Shiny Camera!

By the way, the camera is named Vera. Anyone who doesn't know the reference needs to go watch Firefly right now. All 14 episodes. Go!!!!

2+2= no gym for you

So I wanted to go gymming with honkyredvan tomorrow. Tomorrow is a fast day, which I knew (and I even thought to myself "maybe I shouldn't go biking tomorrow since it's a fast day and I don't want to over-exert myself...") But I didn't put together the fact that I wanted to go gymming and the fact that it's a fast day. Gymming while fasting would fall under the heading of "Bad Idea."

Which sucks, because I do have to eat food tonight/at 5 am before the fast starts, which would not have been a problem until 2 minutes ago, when my scale said I was 131. There's no way I could have possibly gained 5 lbs over yom tov. Unless I really did eat that many cookies and that much chocolate. But all of it was necessary.

The way my scale seems to be working is that it will stay the same weight for a while and then it will change. So it was at 126 for a really long time and now it's at 131. I'm not sure why. Maybe I've been more than 126 all along.

So that scares me a bit, even though my clothes still fit just fine. And there's nothing I can do about it tomorrow until after the fast is over. Though then it would be pretty stupid to just go to the gym after fasting for 14 hours...

And I really should have something to eat now, no matter how I feel about myself. There's no reason to make the fast harder than it already is...

I also just realized I'm mashing while fasting tomorrow (3-4). Yay for adding insult to injury!

Maybe this is divine punsihment for missing most of davening. But it was for a good cause! I was supervising kashrut plus helping someone else go daven. Maybe this is punishment for vanity. Though I don't think that's the case either. I believe everyone is entitled to like how they look, and they probably should, because otherwise you'll just be miserable.

Or maybe it's all just PMS and in a few days I'll be fine.

If only I could give my extra weight to the 3 friends who want to gain it. I would gladly do it.

That high holiday post

If I've done anything to hurt or offend or upset any of you this past year (or before then), I would like to apologize and I humbly ask your forgiveness.

And if there's really something specific and you want to talk it over, you can send me an e-mail (or call me).

Gmar Chatima Tova

Don't we have enough angst already for one day?

The charger for my laptop stopped working. It's dead. ( cut for profanity )

I have about 70% power left. And I bet it will take forever for dell to ship me a new charger. Help!

Does anyone around here have a dell inspiron laptop with the same charger as mine and want to let me charge my laptop?

Until then I'm screwed. I'm going to shut down now so I can at least e-mail myself what I have and work on it tomorrow.

I called tech support, and it turns out the charger was just overloaded (that's what I get for plugging it in over 2-day yom tov). I suspected as much, but I feared the worst. (And yes, I did test it with other outlets before calling. I do have some common sense, mind you). I feel a bit stupid, but I'd rather be stupid with a working charger than smart with a broken one.

Back to the thesis. Because that's what I should be doing.

Stolen from heidis_uncle

Type "[your first name] was arrested for" into google and see what comes up. Don't forget the quotation marks.

Rachel was arrested for human cruelty...
Rachel was arrested for posession of marijuana...
Rachel was arrested for singing a song about never forgetting the thousands who have died for democracy in Burma.

I like the last one the best.

( and another before I go to bed, stolen from nesheekah )

Thesis and stuff

I met with Ben today for what ended up being slightly over 2 hours. First we talked about grad schools and then we talked about the thesis.

In regards to grad schools, I'm only applying to 5- Bar Ilan, Hebrew U (Rothberg), Harvard Divinity, and then something in NY (either NYU or Columbia) and something in the DC metro area (either GWU, American, or UMD college park.) I'm looking more towards anthropology degrees and focusing on archaeology within that, since I believe that archaeology should be done from an anthropological perspective, with the goal to be to learn as much as we can about the culture that has left these items behind. It makes so much more sense to have it there as opposed to Near Eastern studies or Art History or regular history.

The thesis is...thesisy. We talked a lot about Neusner, and when I gave him all my printed stuff that I've worked on in the past 2 weeks, he thought that it was a lot, even though I didn't agree. I'm only about halfway done with Neusner, but that's ok.

And all of these ideas came out. Like the fact that neither Neusner nor Douglas pay much attention to the material culture, while Ronny Reich barely looks at the culture. A friend of Ben's is writing a dissertation on the subject, but she's looking at it through a perspective of Roman/Greek influence. I'm looking at the halacha. But if she finishes her dissertation in December I can read it and use it as a source. And Ronny Reich's dissertation is supposed to come out in English soon.

I'm only now finding all these flaws in Neusner's argument. For example, he talks about how it was important for the Pharisees to eat their meals in purity, as though the table was the Temple. But this can't be practical at all if they were really required to keep that same status of cultic Temple purity. What if someone touches a dead body? They'll be impure for a week. Do they just not eat? Or a woman who has just given birth to a baby girl and is impure for 80 days. Or a menstruating woman-should she starve during her period? (Oh the irony of today being a fast day...) Surely there must have been a distinction between this purity and Temple purity, but beyond the logic of practicality I'm not sure how to prove it.

And I want to look at Pharisaic material culture, but I'm not sure if it has been excavated and published. (I want to talk about class differences, and the contrasting ideas of purity in the different sects, and the struggle between them all for legitimacy.) maric23 do you know anything about this? Do you want to be my bestest friend in the world and get me some material sources on Pharisaic purity? Can you go dig up a Pharisaic house in Jerusalem? Pleasepleasepleasepleasepleaseplease*? I'll give you a lot of fresh chocolate chip cookies and a big thank you in the acknowledgements section of my thesis...

If it will be helpful, I would love to go to Israel during winter break in order to do further research. But I can't just pull out a trowel and patiche and start digging. OMG they finally have the patiches back in stock!!! Which size should I get, maric23 and yadfothgildloc (yadfothgildloc - what size was Rebecca's)? (I think they're totally worth the 33$ investment, and I can totally spare that much money after all the mashing I've been doing. It's basically the 25$ head mash bonus plus a bit of extra money....) I totally need to get one so I don't have to use the ginormous hand-picks that they have at Safi. And it would just be shiny to carry around. I could hit people excavate with it.

Anyways, back to the thesis: people usually ask the question of the cultural logic behind purity laws. I think that this is a problematic question. Sure, rabbis have been trying to find the taamei mitzvot (reasons behind the laws, specifically the ones that don't make sense) for centuries, but to rely on that as the sole meaning could put you in a quandary as soon as that meaning is removed. For example: once upon a time, kosher slaughtering was the quickest, most painless way to kill an animal. But now non-kosher meat uses techniques that might be more humane. So does that mean we should abandon kosher slaughter and use electrical shocks or whatever they use to kill cows? No! Of course not! Why do we eat kosher meat? Because we believe that God told us to. So too with the purity laws. There's no objective reason why immersing dishes in the Schukyll would purify them while soaking them in a bathtub of boiling water wouldn't. It's the Schukyll!!!! There are 3-headed fish there! But that's the way the law works, and we recognize that it doesn't make sense. And yet we do it anyways.

So that's where my thesis is going right now. I want to argue against all the experts and the methodologies they use. This isn't so crazily obscure as cynara_linnaea and honkyredvan's Chinese theses, but it is quite an undertaking. But at least I have an arguement, however vague and unfocused it might be. And I got away with not finishing the work I said I would do.

And Ben has a carrel which he's letting me use. I don't think I can sign books out to it, but he can. And the space itself is nice, with an outlet and a light and a window.


*Looking at it written out a billion times, "please" is a funny word to write.

This is why I hate fast days

I'm getting that thing I get sometimes when I don't eat enough and there's a burning pain across my chest that won't go away. I would take tums or something (I don't count that as breaking the fast) except that I'm mashing, and I can't leave for another 20 minutes. Though this thing happens not so infrequently, so I'm used to the pain, and I'm not going to scream or anything.

If only I could break the fast right now on the plentiful cookies here.

Or maybe I really should break the fast if I'm in this much pain.

Advice?

*smacks forehead*

So remember the kippah that I was working on and then had to take out 3 lines of patterns?

So it turns out that the rabbi's daughter liked the pattern after all, but just wanted the colors switched around. After all that. Fortunately I should have enough time to finish it now. And they want a 2nd (easier) kippah. So huzzah! I'm in the kippah business again.

And now that I have the camera I can take pictures of patterns. That's probably easier than writing them out on graph paper in MS Paint (as I usually do.)

So that means a slight delay for you, kellev and a much longer delay on my TGS kippah. And I think that's it for the queue, unless I actually do make a shabbat kippah for boroparkpyro. But in any case it wouldn't be done until at least November.

I want to ask my teachers if they'd be ok with me crocheting in class. I concentrate better that way, but these are small <= 6 person seminars. So there's discussion. But I can discuss and crochet at the same time! I managed it just fine in Ben's class...

Or I need a long busride. I still have no place for 1st days of Sukkot. Though I do have JitW and going to moss_raven's again. Though the kippah deadline is before then. The bat mitzvah is 10/27. So I would want to send it out the 20th at the latest. Maybe I can finish it in a week if I really really try hard.

Meanwhile levana_b said she would be done working in a half hour. An hour ago. I had enough time to go through the entirety of Yom Kippur mincha. It's pretty shiny, though I'd like to play around with the last line of kaddish shalem, because OCP has a much more fun way of doing it.