חלב ודבש וחברים

Shavuot has just passed, and it's now Veta's birthday, another important festivity.  I continued to count the Omer right up to day forty-nine, although there's a small possibility that I forgot to count to seventeen.  School and Hebrew both continue fairly well, although I know that they will both soon end; or, more specifically, when I am back in the United States, they will both continue in significantly altered forms.  Also, I've had to say some goodbyes in the past few days; you'll here all about this presently.

To begin with, after Ulpan on Thursday (May 29th), I collapsed in my apartment.  More specifically, I collapsed on a fantastic book about spacetime that Eli had lent me, entitled The Fabric of the Cosmos, by Brian Greene.  If this name and topic sound familiar to you regular readers of this blog, it's likely because I wrote a review of another one of Professor Greene's books, The Elegant Universe, after my time serving in Sar-El.  The Fabric of the Cosmos, despite overlapping slightly in theme, is nevertheless an altogether different book than The Elegant Universe, and although I greatly admired and enjoyed reading them both, I consider The Fabric of the Cosmos to be slightly more appealing to the general readership.  On Friday morning, after stopping by the Ramla shuk for a few items to bring with me, I rode the train to Savidor Station, and even managed to exit from the proper side of the station, into Ramat Gan.  I walked to Eli's apartment on Bialik, where I met up with both him and his sister Judy, whom I'd only met briefly before.  Judy, like her older brother, is serving in the IDF, but services humvees, rather than working at a desk job as a jobnik.  The two siblings remind me a little bit of Sam and Andrew, and are more similar than I think either one of them realizes.  Eli and I identified what ingredients we needed to make Eli's Grandpa Salad and to cook Josefin's lentil soup, and went shopping on Herzl street for everything we needed.  It was surprisingly difficult to find lettuce that didn't look suspiciously old, but we succeeded.  Soon after our return, Josefin arrived.  When we realized that Josefin actually knows how to cook the Persian-style rice that Eli wanted, we realized that the most efficient division of labor was also the most sexist: Josefin and Judy remained the home (specifically, the kitchen), while the men went out and bought last-minute ingredients, and we thus chose competence over progressiveness.   At least the rice turned out well.  Soon afterwards, Eliana showed up, and we found ourselves, by the end, lighting candles just moments before sundown, but we made it to synagogue, and then back.  There were no running-up-and-down-the-stairs adventures this time, unfortunately.  I really need to be with Rachel Silverman for that to work out, I guess.  The five of us stayed up quite late eating and speaking.  Judy and I slept on couches in the main room, and I fell asleep first, predictably.  My body just isn't used to the kind of strain with which I encumbered it throughout my years as an undergrad at Cornell, and it's hard for me to go to bed much earlier or later than midnight.  I did manage to finish The Fabric of the Cosmos before bed, and was therefore able to pick up Jose Faur's Horizontal Society the next day.

On Saturday, I was up a little bit before eight, and had several uninterrupted hours of reading, of which I took full advantage.  Then, Josefin got up, and the two of us spoke for about an hour, mostly about our academic plans for the upcoming years.  Josefin is going to learn Ancient Greek, which is going to be very hard, but, I hope, rewarding, for her.  Although, it probably won't be as difficult for her as it is to the typical monolingual American -- Josefin can already speak a few languages, two of them fluently, and Ancient Greek will probably provide less of a mental stretch for her.  Anyway, eventually, all five of us were up.  I read a lot throughout the day, and enjoyed Eli's Grandpa Salad; I think that it gets better every time that I've tried it :).  Somebody found a copy of Isreali pseudo-monopoly (Kesef Gadol; grandparents' houses always contains games, if you search hard enough).  After Havdallah, Josefin and Eliana returned to Jerusalem, leaving just Eli, Judy, and I in Ramat Gan.  My reasons for not returning to Ramla immediately were two-fold: 1) I love being around Eli; 2) Elliot was arriving, and I hadn't seen him in a few months (last I saw him, I was driving him to Wegmans and the wine store downtown, and trying not to kill us both in my parents' car).  Elliot arrived shortly after midnight, in the middle of our viewing of Revenge of the Sith (which I still hadn't seen), and I was very excited to see him.  I wonder if I came across to him as tired and worn-out as I've begun to feel.  My job in a school has been wearing me down, mentally and physically, and, much as I enjoy it, and am proud to have an opportunity to do the work that I have been doing, I think that I need a vacation.  At least my Hebrew has improved since I last saw Elliot (and since I last studied in chevruta with his sister Ranana), but there's not much more that I can say for myself.

Sunday morning, I headed back to Ramla by train, while Judy returned to her base, and Eli and Elliot left to visit a museum.  I returned to my apartment, took a run, and went to where I was supposed to meet a student, who never appeared for the lesson that we had arranged.  At around 6:30 pm, however, I arrived at the English Center for the Community Involvement graduation.  For those of you who don't live with me here in Ramla, my group of Israel Teaching Fellows lives in the same town as another group of volunteers, whose job it is is to volunteer in various capacities in the community for five months (for those of you who remember my former three roommates, they were enrolled as part of the same five-month program).  Both programs, ITF and CI, are sponsored by the same company, Israel Way (also known as Oranim).  In short, volunteers were leaving town, and we decided to have a party for them in the English Center, where several of them volunteered.  Carmel was there, of course, but Amit, sadly, left two weeks ago :'(.  I hope that I'll see her at the ITF graduation next week.  I took pictures, and had a fantastic time because of this.  Note to those planning to take part in a photographed ceremony in a room painted entirely white; wear brightly-colored clothing!  Juliana won the "most photogenic subject of the evening" award in my book.  The highlight of the ceremony for me was telling my story about why I will miss Florencia.  Afterwards, we all decided to party in Tel Aviv (20 minutes away), in order to celebrate both the CI graduation and Veta's birthday, and those with cars drove those without.  I got to drive with Carmel ha-ahuv <3, as well as Julia, Juliana, and Noah.  There was some confusion about the restaurant where Natalie had made reservations, but we (almost) all eventually ended up in the same place.  Ma'or even made a surprise appearance :).  I ended up splitting a drink three ways with Natalie (who became very, very sleepy) and Shira.  After a couple of hours, those of us returning to Ramla took a monit sherut to the bus station, and, from there, a monit sherut to Ramla.  The sherut to Ramla took a while to fill up;  Noah made a new friend (he's much better at that than I am), and Florencia made a surprise appearance.

On Monday, I was back to work, and had what was probably the worst day of school that I have had yet.  I should have predicted it though: we were giving the students a test, and test days are always the worst.  The way that the school system gives students evaluations that are too difficult for their ability level makes them feel cornered, powerless, resentful of those administering the tests, and altogether willing to cheat in any means possible (often without realizing that extracting translations from proctors, sharing solutions with classmates, opening to the dictionary appendices in their textbooks, and using computer dictionaries all qualify as "cheating").  As the son of two academics, I have always been taught that cheating (only one step away from plagiarism) is anathema; clearly this creates conflict when testing occurs, and I honestly would rather that I never again be in a position where I am administering a test in an Israeli school.  I was exhausted by the end of my schoolday, but, luckily for me, I still had my private lesson with Nati and Yosi afterwards.  I taught them about comparisons in English (extremely useful, although probably seemingly arbitrary to a non-native speaker), and also ended up helping Yosi's father with his fax machine, the interface of which is entirely in English.  This is not the first time I have needed to come to the rescue, so to speak, with my English; Sabba also had a medicine, the label of which was printed only in English (can you believe this?  Imagine if there were medications that were sold in the U.S. and designated for senior citizen use only, but with directions written only in Japanese.  It would rightly cause an outrage).  Anyway, I took the bus directly from my students' apartment to the house on Veradim, where I came 20 minutes late (I had already told Carmel not to count on my arrival), at 4:20 pm, to the Shavuot enrichment.  Perrin and I were teaching Underground at 6:00 pm, and I begged some chumus off of Natalie to last me until night.  Natalie was my hero for the day for feeding me <3.  Underground was excellent, and continues to be one of my favorite parts of volunteering here.  Perrin is 100% in charge, and very good at instructing, and it is my job to provide Hebrew support to students who are lagging (this time, it was two Arabic women).  I finally returned back to my apartment, and continued to read Horizontal Society.

Tuesday was Erev Shavuot.  I took a nice long shopping trip to the shuk where I picked up, among other things, fresh dill and sale-price medjoul dates for the holiday.  I ran, prepared food, and invested a fair amount of time in studying Hebrew.  Then I went to synagogue in the evening (running into Micha'el, Tamar, and Shiloh on the way), and, after a dinner that included some excellent homemade flan by Alex, I tried to stay up all night reading.  I failed miserably, and fell asleep around 1:00 am.  I'm just not the student I was when I studied at Cornell.

Wednesday, Shavuot, was a day of getting up early and immersing myself in study, for most of the day.  To my enjoyment, I also visited the Veradim house.  Natalie was in Eilat, but I talked to Noah for a while until he left to attend his teacher's barbecue, and then spent about two hours speaking with Perrin.  It was time well spent.  I do wish that I had made more friends here in Israel, but I do feel as if I can rely on those that I have.

Today, I woke up feeling disgusting.  This is the second or third time in a row that I have developed coldlike symptoms, most notably a sore throat and clogged sinuses.  I am getting quite tired of it.  I spent a rather unproductive day.  I unsuccessfully tried to pick up something that I needed from the pharmacy, although I did manage to finish the end of vol. I of Horizontal Society, and write down a few thoughts to some friends.  Now, it's late, and I need to get to bed.  Before, I do, however, I'll just mention the following slideshow that I made for my school's English Day (see last post).  Enjoy!
 
English Day at Rambam Slideshow 

~JD