Where are you now, RDB?

Oh, I'm in a...

Teach Erica Something Lessons Two and Three

Man, I love Berkeley.  I'm definitely going there in my next life.

This road trip, number 1 of 3, is off to an amazingly wonderful start.  Great times with good friends and excellent lessons!  Teach Erica Something Lesson Two was how to play the very nerdy game Dominion.  I failed kind of disastrously at my first game, but I still learned how to play, so it counts, and any game in which I can say the sentence "I'm going to Throne Room my Festival to buy a Province" and have it make actual sense is a win in my book.

Plus, I had drank a Whole Entire Beer by time the game was halfway through and for me, that's A LOT.  That's like, RDB's Totally Sloshed (cheap date, anyone?), so I am willing to cut myself a little slack.  Lesson Two was immediately followed by Lesson Three: how to play the ukulele.  The ukulele!!  I learned four chords and one strum pattern, and apparently I can play about half of North America's popular music with just that.

So fantastic.  And that whole day began with an extremely exhilarating ride on a friend's motorcycle.  We ride for a little bit and he says to me, "Isn't it nice to remember you have adrenaline?"

  I AM A HAPPY GIRL.

ARE YOU CURIOUS?

Somewhere between Bend, OR and Seattle, WA

the Teach Erica Something World Tour begins! Lesson One.

So, I've been pretty excited about spending much of the year traveling and visiting friends, but it's clear that without some larger purpose, I feel enough guilt about "just" doing that to impede my actually enjoying just doing that.  I can couch-surf across America for 8 months, but apparently only if at the end I write a book called Couch-Surfing Across America or something.

Probably I will end up working a significant portion of January to June (more on that plan later), so now I am really just "just" traveling for a few months, something like now (September) to December (until Winter Camp at the very latest).  I set out from Los Angeles last week and headed straight up to Berkeley to stay with two wonderful friends (Aloni and Rebecca) and see as many others in the Bay Area as I could.  Just before I left, however, I had quite a bit of time at home without a whole lot to do, something that has basically never happened in my life before, ever.  I am one of those people who is utterly behind on everything, all the time, and claims, "I've just been crazy busy lately," to which everyone who knows me replies, "It's not 'lately'; you are always crazy busy."  During that down time, I did a few very Erica-like things, like reading Roots by Alex Haley (LOVED it) and a few very UN-Erica-like things, like watch a bunch of TV.  It turns out that I cannot sit still during TV shows, maybe because I got out of the habit of watching them (it's been a while) or maybe it's that YOU ARE LAZY AND UNPRODUCTIVE voice again, or who knows what, but I pretty much always need to also Do Something Else while I watch TV.  I decided I really want to learn to knit or crochet or something, so I can do it while I watch television and finally both enjoy being a couch potato and feel productive at the same time.  When I found out that one of the friends in the Bay Area that I wanted to visit was willing to teach me to crochet, a Project was born.

It's a small project, but it's something.

It's the TEACH ERICA SOMETHING World Tour.  I got up to Berkeley and had a very fun time and lots of ice cream with RBP and AJC.  I saw a ridiculous movie, I went to an Israeli dance led by Aaron Alpert where I got to introduce myself to (and take a picture with) NOBEL PRIZE WINNING ASTROPHYSICIST SAUL PERLMUTTER.  The next day, I drove down to Santa Cruz and learned to crochet.

 
I learned to crochet!  See?  Those are Dani's hands on the left, looking professional.  That is my first practice attempt on the right, looking not at all professional.  But, you know, it's LEARNING.

It feels so good to be on the road.

Moving On. And Up. And Over. And Down. Then Back Again.

Chapter Zero:  the last 12 months, summarized.

Well, if you know me well (and as far as I can tell, almost all followers of this blog do), then you know I've had quite a whirlwind year.  Exactly a year ago, I got engaged to a wonderful Italian man.  We had some lovely times both in California and in Italy.  We spent New Year's Eve in Venice - a romantic dream.  In February I spent three weeks in Israel chaperoning 50 high school students, in May and June I spent a couple of weeks in Brazil teaching Israeli dance and falling in love with that country, and in April I was in Italy again.  It was pretty magical (and exhausting).  In June I went back to camp for my 9th summer there (oh man).  In August, we called off our wedding and a little while later, broke up for good.

Chapter One:  the panic of What Now.

The plan had been that we would get married in California in mid-October and then live in Italy until next June, when we moved back to the States in time for Summer #10.  I took a one-year leave of absence from my school job and arranged to be away for about eight months.  And then... now..  ohmigod.

So:  funemployed?  On the one hand, it's an amazing gift to end up with an 8-month unplanned break from work in the middle of my working life.  On the other hand, it's for a sad reason and I'm sad.  But hand #1 - oh, there are so many amazing things I can do with this time!  Hand #2 - none are planned, it's too late to do many of them (spend a year teaching English in China, say), and OH THE GUILT.  Also, OH THE PRESSURE TO NOT SQUANDER THE TIME.  OH THE VOICE THAT IS WORRIED ABOUT WASTING TIME, ABOUT BEING LAZY, ABOUT BEING IRRESPONSIBLE.  This is a loud voice.

White whine?  First-world problem?  ABSOFUCKINGLUTELY.  No argument there.

Chapter Two:  GTFO.

So what to do with this time?  I decided first that I wanted to use some of it to travel and visit friends and spend some quality time with people I love and people who remind me of who I am and want to be.  I often go to the East Coast on trips of the I'm-here-for-48-hours-and-I-have-48-people-to-see variety, and that's not so fulfilling.  Now I have some real time, so I'm planning to go and spend weeks in each of the places I usually have only hours.  If you're a friend on the East Coast with whom I haven't yet made plans, get in touch and expect to see me sometime between late October and mid-December!

I don't have much money and I'm not working and OH THE GUILT OF NOT WORKING, so I can't fly all over.  The plan now is to drive someone's car cross-country, visiting whomever I know in middle America (both of them), and then to drive up and down the East Coast in someone else's car.  If you know anyone who has a car they'd be willing to lend (or rent) me for a week or more, or if you know anyone who has a car they need driven from basically any Point A to any Point B, let me know!

Those will be Road Trips #2 and #3.  First, though, is Road Trip #1, up and down the West Coast, in my own car, alone.  And we have come now to the birth of the Teach Erica Something World Tour.

Stay tuned (and wish me luck)!

"Kehilla Kedosha"... קייק

The Museum responded to my question! They say the koof koof (קייק) stands for "Kehilla Kedosha", which means "Holy Community".  I had never seen or heard this usage before, but Debbie found it on wikipedia, so it must be real :)

Back to Italy in 10 days - so excited.  No Venice this time; Rome instead!

"I'm an engineer, and if I could also dance, I would own the world."

Member of panel on "Science in Science Fiction"

WonderCon 2012

Help

So, this is driving me crazy.  When I was in Venice for New Year's Eve (Capodanno a Venezia!!), we went to the ghetto and the Jewish Museum, on Friday afternoon just before it closed for Shabbat.  It was a lovely museum, interesting and carefully tended, but I saw one thing that utterly freaked me out.  On the walls of a display about the different communities of Jews in Italy, I swear it used the word "kike".  It was in Hebrew, as קייק, so I'm assuming that *doesn't* actually mean kike and is some other standard abbreviation for something legitimate... right?? Someone help me out here, because as far as I (and wikipedia) know, there is and never has been any non-derogatory meaning or use of this word.  And I wasn't dreaming it - here's a picture of the display from the Museum's own webpage:

Can anyone help me understand this? Please?

gelosia ,קנאה

It is a strange sensation to feel torn between two countries, languages, cultures, as between two men, two lovers.  I sit in an Israeli restaurant, Hebrew spoken all around me and Israeli musicians on the radio, songs I know well, singers I've even met.  The smells of warm pita, shakshuka, frying schnitzel, these surround me and I bask in them as in the embrace of an old friend, but feel all the while that I am cheating on my new love, that the Italian textbook in the bag at my feet is watching jealously with dark eyes, listening in to see if I will go so far as to speak Hebrew with the waitress, when I have already stooped so low as to enter this place, to accept the comfortable squeeze of the familiar sounds and smells and tastes here.  I am one block and thirty minutes away from Italian class, and perhaps later I'll watch a Roman movie with subtitles, trying to catch and match what words I can... but for the moment my heart is torn, I'm reading a book translated from the Portuguese and half-wishing I were still reading last week's novel, the David Grossman meditation on war and life in the Jewish homeland.  Torn, between countries, as between lovers, cheating on a language by thinking in another.  A strange sensation.

Jotsam... notes down for me.

Oh, it's been so long since we had a good egg salad up in here! I've been cleaning out my office the last week or so, and finding all kinds of interesting things (anyone want a combo TV and VCR? Or a DVD player? Or a Sony Handycam? Someone bought my old printer, yay!). I'm down to going through some very small piles of very small papers, the little notes I leave myself all over, the flotsam and jetsam of my pockets, only they are notes on which I jot things down so I want to call it: jotsam.
Anyway...
Anyway, on one of these small papers is a reference to something I heard on the news, apparently a few years ago:
Wind Erosion Lab Blown Away
 
Oh, how very lovely is that?
(I mean, sorry for the researchers and all. You know what I mean.)

L'educazione, Seconda parte

Tonight's Italian movie was Mid-August Lunch (Pranzo di ferragosto). Terrible.

Obsessed with this song:

Started Italian class the other day, and started listening to the very cute "Drive & Learn Italian" cds in my car last week. I remember having this Berlitz Hebrew tape when I was a kid and I thought it was such a good cultural lesson, in addition to language instruction, because the English speaker would say some polite thing in an upbeat-but-polite manner, "thank you very much!" and the Israeli would say, "ehh, toda raba, toda raba" like he'd rather be anywhere else, doing anything else, than saying thank you. So I'm having that experience again, but reversed: these Italian speakers are So. Happy. To. Speak. Italian. Every word is a jubilant song. Adorable.




Hey, today is 9/10/11. Cute, no?