it didn't ravel, it tore straight in both directions, it had just enough elasticity, it draped beautifully, it didn't wrinkle, AND it was just the right color) for 1.99/yard. Score. I also asked for a couple of cardboard bolts that they might not need (the cylindrical kind, not the flat rectangles), and received two for free. Double score. Those were long enough that biking home was a challenge, but I finally figured out that I could pass them through the straps in my backpack, so that they rested horizontally between my backpack and my back. The nice drivers made sure to leave me an extra few feet as they passed me.

I arrived home, reorganized my stuff, devised a vague plan for how I was going to manage all this, and set off to RRC. It was a completely different challenge keeping the cardboard bolt (I decided I only needed one) at just the right angle as it poked out of my backpack--not so far forward that it'll fall out, not so far sideways that it'll be knocked by the passing cars, and not so straight up-and-down that it'll render my helmet mirror ineffective. Don't worry, I arrived safely. My next challenge was to look like I'm entering the building for a legitimate reason, but to then be forgotten, so as to avoid having to leave when the building officially closes. Now, the building closes at 5 on normal days, but I've frequently noticed that if I'm working in some classroom when 5 pm comes around, the custodian will poke his head in, remind me to turn the lights off when I leave, and leave me alone to finish my work. So, I walked in all smiley and greeted Bubbe, the receptionist, trying to look like it was a perfectly unremarkable thing for me to be carrying a five-foot-long cardboard cylinder. I plunked myself down in our Media Center and hammered out some homework for Learner's Minyan, a class in which our weekly assignments involve, among other things, making recordings to prove that we can sing through certain prayers with sufficient aplomb. It was already 5:30 by the time I finished (I was a week behind, and I took the oppportunity to go a week ahead, so I was doing three assignments instead of one, which took a while) and no one had even come in at 5 to tell me to turn the lights out. I must have been in the middle of a recording or something at that time, and the custodian must not have wanted to interrupt me. I congratulated myself on my good luck.

Then I realized that it was already 5:30, and I had to be home by 7 for a study date. It takes me about 25 minutes to bike home, so that left me just over an hour to pull the whole thing off. I left the media center and headed back to the lobby (Bubbe was gone, thank goodness; she's too sweet to entangle in even a minor act of vandalism) and climbed the stairs to the balcony entrance, which isn't even an entrance at all, but rather a large window that has to be opened. Actually, I had to pull up the blinds, the sash, the screen, and the extra pane of glass (what are those called? Storm windows?) and that presented a challenge of its own, but I got it in the end, and the window didn't even break. Phew. I knew there were still plenty of people in the building, even though it was officially closed to students, so after sneaking out onto the balcony I pulled the blinds back down to avoid arousing suspicion suspicion. It was windy and getting windier, so the opened window let plenty of cold air in and blew the blind around, but you know how people are in a space where they work all the time. They see their expectations and not their surroundings, so they don't notice changes, and although several times I froze as I heard someone go by, nobody noticed me up there.

Four of the six yards I tore away from the other two, and then I tore those four yards down the center the long way, planning to wrap each resulting 12' x 2.5' strip around one of the columns. The remaining two yards was going to be for the curtain/skirt/thing. I ducked into a classroom to do the handiwork (my fingers were getting too cold to thread the needle): I folded over three or four inches from the selvage on the skirt, and sewed a casing (with the grossest running stitch I have ever sewn, but I was in a hurry) around the bolt. Then I took my skirt and my two strips and tried to figure out what to do with them. The next 45 minutes involved a lot of me going back and forth from the balcony to the outside, up and down stairs and in and out the window, tweaking it until it looked right. I ended up making a long rope out of postage tape (lucky thing I brought that with me, because I hadn't planned on using it), threading it through the cardboard bolt, around the base of a post in the balcony railing, back through the cardboard bolt, and around another post. Then I fastened its ends together. That way, the bolt was positioned several feet below the bottom of the balcony, and the skirt fell to about three feet above my head.

Now I had to do the sides of the gate. Originally, I'd intended to encase the white columns in the fabric strips, but even though the strips were about twice as wide as the columns, they still weren't wide enough to stretch all the way around (darn geometry), and there wasn't enough yardage to wrap the columns candy-cane-style. Besides, the bolt was only about five feet long, and the columns were at least seven feet apart, so (as I discovered when I went downstairs and outside to see how it was looking) the "gate" would have looked stupid if there had been a giant gap between the sides and the top. So instead, I didn't-quite-knot one end of each strip around the tape-rope, positioning the knotoids just at the point where the tape-rope emerged from the cardboard bolt (this required me practically lying down on the balcony and sticking an arm all the way through a space in the wrought iron railing, and maneuvering the upper end of the strip with one hand so that it was secured to the tape-rope, hoping and hoping all the while that a. I wouldn't drop the strip, and b. the tape-rope would be strong enough to support the weight of the strips and wouldn't break and make me have to start all over again (and, I suppose, c. no one would drive up to the building, headlights a-gleaming, and find me plainly visible, but that was a constant concern). Somehow, the tape seemed to hold. I breathed a shaky sigh and went back downstairs to twist the strips so that they'd look a little bit more solid and more like the metal beams that Christo used, and finally, I tucked the bottom ends underneath the gigantic planters. I had to move the planters a little bit closer to each other, so they'd allow the strips to be parallel instead of A-lined, but I figured no one would mind much.

Stepping back to admire my work, I allowed myself to crow a little, silently, at my own achievement, and then I dashed back upstairs one last time, closed the storm window (that was tough, since it was huge and heavy and had come off its track), the screen, the sash, and the blinds, dusted the mud off myself and the under-window bench (I'd been standing on it to reach the window), gathered my things, and jetted off to meet my study partner. He was nice enough not to ask where I was coming from at that time of night.

All night I was worried that the tape rope wouldn't be able to support the weight, and that when I arrived the next morning I would see a sad crumpled mess instead of the christogate I'd made. When I finally arrived at 8:27 the next morning, there it was, just as I had left it. Jarah saw it and laughed with joy when she drove up, and Glitter heaped praise upon me, apologizing for having backed out. I kept waiting for someone who *wasn't* in on it to mention it, but no one did during my first class, and no one did during the passing period between that class and my next one, even though I hung around in the kitchen, listening. There's usually a stretch-break halfway through the two-hour classes, and during my second class's stretch-break, at 11:35 or so, Glitter invited me outside to "go get something from her car". Out we went, me still walking on air with glee at my own successful bit of mischief...

...and it was gone.

I couldn't believe it. What?? Already? So soon? Where was it? Where had they put it? Why? What was wrong with it? I could see someone objecting to the process of putting it up (being there after I'm supposed to be gone, being on the balcony, etc.) but objecting to the thing itself?? What's the big deal? I was all set to explode with indignation. I worked hard on that! How dare they remove my vandalism?! And I didn't even have time to take a picture!! Glitter was sad for me, but she couldn't resist a little bit of Itoldyouso. Well, she had told me so, and it turned out that she was right. But still!! Once back inside, Glitter asked Bubbe, with the innocence of a newborn babe, what had happened to the Christogate that was up earlier this morning. I hovered, waiting for an answer. Bubbe got all quiet and serious and looked intently at Glitter and asked, "Did you put it up?" Boy, was I out of there quick. I didn't want to be next...I couldn't lie to Bubbe. As I said, she's too sweet.

I zoomed back to class and Glitter came in a few minutes later, but by that time class had begun, and I wouldn't be able to pump her for the details of what Bubbe had told her...or at least, not until 12:30, an eternity of 45 minutes. I tried passing her a note asking what happened (okay, so I'm a little highschooly sometimes, but this was important!) and she only responded cryptically (and in Hebrew) that "the Prophetess Glitter spoke truly". She was no help. So *she* wouldn't tell me anything, and Bubbe, who obviously knew stuff, I couldn't ask. Going home that day wasn't much fun.

Later, this afternoon, though, I received a phone call from a number I didn't recognize. I forgot to mention that while I was pulling this all off last night, two people saw me. Both are members of RRC's administrative staff. One was a lady I didn't recognize, who saw me outside while I was trying to figure out what to do with the strips of fabric, now that I'd realized that they wouldn't wrap around the columns. "Shh," I told her, by way of explanation. "It's a surprise." "Okay," said she, "but you know you have an opened window upstairs?" "Yeah, don't worry, I'll take care of it," I said, and off she went. The other was a guy who I know because we've played klezmer together. He plays drums. He saw me because he was coming downstairs and passing by the window just as I was crawling back inside from the balcony. I surprised him. "Whoa," he said. "What's going on?" "Um, nothing," I said, pretending I hadn't just crawled through a window. "Nothing at all. I've really got lousy timing, haven't I?" "Looks like a fraternity prank or something," he said. I grinned. "I don't know what you're talking about." "Oh, I see," he said. "Well, let's just say I didn't see anything."

So anyway, I got this call from a number I didn't recognize, and of course I'm not going to pick it up now that I know from Bubbe's reaction that someone's probably on the warpath after me (I still have her quiet, fearful question ringing in my head) but there's a message, and it's this fellow, the drummer, saying that a certain person on the administrative staff has reacted very strongly to this incident, and as luck would have it, she went to my informant first, because he's in charge of P.R., or the way the college looks to the outside world, or something.

I called him back, and after assuring me that he wasn't telling anyone about what he'd seen, he gave me the story: Madame Drill Sergeant came pounding into his office this morning demanding that he address the problem. Unfortunately, he had reacted honestly when she brought the subject up: he laughed. "Oh yeah," Mr. Informant said, "I saw that happening. I assumed it was just a harmless prank." "You saw it happening?" she apparently sputtered. "Who was it?" And at this point, he won my undying admiration: "Well, I don't really want to say, because the student and I had a kind of unspoken agreement that I wouldn't say anything, and I don't want to break that trust." So instead, she convinced him to call me up and to encourage me to go and talk with her, which he did, but he did this in such a way that it was clear that if I never presented myself to Mme. D.S., he wouldn't do anything to make it unpleasant for me, nor even think any less of me. Wow.

Oh, and he also told me that not everyone reacted the way she did; that many of the people came in and saw it, and thought it was funny. That did more to soften the blow than anything else, honestly, because the harshest part of this whole thing was the disappointment of seeing it gone so quickly, and knowing that people wouldn't be able to appreciate it as I'd hoped they would. Most of the RRC people probably didn't even notice it, much less understand that it was there for them to enjoy. I wanted people to think it was funny and clever and whimsical, which I think it was, but to have it disappear so quickly is kind of like performing a piece to an audience who won't look at you. It's not that I'm starved for attention, either, but take my word for it, this christogate was worth seeing, and I'd like to believe that RRC folk are the sort of people who would appreciate it, and I wish I could have seen more people reacting to it. So I was glad to hear from Mr. Informant that other people thought it was funny. Too bad the lady with no sense of humor happens to be in such a position of authority.

Now, of course, my task is to go and make nice to Mme. Drill Sergeant, although I think I'll take Mr. Informant's advice and wait awhile until she's had time to cool down some more. Apparently she was quite the tempest this morning. Amazing, what a little christogate can do. What gets me is just *why* she was so angry. You want to hear her reasons for being angry? Mr. Informant told them to me, so I'll list them for you. There are three.

1. There was a student in the building after hours.

She's got a point. I shouldn't have been there after hours.

2. This student was probably up at some elevated place, and could have fallen, been hurt, and sued the school.

Okay, I was on the balcony, but it's not like I'm not going to pitch myself over the side in a sudden fit of greed. Suit, my trousers. Oh, I forgot to mention that Mme. Drill Sergeant told Mr. Informant that she was also worried that I might have used a ladder to get up there, which would mean that I must have broken into the custodian's closet. Of course.

3. The presence of orange fabric over the doorway might give people the wrong message about the institution.

Because everybody knows what orange fabric means.

A Riddle

2005-02-19T10:15:00.000-05:00

What is it that wears two pairs of pants, lives in Philadelphia, and never rains but it pours?

Me, every time I want to go outside in this stupid weather. Okay, I don't pour, but I do live in Philadelphia, and I do wear two pairs of pants. Hello, it's past mid-February now. Enough of this "21 degrees but feels like 10" already.

TMBG are playing at Swarthmore tonight and I can't go because I'm not a student there. I have to console myself by finding some way to get to their free in-store show at Borders next week...which will be a sad substitute, but better than nothing at all, marginally.

We use it for our own amusement.

2005-01-28T13:59:00.000-05:00

Another minipost. Last night, my family and I had dinner in a large garage dressed up to look like an Italian restaurant. My dad likes it. Fortunately, they make up for the lack of atmosphere with their oppressive waitstaff, who hang nervously over your shoulders asking if you'd like a salad or a drink with dinner, and whether you'd like to hear the specials again. Seriously, I think our waitress had tears of anxiety in our eyes as she asked if everything was okay. Walking away from the restaurant, we passed a Hong Kong-themed (Hong Kongan? Hongkongan? Hongan Kongan?) restaurant that advertised its policy with a sign in the window. I did a double take, passively reading it while thinking of something else, finishing processing it when I was several steps past it, and then stopping short and dashing back to reread it, to see if it really said what I thought it said. It did.

WE DO NOT
USE MSG FOR
YOUR HEALTH

They sure don't.

Current Music: The Astor-I-A, one of TMBG's venue songs, has been rattling around in my head for the past few days, although it was just interrupted by the same band's song "about" the New Orleans House of Blues. They were right; it did find me in my workplace, and resistance was futile.

ACTIVATE GERMAN HAND PEDAL

2005-01-21T17:53:00.000-05:00

Oh my God, I just found this. I am dying from laughter.

Current Music:

I think I linked to this sometime ago, but those of you who've never seen the original F.A. and D.W. can enjoy it now. Remember to breathe. : )

Gloating

2005-01-21T16:56:00.000-05:00

One of the rabbinical students is moving to a new apartment, and she just sent out a plea for help to the student email list. The reason why this is interesting to me is that one of the lines in the e-mail was "come enjoy good company tomorrow while you wait out the snowstorm". Snowstorm? According to Yahoo's weather service, it currently feels like 5 degrees F. in Mt. Airy, and 55 degrees F. here in San Leandro. Ahahaha. Oh man did I ever choose the right time to go visit home. : )

I am less than three California!!

Current Music: Stayin' Up Late With Sonny, Indigo Swing

superclerk

2005-01-20T13:20:00.000-05:00

The former Mr. Scrooge is ascending to the role of Head Clerk (that's "clark") next Christmas. It occurred to me, as I read that bit of news, that it's a shame he's employed by Mr. Fezziwig and not by the Duke of Kent (whose waltz is part of the Fezzi repertoire), because then, whenever they dance that waltz, they could call it the Clerk of Kent's Waltz, and Bangers & Mash could play a 6/8 version of the love theme from Superman, and then I could snicker to myself.

And that's really what life is all about, isn't it?

Primal Scream

2005-01-13T00:00:00.000-05:00

At Stanford we used to blow off steam during Dead Week by opening our windows every night at exactly midnight and screaming. The effect was amazing. You'd hear a slow crescendo of wailing, first hovering above one dorm, and then spreading gradually like the 10th plague in the movie The Ten Commandments until this banshee-like sound of pure suffering was completely surrounding you. The year I lived in Loro, when the poor SLE students were in the middle of their 72-hour gigantic take-home final, I had the unique experience of hearing what was probably the longest primal scream ever. It must have gone on for at least three minutes, which is an insanely long time for a scream. I personally didn't usually participate in the scream, but it was still cathartic to hear that everyone else was going as crazy as I was.

I could really use some of that right now.

Lindybombing

2005-01-09T22:54:00.000-05:00

Last night I went to a hotel called The Four Seasons with some people I know from swing dancing. Apparently this is big thing in Philadelphia; when my neighbors saw me leaving in a dress instead of my usual jeans-and-sweater uniform, they asked where I was going, and when I told them, they said, "Oh, The Four Seasons, wow! Have a good time!" And it *was* nice. They have a band and a teeny dance floor in a tastefully decorated lounge, where they charge exorbitant prices for luxuries like glasses of port, decadent desserts, and cigars. Apparently this is the place you go if you have a date to impress, and a week's salary to burn.

Mr. Metrosexual, one of the regulars at the swing dances here, and a guy with a very unique sort of leading style, has done this type of thing once or twice before, and was organizing a group to do it again, although he was careful to warn us that we should expect to spend quite a bit of cash, or else the staff would *not* look kindly on us spending several hours alternately occupying their best seats and intimidating everyone else off the dance floor. We ordered a dessert sampler platter which was actually not unreasonably priced, and offered a very pretty selection of delicious teeny cakes and succulent berries with whipped cream.

Mr. Metrosexual's original concept was to gather a group of people to go somewhere where they have lindy-able music but no lindy dancers, and to dance our toes off, to the delight of all in attendance, especially ourselves. Mr. M calls this lindybombing. As it turned out, we didn't really dance our toes off, but only because we were enjoying socializing with everyone and admiring the beautiful setting (and perhaps enjoying the desserts) so much that deserting the rest of party to dance to every song seemed downright antisocial. In addition, there were enough of us (11) that the floor wasn't big enough for everyone to dance at once. Maybe if we'd been doing balboa.

Thinking back on it now, it's hard to pinpoint what made the evening so exciting. Certainly, part of it was the beautiful setting. Four Seasons had clearly spent a great deal of energy and money making their lounge as understatedly decadent as they could. We had a table near the fireplace with plush chairs and sofas, several gently glowing lamps, and an excellent view of the rest of the room. The demonstration-dessert tier was directly behind us, and we were across the room from the band and the dance floor. Even the table we sat around was lovely; it was round and low and made of highly polished dark wood, with some filigree design where the legs joined the top. All the details were in place, but that wouldn't have been enough to make the evening so special.

Part of it was also the exhibitionism aspect: in his pre-event organisational e-mails, Mr. M. had pointed out that there is a dress code, and we should respect it. As hard as it is to convince me to put on pretty clothes and go out dancing in them, I gathered all my willpower and managed something decent...and probably overdid it, but it's practically my trademark...I mean, if I ever didn't unwittingly overdress, I might not recognize myself. Of course, when girls see other girls in pretty clothes, they tend to be generous in their compliments, so we all gave and received a few "how nice you look!" cookies, and enjoyed their sugary goodness. The gents all presented themselves nicely too, and I was glad to see that they managed to express their own taste and look distinctive, even within the confines of modern gentlemen's semiformal fashion.

So there was the delight of how pretty our setting was, and the delight of how pretty we were, but probably the main thing was the underlying absurdity of it all. We had no business there, and we knew it, and yet there we were, dancing amid the nice respectable couples like super-high-bouncy balls in an antique champagne flute store, and making the young wait staff, who were probably just kids our age putting themselves through school, grin tolerantly instead of discreetly throwing us out.

Oh, and another thing that made the evening particularly nice from my point of view is that one of the guys was celebrating his birthday a couple of days late (he just turned 30) and so we gave him a birthday jam, and it came up that I am a few days away from 24, so I received a birthday jam too, which I wasn't expecting, but was sort of hoping might happen.

There were pictures, too. Toward the end of the evening, between the band's penultimate and ultimate sets, the series of canned songs included a two-step, and although Miss Idea had never danced two-step before, she was game enough to follow me through one. Unlike my beloved Stanford dance community, among Philadelphia's swing dancers, a girl leading a girl is a rare enough occasion that our camera-wrangler-du-jour had to capture it on film*.

At one point, Mr. Metrosexual laid a cloth napkin across Wired Librarian's lap like an apron, and someone commented that with his shirt and tie and cloth apron, he looked like a waiter. So, willing as he is to bounce off the slightest suggestion, he took the napkin and folded it into quarters and laid it across his forearm, and tucked another one into his waistband, and started playing waiter. My water glass happened to be empty, so I held it up and tried to look thirsty.

Just afterward, Wired Librarian was walking back around to his chair when an older gentleman at another table snapped his fingers and called out, "Garcon!" and indicated the offensive presence of the used plates in front of him. He and WL held character for a delicious few moments before the real waiter arrived with the gentleman's check. Pity one of us wasn't holding a camera while they were holding character, but I think we were too busy cracking up.

I also wish we had a picture of the band, Beau Jazz. They were very friendly to us in spite of our silly requests, and more to the point, they were exquisitely danceable. The singer's native language was French, which I didn't realize until she sang La Vie en Rose with an accent that melted us all. I also wouldn't have guessed, from observing her in her very proper cocktail dress and conservative heels, that when she's not performing at Four Seasons, she plays electric guitar. There's something about heels and electric guitar that are mutually exclusive.

*And by film, I mean pixels.

Current Music: Popsicle Toes, Diana Krall

What? I am writing!

2005-01-05T20:46:00.000-05:00

It's Dead Week at RRC, which means I have two 10-15-page papers to write and two giant Hebrew finals that demand studying. So, like any sensible person, I'm getting right to work, cleaning my room, catching up on e-mails, and posting for the first time in half a year. Rose-Colored Glosses, taking sporadicality (sporadica? sporadity?) to new heights.

Adele's poor little ethernet port gave up and died some time ago, so in order to gain access to my sticky, sticky interweb, I've been using a high-speed ethernet adapter that plugs into a USB port and hangs out her back end like an off-center beaver's tail. Not very pretty, but I found the piece on e-Bay for like $15 and was just ridiculously pleased to snag such a good deal...and it died last weekend. Hmph. I used that opportunity to start taking full advantage of my wireless-capable router by replacing that dead beaver tail with the elegant duo, a wireless card and adapter. Kind of like an early birthday present from hahorim sheli, and what a birthday present it is. I really really like being able to [not] work on my papers wherever I want, not just at my desk. Somebody should welcome me to the 21st century. I'm only a few years late.

One of the papers I'm not writing right now is for my Christianity class, a required course at RRC. We all attended two Christian events of our own choosing (the vagueness of the term "event" is intentional, to allow for latitude) this semester, and the first we discussed in class, around mid-semester. The second is to be material for the final paper--not so much a presentation and analysis of what happened (that was what we did with Christian Event #1) as a presentation of how we experienced it. That's RRC for you. I'm not sure the two are all that different for me--I tend to direct my focus externally and try to pay attention to what's going on, rather than directing my focus internally and figuring out how I'm doing as the event goes on (I mean, what am I going to do, go to Mass and take my own pulse every 5 minutes?)--so my experience tends to be as close to "what happened" as I can make it, with (of course) the inevitable rouge (or whatever)-tinted filter through which I inevitably see things. So I suppose the "write about your experience" thing isn't really so egregious an assignment, even if it does seem to be kind of non-academic in its thrust. Still, and this is the main thing that bothers me, the assignment seems a bit like it would lend itself to telling a long rambling story without a clear conclusion, rather than lending itself to, say, applying the material we've actually been studying in class to a real situation. Why isn't the prompt, "Analyze the event in light of one or two of the texts we studied"? Why do we have to do this "talk about your experience" business? What, a rabbi has to be in touch with her feelings or something? Grumble grumble don't wanna psychoanalyze myself grumble just wanna be a student and learn stuff grumble grumble.

Come to think of it, I'm going to have to figure out a different plan of attack for both this paper and the other one I'm not writing right now, for my Reconstructionist Thought class. I had a long conversation with my professor (let's call her Madame Grandvent) after class today (yes, class today, and yes, it's *that* kind of Dead Week) trying to figure out exactly what it was she wanted from us. Apparently our paper for that class is supposed to be an answer to the question, "What is Reconstructionist Judaism?" but it's not supposed to be a paper. It's supposed to be a Talk we would give, but written down. It's supposed to be simple and easily comprehensible and light and sugary and fluffy and not too complex (lest we should commit the cardinal sin of causing our hypothetical readership to break their heads open trying to think), which is exactly the way I -NEVER- write papers. Apparently everyone here has it in for the academic style or something.

The other problem is that there are so many aspects to Recon'ist Judaism that I can't possibly talk about all of them in depth in one paper, even in one 15-page paper. Maybe three or four aspects. I asked Mme. Grandvent whether she wanted us to focus on prayer, or community, or halacha, or God, or social action, or Torah study, or healing, or spirituality...? She kind of smiled and said, "Yeah, those sound good." *boil* The first paper I wrote at Stanford, for my fall quarter IHUM (Freedom and Eros in Philosophy and Art--best IHUM ever, by the way), I vividly remember Stephan Käufer, our section leader (who seems to be currently teaching a course at Franklin and Marshall, right here in PA, quite similar to the one I took with him at Stanford...cool), instructing us to narrow our thesis to a "laser-like focus" (let the ls roll slowly through your tongue!) because otherwise our papers would be too wide in scope and grow large, awkward, and ungainly. The wider the scope, he taught, the more impossible it is to prove the point stated in the thesis...and so the more precise the thesis, the clearer and better the paper. That's what good writing is, but that's not what she wants. It's as if Mme. Grandvent is asking me to write fluff. Insubstantial sugary fluff, stretched out to cover every topic possible, nearly falling apart, it's so thin, but that's okay, because as long as you stand far enough away, no one will see the holes in the writing.

That's not what Reconstructionism is about! It's NOT some happy little ragtime onestep. It's Argentine Tango...subtle, and complex, and not necessarily immediately graspable, but it's deeply attractive to people who are willing to keep coming back to it, willing to sit and work through things and really try to figure them out. At least, that's the aspect of Reconstructionist thought that's interesting to me. And that's the way I want my paper to be...I want to capture that complexity, to choose two or three intricately related aspects and conduct an in-depth exploration of them and only them, replete with delicate points, complex ideas, intricate interrelations, and ultra-compact language, and then conclude with something fancy*, but thisassignment, apparently, wants nothing to do with that kind of carefully crafted writing. No, we have to take that beautiful complex tango and present it as if it were no deeper than a onestep, which just isn't true.

The other thing that's disturbing me about this is that we (my entire class and I) are beginning to think that nobody really knows what Reconstructionist Judaism is. Mme. Grandvent certainly doesn't--she spent part of Wednesday's class reading to us from a debate that occurred over e-mail in which various leaders of the movement (including her) were struggling to hammer out just what Recon'ist J'ism's core values were.
-Is it the non-supernatural theology?
-No! That was Mordechai Kaplan's thing, but it's not essential to the movement! Today we value deep spirituality above all else!
-What do you mean, not essential? How can you call Mordechai Kaplan's theology nonessential to his own movement?
-How? He didn't care about his own theology anyway--look at how many different, opposing ones he had! He only cobbled some makeshift theology together so that he could use it to unite and revitalize the Jewish people!
-What do you mean, didn't care? Of course he cared; why else would he have spent so much energy trying to figure it out?
-You're wrong; what matters isn't his particular theology, but rather that we all should struggle to figure out our own theology. To adhere to his instead of formulating our own would be absolutely anti-Reconstructionist!
...and so on.

*sigh* This is going to be a difficult paper.

*I just remembered that that was another Käuferism; later in the quarter, when he was preparing us for the in-class multi-essay final and trying to help us believe that we really had no reason to worry, he demonstrated how to answer a sample prompt: "Just start by introducing the topic with a sentence or two, say how Plato defined the soul, put in some transition, tell how Nietzsche defined the soul, show how they're different, and then do something fancy," he said, flicking his wrist carelessly. It was the "do something fancy" part that had me worried. It was years before I decided I finally understood what he meant by that.

Current Music: I still have Poet's and Sprite's wedding waltz in my head, from playing it on the accordion earlier today.

Denial

2004-07-29T13:23:00.000-04:00

Two and a half more days, and I still don't believe I'm leaving New York. It's not as if I haven't had enough time to process the information--I *have* known since early June--it's just that I want to stay here so badly that I seem to have chosen not to believe I won't be. I am looking forward to starting school, of course--especially after registering for my classes (there's nothing like looking at classes and their descriptions on a bulletin to make me eager for the end of summer), but I wish I didn't have to leave, and that wish is so intense that I can't even visualize myself boarding the bus and heading to Philadephia. It's like trying to imagine walking into a strip club and applying for a job, in that I can try to put together a mental movie about it, but I don't honestly believe I'm ever going to do it.

I can't leave yet. It doesn't make sense. There's too much left to do here before I can go. I haven't bonded yet with Astor Place, or scoured all the vintage clothing stores north of 14th st., or gone to an all-night milonga at Triangulo, or been back to the Collective Unconscious to really explore and appreciate it (and it's too late now, anyway, because they're relocating). I haven't gotten to know Williamsburg yet. I never made it to the Sunday afternoon swing dance in Central Park. I never explored the fossil store on Columbus near 81st St. I didn't even go to the Met, for God's sake. Why did I let that happen?

All the infatuation that the city triggered in me when I first arrived hasn't faded in intensity, although it's shifted somewhat. I still love ambling through Central Park, but it doesn't seem quite so mysterious now, although it still holds just as much potential for surprise and delight. Times Square, with all its flashy lights and thronged sidewalks, is less breathtakingly impressive and more an annoying area to avoid walking through if I don't want to move down the sidewalk at the pace of a snail in a catsup bottle, but I kind of like knowing that I've gotten over the Wow Stage. The subway system doesn't seem quite as romantic as it did when I first arrived, but in exchange I know it a bit more. Still, I find it thrilling to be in stations I've never been in before and discovering their unique structure, antiquated tile mosaics, or accompanying works of art.
This city has an endless supply of offerings, only a tiny handful of which I have tasted. I am greedy, and want more before it slips out of reach. It isn't just unexperienced experiences, either; it's also people I've met here that I haven't had enough time to be with: Rob, of course, who is so intricately tied in my head to the essence of New York, with the essential frankness and intensity that they share, that at first I found it hard to separate them; Amy from Drisha, who has a sense of humor like a spring of clear cold water; Wendy, my fellow ringer of bell and the group that hovers around her at dances like fizz; Miss Amanda, with her glow of Charming Young Lady-ishness; and likewise Shana, who has less overt charm but more cityish sophistication; Talitha of the Inconquerable Spirit, who doesn't bother with sophistication, thank goodness, and who lives a few blocks north of me but belongs about 100 blocks south; and Dan, whose enthusiasm for this city comes not from being excited about its mysterious unchartedness, but from having personally explored almost every corner and loving all that he's found. (He ought to write his own guidebook someday.)

There is also a certain style of interaction that I have observed here, and I like it. People kibbitz. I have had many more brief conversational exchanges with total strangers here than anywhere else, except maybe airports. People have to go to much greater efforts to insulate themselves with books, newspapers, headphones, or scowls if they don't want to be spoken to by strangers. In general, the exchanges are wholesome, too. One night after dancing at Midsummer Night Swing, I went to Tavern on the Green with some Swing Accomplices (normally there's a cover charge, but it was late and so the Maitre d' let us in free after a little bit of negotiation) and one of the girls with us was wearing the sort of shoes that are lots of fun to wear for the first ten minutes, so since it had been several hours, she was in pain. One of the guys decided to carry her to the subway, across the park and a few blocks away, and she gleefully agreed and hopped into his arms. Out of Tavern on the Green we bounced, and one of the bums sitting on a darkish park bench remarked, "That place has great door prizes."

And then there is the way the city wears the seasons. I think I may have had my fill of Hot And Sticky, but I have *not* had enough of watching fireflies light up and wink at me in deliciously unpredictable patterns against the darkening green of the lawns, especially if it happens to be after hearing the New York Philharmonic play Sheherazade on the Great Lawn. I want to see Autumn on Central Park West again, with piles of leaves popping out from the dark grey hexagonal cobblestones, and shocks of brighter leaves popping out from the softer grey sky, and a ticklish wind sneaking in through the bottom of my coat and out through the sleeves. I want to spend another December evening admiring the bright crystal snow balanced on the filigreed wrought iron gates, reflecting colored Christmas lights from the houses nearby. (Who would have thought there was so much beauty to be found at the end of the R line?) I want to watch spring reveal itself in the Cherry Tree Esplanade in Brooklyn's Botanical Gardens, where all of a sudden everything is decked in shades of pink, and then I want to ride back to Manhattan and walk uptown looking at the windows on Madison Avenue, where all of a sudden everything is decked in shades of pink. One year is *not* long enough.

Current Music: Sheherazade, Rimsky-Korsakov

Home again, home again, hustley hustle.

2004-07-06T13:42:00.000-04:00

Sometimes, going out alone to a dance I've never been to before feels like a blind date with 50 strangers, and there's not even any guarantee my "date" will pay any attention to me at all. It can take a considerable act of will to decide I look sufficiently nice and to kick myself out the door. It's a bit easier now that I only have a little time left here, because I have the added motivation of "it's now or never" to spur me onward. Inspired by Gary, Rebecca, and the aforementioned "now or never" sentiment, I went to Dance Sport for a hustle night last night, for the first time ever, even though I've sort of been planning to go all year.

I'm glad I went. The dancers I followed led me through stuff I didn't know I could do and they were actually enthusiastic about teaching an (admittedly obvious) beginner. Apparently this is where the hustle teachers go to dance or something. It was doubly pleasurable because when I walked in I was sort of intimidated by the trashy gangster aesthetic most of the guys affected in their dress (to me, they looked like the people who started fights in high school, only older...the girls, for their part, looked more discofabulous than trashy, or perhaps I'm just more inured to girls looking trashy and I don't notice it) so I was hesitant to ask any of them to put their hands on me, even in the dance framework (haha) but really, all they cared about was dancing. Either that or they were all gay. :) There wasn't even any alcohol available, which is a marked anomaly; there was only a cooler filled with orange Hi-C (or some derivative) and a plate of sliced red apples drizzled with lemon juice so they wouldn't turn brown. Yum. Besides all that, it was only $7.

I was there for over two hours--a short evening, by most standards--and I only danced six dances with five guys, but that was because of a combination of three factors: first of all, I spent some time in the beginning being afraid to ask anyone, but content to watch the couples go; secondly, I later dove into a conversation about religion and human interaction with one of my partners, a civil engineer from Brooklyn who was dressed like a pimp and, I kid you not, said, "My friends call me Suede" (he was actually really cool--he wasn't at all surprised that I'm both rabbinate-bound and female, and he had some very interesting things to say about the difference between being a congregational rabbi and being a chaplain, which he compared to commercial and domestic engineering, and then to leading and following); and thirdly, the dances there just sort of go on until the dancers want to stop, because the DJ blends one song into the next. Each of these dances must have ranged between 10 and 20 minutes (not that I noticed the passage of time). My first dance was with a guy named Miguel who smelled of cigarettes, but for once I didn't mind so much. He gave me a lesson in technique which consisted of him saying things like, "Just relax," "Keep spotting on my forehead," and "Let your arms go free," and I really *was* able to follow much more easily than usual...though most of it was certainly due to his flawless leading. He said he wanted me to be in a performance group he's starting, which I declined (that's a little too rash, even for me, and anyway, I'm about to move to Philadelphia) and then he gave me his card and I learned he's both a teacher and a "world hustle champion".

I decided to walk home afterward--it was on Broadway and 60th, so it was a nice just-over-a-half-hour walk--and I was so glowingly buzzed and so in need of evaporating (yeah, I don't quite have the cool-and-effortless thing down yet) that I really had no desire to descend into a steamy subway and stand still for 15 minutes waiting for a train. Did I mention New York is a sauna now? Half the time the air is hot and drenched, and the other half of the time, the sun's out. Because they blast the AC in the subway cars, the heat from the AC units combines with the already high air temperature to make the subway stations like garbage cans for unwanted heat. Thus, I walked up CPW, where I was greeted with some appreciative comments coming from the park bench sitters (a little weird, but I was in such a good mood that I just felt flattered instead...one guy said I should sit down and talk with him if I had time, and when I grinned and kept walking, he just laughed and said , "Okay, have a good evening!" It was all good-natured like that, and not scary) AND, as if to crown the evening, just as I reached 97th St. a surplus of fireflies flitted out over the park wall to light my path for the last six blocks. Wheeeee.

...and that was Morris Dancing

2004-06-17T16:36:00.000-04:00

I'm happy to report that the Wayward Youth 2004 tour was wildly successful. There are one or two pictures from it up on Wayward Andrew's site, if you want to see what we did. Rumour has it there will eventually be narrative comments too. Meanwhile, for the Morris dancers who read this, here are the dances we did.

Cotswold Dances

Ascot-Under-Wychwood: Trunkles, Mary's Dance, Buns in the Oven (The latter two are Ring O' Bells dances, which made sense, because including me, we had four members of Ring O' Bells with us.)

Badb'y: Donkey Riding, Shepherd's Hey, and Tossing (Tossing was like shooting, except we tossed instead. And I know what you're thinking, and no, we did *not* throw our sticks at the musicians on the last chorus.)

Bampton-in-the-Bush: Highland Mary (This was the mass dance we did when we were finishing a stand and dancing with whatever other team showed up to dance with us.)

Bledington(?): Monk's March (I played for this one too...I never did get all the different capers up to performance level while we were learning the dances at Lake George.)

Ducklington: Lollipop Man (We performed this at the Glenn Echo contradance near Washington, D.C. Snatch capers on a nice bouncy wooden floor...yum.)

Upton-upon-Severn: The Stick Dance (Not really a Cotswold dance originally, but it's been Cotswoldized since. I like how there are, apparently, two dances in the Upton tradition, and one's a hanky dance and the other's a stick dance. Upton serves as a lovely little model for morris dancing as a whole, in which, as everyone from the careful student to the casual observer knows, there are two dances, the hanky dance and the stick dance. It's kind of like Irish music, which has two tunes, the reel and the jig.)

Non-Cotswold Dances

Border: Four Lane End (I love this one)

Lichfield: Vandals (for 4, because we didn't officially learn it, and there weren't eight who already knew the dance)

Rapper: Velocirapper's dances #3 and #4 (we had four former members of Velocirapper with us, and one girl who used to dance rapper with another team and a second girl who learned it in two days). I played accordion for these so I can't really describe them in much detail, but they were really cool to watch, and sometimes so interesting that I had to not watch so I wouldn't mess up, even while playing Swallowtail, a very simple jig.

Current Music: Plain Capers, John Kirkpatrick

More News

2004-06-06T00:18:00.000-04:00

Poet and Sprite are engaged. I'm not quite surprised, but I'm so glowingly happy for them, I hardly know what to do with myself. The marriage is set for "September or October". Wow, that's soon. I guess I'll just have to fly back West to attend the wedding (oh darn) and in the meantime, prepare the blessing Poet asked me to offer.

I can't wait.

2004-06-05T23:02:00.000-04:00

[The] (Rabbi) D[e]an [of] A[dmissi](r)ons(on)* left a message on my cell phone on Friday afternoon. I listened to it as we (= the Wayward Youths) were stopping briefly as we drove down from Albany and NYC. The gist? I passed. I start Mechinah in August. I'm going out of my mind with excitement. This news justifies my entire year here.

Oh, and Lake George is devastatingly beautiful and the Wayward crew are a lovely bunch, but we were practicing for most of yesterday and today, and now my shins hurt. On the other hand, I'm going to rabbinical school. Wow.

Current Music: Ca Ira, Baguette Quartette

*for name, remove bracketed bits; for title, remove parantheticals

quickly now

2004-06-02T03:17:00.000-04:00

I went to the Marlboro Morris Ale with Ring O' Bells over the weekend and I had a fantastic time. The Outside Capering Crew kicks my vestigial coccyx. Possibly the best morris dancing ever. They get extra points for being nice, teaching us some elementary bacca pipe dancing on Sunday morning, and doing a skit involving people doing the holding-the-broom-and-jumping-over-it trick with rubber chickens. Wow. The Mad Bellowsqueezer and the Oaken Whistler both made my Saturday and Sunday nights by letting me sit in with them (not that I really gave them a choice) and giving bits of advice about my buttonwork while they matched chops and made gleeful intricate music. Oaken Whistler let me borrow the rather ostentatious sparkly blue and white Fifi, since Bethena was at Main Squeeze having her bellows patched. Sometimes it seems like there's not enough music happening in my life, and those nights were a particularly euphoric way to break the fast. To increase the goodness, Wayward Andrew gave me another Morris-accordion lesson on Monday morning shortly before everyone packed up and left. I so very much want to just get past the annoying I-can't-play-this-thing part. Oh, and also Ring O' Bells danced pretty well, I think. I was put in two of the three show dances, which surprised me, because I'm such a new member, but Foreman mentioned something about rewarding good attendance, and I *have* been there for almost all the practices. So that was fun.

Yesterday I went to RRC and retook my Hebrew test. It was really hard, and I'm kind of nervous. The deal is that they'll let me into the Mechinah (preparatory) year if I pass this test, which means 6 years instead of five, but I know I did rather poorly (mostly nerves) on the oral section, and I missed things on the rabbinic Hebrew translation section...the modern Hebrew translation bit I didn't finish. File Hebrew in the same category as accordion. I think the rest of it went well, though, especially my own writing piece, which I'd marginally prepared beforehand...I'm supposed to hear on Friday. Six straight hours of testing is too much.

Today I'm leaving for the Wayward Youths of Morris tour, with Bethena in tow, and she needs to be picked up from Main Squeeze at 11 am sharp tomorrow, after I finish doing laundry and drop off a housing application for an apartment in Wyncote with Jarah's sister, who will give it to Jarah, with whom I will probably be living next year, assuming I pass the test, but I don't have to think about that right now because the test is done and now I can enjoy dancing with wonderful people.

I should know better than to think I can post for the first time in a fortnight and keep it short and quick. I throw up my hands in resignation.

Current Music: Let's Turn Gay, Blue Saracens

Yet another song based on a song

2004-05-21T01:27:00.000-04:00

For the past month or so we've been studying a part of Tractate Sanhedrin that covers what one must do if her life or well-being, or that of her neighbor, is put into imminent danger by some violent person who's trying to harm or kill you. Sometime before we started studying this I was introduced to the music of Fountains of Wayne, so when we reached the part about how you're supposed to kill the person who's putting someone's life in danger beforoe he kills his victim, I already had "Leave the Biker" in my head. On May 9th Talia asked me if I was going to do another song before the end of the year, and I decided to develop the germs of ideas I had into a full thing. I wrote the main part of the song that night and the next night, and ever since, I've been tinkering with it and trying to learn how to play it on accordion and still be heard when I sing. It's fun. I sang it this morning after class, with accordion and everything, which probably marks the first time I've played accordion in front of people in a performance-type-setting. I'm no Linnell, but everyone was very supportive anyway.

I should give some background. A rodef is a threatener or pursuer. A mishnah in Tractate Sanhedrin teaches that if a rodef is pursuing a nirdaf (victim) with the intention of killing him, then you, as the third party, are required to stop the rodef however you can, even if it means killing him, and if you do kill him, you won't be considered a murderer because you were only trying to save the nirdaf's life. In essence, as soon as the rodef starts trying to murder the nirdaf, the rodef becomes chayav mitah, which is Aramaic for "obligated to die". We all know he's going to be tried in court and killed on death row for what he's about to do, so he's already forfeited his life. You might as well kill him before he pulls the trigger so you can save the nirdaf's life, and then only one person will have to die instead of two. This is all supported by a verse in the Torah that states, "Lo ta'amod al dam re'echa," which means "Don't stand upon your brother's blood," and is interpreted to mean, "Don't stand around idly while your brother's blood is being shed."

The gemara on this mishnah had all sorts of questions about that:
1. If you could stop him just by injuring his foot, and you kill him instead, haven't you committed murder? (Answer: yes.)
2. If, in the course of escaping from the rodef, the nirdaf runs through your house and happens to break one of your vessels, and then you successfully save the nirdaf, who is responsible for paying for the damaged property? Is it the rodef, or the nirdaf? Or do you just have to deal with the damage yourself and not complain? (Answer: the nirdaf is responsible, because even though it may have been the rodef's fault that he had to crash through your window and shatter your Ming vase, we can't charge the rodef because of a little technicality that says once he's chayav mitah, he can't simultaneously incur any other obligations, even monetary ones. The only other choice would be to say that you, the third party, will simply receive no compensation at all, but we don't want to do that because we want to make the part of the hero very attractive, to encourage people to save their threatened friends whenever possible. Thus, the nirdaf is in debt to you for your vase which he broke while he was running for his life.)
3. What if you have to go to a great deal of effort and expense to effectively save the nirdaf? How much should you reasonably be expected to do? (I don't think they decided the answer to this one; either that, or I don't remember it.)
4. What if the rodef never learned that it's against the law to murder people? Can we still kill him? In the case of other crimes, such as being alone in a room with a member of the opposite sex, you can't punish the "criminals" unless they were given hatra'ah (warning), in the presence of at least two witnesses, that what they are about to do is punishable by x punishment. Shouldn't a rodef have this sort of warning too? (Answer: No, you fool! In the case of murder, as with rape, you don't give the rodef the benefit of the doubt.) There is a long and involved passage of commentary from the Tosafot discussing who is entitled to hatra'ah and who isn't, but everyone agrees that the murderer and the rapist don't deserve hatra'ah. Them, you just kill.

It was an interesting subject to study, but with all those qualifications I began to wonder what would happen if a rodef were chasing a nirdaf and someone else were sitting there watching the scene, realizing what's going on, but unsure of what he's permitted to do in the situation, and methodically going through Sanhedrin to figure out how he ought to proceed. That's the premise. Here's the song.

Shoot the Rodef
Stolen from Leave the Biker by Fountains of Wayne

Seems the harder I try to run, the more he quickens his pace
Can't this man try to understand I like my personal space?
And it looks as if he's packing some heat
Underneath his right tzitzit

Chorus:
He's got a gun and he's gaining on me
And you sit and stare while you learn Sanhedrin
Oh, can't you see my future is falling apart?
Baby please, shoot the rodef, shoot the rodef through the heart
Baby please, shoot the rodef, shoot the rodef through the heart

Lo ta'amod al dam re'echah--never stand idly by
You think maybe you'll shoot for the leg, but baby, that ain't gonna fly
'Cause you're only gonna have one chance
And the fellow's wearing bulletproof pants

[Repeat Chorus]

The Tosafot's dense, but use your common sense--the guy's chayav mitah
I'll be dead and buried, and you will still be worried over whether he got hatra'ah
And you're wondering which one of us pays
'Cause I happen to have shattered your vase

He's cocked his gun and he's aiming at me
And you're getting scared, but you still aren't helping
Oh, can't you see he's planning to blow me apart?
Baby, please, shoot the rodef, shoot the rodef through the heart
Baby, go, shoot the rodef, shoot the rodef through the heart
Do it now, shoot the rodef, shoot the rodef through the heart
Hurry up, shoot the rodef, shoot the rodef through the heart
Put down the Rashi, shoot the rodef, shoot the rodef through the heaaaaaaaaaaaaaa--

Current Music: What a Fine Day for a Parade, Fountains of Wayne (in my head)

The Starched Shirt of Turin

2004-05-13T02:34:00.000-04:00

On Columbus between 89th and 90th, there is a dry cleaning service called Turin Cleaners. This is just too good.

Turin Cleaners: Give us your old, dirty coat and we'll return it to you, looking like new, in just three days! Place your faith and your dirty laundry in our hands. We gently but thoroughly remove even old stains (even very very old stains) caused by Coffee, Lipstick, or Our Lord and Saviour! Free pick-up and deliverance service available. Call and ask for Veronica.

Current Music: Leave the Biker, Fountains of Wayne

The Ubiquitous Octopus

2004-04-04T11:35:00.000-04:00

What this city lacks in the tree department it makes up for with graffiti. New York graffiti is kind of like New York pizza; even when it's in bad taste, it's still more enjoyable than the usual fare. Walking around the more interesting parts of the city is like walking through an art gallery. Granted, it's not always good art--there's plenty of crudity (and sometimes carrots and tomatoes too)--but most of it has a good reason to be there. For example, the subway ads advertising Ringling Bros./Barnum & Bailey Circus (performing at Madison Square Gardens) were edited with messages like "cancelled due to animal cruelty", which is the sort of thoughtful wall message I don't mind seeing every so often.

Every time I go to the lower east side, I see a particularly delightful piece of graffiti (or "tree") spraypainted around. It's a simple cartoony doodle of a smiling octopus (although only four tentacles are visible...maybe I should have titled this "the ubiquitous quadropus"), with gaze directed optimistically upward. Here's one.

The first one I saw was just outside of Battery Dance Company, where Ring O' Bells rehearses. I don't wander around the lower east side enough, so for a long time I felt all special, believing the octopus was unique to that building. Initially, when I started seeing more of them, it was a bit disappointing--the one I noticed wasn't unique after all--but soon I realized how ubiquitous they were, and it just seemed so charming that I stopped being disappointed. I found two pages photodocumenting the octopi, so if you want to look at more examples, here are some and here are some more.

Nature doesn't live here so much, but people create here. Okay, it's technically against the law and all that, but it makes me happy to see New Yorkers owning and changing their surroundings. I'd rather see a four-tentacled octopus on a dirty wall than not notice the dirty wall at all.

Current Music: Misery, Green Day...step step step hop...

All done!

2004-04-04T08:53:00.000-04:00

On Friday afternoon, shortly before Shabbat, I finished the last application essay I had to write and sent it off in all its electronic glory. Nine minutes later, I received an e-mail from the dean of admissions saying he received it, and now he can finally invite me for my interview. I guess he was doing his last flurry of e-mails before Shabbat, too. So anyway, I have an interview with RRC on Thursday, the 15th, and a placement test the previous day. Now I just have to figure out how to take public transportation to Wyncote, PA, which is about half an hour away from Philadelphia. This will be fun. :)

Now that I have finished my essays, finally finally finally, I can do other things I've been putting off, for example, playing stuff on accordion, writing letters, cleaning my apartment for Pesach, sewing a vest for Ring O' Bells (sewing party this afternoon), going dancing (at Irving Plaza tonight, with Harlem Renaissance Orchestra), writing about the time I spent in Boston several weeks ago, and telling you all about the octopus. But the octopus, like the Boston Report, deserves a separate post.

Current Music: The Love Cats, The Cure

Well, they did say "please explain"...

2004-03-21T05:57:00.000-05:00

On its application for admission, the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College asks,
"Have you ever had a serious illness, injury, or operation? If yes, please explain" and while normally I just check "no" to those, it occurred to me as I was filling it out this morning that perhaps the head injuries I had when I was little might be the sort of thing they're talking about. So, I decided to have a little fun with it:

I’ve had two concussions. Does that count? One was when I was 8; my brother and I were playing in my bedroom, which I shared with my sister. She had just graduated from crib to low mattress, but my mother, just to make sure my sister wouldn’t roll off the mattress and plummet to her death on the floor three inches below, had put a bed rail along the length of the mattress. My brother and I were having one of our epic stuffed animal wars, which are like pillow fights but more interesting, and he’d just invented a new strategy: throw a blanket over your opponent’s head, and then attack her before she can regain her bearings. Clever, no? Anyway, I had just been blanketed, and was trying to walk backward away from the spot where I thought he was looming, about to pummel me with Elephant. I escaped Elephant, but I backed straight into the bedrail, tripped, and fell backward onto the low mattress and into the wall. I broke my fall with the back of my head. I had the second concussion when I was 10; I was trying to surprise my friends at school by showing them a new trick I could do on the travelling bars, and instead, I surprised myself by falling backward and hitting my head on the asphalt. I blacked out for a few seconds, which was an interesting experience. I think I damaged my mother more than I damaged myself. I’m fine now. I’m pretty sure she’s recovered, too.

Current Music: In the Belly of the Whale, Newsboys

Who knew that Rosie the Riveter was a lefty?

2004-03-19T15:12:00.000-05:00

This is an idea I had that I'd fully expected someone else to have realized already. If I'd had the patience, I'd have replaced "we can do it" with the Hebrew phrase that's transliterated "na'aseh otoh", which means "we will do it," but as it happened, I lacked the patience. As it is, this phrase probably better expresses the intent of the message anyway; it's not that all Jewish women shall wear tefillin so much as that they may.

For the curious, the wiki encyclopedia has a very helpful explanation of the controversy surrounding women and tefillin.

Current Music: "Hey, Julie" by Fountains of Wayne has been in my head all afternoon.

Tractate #4

2004-03-17T01:09:00.000-05:00

Finally finished this thing that was supposed to be a companion piece for the Purim performance of Rabbi Jastrow, but wasn't. It's intended to be a spoof of the introductory talk Devorah gives us each morning, in which she shares any pertinent Drisha news and then tells us what we're going to be studying that day.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is Tractate #4[1].

Five, seven, eight and nine[2],
Everybody up the stairs, cuz we're way behind in our
Schedule for the chapter
We spent five days on the daf[3]
So we've gotta move faster

Whose turn to read this morning?[4]
Nadia's up but she had no warning[5]
Down on the ground floor Hilary's furious[6]
And I hear that[7]
But let's get serious[7]

What can I do? It's hard to function
When you're coping with construction[8]
We have no heat[9] and my markers are drying[10] but
Here is your assignment

A little bit of Rashi, inner margin[11]
A little bit of Tosafot needs enlargin'[12]
A little disagreement written here
Chachamim object to Rabbi Me'ir[13]
A little Yad Remah[14] and when we're through, we'll
Look at the machloket of Rav and Shmuel[15]
Notice how the Rambam[16] makes it clear
Finish to the Mishnah[17], and we'll do shiur[18]

Tractate Number Four!

Go three lines down
Go and read it all around
Say the phrase like you're proud
Of your Ashkenaz sound[19]
Here's one new sheet
And one new packet[20]
It's written in Greek[21]
But see if you can hack it
Analyze once
And analyze twice
And if it makes no sense
You're reading it right

A little bit of Rashi, inner margin
A little bit of Tosafot needs enlargin'
A little ambiguity makes it fun[21]
A little bit of Targum Yonaton[14]
The Ran[14]'s not wrong but his style's sloppy
A little bit of him on a blurry copy
A little Ibn Ezra[14], not too wordy
Finish up tomorrow, cuz it's twelve thirty[22]

Jastrow!
The Jastrow!
Tractate number four!

A little bit of Rashi, inner margin
A little bit of Tosafot needs enlargin'
A little disagreement going on
Talia insists that Karyn's wrong[23]
Move a little forward, but at what cost?
Jarah is annoyed[23] and I'm[24] just lost
A little bit of clarity, from Rachel Wainer[23]
A little mental breakdown--we're insane here.[23]

Don't be vexed; these
Texts we're reading are never easy[25]
Ask me questions
All you can
Everyone's gonna understand

Tractate Number Four!

Current Music: I'm going to serve Lou Bega an eviction notice if he doesn't get out of my head.

[1] The entire body of work known as the Mishnah is divided into six orders, which are then subdivided into tractates. This year, we in Devorah's Gemara class are studying Sanhedrin, which is tractate #4 of Nezikin.
[2] Drisha is on floor #9 of the Jewish Center at 86th St. The building is old, and the elevator frequently breaks. Floor #6 is the bottom half of a swimming pool, and thus does not exist.
[3] A daf is a page in the Talmud. Spending five days on one daf is really slow. By the way, you can see what any page of the Talmud looks like if you go to e-daf.com and fiddle with the sidebar to request a specific page. Pretty cool, no?
[4] Each day, one person is elected as Reader, and they read and translate whatever section of the text Devorah is teaching that day. You're supposed to prepare for this job by making certain to read through all the assigned sources before it's your day to read, but sometimes people fall behind in their work and are caught by surprise.
[5] This being caught by surprise seems to have happened to Nadia more than to the rest of us, somehow.
[6] After over a month of having no elevator, Hilary decided she was going to organize a protest. She'd stand in the lobby next to the elevator and refuse to climb the stairs until the elevator was fixed, and she encouraged others to join her. Nobody did. This incensed her even more than the lack of an elevator, and she delivered a message to us, via Devorah, that she thought we were all spineless.
[7] One of Devorah's pet phrases.
[8] The whole building is being renovated, and poor Devorah gets the worst of it. Her office is directly below the 10th-floor bathroom, which is being completely redone, but was somehow still functioning as a bathroom during renovation. Aside from the constant noise and showers of plaster dust on her computer, books, and person, she's related to us tales of what happens when there's a bathroom above your head and all the sound-proofing layers of flooring have been removed.
[9] Around late January they turned off our heat for a while.
[10] Devorah tends to rely heavily upon the giant whiteboard as a teaching aid. She has a charming habit of picking up a blue or black whiteboard marker, beginning to write a word, discovering the marker to have no ink left, and putting the marker back on the metal ledge, as if replacing it and letting it sit there for a while will replenish its supply of ink.
[11] In the standard editions of the Talmud, Rashi's very practical clarifications are printed in Rashi Script in the margins around the main block of text. He's always on the inner half of the page. Why? Good question. He was considered the most important commentator, so they put him closer to the spine of the book because that way the rats, who would nibble the books from the exposed page-edge inward, would get to his words last.
[12] Tosafot is a general term meaning other, non-Rashi, commentators who lived and wrote later. They're printed in Rashi Script, too, and they, like Rashi, appear on the page around the main text, but on the outside half of the margin. Rats used to love Tosafot. I, however, am not a rat, and find them annoyingly indigestible, not to mention quite a strain on the eyes. Spend a few hours staring at the Tosafot and you'll be well on your way to earning a one-way ticket to Myopiland. I get teased for refusing to read Tosafot until after I've made an enlarged photocopy of the page in question. Thank goodness for a working photocopy machine.
[13] Rabbi Me'ir is one of the fellows in the Canon of Rabbis, who frequently tells us his opinion about some mishnah (teaching). Sometimes the chachamim, or "wise guys", disagree with him, and he has to stand and argue his opinion all alone. Poor fellow.
[14] Another commentator.
[15] A Machloket is an educated disagreement. Rav and Shmuel are two of the oldest and most famous members of the Canon. They fought a lot.
[16] The Rambam, aka Maimonides, was an enlightened thinker who could explain everything so that it all worked out perfectly. He sometimes did this at the cost of a literal affirmation of certain creeds, so he's not very popular in some schools.
[17] The central text of the Talmud alternates between mishnayot, or teachings, and gemarot, or discussions on those teachings. If you've finished to the next teaching, you've finished reading and digesting the teaching and discussion that you were assigned to learn.
[18] Shiur is Drishaspeak for classtime, as opposed to Seder or Chavrutah, which means time you spend in the Beit Midrash (study room) working with your partner.
[19] Ever notice how there seem to be two ways of saying every Hebrew phrase you've ever heard? It's shabBAT shaLOM or good SHABbes; yom KIPper or YOM kipPUR; ROSHhaSHANuh or ROSH hashaNAH, talLEET or TALLis, chupPAH or CHUPpuh, and you get the idea. Ashkenazic Jews tend to accent the first syllables and turn some of the t sounds into s or th. Sephardic Jews tend to accent the second syllables. Sephardic pronunciation is generally considered more correct, partly because that's they way they speak in Israel. Ashkenazic pronunciation is Old Skool. Devorah tries to use the Sephardic pronunciation, but she grew up speaking with the Ashkenazic accent and sometimes she forgets, at which point I smile (it's still a little jarring to my ear) and Talia and Karyn (who also grew up using the Ashkenazic accent) cheer because they're being represented. That line was directed more toward them than toward Devorah.
[20] Typical methods of distributing assignments
[21] Not really
[22] Gemara class goes from 9 till 12:30 daily.
[23] This often happens.
[24] That would be me stepping out of character and speaking autobiographically.
[25] This awkwardness of lyric was an attempt to parallel Mr. Bega's rhyme scheme. Check it out:
I do all to
Fall in love with a girl like you
vs.
Don't be vexed; these
Texts we're reading are never easy

You can read the complete lyrics to Mambo #5 if you want to.

Not bad for a weblog with a name that sounds like a cosmetic.

2004-03-11T00:03:00.000-05:00

In honor of my having this page for almost a year now, this post marks my first foray into metablogging. Every so often I indulge in a bit of recursive voyeurism and peek through my secret periscope to see what search phrases people are using to find this page. Here are some of them:

1. actress drisha

2. letters ihum

3. jewish glosses

4. rose parade radio broadcast

5. why isn't kant an existentialist?

6. picture of lido cookies from pepperidge farm

7. philosophy's human drama

8. yeats "walking naked" poem meaning

9. plinyl floor

10. halacha door-to-door

11. "pepperidge farm" delectables

12. "ruckus room" "rumpus room"

13. "who broke my window?" LDS

14. "Once i READ A BOOK"+LYRICS

15. "round green rug"

16. victorian ladies + sore bottoms

17. white food turnips camphor sausages inspiration

18. figuring your colored contact

19. schitten ritual

That last one really piqued my curiosity, so I reproduced the search, and found a lot of pages in German that I didn't understand, with the exception, of course, of my page. What I found most amusing about this, and the real reason why I'm writing this post in the first place, is what happens when Google translates my page into German. From what little I know of the language, it seems to be a fairly accurate rendition. Check out the word for "hair elastic".

Current Music: The End of the Tour, TMBG

How to Panhandle in Manhattan

2004-03-09T18:49:00.000-05:00

Find a girl who is running up the block at top speed.

Place yourself directly in her path.

Speak these words: "Yo, bitch! You got fifty cents?"

Current Music: Rose Leaf Rag, Scott Joplin

Weekend Update

2004-03-08T19:09:00.000-05:00

Today during lunch Jarah and I performed the Mr. Sandman/Rabbi Jastrow piece for everyone else at Drisha, in honor of Purim. It went really well. The harmonies sounded right, the tempo stayed even, and everyone laughed in all the right places. Devorah herself was gone during lunch, so when she returned she requested a reprise performance, which Jarah and I gave in her (Devorah's) office just before she (Jarah) had to go teach Hebrew school. Devorah, too, laughed in all the right places. She especially liked the "three point font" bit, as did a bunch of other people, so I was glad I put it in instead of the other line, and particularly glad I saved it till the last verse. It's total big-fish-small-pond, I suppose, in that nobody else seems to have considered rewriting song lyrics, so they're impressed when someone else does it, but I'm prouder of this work than any of my others, perhaps just because I managed to not indulge in a weakness of mine and clutter it with too much overcomplicated explanation. It's short and simple and doesn't use too many big words, so other people can get it the first time, which is the only chance they have.

The ball on Saturday night was delightful, but not at all in the way I'd expected. I was expecting a Gaskell ball, and this one, while well-proportioned, was a good deal farther to the petite end of the spectrum. Instead of the 35ish I'm accustomed to expecting, there were ten scheduled dances and a few bonus dances squeezed in here and there, plus a set of German Cotillion games during the intermission. Instead of the 500ish I find at Gaskell's, there were approximately 50 people. I'm bad at these estimates, but the hall was far (FAR) from crowded, and it was also about a third (quarter? again, I am ill at these numbers) the size of the Scottish Rite Temple. The band, Spare Parts, was more of a duo than a band, really, but they had adequate amplification and they were good without drawing attention inappropriately...steady, consistent, and tasteful in their choices of Civil War-appropriate pieces. There was, astonishingly, a slight gender imbalance in our (Amanda's and my) favor, probably due to the Civil War reenactor contingent that attended, and (joy!) knew the dances. Amanda had fun making a subtle production of sighing over the Men In Uniform. How period of her. :) Other nice things about this ball, in spite of its smaller-than-expected dimensions, included: the spread of dainties--all beautifully presented, all with calligraphed place cards telling what the food was and its historical source; the shocking consistency of historically correct, well-fitted, and beautiful costumes on women, and some nice uniforms on men; the very danceable wood floor; the ladies' changing area downstairs (which Amanda and I didn't use, but where we stored our street shoes); the dance cards attached by red cord to tiny pencils, presented to every ballgoer upon arrival; the two German Cotillion games we played between the two sets (the first was a simple game in which ten gents polka'd in a circle together while eight ladies stood around the edge of the room until a whistle was blown, at which point the gents found ladies and danced with them, except for the two extra gents, who had to dance with each other...so innocent, it's almost invisible; the second was basically the same as the Paul Jones we sometimes played at Friday Night Waltz when Richard was in charge--1. couples make a circle and progress to the left in time to the music, 2. when a whistle is blown, all turn to face partners and dance a grand chain, starting by passing partners by right hands, and 3. when another whistle is blown, all take the approaching person of the opposite dance role and dance anywhere in the room until a third whistle is blown, at which point all reform the circle--only it was done in waltz time, and the gents were blindfolded, to the great amusement of the audience); the wide age range (there were boys of 12 or 13 and men of 70ish, and girls of 13 or 14 but looking 18--corsets under low-cut dresses will do that--and grandes dames of 60ish, but looking 40--corsets and low-cut dresses will occasionally do that, too); and the uniform friendliness of everyone I spoke with there. I suppose when attendance is so light, each person is more obvious, and people are more willing to share themselves with strangers. The smallishness made it feel more like a "real" private New England ball, somehow, especially because Mr. Patri Pugliese (who, with his wife and children, hosted the ball, I think) announced and MCed the entire night. He also taught all the dances and was the liaison with the band. He has a very gentle sort of commanding presence.

On further reflection, the best part of the weekend really might not have been the ball; it was hanging out with Amanda and Co. on the way up, on the way back, and during the day on Saturday and Sunday at her parents house. "Co." turned out to be only one person, whom I'll call Mountain Man, instead of two or three, which was lousy for the car rental price we each paid, but nice for the person who could sit in back and stretch or sleep during the 5ish-hour drive from Manhattan to Amanda's parents' house.

I'm excited about Amanda. She feels sort of like the part of me that doesn't get to come out and play so much at Drisha. I started thinking she might be a good person to get to know when I met her at a contradance and discovered that she does all the Victorian ballroom stuff I do, and in fact, used to perform the same sort of historical re-creation business I did, only through something run by Mr. Pugliese rather than through Dickens Fair. She didn't know all the mazurka variations, but we got together one evening on the 5th floor of the Jewish Center, where they have a ballet studio, to play with stuff, and she follows like a dream. No. Dreams rarely follow anything. She follows like ei after c.

She's just over thirty but looks my age, and she's stunningly beautiful and comfortable with it, so while we were upstairs doing the requisite three-hour-ball-preparation-marathon (while Mountain Man stayed downstairs until the last five minutes, chatting with Amanda's parents about business...how classic), she was not at all ashamed of playing dress-up in very pretty things and grinning coyly into the glass with bubbly girly satisfaction. ("I'm so pretty!" she actually said, although not entirely seriously.) She admits to desiring nice things, in spite of the materialism implied, and when I saw the aesthetic loveliness of her parents' home, I could understand why. (The guest room, where I slept, had a hand-made quilt in shades of green, which matched the towel and the carpet.) She likes admiration, and gets it. She's a struggling actress, but not struggling as hard as some. She knows the words to all the worthwhile musicals, including G&S, and takes song cues almost as often as I do. She doesn't pun back at me so much, but she gets them and appreciates that sort of thinking. She likes third-grade jokes, and we passed some time in the car trading them...the one about no tomatoes had her laughing for several minutes. (You know: What's red and invisible? No tomatoes.) She seems to make the same relationship-related demands and errors that I do, and to be attracted to and to have the same difficulties with the same sorts of personality traits in others. Many of the choices she has made in life, when they weren't the same as the choices I've made, were the ones I almost made, and vice versa. She's Unitarian, which is, as far as I can tell, the "Christian" version of Reconstructionist Judaism. She was thinking seriously of becoming a minister for a long time before she chose performing. Talking to her late Saturday night, after the ball, cuddled under the hand made quilt, felt like talking to an alternate-universe-version of myself.

Mountain Man and I didn't hit it off so well. To his credit, he did a good job of being a gentleman throughout the ball, but at points over the rest of the weekend there were other parts of his personality that impressed me unfavorably. He seems to be, in many ways, rather good at conforming to the stereotypes of "Man". The sad thing is that I think this is intentional. Aside from the physical aspect--he's quite tall, and broad of shoulder--he also seemed overly given to doing the sorts of things that are joked about in those annoying jokes that bitter women make up about their ex-husbands. Amanda had taken the first driving shift, and when we stopped to switch drivers, he asked if either of us had a hair elastic for him to borrow while he drove. His hair is shoulder-length, and I guess it bothers him to have it loose when he drives. I had two elastics, one light blue and one black. I let him choose. Mountain Man chose black. "Really?" I queried, looking at his light blue plaid shirt and his faded jeans. "But the light blue one would match your shirt and jeans so perfectly." "Yes," said Amanda. "Look, it's the exact shade of this stripe here." And he explained (I wish I could remember his exact words) that the light blue would be too feminine. ??? I guess for some people it's important to look manly by wearing black hair elastics while driving to Massachussetts with two ladies in the car. Okay.

Later, while he was driving through part of Massachusetts near Boston, a pickup truck ahead of us wasn't going fast enough for his liking (we were doing 70 in the left lane) and he handled the situation by continuing to go at the exact same pace even though the pickup, which remained in front of us, continued to go slightly more slowly. I was once in a car with another guy from my past whose first name was the same as Mountain Man's, and as Past Guy looked down to fiddle with the AC for a moment, I watched, increasingly disbelieving, and mute from terror as we rear-ended a pickup in front of us. The pickup was stopped at a red light which Past Guy hadn't seen. All of us were fine, but the hood of Rosenante, Past Guy's light blue Toyota Tercel, had crumpled like aluminium foil. I did a good job of not acting like I was scared until the next time I was in a car and felt as if we were approaching the car ahead too quickly. My breathing grew shallow and I kept involuntarily slamming on the passenger-side brake. In fact, I've never really completely gotten over that reflex. Anyway, back to the recent past, I decided that Earlier Than Necessary was a better time to speak up than Later Than Necessary, so as I watched our rental car continue to close the distance between us and the pickup in front of us, I said, quite clearly, "Uh, you're planning on slowing down, right?" No response. We crept closer. "Please slow down." Mountain Man: "He shouldn't be in the fast lane if he's going to move so slowly." Closer. Me: "He's not changing lanes!" Amanda, loudly: "I am NOT comfortable with you driving this way." Then Mountain Man dropped back, and proceeded to execute an elaborate lane-changing maneuver in which he ended up going all the way to the second lane from the right and back again to the left just because he was so determined to pass this pickup. After about 10 minutes I started breathing normally again, and Amanda drove on the way back.

Sunday morning, Amanda (who can cook things) decided we ought to make an omelette for breakfast. After I passed a few minutes by washing and coring mushrooms while she beat eggs and fiddled with spices, I realized that Mountain Man was doing something odd. He was sitting in a nice winged chair reading a newspaper. "Would you like to help me with the mushrooms?" I asked. "Of course," he said, and up he got. He found a large knife and sliced the mushrooms paper-thin, which was fine, if a bit of overkill, but when you're a guest in someone else's house, why not offer right away without being asked? Is cooking really so ominously light blue?

I sometimes wonder why it is that my close male friends tend to identify, or be identified, with a certain image that isn't particularly marked by a preponderance of testosterone. Am I unfairly ignoring all but a certain subset of society? Then I remember what it's like to hang out with the testosterone-driven guys, and how certain thought processes that I take for granted seem, in their case, to be seriously impaired, and I feel thankful that I've found the good ones.

Current Sounds: raindrops on pavement