3W

So, this time I will just link to a poem, a classic:

Howl

Most of you have probably read this, and if you haven't you should (warning: it's really, really gay.) What you probably don't know is that I read about 5-10 minutes worth in front of my 10th grade english class - which was rather intense at the time. It's kind of odd that that would be harder for me, now, than it was then; and this isn't because I have any fear of public speaking. Reading poetry in public (esp. ginsberg) is really ... emotionally vulnerable? That's not exactly what I'm looking for, but something like that.

Rav Reichman is the man. I went to his thursday night "chabura" (for lack of a better word); it was an odd experience for me. For some reason, my mind was swimming with all sorts of chassidic/kabbalistic nonsense on the way home - though he hardly spoke of such matters - I was drawing all sorts of weird connections between what he had said, and sefirot, and various platonic stuff, and stuff in my life, and random aggadot I had heard, and some science I know, and none of it made any sense but it all seemed perfect and really important at the time. I went to sleep dreaming of weird webs (I actually saw graphs in my head like the ones you do in graph theory) of analogies between fire,water,sin,torah,flooding,sand,geulah, noach,enoch, the republic and a thousand other things, it was very weird and mildly hallucinatory. This was especially odd because the things he had spoken about were mostly mundane. It was also a weird experience because of my own reaction to his extreme right-wing-ness - stuff that used to get me fired up, but to which I have a very different reaction nowadays than I used to, which I need to sort out. I should note, however, that on the whole the experience was really awesome, I had missed that sort of thing greatly, and I plan on going every week if possible. It was just odd.

Shabbos was nice. Go Shabbos. I got to explore with some friends, sneaking onto the roof and into some of the towers of the main building. Quite an adventure. Good fun was had by all. We also had a nice dinner at my place with like 8 people. Having goyim at shabbos dinner is so funny, it's basically like everyone is speaking french or something, and the poor guy is trying to follow the conversation, and every few minutes he notices that someone said something about him.

After a few slow weeks at work, it promises to pick up rather heavily starting tomorrow, which should be good.

Happy new year everybody, send some love.