Back to Beit Sefer (school)...

i'm a little nervous about this year, especially since it's my last at Rochester. it's going to be a tough one. i have my work cut out for me. i went back and forth on whether or not to relist my degree as a BA with a double concentration. the BS degree is a full 9 additional courses and will require i seriously hustle to fit everything in by May. but i've decided to stick to my original goal rather than lower my expectations. i think of it as running some kind of track relay - and how you get really tired preceding the last lap and you begin to contemplate just slowing down. you reassess whether winning matters and you have to make a choice. you either commit to the optimism you had before you started and ignore the phlegm that choking you, the calves that burn, and wheeze that tallies each breath OR you revise your goal and try to rationalize disqualification. experience has taught me that even though i fatigue easily and don't really have a winner's physiology, when i set a goal, i usually attain it unless i get in my own way. so, i'm sure i'll revisit this decision again and again throughout the year, but i'm going to do my best to finish a dual degree program: a BA in linguistics and a BS in BCS. there really isn't any advantage to doing it. it won't really make a difference in grad school or employment. the only difference it will make is whether i look back on this undertaking and feel i really achieved what i set out to or came satisfactorily close. understandably, i tend to set ridiculously high goals for myself, but that's what's been so exciting - looking at seemingly impossible things - israel being the most recent - and robbing them of their impossibility.

at this point, very little seems to be cooperating - i won't get into it, but it's not merely uphill right now. what was a steep hike has graduated to full-on rockclimbing.

wish me luck - and understand if you don't hear much from me or if when you do i'm a miserable bastard. i still love you.

the inauguration of a new world

i thought i'd ramble for a bit while i sit here alone on a friday night listening to the sound of a bell on a collar on a cat that is trying her best to free herself of it. other than the tinny sound of the bell and the muffled yelps of what must be one of those obnoxious little dogs - it's quiet here. it's the kind of quiet which prompts one to silence it with noise - iTunes, television, even the hum of the air-conditioner though tonite is more september than august and there's no need to cool the place. it's nice. churchlike. church with a yelping dog and a bell, but there is a peace about this messy apartment which seduces one to contemplate.

some of you are close enough to me - physically - to have suffered through the verbal solutions of my recent evaluation of faith in light of science and faith in light of historical fact. it has not been easy to welcome once again - dichotomy. my life until a few years back was spent trying to reconcile an unrelinquishable, determined faith with the persistent sexuality of my experience - constantly mediating the two extremes. to say until suggests i've finished with all that. that's not true. i've merely reached a point where both parties within my conflicted singular soul are two exhausted to compete with each other - furnishing me in the meantime with seeming peace. i've learned a few things which, when invoked, shame each into a managable silence.

but to resume my initial point, "recent evaluation" stretches back a year or two when i returned to school but the actual crisis has been within the past several months. i call it a crisis because for me it is very much a crisis. it's something like a slow growing cancer, perhaps a pregnancy - nothing that will kill you in two months, but something which must be addressed before it crosses the threshold of severity. it's something which your friends and family know about - maybe - and which surfaces for one reason or another in conversation but graduates from news to smalltalk in a matter of months. there it remains largely dormant beneath a fascade of normalcy which smoothes over any alterations and makes the toll appear more mild, more gradual than radical and threatening. inside - even when i'm too busy to entertain it - i feel the difference. much like with cancer, i do not feel well. my dis-ease is more the chemo than the cancer though - the cancer grows slowly and usurps it's priority with deceptive courtesy - the chemo is what makes me violently ill. and just as with cancer, the illness that comes with chemo is a good kind of sick. it's a sickness that reminds you you're fighting and ultimately restores health. that's kind of what i'm feeling. very sick inside - privately sick. i know i have to ask these questions. i know i have to commit to looking for their answers even if there are in fact no answers. i must search long enough until i've committed to the questions themselves as answers and discover whatever sleeping questions that might awaken. i am very sure that this too shall pass as it always has, and i know the process will refine me in ways which will surrender their logic when the time is right.

however obscure and elusive things are now, today's opacity is more transparent than yesterday's clear.

i know i haven't said much here to make what i'm talking about understandable to you, reader. i guess that's not really my point. i don't really want to try to do that. it'd disappoint both of us. because it's my growth, literally as well as the figure mentioned above, i don't think i will ever be able to make it remotely appreciable to you. should i seem to succeed in such an explanation - i will have failed to have apprehended it myself. it is like a circle though. i can tell you that much. like a gold band. it is going back to where i was before and seeing it differently. it is going back to that same place and bringing with me new things to put there - like renting an apartment from an earlier season in one's life, and furnishing it with the comforts and collections that have accumulated since that time. the walls are the same. the doors and windows and the light that shines through them - all familiar. but the surfaces which the light strikes and how the eyes perceive all of it? it's the inauguration of a new world quilted from oddly matched remnants - not wholly unfamiliar, but like the blending of two veteran flavors into a novel third, permits the distinction of constituents. nonetheless, it is only rightly called something new - something different. a marriage.

my life is marrying my life. this is the seam - the line between patches. the leap from paisley to plaid, and the needle penetrates with each needful stitch to join the two. who can see the hole i feel mending. who can see the whole?

Sorry, little ones...

didn't mean to disappoint with a slight hiatus from the Third Book of Samuel. Writing Torah is tough work, and this young prophet has lost his vision. Unfortunately.

I am starting to miss Israel. I really liked it there. It's weird, but...well, I'm weird. I felt at home in whackyland. Since coming home, I've pretty much been a nervous wreck. Of course, I ran out of medication (Wellbutrin) in Israel, and while it was fine for a time, it's less fine now. A friend of mine had some on hand from before when she was taking it, and made a generous contribution to my sanity or the general appearance of such. Thanks. So basically, my trip down to Atlanta was more of a drug-run. I did manage to squeeze in some pontifical parental linguistic enlightenment for the benefit of young deaf children. Not that this will mean anything to most of you, but I seriously was impressed with how far I've come as an instructor in my ability to explain complicated things simply and get inside the heads of my students to help them sort out confusion.

Anyway - after a rather long, intimate reunion with the Atlanta airport as my flight crew was stranded in Alabama and I was grounded due to T-storms, I did finally make it back home at 2AM.

Looking at my mail makes me lightheaded and short of breath. I seriously feel like that Verizon commercial where there's this mass of people following the person on the phone as their "network." Only, I don't have a phone (as most of you know), and these tag-alongs are not my network, rather a cloud of CO2 producing obligations with account numbers and (800) numbers which convene and conspire to dilute my enthusiasm for life and inspire more firey stunts from high places. (not that I've ever done a firey stunt from a high place)

I am looking forward to school starting. I really am. Someone remind me of this sometime in the second week of December.

Life feels like it's falling apart. Life feels like it's coming together. Love feels distant. Love feels imminent. Freedom seems like a useless abstraction - like someone's pointing up into the sky and shouting at me "There!" I look. I trace the vector carefully from the fingertip outward - but what should be a line, direct - point to point, is more like a cone. Only the starting point is precise and identifiable. "There! becomes an expansive base of possibilities and beyond from any of these I could look back and say, "Yes, there it is. That's the line. I see it now." But only looking back. Looking ahead, I know only direction - there is no visible destination. What's more is that each step "toward" is made with the assumption that I'd want to go there if I knew where I was going. What if, what if, I get there and it's nothing more than a place to sit and missing the starting-line? What then? When I was young, I felt like an adult and would have jumped through any hoop to win a place as peer among the adults. As I "become" an adult, the battle reverses. If there was only some way to convince the young that I too am youthful yet. If there was only some way to remember that the old, convalescent on the bench outside the sliding doors of the nursing home is no different. We experience - whatever that means. Experience is not simply showing up, but being present, and reflecting on what happens afterwards. We claim that our experience amounts to wisdom, and maybe it does. Often we dishonestly count for Wisdom what is better appraised as bitter retrospective counsel forced on the next generation. The authority of our tenure insists they walk a different route than we did lest they stumble on the same stones. Or, we contradict with demands to trudge dutifully down the roads we ourselves paved lest they enjoy what we could not or shame us with the discovery of a shorter route. No matter what we call the quality which sprouts in response to years of calculated misery and chance vitality, it cannot fairly describe the elusive inner qualities we mean to invoke when we speak of our age. I'm getting older. As I age, I appreciate youth. Youth unappreciated - the youth of the young - is not the youth we long for. We long for youth which can enjoy its youthfulness. Growing old one apprehends his youth, remembers the salient simplicity of sandwhiches cut into squares, the magic of holidays, and the awe inspiring commonplace. One must grow old to grow young. Not all do. Of those that do, not many do so gracefully.

The saga continues...

This blog is meant to be a continuation of the one I started in Israel which gained such popularity among friends, family, and even myself. The Sam in Israel blog can still be accessed here. This one is going to chronicle my life stateside. It should be equally interesting only lighter on the mizrakhi flare and Jonesian (Indiana) Adventure. Still, when my life becomes boring, we will all know once and for all that there is a God and that He answers prayers. So until then - the speculation continues.