From the Man who Redefined what it Means to be Chasidish...

Succeeding Miserably

from the man who redefined what it means to be chasidish

(with only the most moderate of editing by your truly)

The obedient boy
A reluctant non-rebel
Freedom is his daydream
A glorious future awaits him

If he can do what's right

He lacks the courage to follow his mind
Like a bee flies about the window
Because he is afraid of darkness
Uncertainty and difficulties
Hopes that time will change things
The pieces will fall in place

They never do

Resigns his destiny to fate
Locks himself with invisible chains
Does everything he loathes
Beats and chokes his soul
Until it flies away and dies
Imprisons his intellect
Adjusts his scruples to match his appearance
And fakes the rest

He has settled down, his peers think

Alone, he walks among the crowd
Keeping his opinions to himself
Shying away from controversy

Biting his tongue

Raises children to worship bullshit
Lives a dull and meaningful life,
For purposes not worth a damn
A happy life, he thought

Old, broken, and ill
Lies on his deathbed
Feels like shit
Like Ivan Ilyich
Hasn't accomplished anything
Nothing to be proud of
Worked all his life to become The Unknown Citizen
And succeeded miserably
Oh! He won't go gentle into that good night

Or will he?

What's done is done
If he knew back then
How life would end
Perhaps he would have packed up,
And left

Priorities

Yesterday, I was walking to my domicile from the Presdient Street 2 station. As I was walking between New York and Brooklyn, I noticed that the sidewalk had been shoveled in front of every single house on my side of the street, with one exception: the vacant house on the block. The snow had been shoveled off the porch and the part of the front walk nearer the house. But the rest of the walk and the sidewalk in front of the house was covered in ice.

Who spent his or her time shoveling the porch, but couldn't be bothered to shovel the sidewalk?

Near Disaster Nearly Averted

A mere twenty minutes ago was the linear algebra final. In brief, he's what linear algebra entails: you do simple things like add, subtract, and multiply. But you gotta deal with a bunch of numbers at once (usually nine [because they like to use three by three matrices]). This drives me crazy. When you're dealing with all these numbers, you're bound to make a silly mistake somewhere. And good luck catching your mistake.

So there I was, trying to evaluate simple determinant, and for some reason I thought that 30*10 was equal to 40. Aurgh!!! Nothing was making any sense. I was stuck trying to solve this quadratic equation that had no solutions. And if I couldn't solve this equation, then I'd need to get the next two problems wrong, because they were based on this equation. So after many long torturous minutes of wasting precious exam time trying to solve this insoluble equation, I went of the teacher and asked him what to do. Said the wise teacher, "You've got the hard part right. Just look more carefully." (He said "got" rather than "gotten" because he's German and speaks British English.)

So I sat down and sweated some more, until the light bulb went off in my head, and I said, "Oh!!! 10*30 is not 40! It's 400!"

I resumed my scribbling but things still weren't making sense. I looked and looked for other simple mistakes, but none were to be found. The teacher saw my frantic squirming and came over to me. "You look like you're in a rut. Continue with the other problems, and get back to this one later."

"I finished all the other ones." said I, "I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong. I already realized that 10*30 is 400 and not 40, but the quadratic still makes no sense."

"Are you listening to what you're saying?"

The light bulb went on again! 10*30 is not 40. Nor is it 400. It's 300!

The quadratic equation suddenly became simple, and everything worked out nicely. I know I got that problem (and the ones related to it) right, but I'm still not so sure about the others. Who knows what other silly mistakes I made without realizing it? If I was nervous enough not to know that 10*30 = 300, then I could have made all sorts of silly mistakes. So I'm sitting tight, waiting for him to post the final grades.

Yud-Tes Kislevs of My Youth

were a 48-hour haze of farbrenging, learning chassidus, doing mivtzoim in the cold, and late-afternoon naps. And this year? We kicked off Yud-Tes Kislev with a nice hullyenish at the TRS-LE7 residence. 'Twas quite the fun.

Tonight there's another hullyenish, but we'll talk about that later.

Thinking is so 80's

So Chelsea Clinton is engaged to a Jewish guy, which leads to the great questions like: Will she convert? Is this "good for the Jews"?

This article quotes all sorts of people whose "expertise" ostensibly makes their musings more relevant than other people's musings. But after all the musings, the article doesn't tell you anything you couldn't have thought up while hanging around and chit chatting with friends.

Is this the function of an article? To replace chit chatting with real people? Or should articles tell us something we didn't know before and challenge us to think?

A Word of Wisdom from Alan Watts

If the universe is meaningless then so is the statement that it is so. (The Wisdom of Anxiety, page 114)

A Non-Miracle Story!

Mushkie posted about how she wrote the Rebbe and didn't get an obviously miraculous answer.

I do not want to ridicule Mushkie. I just want to point out that this is an excellent example of the non-miracle stories which play very non-prominent role in people's beliefs.