The day in which we attempt to give thanks for what we have

Happy Turkey day, Americans!

This year, instead of going to Gladys's high school English teacher's house in Staten Island with the teacher's family, we spent the day (my brothers, my mom, and Beth) having a 'game day', in which we have played a multitude of board games, watched Gabe kill lots of people in Assassin's Creed, and ate a Boston Market dinner. We're still here for a good chunk of time, before going back to dad's for eighteen hours or so, then coming back here for the week. (Don't get me started on the amount of car trips this is requiring.)

It's been fun, though Gabe's occasionally a poor sport. Lots of sales tomorrow which I will not be attending, since I'll be at my dad's, and not with my mom and Beth for Black Friday.

I need Hannukah gift tips/requests for basically everybody, by the way. So feel free to contribute.

Conclave re-cap

My mom and I drove up in her car, because she doesn't go on the bus and I don't like to. We arrived at least half an hour before any of the buses, because even though we left at almost-one and hit a bunch of really irritating traffic, we know all the short cuts (our record drive is about two hours).

Arrived at about 3:40, and I ecstatically jumped out of the car, grabbed a bag, and headed in towards Manor House. With Manor House came...Elana! Elana's a very good friend and sometimes Teva (nature program) director. Hugs all around, and then the much-missed smell of Manor House, which I certainly hope is not lost with all of this planned renovation.

I ran around a bit in an empty Manor House (unheard of!). I kept expecting to run into a whole cadre of Machon (CITs) sitting in the Great Room (which we called the Living Room this weekend), but of course I didn't, which was very sad.

When the first buses arrived, I jubilantly volunteered to be the one to lead the eight and ninth graders up to bunks eight, nine, and ten, where they were staying. It was cold. Very, very cold. And I did it at least four times, because I'm a dork and a loser. But a loser who loves Eisner!

Bunk eight, where the boys were staying, was very difficult. I kept looking at the wall, expecting to see a massively huge Israeli flag and a creepy stalker, but thankfully it has been several months since he returned to Israel, and with luck will not return.

Weekend, as a whole, was very very enjoyable after this point.

Sarah and her brother were on kitchen staff for the weekend, and it was fun to hang out with her a bit.

Saw this very cool documentary called Mechina: a preparation, and I shall be joining the facebook group for it as soon as I get home. The film was about six kids around our age getting ready for the army in Israel, and it really brought the human side of Israel to a lot of the kids in Hebrew school.

We (meaning just the seniors) led Havdallah (the Saturday night service that separates Shabbat from the rest of the week). My reading, which was supposed to be about how great Hebrew High is and how much it has affected us, basically consisted of: "I have this song stuck in my head, and because I am uber-Jew it is in Hebrew. The first line is 'Ani v'atah n'shaneh et ha'olam', which means 'You and I will change the world'. What we do here does that. We also have fun." Good times.

After that, we participated in and then led a program (when I say we I mean the eleventh and twelfth graders). The first was a heated debate, and I'll go into it another time. Suffice it to say that one particular senior is kind of a bitch and I really don't like her in any context, as she radiates an aura of hatred wherever she goes and whatever she says. The second was about development of hope and Israeli music. Don't ask, I don't know. We played HaTikva ('The Hope'; Israel's national anthem), then a song by Rick Recht called 'The Hope' (Video here, and tell me if you can figure out the venue without looking), followed by Tikva by Subliminal and the Shadow, an Israeli rap duet. Good videos, I'd recommend the songs.

And I never thought I'd miss Louie, but our song leader was awful. He was conservative, so we didn't know any of the same melodies, and he didn't precisely make an effort to sing things our way, even the songs we all knew.

While in the Beit Am (theater-type building), I found a Grease playbill from this summer. 'Twas hilarious.

Another discovery: In the library, in one of the locked cases, is a binder that looked very familiar, and, peering closer, I discovered that it is, indeed, a Machon binder; it's Robbie's, in fact. I couldn't get the case opened, though, so I couldn't look closer.

I've got lots of pictures, but those will have to come later, as I don't have a connecting cable for my camera on me at the moment. Speaking of, my mom and I went up to Lookout Point.

Oh, and Danny was there at the end of the weekend, which was nice.

And now I've written more than I have for any other post to date, so I'll stop.

Slow

I'm apparently slowing down my posting (which Jordan will probably be grateful for). And it's going to get even slower over the weekend, as I'll be at EISNER CAMP for a Hebrew school retreat. No internet access. So if I don't get back to anyone right away, that's why.

Peace!

Cheating

Last week, I spent the entirety of a badminton game in gym class arguing about cheating. My doubles partner and I are both reasonably intellegent people, if I do say so myself, and our opponents were, shall we say, not. They were attempting to convince us that we were really mean because we wouldn't give them answers on tests. The girl we were facing kept on tossing around the phrase "share the wealth!"

What?

Roleplay

I miss roleplaying. I miss having time for it, and I definitely miss Corruption. That, I think, was the worst casualty of the original Unbinded dying. Of course Corruption was already pretty much comatose by the time Ogu shut down the forums. But still. I've got the file on my (broken) computer, so if I recover the files I'll have it. Hopefully Ogu still has the Unbinded files and can send them to me again.

Another new EverQuestII expansion comes out today, and I'm still not back on the servers. I sort of want to re-up my account, but I don't have the time, the money, or the working computer to run it properly. Well, I have the money, but I owe my mom too much, and I need to save for a computer. So it's a bit circular.

I miss the guild, and I definitely miss roleplaying. I'm going to fall even further behind, since they're bumping the level cap up to 80 with this expansion, and I'm still at 50-something, maybe even just 50. I've got the cash to buy proper armor and weapons, which will be nice, considering the fact that I just moved up a tier and most of my stuff is quite a bit behind.

My mount makes me want to shoot myself some times, though, since it's only a 10% run speed, and as a human paladin I'm not all that quick to begin with. All of my groupmates always have much faster mounts and other speed increases. I'm onto my carpet quest, though, and Muqali's home so he'll probably help me out, since he's really nice. I need to be powerleveled, really, but I'd settle for being dragged through the carpet quest.

Back to roleplay. I'm trying to get into Laik's new roleplay on the new Unbinded, Staring at the Sun, but I'm confused. And I'd be happy to get into Frecyo's Shattered Sea thing, but that's even more confusing.

And on top of all that, I've still got work to do.

Dammit.

Rabbits

Fluffy, adorable animals, right? Everybody loves them, and only a few people love them for their nutritional assets.

But oh my god, those that do eat them: Gross. Really, really gross. And mean. Really, really mean.

We were just watching Michael Moore's first documentary, Roger and Me, in economics, and there's this woman in it who sells rabbits for food and pets to try to make ends meet. And you know me, I'm all for people having enough money to feed their families, but I shudder at bashing a bunny's head in, tying it to a tree, and skinning it, all in front of a camera. Way to make me nauseated.

On a national level

Today is Veterans Day.

I was debating whether or not I was going to acknowledge it, but I've decided that I should.

I am, though I was not always, a patriotic American.

My patriotism might not lead me to agree with the present administration, or with a lot of what some prominent individuals say, but I do love my country and what it was founded on.

I respect the sacrifice of every veteran and every soldier, even if I don't necessarily agree with the war they fought in. They fought, they died or they survived, all for their country.

My salutes to you, members of the armed forces.

Clark

Well, I had fun.

I also had no time to work on my Hebrew, but whatever. Could've gone to a Hebrew class, but then I probably wouldn't have gotten home until about now.

Clark's very nice, although the city of Worcester, which it's very firmly embedded in, is not so nice. The Provost isn't a very good speaker, but what he had to say was interesting. The astronomy class that I sat in on was a bit of a joke, as I knew everything they had to say about quasars, dark matter, and dark energy. Either that or Mr. A, Brett, and I all have very in-depth discussion.

But speaking of the astronomy class! There are four people from camp that attend Clark, and one friend from NFTY (North American Federation of Temple Youth). Of course, I was avidly trying to reach Jeremy, the NFTY-ite, the entire time, but he never picked up his phone.

In the astronomy class, I spent the whole time staring at the back of the head of this one guy who looked so familiar. After the class ended, he stood up, stretched, and turned around, and I immediately went "Aaron!" He looked up, and we went, "Woah, small world. Hi." He showed me to the building I was meeting my dad in and offered to answer any questions, as he's a tour guide.

Then I spoke to the Hillel director, and while talking to him, he pointed out the window and said, "Oh, there's Dan." Dan and I worked together on the Bonim (entering fourth and fifth grade) show, Peter Pan, this summer. I face-palmed a little, on the inside, and continued the conversation, as I couldn't just walk out. When I looked up again to go find him, he disappeared, and I was very sad. But then he was ten inches away, giving me a hug. Fantastic.

The Hillel director couldn't remember the name of the last Eisner-ite, though he thought she was Israeli. I, for the life of me, could not recall a single Israeli at Eisner who attends American Uni, so I was a little confused, but that's okay.

Later in the conversation, I saw someone very, very familiar walk by. Someone Eisner-y, and...Israeli. Only not. I thought she was Israeli at camp, and I was embarrassed by my assumptions there, so I blocked it. I called to her retreating back, "Yael!" She turned around slowly, and we both went, "Well. I'm confused. Hi. Random."

Good times.

Of course, Clark has more positive attributes than merely the presence of three Eisner-ites that I ran into, another Eisner-ite and a NFTY-ite. But I don't particularly feel like detailing them now, since I've already run longer than most of my other posts.

College Search

Hampshire supplement is eating my brain. They want so much. Five out of their seven questions could be essay topics in and of themselves. Grah. Clark wants a little, too, but it's not due for a while, since I'm applying regular decision.

Speaking of Clark, I'm going to visit tomorrow for an open house, and I'm leaving at FOUR IN THE MORNING. Shoot me now. At least we're just making it a day, and not staying over and the like.

I'm bringing a little backpack of stuff, and the contents are as follows:

• One notebook, for note-taking purposes
• My folder on Clark and the like
• A whole mess of pens and highlighters, for above purposes
• My self-made Hebrew dictionary (a notebook in which I write down Hebrew words in an effort to teach myself the language)
• My real Hebrew dictionary (as in the printed kind - - the pages are yellow, in case you were wondering)
• My Hebrew workbook from the ten minutes I was enrolled in the Independent Study class Freshman year
• My itty-bitty book of Psalms, which is retaking it's position of being taken with me everywhere
• If I can find my Tanach, it's going to be added as well
  

Because I am a dork.

Bubbles

One of my more vivid memories from first-year Ofarim (the unit entering sixth grade at Eisner) is blowing soap bubbles in the bathroom of the new Chadar (dining hall).

We would spend endless minutes after we were done with meals in the new bathroom, with its row of sinks and soap dispensers, along with loads of mirrors and lots of space. Dev and I had perfected the art of creating exactly the right consistency of lather for prime bubble-blowing, and we'd be able to create bubbles the size of our hands; the size of two hands, even. We learned our chemistry from observing the fact that a decently lathered hand, if using a slow, gentle approach, could poke at someone else's bubble without bursting it.

I was just taking a shower, and I completely zoned out and started trying to blow bubbles again. Either my soap was the wrong kind or I've lost the art.

Technology

Oh, bane of my existance.

My computer broke last year, and began making funny clicky noises at me whenever I tried to turn it on. Apparently that was the hard drive. My laptop has the summation of everything I've ever done from about 2004 until the time it broke last year, and I'd sort of like that back. We brought it to BestBuy's Geek Squad to try and retrieve things from it yesterday, and they said it'd cost about $160, so we bought an external hard drive and forked over the money.

Got a call a little while ago - the clicky noises were the hard drive, and that means that they can't do it there. They've got to send it out, and maybe the 'big' Geek Squad people can get it. The big guys have a 95% success rate, and it'd be just my luck for me to be in that 5%. Also, it's going to cost more than $160; it could cost anywhere between $250 and $1600. Holy shit, that's more than a new computer. All this for a few days of music, a whole mess of files, and my otherwise irritrievable collection of pictures from Israel and beyond. Dammit.

Whooshing again

It is surprisingly difficult to write about yourself endlessly. It shouldn't be all that hard to describe why "If not now, when?" would make a good school motto. For some reason, though, everything I'm writing sounds trite and forced, and I can't take it anymore.

Heart of Darkness is ridiculously thick and rambling.

Economic current events = Hit me over the head with a blunt object

I'm hungry, but I just ate. I don't feel like getting up, but I should really shower and get ready for the day. I hate sitting here, but I can't imagine going anywhere else. I sort of want to go work outside, but I want it to be summer weather.

I need to lose weight. I need to stop eating so much. I need to eat better, do my homework, get into college, and keep my room clean (I cleaned it yesterday, though, so that's one check off).

I kind of want to play EverQuest II again, but I don't have the money, the time, or a good enough computer to run it.

I'm discontent.

Rights

We all have a right to an education. In this country, that's expressed through government funded (which means taxed) public education.

I attended private school for my elementary years. I fell out of touch with a lot of the friends I made there, but through the wonders of modern technology ('the internet is really, really great...'), I recently reconnected to a friend from my early life.

This evening, we had a bit of a conversation about education. After complaining mutually about the terror that is senior year, we compared schools. She had stuck with the private school system, transferring to another private secondary school, while I had moved to public school in the fifth grade.

She mentioned an economics paper (and this is approaching where I intend to go with this post) in which she had to write about the fact that everyone has to pay for public school, presumably from the angle of the fact that it's 'not fair', especially to private school attendees.

I disagree heartily.

Public school is a right and a privilege that we enjoy in this country. The reason the system was created was to benefit those who could not afford if for themselves. The operation of the system, though no where near perfect, at least begins to allow for an equal access to equal schools, regardless of family income, because what everyone pays allows everyone to attend.

By opting to attend, and subsequently pay for, private school, you opt to default the right that you've been given to government funded schooling.

People choose private tutalege for any number of reasons, ranging from religious or personal beliefs, or a desire for a particular emphasis in educations. The ones who are really attempting to cheat the system, I think, are the ones who select a private school because they want a better education than the one offered in their public school district. By paying the extra to send a child to a private school that only the wealthier can afford, the family is cheating the less monetarily enabled families of the district out of a good education, in the long run, because families that send their children to private school typically vote to lower public school budgets, because it does not affect them directly. This lowers the quality of the schools, making more families send their children to private school, and perpetuating the cycle.

This cycle cheats some people of their rights: their rights to a full and equal education, regardless of race, gender, religion, nationality or national origin, ethnic background, or socioeconomic class.

Guitar

My little brother's learning to play, and he's getting good, if I do say so myself. He just got an electric for his birthday. He's practicing right now. I'd post a picture but I'm too lazy to scout out my camera.

'Carry On Wayward Son' is vaguely recognizable, albeit a little slow, and he's sort of singing softly in the background. He's no great shakes at singing, but he can carry a tune. I can't wait for him to be a big person, and yet he's adorable and huggable and nice just as he is. I'm afraid of the intermediate years, when he won't be nice to me anymore, like my other brother. But I'll be in college by then, so he'll only see me sometimes.

Of all the people in my house, I think he's one of the best. He's just a genuinely good, insightful person, despite the fact that he's only eleven.

And he's a good musician to boot.

Words

Language fascinates me.

Have you ever stopped to think about the fact that we're able to communicate?

I mean, clearly, most of what we do has language as a vital part. All of this -- the internet, blogging, computers -- requires language. We need to communicate with one another. We need to communicate with machines. We need to communicate with our selves. How could anything have developed at all without communication?

I stare at all of the books lining my shelves, and I'm astounded. I can't imagine life without them. All of these languages, too; I have books in three or four languages on my shelves. The Tower of Babel was always one of the most intriguing stories to me. Can you imagine being able to communicate fully and universally? I certainly can't. I can't even fully communicate with many people who ostensibly speak English -- many of my peers don't even know what 'ostensibly' means.

Shades of meaning are what really define communication for me, though. Connotation is the best part of writing. In my search for a title to one of my posts from yesterday, I translated the word 'time' to Latin on an online translation service. It gave me a number of results (vicis, tempus temporis, tractus, hora, aetas), so I decided to translate them back to English to figure out exactly what they meant. They all were yielded to me in a search for 'time', but they all had very different meanings. 'Tractus', the word I decided on, means 'a dragging, drawing, pulling, territory, tract, space, time, lapse, extension, length, course, progress, movement'. If you read the other post, that's absolutely perfect. Exactly what I meant by 'time'. However, one of the other words I translated, also technically meaning time, was 'aetas'. Aetas means 'an age, stage, period of life, time, era'. Each of these might mean time, but they're so, so different. Precision of language, to me, is the most important part of communicating.

Hebrew has these phrases that are just so perfect for some things. It's a language well entrenched in religion, of course, so it has sayings from that. There's a proverb that goes something like this: "Everyone should keep two pieces of paper on them, one in each pocket. As things happen, one should pull out one or the other. One should say 'Anochi afar va'efer' and the other should say 'Bash'vili nevareh ha'olam'; 'I am but dust and ashes' and 'For my sake the whole world was created'." 'Dust' and 'ashes' are the same word, letter by letter, in Hebrew. And our language is filled with words like that, and phrases that do not bare with literal translation to any other language.

I once heard that the Eskimos have hundreds of words for snow. I've since heard that it's fewer than that, but still much more than the one we have. Because their culture requires them to have all of the words, for the sake of precision of language and good communication, they have them. The same is true of artists. In English, there are hundreds of different words for colors, but most people only know a few of the more basic ones. An artist would be able to identify, and subsequently remember, different colors because of the different names that a slightly different color can have.

And don't even get me started on tone.

Tractus

I love astronomy.

It's just so amazing, looking at the stars and realizing that they're not just friendly little points of light that seem to be just out of reach. They're really countless lightyears away. Most of them burn brighter, bigger, and hotter than our own sun, which seems so powerful and huge.

Most people don't really realize that light has to travel to get from place to place, same as the rest of us. Of course, the reason why we don't think about it is because light that we produce or see on our planet has to travel so little that it seems instantaneous to us. The sun rises eight minutes before we see it. That, though, is not a particularly long amount of time, considering how fast light travels (299,792,458 meters per second, in case you were wondering). What's really fascinating is that because some galaxies are so far away from our own, we're actually seeing into the past.

Woah. Hold on. What? Let me repeat this for emphasis, because it's really too cool to say just once.

We're seeing into the past.

Some galaxies are so far away that it takes light billions of years to travel to our corneas. We can see almost to when we think the formation of the universe happened.

Makes you question how hard-and-fast all those science 'laws' you were taught are, huh?

The downside to the whoosh

I spent this afternoon with both my father and my mother, in the same room. They, jointly, told me that I need to shape up. They're going to treat me punatively, for the first time in a while.

Oh, backtrack: my economics teacher called home on Monday. I had a 35. That was, as you might expect, a bit of an issue. I dodged the bullet of super late papers and got the stuff in, and now that I'm out of the fire, they talked to me about it.

Long and short of it: they're going to be checking my homework every now and then. And, (and this is the worst of it,) they're not letting me do stagecrew for this coming quarter. I hope the company will let me help out on the nights of, and that they'll let me go to the cast parties.

Life

I found out this morning that a friend's mother died. Her father died when she was young, so now she has her grandparents and an assortment of older brothers. She's also one of the last families in our area that owns a farm, so she's always working, and she rarely has time for fun or activities (she used to be on stage crew, but she hasn't been in years because she never has time). She's a great, sweet person, with a great sense of humor; basically an all around good human being.

I don't understand life sometimes.

When I say 'whoosh' I mean 'whoosh'

I've had so many waking hours this week, I'm confused as to how I managed to not finish my homework. I finished the so-called 'important' stuff at ten last night, but the missing assignments will add up unless I get them to my various teachers by two o'clock. Which probably isn't going to happen. So it'll have to be more like five this evening. Thank god everything left is to teachers that actually check email.

And so it begins.

Blogs are interesting. I'm never quite sure what will come of them. My title seems to lead to this blog ending up as simply a method of procrastination, but I hope that won't be the case. My livejournal has been feeling rather different lately, and perhaps this is just what I need -- a place to write that doesn't have connections to friendships I've made through years-old posts. We'll see how it goes, shall we?