The Wild West

Today I learned:

1. I live in the Wild West. For real.

2. Some girls really are crazy. A family friend dated a girl who was so insane over being careful about every little thing she did, she would do things like...not move her left foot before her right or something weird like that, and she wouldn't move things in certain directions...I don't even know. But a big rav in Williamsburg was the one to finally tell her to just relax. Yeesh!

3. The Weiss family has a blog (but I'm not sure how public they want it to be which is why I didn't link to it on my main blog. I don't think very many people actually read this one). But for anyone who does want to read it, they have a really interesting story and I think the blog will be really worth reading.

4. I'm seem to be the teen drama mediator in my family.

Waves

Today I learned some contradictory things.

1. I remembered why it is I don't always like to talk. Too many times today I said things, and not even timidly or too quietly, and they went completely unheard/ignored, though I think more unheard than ignored. It's less discouraging (/hurtful) not to make the effort in the first place.

2. On the flip side, I spent a lot of time having fun with my friends.

3. I learned that it's actually quite difficult to write truly bad poetry on purpose (but also a lot of fun).

The Drowsy Chaperoned

Yesterday I learned:

1. SJ, The Apple, and I really do all have ESP with each other. We all wore blue (accidentally) and then took a picture.

2. I guess I don't care enough about art to put in enough effort to actually take a class in it. I just find it really relaxing to draw on my own time, but not actually for anything.

3. Wine makes me really tired. I went out for dinner last night with my family (my mom and Trademark went to see Wicked, so Straight Man and I met them at a restaurant later and my dad came also a little while after) and my dad got us all a cup of Moscato wine (however it's spelled) and sometime through the meal I was suddenly hit with an overwhelming wave of utter exhaustion. Like...it was actually painful to stay awake. And I didn't even drink that much of it! My mom kept telling me to pretend I was on a date, but I think I would have fallen asleep even if I was. So my parents sent me outside to get fresh air. It was sooooo weird.

First Few Days In TBA

TBA = The Best Apartment (ever) or The Blogger Apartment. Or both. Or anything else you'd like to call it.

In any case, today I learned:

1. There is AMAZING parve ice cream right across the street from TBA. We got mint chocolate chip and it tasted DAIRY.

2. You should always warn the apartments down the hall if you are self-cleaning your oven. This way they don't think they might die from something mysterious going around. Basically, I was very innocently sitting at the counter in the kitchen/main area (it's all one room, really) playing on my laptop and drawing a pretty schedule of my classes for tomorrow when I suddenly looked up and frowned.

"Um...M.R.? Does it smell kinda funny to you?"

M.R. sniffed the air and also frowned.

"It smells really bad. Not like smelly bad but like dangerous bad."

"What?" asked SJ, emerging from her room.

"Something smells dangerous in here," said M.R.

"It smells like gas. I hope we're not going to explode." (This was from Chana)

We then all proceeded to try and figure out what was causing the smell.

"I don't wanna go to sleep with it smelling like this," I said, slightly worried. M.R. and SJ seemed worried, too.

"Maybe it's coming from the hall," suggested SJ. She walked towards the door, near where I was sitting.

"Yep. It's a lot stronger over here."

I got up and edged towards the door. SJ opened it and then quickly shut it.

"Oh, yes. It's from out there."

"Let me see what's going on," said M.R. and she slipped outside. I closed the door after her and coughed from the smell. It was strong.

"I hope we don't all die in our sleep!" I think this was from Chana.

A few short moments later, M.R. came back, a relieved grin on her face.

"They're self-cleaning their oven! That's what it smells like."

And so we didn't have to die in our sleep after all. But it would be nice for people to warn everyone else when they do something like that! Oh well.

3. Lost things usually have a way of being found.

4. Girls will always act like girls, no matter the context. Today someone was walking around with a bin of washing cups to give out to the various apartments. When she got to our room and asked us if we needed any, SJ and M.R. said yes and SJ started to take some. And everyone commanded in unison, "get the pretty ones!"

Post-Hiatus Lessons

I took about a ten day hiatus from this blog - not intentionally, but just because it really is difficult to notice what you learn each day. You do learn things, but I think a lot of learning is either unconscious or falls way below the radar of what you remember about each day. Which is in some ways sad and in some ways natural. I think we soak things up without even realizing it and all those things become a part of us, but subtly.

Anyway, I'm not going to play catch up for the days that I missed. A missed day is a missed day. I'm going to focus on the present.

Since it's only the afternoon, though, I'm going to write about lessons from yesterday and so-far today:

1. Playing catch-up is unproductive (sometimes)

2. Sometimes people are just not nice, but when faced with confrontation, it brings out the niceness in everyone else

2a. The workplace is just like high school, in some ways

3. Every cloud really does have a silver lining.

4. Anything you do can have an effect on people - even something really simple

Also, I think everyone should watch the movie Pay It Forward.

8 Things - In Honor Of The 2008 Olympics

Today I learned:

1. That if I want to watch the Olympics, I should watch on channel 4, not channel 99. It took me a while to figure that out, sadly. I couldn't understand why NBC (on 99) kept showing the same interviews with athletes over and over but no actual competitions! Heh.

2. How to defrost the inside of my dad's car

3. I drove in the rain!

4. That I apparently need to watch the Rocky movies to toughen up

5. That the smileys don't turn or animate at all on google talk (sadly)

6. That there's a huge difference between an Olympic sport and a normal sports game (too tired to elaborate on that)

7. That the Seal of Truth youtube is VERY CREEPY and disturbing and that curiosity in times like that (to keep on watching) can prove more harmful than rewarding (I ended up not wanting to have seen everything I saw)

8. That if you think hard enough, you can always find something you learned each day. I know, because I was all ready to write, "I did not learn anything new today" and here I am with 8 things on my list. So ha.

8.

Tisha b'Av Lessons

Today I spent a while watching the YU livefeed of Rabbi J. J. Schacter reading and teaching various kinos. I took some notes, so I figured they count as things I learned today. I'm gonna post the highlights here (er, from the times when I wasn't spacing out from dizziness).

1. Rabbi Schacter was talking about how no one really believed the BHMK would be destroyed and that's a much more difficult kind of loss - when you truly believe you're not going to lose something and then you do. So in the same vein, we can't take Israel for granted and just assume that now we have it, we can't lose it. Redemption is contingent on us - who says now is the time? We have to make sure there won't be another churban. And even if you feel you're just an average Jew and you can't really do anything to make a difference, you can. Even if you just really mean it when you daven for things like shalom and Yerushalaim.

3. At the end of the day, tzaddik hu Hashem, God is righteous in all His ways, which is something we have to accept. It's really hard because there are so many unpleasant things that happen which we don't understand, but we have to trust that all which happens is right.

4. A Stern girl is writing an article for the Observer about hashkafa, so she wrote to Rabbi Schachter asking him what his hashkafa is. I was especially interested to see how he would answer that question, seeing as I'm on a revolution against unnecessary labeling and boxing people up. His answer: "to create a way in which to have a close relationsihp with HKBH and to appreciate the gifts we're given via torah and mitzvos to create a close relationsihp with HKBH." He said the Torah and mitzvos are both a din and a relationship. They provide us with a recipe how to develop that relationship. This was in a greater context that I missed, but he added that there's the maaseh hamitzvah and the experience of the mitzvah. What's going to bring us closer is the experience of the mitzvah, but, of course, the maaseh hamitzvah allows us to experience the mitzvah. We have to overcome the distance, transcend the distance, bridge the distance. Davening is really important in doing this because it's an obvious part of the relationship. That's what we struggle on tisha b'av to develop, because it doesn't look like the other side is having a relationship with us so much, it's not obvious to us, so we have to work on it.

I also learned:

1. It's possible to read three books at the same time (sort of). I don't mean be in the middle of three books at once (I've been doing stuff like that my whole life). I mean - switch off between three books in one sitting.

Yeah...that's all I've got. I'm still feeling kind of out of it from the fast.

Mixed Emotions

I never wrote a post for Friday, so this one will cover both Friday and today.

Friday:

1. I learned how to slip back into my cheerful self again, despite everything that's been out of sorts lately.
2. I learned that I definitely will be able to stay the whole year at Stern, with or without the letter they can't find (somehow it all got sorted out - I'm not sure how)
3. I learned how to talk to some of the people at work and how to not be terrified to ask people things
4. I learned that time cards can't be thrown out until after three years (I think). We threw out a LOT of time cards in the basement at work.

Shabbat/Tisha b'Av night:
1. I learned that the more people talk about two of my really close friends getting married, the weirder I feel about it, even as I'm very happy for them.
2. I learned that it's possible to feel a slight amount of fear at the prospect of a burning Beis Hamikdash. Tonight, for some reason, I just really felt it. It makes me want to write.

Comin' Along

Today I learned that it is very difficult to keep up this blog. But I also learned that it is extremely, extremely important.

And also:

1. I care too much what other people think. But at the same time, I'm sick of people telling me to stop caring what other people think because, you know what? I'm not going to. And neither are they. Everyone cares what other people think of them. That's how we have a society. That's how we live in communities. Caring too much is bad, but it's bad advice to say, "stop caring." That's just going to the other extreme. It's important to care. Just not too much.

2. I've been discovering this over a longish period of time, but I have a lot of respect for each of my friends. I know this is an odd thing to "learn." But I found that I am able to respect very mundane qualities that I see as important. Some people respect those with amazing qualities who have overcome difficult obstacles, who have acted heroically, who have grown in major ways...

No. I respect that, of course. But I have a lot of respect for the simpler qualities, too. And I think that helps me see the goodness in people a lot easier.

3. I learned this one from a very random place, but the happier, more confident, more easy-going you are, the easier it will be to have that charisma necessary to easily make friends. And the more people will like you from the get-go without having to break through any walls first.

It's been a difficult few days. There have been times where I just wanted to sign out of gchat for forever and retreat away from everyone and everything for a while. Drastic, I know. But hopefully I'm reaching the end of that. Keeping this blog is forcing me to find the positive in each day, which is really helpful. I've been overly sensitive to everything this week and part of me just wants to curl up and have ice cream and some TLC or something for a while. Or at least a good laugh. But I guess part of maturing is also knowing that those things don't always come after a difficult time. Sometimes you just have to be strong enough to get over it without anyone to soften things up for you.

...I guess. It's hard to say that stuff. But it's true. But that doesn't make it any less hard. I'm not the toughest girl out there.

Rough Day of Learning

Today was a hard day. I had some difficult things to learn, and some more trivial ones.

1. I discovered the kind of adult I don't want to be. I don't want to be the kind that is constantly in the HR office complaining. I don't want to be the kind that is 40 years old but never seems to have grown out of the high school mentality of coming up with petty excuses for every little thing. Own up to your mistakes. You're an adult, for crying out loud, and not even a young adult anymore. It's my personal opinion that people will have a lot more respect for you if you recognize you did something wrong, apologize, and try to fix it in the future than if you try to weasel out of it by bringing up every excuse in the book.

I guess the real lesson here is - there are lots of adults who never really gained much maturity. Don't be one of them.

2. I realized that part of why I was so depressed at work was because I never knew who was going to ask me to do what and I was completely and utterly dependent on everyone else ordering me around. I didn't even know enough of what needed to be done to do anything on my own initiative. It isn't that kind of a job, most of the time. It's not like there's general "stuff" that I need to do. It's more - if someone asks me to do something, I'm there to do it for them. But lately the main guy I work for has been bringing me down to the basement to do some serious cleaning up in a storage room. It is filled - literally FILLED - from floor to ceiling with file cabinets and a gazillion dusty old cardboard boxes. Every corner of the room is stuffed. When we first started, you could hardly walk in through the door. The air conditioner couldn't work because everything was piled so high. So we worked for a while clearing stuff out, throwing stuff out, filing a lot of stuff they still need to keep, etc. Today, I got sent back down there with another person who was supposed to help me (they didn't want to leave me down there alone, thankfully, which is why they got the other person). And I was sort of in charge there because I knew what I was told to do and I had to direct the other person. And as much as I didn't like what we were doing, I liked being in charge of someone else. I liked knowing exactly what needed to be done because that meant I could do it my way and I didn't have to rely on someone else telling me how to do it. I liked having that independence and freedom of being in complete control of what I was doing. It's interesting, though, because in a crowd, I'm waaay too timid to actually take charge. I'd feel like I was taking it away from someone else who was more qualified or just better. But I like it when I have my moments.

3. Weirdly, I have never been given a ton of mussar in my life. Not real mussar that was meant for me, personally. I've given other people mussar, but I rarely have to take it. It's not that there's not anything about me to criticize, because there is, but I usually don't allow myself to open up enough to give people reason to give me any mussar. I guess because I'm afraid of it. The only people who really give me mussar are my parents and I know I always end up extremely upset and nearly in tears when they do it. So today when a good friend started giving me mussar, I realized just how bad I am at taking it. I have to learn to be stronger. I know I do. I'm way too sensitive. I have to learn that being criticized does not mean I'm in a fight. And I definitely do know that as much as I dislike receiving mussar because it's hard, I'd be really pretty scared if people stopped doing it. Because that would mean they no longer cared. Just thinking about everyone no longer caring makes me feel really cold. So maybe it's not so bad to feel all fired up after receiving a mussar speech. I need to hear it. And it's better than that empty feeling of no one caring enough.

4. People generally don't bite over the phone. I had to make ten phone calls today and I am sooooo very phone shy (it's a big deal if I can talk to someone on the phone. I get nervous even before calling my friends). But I called every single one. Not all of them picked up, but enough did that I still felt proud of myself afterwards.

5. Don't eat too many spicy fries for dinner. It's a little nauseating.

6. The Marvelous Midos Machine is a LOT more classic than I thought it was. And it's really fun to start a whole statii trend. That's part of number two, I think. Liking to know I have an effect on people - even in something as simple as inspiring lots of fun statii. :) But in more serious stuff, too, obviously.

Toughening Up

Today (and yesterday) I learned that I need to be tougher if I ever want to survive in the real adult world. An old lady came into the office today and started crying. She was really, really upset - she wanted to go home, she was in pain, she wanted to see the doctor but had missed him that morning, she was angry at the nurses...it was sort of heart wrenching. I think I was way more horrified than I should have been. Between that and things that happened yesterday, I feel like I'm getting it full in the face that I'm still really just a scared kid inside. I don't know if it's because I'm really naive or just really immature - or both - but I really feel it starkly when I'm faced with certain unpleasant things. I don't know how to ignore them.

On a totally separate note, I spent two hours tonight perusing through a file my parents kept of all my old projects and report cards and just stuff of mine from the day I was born until the present. I really learned a lot about myself. But I think the biggest thing I learned is that I'm pretty smart and way too lazy to the point that it does me an injustice. I also have to mature a lot and realize that if I don't like a teacher, not doing the work to spite her will actually just hurt me, not her. And I have to learn how to be a harder worker. It's unfair to myself if I don't tap in to my own potential. And that's actually true for everyone. Our potentials are there for a reason - to be reached.

Murphy's Law Revisited

Today I learned a few things.

1. However bad you think things are, they can always get worse. And the more you complain, the more likely it is that they will get worse. And the more worse they get, they can always get even worse, still. So it's important to put things into perspective. You may not like the way something turned out, but you'd be even more upset if it turned out even more horribly. And if it does end up progressing to that level of horrible-ness, you'll wish it had stayed the other way.

The grass is always greener on the other side, essentially. Even if that other side's grass used to be brown. So instead of looking where it seems greener somewhere else, try to find the green in your own grass. Because if you ever get moved to grass on the wrong side, you'll look back at what used to be your grass and notice the green when it's too late.

2. When all else seems to be going wrong, if you've still got your friends, you've got something. Friendship is one of the best things in the world to have - even more important than having a fun job. :)

3. I have a lot more maturing to do than I thought I did.

Something New

Today I was asked, "do you have days where you don't learn anything new?" Immediately, I responded, "yes."

I have had this empty blog for a few months already and wasn't able to find a use for it - until now. There is something utterly tragic about responding, "yes," to the above question. I wonder, if I thought hard enough, if I really couldn't have found something new that I learned every day of my life? After all, why else have we been created? To learn, to grow, to achieve, to succeed in both yahadut and in the world as a whole, right? And so we must make sure to learn at least one new thing every day - even something completely simple (who said life had to be deep and complex all the time? Sometimes simplicity teaches the best lessons, anyway). How else are we actively engaging in this world that was created for us by God? I am certain we are not meant to be passive residents in an earthly resort.

"Each day is a gift, that's why they call it the present" - isn't that how the saying goes? I know, I know, it's cheesy, it's corny, and it's every other person's quote in your high school yearbook. But still - that doesn't make the concept behind it any less true. Our lives are a gift. It's a gift that we exist to partake in what this world has to offer. What better way to live our lives than by paying attention to what we gain from each day that we're here?

So that's what this blog is going to be about. What I learn each and every day I'm alive (and keeping up with the blog). Because I think that is crucial to being an active member of the human race. Otherwise, I might as well be a vegetable.

And that is what I have learned today.