theyellowhobbit

JitW was amazing. I always feel so much happier when I've gotten back from a JitW. It doesn't usually last more than a few days, but so far, it's still here this time around. More on that later, since I want to go in chronological order.

On Thursday after class (which was spent consuming more of the chocolate chip cookies I had baked this week) I took 2 trains (SEPTA and NJ transit) to NY. I got in at around 9. I stayed over A.G.'s house. She had made us this amazing pasta with actual parmesean cheese (like the kind that you grate that FG would never ever ever ever sell in a million years, because they're FG) and pine nuts and broccolli. And we had warm apple cider, with cinnamon and nutmeg! And eventually we went to sleep.

I woke up around 8:30ish on Friday morning. A.G. and I had breakfast, and then I took the subway up to Washington Heights to meet boroparkpyro, my trusty ride to nJitW.

He came like 2 seconds after I had walked outside. It was awesome.

We loaded up my stuff, and started driving around. The other girl who was coming with us, V. was running late, so we stopped at the cleaners so boroparkpyro could pick stuff up. There were a lot of cops directing traffic. Then we picked up V., and were on our merry way.

boroparkpyro is an insane driver. I guess he has mad Boro Park driving skillz. But he tried many things I would never dare, weaving between cars to get ahead. I guess we have differing definitions as to what "space" is. But we didn't die, so it was all good. And there were cookies, and cookies are the solution to everything.

However, we did get lost quite a bit. (5 times) I had thought this was my fault, a) because I was supposed to be navigating and b) because I'm an albatross of logistical nightmares, and I had even told boroparkpyro that nothing was going to go wrong since I had all the other JitW-related logistical nightmares this week. But actually, it was alanscottevil's fault, since his car was cursing our car. Or something.

Pictures of the journey up:



But we made it there. And it was right before Shabbat. I had enough time to change, though I realized I hadn't brought my jewelry bag. I did have one necklace, but no earrings, which was sad. But a lot of people complimented me on my all-white hippie Shabbas outfit.

We started Kabbalat Shabbat up in the "womb" (it was dark, and warm and cozy, so that's what we called it) but the floor was shaking from all of our hippie dancing, so we moved downstairs. It was one of the most amazing kaballat shabbats I've ever experienced. There was just so much energy!

Then there was maariv which was also amazing (and they did my long lost lecha dodi as the tune for mi chamocha!) and then there was dinner.

And by then, of course, I was dead, because I made the classic Rachel JitW mistake. I hadn't eaten much on our journey up, since I wasn't really hungry at the time. So I ate a lot of dinner. And then we sang.

Then we had learning/sharing and A.N. and alanscottevil led an amazing session. In which a bunch of us realized we all knew each other on LJ! So I got to meet the amazing spin0za1. (And orawnzva, but I already had known he existed in both LJ and real life). After the session all of us LJers started talking, and it was all shiny.

Then I attempted to learn my leining. On the car ride up I was trying to pick up boroparkpyro's trop, partially because I had my high holiday trop in my head and couldn't get my normal one back in, and partially becuase his trop is way cooler than mine. But it was just slowing me down at this point, so I learned it in normal. I got about halfway through and realized it just wasn't sticking, so I went to bed.

I woke up in pain, because I probably didn't have enough to eat at dinner, even though I was full at the time. But since no one had come in to wake us I assumed it was before 8:00 and I could go back to bed (which took a while because of all the pain.) Then I awoke again, and it was 8:40, and they had never come around to wake us. So I quickly got ready, and I had breakfast, and then went down to davening, while also attempting to learn the rest of my leining.

Unfortunately, I didn't do a very good job. I had only had 3 days notice, and it was 22 pasookim. The other thing that tripped me up a lot was that the columns in my tikkun and the columns in the Torah were not the same, and had the words been in the same place, I could have recalled it a lot better in terms of trop. Though I did get the shalshelet right, which was good. (I messed up a lot of pronunciation...) And trop has colors, too. The darga is green and the t'vir is purple. Shalshelet is red. And so on, and so forth.

And people said yasher koach, but I felt really bad about making that many mistakes, and probably slowing down davening by a lot. Maybe it's just one of those perfectionist things, but I know I could have done a much better job leining had I more time to learn it.

Davening ended at 2. We started at 9 and ended at 2. That's 5 hours of davening!!!! So by then we were all starving. And we had to do major schedule modifications to have both the learning and the eating.

I forget what I did after lunch, but it was cool and involved hanging out with people.

boroparkpyro led mincha. And he did a really good job. Maybe that happened before all the hanging out-ness.

And eventually we had havdallah outside, which involved walking through the dark woods (I was afraid of falling) and then circling around, with a spiral inwards, so we were all close together. And afterwards there was dancing. And dinner eventually.

There was a session on contact improv that I was first watching and then decided to join in on. It was really cool. I got to stand on spin0za1 and she also stood on me. I realized that I'm a lot stronger than I thought I was. Eventually I was getting tired and dizzy and sweaty, and left.

A bunch of us stayed up and listened to orawnzva play us a bunch of his songs. And then I found out that someone had brought a lefty guitar to JitW! Which meant that I could play it! (Well, I can play righty upside-down, but it's really annoying.) And so orawnzva and I played for a bit.

And boroparkpyro had brought his laptop, and we learned that there was wireless internet!!! So I got to check my 30 billion e-mails. One of was from Ben, and he gave me a bunch of sources.

Speaking of Ben, a disproportionate amount of the males at JitW were named Ben(jamin). Like 10 of them, of maybe 50 guys total. I lost track of how many. There might have been more. And there were only 2 Rachels.

Then this morning I led davening. I woke up at 8:15, and I was able to take a shower (a shower! at JitW!) before the service. And I had a breakfast, which consisted of some M&Ms, because I wanted to start davening. Meanwhile, there was all this time between psukei and shacharit where we were trying to get a minyan, where I could have grabbed real food.

Psukei itself was uneventful. I got to sing some fun things, like alecha, and doing the ki va mo'ed/psalm 96 tune for the Chronicles stuff, which is very similar to psalm 96. You have to know what you're doing, so you don't get tripped up by the word differences, but I've led so many psukei that it was pretty easy. And I did 146 to Hallelujah. There was a point where I stopped. People might think it was because I had lost my place. But no, it was because there was a giant spider on my siddur, and I was trying to get him off and let him down onto a chair, which made it hard to read the words. (We were davening outside.)

And shacharit was...interesting. I didn't really know weekday nusach since I haven't made it to weekday minyan much lately. Though I did finally get to do the first 2 blessings of the amidah with the cool NFTY weekday nusach. But the blessings after the kedusha aren't done by NFTY, so I was on my own again. And the nusach is similar to the tune for after the haftarah, and I didn't want it to actally be the same thing, so I had to play around with it. Had I know it was going to be this hard, I would have practiced.

And then we cleaned up, and had a closing circle, and had a lot of hugs, and headed out of the woods. I got a ride back with the 2 Y.U. boys.

And I kept that JitW feeling. I've been smiling at strangers, and I even talked to people on the train. And people don't usually talk to people on the train (or the bus for that matter) in America. Usually you pretend that the other person isn't there. But these women were interesting- they had all gone to some big chocolate thing.

And then I got home, went to SNL, watched Serenity, and now I'm here in my room. (On our way out of Meyer levana_b and I saw that there was all this flooding water coming out of sprinklers in front of the trailers. Like actual flood as opposed to the normal rediculous sprinkling. And yes, it was raining out. Those pictures are at the end of the above album.) I should probably go to sleep now, since tomorrow is uberthesis day. And I owe some of you e-mails, which will actually be sent tomorrow, since I'm about to crash.

Maybe I'm not your local Hobbit, now that I think about it. There are probably hobbits outside of Penn. Like at Brandeis.

Jews in the Woods. There was sooooooooooooooooo much singing. desh gave me a ride because he's the awesomest person in the world. When I got there Josh S-M, who was at Pardes with me, was there, and I totally did not expect him. I hadn't seen him since Pardes! And a bunch of people who I did expect were there, such as alanscottevil and rachinisrael.

And then there were the people who I thought were going to be there but weren't, such as arctic_alpine and her crew of UMD people.

I got a phone call from her, asking if they could stay in my apartment. They had gotten a flat tire and were stranded in Philly [at that point Shabbat was in less than 1/2 hour]. So of course I said yes, provided that if they slept on any sheets to tell me so I could wash them. The guys had sleeping bags and arctic_alpine slept in my bed, which I didn't really mind.

I tried to get them meals but it was too close to Shabbat. But they ended up being ok in the end. They came up on Saturday Night. And thus, I hosted "Jews in the Urban Jungle."

There was an insane amount of singing. While we were waiting for people to arrive between candlelighting and when we started kabbalat shabbat we sang a bunch of nigguns. Kabbalat shabbat and maariv combined lasted 3 hours [usually it's 1 hour]. After services we were singing before dinner [aaaaah, give me food! I haven't eaten since 1pm!!!] and after dinner.

The next morning I was about an hour late for davening, maybe a little less, and they were only halfway through psukei d'zimrah [usually we'd be up to the shmoneh esrei]. Services went until 1pm, and they started by 9:30 [desh would actually know when services started]. And then there was the long lost lecha dodi!

I leined the 3rd aliyah, and other than messing up the pronunciation of 2 words [I had practiced incorrectly] I did a pretty good job. According to alanscottevil I have a cool munach caton trop. I forgot that I had previously decided to steal that one from cynara_linnaea after trying out some other ones and liking hers the best. I actually had to step out during the haftarah and get more food, despite the fact that I had eaten breakfast, because my stomach was in pain. I had a banana and felt a little better, but again before lunch actually started, I was in pain. And between when we got into the dining hall and when we actually did motzei there was a huge gap of time.

In the afternoon there was more singing and then people either learned, hiked, or chilled. desh taught me and some other people how to play Puerto Rico, this awesomely awesome game that is perhaps awesomer than settlers of catan. We played on Saturday night.

Towards the end of shabbat I taught people the tune that I then used for havdallah. It's a really pretty one that no one knows, but Aliza and Gershon use it, so maybe jtersesk would know it.

Saturday night the Jews in the Urban Jungle joined us, and 2 of them- Nick and Jonah, brought their guitars, which they played simultaneously with harmonicas. I then brought down my guitar, but had trouble keeping up with them. I looked at Jonah to see what cords he was doing, but he didn't always keep up with Nick. We did sing Elias, though. Elias!

And then people sang happy birthday to me, and I was given a small shot of rum, which I didn't finish because it tasted awful.

Sunday morning we had a closing circle, and then drove home.
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I'll write about my birthday in more detail later.
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And now for today:

On my way to lunch at Hillel I saw Ben Porter walking and he stopped to say hi, and asked about my weekend. "I was at a thing called Jews in the Woods. There were Jews, and there was woods." And also told him about how I turned 21.

I was late to Anth 001, which is a bad habit of mine. I always take too long eating lunch, and today I had a chevruTa [there is no 's' in "chevruta"] with Orit. So my lunch runneth over.

When I got there, I saw Professor Saboloff sitting in the back where I entered, and I'm pretty sure he saw me and my lateness. Jordan (f), one of the TAs was lecturing for the lesson. Usually Mike M, [who was a TA in my anth 003, and is also now in my anth 170] sits where Saboloff was, and he always notices me being late, but he doesn't care. So I started taking notes. At one point they were talking about how hunting and gathering is actually more efficient for getting calories than agriculture, and the nutrition of hunting and gathering also was better. And they were more healthy. [There's this whole thing analyzing animal bones and the bone marrow in them, which I don't feel like typing out.] So why did we move to agriculture? So I asked "do they take into account the fact that the dwellings the agricultural society had were permanent, and therefore more stable? [offering better protection from the elements, etc.]" She said no. And professor Saboloff looked at me as Jordan was explaining more about that study.

After class he came up to me and said that I asked a really good question, and that that's why ethnoarchaeology is so important, etc. So I'm thinking like an archaeologist now! Shiny!

In Primates we got our midterms back, which I had been dreading ever since we re-looked at the multiple choice questions on Wednesday. I knew I had gotten 10 points off the multiple choice.

Surprisingly I got everything else right! Which gave me a 90!!!

In Ben's class we were talking about evidence for David and Solomon [or lack thereof, depending how you interpret things], and there again I asked a bunch of questions. Sometimes I think I might be interrupting a bit too much, but then again he wants us to ask questions and think about the given assumptions we have.