…but it was still kind of awful.  Thank G-d for Zpac, which helped me to get back in the swing of things.  Speaking of swines (or the lack thereof), some time ago I went with someone to a (swine-less) kosher farm in upstate New York for a Shabbos – a really cool experience.  Turns out that the ‘farmer’ is a massive talmid chachom who blew my mind with all sorts of interesting words of Torah [1] interspersed throughout the Shabbos meals and some one-on-one chats.  I’m very much looking forward to hearing more from him in the future [2]. 

While walking around the farm, I realized just how clearly I was removed from ‘real outdoors life’ when I heard the penned sheep go ‘bahhh bahhh’, and thought, my goodness, they sound just like they do on cartoons.  Ya.

Well, I just received an email notifying me that I will get more information about my position on the university that I applied to’s wait-list no later than the end of this month. Three cheers for that.

I had a job interview in Mahwah, NJ this past Thursday night for a position in sales.  Unfortunately, it looks to be more of a scam/pyramid-scheme type of deal than anything else.  A stand-in for Borat gave a Powerpoint-like presentation on what the company is all about, with way too much time devoted to explaining why it is not sketchy (which, of course, is pretty much a dead give-away that it is kind of sketchy).

More to come.      

[1]  Did you know that the Zohar references black holes?  I did’nt. 

[2]  He has already got me psyched to meet a relative of mine, the Stoliner Rebbe, who resides in Givat Ze’ev, Israel.

Writer’s note: For those who have been reading this blog from its inception, some of the next parts of this serial might bear an uncanny resembelance to a previously removed story.  No, your eyes are not deceiving you.

Yonah walked back to his house, sure of himself for the first time in…in as long as he could really remember.  He wanted this for so long, but now felt confident in himself – he was sure that he was making the ‘right’ choice.  He dialed up a rebbi from one of the yeshivas that he had spent a large chunk of his seminal yeshiva days at.

“Rebbi, uh, this is Yonah Gishering…”, Yonah said.

It had been years since Yonah had last spoken with Rabbi Locobovitz, and a sense of embarrassment and intimidation started to befall him.

“Yonah – it’s so nice to hear your voice, tell me, how’s everything?  You’re married now, right?” Locobovitz asked.

Yonah visibly blushed at that question.  He had never informed Locobovitz about his marriage to Lemkele.  When he left the Yeshiva of Appleton, he pretty consciously lost touch with many of the relationships that he had forged there, rebbeim included.

It all went back to Yonah’s mother.  She had wanted him to go to a top-notch yeshiva straight out of high school and tried everything she could do to square Yonah’s circle.  She had always tried to hide such Sodomite tendencies behind a veneer of religious righteousness, quite the toxic mix.

So Yonah, at least in the beginning, went along with the ride that his mother had set out for him.  ”Like a fish in water,” she said that he would find himself feeling like in the elite Yeshiva of Ivoryville.

Not so much.

The very first thing that had hit Yonah upon his arrival in Ivoryville was the contrast between the physical beauty of the yeshiva and its slum-like surroundings.  He walked into his dorm room, and his physical senses were pleased with the aesthetic of the setup; there was a lot of space in there, as the beds (with built in cubby-spaces underneath them!) were relegated to the outer perimeter of the room.  It wasn’t cramped – it was quite a breath of fresh air compared to the way things had been in his old high school dorm.  Yonah was told that the yeshiva building was relatively new (which, to some degree, explained its beauty), the old premises had gone up in flames a decade before.

There was an irony there that Yonah picked up on.  This less modern (in the theological sense) yeshiva was far more physically attractive and contemporary-looking than his old high-school haunt.  This made Yonah feel envious.  Envious because he knew that he would not last long in Ivoryville, and he knew that when he would leave he would always feel jealous that such a place actually existed, a school that could have its spiritual cake and physically ingest it too.

Ivoryville’s student body was made up of the very serious, driven, and religious sort.  

Next time: Ivoryville, continued.

So that first semester ended with me receiving a 4.0 average, and still being able to attend just about every seder in yeshiva.  But I was burning the candle at both ends, and it would hit me hard the next semester, when I would be taking much more serious courses; Inorganic Chem I, and Precalculus.  

I’ll give away the ending now; I did royally horrible in both courses.  I suppose I probably would have done well in math, if not for the fact that I was taking it with a home-study CD-based kit.  That experience taught me how much better I perform in a real classroom environment.

Chemistry, although it was a course that I did physically show up for, did not offer me much solace either.  The professor was a cranky old Yekki, who was also (interestingly for a Yekki) a devout Chassid of a group who’s patriarch I am pretty closely related to [1].  I would show up for class, often late, due in equal parts to traffic (it was an hour drive without cars on the road) and the fact that I was still trying to maximize my presence in yeshiva.  The prof make comments [2] to me like “y’know your like a fine wine – only the exact opposite, you’re disintegrating as the semester goes on.”  The jab that caused me to drop his course was his “I don’t see a doctor in your future, my friend, perhaps a medicine man,” line.

By this point, my Rebbi had given me points for the sincerity that I had displayed to him re: maintaining a rigorous yeshiva schedule, and therefore ‘forgot that he did not know’ that I had been taking courses, so that he might be able to console me.  I was pretty much beyond consolation though.  I told him that it’s ludicrous for me to be spending so much time just getting to school on the nights that I had class, and that I would be leaving Yeshiva unless he furthered his dispensations for me by allowing me to go to the local (forget about non-Orthodox – not even Jewish) school down the street – a five minute drive away.

He hemmed and hawed on it, finally saying that he would have to ask his rebbi if it would be okay.  Turtles all the way down, I tell ya.

[1]  In the beginning of the semester, when he had not yet thought terribly of me (in fact, he really liked me…in the very early days of the term), he would often interrupt his over-rapidly-paced lectures to say, “that’s like the famous vort said over by the Yechachu Rebbe,” he would then point at me, saying “You’re a great-grandson of his, right?  You know the vort, right?”  Even on the occasions when I did in fact know the vort, an attack of nerves would besiege me, and not a word would leave my mouth during the two-second opportunity that I was given to answer him within.  He would continue to say the vort, and I would feel wholly miserable.

[2] In front of the entire class.

Next time: Visit To a Secular Campus

Yes, I know, I have not posted nor commented on the blogs of others in a while.  I think that this is due to a perfect storm of reasons, which I will call the ‘Funk.’

Elaboration of said Funk:

A. Pesach got in the way, y’know?

B.  I got really sick on the last day of Pesach – at a hotel, no less.  I’m still recouping.

C.  I think I have reached something of a crossroads w/r/t what this blog is all about.  I have finished a couple stories that I am allowed to keep up -of the unfinished ones, one is in indefinitive limbo, and the other (The Kollel Guy) is, well, it’s at the end of Season One so to say (Season Two will soon arrive, with a couple twists on its horizon).  But my first nonfiction serial posting (In a Previous Life) really does display to me that the blog is heading in more of a direction that I’m going to be more comfortable with on the whole (assuming that I can keep blogging).

———————————————————————————–

In general, I’m busy with a million things (a lot of them being articles), but have a very hard time garnering the motivation I need to get them done. It’s not just a matter of motivation, it’s also the problem of not knowing how to deal with editors when you have had zero experience with them (any of them – I’m really brand new at this) in the past.  I’ve already been told by one arts editor that I displayed a lack of ‘effecacious proffesionalism’ to him on one occasion (honestly, I think that he would even admit at this point that it was just a case of his ego getting in the way of things, creating an issue when there really was none, but that’s a different story).

Something that I’m learning about making it in this world is that one has to be there own cheerleading squad.  If you can’t do that, you’re gonna get totally hosed.  Some people have this ability from birth, others must work on it, while yet others will never get it – but might get by if they pretend they do.  I think I fall into the last of the three categories.

Getting back on the blogging horse is never easy (for me at least).  I don’t know how much I’m going to be able to blog over the next couple weeks, or how things I put up will ‘look’, but I do know that something has changed – so stay tuned.

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So I spent the last days of Pesach at a hotel, and couldn’t get passed the striking resemblance between many of the vacationers and the humans from the film Wall-E.  Seriously.  I got to join the eat, sleep, rinse & repeat Borg, but not for long enough to look any less emaciated than I always look.

Some other thoughts from the road, the hotel, and, well, from the entire Chag:

– There are more signs along Pennsylvania highways warning (regular) drivers about other drivers that might be driving ‘under the influence’ (UTI) than the number of signs warning against driving while UTI – period (I was sorta keeping track).

–There is no in-between on Sefirah beards; they either make you look like a rock-star or a vagrant recluse.  Grower beware.

–I needed to take a smoke – it was hard enough to find a yarhtzeit light to get things going, but I really didn’t want people to see me smoking on yuntiff as some modern poskim now say that it is actually assur to do, as it is no longer considered to be ‘ochel nefesh.’  So understandably, I wanted some degree of privacy while consuming my cancer stick.  Going up the top of the hotel’s stairwell, I got to the door that leads to the hotel’s roof (perfectly solitary smoking spot, for sure).  In the past when I would see exit doors that said EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY, my knee-jerk reaction would be to not use them, as I would always think that an alarm would sound upon opening them.  This is not (supposed to be) the case, an alarm sounds if it says so on the ‘emergency exit’ signs – if it doesn’t make mention of an alarm, none (should) go off.  I was confronted with one of these doors on this particular smoking excursion, and after some mature interactions in recent history with such entranceways, knew that I could go thru the door without sweatin’ it.

– I caught a bad cold on the very last day of yom tov and spent the balance of my Hyatt stay in bed.  I’m currently pounding this post out in my bed, still sick, hoping that I’ll ‘get well soon.’  My dad was kind enough to go out to the drugstore and pick me up some cold meds, so instead of bynging on after-Pesach bagels, I’m going to get high on NyQuil.

Happy Shabbos everybody!

Yes, this is part of a serial.  No, this is not (quite) fiction.  Because of that, I cannot make any commitment to ‘chronological linearity’ throughout this series (or a pledge to weekly updates), as I am not telling over a story with a beginning/middle/end here; rather, I’m relating memories as they coalesce on my ‘front-burner’.

In a previous life (I was around twenty-one or so) I attended a yeshiva that did not allow college.  When I informed my rosh yeshiva of the fact that I felt compelled to go university notwithstanding the ‘no-college’ rule, he acquiesced; saying that I could do it – as long as nobody would find out about it.

“I don’t even want to know that you’re going to school – as far as I’m concerned, it’ll be like you’re not,” he told me.

Alas; the Navi says that trying to be “posei-ach al shnei sih-eefim” is, in the end, untenable.  For me, the situation ended up being no different.

My first semester of school went well enough.  I took twelve credits at a college that was about an hour’s drive [1] away from yeshiva.  I would sneak out just before the end of second seder to make it to macro-economics on time.

The macro-econ course was sketchy enough, as I was able to walk out of class halfway through and sit through an equally shady English 102 lecture for the balance of its own duration, thereby getting six credits in the time it would otherwise have taken to have amassed three.  College algebra was taught pretty seriously and professionally though – but the professor was honestly an above-average teacher; and actually learning (and excelling) in something that I had failed at so miserably in high school was a pretty rewarding experience.

Sunday’s were set aside for the biggest joke course of all:  Public Speaking 101.  It was taught by a Singaporean expat (who claimed that he was Columbia trained – who knows, maybe he was).  To make a short story out of it, a student was pretty much handed an A with his [2] three credits for being able to recite the first paragraph of the Gettysburg Address by heart.

I would slither back into my yeshiva’s beis medrash about halfway through night seder without much fanfare.  I was surprised at how long I was able to maintain the secret [3], being that it was a pretty small yeshiva and all, but there were apparently a few factors that contributed to its prolonged secrecy.  One of the reasons was also part of the explanation for my eventual college  burn-out, which I hope to get into next time, so stay tuned folks…

[1]  That particular yeshiva had a lot of bochurim who were of ‘dating-age’, it was therefore not at all strange for guys to have cars, almost a necessity for the functionality of efficacious shidduch-dating.  My own was on loan from my dad; a busted-up ‘98 black Civic.

[2]  It was a men’s only college.

[3]  To some extent, it always remained a secret.