another dull post

you are what you love
and not what loves you back

Yay Jenny Lewis.

Yay being bored at work, procrastinating my homework, and watching “Coupling.” It’s amazing how much I can multitask at just so I can avoid my proposal for my ethnomusicology project.

All of a sudden college involves actual work and lots of different research projects. In the next month, I have to develop my own neuroscience paper, do this ethnomusicology project, prepare a pre-1820 text for modern readers, write a couple concert reviews, and do regular homework. I guess I should be excited, since I’m always complaining about not having any challenges at school. Hooray, lots of work along with my actual job and my actual internship. Oh, life.

This winter I’ll be going to New York and Israel, though, so that should be a nice break. I should probably start learning some Hebrew and pay a little more attention to what’s going on in Israel at the moment, because I’m definitely an uninformed Jew when it comes to that. :-p

more judaism and the last of summer reading

Shabbat we had the option to do absolutely nothing, or we could participate in a variety of workshops, lectures, talks, activities, etc. In the morning I went to the “morning musical service,” which was just a regular reform service that included lots of Shabbat songs, many of which I did not remember/know at all, and even more that I learned with completely different tunes. That would be weird, except that I’m pretty sure that everybody else Jewish in the world knows the tune that I don’t. I’m thinking the guy who was our songleader when I was little just liked coming up with new stuff.

For the next block, I went to “Whole Torah in Just One Hour,” with one of NYU’s rabbis. He seems pretty chill, and he greeted everyone by going, “Shabbes,” the way the stoner turtle in “Finding Nemo” might say it. In 75 minutes, this guy managed to do all of the following: quote the Iliad in Greek; reference King’s “I have a dream” speech; talk about 100 Years of Solitude; give an anthropological history of the ancient Sumerians; describe the epic of Gilgamesh; and actually talk about the Torah. The whole trick was, of course, that you can’t do the whole Torah in an hour, but we did get to chapter 13 of Genesis, which he said was further than they got last year. So that was fun.

In the afternoon, I went to “Let’s Talk About Sex,” because, frankly, what else sounds interesting when that’s on the bill? And it really was, because we talked about myths about Jews and sex, like how no, nobody has sex through a sheet, and actually, it’s commanded that you be completely naked (no socks) when you have sex. We also looked at Genesis, cartoons, short stories, halacha, and quotes from Maimonides to discuss men and women’s roles in relationships and where sex fits in. I wish it had gone on longer, because that could be a really interesting class. It was a little bit too large of a group for a really good discussion.

I’d say more, but it’s already been so long and I’m on to new and different things. I finished three more books before school started on Monday, and I’m still plodding through that García Márquez (on a side note, why does everybody in the English-speaking world refuse to see how easy it is to pronounce his name correctly rather than emphasizing the “quez” part?). Those books were:

1. The Journals of Sylvia Plath by, of course, Sylvia Plath. This is another exhausting book that takes quite a long time to read, but being in the company of genius is always awesome, like in the real sense of that word, so it was wonderful to read. The most frustrating thing, aside from knowing I will never be that amazing, was knowing that Ted Hughes destroyed her final journals. I so wanted to read them. I wonder if he did.

2. Prophecy of the Sisters by Michelle Zink. I don’t want to say much, because I read this to review for teenreads.com, and the review of that is going to be up soonish. But it was in the vain of Libba Bray’s Gemma Doyle trilogy, and while it wasn’t perfectly written, it was a pretty awesome plot, and it was definitely a fun read.

3. The Worst Years of Your Life, edited by Mark Jude Poirier. I was happy to see this collection, because I love teen angst, I try to love YA, at least when it’s good, and it was so neat that this was an accepted collection of “literary” stories that still dealt with that stuff that usually gets labeled “crap” or “Gossip Girl” (which, incidentally, was not crap when it began–only when it continued). Unfortunately, a lot of the stories just seemed so “literary” and weird that I couldn’t really get into them, but the ones that were good were really evocative and interesting. I also appreciated that they mixed contemporary and new authors with older ones.

So that makes 19 books this summer. That’s not what I hoped. And it seemed like so many. It takes longer to read books now than when I was younger. Part of that is that I read harder, better books. I hope. But is it also my short attention span since the Internet came to be? Still, I’ll plod along and keep reading. All I’ll be doing for school this semester is reading anyway.

Stuff about school and life later. Off to do endless homework and work.

shabbat shalom

I spent this past week in Clayton, Georgia, doing training for my Hillel internship this year, and just being more Jewish than I have been for quite awhile. I still can’t really say I’ve ever been to the South, because soul food and kosher food are not really the same thing, and Jew camp in a mountain isn’t really Atlanta. But, regardless of my geographic location, I had a great time.

I grew up Jewish, but the religion wasn’t really the main part of it, and I decided on my own to quit being religious when I was about 13. Since then, I’ve found I really want to go back to it, but it’s been hard, because you feel very uncomfortable when you’re a college student but you were never bat mitzvah’ed and you don’t read any Hebrew. Hillel’s siddurim do not have romanized transliteration of Hebrew, so I am completely lost when I go to services, and that is why I bought a teach-yourself-Hebrew book. I have yet to open it, but it’s a start.

Since we were really there for training, we spent a lot of time clustered up with another campus, Rutgers in my case (and our cluster was cluster F, so we had a lot of fun with that), and did bonding things and leadership things and peer networking things, since that’s the basis of our internship. However, we also did a fair amount of Jewish learning, and since I was there over the weekend, we had Shabbat stuff to do that was wonderful.

Before this summer, it had probably been about seven years since I had attended a Friday night service. While I was in Uruguay, we went to services, but as I wrote, I didn’t always enjoy them, though just the feeling of being around people chanting in Hebrew was very comforting. This Friday, though, was the best feeling I had felt in a long time. It made this summer finally feel like summer (magical), and it made me feel as if going to services more often (and taking a b’nai mitzvah class if I can find any free time and more participants) would really help me keep my sanity. I loved it.

Though this is a very ancient tradition, the custom of wearing white on Shabbat has kind of died, I think. But it is apparently a camp-y thing to do, so almost everyone was wearing all or mostly white as we had three processionals to the outside arena where we met, sang, danced horas, and learned other nigunim (songs without words, but sung with many voices including things like “lai lai lai” or “bim bim bom”). Then there were many options for services, and while I could have gone to a traditional one, I chose to stay for the one that other students had put together, which was not very religious, but included singing, active resting by learning about yoga, discussion, reading, etc. I forgot how wonderful it is to go to a service, and I re-familiarized myself with songs, terms such as “d’var torah” (a chosen reading from the Torah that is used to start a discussion about a value, current event, book, or whatever), and just the customs that I grew up participating in (though in a very lax, reform way). I felt really uncomfortable a lot of the time, like on Saturday morning, because I had never been to a morning Shabbat service, and I still don’t know all of the mourner’s kaddish or every song to sing, but even in my moments of discomfort, I’ve scarcely felt so peaceful in recent memory.

I love being Jewish. I can’t wait to become more so this year.

Next time, a blog about other ways to be Jewish, and other things I learned.

summer reading #3

Haven’t updated for awhile, and I am moving very slowly in some books, but I also read very quickly some others. What else is there to do but read when you are stuck in bed with the flu? Now, of course, I am better and off on adventures, but here are the latest books I’ve finished.

I have not read books that I expected to read, due again to the fact that I did not expect to be sick with so much free time. So I’ve been a bit disappointed in things. But such is life.

1. Cocktails for Three by Madeleine Wickham. So disappointing! This woman, who also writes as Sophie Kinsella, has always impressed me, because while she writes chick lit, which basically means dumb, she writes it in a way that makes you want to read it, because both she and her characters have clearly read other books before. This one, however, was utter crap and made me really, really angry. Pregnant women being alcoholics, women being stupid, and just stupid, stupid, stupid. Don’t read it. That is all.

2. Social Justice: A Jewish Perspective by Bernardo Kliksberg. This was lent to me by a friend at Hillel after I was told to stay in bed for three days, and it’s a very good and pretty easy read. Since this is a vaguely religious trip that I’m on (or was on, since now I’m just vacationing and traveling), it was nice to kind of get in touch with my Judaism a bit and remember that there are ways I identify with my religion, even if for me it’s not about being completely stuck in the past or really Orthodox or keeping kosher. Even if you’re not Jewish, this book has a good outline of what social justice is and why it’s important that it exist. It didn’t exactly tell me things I didn’t believe in before, but it was nice to have them outlined well.

3. Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. I didn’t want to read this book, but my friend lent it to me and I figured I’d at least look at it, and then I finished it in a day. Whoops. I guess part of my reasoning for not wanting to read it was my resentment for Americans who do “spiritual” things to be trendy, and also because I generally feel kind of icky when talking about it. For me, religion is very personal, and while I’m glad I have my beliefs, I don’t particularly care if anyone knows them or not and I don’t really enjoy evangelicals who are constantly trying to tell me what they believe and why I should believe it, too. Maybe that’s mean of me, but it makes me feel uncomfortable. But this book, even when it got borderline sappy, was a great read simply because Gilbert was a really great storyteller. I haven’t felt like writing lately, and in the middle of the book I just had to run upstairs and journal. And it reminded me how much I enjoy traveling, even when I don’t, and how much I like to write personal essays. So I would recommend the book above all. Plus, who wouldn’t want to read about living in Italy?

So that makes 10 books thus far through the summer, and I’m well into the middle of two/three others (a García Márquez book that I’m reading simultaneously in Spanish and in translation and a book of poems). We’ll see if I make it to my goal of thirty, though. And hopefully the rest of the books I read will be better.

Stuff about my latest adventures later.

montevideo 1

Now I know I am acclimating to being in Latin America, because it does not feel at all like 4:30 in the morning. I just got back to the hotel, and most people are still out at another club. I was with Caryn and Danny and two uruguayas, Melu and Lili, and when we left the club El Pony Pisador, we decided against paying a cover charge for an overcrowded club, so we went to McDonald’s (elegant and gorgeous and really nice here!) and hung out, speaking in Spanglish.

I feel very immersed in Spanish already, and I’ve only been here since Monday afternoon. Oh, I guess that’s a week already. I really like it here. I don’t feel entirely comfortable, but I think that’s a good thing. Many of the participants don’t speak much Spanish, so we’ve been divided into two groups. Thankfully, my group doesn’t have to sit around learning grammar, since I feel like every class I take “teaches” me the same thing over and over again. Instead, we are learning about Uruguayan culture, politics, and slang. We’ve learned a few things, like formal phrases for letters, and much more vocabulary, but mostly we just get to practice conversing by talking about things that are actually interesting. I love it. I’m just not a huge fan of having class at 8:30 in the morning, because it lasts for four hours.

After class we eat out, and then I go to my internship at Un Techo Para Mi País. It’s like the Habitat for Humanity of Latin America, except they actually do a whole lot more. Thursday I went to a shanty town, which was a really, really powerful experience. We have poverty in the US, but it does not look like this. Or smell like this. At the risk of sounding really cheesy, I felt extremely humbled. And then afterwards, I left and met everyone at the hotel, and we went to Teatro Solís to see the opera “Nabucco.” So it was a day of highs and lows. The opera was pretty good, and the theatre is absolutely beautiful.

Since I am here on a Jewish program, we are required to go to Shabbat services each Friday. So last night I went with most of the group (there are 9 girls and 2 boys) to the Orthodox synagogue. I did not like it.

More than that. I felt pretty offended by it.

I won’t say that I know everything or even a lot about Judaism. My family has always been more culturally Jewish than religiously so, but it’s not like I don’t know anything. And never having experienced Orthodox Judaism aside from here, I can’t say how common this is. But first of all, this separating men and women thing is a tradition that I think needs to go. Everyone has an equal right to enjoy and participate in a religious activity. After the service, people asked if I liked it, and I wanted to say, “How could I? It wasn’t meant for me to enjoy.” The women were put into a small part of the room, and we had a glass partition up that had lines across it so we couldn’t see much. We were perpendicular to the podium, and we were crammed. The partition was a two-way mirror so that the men just saw themselves. But they were in the main part of the synagogue, and they had room to dance and move around and greet each other.

This, to me, seems like an anti-religious practice. Religion is meant to bring people together, and I didn’t feel like any part of the service was for me.

I will say, though, that the book they used for the service was great. I really appreciate transliterations of Hebrew, because I can’t read it. I do want to learn, so it actually helps to have a transliteration written under the Hebrew, so that you can match the sounds together. And they also had a paragraph on each page explaining the significance and meaning of the prayer, along with the direct translation. That actually feels very Jewish, because I think a lot of what makes this religion wonderful is that you aren’t expected to blindly follow things; instead it is about asking questions and thinking about things and discussing issues. So I really liked that.

After the service we were all assigned Uruguayan families for dinner. Jessica and I went with a man and his 11-year-old son, and when we arrived at their gorgeous penthouse overlooking the Rio de la Plata, we met his older son and wife. They had a daughter who was in Rio de Janeiro for a wedding.

I messed up the ritual of handwashing, and I felt bad, but I tried. We sang songs together which I knew, and then the father said the other prayers for the challah and the wine. The dinner was amazing. So many meals have three courses here; I am going to come back home in five weeks weighing at least 10 pounds more.

There’s so much to say about my experiences that I don’t know how to write it all. That’s the problem with traveling. I have barely been journaling at all, because I just don’t know where to begin. This is why novels written as journals are implausible; it’s impossible to remember your entire day and have time to write it all. When I travel, I like to be drenched with the experience, so I don’t usually remember that I should go get away from it and write it down. It’ll stick in my head, I’m sure. But I’ll also try to write about it here.