Fuzzy Monster

Yesterday after I took a shower I tried just blow-drying my hair without putting any stuff in it.  Bad idea.  My hair ended up looking like it was about to jump off my head and devour someone.

That's not the worst thing that happened to me this weekend - the Mage game was cancelled, and so was my appointment with Martine to watch Mansfield Park.  So, without any proper organized recreation to vent out my impulse for fun, I have been rather lethargic.

At least I got something done.  In April, when my little brother becomes a Bar Mitzvah, I am going to read three lines of Torah at the service.  It will be my maternal grandparents' aliyah, which means they will say the blessing and I am in effect reading for them.  Dad found a Navigating the Bible site that has line-by-line recordings of all the readings, so I downloaded the files for my three lines.  I also have a photocopied page of my reading (in Hebrew).  I listen to the recording and follow the text and, going by a few words at a time, try to get the pronunciation and chanting right, or as near right as I can get it.  My new digital recorder is helpful for this.  I've reserved a file folder on it for my reading.  I make very short recordings of myself singing two or three words, then use "continuous playback" to hear them all in sequence - a little choppy, but not that bad.  So far I've got about half of the first line in there.  My plan is to record a little more each day, and then it will be a matter of remembering all the segments and stringing them together.  after two days I can already chant half of the first line:

Veem-tachteha ta'amod habahereyt lo-fasta v'or v'heev chayha...

My reading - Leviticus chapter 13, lines 28-30 - is about rules concerning leprosy.  Joy oh joy.  When I became a Bat Mitzvah, my reading was about premarital sex.  If a supposed virgin didn't bleed on her wedding night and her husband could prove she had had sex before marriage, she got stoned to death.  If she (or, rather, her family) could prove that she had in fact been a virgin, the husband had to pay her father with a substantial amount of silver.  Real equitable, that.

I've just noticed that my reading seems to cross over from the fourth to the fifth "official" reading. This is probably because the site documents all the readings according to an annual cycle, and my synagogue uses a triennial cycle, which means we read one-third of each book of the Torah for three years (for instance, the first year we read the first third of Genesis, then around the same time next year the second third, and then the last third). Also, we abridge parts of the readings.

I almost forgot, the Rhoads Halloween Party is tonight (Rhoads is a dorm here, as you may have guessed).  It's not my kind of party, but at least I'll have an excuse to wear a costume and eat junk food, always a good thing.

Um...whoa...

I was under the impression that a Halloween party was an opportunity for one to wear a creative costume, not to wear a costume that is very little in the way of clothing at all.  But, judging from most of the costumes I saw at the Halloween party, this is in fact what one is supposed to do.

They had no food and the only person I knew there was serving as a bouncer, so I went back to my room.  I ordered a small pizza and goofed around some more, like I've been doing all day.  Tomorrow I actually have to do some work.  Since it's Halloween, I shall wear my costume around.

My Evenstar pendant is fixed.  I had to get a new chain which is longer than the old one, but stronger and looks nicer.  Now I can wear it again!

MUD families

On the Discworld MUD, there are functions that allow you to set up family relationships with other people.  You can have a family name, which has to be paid for in MUD-money regularly, or just have the family relationships.  You can also get married.  There are wedding chapels here and there around the Disc, and places to buy engagement and wedding rings, as well as shops where brides can get lovely clothing for That Special Day.  There's a couple of custom clothing shops in one city that make wedding gowns and veils.

Now, here's something funny - someone I know on the MUD is planning to have one of these MUD-weddings, and she asked me to serve as a bridesmaid.  Her name's Faye (her character's name is, anyway) and I have a thief alt named Faiye.  We're both sort of based on the Cowboy Bebop character, you see.  After a bad first step when I jokingly called her my evil twin and got her mad - she had, after all, had that character longer than I'd had mine - we made up and are now good MUD-friends.  Still, I didn't expect that she'd want me to be a bridesmaid!  It's kind of cute.  Maybe I can go to the ceremony as Faiye and then switch to Priscilla, my wizard, and use magic to cater the party, if she's having one.

Yay! Swag!

Well, this Halloween turned out well after all!  I ran into my friend Joanna, who was taking some of the international students out trick-or-treating because they'd never done it before.  Since we are technically too old for this sort of thing, we did skits at people's houses to earn our candy.  It worked - people gave us lots of yummy things.  At one house, where we were invited in, there was a retired professor and his wife.  She was a Bryn Mawr alum (class of '54) and was overjoyed to see us, so she started the Anass chant.  Two of the trick-or-treaters left about halfway through and we were joined by Kim, who was dressed as Stitch (we had to change our skit accordingly).

I'm going to count up my candy and see what I got...

Ever had one of those days?....

Today I went to visit Beth Zion-Beth Israel, the Conservative congregation I will be studying for my thesis.  Instead of taking the train I accepted an offer from someone in my Anthro Senior Seminar to ride in her car.  She's a nice person but her driving (lots of speeding and near-misses) makes me nervous.  Next time I'll take the train.

I walked from where she dropped me off to the synagogue.  I was a bit nervous walking in that part of Philly by myself, but nothing happened.  It was a nice walk and I crossed over the bridge at sunset, so I got a great view of the river.

The synagogue itself was in a converted church.  They kept the original Gothic stonework and such on the inside, though they replaced the stained-glass windows with Jewish-themed ones (one problem with church windows is that they feature people in their imagery, which is taboo in a synagogue).  I talked to the cantor, a very nice man who gave me contact info for the rabbis and regular Torah readers in the synagogue.

Then I went down to the main sanctuary so I could write a description of it.  It looked a bit weird to me because there were plaques dedicated to founders, presidents and funders of the synagogue, as well as memorial plaques and yartzheit (or anniversary-of-death) plaques on the rear wall, which we do not have at Adat Shalom (then again, Adat Shalom hasn't had its own building for long enough to accumulate such things).  I went up to look at the ark where the Torahs are kept.  They were behind a curtain.

Here's the stupid and embarassing part.  I pulled back the curtain to see the Torahs - I meant to count them - and I ended up setting off an alarm.  Now I'd never heard of alarms on arks before, and I didn't think there would be alarms anywhere because everything was open and there were lots of people in the building at that hour.  I talked to Dad on the phone about it later and he told me that Torahs are quite valuable ($30,000 dollars and up), and people steal them to sell on the black market, hence the alarms.

Nobody rushed into the sanctuary.  That would have been REALLY embarassing.  I went into the main hall, apologizing to everyone I saw for setting off the alarm.  Someone finally entered the code to turn it off and called the security company to tell them it was a false alarm.  He didn't seem too ticked off about the whole thing - nobody did - but that didn't make it any less humiliating.  The guy who turned off the alarm also happened to be the senior rabbi of the synagogue, who I want to talk to at some point (I discovered this when he spoke to the security company on the phone).  I decided that it was not a good time to introduce myself and I left.

I got a salad at 30th Street Station and took the train back to Bryn Mawr.  From there I went to the library to look through the Encyclopedia Judaica and flesh out the glossary I'm planning to attach to my thesis.  I'm going to head back to my room soon and eat some of my Halloween swag.

Since my brother's home for election day, I'll have to call him.  My absentee ballot didn't come in the mail, so I think I just missed my first Presidential election because I used a pen instead of a pencil to fill out the ballot.  Oh well, Kerry's got Maryland firmly in hand anyway.

Tomorrow will probably be very tense.  If Bush wins then I shall make plans to move to England or Canada.