Thesis Graphs

I'm pleased to say that, early on Thursday morning, I finished Chapter I of my thesis!  It's nice to know that the goal of being entirely finished by early April seems far more possible, now.  I'm still, unfortunately, behind schedule, but now, at least, I know that I'm more than 3/4 done with my writing.
I've made more than a dozen graphs thus far for my thesis, mostly for Chapter I, using a website called ChartGo.  This has mostly been in order to convey quantitative information in as simple and understandable a way as possible.  I thought that I would share a few of these with you; some of them are rather interesting.

This first graph depicts the world agriculture market from the time of the great stock market crash of 1929 (i.e. the beginning of the Great Depression) until 1938, the year before war broke out in Europe.  The purpose of this graph is to show the sort of economic pressure from which French farmers suffered leading up to the war.  Hundreds of thousands of French young people were emigrating from the countryside during these times, and the rural population was steadily aging.  It was not easy to work in agriculture during these times, and an increasing number of foreign workers (mostly from Belgium, Italy, and Spain) were needed to ensure that there would not be a labor deficit when harvest came.

This second graph depicts crop yields of the various European countries throughout the 1930s, leading up to World War II.  (The unit measured on the y-axis is quintals per hectare.)  For those of you who don't know, yield in agriculture means the mass of crops harvested in a given area of land.  It's land efficiency, in other words.  Notice how low France is, with just over half of the yield of such countries as the Netherlands and Denmark?  France during this time was lagging, technologically, behind the rest of Europe.  There was not even running water in many rural French districts, let alone the kind of highly mechanized agriculture that was quickly catching on.  However, if you break France into districts over this time period, you will find that various regions of France have yields in excess of 30 quintals per hectare, the highest in all Europe!  How could this be, when the average is so low?  In fact, French farming was becoming increasingly divided, during this time, between a large class of peasant smallholders, and a small class of large landowners.  The former group was too poor to purchase many of the more expensive imported agricultural inputs (fertilizers and pesticides), and had fairly conservative mentalities regarding new agricultural techniques, preventing them from deepening their level of mechanization.  The large landowners had some of the highest-yielding and best-equipped farms in the world, whereas the peasants were barely managing to eke out a living.

 This third graph gives some idea of just what the French were producing during these year.  I needed to leave out rye and wine, the next two largest crops.

This fourth and final graph is cultural rather than strictly economic, although it has economic causes.  Quite simply, it shows the trend we are seeing everywhere in the world: as people become wealthier, they eat more meat.  This trend is as evident for 21st-century Africa as it is for 19th-century Europe.  Here I trace food consumption from shortly after the dawn of the Third Republic (established 1871) until just a few years before World War II began.  You may notice that there is no figure for 1914-1919 here.  Those of you who are students of history will understand this anomaly: World War I lasted 1914-1918, and 1919 wasn't a wholly normal year, either, for that matter.  There therefore aren't data available for these years.

This is literally only a fraction of the graphs that I've made so far, and I'll probably construct several more before my thesis is finished.  I hope that these data and my explanations have been entertaining.
~JD

Fundamental Skill Set

Here's a question that I like to ask people.
"Assuming already motor skills and speech capabilities in one language, what five skills do you think that all people in the world should possess?"
I've gotten some interesting answers.  There seems to be some connection between political affiliation and the answers given.  I realize that the question is rather vague as to what constitutes a "skill," but I'm not asking for precision.  Here are a few possible responses:

- Literacy
- Swimming
- Simple arithmetic (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division)
- Bicycling
- Singing
- Praying
- Writing
- Simple computer skills
- Driving
- Cooking/Baking
- Fishing/foraging
- First Aid
- Firestarting
- Simple horticulture
- English language proficiency
- Timekeeping
- Scientific thinking (hypothesis/data analysis)

Well, what do you think?  And try to think universally, taking both the developing and developed worlds into account.
~JD

Mock Interview

I finally had my mock interview at Arts and Sciences Career Services yesterday.  For those of you who don't know, I've been turned down now by about half a dozen different jobs to which I've applied.  In some instances, my application has been rejected out of hand, and I have not even been granted an interview.  In other cases, I made it to the final round of interviewing, and did something (or failed to do something) that made my interlocutor decide that I was not the best choice for the job.  In one particularly frustrating case, I actually performed quite well at an interview, but because of a misunderstanding regarding the program, disqualified myself from participation.  No potential employer gave me any feedback regarding my mistakes (why should they have?), and I desperately needed to know why everyone has thus far refused to hire me.
My appointment was only schedule to last 15 minutes, but it lasted an hour and a half.  The career counselor analyzed the form and content of my interview, discussed my resume with me, and suggested possible job opportunities.  It also turned out that she was a fellow Ithaca High School alum, and, therefore, a Mrs. PB fan (we both majored in History at Cornell because of Mrs. PB).
I learned a lot from my interview feedback.  I'm not going to list in detail every single mistake that I made, but I'll explain a few.  First of all, I do not give enough information when asked "tell me about yourself."  I haven't lived a particularly interesting life (as many of you may know), no matter how enjoyable it has been thus far, so I tend to make a few cursory remarks about growing up in upstate New York, attending Cornell, and studying abroad at the University of Paris.  What I should have been doing was leading this question back to the employment at hand -- i.e. what the interviewer is really asking is "who are you that you should have this job."  It's almost not too much to say that an employer will want to hear a teleological life story with the job in question as the natural next step.  Second of all, I list too many things, and too many of the wrong things, when asked "what are your weaknesses."  I have been taking the opposite approach of the people who give answers such as "I work too hard," and "I'm a perfectionist," even though at least one of these is true in my case.  I have been giving responses such as "I am socially awkward, I have poor interpersonal skills, I do not work well under pressure, etc.," which are also all true.  What I should have been doing is mentioning real faults that I do possess, and immediately explain what I am doing to fix them.  Third, I really don't have good answers to such questions as "what is the biggest risk you have taken, and what have you learned from it," and "tell me about a time when you had a dispute with a colleague, and explain how you overcame it."  I don't take risks, and I haven't been in a real fight with a peer since my sophomore year of high school (my family is a different story).  I typically just comply with others when I come into some form of potential conflict with them.  This tends to work, because, frankly, I haven't had much worth getting in a fight over.
Frankly, parts of this interview reminded me of a passage from Nietzsche.  The German philosopher derisively describes a man in love, who "asks himself whether the woman, when she gives up everything for him, does not perhaps do so for a phantom of him; he wishes first to be thoroughly, indeed, profoundly well known; in order to be loved at all he ventures to let himself be found out.  Only then does he feel the beloved one fully in his possession, when she no longer deceives herself about him, when she loves him just as much for the sake of his devilry and concealed insatiability, as for his goodness, patience, and spirituality" (Beyond Good and Evil, 194).  Nietzsche hated this kind of thinking, and I think that it represents the mindset that I'm stuck in right now.  I've been trying to reveal all of my holes, my faults, my shortcomings, etc., so that my interviewers know exactly whom they are agreeing to hire.  However, I really should be trying to display my accomplishments (or lack thereof) in the best possible light, even if it means that I might feel as if I'm peddling spoiled goods.  It also reminded me of something I heard from Robert McNamara in The Fog of War.  He said that when you're asked a difficult question, rather than answer the question that was just asked, you should instead answer the question you wish you had just answered.  That certainly seems closer to what the career advisor was suggesting.
My resume needs to be completely redone.  I'm in the process of this right now.  In short, I've been using a template, and the career advisor told me that almost every resume with problems has its problems caused by its template.  So I'm trashing it and rewriting it for my next potential employer.  Furthermore, there were three activities that I hadn't even considered worthy of putting on the resume (my three semesters with EARS, my Slope Day volunteering, and my two and a half weeks at yeshiva in Tzfat).  I might ask one of you, in the near future, to look over the draft of this resume.
I also learned about job opportunities of which I had been previously unawares.  Again, too many to list now, but, hey, if I am accepted to any of them, you'll read about it :).
~JD

Thesis as of February 3rd

I assume that everyone who reads my blog is currently watching A) The Superbowl, B) Downton Abbey, or C) The Puppy Bowl.  I, meanwhile, am trying desperately to finish the first draft of Chapter I of my thesis, while listening to an audio file of chapter 6 of Megillat Esther.  It's high time that I've let you all know how the thesis is progressing, seeing as it's currently dominating my life, perhaps even more so than my job search, and certainly more than Ezra's Archives, KOACH, CJL house-managing, any of my academic classes, or any of my chevrutot.
To begin with, a quick refresher: my thesis is about food rationing, hunger, and provisioning in France in World War II.  There were slightly 40 million people living in France during this period, and I'm researching how they survived, often in spite of the government rationing system.  There are three chapters to my thesis. Chapter I addresses macroeconomic factors leading up to the war, discusses Germany's war aims vis-a-vis France as an agricultural state, reveals Vichy incompetence and its detrimental effects on French society, and the provisioning-related origins of Resistance and Resistance propaganda.  Chapter II gives a detailed description of the rationing system that Vichy put in place, describes the black and grey markets that so cleverly and surely undermined it, describes how people of different classes fed themselves in times of dearth, and analyzes the social distinctions resulting from differences in food supply.  Chapter III focuses on various disadvantaged populations in France at the time, mostly the Jews of Indre-et-Loire on whom I have done archival research, but also the romani, women, rural resistance groups, the mentally handicapped, the elderly, etc.
I've written all of Chapter II, and have edited it three or four times.  I will soon be adding a few more data that I gleaned from books that I have been reading recently, but it's 90% there, I think.  Chapter II is by all means the most crucial and innovative section of my thesis.  There is still no single work on the problem of food and rationing (although several monographs devote one or more chapters to this element of social history life), and that is where I have room to make the greatest contribution to the field.  I believe that I am uniting and analyzing data that has yet to be scrutinized in the way I am scrutinizing it, and hope that I can make serious, pertinent points about hunger conditions.
I'm currently writing Chapter I, which is the most statistics-heavy of my chapters.  I expect to make at least a couple more graphs on chartgo.com before I am done with it.  It is a fascinating chapter.  I write history papers in a somewhat unusual way, and need to put down all of my citations on paper before I begin to stitch them all together, rearrange them, and translated direct quotations and statistics into meaningful statements in my own words.
Chapter III is where I hope to use some of my summer research.  It's really the unusual chapter.  It's probably going to be the preachiest of my chapters, seeing as a lot of people, especially poor people, suffered greatly from hunger in France in World War II.  Many people may not be aware of it, but the approximately 20 million deaths due to hunger in World War II may even exceed the approximately 19.5 million combat deaths of World War II.  Together, these two causes of death in World War II are approximately equal to the entire population of France at the time.  Think about that for a moment.  And then remember that that does not even begin to include the atrocities of the German death-factories, concentration camps, and ghettos.
Well, back to Chapter I, I guess.  I'm currently behind schedule, and need to catch up.
~JD

Spring 2013 Schedule

 Well, it's that time of year again.  Except that this is my final course-enroll process, and, well, this really is my last time enrolling for undergraduate classes at Cornell University.
Here's a list of the courses for which I've enrolled:
http://www.schedulizer.com/p9ym
Intro Hebrew II: A continuation of last semester.  Especially if I end up tutoring English in Israel, I need all the help that I can get!  I really need to brush up on the Hebrew that I learned last semester.
Honors Thesis Class: Mandatory, if I want to write that thesis.  And, really, I do.  I'm writing about France in the era of World War II; but you remember that, don't you?
The Jewish Question in Nineteenth - Twentieth Century Europe: Taught by the eminent Professor Holly Case, probably the #1 History professor among those whose classes I haven't already taken.  Prof. Case is the East European specialist, and can read all of those wild Slavic and Finno-Ugric languages (the languages are wild, not the Slavs and Hungarians).  Moreover, I'm hoping that this class will give me more background on the events that I'm describing in Chapter III of my thesis, which concerns the marginalized populations in Vichy France, especially the Jewish population (I'll be incorporating my summer research on the wartime Jewish community in Indre-et-Loire in this section).
Medieval Philosophy: To quote the course roster, "Topics include the problem of universals, the theory of knowledge and truth, the nature of free choice and practical reasoning, and philosophical theology. Readings (in translation) include Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, Abelard, Aquinas, Scotus, and Ockham."  I can't wait: other than Augustine, and a tiny bit o Aquinas, I haven't read the original of any of the above philosophers in their original primary sources.  I'm going to continue my current practice of turning all of my classes outside of the History department into historical investigations, and add this to the growing constellation of intellectual history in my head.  I wonder if they'll let me do anything with Maimonides...
Kosher and Hallal: Starring the awesome Prof. Joe Regenstein!  Unfortunately, this class meets at exactly the same time as my Thesis class.  So, I'll be taking it as an independent study, and following on with the class online.  Not optimal, but still acceptable.  Only possible because Prof. Regenstein is great!  Note that this does not appear on my Schedulizer schedule.
I'm excited!  This semester is going to be awesome!
~JD

New Year's in New Jersey

Due to backlogging, I'm over two weeks late posting the rest of my trip to the tri-state area.
December 31st, I was still staying with the Feldmans.  Having visited the Cloisters and the Metropolitan Museum on the 30th (my Mother's birthday), Peninah and I decided to visit the Liberty Science Center on Monday the 31st.  Although the exhibits there are aimed towards a much younger audience than the two of us, we still had a good time together.  Peninah, as usual, ended up revealing that she knew more about everything than I did, about astronomy, physics, pathology, and, of course, agriculture.  As for the museum, I was semi-impressed.  It's three to four times as large as the Ithaca Science Center, but, doesn't have the amazing George Rhoads ball machine that I know and love so much.  It does, however, have a good room of interesting physics puzzles, a nice exhibit on infection and disease, a decent aquarium, and some excellent videos on current events in environmental preservation in the New York City area.  It also has one of the Da Vinci surgical machines (for long-distance surgery): I've always wondered how those things worked.  In the evening, Peninah and I awaited 2013 with some of her friends from high school, and promptly returned back to her home right after midnight, and hit the sack.
The next morning, Peninah drove me to Five Towns.  The drive, which normally lasts over an hour, took only about forty minutes, because everyone else was sleeping in or hung over.  Eli has a big beautiful house, full of sunshine even at this time of year.  His Israeli mother and all three of his sisters were home -- we two were the only males in the house.  Whereas I grew up the youngest of three boys, Eli is both the oldest and the only boy (that must be hard).  We watched the end of Star Wars Episode VI, beginning just before the ewoks appear.  Eli pointed out that I... resemble CP3O in certain ways.  I'm afraid to say how correct I think that he is.  We took a long walk through Five Towns: compared to what I know, it's both very wealthy and very Jewish.  I'm just not used to seeing a restaurant full of black hats.  Eli is wonderful, and makes such good conversation because he's so knowledgeable (he's a philosophy major, after all).  We ended up wandering fairly far from his house, and didn't make it back until after dark: Eli showed me where the restaurant that his father owned used to be.  I got into bed a little bit later than I had planned, and, the next morning, didn't get out of bed until about 6:50 am.  I caught the train to New York City at around 8:00, and took the subway from there to my appointment.  Again, I had a lot of reading time, but luckily, I had my Kindle with me.  I made it a few minutes late, but I think that everything went well: I took the subway a few more stops, and ran the remaining blocks to the Cornell Club, where I caught the 12:30 pm bus back to Ithaca.  I hadn't seen much snow since I had left upstate New York, and it was comforting to pass through the pall of snow in the air, about two hours' journey south of Ithaca.  I made it home -- and just in time to leave, just a few days later, for my wonderful trip to Boston, which I described in the last post.
Before I close this post, I'd like to mention that, among the pile of mail I received today, I received a letter from one of the teaching programs to which I've applied -- soliciting me for money.  A tad ironic, don't you think, especially considering the fact that, as of yet, I'm still unemployed?  The situation reminds me of a quote from Moby-Dick: "And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But BEING PAID,--what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!"
~JD

Visit to Boston, January 2013

I've been very lazy about posting, recently.  Let's see if I can catch up, OK?
Last Friday, I boarded the 1:30 am Shortline bus from Ithaca, New York to New York City, slept most of the way, and slept a good part of the way on the 8:10 am Megabus bound for Boston.  I arrived at about 12:45 pm, took the T red line to Charles MGH, and was at my brother Sam's apartment by early afternoon.  He's a grad student now, and wasn't feeling well.  I picked up some groceries (I hadn't eaten anything all day long, having been in transit), read a little bit, and made preparations for Shabbat.
I left for my walk to Cambridge, and arrived at the Harvard Chabad House at around 5:00 pm, and, miraculously, found my way without trouble.  If you know where to cross the Charles, and can find your way to Massachusetts Avenue, it's not too difficult: I could, and though it was lightly raining, I made it to Chabad about twenty minutes early, and sat and read the parsha until Kabbalat Shabbat.  A few moments in, Sam Weiss walked in and sits down to my left!  This really, really excited me, and, to further improve matters, Orion, Michael Weiner's former roommate whom I met the last time I was in Cambridge, sat down on my right a few moments later!  After Ma'ariv, I went upstairs with the rest of the students who were staying for dinner. Marissa and Sarah (who was staying with Marissa) had been on the other side of the Mechitza, and, after some chair shuffling, we all managed to sit down at the same table, along with Marissa's roommate Chana, Chana's boyfriend David, Marissa's friend Kenny, and a couple more people on the far side of the table from me.  Kenny made the second most frequent pun on my name, on account of his being a law student; he was a lot of fun, though as was everyone else at the table.  It was wonderful to see Marissa and Sarah again, even after what had only been under a month.  Chabad was hospitable and friendly, as usual, and the Rabbis even remembered me from my last visit (nice, isn't it?).  I left with the others, but took a right on Mount Auburn, and made it back to Sam's apartment.  I accidentally walked to the two legs of the right triangle to Beacon hill rather than the hypotenuse.  I talked with Sam until I went to bed.

I got up late Saturday morning at 8:15 am, and made it as fast as I could to Harvard Hillel on Mount Auburn Avenue.  Again, I ended up sitting next to Orin, and was honored with Gelilah for the first Sefer Torah (it was Shabbat Rosh Chodesh).  During Shacharit, I noticed my friend Morris Alper from Palo Alto, and I spoke to him afterwards: Ilan Rasooly also walked in having coordinated to visit his sister Tali the same weekend that Sarah was visiting Marissa.  I saw Sam Weiss again, and, much to my excitement, so was Nate Schorr!  Marissa also introduced me to her friends Danny and Melanie.  We walked to Tali and Yoni's house after kiddush, along with Sam Weiss's roommate Avi, and one of his friends.  Tali and Yoni are an incredibly friendly young couple with a very comfortable apartment, and are full of interesting things to talk about, and have a good library of books.  Sam Weiss suggested that I look up one of the books they were discussing, Gödel, Escher, Bach (I was one of the less technologically-oriented people in the room).  Lunch was wonderful, and I think that Ilan's was the best vegetarian cholent I've ever had -- I was especially happy because they had clearly thought about me.  Around 3:30 pm, everyone decided to leave together except Tali, Yoni, and Ilan, and I asked to follow Marissa and Sarah far enough for me to be able to recognize their apartment, before I returned to Harvard Hillel for 4:10 pm Minchah.  A few minutes after leaving Marissa and Sarah, I must have become lost -- I had been looking for a street called Kirkland, but ended up crossing a bridge onto Adelaide, and never made it.  Eventually, I made it back to Sam's apartment around 7:00 pm, where I changed, and left again for Marissa's apartment, picking up a bottle of wine on my way.  Marissa had wanted us all to be there by 8:00 pm, and I had hoped to be there by 7:45, but because of my stupidity in getting lost, I had lost too much time to make it back in time, even though I ran at every opportunity.  I arrived at 8:30, expecting to find a full house (people show up early to spend extra time with Marissa -- for good reason), but was the first guest to arrive.  I helped to toss a salad, and we had begun on the fruit (which, among other good things, had candied kumquats from Marissa's mother).  We Skyped in the two older Zwillenbergs, who had just returned to Philadelphia from Israel, to tell them how much we missed them both.  Soon afterwards, the others arrived -- Sam Weiss, Ilan, Chana and David, and, much to my excitement and pleasure, Ben Chartock and Eli Shaubi!  I literally jumped on Ben, I was so happy to see him (and, yes, I'll blog about my earlier adventures with Eli presently -- backlogged).  Eventually, Nate and Danny showed up.  After a gamut of subjects including Marissa's tri-Angell trip to Switzerland and her one-week workshop on how landscape architecture can be of use in the pursuit of peace in the Israeli-Palestinian situation, we began to speak about my Monday interview.  Everyone agreed that, yes, I should go ahead and try to dress well, because it will be a real travesty if I were to fail to be employed for coming to the interview in sneakers.  I was becoming worried that Sam was waiting up late for me to return, and would only make himself sicker in this way.  So I wished everyone a good night, and Marissa walked me out at around 12:15 am.  When I reached the T, it was chained shut, so I called Sam, and he suggested that I take a cab, so I did, and was back in Sam's apartment in about ten minutes.  I met his roommate Anthony's brother Sean, and Sean's French girlfriend before going to sleep.

Sunday morning, I got up around 8:20 am.  Around 11:45 am, Sam and I left for the day.  For the first time, I explored Boston proper -- not Cambridge.  Our main mission was to buy me clothes for my Monday interview.  Sam was incredibly patient throughout, and we ended up visiting several stores before I had the clothes I needed to look acceptable.  We had dinner at an Indian restaurant, and returned to Sam's apartment, where I tried on the new clothes, Sam and Anthony had a tie-off and tried to explain football to Sean's French girlfriend, and I went to bed early.  I was up at 6:00 am on Monday morning, so that I would have enough time to make it to the interview on time.  Taking my suitcase and backpack with me, I left for my interview.  I had studied the T map the night before, and arrived at Match High School, 1001 Commonwealth Avenue, at 7:35 am.  The doors were still unopened, but a few students were outside, and told me that the staff would let me in: they knocked on the glass, caught a teacher's attention, and I was inside.  I signed in, took out my book, and tried to calm my mind down with something that I knew that I would find comforting.  Another candidate arrived, a student from Madison, Wisconsin, who, unlike me, has training specifically in teaching.  Jasmine Mark, the Recruitment Manager with whom I had been in contact, arrived to show us around the school, just as students were filtering in.  Before entering, students pass through a dress code check administered by one of the staff members (the result is that every member of the administration knows almost every student), and, in response to the question "What do you need to succeed?" respond "courage, discipline, and perseverance."  There is a lot of discipline at Match.  I am amazed by how little heckling there is in the halls, compared to IHS, my own High School.  I'm used to fairly aggressive bullying (having known some prime victims), explosive food fights, f-bombs, ragging, petty cruelty, blatant racism, subliminal but present class antagonism, etc.  I noticed none of this at Match, where the student body is mostly from the inner city, and didn't notice a single security guard (of which there are several at IHS).  The interview lasted from 8:00 am until 2:00 pm, and comprised two quasi-observed tutoring sessions with students (one in Algebra and one in English), and three one-on-one interviews.  We had time to prepare our tutoring sessions in the third-floor teachers' lounge, where we had an opportunity to meet the faculty and staff.  I felt extremely comfortable around them all, and found a lot of common ground (I also got a chance to give my classic Kindle infomercial).  The interviews were with the director of Match Corps, the Match Recruitment Manager, and the director of athletics and after-school activities.  I think that I did a good job of conveying my very real enthusiasm for teaching, and for Match's social mission.  The two tutoring sessions likewise went extremely well.  Both of the students needed just a little bit of nudging, and a few reminders, in order to complete the work that we had set aside for them. I am extremely thankful to all of the people who taught me how to take apart and simplify math problems -- mostly Sam and my Mother.  I'm not a "math person" -- however, I do love the simplicity of geometry and algebra.  Although I didn't need to remember any trigonometry, take a single derivative, or even whip out the old quadratic equation (x=-b±√(b² – 4ac)/2a, for your information. And you thought I needed to look that up?  Hah!), I did need to be able to understand complementary and supplementary angles, solve equations with two variables, and calculate midpoints well enough to explain them all to a student.  The student was very sweet, and incredibly motivated.  The only thing that she had truly forgotten were the formulas for calculating the area and circumference of a circle (Πr² and 2Πr, respectively).  Likewise, she miscalculated one midpoint with the midpoint equation, and I needed to show her a simpler method of calculation.  However, she really was an angel, and went above and beyond our expectations.  The student to whom I tutored English was very quite and reserved.  He had just read Macbeth, and had not only understood it, but had seemed to have enjoyed it.  He had a great difficulty with English, and I needed to simply define certain terms for him -- "balk" and "visceral," for instance.  However, he understood irony, and, when I once explained how to spell "noble," he never misspelled that same word again.  I had never read more than an first few chapters of The Things They Carried, the other book his class had been reading, but I did my best to conceal this, and to give as much help as possible.  Just like in the first student, I saw in this second student lots of dedication and discipline, despite difficulties.  Both students evaluated me -- I have no idea how well I scored.

The interview ended at 2:00 pm, and there were really no major problems, although Jasmine Mark felt very upset that I hadn't been able to eat lunch on account of there not having been a kosher option.  I was not upset (I'm almost glad that I didn't have the option to stop to eat -- it meant that I could concentrate more fully on the tasks at hand).  I took the T back to South Station, caught the 3:00 pm Megabus back to New York by a margin of only a few minutes, and caught the 8:30 pm Shortline bus back to Ithaca.  It was a very productive afternoon of reading, and I was delighted that my friend Ahmed was on the same bus back to Ithaca.  We sat together, and spoke about our respective families for the beginning of the drive.
I arrived back at North Campus Ithaca around 1:30 am, where Victor picked me up.  I fell asleep at just past 2:00 pm.
Thanks to the following people, in alphabetical order, for making this a great weekend: Marissa Angell, Anthony and Sean Breece, Chabad House of Harvard, Ben Chartock, Chana, Chloe, Dad (who drove me to the bus stop), Danny, David, Sam Davis, Ahmed Elsamadisi, Victor Haas, Gelilah-assisting guy, Doug Lemov, Kenny, Jasmine Mark, Nedra Massenberg, Mom, Morris, Orion, Sara Parr, Avi Prince, Ilan Rasooly, Nate Schorr, Eli Shaubi, Sarah Sonenberg, Jonathan and Tali Speiser, Gray Visco, Sam Weiss, and Judy and Michael Zwillenberg (Apologies if I've forgotten you).
~JD