Relaxed hospitality.

I really enjoy Israeli ideas of hospitality (even if I’ve yet to practice them much from the other side . . .). Lunch today was a perfect example.

First, there are drinks — generally juice and water — before the meal, while the food finishes cooking.

Next, everyone sits down for the main meal, which usually features meat but in a supporting role, and includes at least one good salad. For example, today there was a kind of picadillo with ground turkey and summer squash, boiled peeled potatoes, a salad with chopped tomatoes and lettuce in vinaigrette, and a salad with small-diced cucumber, mint, and cooked whole grains in vinaigrette. All were delicious.

After the meal, there’s dessert. Today was ice cream (raspberry swirl) and fruit (watermelon pieces), which is also typical.

After dessert comes coffee or tea, little cookies to nibble (today’s were homemade miniature bars with chocolate, walnuts, and marmalade over pastry), and conversation.

If one is willing to assume that all the desserts and drinks are storebought, then it’s not actually that much work: prepping the main course beforehand, making the salads and starch in the half hour before serving, and preparing hot drinks while everyone relaxes after dessert. Nor is it overly expensive, given the cheap cost of fresh produce here in Israel. The result is really lovely, though: a relaxed, extended meal with good, healthy food and congenial conversation. Honestly, it makes me wish I had more chances to be a hostess. Which is entirely up to me!

busy busy.

Soon, the semester will be over, and I’ll be able to prod myself into posting more.

But for now, I only have one specific thought: I don’t know how I got by without Amazon “Look Inside.” It’s like Google Books, only much more comprehensive for modern books, and it allows me to search for keywords anywhere in the book. Which is pretty invaluable, or at least an amazing time-saver, when writing papers. You need the physical book as well, of course, but the combination of the two makes it so swift and easy to hunt down half-forgotten quotes or passages.

Mmmmm, technology.

Will I look back and laugh at how much I did, or how little?

I thought it might be helpful for people who’re wondering why I never talk to them any more to see what I’ve been doing this semester. Um, and if you’re one of those people, I’m truly sorry.

The relationship between the links and their subject is left as an exercise for the reader.

Classes:
Environmental Theologies
Religion in American Society, 1550-1870
Principles and Practice of Preaching
Introductory Greek
Practicuum (discussion and support of structured church internship)
New Testament Interpretation (auditing*)

Work:
Internship with a local “evangelical, ecumenical, Episcopalian” church
Intern for the City for the Transportation department, working on projects of sustainable transit

Extracurricular:
Yale Earth Care Committee (apparently I’m the technical president . . .)
Elm City Cycling (committee member, city liason, and baked-goods-maker)
Committee member for the Org. for Transformative Works
Monday night WoD RPG
Berkeley Divinity School

So, yeah. When I’ve gotten to the point of telling the boyfriend, “how about I just give you access to my Google Calendar, so you know when I’ll be free, since I’ve got eight things lined up for every day already” . . . I know I’m busy.

(* – I like the NT lecturer, and I really need the background, but I didn’t have the space for the class this year. And frankly, I’m much more interested in refreshing a general background for academic exploration of the NT texts, so I can take upper-level seminars in NT next year, than I am in memorizing dates and writing entry-level essays. So this way, I get to attend lectures without having to do the boring work. Yay!)

I hate summary posts.

Things I did this weekend:

• Made crème brulée with a real propane blowtorch (mmm, fire. mmm, burn-sugar crust that crackles when you pierce it with a spoon.).
• Made crisp, melt-delicately-on-your-tongue meringues that tasted almost as good as my aunt’s, even if they didn’t look quite as pretty.
• Made real, delicious, non-mushy Spanish rice from scratch, and chicken seared in a cast-iron skillet and simmered in a kicked-up enchilada sauce.
• Carried the bishop’s crosier before her during a high Mass.
• Read a chapter of Greek, and remembered why I didn’t want to take it.
• Watched a couple of episodes of Batman: TAS, and remembered why it’s such an amazingly good show.
• Started to plan for my First Sermon Evar.
• Bought pseudo-eco-friendly food and felt guilty as an environmentalist.
• Discovered (and sang at a hymnsing!) “There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood,” which is the most cheerfully gruesome and morbid hymn I’ve ever heard.
• Chastised myself for falling behind on my journal, then tried to write this entry twice before and had it deleted twice. Dammit.

At some point I’ll write up a summary of my courseload and commitments for this semester. Too busy for that now.

I saw Eternity the other night.

When my father died when I was seventeen, I pondered heaven and God’s plan for el’s complex and contradictory children, and it seemed to me evident that nobody I know, certainly including myself, was ready for heaven after this mortal life in which we are all, one way or another, bent and broken. There may be a handful of people who are prepared for the unveiled vision of God. But most of us are not, most of us still have a vast amount to learn. I don’t know how God plans to teach me all that I need to know before I am ready for the Glory, but my faith is based on the belief that I don’t have to know. I have to know only that the Maker is not going to abandon me when I die, is not going to make creatures who are able to ask questions which simply cannot be answered in this life, and then drop them with the questions still unanswered.

– A Stone for a Pillow, by Madeline L’Engle

I’ve been behind in my posting.

And I’m sorry. Everything’s fine, but . . . I suppose I haven’t taken the time to write the sorts of things that I’ve posted here, and it’s a shame.

The new school year starts in a week, which should be fun. I’m gritting my teeth and telling myself that I can get an H in Greek if I try hard enough. Really. And one of my favorite undergrad professors convinced me that having better Greek would convince potential PhD programs that I’m Serious About This, and at any rate, I would like to know Greek. I’m just terrible at learning languages.

Human languages, anyway. I taught myself PHP a couple of weeks ago; on my vague to-do list is a web database of all my recipes (both the ones here and the ones I have written down elsewhere), so they’re easy to search. It’ll be good for me as much as for anyone else.

After a week of visiting home and going to every obscenely fattening restaurant I’d missed so deeply, I was in the mood for something light today. The little grocer on the corner has had $1/lb local summer tomatoes for the last month, so I cooked some cheese tortellini and tossed them with diced ripe tomatoes, crushed garlic, olive oil, and salt and pepper. Bruschetta pasta, or something like it. Trés yummy.

In the news today

Hrmph. This “updating regularly” thing has really fallen by the wayside in the past few months. My apologies.

Anyway, this is a brief post, primarily for the purpose of bragging and talking about my summer jobs. I just opened up the New Haven Independent, and my two bosses were in side-by-side articles. First, this guy is the head of Traffic and Parking; he took over the department a couple of months ago, and even though I was assigned a different internship for the summer, I love working for him so much that I’ve fought to keep working there one day a week. He’s one of those people who’re a delight to work for: he’s incredibly competent and dedicated, and he balances genuine idealism with experienced pragmatism. I didn’t have much to do with the events in the article, beyond being present for several of the Indiana Jones planning meetings, but it’s a good example of how fun it is to work for someone who actually cares.

The second article is the one I’m most proud of, though. The Mayor had a press conference today at the police department. Well, all that data he cites about shootings in New Haven? That’s what I’ve been working on. Half of the PowerPoint presentation linked by the article was copied straight from the data and observations of trends that I compiled, analyzed, and wrote. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting them to cut-and-paste so completely; it’s a little intimidating to be watching the Mayor giving a press conference and realize that he’s quoting what you wrote, stylistically awkward turns of phrase and all! ::grins::

Still, it was fun; and more than that, it feels good to know that the weeks of work I’ve been spending are actually getting out there. I’ve been spending eight hours a day, four days a week, immersed in case files and criminal records of people getting shot or shooting each other. It’s been . . . overwhelming, and challenging, and hilarious, and depressing, in turns. Part of me wishes that the police department kept better electronic records; but part of me realizes that by having to enter in all that information in painstaking detail, I immersed myself in the details and trends of the shootings in a way that simply seeing the numbers wouldn’t have accomplished.

Anyway, that’s been my summer so far. I’ve been doing lots of cooking — I baked pita bread for the first time this week, and it came out delicious — and I need to nudge myself to post those recipes and photos. Here, have a link about a romantic and sad story about a transsexual Pakistani and his young wife.

Things I did tonight

• Calculated dinner checks for 12 people from an unlabeled bill, including tax and tip, such that we had exactly the right total at the end.

• Asked for my squid “extra spicy,” and got something that any Texan would be hesitant to even call “medium.”
• Walked into a bar and ordered a glass of milk
• Sipped my milk while my friends drank beer, and got intoxicated by association
• Debated whether Christianity calls for socialism/communism in global politics, or only in our personal lives
• Brainstormed on topics for my feminism paper, which may end up being about gender essentialism
• Hugged two people, but not as many as I wish I’d hugged
• Told Rachel two secrets, but not all of them

Not much to say.

My posts haven’t been as frequent, and I apologize; I’m doing fine, just haven’t had the urge to write in this blog. Spring break’s going well, I think.

Completely randomly, I stumbled upon this site: The Merry Life of the Beekeeper. It appears to have last been updated in late 1997, and to be entirely unconnected to any other organization or department in Yale. It’s a “guide for New Haven and Yale” from a thoroughly anti-establishment, pro-union, progressive perspective, and it’s a delightful snapshot of New Haven through those eyes, even if much of its information is outdated. I may have to try to track down its writers (or whichever subversive IT person is keeping the website from going down) and see if there’s any hope of a new edition.

My restless soul is longing

It’s colder than before;
     the seasons took all they had come for.
Now winter dances here.
It seems so fitting, don’t you think -
     to dress the ground in white and grey?
It’s so quiet I can hear
     my thoughts touching every second
     that I spent waiting for you.

- VNV Nation, “Beloved”

A few photos from the first snow day of my life. Unfortunately, the sky was overcast, but I still wanted to capture it while it lasted. You can view the whole photoset here.

In other news, my odd raffle-winning ability continues; after winning a free, expensive book in the last drawing I recall entering, I managed to walk away from Moka’s Valentine’s Day event with a gift bag including $26 of Joseph Schmidt truffles. Not bad.

(<geekiness>What’s more, my entropy effects apparently also extend to Slay Machine, as a Div School friend can attest. I was annoyed at my own laptop breaking down, and when I touched his, a spark leapt from my hand and the whole computer died. Seriously.</geekiness>)