I feel like I’ve been pretty quiet lately. Guess that’s partly a function of my schedule now–busy–and partly the fact that I’m starting to settle into a routine and having fewer Big! Adventures! that feel directly blogworthy. But, of course, the little things in life are most certainly quite bloggable, so I suppose I’ll have to just tune my inner radar into the quieter bits in order to keep you all entertained out there in TVland.
Well, I don’t have a TV, so this really is all I got for screen-staring entertainment, anyway.
This past week was a lot about getting my routine on. Am starting to get the flow of classes and evening activities. Sunday I end class at 4:30 and then have another class in the evening at another place around town–a class on women and halakha that’s really fun. It’s a chance to look at a lot of the sources with which I’m familiar (and a lot with which I’m not) from the inside in a deliberate, methodical way, which will def. be useful to me from here on out. It’s chill and a nice antidote to my Codes class, which I have Sunday afternoon and includes, for the moment, a lot on the question of, “May one marry multiple wives?” (The question isn’t the problem, it’s the snarky asides some of the poskim–legal writers–seem to feel it necessary to make that I’m less into.)
Monday I get out around 6:30. A friend and I have talked about trying to start up a semi-regular crafts night for folks around town, and I think Monday might be the night. We met this week and it was soooo nice and relaxing to do something tactile and non-intellectual after a long day at the Torah Farm. I’m into beading necklaces a lot lately. Tuez I’m going to meet every other week with a hevruta–study partner–to learn mussar, a type of Jewish literature aimed at helping to bring a person to the, er, more enlightened aspects of his/her personality. I think we’re gonna learn Mesillat Yesharim. The rest of the week, thankfully, isn’t that scheduled up. Yet.
Cool story: Around the time I was applying to rab school, I heard through the PTA grapevine (thanks to my mom’s best friend) that a kid with whom I had grown up, literally two houses down from me, was at rab school in another denomination. His name came up every now and again, and periodically I’d hear that he had gotten married, that he had a kid, etc. Well, ran into the guy at services on Simchat Torah–he’s also here for the year–and turns out that both he and his wife are really cool, the kinds of people I’d be friends with anyway, which is not always my experience with people with whom I grew up. (Not most people’s, I reckon.)
What with the bond of having known each other since we were in diapers, we’ve become fast friends. It’s nice, since I’m in so little contact with people with whom I’ve grown up, it’s almost like a little tikkun (healing, fixing) for me to have a friend who shares my memories not only of Little Red Hen pizza and Big Al’s french fries (so greasy they soaked through the first of the two brown bags in which they were placed) but also of what the Park Accross The Street used to look like before they fixed it up, what it was like to be from the kind of suburb in which we were raised, etc. It’s kind of like a part of my life that has long felt like a faraway dream (I haven’t really been up there since we sold the house in ’96) is re-integrating with the rest of me. It’s nice. Anyway, this is the cat with whom I’m gonna be learning mussar. Should be interesting. Mussar is heady stuff; I hear it changes you to learn it. Will let you know.
Oy. It’s late. I should try to get some more sleep (up randomly in the middle of the night tonight, dunno why) before it’s time for wakey-wakey and getting to minyan. Good night, good morning, have a lovely day.