Symphony No. 9 in E Minor ("From the New World")

Yeah, yeah, I should be writing about Important Things (such as BSM's first haircut) or at least Israeli Things (such as a pharmacist's refusal to sell me more than 10 doses of pseudoephedrine and his complete inability to understand why I'd want some in the house for the next cold). But I'm at work, and Dvorak's Symphony No. 9 just came up on on my playlist again.

Granted, this is coming from an amateur, but Antonín Dvořák totally nailed it: the main theme of his 1893 "From the New World" symphony absolutely sounds like a (very good) Hollywood soundtrack.

Restless

I have laryngitis today, which means that I'm feeling much better. (Refer to the the graph below, but shift the "How bad you sound" peak back to day 3.)

COLDS (xkcd.com)

However, in addition to feeling better I am super restless. (Refer to the following quotation.)

...Then the old man understood. The Adem are called the silent folk, and they speak only rarely.
The old man knew many stories of the Adem. He’d heard that they possessed a secret craft called the Lethani. This let them wear their quiet like an armor that would turn a blade or stop an arrow in the air. This is why they seldom spoke. They saved their words, keeping them inside like coals in the belly of a furnace.
Those hoarded words filled them with so much restless energy that they could never be completely still, which is why they were always twitching and fidgeting about. Then when they fought, they used their secret craft to burn those words like fuel inside themselves. This made them strong as bears and fast as snakes.

-Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear 

Because it's so much easier for me to express myself in writing than in speech, and because I spent so much of my childhood happily playing in my own mind while my older siblings kindly fielded uninteresting questions addressed to me, it's easy for me to forget that I actually like to say stuff. But I do, and now I can't.

I like my privacy, and I need my space, but after a while, I also like to just chat with people. Today, this is manifesting after 2.5 hours of sitting around not being able to say anything. Not that I have anything to say, mind you, but it would be nice to throw around a couple of sentences about the occasional fleeting thoughts flitting through my head, instead of being unable to focus on anything because of all the speech inside of me that can't get out.

Come to think of it, that may be why I got so angry at the Kibbutz toward the end of our stay. I had gone through a stressful, exhausting process of moving halfway around the world, and I really needed a couple of months to retreat into my own mind with no one pestering me to come out. But when John and Shoshi moved off the kibbutz, there was no one left for me to chat with, and my antsiness grew and grew, and my words became a fire inside of me.

At least that's the theory I just came up with as I blogged this blog, desperately trying to release enough words so I can get back to my work. My work which is, after all... writing words.

Memorial Day

I've known for a long time that Yom HaZikaron is very different from American Memorial Day, and my manager recently very elegantly summed up why.

I was wondering why Israeli schools have a half-day for Memorial Day. After all, I posited, if a main focus of Memorial Day is a ceremony commemorating those who died in the struggle for the State of Israel, wouldn't it make sense to have a half-day of classes followed by an in-school (audience-appropriate) assembly? My manager pointed out that a general assembly wouldn't actually make sense, since so many students attend private ceremonies.

Because there are private ceremonies. Because there are too many people here for whom a personal ceremony is the only possible response to Memorial Day.