A boring, technical Lizrael Update for yous.
Work, work all day.
On the job front, things are going really well. My workplace is calm and friendly, half Anglo, half Israeli. The top people treat the bottom people with respect. I’m not exactly bottom by any means, but I’m just saying. It’s chock fulla respect here. The office is located across the street from Malcha mall, mucho convenient for bus travel and lunch breaks and after-work dinner shopping. The actual work is mostly interesting, usually exciting, and always educational; since I am actually a big geek who likes to learn about random stuff, this last adjective describing my work is very awesome for me. Did you know that there are volcanoes in space?
School’s in for autumn.
It has finally been admitted to me by the department of Conflict Management and Negotiation at Bar-Ilan University that the schedule of classes for all first-years is Tuesday, Wednesday Thursday 4pm to 8pm. Yeah, I consider it sucky, three days in a row to schlep to Ramat Gan from Malcha Mall and then get back to Baka by 10pm. But then again, I am (as mentioned above) a geek and therefore excited to begin learning in a classroom again. Sure, it’s in Hebrew. So there’s sand! I’ll figure it out.
Course schedule to follow, including some really crazy classes like Psychology in Conflict Management, Managing Conflict between Secular and Religious Jews, and other relevant-sounding topics… (I can assure you it will include law; can you feel the disdain through your monitor? Then again, I might actually like law… my disdain for it has more to do with who studies it and what they do with it rather than the topic itself).
Gotta live somewhere.
I love my apartment in Baka and I actually like my roommates (that is an understatement but I won’t gush here). Unfortunately, said-roommates are chucking me out by December. OK, to be fair, I agreed to sublet until then because they needed someone to cover a different friend who can only move in December time. I have very very very loose plans for come-December, and the loosocity of these plans scares me because now that I actually have a job and classes, the thought of being homeless is not as glamorous as, say, when I had no job, no classes, and really quit a pathetic existence of sitting around all day. In other people’s apartments.
Life and beyond.
In general, life is good on the meter that measures ‘life’s being good’. My brother is here studying in the after-high school-yeshiva-year capacity. While he and I are not necessarily fans of this style of living for him, it was a way for him to spend time in Israel and think about it seriously, hopefully despite his yeshiva peers. I’m trying to help him find ways to feel the living in Israel for real as much as possible despite actually living in an Anglo yeshiva in Jerusalem.
And so…
Other than that, I’m really just settling into the routine of settling into routine so that later on (probably sooner than that) I will begin to complain about having settled into routine. And then perhaps I will forget to look at life a bit not-so-seriously and I will need help remembering. I have many good non-American friends for that. And there is this Lizrael Update I keep so that I can scroll back and remember why I came here, what life for me is about, and that in the end, sometimes when you keep your eyes open and your mouth closed – even for just five minutes – you end up learning a lot more.
Whadya got: