electricpaladin

Today was Rosh HaShannah, the Jewish new year and the first day of the Days of Awe or High Holy Days, or whatever you want to call them. I went to services with Abby's family, and it was nice.

What it wasn't, though, was terribly profound. I can't decide whether to be troubled by this. On the one hand, I like profound experiences, religious and otherwise. On the other, when I think back on it, every other profound Rosh HaShannah has been profound in a distinctly bad way. They have all been new years in which I resolved to make some improvement or get out of some bad situation. Right now, I'm not in any bad situations, and while I know I have many flaws and failings, there are none that I have a burning, immediate desire to correct.

I suppose despite the various situations of my life - the lack of a job, my parents continued griping (more on that later), my various mistakes - I am actually content.

Of course, a lot of these situations aren't as bad as they could be. Take the lack of a job, for example. I do have three great jobs teaching religious and hebrew school. They are all fulfilling and fun, and who cares if they don't pay enough? I'm doing what I want to do with my life, and that's better than what a lot of people can say, and better than what I could have said last year. And, in addition to all that rather ephemeral optimisim, I have a job offer. A stationary and chatchke store called Papyrus is offering me 15 hours a week on betwen $9 and $10 an hour. It's not enough to get us out of Abby's parents' house, but it's a start.

The promised (threatened?) aside to my parents is this: I think I have finally found out the center of my mother's gripe. She doesn't think I'm asking for advice often enough. She's upset because she thinks I don't understand that she and my father are the only people in the world with my best interests at heart. She thinks there is something deeply wrong with what I'm doing with my life right now.

I guess she's right about a few things. I haven't gone to my parents for advice as often as I should. In my defense, my project was to get out of the house, and all my parents seemed to be able to talk about when I brought it up was how impossible this project was. Who wants that kind of advice? I had decided I was going to do it, and so I tried, and I succeeded!

Also, it's hard to go for advice to a couple of people who have spent years making themselves hard to talk to about problems, but I can't tell them that. Honestly, it's not that I'm afraid of causing a fight. The fights mean so much less from across a continent. It just doesn't seem fair to say something like that in a context where I know it will be misunderstood. If I could get my parents into family therapy or something, then maybe I'd be able to say it. In the meantime... ah, whatever. I'm out of that house, and as much as I love my parents, I don't think I'm living there again. Things might get better and things might get worse, but I'm going to keep myself safe. I don't know where their doubts and anxieties end and I begin when I'm living there, and that scares me too much for me to allow it.

That's all there is about my parents. What else have I promised to write about?

The kids! That's right, the kids. My Sunday morning class is billed at twenty-two kids, but considering absences, it's usually more like sixteen or eighteen. They're sixth graders, roughly evenly split between boys and girls, with a really exciting mix of personalities and backgrounds. A lot of them are "half Jewish" - though, as I tell them repeatedly, in my classroom they're Jewish, and that's all that counts - and the other half ranges from spanish to scottish. One of the girls looks middle-eastern, but she could be spanish, or just mizrahi.

They are really great kids. I have my share of troublemakers and eccentrics, from the boys who are so entertained by my difficulty with their names (it's only been three classes, give me a break!) that they keep lying during attendance to the girl who puts on such a bored, disaffected personality that I'm really afraid she's going to grow up and become a hipster, but they are all really just spirited. They ask good questions, and they don't resist my efforts to make the material exciting. Their misbehavior isn't even that bad; they have a hard time staying on task and sometimes it takes a while to get them quiet, but by and large there isn't any blatent disrespect and, as far as I can tell, there isn't any bullying at all.

I've only met the Wednesday kids once, and I haven't met the Saturday kids at all, but I'll post about them at some point.

So, in short, my life is better than I think, I have great jobs and good prospects, and perhaps that's the most profound thing about this Rosh HaShannah.

Also, when the haftorah and torah were being read in Hebrew, I could sort of half keep up with what it meant, which was awesome.

L'shanna tova.

I'm sure there are more important things for me to be doing, but I've been promising a serious post for a long time now, and nothing beats livejournal for rank procrastination.

The past few weeks have been a lot of fun. First, a week in Palo Alto, at ladypimpernel's house, followed by a week in Chataqua, with ladypimpernel's family. Both were a lot of fun, with lots of solo gaming and sleeping in and wandering around beautiful Palo Alto and beautiful Chataqua with, you guessed it, ladypimpernel, which amounts to a whole class of enjoyment in and of itself. I also had a chance to read her the first two chapters of A Knight of the Land, and she has since read the third chapter on her own. It seems that my worst fears have been realized; my father was right, it really is quite good, and while it needs some work, I ought to try to get it published.

The week in Palo Alto also gave me time to pursue jobs for the coming year. California is looking very likely now. I have recieved one offer for a teaching job at one synagogue and another, as yet uncomfirmed (ie. I want to have a final conversation about salary and hours and the rabbi is playing hard to get) job as a part time office worker and "informal educator" (whatever that means) at a different synagogue. Another offer as a youth group leader is pending, and I have the time and the inclination to substitute teach at several synagogues and take another part-time job at a bookstore or a coffee shop or a restaurant or something in that neighborhood.

At the moment, however, things are tense and unhappy. My mother, as she often is when my life is engulfed in some upheaval or another, is on the rampage. She wants me in New York for a variety of reasons, some stated, some not, some legitemate, some not. She thinks it's best, she thinks I can make more, she thinks I'm less vulnerable to being laid off here, she wants a greater measure of control over my life, she's suffering from empty nest angst - whatever it is, it's getting on my nerves. I really don't like this. My parents, even my much-maligned mother, can be very reasonable at times, and dealing with them is the picture of an ego struggling against dissolution. I can't dismiss them out of hand because they're not bad parents, really, just very human in some specific ways that I, with my own baggage, have a hard time dealing with. Because I can't dismiss them, my compassion, relativism, and love of discussion kick in, and I start arguing with them. I need to prove them wrong and have them acknowledge my arguments to feel vindicated, but I often get the impression they aren't playing by the same rules that I am. They were always good at letting me win from time to time when I was growing up, letting me keep the gaming books hidden in the back of the closet, letting me walk the dog for an hour with my brother so I could run him free-form games, letting me think I had gotten one over on them here and there. What happened? Why do they feel the need, all of a sudden, to really, really win?

Or possibly this one is on me. Maybe the stakes are higher, and suddenly I'm the one who wants to win, and they don't know how to deal with it.

I feel pretty adolescent posting all this. Aren't we supposed to have made peace with our parents by now? Made peace or told them to fuck off? I can't seem to do the first, and I don't want to do the second. I had damn well better be in California next year. If I'm here, I'll do what I did last summer, just swallow my self-determination and simmer. It was good for my writing - I produced a three hundred something page novel, and it's apparantly worth pursuing - but it plays hell with everything else.

Further bad news: I have decided that except in the sense that every bad experience is a learning experience, the Bay Area Mitzvah Corps was basically a bust. In an email with one of my fellow coordinators, I have discovered that in the final arithmetic - in her opinion - I basically did a bad job. I can't argue, though I wish I could. I know I shared some good times with the kids and taught them some good lessons, but as a counselor I had a hard time staying engaged and as a coordinator I had a hard time staying on target, though both improved with time. While it's possible that my coworker is being hard on me, I think she's right. I'm going to chalk this one up to experience and move on. Transferring from a counselor or office intern who takes the orders to one of the counselors and coordinators of an entire program, with one third the fate of fourteen teenagers resting squarely on my shoulders, is not easy. I'll have to get good at this, but I'm not going to beat myself up too much. I'll do better next time, but I really wish I'd done better this time.

Enough moping. It turns out that my brother picked up juggling over the winter, which is pretty great. With his help, I've picked up my first trick, adding stealing to my malnourished juggling repetoire. Also, I have a collection of jobs that will let me live in California, if I can ever get ahold of the rabbi, which is exactly what I've been looking for. Even my father admits that it's a distinct possibility that this will work out, though confronting my mother will be tough.

In the final thought of this great mess of a post, Abby and I are considering living together next year. While our readiness is dubious, it's not totally out of the question. We'll have been together a year in September, after all. We spent the two weeks before this basically living together, though we left out a lot of real-life necessities like keeping things neat. I don't know if we're ready, and Abby has been asking for advice on her livejournal, so I may as well do the same on mine. Advice welcome.

So, in short, I am in a frustrating and disappointing limbo where every success is hard-bought, and most of them turn out to be failures whithin a day or two, regaurdless of how much I paid for them. I can't seem to please any of the people I love and want to be proud of me. I suppose this is life. I'll work on it.